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A 1970 Corvette

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Posts posted by A 1970 Corvette

  1. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    Stuff released this year:

    Spoiler

     

    -Deadzone Rogue - I have an overall positive experience with this but I feel like it runs into some general issues of the roguelike genre which only become more apparent since I was so familiar with FPS games in general. In the lower difficulty levels it kinda feels like you only need general FPS skills for the first few levels then you just get carried by synergies annihilating enemies just by generally pointing your gun in the direction of enemies.

     

    The issue is that on higher difficulties it's still got that issue but you kinda just die really quick too so it becomes rocket tag with enemies. There's a bit of a cap on how tanky you can get due to how perks work, which is intentional, but with how damage scales at hard/extreme/nightmare the things that make you tanky in lower difficulties become untenable. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it creates a rough gameplay loop where runs that take half an hour can end in half a second. I'm no stranger to that as a Noita fan, but I feel like you have less control over that than in a game like Noita (which may surprise less experienced Noiters, but it's true that you have a lot of control over dying)

     

    The meta-progression is lame as fuck and just tacked on to force a little bit of grind between the start and end game. Shouldn't exist, or just be tied into clearing each zone, tbh. The maps get a bit samey and have weird basic as fuck issues (several areas with death pits just let loot fall in there and you can't get it? what?). The difficulty issues with rocket tag might be fixed up with co-op but idk how any of that works.

    Also why do semi-auto weapons in this game have an automatic fire option, but it's *significantly* slower than the actual fire rate if you click it out? That defeats the fucking point. Either autofire them at the actual max fire rate or don't let them autofire at all.

     

    -Nubby's Number Factory - I don't even know what there is to say about this one. I like the aesthetic and it has that nice fun gameplay loop, though I think as a game it doesn't hold up or have as much skill and decision making as, say, Balatro. The challenges feel a bit more reliant on RNG to dictate a build but that might be scrub talk. I have an issue with the length of an average run without good ways to "skip ahead" if you've got something strong early on.

     

    Both of these games had a general issue with build synergies having the potential to just make your mechanical gameplay pointless, though DZR's harder difficulty options give you more options if you want to be threatened with death at all times.

     

     

     

    Stuff I played this year but wasnt released this year:

    Spoiler

    -Stalker: Call of Pripyat - An interesting situation where it lost a lot of the stupid bullshit that bogged down the previous two stalker games in order to create a more playable game, but as a result lost a little bit of the uniqueness at the same time. I think overall it's the best game of the series as a game but Shadow of Chernobyl holds a more interesting story and even Clear Sky has a lot more ambition with its faction war mechanic, as flawed as it was. I really love this series. I am interested to see what Stalker 2 is like, some day.
    -Saints Row 2 - Holds up pretty well, considering this era was when open worlds were breaking into the general gaming zeitgeist. Interesting as a piece to compare with GTA IV, especially since I like GTA IV a lot (despite the flaws). I honestly kinda rank them equal, they hit different points.
    -Marble It Up! Ultra - Dude some of these secrets suck ass. There's no fucking balance, 90% of them are piss easy and the remaining 10% are fucking hard. As a marble game I think it hits everything I want, though. Perhaps kind of a pointless review since I'm not a marble game afficionado so this random genre entry is good enough for me and I won't be likely to get any others.
    -Dead Rising 2 - This game is really good but also not really my kind of game, I think? It's weird because I had a lot of fun playing it but looking back I don't really want that much more of it.
    -Counter Strike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes - Plays like a really good HL1 campaign mod, which is both a good and bad thing. I liked it but I can't imagine someone not deep into the goldsrc rabbit hole enjoying it all that much.
    -Marathon 2: Durandal - Weird fucking game. Terrible weapon sandbox and map design that at times was pretty good for an old FPS and at other times fucking terrible (aka par for the course). The story bits, as sparse as they are, were fun; I liked the character and role of Durandal. I'm glad I played through it but I don't know who I'd recommend it to and I wouldn't say it was 100% fun. Perhaps it comes more into focus if you grade it based on releases around the same time of it, but I'm not familiar enough with what you'd look at in that lens. 
    -Hades: It's pretty good(tm). Don't know if I'll ever finish it though mainly cuz the core gameplay isn't really my jam, but I don't really need to extol the overall quality of "like the most popular indie game of all time" people know it's good

     

    My pick for GOTY of all of these would be Stalker: Call of Pripyat. This series of games is just something I wish I knew about earlier and they all hold a special place in my heart despite all their flaws. I plan on doing another playthrough and checking out the really popular conversion/standalone mods for them too.

