Computerchairgeneral

Tunic is a great little game. I can’t think of any other game that captures that feeling of playing a game for the first time and slowly testing the boundaries of what you can and cannot do. Definitely one of the better love letters to the old Zelda games out there. My main issue with it was the fact that the end-game is mostly just puzzle-solving. It kind of felt like the game had changed genres on me, especially since I had seen it recommended so many times as “Zelda meets Dark Souls”.

Thanks Google, I hate it. At least the udm=14 trick and website still works, at least until google decides to stop supporting that feature. Definitely going to be using that more and more if this becomes the default google experience.

Good riddance. Might be willing to check the game out now.

I don’t have much faith in advertisers starving Zuckerberg of cash. Unless there’s an exodus of users from Facebook, Instagram, and whatever else Zuckerberg owns then there’s not going to be any pressure on advertisers to abandon those sites.

Mildly surprised Sony actually budged on this. Of course, they really should have had this setup from the start. No one is going to like being forced to set up a PSN account to play a game, but I imagine a lot of people will do it for a free cosmetic skin or whatever in-game incentives they come up with.

“You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen!” -OpenAI 2025.

Photos taken moments before TPKs.

Been playing through Tunic this last week and I don’t think I’ve had a game leave me this conflicted in a while. I picked Tunic up on all the recommendations of it being classic Zelda with elements from Dark Souls and that’s definitely what I got, for most of the game at least. I also enjoyed the puzzle elements with the manual, trying to decipher what it was telling me based on the images and the odd English word. If there’s one thing the game does well it’s capturing that feeling of playing a game as a kid and not really knowing what’s possible. I had quite a few “Ah-ha!” moments where the game hinted at something just enough to let me figure it out on my own. But then you get to the end-game, the game takes away all your upgrades, and makes you go through a gauntlet of enemies to get them back. I get what they were going for here, but playing through it was just a slog. In theory, I like the idea of being powerless again and having to treat every enemy with caution, but in practice this segment just dragged on for too long,

Another mechanic that overstays it’s welcome is the “Holy Cross” mechanic. It’s neat the first time you use it and figuring out how to use it on all the sealed doors and golden statues I had seen was fun. But the issue is this is where the game completely changes genres on you, at least if you want to see the true ending. The Zelda/Dark Souls elements are now completely secondary to deciphering the manual and completing the Holy Cross puzzles. Enemies are just obstacles between you and where you have to go to solve the next puzzle, culminating in the Golden Path puzzle, which the true ending is gated behind.

I did enjoy everything up until that point, but once it became about this meta-puzzle and flipping through the manual to solve it I just lost interest. Yeah, I was stuck with the “Bad Ending”, but the amount of effort the game wanted me to put in for a cut-scene just didn’t seem worth it.

While I’m a little skeptical of EA when it comes to rereleases of classic games like this, at least these games won’t be abandonware anymore.

Honestly, the most interesting part of all of this is learning that Larian has an official Tumblr account.

No, vampires usually leave that sort of “exact words” trickery to faeries and genies.

Three things are certain in life: Death, Taxes, and Doom running on things you didn’t think could run Doom.

That “If” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. Really interested to see where SteamOS goes in the future.

Well…that was an agonizing article to read. I’d heard of some of the allegations about Gaiman a while back, but it just gets worse and worse the further on you read. And it’s really damning when Gaiman’s response essentially boils down to “yes it happened, but it was consensual I swear.”

Focus on what you can control is pretty cliche advice, but it really is all you can do in situations like this. Something I’ve started doing is a “news diet” where I sit down on Monday and basically skim through the last week of political news. Then I just try and ignore political news as much as possible until the next Monday. It’s not a perfect system, but it helps deal with the fire hose style news coverage the media gives to Trump.

It’s almost impressive how companies can think up the worst ways to experience games when they want to show something off at these events.

While I wouldn’t underestimate Hasbro’s ability to blow everything up trying to make the line go up, I do think D&D just shambling on for another decade is likely. It’s just so entrenched among so many players. Sure, every new scandal is going to have some group swearing it off and going back to old editions or looking at different games, but the majority will just keep playing.

I wonder how Twitter came to be such a negative place? Who could be responsible for such a thing?

Doom 2016 kind of felt like it hit the sweet spot between the two. Just enough lore to be interesting, but still grounded in a simple premise. Then Doom Eternal had so much lore I actually had to check that I hadn’t missed a game where all this stuff had been introduced.

This console generation is ending already? Like, logically I know it’s been six years, but it still feels short for a console generation. Curious to see if the handheld rumors pan out and what confusing name they give it.