SquareEnix felt legendary growing up.
I played through the first "new" Tomb Raider and it was very much "walk on the path marked walkable, climb the ledges/walls marked climbable, shoot the specially marked doors to create a scripted zipline", etc. Oh, and "waist-height walls mean upcoming combat sequence". Based on that I decided to skip the other two. Uncharted was better able to mask the on-rails nature of its experience, at least.
I imagine that that may have been a huge grind to the people at Eidos who were once at the top of their games in terms of visual fidelity. Sacrifice that exploratory feel but still achieve best in class graphics like the old days
I'm also impressed with the upscaling/visual improvements. The game looks how I remember it looking, though I know full well it didn't look this good. Still, it wasn't a massive overhaul. Light is a little better, edges have been sanded down, etc.
uncharted, horizon, god of war, last of us etc
Feels like the queen bitch valkyrie was the only encounter where they actually decided to push the combat. Imagine if Sekiro or Souls games only had a couple of bosses that felt like real bosses.
Overall a phenomenal game, though.
Consider fighting a normal high level draugr with an under leveled/geared Kratos. Assume we are on the highest difficulty.
You'll basically have to dodge a lot (or spam ranged attacks), your attacks won't reliably stagger them, you'll tickle their health bar and getting hit once or twice will kill you. That is punishing and hard if there's more than one of them.
However, if your levels are similar you'll be able to count on staggers, there will be certain attacks that cannot be blocked, certain attacks that will stagger you if the block wasn't perfect, you can freeze one of the enemies.
The hard case is far simpler and less involved than the normal combat.
I consider the normal valkyries hard, but individually they don't really have lots of tricks that require hyper focusing both on reading them and executing the appropriate counter. They are fairly simple to understand for the most part.
You need to have cached a butt load of movements and their appropriate counters to fight the queen valkyrie. You might even find some non obvious openings for poking.
Most valkyries are straightforward when you get their 1-3 special attacks. That's not much more than regular enemies.
All the non box office revenue kicking in should be decent. The film didn’t do well critically so that isn’t an issue. A recent non box office success example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/e2-80-98uncharted-e2-8...
I believe video games movies outside the recent Sonic one[s] are known to not perform well financially so that rep will still be there
Are the movies the same? Just like an earlier movie but weirdly way more violent?
OTOH, my friends who praise these games do so exactly because of that. To which their own.
Linear game that's awesome: Pillars of Eternity.
Linear gameplay that's not awesome: Tomb raider games.
Or maybe different games are made for different people. That could also be an option.
I started the game, went to margit, found him too difficult, and then, with no particular alternatives, pretty much explored the entire map aimlessly, wishing for a clear direction on level appropriate content. It was hard to find the next thing to do. I didn’t want to skip through things with ashes or multiplayer. I didn’t want to farm.
By the time I actually found this content there was nothing left to do besides warp to bosses and murder them, or look up the obtuse quest lines and warp around to complete those. A huge floor on character progression is finding the flask upgrades. But since they’re just lying around you just go from having none of them to quickly finding more than you need for 80% of the game.
Like… dark souls would just be a worse game if every door and elevator was open from the beginning. It would just be confusing and frustrating if you started making “wrong” explorations.
I would greatly have preferred elden ring with pretty much the entire open world cut and instead just a tour of the legacy dungeons. The open world just compounded on some of dark soul’s weaknesses. Like finding even more cool weapons that you can’t practically try without farming a ton of upgrades and changing your build.
Playing through Elden Ring made it clear to me how impressive Breath of the Wild was in retrospect. Even without any meaningful awards (or because of?) the exploration in BotW is just so much more memorable and dynamic.
Sure, I'm aware somewhere in the back of my mind that everything has been laid out for me, but in my favorite games, I'm able to suspend my disbelief. However, if I can't figure out where to go, or if the game is too hard and I die too frequently, or if the game is too easy and I don't feel a threat, or if the pacing gets bogged down by optional side quests and bullshit skill trees... it's very easy for any of these things to break the illusion.
I'd actually hold up Portal 2 as the best example of a linear cinematic experience done right. The pacing is perfect, the difficulty is perfect, and there's no distracting side quests or experience points. Combined with the first person perspective and the mute protagonist, I really feel like I am Chell, trapped inside Aperture Science and talking to Wheatley.
About that... Tomb Raider 2013 has probably the most gruesome death animations I ever encountered in video game.
When games don't have a penalty for dying, players will sometimes fall back on a trial-and-error approach, where each individual attempt stops being meaningful. Some experiences, like Celeste, are designed around this type of gameplay loop, but it usually doesn't work well in a cinematic experience.
The most common penalty for dying is lost progress, but this also doesn't work well for cinematic games, because the experience looses its magic once you know what is going to happen.
So Tomb Raider takes a different approach. Checkpoints are frequent, but the death animations make you really, really not want to die!
I'm very squeamish, so I always had to close my eyes when I died. But even the chance that I might see something was a good incentive!
