the first person shooter game thread (eew fps)

[XoPachi]

So you're telling me it's much worse than the original FEAR, which didn't have any of those problems.

If you keep pushing forward, it's fine but you are skipping so much in doing so and will be greatly punished for skipping secrets. You'll be missing critical upgrades that just help a ton. I imagine when you memorize everything its much smoother but the first few playthroughs will be suspect.

[Daytime Waitress]

Selaco's "FEAR-via-GZDoom" is easily my highlight of new releases for 2024, but I'd be lying if I said that the thought of ferreting secrets and scrounging currency weren't putting me off a second playthrough at a higher difficulty.

I can deal with ammo/health conservation, but having to secret hunt and then having to spend currency just adds a layer of ["padding" has been abused overmuch, so I'm gonna go with] unnecessary book-keeping to proceedings that I'd rather wasn't there.

It does make me wonder how they'll balance it for the later chapters, though.
My profile is sitting pretty with all the weapons I could be arsed upgrading now MAXXED, because I went back and found all the secrets before the Point of No Return in the campaign.
So from here in, I'd just have to worry about resource management, right?

I'm surprised that it didn't opt for small random spawns between the scripted main battles. The way it frames enemies adapting to you (its really just typical new enemy introduction) I would think they would somewhat repopulate past areas with new baddies. Even Metroid Prime, an easy game that's literally exploration first, enemies respawn every few loading zones. So exploring retains a bit of danger.

Selaco has no tension in regards to exploring. So the choice comes down to "how much walking in silence do I feel like doing?" instead of "is the threat of possibly seeing Seigers and Enforcers worth returning to Pathfinder to see whats behind that L3 security door?" And you really need to do this to get those permanent upgrades and money to buy health kits/ammo.

FWIW, I shitcanned the game's level design for most of the first third because the maps felt indistinct, and relied on a very modern contrivance of "intended linear pathway is neon green" rather than naturalistic architectural or geometric landmarks. But as I bunny-hopped my way through the aforementioned secret hunting, I was pleasantly surprised that they actually felt very navigable, quick to traverse, and "stick" in your mind quite a bit better than at first blush. I was so chuffed at having found that out that I kinda didn't notice how ludicrously static everything is until you mentioned it.

But that brings up a whole other question, dunnit? If there were respawns or heavier opposition behind the security doors like you suggested, wouldn't that feed back negatively into the conservation loop? The rewards would have to be astronomical for the player to risk attrition by... risking further attrition!

I dunno, man.
Once you do unlock everything and can mix-n-match a loadout to your liking, it all clicks very neatly: partying with BFF Grenade Launcher-chan while twig-thin bouncer Turret-kun keeps watch on the door never gets old.
The way upgrades are sewn into the world, complete with the daft vending machine waifu, is probably the best way they could've implemented it tbh.
And I'll concede that it's not entirely a modern conceit - there's a fair amount of System Shock or Deus Ex DNA buried in here, I suppose.
But on another level it all feels a bit like creating the problem and then selling the solution... to something that wasn't a problem back in 1993 - gimme a 50 shell capacity from the off and let me spend it how I will ffs.

Whenever I post about this damn game, I seem to piss and moan excessively; but I truly did enjoy my first run with it, and the only things I nitpick are the times I'm not in combat, and the combat is, inarguably, fucking sublime.

[Despatche]

things like Halo and Destiny are clearly designed for a normal pad and not for the mouse

The only FPS that is properly designed for a standard controller is Metroid Prime. I have never seen another console FPS that plays like it. Destiny definitely doesn't.

Halo was intended to be a PC game, specifically a Mac game. It was bought out at the last minute and forced to be an Xbox exclusive. Bonus points for the Xbox controller ports being modified USB ports, Microsoft could have totally allowed keyboard and mouse if they wanted.

Despite being the first PC game I bought, I never actually ran through it completely, let alone on Nightmare, until the re-release adopted Copper's modifications.
The 50HP cap meant some spots were a bit peek-and-shoot, but it also added a great deal of tension and I felt the changes were for the better overall.
Having not completed it in vanilla, I'm probably not the best judge of that, but it held my attention through the campaign and both expansions (fuck that dragon, btw) for the first time in over two decades, so there's that.

The problem I always have with unmodded Quake Nightmare is how much of a pain in the ass it makes Grunts. Of course it's not much of a problem in the OG campaign but when you get into custom maps any amount of careless shotgun spam becomes highly irritating, it's like nobody grew out of the Plutonia stereotype. I don't have an issue with the original Voreball speed, just gives you an excuse to exploit movement tech to escape. Then you have something like Arcane Dimensions which removes most hitscan (and gives you the triple shotty) and suddenly Nightmare is dead easy.

You should try the new Nightmare in Copper 1.30. No more boring 50HP cap, lots of interesting changes (on top of the core Copper changes)... it's a proper difficulty level now. I'm not sure how well Underdark Overbright and such play in it though.

[m.sniffles.esq]

I decided to take advantage of some real-life, day-one, game-pass action with Сталкер 2

It kills the shit out of you. The entire prologue can be described as 'running around in the darkness, dying frequently'. But I suppose in this post-souls world we now live in: "I died 15 times in the prologue" = "totally awesome" (it keeps track of this number so I guess you can brag about the ridiculous amount of time you've died, I suposse)

It's also as buggy as the reviews state. One thing that been driving me bananas is the only way to swap weapons is via the radial, and the radial randomly ceases working (leading to even more deaths than the deaths your supposed to endure)

Edit: I've deduced that if Stalker 2 isn't some weird attempt at an anti-game, then it's seriously the nvidia update of E.T. on the Atari (but instead of throwing you in a hole over and over, it just kills you)

(granted I've seen people who are all "Fuck you if you can't handle a REAL BROOTAL PUNISHING experience. I hear there's a new mario game you may want to check out", but even E.T. had it's defenders)

[it290]

Have been on a boomer shooter kick lately, playing games both old and new:

Blood: holy crap, how did I never play this back in the day? This game kicks so much ass it's not even funny. I've been a Monolith fan since the original NOLF but never went back and played their earlier works as I didn't get a PC until 1998. I think NOLF still edges this out for me, but only just.