     

    If it's only stuff released this year Deadzone Rogue kind of wins by default, but it's still a fun game that I'll definitely come back to now and then. A lot of my nitpicks with it are minor, and some of the more glaring issues I think are hard for the genre to fix.

     

    (Disclaimer: it's highly possible I missed something [actually there's a lot of porn games I didn't put in here and might cover since moby covered several of his own] and might edit this later or reply or something idk)

    Moby, Silent, Idiot Cube and 1 other reacted to this

  4. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

     

    I know this song isn't likely anyone's cup of tea but the official audio mixing for this is psychotic. The cymbals seem to be only in the left ear for certain parts with the rest of the drums are as normal. What the fuck. The whole ALBUM is like this!! Shitty rips uploaded to youtube that flatten the sound unironically are more listenable.

     

    I guess I can see why it's that way, but I've never heard an album have it so drastically skewed toward one ear like that. The particular sound of the drums in this might also be calling more attention to it than other bands I've listened to as well

  7. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    I think an appeal is supposed to be that sense of discovery when you find something and go down the crafting tree which lets you find more stuff and you kind of get sucked in, but I also think a lot of people designing those kinds of games and mods forget the balance between getting access to basic functions and getting stuff to min-max with.

     

    I kind of hate how many mods for Minecraft seem to assume you'll just grind to the Nether (or god forbid the End) every new world before they even let you do anything cool. I guess they assume you'll just cheat the materials if you don't want to bother, but come on now. But maybe that's just me being tired of the general "loop" of minecraft idk

  8. Posted

    Yeah okay this perfectly reminded me of those DVD trailers that played out like fever dreams and you kind of remember but not fully. That they were usually those kinds of 3DCG only added to the surreal feel that makes you think they weren't real when you think back on them.

     

    It's kind of telling that the trailer for that only has about half of it with the interesting circus stuff and the rest is mocapped skating that looks kind of flat. I bet the full thing is a real banger!

  9. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    Is there a term for the aesthetic Highguard is going for? It's like "Reskinning sci-fi into fantasy" or something.

     

    I want to know a term for it because I fucking hate it.

     

    The actual game could be fun (literally no important info is displayed about it other than it has guns in it), but man I do not like that look.

  10. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    That dipshit fucking video is why I check every single playlist on youtube for albums before I listen to them. I've never gotten tricked by it yet, mainly because the previous reason is that I don't like it when playlist makers put songs out of order so I always checked for that first, but I started seeing it everywhere and it rapidly became even more important to never get jumpscared by it.

     

    And yeah in my experience it's on those less-popular albums that don't have a lot of mirrors, a lot of thrash and death metal that you don't really listen to unless you're deep in the genre weeds in my case

  11. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    6 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

    If I were a billionaire I'd build a faux ancient temple out in the middle of nowhere full of secret passages and traps.  Then I would not tell anyone even at my deathbed.

     

    The only purpose would be to give the archaeologists of a thousand years in the future some fun Indiana Jones adventures.

     

    If this means disposing of the workers to maintain secrecy, so be it.

    You'll need the workers to live in the walls and attack archaeologists anyway, so they won't be able to get out until the time is right. Win-win.

    Gyokuyoutama reacted to this

  13. Posted

    On 11/28/2025 at 8:56 PM, Moby said:

    image.thumb.png.ca6f878ee4210c293f9f87abf83c94ad.png

     

    Huh, its the first time I've seen this.

    bro there are like two entries like that and even when doing some tricks with steam game IDs I couldn't figure out what they were. I think one of them was an old bundle that got repackaged, but it still drives me crazy not knowing for sure.

