Last Game You Played

Finished the game over the weekend. I'd rate it either a 4/5 or 4.5/5. It definitely tops the first one in all areas but story for me. This spoiler-filled discussion with the game's director gave me a greater appreciation for what they were attempting even if I didn't think they hit the mark all the time. Intihar mentioned the MCU as a guidepost for set pieces, storytelling, etc. I think both games blow the MCU out of the water, but that's just me.

I'm afraid to look at how many hours I logged in the first two games on PS4, but I could amuse myself endlessly swinging around and replaying the occasional base. Really just enjoyed the experience of being Spider-Man, and the games overall were just great.

My big hope for the next one was that they'd lean into the realness of the swinging, try to impose some real-life physics and pendulum effects and not just let players point in whatever direction they want to go. All the videos of the new flying mechanics made me think they went the opposite, focusing on more speed and ease - but I just learned they implemented a slider to dial down the swing assist! I was planning on waiting a bit to pick the game up (super busy with work and life, and I know myself enough to not invite the distraction) but now I'm even more excited to try it out. Really glad they included that as an option, even though I may very well try it and decide it sucks all the fun out of the game.

@tsi  I feel like Goblin has to be in the running as one of the primary antagonists for the final game. That being said, there's some pretty strong opinions out there that the third game is going to basically be a Maximum Carnage remake, which could be pretty interesting and also awesome. I suppose they could do both. Insomniac has done a phenomenal job, in my opinion, balancing that needs to focus on something so the game isn't just endless boss fights with no payoff, while still featuring lots of SM's rogues gallery - one of the best in all of comics, in my opinion.

At the same time, there's also no reason this needs to be a trilogy.  SM1 and 2 have sold incredibly well and are some of the best-received games out there. Granted, I haven't finished the game yet so there's absolutely probably context I'm missing to make this judgement, but I feel like they're planting enough seeds to get 4 or 5 games out of this if they want to (5 or 6 if you count the Miles stand-alone).

@h-bird  I'll say this much - I don't play with the slider set to 0, but I did try it and immediately face-planted the ground. I'm absolutely sure it would be fun if you take a few minutes to start getting used to it. You don't really notice, until you turn that off, how much the game is doing for you. That being said - I think there's a sweet spot between 4-7 on the slider to get some auto-mapping on your swings so you feel appropriately Spider-Many without lots of extra effort, but without feeling like you're having your hand held.

The coolest thing is, as you said, it's a slider. I really love that they went with that rather than a binary on/off. You can also separately turn on/off fall damage. So you can decide if slamming into the ground will penalize you or not - beyond potentially messing up chases.

I'm sure this will be controversial to some 'gamers' - but I have ZERO regrets about turning off QTEs. I'm maybe five missions or so from the end of the game now. I've played through more than half of that with QTE auto-complete enabled, and I don't feel like there's been one moment where I was like 'aw, that would have been cooler if I couldn't really watch the cinematic because I was going cross-eyed waiting for a button prompt to show up in the middle of the screen.'

"Some gamers" can fuck off. Accessibility options let more people experience the game in whatever ways they're able to. That's a good thing. I use them myself all the time to customize the experience.

They definitely laid the groundwork for a number of different avenues for the sequel. I'm curious to see how Insomniac/PlayStation handles future installments. My guess is the core team will knock out one more game before moving it to another part of the studio. The games sell so well that they could fund new IP/other games. I also wouldn't be surprised to see them hand the project to another PlayStation studio.

Posted by: @tsi

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"Some gamers" can fuck off. Accessibility options let more people experience the game in whatever ways they're able to. That's a good thing. I use them myself all the time to customize the experience.

They definitely laid the groundwork for a number of different avenues for the sequel. I'm curious to see how Insomniac/PlayStation handles future installments. My guess is the core team will knock out one more game before moving it to another part of the studio. The games sell so well that they could fund new IP/other games. I also wouldn't be surprised to see them hand the project to another PlayStation studio.

Oh yeah - handing off a popular franchise to a different team worked so well for Mass Effect, right?  🤣 

I get the logic, and you're almost definitely not wrong here. But I see ME: Andromeda or AC: Valhalla in my head whenever I hear 'different team.' It's selfish and unreasonable to expect the same team to just make the same game over and over for decades of their lives but like.. I want 'em to? Haha.