Amid Evil: this game is also brilliant. Amazing visuals, transcendent level design, well-balanced weapons with perhaps the best BFG weapon I've ever used in a game, and FPS boss battles that don't suck. Between the game itself and the expansion, I just wish there were more of it.

HROT: this is an odd one, like an alternate reality Soviet Quake set in 1986 Czechoslovakia with some surreal-ass enemies. Looks and plays a lot like Quake but with slightly more emphasis on ammo conservation and running from fights. I find the combat really fun but the level design is a little obtuse. Fun game.

Turbo Overkill: I've only played this for about half an hour but something about it isn't quite clicking for me—I think I just don't really like FPS games that focus heavily on additional movement mechanics. This one has a chainsaw slide that is somewhat similar to the slide in Vanquish but nowhere near as fun to use. Will probably finish but it's the lowest ranked of the pile for me so far.

[ExitPlanetDust]

I think it’s a free online weekend for PSN. Anyone want to co-op some Doom 1 + 2?

[Lemnear]

I was thinking if actually a FPS like Doom/Ultrakill and arena games in general, were a sort of first person SHMUPS. There are few examples but there is that SHMUPS vibe where you actually jump and dodge shots while shooting everything.
Is somewhat the Shoot'Em Up the ancestor of the FPS? The "origin" of Shooter, or rather "the invention of shooting".
And why is hitting targets so satisfying in general? from the gun to the bow to video games? Even in fighting games. Because in a certain sense "violence" is one of the bases of video game fun and not? If I had to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator or almost, the other great "non-violent" genre would be puzzles (point&clint also and even strategy games/tactics)...maybe simulators is the third way.

[Sima Tuna]

It's not the violence that makes FPS games fun. Violence is just the firework to accompany either success or failure. The "fun" is the thrill of lining up your trick shots (movement plus aiming) and hitting them.

People think violent video games are "fun" because people are violent and enjoy violence. They're not. It's because the mechanism of coordinating something challenging is naturally enjoyable for our mammal brains. We get the hit of dopamine when we do it right, and then the double hit of dopamine when the game itself also says "yes, you did that right."

Whether it's a Quake chainsaw guy exploding into gibs or a lego star wars enemy exploding into lego bricks, the level of violence itself is not the factor here. You could have a completely bloodless FPS that's still fun to play, and shmups players should know that!

All video games are puzzle games, when you boil them down. You're given x tools and y problem. Can you solve it? When you can, the game shoots off bright lights and tells you, "Yay! You solved it! That's great!"

People don't love violence. Real violence is scary, messy and random. People love being rewarded and told they're doing a good job for solving puzzles.

[Mortificator]

'Struth, especially...

Real violence is scary, messy and random.

...Which is why it's so thoughtless when people want to make a game realistic. No one* comes out of real combat going "yeah, that was a blast, let's do it again!" *aside from the exceedingly rare maniac, which you aren't, even if you think you are. The more realistic you make video game fighting, the closer you make it to something that's no fun at all.

[Lemnear]

It's not the violence that makes FPS games fun. Violence is just the firework to accompany either success or failure. The "fun" is the thrill of lining up your trick shots (movement plus aiming) and hitting them.

People think violent video games are "fun" because people are violent and enjoy violence. They're not. It's because the mechanism of coordinating something challenging is naturally enjoyable for our mammal brains. We get the hit of dopamine when we do it right, and then the double hit of dopamine when the game itself also says "yes, you did that right."

Whether it's a Quake chainsaw guy exploding into gibs or a lego star wars enemy exploding into lego bricks, the level of violence itself is not the factor here. You could have a completely bloodless FPS that's still fun to play, and shmups players should know that!

All video games are puzzle games, when you boil them down. You're given x tools and y problem. Can you solve it? When you can, the game shoots off bright lights and tells you, "Yay! You solved it! That's great!"

People don't love violence. Real violence is scary, messy and random. People love being rewarded and told they're doing a good job for solving puzzles.

I didn't mean "violence" in the strict sense, even a bloodless fighting game or a SHMUPS that essentially only has explosions, are they...soft-violence? It's the very intent of "hitting" a target, which can be with a punch, with a bullet or even landing on a platform. A constant chain of nano-targets that give nano-satisfactions, in continuous escalation and to the point of boredom except for some excellent cases. Sometimes tension is built for greater satisfaction.

I feel like there's a possible middle ground that's rarely explored between an FPS and a BulletHell...in a certain sense the realism and the covers have ruined the "arcade" experience that you could have EVEN in an FPS.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Granted, I was leaving the service when the first influx of 'Doom-babies' were coming in. But from what I was told, there were a pretty sizable number of them bummed out that they weren't going to spend four years playing Doom for real.

Thus, a happy medium had to be struck pertaining to 'realism' with cover systems and whatnot. As it behooves the military to have kids training themselves for ten years before they step foot in the wire. Likewise, it behooves the video game industry to make buddies with the military for obvious reasons.

[Lander]

People don't love violence. Real violence is scary, messy and random. People love being rewarded and told they're doing a good job for solving puzzles.

Not real violence, no - that shit's fucked up.
But, people love catharsis, and seeing a capital-B bad guy fictionally explode into chunky salsa is quite an effective form of it! 80s action cinema, and all that.

