Argh.
Alan Wake 2, you fuck.
- writing is dull and expository to a fault
- gameplay combination is jilted and its disparate elements have no flow together
- the direction is abysmal, these scenes are bad trope-y and they don’t make for a well paced experience.
- the game does look nice
- it feels constantly tedious to play
- fucking random imagery and jump scares? Coming off Silent Hill 2, shit feels like the bad stuff Bloober made, maybe worse.
I am confounded that people enjoy this game. It’s bad by many metrics.
I liked the people that pretend they didn't obviously race swap the main character.
Spoiler: (click to show)(click to hide) Giving her an absentee father was a good touch though. That shit is even more racist than me pointing out the obvious race swap.  The good guys everybody!
1 user liked this post: Nintex
That is actually part of the story.
Her father is most likely
Spoiler: (click to show)(click to hide) Mr. Door
And the race swap was done because
Spoiler: (click to show)(click to hide) they want to tie Quantum/Control/Wake together and Mr. Door/Mr. Hatch were both supposed to be played by Lance Riddick but he passed away before AW2 was finished.
Yes, thanks. I played the game as well. Doesn't make it not an obvious race swap.
She was white in the teaser and is completely scandinavian coded. Rewriting the character after the fact to virtue signal isn't a huge win in my eyes. Spoiler: (click to show)(click to hide) If they desperately wanted a black main character why not use the Lance Reddick character himself? Or create a new one?
Glad the gamble paid off for them though. I hear the game is still not profitable.
1 user liked this post: Nintex
I'm a sucker for Remedy games but I have to say that I found the environmental story telling better than the cutscenes and the actual narrative.
1 user liked this post: Potato
Yeah, the environmental storytelling is very good relative to itself but the actual accompaniment of gameplay just isn't working for me. Feels like ambition gets in the way and maybe it's that I'm super busy/distended atm - but I'm struggling to find my waypoint a lot. Anyway, 'American Nightmare' is still the best time I've had with an Alan Wake game. I also really enjoyed playing and beating Control. The sensibility of the scares and tension makes AW2 feel almost childish. If I wanted to watch 16 frames of scary imagery popping in something randomly, I'm sure I could find it on Youtube. When it's not doing the frame imagery, so far, the 'scary' scenes have made very little impact.
Also, the original Silent Hill 2 always felt a bit 'meandering' in terms of objective but I never once felt lost in the remake. Struggling to find waypoints in these games is a real turn off and the design of the initial area is just horrendous.
I think the game has a lot of premise but sort of gives you only a bite size impression of what it could be like if they developed those concepts further.
Some of the Dark City scenes like the Hotel, Alley, Metro, Appartement etc. are my favorite, really Matrix/Inception like.
The True Crime vibe at the beginning of the game also caught my attention. I'm mixed on the theme park, village(or rather 1 street) and things like that.
The mental breakdown of Saga felt forced(?) she's an FBI agent, she wouldn't be let out in the field to catch murderers if she was this mentally unstable (or maybe with DEI she would ).
Also I went 100% on the collectibles like the Nursery Rhymes and hidden boxes and that was a total waste of time as is talking to the NPC's in the game not related to the story.
I think Alan Wake always had a bit of difficulty how to translate the themes and things that make it really compelling into a fun game and how to keep it engaging once they run out of party tricks.
01-05-2025, 01:47 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-05-2025, 01:48 AM by Besticus Maximus.)
Funnily enough having finished Silent Hill 2, I'm giving Alan Wake 2 another go.
Tbh I didn't think much of the first four hours I played at release but it looks nice.
Silent Hill 2 was incredible, a seriously underrated bit of vidya
1 user liked this post: Nintex
I kept seeing Shatterline on Epic Game Store for $5 and wondering "wasn't that a F2P game?"
After some investigation (reading a reddit thread) it turns out that apparently the devs totally wrecked it and ignored all the problems players wanted fixed. So with a dead game they yanked it off Steam. Then RELAUNCHED it EXCLUSIVE FIRST RUN on EGS with NFTs and saying stuff about how Valve doesn't care about developers because they don't let them do something with NFTs or whatever. Also all the players who bought stuff on Steam, because they had battlepasses and skins and stuff, lost everything.
