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General DeGroot

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Posts posted by General DeGroot

  1. Posted · Edited by General DeGroot

    Damn, I played Way more new vidya than I remember. Perks of having an actually paying job, I guess.

     

    Spoiler

    Pizza Tower was pretty fucking good. Thousand March and Tubular Trash Zone will forever be a pick in my brain, not to mention the horrors that modders make such as Golf 2. Easily the best platformer I've played in years - Love that Mach 2 feel where you're in free-flow, running around and smacking the shit out of enemies who are literally screaming in fear as you approach. Peppino is going to hell.

    Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a game I've been waiting for ever since I 100%ed Jet Set Radio on steam, and I really like it! It's the kind of game that honors the original without necessarily relying too much on the original's style and flow, which I think is what all spiritual successors should do. More importantly, the modding scene is insane - within the first week, we had a custom playlist mod AND a multiplayer mod, and they're still coming up with new, wild ways to change the game even more. Best music, good game. Jet rank.

    Hi-Fi Rush Made me remember my love of muscle girls and The Prodigy. Chai being a lovable doofus was also pretty cool, and the understated story about forming a sort of band and Chai developing into an actual leader made it stand out way more than I thought it would. Korsika best girl, but Rekka can hang me out to dry whenever.

    Hardspace: Shipbreaker was decent. Not great in my opinion, but Sseth's racial trait "oversell" is OP as hell, so I bought it anyway. It's a nice chill game, even if it only has seemingly two soundtracks you listen to for the entirety of your 30-hour campaign. Tossing nuclear reactors into the barge was fun, but the story was as Meh as it gets, especially as the game was made as a commentary on the incredibly horrible working conditions of shipbreakers in the third world.

    I didn't finish Ghostwire Tokyo. Gameplay loop got too boring too fast. Maybe I'll retry it later.

    Shadows of Doubt is the kind of game you put on while you're chatting with homies in Discord, but I find the loop and setting just engaging enough to play every now and then. Once the magic is lost on the whole clue system though, it quickly becomes a case of which peg in which hole, which is unfortunately boring as hell.

    DREDGE is my favorite genre of horror - Cosmic - and is also the most difficult to write for, which makes games of its type immediately my favorite. Just even cruising around in that little ship was fun, and that's not just the Sea of Thieves player in me talking. Traveler music best music.

    I don't remember when I did, but I bought DEATHLOOP as part of a bundle, and as much as a lot of people called it "Mid" and "The beginning of the end for Arkane", I think it was pretty good. Although there was times I accidentally sequence broke by pushing random buttons, I rather enjoyed the mix of old brick-and-mortar violently contrasted with Neo-Futurism[An artstyle that is either gross or grossly underrated, I flip-flop on that] and the neat concept of invading other players' worlds. I think Arkane missed the boat by never making an asymmetrical PvP shooter set in Dishonored's world, and this infuriates me to no end. Fantastic game to sink hours into looking for secrets and interesting odds and ends.

    Psychonauts 2 finally made its way into my library and sweet jesus, I'm glad it did. I have never loved a story or setting more than Psychonauts, and it's easily my favorite story of the year. Perhaps my favorite aspect is that the focus is much more on the mental health and representation of each character's personal struggles[alcoholism, addiction, loss, etc.,] and their methods of improving from them. I won't spoil it, but there is at least one level in that game that is going to stick with me forever - Bob's Bottles - and I don't think there's another level with that many layers of nuance and symbolism that doesn't come across as pretentious. Tim Schaeffer did it again, and I'm glad he did.

    Celeste is okay. Good platformer, but I don't see the allure that many others do, I suppose. That and the whole cult-of-idpol that seems to hang around that game gives me a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, even though I think you can enjoy art without liking the creator[I.E. Disco Elysium's a good game, even if I don't like what Kurvitz did at ZA/UM]

    I'm about halfway through DUSK, and I'm having a blast. Get it if you haven't and enjoy movement shooters, it's a fantastic romp through the lovechild of Quake 1 and Blood.

    I refunded Lethal Company after half an hour and bought Celeste and Dusk with my refund. Boring FOTM slop.