...Which is why it's so thoughtless when people want to make a game realistic. No one* comes out of real combat going "yeah, that was a blast, let's do it again!" *aside from the exceedingly rare maniac, which you aren't, even if you think you are. The more realistic you make video game fighting, the closer you make it to something that's no fun at all.

Playing one of the Black Ops games in university hammered this home for me. Moment-to-moment shooting, sure sure, watch the goons do exaggerated flips off of gantries and what have you; classic action stuff. Uagh!
Then comes Press R3 to covertly open this man's throat (in overtly gory detail). Totally scripted, no fighting for your life, just stealth-killing a guy in cold blood for the sake of watching his life ooze out onto the floor. Maximally gratuitous, but more (self-)disgust than satisfaction.

Quake and Goldeneye are the sweet spot by my measure. You either go over-the-top to the point where the KERSHPLATglaub is clearly not posed as a serious endorsement of actual violence, or take the wholesome Lucasfilm approach of making the OpFor a bunch of bumbling stormtroopers who can't aim for squat, and perform every action as the most exaggerated theater. I'm going for a dive roll, watch out! Whoooa! Dear god I hope this mocap rig doesn't strangle me.

I feel like there's a possible middle ground that's rarely explored between an FPS and a BulletHell...in a certain sense the realism and the covers have ruined the "arcade" experience that you could have EVEN in an FPS.

Yeah, I think that could exist. Just the other day I was ruminating about what would happen if you put Gradius options in Quake and gave the player a limited wallhack for the sake of aiming them around corners. It'd require a bit of wiggling to make work, since 3D and first-person have fundamental implications on environmental awareness, but there's definitely something there. Probably not too tough to bash out as a QuakeC mod either, since you could reuse Shub's teleball thing for the graphics.

I'm sure I've seen a couple of FPS indies steal NieR's 3D danmaku pattern thing too, though can't think of which ones off the top of my head.

Blood: holy crap, how did I never play this back in the day? This game kicks so much ass it's not even funny. I've been a Monolith fan since the original NOLF but never went back and played their earlier works as I didn't get a PC until 1998. I think NOLF still edges this out for me, but only just.

The gold standard of BUILD games scaffolded from finely-mulched pulp, perfect just-sadistic-enough game balance, and equally sadistic antiprotag with delectably evil one liners courtesy of Stephan Weyte. I daresay it outdid even Duke, much as I enjoy the King's machismo exploits.

I'm here to donate some Blood.

Somebody else's

Also one of the few boomer shooters where crouching mid-fight is actually effective at throwing off your enemies' aim - always liked that about its combat, well thought out.
Avoid the sequel, though. It's good fodder for ornery YouTubers to roast over a roaring firepit of Gordon Ramsay memes, but that's about it.

[Sima Tuna]

I live... Again.

BLOOD was the inspiration for a very kickass manwha called Priest. You should read it if you haven't. It was never finished but you should be able to find the whole thing online. The author was very open about his inspiration, although the tone of Priest is quite a bit darker and more detailed in its melodrama than what we get in BLOOD.

There are very few manga I would recommend to anyone, including non-weebs. But Priest is one of them.

[Lander]

I reinstalled S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly last night - the free fanmade standalone that takes the 30-some maps of the official games and smashes them together into a giant freeplay sandbox with refined and expanded mechanics.

See, I fancied treating myself to some gopnik misery over the holiday season, but the recently-released S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is still far from done, so it's back to the classic: Playing a vanilla Loner on Hard / Survivalist settings starting out of Rookie Village.
And it only took ~8 attempts to get through the tutorial without heavily-armed questgiver Fanatic being gored by boars, this time. That might be a PB

Which is to say, Hard / Survivalist is no picnic. Returning to fight tooth and nail for a bottle of water takes some adjustment (not kidding - I almost lost a chunk of progress to thirst before looting a hail-mary Evian off a recently-zombified stalker,) but the atmosphere and tension is top notch. It does a great job of scaring you into slow tactical play with an ever-present lethality factor and profusion of almost-invisible traps; my first bandit encounter was a slow terrified creep through a run-down farmstead, hoping that I'd see the dead man's five homies before they saw me. Turns out there were only two, one of whom apparently booked it after seeing what happened to the first. Didn't feel that way at the time, though!

And man, the limiter-released A-life system still puts modern open worlds to shame. Hearing emergent engagements from across the map that are actually happening, seeing other stalkers post to Blyatter about witnessing (or being on the business end of) one another's exploits, hunting quests self-resolving after the locals take issue with whatever fauna you had a hit on. It feels alive in a way that other games still don't, and isn't even technically a real open world!

Next goal: Procure a well-kept shotgun that doesn't have a small % chance of exploding in my face.

BLOOD was the inspiration for a very kickass manwha called Priest.

Cool! Nice clean-cut line work, and the Spiritu Sancti Etcetera angle recalls some classical old-testament horror. Pleased to see I must stop this train feature so early

Interesting allusions to a Hellsing-ish he's keeping a lid on ~it~, as well; Blood was originally planned to feature similar, but the beast transformation ended up cut and had its player sprites reworked into the boss of the Post Mortem episode.

[m.sniffles.esq]

See, I fancied treating myself to some gopnik misery over the holiday season, but the recently-released S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is still far from done

Since it's been brought up again, and I called it the "nvidia update of E.T. on the Atari" or something, allow me to offer up (half) a mea culpa. The dev released a statement saying the xbox/gamepass version was 20x harder than it's supposed to be, due to a bug that was causing the stick to have no deadzone.