Quote:Kiuji-senpai
24d ago
Edited 24d ago
long time player here, playing since before the game even came to steam.
for years we were promissed a game, a game that we were supporting (even financially), playing, testing, and giving feedback on. promissed to have a free game on launch, with no P2W, with the early access players getting to keep everything they grinded for, unlocked, and bought with real life money.
after a while it seemed like the devs were ghosting us. they went radio silent for months at a time, but it all made sense one day.
fastfoward a few years. we are told the game is now going to shift to the blockchain for the full release (AKA crypto. AKA the game will now feature NFTs). a little while later we also come to find out they lied about "shifting" to the blockchain, as that had been the plan (secretely) for two years, and even some devs working for the making of the game were unaware. this is why they were silent for so long, they were preparing to flip the kill switch. most discord staff quit, most devs that were blindsided quit.
fastfoward to the game's launch a little while ago. the game is now on epic games, and all plans for a console release were gutted (steam, xbox, playstation, etc, do not allow NFTs), all progress was wiped because of this switch to epic games, and the game is now paid. and now the game does have P2W features on the PVE mode.
i was gutted by all of this. shatterline was the best arcade fps ive ever played, dethroning even black ops 2 for me. i was literally mourning for a few weeks after everything went down. what a waste of a game with such an amazing future
Anyway, it's currently on sale for $0.24: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/shatterline-e1cc3c
Spend that quarter if you want to see the cool NFT's:
Quote:kukov
25d ago
Edited 25d ago
I seem to be the only one coming to this game from the NFT side, so I can offer some perspective on that.
First, I think what they did in terms of not migrating anything is a disaster. It's shameful. And it 100% means they deserve to fail. If I was one of the players who got everything wiped, and with this level of macro-narrative, I'd be so pissed.
Coming to this from the NFT side, I'm an owner of a HV-MTL, previously from Yuga (BAYC people - all nonsense, I know) and I'm excited to get some utility out of my NFT in the game. From what I understand you don't need to own the NFT - but if you do you get some bonuses. But it's not game-breaking. So I think that's cool.
I think a big part of the move from Steam to EGS is EGS supports "nft games" and Steam does not. So maybe if they stayed on Steam they would have gotten removed anyways. But what's weird is that you don't need the NFT to play, so not sure why they needed to do that. I also know EGS gives people money to go to their platform so maybe these guys got a grant, and that helped their calculation. Alternatively, they might have got money from Faraway, the NFT company they're partnering with, so the move to EGS might not have been so much of a choice as a necessity to stay in business. But if the cost was "alienate your entire Steam playerbase (BTW, be on Steam or don't bother)" then I don't think it was worth it. And interest from the NFT side of the project is low. IMO they would have been better served trying to find some way to integrate NFT owners in the existing Steam game than jettisoning it all.
The actual NFT component is you can buy a HV-MTL robot and it hovers around you and gives you bonuses when you play. That's about it.
In terms of the $5 fee to play, that's to eliminate bots. Not sure most people from the original game have looked it up, but, as with all things in ponzi-town, they now give cash prizes to the leaderboard (rank 1-3 gets $1k - $500). If they didn't have the $5 fee it would incentivize people botting for the cash prizes:
https://faq.faraway.com/shatterline/shatterline-leaderboard-prizing
All of that said, I am hopeful they can create a good example of web3 assets being used in a "real game" (all other NFT games are garbage) so it will be interesting to see if they can somehow survive this diasterous poisoning of their playerbase.
No, I have no clue what any of this means:
https://hv-mtl.com/
https://opensea.io/collection/hv-mtl
1 user liked this post: MMaRsu
Detective Benji is on the case lads
(12-29-2024, 10:09 PM)books wrote: Got my nephew FFXVI for xmas. I initially wanted to get him the first two FFVII remakes, but it just seemed too ridiculous to only get him 2 out of 3 games, so I just went with 16. They're all fun in their own way so I hope the reviews are as untrue as they normally are for everything. (Cuz i wanna play it) I think in the moment I had a rocky experience with 16, but retrospectively I think it's perfectly cromulent and I like it a lot.
That said, I am one of the weirdos who thinks every mainline FF is a good game, so grain of salt.
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