  14. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    I saw on the front page that BF6 was having a free weekend. But I looked into it further and saw that it was being called a "Free Trial," which confused me, so I checked it and... it's a free weekend but you can only play on certain maps and with certain items? Is this just a scheme to get people to download their battle royale mode launcher?!

     

    Would it have killed them to just make it a normal free weekend? It's so weird to me to do this

  15. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    If MtG folded up for whatever reason (as unlikely as that is) and officially confirmed there were no more sets coming it'd be really fun to see the custom stuff people would get up to to keep the new card fix going. Fun because there are some decent fan designers and cube makers out there, and also "fun" because we'd get a thousand new Foegods too.

     

    It'd also be interesting to see community efforts to figure out banlists/formats again, since the overwhelming sentiment I've seen for real formats is that WotC sucks at, and is way too slow at, banning cards.

  16. Posted

    As a player who started deep into the NWO design era I had heard complaints now and then about how the gameplay has shifted (probably most common the powering up of creatures compared to other card types) and I had some of my own issues with the design philosophy as well.

     

    I think about that now where it's kind of impossible to be insulated from the FIRE era (apart from being a closed format like Premodern) and wonder if the previous eras of design ever displaced the gameplay of predecessor design eras so thoroughly to the point where there was no format or game type players could retreat to in order to keep it. Given how card pools work, I suppose it had to have happened, but we're kind of at the point where it's a different game entirely. You'd need to basically ban everything after a certain point because the powerlevel went unchecked and it started informing its own balance decisions.

  17. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    While fending off a fever I had a dream about a game that was set in Modern Warfare 2's Derail map, but seemed to have Goldeneye 64 controls. And despite Derail being a multiplayer map it was a singleplayer game. I legit think my brain was just fusing them together because they both had snowy Russian maps.

     

    There was some enemy that didn't have auto aim (and you couldn't aim like you can in goldeneye 64) so you just had to hope shotgun pellet spread would reach them from their elevated position. I remember thinking the game was great.

  19. Posted

    I really think that there's a specific trick to getting out of the water in the Marathon engine, but throughout my playthrough I couldn't figure it out. There's kind of a strong pull downwards when you enter water that guarantees your head is going under even if you're holding swim up, which is what makes it so you can't try again if you're near a ledge. At the same time, getting the apex of swim height briefly puts you in the air or something which is where you'd probably be able to "climb" to the ledge, but there's kind of an overall physics issue in the game.

     

    The gravity on marathon is abysmally low, and your air control is almost nonexistent outside of whatever momentum you had when you became airborne. So this creates a loop of cresting out of the water where you can't subtly influence your movement towards the ledge, but also you immediately get sucked down when you're past the apex of the crest since you're entering the water again.

     

    The same gravity/momentum shenanigans makes fighting on stairs a fucking nightmare since you might just trip down them in the middle of a fight since you go airborne for brief moments and lose all control over your character which makes it very hard to slow your downstairs momentum since you only briefly touch the next step before becoming airborne again and not having much time to apply a slowdown.

  20. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    I recently had a craving a retro FPS game and I remembered that the Marathon games were free, so I played Marathon 2: Durandal, a game I remember playing the demo of from the Xbox Live Arcade demo system. I also had a passing curiosity about the "lore" of the games which bungieheads always said was better than anything Halo had.

     

    Having played it I don't really agree and feel like it's kind of just a contrarian opinion to appear to be an oldhead since there's basically a couple pages of text crawls and that's it? But I did like the writing for the one character the game has, Durandal, since he had a fun HAL9000 routine going on. 

     

    As for the game itself, I probably need to preface this by saying I haven't played many true classic FPS games, so maybe it's more par for the course if you're familiar with contemporary games, but I'll try and sort that out.

