This is still running? I’m amazed it hasn’t catastrophically failed beyond repair due to my negligence.
Anyway, just did some basic housekeeping shit. Hopefully it shouldn’t collapse any time soon, I guess.
I’m not dead, site’s not (quite) dead, life’s fine or whatever, video games still suck terribly these days. You know the only games I’ve really been playing recently? The kinda idle shit that I can do while YouTube is playing old British comedy shows on the second monitor. Vampire Survivors, Noita, Tyrant’s Realm, those types of things.
I will say Animal Well was fantastic. I’m keeping my eye on BigMode for sure, I feel like Dunkey has decent taste for the most part so anything his company publishes probably has merit. Animal Well was fiendishly clever in a lot of ways and was loaded with countless satisfying moments. Figuring out the solutions to puzzles was really rewarding. I’m gonna try out Star of Providence soon, though generally speaking shmups aren’t something I’m particularly into or good at, but it just seems so lovingly well made and loaded with fun stuff, so I’ll give it a shot.
Street Fighter 6 has taken a back seat for me. I took a long break, then wanted to go back and at least get a second character to master before Mai came out, so I did that with Akuma (probably still my favorite character in the game at this point because he’s just really fun to play.) I fully intended to put a ton of time into learning Mai, but the urge hasn’t been there. Mai looks like ridiculous fun, and Capcom didn’t hold back on making her hot as hell so that’s a plus, but yeah I think maybe I just played SF6 too much and the desire to play has really waned. Capcom Cup is coming up in March though, that might restore some interest for me. I do think it’s inevitable that I’ll go back to it, I just don’t know when. But when I do, I expect I’ll be learning Mai.
Stuff I want to do for the site: With society falling apart around us and wanting to get the ever loving fuck away from anything and everything to do with social media or the internet in general right now, a couple months back I pulled my old Quest 2 VR headset out of the closet and played through Half Life Alyx again with the intention of it being the last time I ever touch the Quest 2 before mothballing it forever. I really enjoy that game and it’s basically the only good VR game ever made, or at least the only one that genuinely seems to understand and utilize the technology to an acceptable degree. I wish Valve made games anymore because when they do, they actually give a shit and make really good stuff. Long story short, I kinda wanted to record a full play through of myself for Half Life Alyx, because maybe that would be fun and I fucking love the hell out of the Half Life series. I just didn’t get around to it and I don’t know if I’d bother with any kind of commentary. Haven’t thought it through. Maybe soon. Maybe never.
Elsewise, I’ve been thinking back to Desert Strike because I really love that game. There are tons of “spiritual successors” supposedly “coming soon” but they’ve been “coming soon” for actual years now. If they ever come out I fully intend to try some of them and see how they are, and I will of course document that. One named “Reflex Unit: Strike Ops” has a demo on Steam so I tried that, it was okay. It has some things going for it but also a lot of negatives, like ridiculously poor AI voiced dialogue and an awkward lock-on system which ruins an otherwise smooth gameplay experience. It didn’t impress me enough to buy the full game, but I am very glad that a demo exists. ALL games should have a fucking free demo version. But anyway, while I wait for all those other Strike successors (there’s like ten of them and I fully expect more than half of them will never release) I may very well do a play through of Jungle Strike and Urban Strike in the future like I did with Desert Strike.
Anyway, that’s what’s up.
EDIT: OH, something cool I forgot to mention in my post: I ordered a FlippyDrive a while ago and it should be arriving soon. I’m sure I’ll put a post together of the install and usage of it and my thoughts about it. (For anyone who doesn’t know, FlippyDrive is a very fucking cool piece of hardware for the GameCube which allows you to run roms and such without the need for physical discs, but without any need for soldering or physically altering your stock console. You just slot it in with a ribbon cable alongside the existing disc drive, so you can continue using your stock console as-is with physical discs, or switch to the FlippyDrive to play roms. In this era of retro game resurgence and failing old hardware, that’s actually a spectacular way to preserve the GC’s disc drive and prevent wear and tear while still playing the games on original hardware.)
Comments
How do you feel about VR games in general? I realized while reading your post that I haven’t heard of any significant releases since Half Life Alyx. I don’t know if the whole medium died after the hype subsided or if I just haven’t been paying attention. Also, which old British comedy shows are you watching?
I almost forgot that demos existed. Man I loved playing demos when they were more common, especially in mainstream releases.
Generally speaking I think VR games are, at best, a weak gimmick with no staying power. There’s a ton of reasons for that, like expensive hardware, the simple fact that it’s awkward to have to wear a big heavy headset which almost always has one or more cables attached to it, and often requiring a fairly large, open space in which to use it. And of course, not really any truly good games to make the investment worth it. In my opinion, Half Life Alyx is still the best by far and only thing that I could understand someone wanting to make at least some investment into a headset to experience.
Another problem is that VR games don’t have the same degree of mod support that regular PC games do. If you’re a PC gamer, you are always eating good by definition. Mod support for games means you can customize your experience SO EASILY for basically any game. But VR has a much smaller audience and therefore only minimal modders. And no, I’m not talking about using mods to cheat or give characters big tits – the best mods are the ones that improve quality of life by removing annoying unskippable logo intros that waste thirty seconds of your time whenever you boot up a game, or improve visual settings when devs are too inept or lazy to properly implement things, or fix egregious bugs.
tl;dr – Not enough good games. The ones that are good aren’t really even anywhere near as good as an ordinary game and have to rely on the gimmick of VR. The hardware is too big of a barrier for VR to ever be anything more than a gimmick that didn’t even reach “flash in the pan” level of popularity. It was never even interesting enough to become a quick fad. VR has incredible potential for all kinds of things though, but nobody’s bothered to focus on it for gaming. If Valve made more titles like Alyx things might get a little more interesting, but they won’t because there’s no money in it.
As for British comedy shows, I’m mostly watching panel shows like Cats Does Countdown and Would I Lie To You, but I’m also watching a lot of Vic & Bob stuff (Catterick, Shooting Stars) and also Peepshow.
And yeah, the death of the video game demo is an utter tragedy.
OH, something cool I forgot to mention in my post: I ordered a FlippyDrive a while ago and it should be arriving soon. I’m sure I’ll put a post together of the install and usage of it and my thoughts about it. (For anyone who doesn’t know, FlippyDrive is a very fucking cool piece of hardware for the GameCube which allows you to run roms and such without the need for physical discs, but without any need for soldering or physically altering your stock console. You just slot it in with a ribbon cable alongside the existing disc drive, so you can continue using your stock console as-is with physical discs, or switch to the FlippyDrive to play roms. In this era of retro game resurgence and failing old hardware, that’s actually a spectacular way to preserve the GC’s disc drive and prevent wear and tear while still playing the games on original hardware.) I’m gonna edit the main post to include this paragraph because I forgot that was most of the reason for posting in the first place.
Thanks; that explains why VR never quite seemed to have taken off.
That FlippyDrive is an incredibly cool idea; that would be a great thing to have for any old console, especially since there’s literally nothing to replace them with if they all fail.