     

    Silent reacted to this

  3. Posted

    2022 was a year of great change for me - I got back into school, got my welding certification, and made some other, smaller steps towards autonomy and personal freedoms. I also discovered a game that might be my favorite of all time.

    Sea Of Thieves continues to ruin my life with its on-going narrative that's as predictable as yesterday's weather and PvP I'm absolute garbage at. The grind for getting all the fishing commendations continues ever so, even as dedicated PvP rears its head and demands my presence. One day, I'll get that ghost curse, but I'm a sore loser right now. Gonna have to bite the bullet at some point, though.

    Psychonauts 2 finally found its way into my steam library, and I don't regret it at all. While I don't exactly think Tim Schafer is good with money, I certainly do enjoy the playable mid-2000's Pixar film that is the Psychonauts series, with its mature topics that aren't watered down. The modern-day mental health awareness has clearly bled into this game's influence, as much of the original game's understated tones of various mental maladies take a much more pronounced role in the characters' psyches. My favorite level is Bob's Bottles due to the narrative surrounding depression, isolation, addiction, loss and projection. It's campy, but the camp has the coziest damn fire I've ever sat down at, and it balances well against the very serious topics that some of the minds portray. 

    It was almost love at first sight - the moment I had found Disco Elysium, it was like every other game I had ever played simply could not match up. It saddens me to know that ZAUM is now dead, and the devs tell everyone to pirate DE, but I still love it. For me, the murder mystery thriller is like a story I put up on the shelf, only to take down months or years later to look through again and enjoy. It's fantastic, tragic, and inherently unlike any other game I've ever played. It's the kind of game that comes out once in a lifetime. I'm glad I was there for it.

  6. Posted · Edited by General DeGroot

    yes, this is entirely just an excuse to spooge about one of the best games i've ever played, fight me
    So recently, I finished Disco Elysium, and came to the conclusion that it's one of the best games i've ever played and likely ever will play. Which is quite frankly baffling, because I don't even really like CRPGs that much.
    For those of you out of the loop, I'll get you up to speed real quick: Disco Elysium is an isometric top-down, cop-drama-thriller based in a fictitious world with DnD-esque skill checks that can go hilariously wrong. Recently, in the small coastal town of Martinaise, there's been a murder. Due to jurisdiction issues, this is a joint operation between two separate precincts. Precinct 57 sent Lt. Kim Kitsuragi, a straight-laced, by-the-numbers officer who despite being the voice of reason at all times, is 100% looking for any opportunity to break from that.
    Precinct 41 sent...You. You're a good cop, but a bad person, and this is further proven within the first 10 minutes when you discover just a fraction of the damages you caused before you drank so much you completely forgot everything, including the concepts of money, capitalism, the antimatter fog surrounding the world, and your own name.
    In terms of story, I think it provides quite well, taking elements from the murder mystery genre and retrofitting them into something unique, even if the finale 

    Spoiler

    breaks one of the principal laws of storytelling by making The Deserter show up out of nowhere in the final act with nothing to suggest he even exists up until then.

    That being said, it does come out of left field in a genre where you're trying to solve a case you don't have all the clues to yet. I know the consensus is that this was a poor move, but I think it plays well as a one-off rug pull, although I would certainly not be impressed if they did it again. For me, though, the place this game really shines in is...
    The characters. God, the writing and thought put into each worldview that each character has is breathtaking and really sells you on the world that you live in, compounded by the use of politics without necessarily going overboard by forcing ideology much, even humanizing obvious racists like Measurehead, who despite retaining a racial superiority complex, is also a victim of domestic abuse. Learning all the stances that are carefully constructed and bounce off each other is fantastic, and I can only imagine the amount of time and effort that went into making this all happen.
    I mentioned  before that DE is political, and while the devs are communist, they aren't afraid to launch a scathing critique on communism itself. The only two real supporters of communism are a pair of students who are so desperate for leftist book club members that they'll let you and Kim, two cops, into it. Lines like "but real communism has never been tried!" will come up in dialogue, and overall the idea of exploring an ideology rather than forcing it takes center stage, much like Bioshock before it. That being said, I personally didn't like the fact that the four political stances you can take are Communist, Left-of-Center, Anarcho-Capitalist, and Just Straight Fascism. It's not a big gripe because your political bearing in-game doesn't really do much to solve the case[if anything it puts you further away from it], but it certainly comes across as surprisingly close-minded for a development team that is fully willing to smack-talk their own ideology.
    That being said though, I think that my personal favorite character actually has to be The Deserter. Although his inclusion breaks a lot of story issues, he makes sense from an ideological perspective. In a sense, Disco Elysium is about waking up to your past mistakes[Literally, in detective costeau's case] and deciding how to accept and move on from them. The Deserter represents the end of the road, both politically and mentally. A bitter, furious shell of a man held together by pure hatred and morphine. There is nothing you can tell him that won't make him hate you, no political alignment that will make him respect you, no dialogue options. To him, all you are is another fascist bourgeois stepping on his grave. This is who you were, still are, could be. It's like the story shows him to you and says, "is this who you want to be?". It's fantastic, and completely nullifies the issues with revealing him late into the story.