I was assuming that shooting from the hip was intentionally impossible (granted, I thought this was strange since every monster is very fast and just rushes you, so I felt a little dumb drawing a bead on something that was literally on top of me, but there seemed to be no other way of hitting them), but I guess this wasn't. Perhaps this has been fixed, and it's better/more playable now.

[Lander]

Since it's been brought up again, and I called it the "nvidia update of E.T. on the Atari" or something, allow me to offer up (half) a mea culpa. The dev released a statement saying the xbox/gamepass version was 20x harder than it's supposed to be, due to a bug that was causing the stick to have no deadzone.

I was assuming that shooting from the hip was intentionally impossible (granted, I thought this was strange since every monster is very fast and just rushes you, so I felt a little dumb drawing a bead on something that was literally on top of me, but there seemed to be no other way of hitting them), but I guess this wasn't. Perhaps this has been fixed, and it's better/more playable now.

Huh, I must have missed your post in the Blood frenzy

I've been watching Dan's Gaming play the PC build, which has been rough. No control issues, but mutant health and economy were way out of whack on launch, along with a slew of broken quests, looney-tunes bugs like missing facial animations or getting stuck in dialogue because someone forgot to add a later brav option, and memory leaks destabilizing the game after a few hours. It also has Baldur's Gate III syndrome, so the bug factor increases sharply in the back half.

The balance is a lot better now, and some of the prominent stuff is fixed, but there's still a laundry list of issues in the pipeline. Most notably, A-Life doesn't work. It's in there, but dialed down so far that the world seems empty until a squad of hostiles pops into existence 15m away and opens fire. And then there's the unreliable stealth, inhumanly accurate scrubs, footwear-seeking grenades, artifacts falling under the map, a HUD that doesn't always show up when it should, mess-with-the-player psi radiation features that end up looking like bugs because you can't see the wood for the trees... Just all sorts.

Though the core seems nice and tight, to the point where I can see Actually Finished Edition being a rad Stalker game. The modding community will no doubt be all over it, but - as demonstrated to great and terrible effect by Pirahna's repeat scuppering of the MechWarrior 5 unreal modding scene - needs a stable foundation to build on.

It's an odd one - feels to me like GSC haven't Cyberspunk 2077'd all their goodwill away just yet. They're making the right noises, but players are still left holding the jeez i hope they follow through bag in the meantime

[XoPachi]

Turok has been trash to me since 3 so I feel like you can only go up. I fully accept nothing is topping the 1997 original for me so I won't hold this new game to that standard.
We've got a competent dev and they want to do their own spin on things. I'm willing to give that a try.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK2sg_RgY2M

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Working on playing through Wrath of Earth, an old FPS with a really cool vibe I dig. The first time I played it was on Easy (the default difficulty if you just mash enter to start a game), which is manageable, but still fairly tough at points, and the CD version is unwinnable due to a teleport bug on level 7 which has been thankfully fan patched.

Standard Difficulty might as well be Hard. If you take a lot of damage, you need to sit in open light to repair slowly, and some fights can quickly tear you up. Add to the fact you can't carry much of your powerful ammo at once, and the game won't repair any shielding until your energy's maxed, and it's tough. I got to Level 5 and I was getting my ass handed to me. It's way, way harder than any other level in a FPS I've played. The only walkthrough on Youtube I found has a disclaimer saying it resorted to cheats to clear it because it is by far the spikiest of difficulty spikes, and I agree, it's bullshit. To do it without cheats I had to totally memorize the level and where all the supply points with a dozen or so failed attempts, then speedrun it like hell. I'm planning on uploading an annotated video walkthrough with details on what to do, and I wanted it on Standard difficulty, but it was brutal and I can't see myself getting through this on the hardest setting at all. It's a bit more manageable on Easy because the damage you take is greatly reduced, but you'll still likely die if you get lost and your suit's navigation systems fail.

You're in an extreme cold environment that limits your movement speeds and saps your health over time. It also saps your energy and suit systems, and it's dark as hell, making navigating brutal. You have to find 5 items (4 really, one's at the start) before you can exit the level, and there's only one spot at the end of the level where you can safely sit and recharge energy and shields. You take tons of health damage even before your shields run out, so you can't plan on recharging, exploring a bit, then running back to recharge. You gotta learn where to go, then plan a route and aggressively follow it while downing stuff with missiles, and grabbing the energy refills quickly so your shields will recharge (shields and systems only repair if you grab energy refills near max on Standard difficulty...). It's incredibly hard and there's several fights where you have to fight mechs that can't be locked onto in the dark. Took me all day of attempts to beat the level (trying to do each level in one sitting).

I've not managed a deathless run of the whole game on any difficulty due to the extreme danger many traps have (unlike in Doom, stepping into nuclear waste or lava will kill you in like 10 frames, your advanced powersuit be damned), but that'd be fun to attempt even if it's just on Easy later. Difficulty only seems to affect the damage enemies do. Nothing else seems to change, I tested how strong my weapons were on enemies and how much ammo/health items gave, the only difference between difficulties is enemy damage. It's called "Easy" but it's the default and it might as well be considered the normal mode compared to how brutal Standard and Difficult are.

The multi barrage homing missiles that let you lock onto like 5 enemies at once and blast them all at the same time are pretty nifty, there weren't too many early FPS games that let you achieve that kind of killing power.

[Lander]

I've been descending deeper into the Stalker rabbithole the last few days, by way of G.A.M.M.A. (trailer-y thing) - a massive curated modpack for the aforementioned Stalker Anomaly standalone that refines more or less every facet of it. Graphics, sound, gameplay, armory, enemy roster, economy, AI, balance, the whole shebang.

