"If you are born dumb, then you will grow up dumb!"Enna Alouette

Vidya Games Thread

Todd's Strongest Howard

Do not trust the sticker farmer.
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 13, 2022
I didn't want to flood the general thread so I moved it here, but to answer your question: It's a mix of the translation being stuck in development hell (some dude almost killed himself from the stress) and Falcom's past boneheaded decisions/apathy towards the western market (releasing Cold Steel in the West while skipping the Crossbell games, messing up the chronological order). It's only very recently that (almost) all the games in the series are available in the West. We're only missing Kai no Kiseki which released in Japan last Fall. Now you can play through the games without any weird gaps and I think the remake of the very first game coming out this year will introduce a whole new wave of fans similar to Persona 3 Reload.

General thread is the new banter, all the actual chuubanter is subthread material now. :dokiSmug:

As much as I'd like to check them out it'll have to be a dripfeed because fucking shit there's a lot of these assholes and when they're not on sale they're like $80 apiece. These days I'm not willing to throw down more than $20 for anything that isn't proven while I wait for the entire gaming industry to burn down so we can get a proper reset.
 

RestlessRain

Well-known member
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 21, 2022
27 years after the anime's release. Talk about the devs striking while the iron's still hot.
Serial Experiments Lain was released so long ago that the anime was set in the near-future and the video game's going to be an alternate history.
 

Abomination

The abominable amalgamation known as "chyaaat!"
Joined:  Apr 1, 2023
I have to wonder how good these games are if I keep hearing praises about them but they're never seemingly made huge waves.
I'm a big fan, but they're definitely not for everyone. Every game is closely tied together, all taking place on the same continent with many recurring characters and related events, lore, history, etc. Because of this, it's strongly recommended to play the games in order as the sequels expect you to know the events of previous games with some games even taking place at the same time as later games in the series. And because of this, it is a very big time sink if the series does grasp your interest.

Without sperging too hard (because I could go on for a while), I'm a big fan of how the world is presented, and how nearly every aspect of it, down to the individual NPCs, change as events in the world happen. I like the stories and characters a lot, even though there are some questionable decisions in the story and some annoying characters, like with most things. I also really like how some many events have a tangible effect on the various countries and people of those countries in the games that are set in those countries and how deep some of the geopolitics between the countries are.

As for why they never made waves, I couldn't really tell you as I'm not very good at speculation on the market, especially between the JP and Western markets. I will say Falcom, the creators, is an interesting company and some of their ways are probably a big part of the reason. As @chihirogumi stated, one of the most annoying things is how long it takes to get a Western release for their games. From what I remember, Falcom doesn't work with the localizers during the development of the game and only sends them the script after the game releases in Japan, so it usually takes at least a year for it to be released in the West. Falcom never really seemed like they wanted to try and elevate their series to the widest audience possible. They're probably one of the oldest video game companies still around, and yet they still have less than 100 employees working for them, and back when consoles were the popular thing in Japan, they were more focused on releasing games on PC for a long time. I have to kind of respect them for sticking to a smaller scale operation while putting out pretty quality games like this, but it does come with some problems.

Still, they are probably one of the most influential video game companies that many here in the West probably haven't heard of as they helped pioneer a lot that the biggest Japanese video game companies are known for today in the realm of JRPGs.

TL;DR: They are great games, but major time sinks. And while they are great games, the company that makes them, Falcom, hasn't done much to spread knowledge of the series in the West.
 

Todd's Strongest Howard

Do not trust the sticker farmer.
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 13, 2022

I figure with a series that has so many titles with numerically iterative titles that they're probably interconnected, even despite the precedent set with Final Fantasy I still consider them to be the outlier for that kind of behaviour. I would want to start from the beginning but for me gameplay is 90% of interest and what keeps me in, I'm usually ambivalent or disinterested in story as a driving factor of playing the game. I'm going to look into what the actual gameplay is like.
 