And there’s quite a lot of those.
TR2013 doesn't push any boundaries, but it does execute a standard formula more effectively than anything else I've tried. I did not think the two sequels were anywhere near as good!
(I haven't played The Last of Us though. I hear it's incredible, but I can't deal with the subject matter.)
But, 2 and 4 are very different. 2 is a solid 3d action-platformer, while my favorite parts of 4 were when it basically just became a "walking simulator"-type game for long stretches, with most of the action and platforming just feeling tacked-on and superfluous.
> (I haven't played The Last of Us though. I hear it's incredible, but I can't deal with the subject matter.)
I should have loved it, but bounced off hard. The prologue had me, but a little while into the game proper I just wanted all the main characters to die, including the one you're really, really not supposed to want to die. They're all horrible and I didn't like or care about them a single bit, to the point that I wanted them to fail. The protagonist in particular, I had to root for him to fail because clearly this humanity-on-the-brink would be better off with one fewer self-interested mass-murders around making things even worse. That's... not a great way to motivate the player.
Isn't the question of the players morality vs the "enemies" core to the entire concept of the game though? I think the lesson the game is trying to teach is exactly that: by what standard is the protagonist actually any "better" than those he regards as enemies? By the end of the game, I think doubting the main character is hopefully exactly the point - he isn't a good person either. In a completely lawless world such as that inhabited by the characters, I think this makes sense to explore.
Make the central character a likable, non-mass murdering fellow and this huge central theme of the game disappears - The Last of Us is harrowing by design, I'd argue, and its commitment to being harrowing is what sets it apart as a game in a sea of relatively emotionally shallow "AAA" titles of the same era.
I think I quit right after the game had me murder a couple soldiers for bad reasons. I already have several GTA games I can play, which, thanks to tone and expectations, aren't frustrating when they ask me to do that kind of thing. My head-canon is that the soldiers instead shot everyone there and that was the good ending for the story.
If it is a future of squenix, maybe it would be better for them to stop making games.
People mix both SquareSoft's success and Enix and their merge
They have a kind of weird approach to releasing it in the West where they give everyone British accents (which are totally real but Americans think are made up) and make it kind of kiddy, but even the new ones have a lot of quality. If you ever wondered what a game made by old people would be like, it’s that.
The power of Square once upon a time may have been truly legendary, but who knows for sure?
It made me much less willing to take a chance on a games I might not like. These days with Steam I can at least see if I hate the game immediately and return it, so much better from that perspective. Of course I can resell when I'm done, which is less good.
Cartridges were not only an anti piracy move, it saved on cost of console manufacturing (the N64 was still sold at a loss).
As you point out N64 games were originally a lot more expensive than playstation games.
Also Nintendo were really restrictive with who could develop for the N64, remember the whole "dream team" thing? Mean playstation had way more favourable licensing and you didn't need silicon graphics workstations (I think I'm correct in N64 dev requiring them?)
1. This was the first console controller with any analog stick at all.
2. Goldeneye, though it controls differently to modern shooters, was an excellent use of the single stick at the time. You could also use dual sticks by using two controllers at once - groundbreaking!
3. The Z-button was the first trigger-style button on console controllers.
4. The rumble pack was one of (if not) the first force feedback options for console controllers.
So obviously very many of the concepts in the N64 controller laid the groundwork for what became the standard controller design later, with dual triggers, dual sticks, and built-in force feedback.
Personally I think the N64 controller was less weird than:
1. Gamecube controller
2. Wiimote
3. Dual Screen handheld with touchscreen and stylus
4. Probably whatever the Wii-U had.
The Gamecube controller may have looked a bit funny, but it's at least recognizable by modern standards. I recall it being quite comfortable to use at the time. If you gave both it and the original N64 controller to a young person today who had no idea about Nintendo's history, I daresay she'd call the Gamecube controller the less weird of the two.
Also, it wasn't Nintendo, but I'd call the Dreamcast controller a bit weird. Gigantic, weirdly shaped, a dinky LCD smack dab in the center ...
Wait, what!!? Can you really play dual-stick Goldeneye on original N64 hardware this way?
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDQ_ri2ZbY4
Amazing!
Atari 5200 beat them there.
On the other hand discs allowed much larger games. There was a crazy amount of variety on the PS1, though as a result also a lot of crap to sort through. I was a Nintendo-first fanboy at the time, but when the PS1 dropped in price to about $100 I picked one up, trading in N64 games I no longer played to help fund the purchase. I think it was around the time FFVII came out because I remember reserving it for day-1 release.
Ahh simpler times, working manual labor while in school. Sometimes I'm nostalgic for those days of unskilled (relatively) non knowledge-based work. It was much less stressful, even if the pay was crap.
I couldn’t tell you a single game on the PS5. I don’t know about other countries, but it’s like they’re not even trying in Japan
Even today it is hard to buy a PS5. So, no wonder they aren't pushing it that hard.