The video linked above gets across what it represents better than I can in text, but it drags the presentation up to a modern standard, refines the previously-ignorable survival craft-y mechanics into a system you have to engage with, adds a ton of well-needed unique quests (including some excellent horror boss encounters,) loads of quality-of-life features, and much more. I've been playing it for about a week, gradually bootstrapping myself up out of the early-game povo economy and into self-sufficiency, and it's been awesome; very challenging, but equally rewarding.

In fact the overall proposition clicked with me last night, after taking a run at Laboratory X18 for the main quest and getting absolutely destroyed by its cadre of psy-horrors: It's free-form Slavic Gun Diablo, with no leveling system, no purchasable weapons or armors, and a giant armory of tacticool military gear instead of fantasy equipment. You can use whatever you pick up, but doing so effectively means being able to repair and maintain it, so progression centers around field-stripping enemy gear and stashing the pieces so you can cobble it back together later with the requisite tools.

And it works great; upgrades are genuinely tangible because they're features, and not just buffs. Scavenging a decent AK means being able to fight from distance and suppress, buying an ACOG means range advantage and ammo-saving headshots, crafting NVGs means viable night operations and better stealth, and finding various crafting kits means stepping out of the expensive vendor economy for a given class of item. Etcetera etcetera - it's an excellent model for climbing from cheeki breeki scrub to elite self-made merc, and feeling every step of the journey.

Special mention goes to the new Flash anomaly for highlighting the systemic nature of the game: It's a hemisphere of light that appears on the ground and, if touched by a creature, will timeskip the subject forward by a random duration. Under the usual video game trickery remit, it's fair to assume that this would be a cheeky Last Crusade style death-through-instant-aging setup. But no; I barrelled into one on accident while fleeing a pair of nocturnal psysuckers, and - after the mother of all lag spikes - found myself standing in the same location in nice sunny weather with no enemies in sight, dying of hunger and thirst, with two days' worth of what happened in the zone updates flooding my PDA and evidence of multiple radiation storms. Now that's what I call an anomaly!

The main downside - aside from (thankfully recoverable) crashes and lengthy load times - is that it's gatekept to an astonishing degree: Where Anomaly and its documentation are freely available via ModDB and other sites, Gamma aggressively pushes users to join its discord in order to get any information, and ships via proprietary installer that scrapes 500+ packages from ModDB and disclaims that it may get you IP banned as a result. Thankfully however, there are well-maintained repacks out there that Do The Right Thing and ship it as a single zip that you can just extract and run.

Unfortunately, you'll probably end up having to join anyway; I wandered into the Darkscape map in the early game, and immediately crashed out with a missing model error. That turns out to be a misnamed file that's been known about about for upwards of a year, and needs an extra drop-in fix which could easily ship with the base set, and is guarded behind a new-user timer wall. Stupid, stupid nonsense that hurts my software engineer soul, and so has been reuploaded here because fack m8.

Worth it though - the broken model ended up being a functional car! Turns out that the original games had to cut vehicles at the last moment, so they've been selectively restored to make navigating the massive forest area more convenient. It's an interesting addition - dodging mutants and anomalies in a jalopy feels a lot like modern Vehicular Horror indies like Pacific Drive, and Stalker was -this- close to being the genre's seminal entry.

[m.sniffles.esq]

I actually think I played that (or something like it) like a year ago? Attempted to play, is more like it.

I was telling someone I never played Stalker, and they were like "oh, this ultra-modded who-ze-whatsit is definitely the way to do it" and they sent me a link

There was a splash screen that was "Welcome to the Stalker Ultra-Modded Who-Ze-Whatsit!" and there may have been a discord link.

Anyway, after randomly stumbling about amongst ridiculously opaque gameplay for about 20 minutes, I gave up. I just figured you had to have some previous knowledge/experience with the game to get anything out of this Ultra-Modded Who-Ze-Whatsit. Dwarf Fortress had better on-boarding.

I actually looked at Stalker 2 again yesterday. Shooting is much easier, however, now it seems if you pick something up, you have about a 50/50 chance of it ending up in your inventory or the black hole of Calcutta.

And the radial menu STILL randomly ceases to work.

[Lander]

Ha, that's a rough start - a bit like plopping someone on top of a mountain and asking "isn't it incredible?" while they die of exposure

Could well have been Gamma, there are a few Ultra-Modded Who-Ze-Whatsits about. Escape From Pripyat is another (presumably inspired by Escape From Tarkov), and the more classically-minded Old World Addon; all of them build on Anomaly, since it made substantial upgrades to the original engine.

And well, 2 notwithstanding, the series tends to respect the player's knowledge retention to a fault. You'll be missing pieces if you didn't play Previous Game, and the mod scene has continued that trajectory with aplomb; OG Shadow of Chernobyl starts out as relatively approachable wide-linear narrative tac shooting, Call of Pripyat opens up the structure, then Clear Sky doubles down on simmy open-ended faction war. Glue all that together with some survival crafting maximalism and you get Anomaly, then nip and tuck with a hardcore-minded vengeance and you arrive at Gamma.

Which comes with this handy chart!

The PDA has a nice Guide tab these days too, like a little diagetic wiki, but it's quite dry and doesn't hammer in the key lifehacks that get bandied about on YouTube and Reddit.

I'd say release order is still worth it if you've the 60-70 hours spare; it's not exactly Tarkovsky, but Shadow's got some pleasingly uncanny cutscene work and impressive setpieces, and atmos is good throughout. The scary bits especially! Though Clear Sky is skippable - more of a spinoff, and oriented around similar open-ended ideas as the mod content.

