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What Games Have You Been Playing Recently

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Thrillho:
So I talked before about how I've been replaying Bioshock Infinite, partly to see if the sour taste it left in my mouth last time would improve and partly because it involves shooting white supremacists in the face, and that's not something I ever plan on doing in reality but sure is therapeutic in this day and age.

Having finished the main game, which I appreciated more on the second playthrough but still feel doesn't have quite enough 'game' in its game, despite the astonishing art direction and strong writing, I moved onto the DLCs, which I had not played before.

One of them is some tower defense bullshit which I have less than zero interest in. Then there's the two parts of Burial at Sea.

I found both of these pretty disappointing.

(click to show/hide)So the first part, you're playing as Booker, and you're in Rapture. This whole section was fanservice. I don't have a problem with all of it - getting to wander around the pre-fall Rapture was really interesting and I appreciated the opportunity.

The redesign of Elizabeth pissed me off. Elizabeth in the main game was not overtly sexualised by video game character standards, and I greatly appreciated that. Given that Booker and Elizabeth are, you know related I appreciated the game not putting me in the position of ogeling this character when I'm supposed to be roleplaying as her fucking father. The DLCs have no qualms about that whatsoever, and so Elizabeth has been sexed up tremendously. She looks an alarming amount like my ex-girlfriend, actually. When you're playing as Booker, and if I remember rightly in the early stages there were some allusions to flirting, that's fucked up. When I was walking to a lift with her character, the game's graphics glitched and blew her skirt up, and thankfully, I found that her legs just stop existing at the top of her holdups so she became an eldritch horror rather than a Marilyn Monroe tribute in that moment.

I thought the gameplay was quite dry and uninteresting, although some of the story points were fun, and intermingled the universes of the different Bioshock games some more. And I pretty much felt like Part 1 ended exactly when it got remotely interesting to play.

The second part... this is the more critically acclaimed part, as I understand it, and it was annoying me at first because of introducing a ton of stealth mechanics. I hate stealth mechanics and the Bioshock games are meant to be about giving you options in how to approach things. Loads of people loved this, but it felt to me like 'yes, I have also played Arkham Asylum.' But I'm getting ahead of myself a little.

So firstly, half of Elizabeth's weapons are non-lethal. I thought this would create a scenario where enemies if knocked out by gas or tranquiliser would eventually just come around later, and come after you again. But nope. There is absolutely no gameplay difference between knocking them out and killing them. Which makes those weapons being non-lethal in story kind of completely pointless.

Secondly, when you drop down, Arkham style, from a hook on the wall and land next to an enemy so you can stealth bonk them on the head, if you hit the button quickly enough as you land, it just does it for you regardless of how ridiculous it is that the enemy didn't see you. I started landing in front of enemies, but pressing the button to land in a crouch, and it gave me a half second before they noticed I was there, by which point I had pressed X and the knockout animation had already started. It was comically easy eventually.

Thirdly, the stealth mechanics don't even work properly. I got to a point where the game forces you into an enclosed space with a lot of enemies and it's implied combat will have to happen. I had run out of stealthy ways to kill enemies, so I waited at a bottleneck for them to walk through, using ironsights on my Hand Cannon so that I could try to headshot at least one when they came in and give myself a head start. I was maybe twenty feet across the room, hiding behind a desk. Four enemies came in at once, I thought I was screwed. So I blow one of their heads off with, I remind you, a revolver so comically enormous it's called the Hand Cannon. And they all just stood there, twenty feet away from me, dumbfounded about where that bullet could possibly have come from and killed their friend.

So yeah. Not enormously impressed by this DLC.
As a palette cleanser, I've hopped back to Bioshock 2 (I bought all of them together in a bundle when lockdown started) which I at least know is enjoyable in places. I am refreshed by some of the annoyances Infinite introduced not being present, plus removals of some of the things that annoyed in the first one (goodbye pipe puzzles). It's fundamentally nonsensical as a story from the earliest point of gameplay, but it is at least, I remember, fun to play.

LeeC:
I net a few more rare achievements on Stellaris:

Gnabberwocky:
I retried Star Wars: Squadrons the other day. As an immersive starfighter flight simulator, it's incredible. As a combat video game? It's just...underwhelming. The battles feel repetitive, and it's nearly impossible to work with your team (which was one of the main selling points of the game for me) due to how quickly the various ships are repositioning. I got bored after about fifteen minutes.

cesium133:

--- Quote from: LeeC on 22 May 2021, 18:36 ---I net a few more rare achievements on Stellaris:



--- End quote ---
This quote inspired me to fix the copy of Steam on my Linux laptop so I could open Stellaris. I had previously broken it while trying to get Kerbal Space Program to run well (for some reason Steam crashed with the version of the nvidia driver I had to install to get KSP to work). So I updated Steam and tried to switch to integrated graphics, and it worked. But then I was worried that I had broken KSP. Turns out I hadn't.

So, long story short, I've been spending this weekend playing KSP.

Veritable_Variable:
I recently picked up Outer Wilds (Not to be confused with The Outer Worlds), and really loved it. Had been meaning to get it for quite a while, as the premise seemed right up my alley, and holy heck, did it meet and exceed my expectations. An absolutely fantastic exploration/mystery game. As it's a game best played going in blind, I'm going to leave it at that.

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