18 reviews liked by Daitarn3


I've just not been on a good run lately, huh?

Yeah idk what's up I think my PC is just having issues, lol. Unity Engine games (and this one?) drain my PC's battery faster than it can charge, and they run like complete shit. Maybe I should just get the battery replaced sometime soon or something, lol, but for now yeah this game was not that promising. Weird games as a service inclusions in an otherwise charming Void Engine game. I'm far from the only person reporting that it runs like complete shit on PC from the looks of it, though. Dishonored 2 on PC is still fucked!

never played this but why did the guy on the cover die so sluttily

Pretty fun seeing and agreeing with this tweet yesterday & blindly starting From Dust only to realise it was exactly the same thing.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.

Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely £2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.

Mappy

1983

Very unfortunate that Mappy is a cop.

This review contains spoilers

11/4/2023- To boot, the starting intro scenes, the fully rendered one, didn’t age as badly, it’s a little rough around the edges but it was the best the studio did, so there’s really no complaints from me. What’s more aged is the controls, while not bad, don’t use any of the sticks on the PlayStation controller, at all. Use the D pad to move around in a tank control method of direction movement then the circle to run in the direction you face, something you need to get used to. Ultimately this isn’t an issue, as Boku is devoid of any action, well any action that you can think of. Boku will very much feel like the battles and tugs…. Deep-sea fishing, of the two features, and first of my play-through to find, that will maybe be the main event of the day by day in game. Also note, the first couple of days, around six, maybe three, are story framing devices for each town resident you meet with, more on that later.

11/7/2023- HOLY SHIT I CAUGHT A BEETLE! I began to engage in the beetle sumo system placed in around 5 days, or whenever you can catch the bug in the first place, I have found two kinds of bugs in the first place but I’m sure there’s more, because around a week, maybe eight days, a new section of the island is opened, a forest. The system of fighting other beetles is a hands-off thing, it’s purely luck and genes of the bugs, you watch the two beetles push each other, with their stamina on the bottom, and hope that its strong enough to push it, or has enough stamina to outlive the round. Takeshi has a shit-eating grin, so I really need to beat him, he’s my rival, I’m the strongest beetle trainer! I also found a rocket valve, might be useful later, but I think there’s two more. Be aware that, swimming is fun, it’s also the riskiest activity, drowning will remove a whole day for you. There's also a strange girl in the family clinic, I don’t know what her deal is, but I love how this game will present you with more mysteries at the turn of every corner, you’re rewarded for going “I wonder what is in here?”.

11/24/2023- It can really feel like the game becomes aimless at times, which it has for me, but it has the design choices akin to dropping bread crumbs on the ground, the space between is boring but you see another bit on the ground and keep going. What Boku will journal in his diary is very funny to me, talking about Yasuko’s relationship with her mother and how they haven’t spoken in years, then her mother moving into the guest house instead of her own home because of her was a hard hitting moment with the right amount of build up, however, Boku wrote about the 50 yen he got from giving a shoulder massage to a strange girl in the clinic. I am convinced that she’s a ghost but the game does a good job of revealing nothing about her. She might be alive, but Sagara doesn’t know she’s there. Who is she?!

11/30/2023- ok the game has started to kick off a lot more now, it’s headed towards the last two weeks of the game (if I didn’t write it, but the game has a total of 30 in game days). We get a little bit of lore drops, if you count events like that, there's gold robbing. Shizue has left the house and left for Tokyo, so we think, but what’s more important is that she left a key in her room. Also grab the ax as soon as you can, then head the the water field, there’s a large tree, then you can finally reach the charcoal hut where Yoh's father is meant to be… he isn’t there as of the 18th day. Nagisa has a side plot and she’s really friendly, I got the impression that she was off-put by me but she’s rather childish in nature, not in a strange way but in an endearing way, she’s nice. I really need to find that third valve. I will make an entry that is entirely tips and a small guide to side stories.

12/14/2023 FINAL OVERVIEW- I cannot state how much I love this game by the end of it, it manages to captivate me with its well knit group of characters that manage to shift and change all the while pushing a small yet intriguing narrative. Visually speaking it's a great looking game even to today's standards, maybe the 3D models aren't up to personal par but it meshes well and oozes the charm. It's a game I will most certainly look fondly back on, in fact I was thinking about this game between sessions, it gripped me. I haven't been able to see all of what you can do, like the beetle fights or the treasure at the bottom of the beach, but that only gives me more motivation to replay. There is a damn good reason why this game is listed as a PlayStation classic and you should absolutely take time to check out this game, go in blind.