The Proctor

Manager Arc Unlocked?
Staff member
Lovebug Proctologist
Joined:  Sep 9, 2022
Holy.
Goddamn.
Shit.



tl;dr: My favorite game is modded by retarded gremlins.
 

UberSoldat

Well-known member
Joined:  Oct 19, 2022
What are you guys getting this Steam sale? I think I'll pass tbh, got enough to do as it is.
 

shipmate_F

menhera addicted sister
Pipproject Producer
Joined:  Jun 21, 2023
What are you guys getting this Steam sale? I think I'll pass tbh, got enough to do as it is.
Just checking some demos, I got too much work and a huge backlog to keep spending.

Speaking of them:

Very interesting concept of putting Megaman BattleNetwork and Digimon elements together, I'm pretty positive about this one.


Now that's a company that tries to listen to feedback. For the unaware, the first open beta was dogshit: broken matchmaking and no training mode, people had to use CheatEngine to play by themselves and they were stupid enough to leave easily datamined content in it. if you entered training mode, Geese, Dark Rock and a 2v2 mode was spoiled in the open there
Super excited to try it again, I hope they fixed my grimmaces with it because the core gameplay is super good.
 

Zizara

No faith in Humanity
Dizzy's Wife
Joined:  Oct 30, 2022
What are you guys getting this Steam sale? I think I'll pass tbh, got enough to do as it is.


I bought this a few days back after stumbling on a video from one of my favourite youtubers playing and have been really enjoying sinking my teeth into it. Essentially, it's a story driven survival crafting game based on the idea that you're a scientist at a Black Mesa-style research group who gets stuck in the facility on the day of the Resonance Cascade, and rather than being a Gordon Freeman to wrap things up, it's just up to the scientists to get their shit together and shut down the interdimensional invasion.
Very defined sense of progression so far, there's a solid gameplay loop of accumulating resources and developing your tech base so you can handle new sections of the facility which will then have new resources and discoveries to get to grips with to fuel your next exploration arc. Gives the impression that the game will have an explicit end point once it's finished, which I prefer to the completely open sandbox approach you see in a lot of survival games. Solid sense of personality and style too, memorable, kind of an impressive level of quality and polish compared to what I would usually expect from an early access game released to the Steam store just last year. Developers still seem engaged and updating things frequently from what I've seen too.
 

Smelliest007

Emoom? Would.
Joined:  Feb 19, 2024
What are you guys getting this Steam sale? I think I'll pass tbh, got enough to do as it is.
I only picked up Gates of Hell thanks to Willemshaven. I'm a little strapped for cash as it is right now. Most games I'm interested in are newer ones yet to release.
 

Zizara

No faith in Humanity
Dizzy's Wife
Joined:  Oct 30, 2022
Holy.
Goddamn.
Shit.



tl;dr: My favorite game is modded by retarded gremlins.

> 7 minutes in
> the USC is actually an unofficial discord community
> ominous music starts playing
> ...hmm...
> 1 minute later
> sure enough, discord mod power tripping over the pettiest, softest, most ivory tower bs
> couple more minutes later
> the server has a bot to automatically discourage anime and promote furry comments
Yeah, I think I can figure out the trajectory of how this hour long video is going to play out. Every community that lets these people into power collapses under them.
 

Faceless Waifu

Well-known member
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 9, 2022
What are you guys getting this Steam sale? I think I'll pass tbh, got enough to do as it is.
Nothing interesting came to mind. I was planning to get SIGNALIS on one of them last year sale, but decided against it because I realized that not only I don't really into horror that much, but also that I ended up getting hit face first by the cursed shitpost of SIGNALIS fanbase as a whole.

For now, I just gonna figure out how to get MMOD to run on Half-life 2 post-Steam Workshop update so that I can use it while still using the steam workshop, or maybe giving Entropy Zero (either 1 or 2) a try.
 