As for my travails, I'm about 1/3 of the way down the chart now - realized that babysitting a 2-4 man clusterfuck squad was eroding my skills, so I sent them home and started using headphones. And what a difference - usually I find it a bit onerous, but the sound design is really great. Gives you all the warning you need to scope-and-mark packs of enemies from safe distance, track threats from behind cover, or hit the rucksack quick-release and book it out of immediate danger when something horrible de-cloaks and goes for your neck.

Turned campfire saves back on too, since having even a little bit of friction between death and rebirth is a powerful incentive to roll with the punches and stay living. It's mildly From; turns off quicksave unless you're stood next to a lit fire, which are quite numerous. Anomaly had it as an option, but Gamma makes it a default and hands out emergency save-anywhere tokens every 15 minutes or so. (Plus a full-on Souls mode with codified respawns, gear retrieval, ambushes etc, but that feels like dedicated run territory!)

Solo with restricted saving really seems to be where the game shines - as exemplified by today's delve back into Lab X18 to disable the Miracle Machine. It's a nifty setpiece reused from Shadow - climb down a broken elevator shaft, fight through a pitch-black cadre of horrors, overload a big reactor while the tannoy yells at you in russian, then escape back to the surface.

And lemme tellya, it was fucking terrifying. Not for the haunted house angle - which is still potent, and no doubt additive - or the endless noclip mind-ghosts that can be resist-stacked out of the equation, but for the sheer tension of fighting through a dense mutant population that can gore you in seconds, or rip your mind out through your eyes given line-of-sight. It's only six rooms long, but feels like an absolute gauntlet.

The best part was my biggest mistake: Dumping my backpack at the entrance for mobility, not realizing that the last ladder down was one-way, and having the pocket-fumble I forgot the matchbox at the midpoint campfire. Oh -f*ck-
Clawed my way up the main chamber to within a few feet of the final off switch... Then ate a faceful of degenerate gas-mask ghoul.

It was a bungle that I'll remember fondly. Should've run, but...

Which is to say nothing of the gnarly dwarf wizard who shows up afterward, the wouldya kindly blow yer own brains out mind controller guarding the exit, or the black gallows humor sewer escape that follows, with bonfires literally every ten feet so the poor sick bastards playing Iron Man can calm their 40-hours-deep nerve shred between five more double Snork ambushes and Hi I'm The Biggest Enemy In The Game busting through a wall for a send-off chase. Sweet christ!

There are people that Iron Man this game!

Best I can tell, it's not done getting better either. Perhaps I'll actually reach the CNPP this playthrough!

[Lander]

Ha, that's a rough start - a bit like plopping someone on top of a mountain and asking "isn't it incredible?" while they die of exposure

Could well have been Gamma, there are a few Ultra-Modded Who-Ze-Whatsits about. Escape From Pripyat is another (presumably inspired by Escape From Tarkov), and the more classically-minded Old World Addon; all of them build on Anomaly, since it made substantial upgrades to the original engine.

And well, 2 notwithstanding, the series tends to respect the player's knowledge retention to a fault. You'll be missing pieces if you didn't play Previous Game, and the mod scene has continued that trajectory with aplomb; OG Shadow of Chernobyl starts out as relatively approachable wide-linear narrative tac shooting, Clear Sky doubles down on simmy open-ended faction war, then Call of Pripyat opens up the structure. Glue all that together with some survival crafting maximalism and you get Anomaly, then nip and tuck with a hardcore-minded vengeance and you arrive at Gamma.

Which comes with this handy chart!

The PDA has a nice Guide tab these days too, like a little diagetic wiki, but it's quite dry and doesn't hammer in the key lifehacks that get bandied about on YouTube and Reddit.

I'd say release order is still worth it if you've the ~45 hours spare; it's not exactly Tarkovsky, but Shadow's got some pleasingly uncanny cutscene work and impressive setpieces, and atmos is good throughout. The scary bits especially! Though Clear Sky feels like more of an expansion to the first game, so is skippable.

As for my travails, I'm about halfway down the chart now - realized that babysitting a 2-4 man clusterfuck squad was eroding my skills, so I sent them home and started using headphones. And what a difference - usually I find it a bit onerous, but the sound design is really great. Gives you all the warning you need to scope-and-mark packs of enemies from safe distance, track threats from behind cover, or hit the rucksack quick-release and book it out of immediate danger when something horrible de-cloaks and goes for your neck.

Turned campfire saves back on too, since having even a little bit of friction between death and rebirth is a powerful incentive to roll with the punches and stay living. It's mildly From; turns off quicksave unless you're stood next to a lit fire, which are quite numerous. Anomaly had it as an option, but Gamma makes it a default and hands out emergency save-anywhere tokens every 15 minutes or so. (Plus a full-on Souls mode with codified respawns, gear retrieval, ambushes etc, but that feels like dedicated run territory!)

Solo with restricted saving really seems to be where the game shines - as exemplified by today's delve back into Lab X18 to disable the Miracle Machine. It's a nifty setpiece reused from Shadow - climb down a broken elevator shaft, fight through a pitch-black cadre of horrors, overload a big science machine while the tannoy yells at you in russian, then escape back to the surface.

And lemme tellya, it was fucking terrifying. Not for the haunted house angle - which is still potent, and no doubt additive - or the endless noclip mind-ghosts that can be resist-stacked out of the equation, but for the sheer tension of fighting through a dense mutant population that can gore you in seconds, or rip your mind out through your eyes given line-of-sight. It's only six rooms long, but feels like an absolute gauntlet.

The best part was my biggest mistake: Dumping my backpack at the entrance for mobility, not realizing that the last ladder down was one-way, and having the pocket-fumble I forgot the matchbox at the midpoint campfire. Oh -f*ck-
Clawed my way up the main chamber to within a few feet of the final off switch... Then ate a faceful of degenerate gas-mask ghoul.

