Taylor

Who needs to review great Doom DLC when you can squeeze an article out of every item in Pokemon Sun and Moon.

Whenever there is three of us on we tend to do 3v3 now. It's very enjoyable if people aren't shouting at you for picking objectively stupid line-ups. It's not a mode to take super serious IMO. The map is cool (no puns intended), although almost everyone has jumped on the catwalk railings for some height and slipped off Sombra seems strong in theory. However, as an invisibility hero she's not too scary, her objective is sabotage and harassment rather than assassination (she can do that but it's usually on you). I'm worried she shares a bit too much space with Tracer, and her ultimate removing Zen/Lucio's ability to counter wombo combos is perhaps too strong? However, in practice I've not seen her do this. It takes more coordination than "Press Q when Zarya shouts" as she needs to be close. Kind of don't like her gun, tho? Doesn't seem particularly thematic to the character and makes her look more like Fedorova than you'd like.

The longer the event is the less compelled you are to buy loot boxes.

Soundtrack is by 65daysofstatic who are fucking awesome.

The Souls series reminds me a lot of Ikaruga in the sense everyone knows they're supposed to like it but very few know why. You give most journalists a shmup to review and they will complain that it's too short, too easy and too hard (I die lots credit feeding), has too much memorisation, etc. but you give the same person Ikaruga suddenly these are all blessings. Wow, it's only 20m long you can really iterate those levels, such a brave design decision! Souls is actually pretty mainstream now, Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne were all top sellers and not some niche hit for nerds, this is good because it shows that principles like trying have not been lost with more modern design sensibilities. However, it is true that it is a clunky mess and disproportionately hard at the start, which causes this opening frustration while you're trying to wrangle the controls and systems. I see very few people talk about how they don't like Souls despite it obviously being a very polarizing game, and if they do it's stated as some cringeworthy act of defiance. " But that's because they are hacks. This is also why any game without a smidgen of challenge or corpse running (apparently invented in 2009) is "like Dark Souls." I got Demon's Souls as an Asia import meaning I'm the coolest person ever and what really hooked me on the game was the exploration and world building. The balance was particularly off back then, PvP was even more of a joke, triggered sections made even less sense in a persistent world, etc. But the fact it's all a bit clunky and death is punishing means the exploration of the world and lore (given its delivery) is something you've got to earn. This is why Dark Souls was so good (seriously look at this) and Darks Souls 2 was by far the weakest as they made a bunch of independent Sonic zones and stitched them together.

Yeah, take that! Or, rather, don't. Augments seemed off. I had zero power for 99% of the game until I realised I was at the end, ate all my biocells, and walked around invisible dunking dudes with impunity. I did enjoy it a lot, definitely got my moneys worth and some good goose-bump moments (especially the harvester mission), but I think I prefered my time with Human Revolution...

I've just done my placements and achieved a humble gold, which I imagine is the tier immediately above average. I'm locked in for a guaranteed 20% of a gun shader. Come on Season 3.

I'm several hours in now and enjoying it a lot. I like a lot of the decisions I've been making and they feel quite organic. Not shoehorned into very obvious dialogue forks like you would see in, say, Mass Effect. Getting a call on the way to one objective with a conflicting one... stuff like that is cool. I also find myself siding with different people (generally I'm just trying to prevent loss of life even if that means learning less about the conspiracy), which probably means I'll need to speed run it a few times after. Also... eh. Gotta talk about it. The augmented being the oppressed still feels strange given the first game almost revolved around your laboratory being blown up for making cheap augs available, and how they were the domain of the rich and powerful because of the reliance on Neuropozyne... Yeah, them all turning into murderers for a few hours is enough for an apartheid plot, but to make them the oppressed instead of the oppressors doesn't really sit right. Every squalor is filled with people with augmented body parts (unless they are sex workers for some reason) and Golem City is really supposed to hammer this idea home, but at the same time the whole fun of the game is augments make you an unstoppable badass. You don't want do be punching down, but it also feels weird to punch up with a fist that's invisible, has a magic hidden blade in it, and is worth millions of dollars. Cake and eat it.

Melee it from the table! Works 99% of the time.

Ranked is back... With no word on fixing healers being discriminated against or enemy rage quitters denying your rank up. Can't wait to get incredibly salty.

Maybe I'm a noob who can't play videogames but I had a lot of trouble in the prologue trying to save Simon Singh. In the end I had to switch mouse and keyboard (for some reason I played HR with the controller) and just shoot everyone like it was an FPS rather than trying to go around disabling people using my augs. Was HR this restrictive with power? I can't remember. I also didn't like how this mission worked. It heavily implies you need to get to Singh to save him, when you just need to run to the battery, and it's kind of strange how this saves him. In fiction there's nothing about this that stops people shooting at Singh, I've just disabled a helicopter, what actually saves Singh is Videogame Logic means a cutscene fires when the helicopter is disabled (by turning a battery off, which is irreversible I'm sure). This probably wouldn't bother me in any other game. I'm enjoying it, don't get me wrong, and I absolutely loved the previous game. I don't have a problem with the setup, it's perfectly reasonable people will not be happy with augmented people after the freak out in HR, and I think it isn't referencing any particular event (although it is drawing from a lot of them). However, and I must stress I'm not very far into the game (just the prologue), it does seem like the sides are wrong? Augments are tied to money, class and power - yet the opening military pep talk and train station repeated checks seem to be trying to imply they're the oppressed. Really strange, but perhaps it's building up to something.

I guess I don't really understand the end goal. If you're looking to do some hobbyist level design it should be a personal question, really. You're doing this for your own entertainment so your personal investment in a game should trump any kind of measure of popularity. If you want to make Doom WADs or CS:GO knife maps go and do that. If you're looking for a path into The Biz then most of the important skills you learn making levels are transferable. The interface will change, everything has its own quirks, the scripting language will be different, etc. But you can pick this up fast once you've got the foundation down. Going lower level will only help.

I could see how multiplayer would get the chop in development given it was always qualified with "the chances are tiny." If you've a huge feature nobody is going to use and you're pushed for time it's going to be first in line. And again, they also did stress it was not multiplayer before it actually came out, for all the jump cuts of on-the-spot interview questions we get to see on youtube. However, generally speaking there is a mismatch between the promise and what was delivered in a lot of aspects of the game. I think that's fair to say. Will it all be patched in? Maybe. Personally, I didn't really enjoy the game but I think I'm not the target audience. I don't want to revert to the Taylor of ten years ago that argues peoples fun isn't valid! But my biggest disappointment is that, as someone who is not there to just "explore," I found the content doesn't interlace in an interesting enough way for the PGC to generate interesting gameplay scenarios compared to games such as Spelunky, Dwarf Fortress, Angband, Starbound, Minecraft, etc. despite being much more technically impressive.

I've heard similar reports!