Punished Anime Discusser

Well-known member
Early Adopter
Pipproject Producer
Joined:  Sep 12, 2022
What are you guys getting this Steam sale? I think I'll pass tbh, got enough to do as it is.
I was debating getting Elder Todds Online, cause there was a """complete""" collection for $17, only to find out the """complete""" collection is missing about half of the actual game, thanks Todd. Other than that, nothing much caught my eye.
 

Planetary Bombardment

It's the only way to be sure.
Joined:  Jan 7, 2023
I was debating getting Elder Todds Online, cause there was a """complete""" collection for $17, only to find out the """complete""" collection is missing about half of the actual game, thanks Todd. Other than that, nothing much caught my eye.

I play ESO off and on, and I'll say there's a massive amount of things to do even without everything, and I don't own everything.

That being said unless you pay for ESO Plus you're going to have zero inventory room for anything and that is (presumably intentionally) extremely frustrating.
 

Punished Anime Discusser

Well-known member
Early Adopter
Pipproject Producer
Joined:  Sep 12, 2022
That being said unless you pay for ESO Plus you're going to have zero inventory room for anything and that is (presumably intentionally) extremely frustrating.
I can probably put up with that, I'm Todd's Strongest Fallout 76 fan and played when the stash was limited to like 400 pounds.
 

John Vtuber👁️

Sentient Eyeball, Primarch of Hag Pride Worldwide
Certified Manwhore
Joined:  Oct 24, 2022
I am so glad you mentioned Fallout 76, because that means I can go into this segue!

"The Ghoul Within" update is today (once servers go back up), and the player character can now become a Ghoul "for the first time in Fallout history" - with obvious references to the Fallout Amazon series, which is probably what got them working on it in the first place:



Now, what does this mean for non-Fallout 76 players? It means that Bethesda now has a framework for a Ghoul player-character, which means they can re-use it in future games! Be afraid.
 

A Source Filmmaker

SFM animator and Anti-Simp
Joined:  Jun 2, 2024
Played this on my handheld
 

shipmate_F

menhera addicted sister
Pipproject Producer
Joined:  Jun 21, 2023
1742332784386.png
article link because preview is broken
:nenebased:

“In other words, I think that the ideal would be to make games the way you like, as those who agree with you will enjoy them.” Sakurai adds that it is vital for people in the industry to “do things freely,” without letting others’ ideas be forced on them. He emphasizes, however, that his opinion is just one way of thinking about the topic.
Having to add that extra at the end just shows the terrible state of mainstream gaming, can't even talk about stuff without fear of hurting someone's feelings.
 

Brosnan Pierce Brosnan

God's Strongest Smartass
Dizzy's Husband
Joined:  Apr 4, 2023
View attachment 92899
article link because preview is broken
:nenebased:


Having to add that extra at the end just shows the terrible state of mainstream gaming, can't even talk about stuff without fear of hurting someone's feelings.
Yeah have you seen how much money SE has lost over the past decade trying to pander to the West? Cuz they sure as shit haven't as they continue to try.

As for the Steam sale I just picked up a couple of Agarest games I'll never play and a couple of Strategy First fps games for a buck that I hope I never play. Xenoblade X and Atelier uh something release like tomorrow who gives a shit about anything else
 

chihirogumi

Well-known member
Joined:  Nov 14, 2022
View attachment 92899
article link because preview is broken
:nenebased:


Having to add that extra at the end just shows the terrible state of mainstream gaming, can't even talk about stuff without fear of hurting someone's feelings.
Culture war libs are gonna go around saying "eRM actually, he isn't talking about DEI or woke content!!1" not realizing that this quote
it is vital for people in the industry to “do things freely,” without letting others’ ideas be forced on them
is the antithesis of their worldview of acting like petty tyrants in every facet of life.
 

Abomination

The abominable amalgamation known as "chyaaat!"
Joined:  Apr 1, 2023
What are you guys getting this Steam sale? I think I'll pass tbh, got enough to do as it is.
Picked up Nine Sols, Ender Magnolia, and Call to Arms: Gates of Hell.
 
Top Bottom