It was a bungle that I'll remember fondly. Should've run, but...

Which is to say nothing of the gnarly dwarf wizard who shows up afterward, the wouldya kindly blow yer own brains out mind controller guarding the exit, or the gallows humor sewer escape that follows, with bonfires literally every ten feet so the poor sick bastards playing Iron Man can calm their 40-hours-deep nerve shred between five more double Snork ambushes and Hi I'm The Biggest Enemy In The Game busting through a wall for a send-off chase. Sweet christ!

There are people that Iron Man this game!

Best I can tell, it's not done getting better either. Perhaps I'll actually reach the CNPP this playthrough!

[m.sniffles.esq]

Holy shit, no wonder I had no idea what was going on

The launcher just says "Anomaly" (I guess I never uninstalled it), which I guess means it could be anything (I'm just looking remotely, I'd have to copy the entire thing over to actually launch it)

[Lander]

Yeah, you'd have to hit title screen to know for sure. Though if it's not launching from a 'Mod Organizer 2' program with a super long list of enabled tweaks, it's probably not Gamma.

I've been continuing my campaign, and trying to break into the back third of the game. I think Hard / Survival in Gamma is perhaps a bit much - it hasn't become formulaic or repetitive, since the A-Life chaos makes every job run dangerous and unpredictable, but progression slows down massively once you top out the second tier of crafting. The final tier is gated behind the northern maps, which are themselves gated behind a pair of dungeon runs that gear check you against mutants and stalkers respectively.

Lab X18 is fine - exciting, tough but fair - but Lab X19 is ridiculous. You have to battle your way through a mutant-dense overworld area, break into a base full of well-geared hostile dudes, then delve into an underground lab to disable the Brain Scorcher before your 10 minutes of protection expires.
In regular Anomaly, hitting the switch fills the dungeon with hostile troops for you to fight on the way back, which is manageable with the usual careful spec-ops creep. (And ability to buy your way into end-tier gear by this point...)

But Gamma - in its wisdom - spawns the dudes as soon as you enter the dungeon, and that changes the proposition entirely. Rainbox Six strats are out the window, since there are 30-40 of them, and 10 minutes is not enough to carefully mete out ammo-efficient headshots. You need to bring hundreds of rounds of expensive AP ammo, and mag dump like a madman to get through in time.

On paper it's a cool idea - take the player out of their comfort zone, make sure they understand how to prep, and have them execute a high-pressure raid against enemies that can usually be waited out. But in practice, they're geared enough to make it nightmarish unless you're already grognard enough to have meta-gamed into high-caliber endgame ammo. I figured I was grognarding pretty hard already, since my AK74 has been fine to this point, but apparently not

But, I did it. In spite of what has to be some of the meanest RNG I've seen so far. The first (failed) attempt was okay - went in at night, dealt with a few nasties on the way in, and stalled out halfway through the lab proper.

So after spending a few hours faming up ~80kg of rifle rounds for the privilege, I went in during the day for better vision and easier overworld enemies, and have never seen so many endgame mutants spawn in an overworld map. A chimera, a psysucker, three poltergeists, a controller, two pseudogiants with huge AoE stun attacks, just about all of it.
Okay, deal with that, reach the base, go loud... And it's time for a radiation storm! Which would have been serendipitous, if the battalion of Monolith troopers hadn't turned out to be immune to it - cue squatting in a north-facing bus shelter chugging anti-rad Stolie and muttering expletives like the goppiest of gopniks.

Which makes for a good story, but the lab part after just wasn't fun. The game is nice enough to enable regular quicksave for the duration, but that just turns it into an inch-by-inch scum with the timer as a sword of damocles hanging over your effort investment; would have been better with reasonable balance and regular restrictions.

The return trip was interesting though - you get to enjoy the haunted soviet installation ambience while picking through the OpFor's soon-to-be-usable nice gear, and have a fucking heart attack when one of their corpses glitches into a deafening physics flail-ball. And another when the one guy you missed sneaks up for a revenge kill.

...And a third when you realise maps repopulate on transition! No fast travel easy-out either, since Stalker Uber doesn't operate in Radar. Stranded deep in enemy territory, weighed down with swag, and down to the last mars bar... time to run away screaming, tactically.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Won't lie, reading all that makes not even want to get into whichever mod I have installed.

Stalker 2 seems to be mechanically working (mostly) now. Things I pick up are in my inventory and all that. However, enemy spawns and AI are still ALL kinds of jacked ups, which I'll chalk up to bugz. That said, one can't really call the seemingly really haphazard design to the missions 'bugz'.

Quick example: One is supposed to turn on a whatsit that's located upon the roof of a shack. There's about six piles of garbage and beams surrounding said shack. One allows the player to vault onto the roof. The other five has the player crash into an invisible wall. Also, the player must negotiate this trial and error while patrols of randomly spawning and disappearing enemies circle (don't worry though, once you turn on whatsit, they'll conveniently all disappear so the player can be treated to an extended cutscene including all manner of bright lights and loud sounds)

I feel like a company like Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc would get crucified for something like this. Just saying

I will say the game does successfully manage to create an environment where doing mundane 'a to b' travel and whatnot feels tense and exciting. But man, the things you have to do when you get there take me back to the days of eidos at their laziest.

Edit: somewhat inspired by making this post, I continued my quest and am now asked to traverse this hole where a monster spawns on top of me, knocking off about 75% of my health instantly, survives four point-blank shotgun blasts to the face, then knocks off the remaining 25%, over and over and over and over. Maybe I'll go back to Cyberpunk. It sucks. But at least it doesn't just keep throwing you against walls.

[Lander]

I heard that 2 got a major 1.1 patch that ships a first round of A-Life fixes, which is encouraging. Quicker than expected, though from the sound of it there's still a long way to go.