Can you feel the heat?
When the tires kiss the street
Move into the beat


Ever since I learned about occlusion culling, a technique deftly handled by Naughty Dog with their first PlayStation 1 title, Crash Bandicoot, my appreciation for the more graphically stellar titles for the system was granted a new shade. It helped offer me a frame of reference (granted, of one of the more extreme use cases) for the necessity to obscure unneeded geometry to save what precious few resources the console could afford - as well as giving me something to mull over whenever I play a 3D PS1 game that looks suspiciously good. Much akin to Crash Bandicoot, racing games benefit from what is essentially a densely curated linear track. With limited camera movement, every attainable viewing angle can be accurately poured over by the designers, letting them carefully weigh up exactly how much they can get away with at every meter of game space. This is very apparent in visually stunning racing titles like Wipeout 3, Colin McRae Rally 2.0, and Need for Speed: High Stakes; their tracks are glutted with turns, verticality and obstacles that exist to obscure as much model pop-in as possible, and offer a new piece of visual stimuli at every turn. This has a knock-on effect for how these tracks are actually driven on, too. Track designers are by necessity discouraged from long straightaways where the world noticeably phases into existence, and instead ensure that the player has very little if any downtime from cornering, maintaining a thrilling tempo that only stops when the chequered flag is waved. I say all this, because I really do miss the era where racing games were these hardware-defying explosions of style and skill, with enough big-money backing to allow the designers to let their perfectionism and neuroses get tangled in the engine’s crankshaft. I can only go in a straight line down a massive realistic unreal engine map for so long.

Anyway. Ridge Racer Type 4 is a Swiss watch. One of very, very few games I’d describe as “meticulous”. Every one of its moving parts serves a key purpose in its grand design. Its mechanisms are the result of painstaking consideration for the most minute details. Built to last, and never lose its sheen. The only game my dad likes (real). It all just moves & breathes with this air of confidence and romance, exemplified by the way the penultimate setpiece is the final lap taking place at the exact turn of the millennium - a genuinely affecting gesture to barrel through doubt and seize your future by any means.

One thing I’m particularly taken by is the overall stylistic presentation of Type 4. Among the first things you see upon loading it up are the game’s signature tail/headlight afterglows leaving trails across the screen. The preamble at the start of this review was for no reason other than the fact that R4 actualises the PS1. Its environments use every trick in the book with a healthy serving of incredible models & baked-in textures to make the world feel rich beyond the scope of the road. The game’s UI alone is worth studying for its consistent use of very few colours, empty-space and minimalist decoration (every game needs a "PLEASE" in the corner at all times). In establishing a universe that seemingly exists solely for the purpose of racing fictional cars around the fictional Ridge City, the developers at Namco have populated the series with a mountain of logos, icons, banners, signs, patterns, manufacturers, liveries and colour palettes. They work to establish the curves, hills and tunnels as very real places with a history all their own. How did Wonderhill get its name? Why is it called Shooting Hoops? Where are these places in Ridge City and how do they fit into the Ridge Racer universe?

Look at the Helter Skelter track’s logo, for instance. One of the things I enjoy about this logo is its deceptively simple construction that results in a complex visual illusion of sorts. Essentially, the structure is a series of circles that reduce in size from top to bottom. The circles do not change shape in the slightest, only in scale, and by removing their intersections and filling in some minor spaces to complete the shape, is this illusion achieved. It harkens to the track’s multi-levelled nature, conveying a sense of movement as you rapidly weave through overpasses and underground tunnels w/ the ferocity of a hurricane.

The whole game is like this. A veritable archive of mindful audio, visual and game design, of weapons-grade artistic talent. Beyond aspirational and genuinely medium affirming.

When Demon’s Souls released in 2009, I was going through a pretty hard crisis of faith regarding videogames. I had grown old enough to finally see their limits, the industry-imposed repetition and condescention in their design, the corners that have to be cut and padded. I blindly took the advice from a few raving cynics I aligned myself with and imported Demon’s Souls from America as a last shot before I defiantly moved on from the medium like the little drama queen I was. DeS was exactly the game I needed, I had never played anything else like it, I had my mind shattered by the way the bosses in the title weren’t so much battles as they were puzzle boxes - imposing small situations to solve, being asked to find the lone small thread that will make the beast unravel. It felt like a NeverEnding Story adventure or something, I loved it, I still do.

With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.

There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.

Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.

if someone told me this was an ubisoft game, i'd never doubt it even for a second