Recent reviews by Naught

Grrrrrrrrr. The startup menu would always switch to French, navigating the options with no clue what they were ended up with me deleting my only save three times, until I remembered the exact ones to choose to avoid doing it again. Please note this preface, because it shows I tried.

David Cage doesn’t send me into a blind rage. I wouldn’t defend him to the end, but I think he’s carved out a decent niche. Though I’ve only played Heavy Rain. Come to think of it, I would actually defend that game. That was his second (of this kind). This one is his first and it’s quite clear. A fantastic opening (soundtrack was good) and all things considered a fantastic first two hours, but even in those two hours, there were little slips that I should’ve taken as a warning to give up before they became unbearable.

The gameplay is mostly QTE based like Heavy Rain except when it’s not: it was these moments I hated. You can criticise the latter games for being light on gameplay, but I urge you to play this so you can see the alternative: clunky, ill conceived, and so drawn out so as to remind the player of other things that take too long, like burnt food, or dial up internet. There’s this one section where the character is claustrophobic and needs to navigate a police archive. So naturally they make it first person with the field of view of a toilet roll, have her control like a Mark V, and have you pushing the keys to maintain some sort of abstract meter so she doesn’t have a panic attack while you slowly move around the stupid room. In Heavy Rain all I would've had to do was flick the right stick. Apparently the story collapses anyway. I wouldn’t know because I stopped playing. I’m not even mad at the game anymore, I’m mad at myself for trying.

It’s an easy recommendation. Not just because it’s the best of it’s kind but it trims whatever could be potentially unsavoury about the genre (stop/start combat [there is no combat at all], inventory management, party management [there is one party member], arcane UI). Not that it’s stripped back, bare, or casualised; the space is filled by a truly original skill system that embraces the totality of the person you’re playing, and these skills have their own voices and tend to contest or inform each other and you as you’re sizing up what to say or do, and none are necessarily always correct. Picture the devil floating over one shoulder and an angel on the other potentially times three. The results were dizzying and very funny.

The amnesiac story line is only a cliche because it’s so bloody serviceable when your character is a blank slate for the player to write on, but the game does actively encourage you to be a drug addict and the fact that physical deterioration or mental breakdowns only ever occur with your own actions seems to affirm that the true enemy is yourself, teetering on the edge in order to solve the case.

It’s nice to know that I’m around for the next big thing, and that it still happens.

Suffering from academic burnout has spurred a semi erratic decision to live overseas; I am reading Infinite Jest — words are at the forefront as I recover from them, so if anything I needed to look at games for its most immediate, because I believe there is no equal in this regard. I needed dopamine, quickly and easily. Whatever game I would end up playing this summer should’ve looked good, played well, and been seven seconds long.

It seems that the consensus in 1999 was that the combat is bad. My consensus in 2020 is that it’s not actively frustrating or broken or boring; I’ve played boring in the “bunch-of-suits-sit-around-a-table-and-ask ‘what do gamers like?’” sense before and this is not it. You just find yourself divorced from it all. Sometimes I would leave my computer to catch up on an endnote, coming back to find that two of my party members have had a full on argument while I was away. I scrolled down the text in amusement and kept playing. Then I’d do something else. This game is not addictive but I always came back.

A quip dispensing skull always noting the lack of women as it floats over my shoulder is a nice accessory, and the people you meet later go far beyond that. I am all for role playing in role playing games, but a conversationalist — or at least some variant of it — is probably the way to go. Anything else and you’d be playing half a game — the lesser half.

Your character is a man that cannot die. This is not superficial, or light seasoning; he cannot die, and the game embraces the fact wholly and in doing so subverts the most innate trope in the medium: the fail state. It would be apt to explore themes about life and death, how ourselves are fluid in the face of either; and the game does that too but I think that’s a gross ill fitting simplification. My eyes never rolled: there is no pretension. It brings such raw wit with it’s candor, I imagine it to have been written by a bright little child, though unsurprisingly, it’s Chris Avellone. It seems so obvious to attempt something like this, which must be why it was already made twenty one years ago. Nothing similar comes to mind. I like to think it’s because they got it right on the first go.

Theres a saying that's been mentioned in someone else's review, that I've seen myself in forums.
"Every time you mention VTMB someone installs it".
It kind of reminds me of that Brian Eno quote about The Velvet Underground & Nico. How every person that heard it started a band. I could totally do some stupid take analogising the two but I won't. Though it is that kind of game. The game where if you see it on a list you're like "ok cool", much like TVU's debut on a /mu/ chart.

It's good, but it is broken. Like it legitimately doesn't work. Download the unofficial patch, and don't play as a Malkavian or a Nosferatu. Malkavians are schizophrenics, which skew your dialogue options, but grant you an uncanny insight into things some of which you won't recognise on a first playthrough, and some of it might even spoil the story. Nosferatu can't be seen on the surface because you're stupid ugly; doing so will instantly break vampire law, so you'll have to navigate the sewers sweetie. Again, save it for a 2nd playthrough to switch things up.

I told you it was good. I'm hesitant to call it dated because many RPGs have regressed in areas this game excels except combat.

- Naught; Chad Toreador

Pretty alg, the sheer diversity of skill checks makes any character viable in their own way. For eg. I have alot of sneak/agility so I can smuggle my guns into casinos making some quests WAY easier.

Little things like that is what an RPG should strive to be, or at least what I look for in one.

I suck

I woke up early in the morning on school days so I could play a spare hour or two.
I haven't done that for a video game in years, that alone makes it special.

This has spoilers.

Before the final level, when the Northern Kingdoms meet to discuss a very pressing issue, you talk to some of the key players beforehand. They note that you're a particularly (in)famous witcher, and you note that they are a king. They talk to you about mutual friends that Geralt knows but you don't. Other kings, events, enemies, allies, government policy, all mentioned in passing. I found myself having to keep the wiki open on my phone to understand what was going on. I wouldn't even care to if it weren't intriguing, but it was. I'm glad they didn't feel a need to explain it to me, because Geralt doesn't need one. He doesn't save the day by the end. But he never could. Instead, he barely scrapes by amidst a political implosion. It sets the stage for the third game, and the story becomes more operatic as a result. Maybe it had to be. I don't know.

Witcher 3 is still the better game, but the margin isn't as big as you think it is.