And yeah - accessibility options are the best. I don't understand the argument against them for any single-player game or single-player part of a game. Even the argument of 'the challenge is the point.'  Like.. who cares? It's single-player. Someone 'robbing themselves of the challenge' doesn't affect anyone else in any way at all. I don't care if every developer puts in an 'AI plays the game for you' mode. I would have LOVED ultra-easy modes for games when my son was very little but desperately wanted to play games. I remember beating AC: Odyssey on his account just so he could have a high level character with tons of skills and weapons and armor maxed out and stuff, to play NG+ with. Basically a super easy mode for my son.

I mean... now he's at a point where he beat Elden Ring and I still haven't. So... I don't know how that turned around on me.

@theknightdamien Yeah I love that it's a slider, it seems like a great way to implement something like that. I'm sure it will take some getting used to, but I'm hoping it's worth the payoff. I tend to only play a two or three games a year and just really run them into the ground, and I'm prepared to spend some time trying to learn how to swing with the assistance lowered and fall damage on. 

I honestly might turn off QTE as well, I didn't know that was an option either. I don't hate them, but they also don't do anything for me, and that crane collapsing scene from the first game would have been a lot more fun to just watch as pure cinematic.

QTE's are just busywork. Doesn't add any real value to the gameplay. I'd rather just watch a cinematic play out, you don't have to trick me into thinking I'm a part of the situation. I feel that way about a few things in this game, like the bits where I'm running around as a civilian. It's the same as the first game in that regard. I don't really need to walk around slowly looking at things. Just make it a cutscene, I'm fine with watching those. 

I've played about 5 or 6 hours at this point. It's fun so far. A lot of weird video gamey stuff that's a little distracting (like Kraven having an absolutely massive army of goons) but that's just the kind of stuff I have to try to look past. 

@h-bird I can tell you that removing QTEs in this game makes for -relatively-, but not perfectly, seamless cinematics. There's been a few times when I legitimately wasn't sure if what just popped up was just a cinematic or would have been a QTE, so that's nice. Way better.
You play your way, so don't take this as me being all judgemental or whatever - but I definitely recommend fall damage OFF (which is the game's default) when you start out. Early in the game when healing is harder to get and your character is overall a fair bit weaker, it'll suck to run into fights at half-health because you sling-shot humped the back end of a parked car on your way to stop a crime.

@popoman  My feelings exactly on QTEs and forced walking/reading/talking segments. I do understand the impulse to force us to -believe- this is gameplay. But I don't know who is buying it at this point. If I have no options but to read the thing and talk to the person - then what's the purpose of me pressing the buttons? Same with any forced walking segment that's in EVERY goddamn game, where you just slowly follow a character around while they exposition at you for 20 minutes. Just do a cutscene. It's fine.

And yeah, I've caught myself getting agitated a few times over the 'video game' stuff that you mentioned - like Kraven apparently being a literal trillionaire to afford to hyper-tech camouflage cloaking on top of buildings and have an endless army of fanatical soldiers and robots at his command. Actually, the thing I dislike the most but I get is basically essential to a beat-em-up game is the idea that literal SPIDER-MAN, with superhuman strength, can't punch through the 'block' of a ... big man. Regular size man? No problem. Unrealistically large man? Impossible. Like every single gang of bad guys has at least one Luke Cage hanging around with them.

But realistically, it would not be a fun game (or.. it would play a lot more like Dynasty Warriors) if ONLY the bosses posed any challenge. It still definitely serves to pull me out of the narrative from time to time. Also a reason I will never play this game with fall damage. He's Spider-Man. Losing half his health because he fell down kind of hard? Ock through him through a building and he was fine, but running into a lamp post and he needs a good nap? C'mon. But at least that's optional.

Ok 2022, I'll try your Elden Ring.

We had a baby right before Elden Ring came out so I knew there was no way I was going to have the time or energy to play this sexy new big difficult game.  I've got fond memories of watching videos while cleaning bottles but that was the extent of my engagement with it.  Until now!  I broke my "small indies" rule when Gamestop put this on sale for $20.

