The games of 2018. (Gaming)

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Wednesday, December 26, 2018, 23:38 (2166 days ago) @ cheapLEY

We need to play that again soon. Korny is not in charge of the race settings this time. ;) I challenge anyone to come up with a 100PI car that can hang with my P50.

I am down any time. I haven't played in a while, but it's still installed. So is Mass Effect 3, by the way. I want to try and set up a night to play that for a few hours with everybody again in the next month or so.

Sign me up for ME3. I'll keep playing that one until the servers go offline.

XBox VR needs to come out ASAP. I want Dirt Rally in VR.

If I knew for a fact that Dirt Rally 2 would also get VR support, I'd buy it on Playstation instead of Xbox. It's a totally different experience (that I'm far worse at, unfortunately). I'll bring my VR if we get another LAN together sometime. It's intense.

Weird, I wouldn't think you would be better or worse at the VR version. I'm curious about why that is.

I'm glad to hear that you got so much out of it, despite being new to the series. That means there's more to it than just a nostalgia trip. I loved it, too, but I've played almost all of the God of War games, and the series has been with me for most of my adult life. Kratos is as familiar to me as any Disney character. So of course I was going to like it as long as they didn't totally screw it up (and they REALLY didn't). What's interesting to me is how the gameplay seems fundamentally different from its predecessors in several ways (like the over-the-shoulder camera, an axe as main weapon rather than swinging blades, etc.), and yet felt completely right to me, from the beginning. I guess it's because a lot of the way you go about things is still the same. Lots of button combo moves, based on the same light/heavy attack system as always, and grabbing/bashing/throwing enemies as a way of changing the battlefield dynamics. They done very good on this one.

I cannot overstate how much I love that game. The original trilogy collection was the PS+ free game a month or two ago. I have it downloaded, but haven't even fired it up, and I'm not really even sure I want to, but I might sometime.

Well I'd certainly recommend it, though I haven't actually played since those games were recent so I dunno how my memory lines up with reality. There's a few things I think I can safely state:

1. Forget everything Kratos said in the PS4 game about being a god, or half-god, etc. As far as I can remember, going in to GoW 1 we all thought that he was mortal, and I'm pretty sure he thought so too. I don't recall how many games in we were before finding out different, or how big of a reveal it was, but at least some of the story you'll be seeing assumes that you think he's just a dude. Keep that in mind.

2. Also keep in mind that although we think of QTEs as standard today, and some have even taken to thinking of them as lazy design, back when GoW 1 came out the idea of simulating physically grueling actions with button mashing was something I hadn't seen before. Spinning an analog stick to twist a Gorgon's head off, or mashing a button to lift an overhead door open was a new idea and seemed more immersive. I'm not saying it was actually the FIRST game to do those things, but at the very least, they hadn't become so common yet, and it's the first game that I can remember doing those kind of things as part of the combat flow, not just in a separate minigame or something.

3. Kratos will not be the wise grown-up you just met, who makes SOME effort to avoid fights. He's younger, he's brash and hot-headed, and as you'll learn in the first few cutscenes, he has absolutely nothing left to lose. He is rage incarnate and he doesn't give one flying fuck what the consequences are.

Also, if you do happen to enjoy the opening trilogy, see about finding a way to play Chains of Olympus, the first GoW game on PSP. It very faithfully translated the gameplay of the PS2 games to a platform that no one thought could handle it, and was considered a major technical achievement in its day. It's the highest-rated PSP game of all time on Metacritic. On top of that, it might have the best story of any of them prior to the PS4 game.

No Man's Sky

I've seen you playing it a lot. I damn near bought it again on Xbox, because I've never really tried the co-op stuff, and I'd like to play with you. $50 ($40 on sale right now) is a steep ask to rebuy the game, though. If it ever drops below $30, I'll probably pick it up.

Yeah I can understand that, and to be honest the co-op by itself probably isn't worth it. There's no content that really benefits from it, and some things are actually annoying, like how only one player can have their freighter spawned in any given system, and how the waypoints that are supposed to show the other player's position almost never work correctly. I had fun playing with Dame but honestly 90% of the time we were just each doing our own thing and talking about what we'd found.