    • Guns feel anemic except for the shotgun which has no ammo. The AR you use a ton of but mainly just because it stunlocks enemies and the chinese bottle rockets it calls grenades can be fired at the same time which when added together makes a weapon that sort of works at midrange. The pistols are pointless. The flamethrower is pointless because it has no range and the AR's grenade launcher kills lined up enemies just fine, plus a lot of mobs of enemies that you'd use it on have Hunters mixed in which take basically no fire damage. The alien flamethrower is fine but only has 1 mag. The rocket launcher has no ammo and doesnt really work in most of the maps where you just corner peek enemies in close quarters. The fusion pistol is acceptable but feels weak.
    • Several weapons blind you for firing them, like the shotgun's reload covering the entire center third of the screen, and the flamethrower which doesn't let you see that you burned through the workers and are now dealing no damage to a hunter who can take off an entire health bar with a barrage.
    • Why the fuck is the sound for "teleporting in helpful items" and "teleporting in enemies" the same?????????
    • Several maps have an obsession with teleporting tanks behind you to the point where I was running through the places backwards
    • Bungie was fucking proud of their water physics. They really shouldn't have been.
    • Did the designers really think that making enemies that are disguised as friendlies and suicide bomb you would lead to anything other than you gunning down every friendly you see because it's not worth risking it? As if the human teammates ever pull their fucking weight ever?
    • Did the designers also not notice that for the second to last level where the super OP alien teammates show up, it just meant every player would hit the spawn triggers for enemies and then let the teammates clean up while they hid in a corner?
    • Someone on the team had a fucking obsession with making the user swim through lava. Here's a fucking question for all the designers out there: If you make a gulf of lava with two healing stations on either side with no enemies, what's the fucking point other than maybe hoping that the player dies because getting out of fluids in this game is a fucking ordeal? 
    • Who designed the final level and where is their house so I can firebomb it? Why does the final boss self destruct with a radius of basically the entire arena? Why does the teleporter to the final boss put you in a vat of lava? Why does the game put you in a room with four panels, and without any warning, have one of them DISABLE THE HEAL AND SAVE STATION IF YOU SHOOT IT? When for all of the previous points in the game you were taught to kill those panels because that's how you always moved forward? And you also have to shoot all the others? And also why does the critical path flood the fucking level with lava and force you to immediately pick a path to run and hope it's the right one?
    • Why is there no soundtrack??? Actually if it was just budget that's fine, I just added my own music which was fun I guess.

    These are kind of just a few specific gripes but there's a general baffling design where you can only save at save points in the map, and healing stations infinitely heal you. So it just makes you paranoid because if you ever aren't aware of a heal station and save point, you may not want to progress until you can find those lest you end up losing progress from something stupid happening (I learned the hard way after plowing through a level entirely without finding a save, dying in the next level, and having to replay about twentyish minutes of the game as a result). Was it really any better than just letting you save at any time? This is one where the game doesn't really screw you much once you internalize that you really should never commit to anything until you save, but like... Why? I know it was an age of exploration for the genre but this really comes off as something that someone should have stood up and said "wait this isn't very fun? it just makes you play slower"

     

    The middle of the game is probably the best, I really liked the first Citadel level in particular which had a good flow and a lot of fun combat. The start felt like the mappers were trying to flex how big they could make maps, and the fucking water (see above link). The end felt like you were emptying an entire mag of AR into each enemy because you were.

     

    The modern port to Aleph One (or is that just the name of the port? idk) and support for 4k like my dumb ass has is pristine though. Other than the archaic keybinds which took a few minutes to reconfigure to something sane I had the smoothest experience ever playing a game as old as this, it was fucking awesome.

  21. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    6 minutes ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

    >is a box

    >no orange version

    They had one job

    They're waiting to sell it as a special edition, like how they did for the various Steam Decks.

     

    With that being said, I have no real use for the Steam Machine, but a semi-transparent plastic smoke case would look so goddamn cool. I still wish I got that Steam Deck edition, but alas. I blame the N64 for imprinting the love for that kind of stuff in my brain

  23. Posted

    The headset is definitely the piece I'm most interested in since it solves a lot of problems my (now positively ancient) current setup has. Mainly wires and base stations, god I am not a fan.

     

    I am mildly interested in the controller, but my gamepad needs are kind of limited to begin with considering my current one is a madcatz-esque 360 controller with maybe like ten hours of usage over the last ten years.

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