It's great, but I don't need to tell anyone that.  I'm not surprised at all at how much it has sucked me in and stolen all of my free time.  What I am surprised by is how much I don't suck at it.  I've played a decent amount of video games in my day and even beaten some fairly difficult ones but I've never fancied myself as being "gud".  I played Demon's Souls on the PS3 years ago and got almost nowhere.  I don't think I ever beat a single boss on my own, I had to rely on summoned players.  Here, however, I'm doing ok!  I'm still fairly early in the game but I've beaten most of the mini bosses in the first few areas and held my own without much grinding.  It's just the right level of difficult so far, where I'm dying but not throwing any controllers.  I haven't bested Margrit yet though so I realize I'm probably mostly still in the training wheels area.

I'm playing offline so I know I'm missing some of the community engagement part of it, but that's mostly fine.  I do wish I could still get invaded/invade others.  When the NPC invader appeared down-river in a red mist I got chills.  It was just so cool and I was bummed to realize it was a scripted event and not an actual player.  Those encounters were always so tense in Demon's Souls and it was extremely satisfying to kill someone that dared invade my world.

So yeah, I think this is where I'll be for awhile.  All the smaller games on my Switch can wait, I need to keep exploring!

Been playing Darktide with buddies lately

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@mikeysee Yeah, I love that it is more accessible than the other Dark Souls games. If you run into something you can't beat, you can always just run around and do something else. And there are plenty of builds that let you cheese it, in a sense. Once you get the mimic tear that helps a lot too. 

@mikeysee Not telling anything you don't know but.. yeah, Elden Ring is a top tier game and deserves the accolades it gets. There's -defffffffffffinitely- some bullshit you'll run into that will probably bring you into throwing the controller territory. But a lot of that happens later on. The training wheels area is what really sucks you in, because it's the area that allows you to think 'I could be pretty good at this' and then the game laughs and laughs and laughs.

Still a great game and one I'm looking forward to getting back into one day. I gave up in one particularly hard (but optional) area and life got in the way a few times, and then some other games came along that I wanted to play. And now I've been out of it so long I think I basically need to re-learn everything before I'll be any good at it again. But I definitely didn't rage quit in the 'I'll never play this again' kind of way like I did with Sekiro. Fuck that game.

Personally, I hate the community engagement stuff. The game gets SO cluttered with often useless and/or stupid comments left around and most people willing to invade you are doing so because they know damn well they're going to kick the shit out of you. Nothing quite as frustrating as having someone invade you while you're trying to grind up that next level and basically watching as they zip around and one-shot you. I turned that shit off as soon as I realized you could and I never looked back.

Played about 10 hours of Spider-Man 2 and came down with a pretty nasty cold. Playing a game with reaction based combat isn't as fun when you're sick, so I went back to Baldur's Gate 3 with a new character. After the new patch came out I've noticed some interactions triggering that may have been bugged in my first playthrough. Overall, it's felt like a fresh enough experience. Playing a Paladin this time around, so we'll see if I break my oath or not. 

I did notice in the patch notes that I can't push Cazador's mist form off the edge anymore 😡 

How on earth do spoiler tags work now? Because I finished SM2 about a week ago and I have THOUGHTS.

Edit: Also went ahead and downloaded the free trial of Cyberpunk 2077 on PS+. Never cared too much about the game at all, so I ignored all the 1.0 drama where, by all accounts, the game was utter trash. So I guess it's fair to point out I've only got experience with the '2.0' game. But it was enjoyable enough that I bought the game when my trial was over.

Stupidly, I left the game on pause for 2 hours when I had to unexpectedly take a work call right after I booted up the trial. So my 5 hour trial was a 3 hour trial. Still convinced me to buy the damn game, so I guess you win CDPR.

For spoiler tags, click the + button on the WYSIWYG. You'll have to title your spoiler first, but that ultimately doesn't really matter. Just do like "Spider-Man 2 Spoilers" or something.

I was so burned by Cyberpunk 1.0 that I will never buy a game without first seeing a review again.