Hi everyone, hope everyone’s weekend has been good. I have been playing more New Vegas this past week. Have a great upcoming week!
Hi everyone, hope everyone’s weekend has been good. I have been playing more New Vegas this past week. Have a great upcoming week!
I’ve had some time off this week and whether it’s just the spooky season looming or the fact that I never played it when picking it up cheap years ago, I’ve been playing through Resident Evil 2 Remake and really enjoying it. Admittedly I’m playing on a low enough difficulty to not worry too much about saves, ammo conservation etc, but that’s letting me just soak up the atmosphere, small details, and ghost-train vibes of it when it does actually manage to surprise or challenge me. It’s a great modern remake of a classic that I almost have more nostalgia than actual memory of at this point.
On the other end of the scale, I’ve been playing a bit of the new Skate with extended younger family members online. That core trick and control system that Skate always had is still really good and just skating around chatting (or occasionally listening to a podcast) until you find an interesting spot and then trying again and again to try and do a cool thing there or compete for the best line is still great and genuinely reminds me of what little skateboarding in my more youthful days.
The problem is everything else. It’s riddled with AI garbage from board designs, to writing, to voiceovers, to dozens of “songs” all just credited to Universal Music Co instead of an artist amongst the actually otherwise pretty varied and good but much shorter soundtrack. The whole vibe is bland, corporate, and completely fucking souless. The new Stunt challenges built around ragdoll physics are obviously supposed to be a slightly silly streamer hook, but they still suck and are incredibly dull. It feels very feature incomplete too (it’s Early Access but what does that even mean for a free live service game that already has founders packs and paid shops and live seasons?) even as a multiplayer sandbox too with the few things like co-op challenges that are in the game poorly implemented.
I love the Resident Evil remakes. 2 remake is the pinnacle of remakes I think because the graphics are great, the controls are great, it’s different enough from the original but still keeps all the charm, the REngine is a miracle that seems to run so smooth vs. stuff like Unreal Engine 5 being like throwing your GPU in a blender.
If you’re ever interested, there’s a randomizer called Biorand that will let you mess with just about anything you want. The RE games are really good for that, I think, because there’s lots of opportunity to run away and win fights in an alternate way. I beat the first RE2 boss with like 6 flash grenades and some knives because that’s literally all the game gave me up to that point.
Honestly, despite having played the original two back in the day when they were new, this new one is how I’m going to picture them going forwards. Not just because I never liked tank controls, but because it feels like such a natural evolution, like the way the game would have been of they had the tech at the time.
I’m kind of amazed at how good it looks too. There’s nothing actually very flashy about it and obviously it’s a very ‘last gen’ game but the smaller scope and really careful, subtle detail to the environments really sells it. Early on in the sewers I was looking around randomly after realising I’d been so focused on the water (for obvious reasons) that I hadn’t really looked up, and where there was a little industrial light there were maybe four or five little moths just fluttering around each other, crowding it. The attention to detail like that, somewhere 99% of people will never look, is just great.
The randomiser thing does sound cool and I could perhaps see myself using it in the further future, but I doubt I’ll be jumping in for another run once I’m done any time soon. One of the things I’m really enjoying about it is playing a bigger budget game that is a much tighter, busy parent friendly experience and I’ll actually probably finish the same week or two that I start it.
There’s so few of those these days. Yet the weird thing about this is that I always think I’ve been playing for longer than I have. Not in a bad way, but in an engrossed kind of way. Each time I think, oops I’ve been doing this forever I bet it’s after midnight already, I find a typewriter to save and discover I’ve only been playing for an hour instead of the two or three I’ve assumed. I’m not sure whether it’s an engrossing atmosphere thing, a pacing thing, the steady but simple pace of progress or what. It’s a strange sensation but very liberating when you’re old and busy.