     Talk about DE and why it's a great game.

    Guy923 reacted to this

  7. Posted

    Are we going to bother talking about the conspiracy theory that Sketchek is now a Vtuber? He nuked his channel[again] and lo and behold, Sonny Brisko signs with nijisanji at roughly the same time
    Does anyone even care? Kristianma always made better content anyway

  11. Posted

    19 hours ago, Rynjin said:

    The Loose Cannon is objectively the best Demo secondary and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.

     

    DOUBLE DONK! goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

    is the loose cannon actually the best hands-down?

    >high skill ceiling
    >mobility options
    >double-donks can't be airblasted back
    >spherical projectile

    SPHERICAL

  15. Posted

    Well, after I spent some time with Tekken 7, I've gone and given SFV a try. Picked up Cody, didn't mind him, tried Gill, found my main. 
    God, Gill is such a weird character to play. Here's hoping I can stick between him and Oro when he eventually comes out.

  16. Posted

    7 hours ago, Raison d'être said:

    The Burger King himself as a Vtuber wouldn't be that bad of an idea honestly.

    I mean, Chuck E. Cheese streams these days so it's not an unfair assumption.
    What confuses me is what Netflix's vtuber is even supposed to do. Is she a guide? A newslady? A mascot? 

  19. Posted

    2 hours ago, Idiot Cube said:

    Pyro already has a close-range, burst-damage weapon, that doesn't require perfect aim.

     

    It's called the shotgun.

    does it two-shot light classes in under two seconds?

  20. Posted

    31 minutes ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

    They RUINED Powerhouse.

    a round timer ruined powerhouse? Or did they secretly add changes to the map as well?
    Also, is the Dragon's Fury a viable sidegrade that would legitimize pyro in 6s? discuss

  21. Posted

    Quote

     

    A new flare gun for the Pyro:
    Pros:
    +10% movement speed on wearer
    Guaranteed critical hits on Uber-Ready players
    +45 max health

    Cons:
    -35 max health
    +15% self-inflicted damage vulndurability while deployed
     

    actually doesn't sound that bad, basically a powerjack version of the detonator

  23. Posted

    On 12/3/2020 at 11:18 AM, hugthebed2 said:

    I dreamt people were discussing a sort of phantom administrator account (with orange community mod color) that occasionally appeared on SPUF. In this dream, TSC apparently had admin access on SPUF, and had an animated black and white Captain Picard avatar of him winking and performing a toast with wine. There was a bit more to it, like the admin account would post, and TSC would say "the account doesn't appear in the database so I have no idea how its posting" and whatnot. I don't remember much else, but it was still interesting to me.

    possible subspuf ARG inbound

  25. Posted

    52 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

    I want to say this is false, but I cannot find a reason why.

     

    He even has a full 3D model with the new postal game.

    better put him in tenko or i'll attach a particularly snide comment to the next updated list
    according to my full japanophile friend you ranked Rushia too low, Aloe being on there is kind of disrespectful, and Debiru being A tier is based as fuck
    i don't fucking know anyone though so whatever

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