Quick example: One is supposed to turn on a whatsit that's located upon the roof of a shack. There's about six piles of garbage and beams surrounding said shack. One allows the player to vault onto the roof. The other five has the player crash into an invisible wall.

Oh yes, the platforming. For better or worse, Stalker has always gotten a kick out of making the player highwire their way around. The older games generally restrict it to optional stash-hunting (nobody will find my two boxes of 9-mil and emergency sausage at the top of this power pylon ) but it occasionally shows up in a quest and leaves you asking if there were some facepalm-worthy critical path that didn't involve broken legs.

I kind of dig the old-school You Found A Secret factor, but it's definitely slav jank.

Won't lie, reading all that makes not even want to get into whichever mod I have installed.

Probably for the best - beats realizing the CBT exceeds your threshold after tens of hours.

...Which inevitably happened to me. Binned the Gamma run after striking out to explore the northern maps; the endgame factions are stupid strong, and hanging out in their stomping grounds for ages in the hope of RNG-ing up the food chain is too much pain.
I even swallowed my pride and dialed the difficulty down to minimum, but the issue is systemic; the ~immersive~ ballistics rework means a stray headshot will still end you instantly, and even a broken stormtrooper is accurate twice a day.

Still, I don't regret most of it; Toma Klansky's Red Six is a fun flavour, but a bit reminiscent of end-level Grim Dawn in asking for an exponential amount of patience after you're already in neck-deep.

I will say the game does successfully manage to create an environment where doing mundane 'a to b' travel and whatnot feels tense and exciting. But man, the things you have to do when you get there take me back to the days of eidos at their laziest.

That emergent travel is the series' crown jewel, I think. Dragon's Dogma II had a similar thing, where the journey routinely upstaged the destination.
Though from what I watched, Stalker 2's main quest was uneven but ultimately more satisfying than that. Picks up once you start choosing allegiances (and getting into surprisingly well-choreographed first person fistfights,) but some bits are straight out of 2007.

Edit: somewhat inspired by making this post, I continued my quest and am now asked to traverse this hole where a monster spawns on top of me, knocking off about 75% of my health instantly, survives four point-blank shotgun blasts to the face, then knocks off the remaining 25%, over and over and over and over. Maybe I'll go back to Cyberpunk. It sucks. But at least it doesn't just keep throwing you against walls.

Ouch, which mutant is it? Bloodsuckers (cloaking game over screen guy) can be abused in a pinch by crouching in a corner (or narrow tunnel) and heal-spamming; makes their run-up swipe miss occasionally, though they might also just stand there and kill you depending on the AI's mood. If it's a Snork (gas mask thing) then more general get-it-stuck-somewhere cheese is in order if your guns can't burst it down quickly, since they're bastardly agile and like to launch across rooms. Also vulnerable in midair, if you're feeling lucky.

An automatic gun with with hollow-point ammo (I think 2 calls it 'Expansive') is generally the best bet versus Stalker's monsters; shotguns are nice big hitters if you're fighting something that can be consistently kited during reload (though it's less an issue with magazine-loaders like the Saiga,) but a nice panic-friendly bullet hose with a deep mag that can be dumped in the general direction of the enemy before it closes in tends to be safer. TOZ Bizon, UMP45, Skorpion, etc. should be solid early-game, if the earlier titles are anything to go on. Or a fancy P90, if you can find one.

--------

Supplemental: Geneaology of a Сталкер Ch. 2

In which the search for an acceptable misery-but-it'll-be-okay simulator advances.

Traveler's Second Step

In the wake of Gamma, I tried Ecape From Pripyat.

It's more actiony. Combat's still lethal, but seems to better balance player vs enemy fragility. The weight of crafting upkeep is lessened, and it's only slightly lesser in terms of shiny presentational mods, but the hardcore-survival 'okay pop painkillers for a temporary heal, then separate splints to make it permanent for the arms and legs, a medkit for the head and torso, some water and a can of beans to settle the dizziness, and now a nap to refill the tired-o-meter' is still present and ughhh just let me play Stalker already.

(Had a peek at Escape From Tarkov for context too - neat milsim, shame about the transparently grimy business model. Not with a barge-pole mate.)

I'm starting to think Anomaly - for all of its impressive artifice and hours of fun potential - was an evolutionary misstep, and represents what would have happened if something like Doomsday or Brutal Doom had become the prevailing Doom platform instead of G/ZDoom; we'd still have a high-tech modern incarnation, but one that went in a wonky and opinionated direction instead of preserving the original work first and building on it second.

See, I did some more digging, and found that there's yet more to the franchise family tree: trilogy-ender Call of Pripyat first spawned Misery (the inception point of hardcore survival) and Call of Chernobyl ('all the games in one' sans extras,) which got merged into Call of Misery, eventually birthing Anomaly and coming to define the series during its lengthy gap between official games.

Indeed, a schism can be observed in the corners of Reddit and ModDB, with the occasional skirmish between prevailing Anomaly-derived and dug-in Original sub-fanbases prompting opposed battle cries of 'Ask in the Discord!' and 'Play the Trilogy!'

Mysteries of the Zone

There turns out to be a less-recognized third tribe; one that still plays pre-survival CoC, and has been diligently hammering away at it in the interim with little recognition. The humbly-named Improved Weapon Pack standalone hides behind it an exceptional source port called CryRay Engine x64, which proves a far superior technical base than Anomaly's Monolith x64: Crashes are rare, loads are fast, performance is good enough to crank up both the A-Life and signature GPU-killing grass while hitting three-digit framerates, and stutter does not happen in moment-to-moment play. That's unprecedented

And, since it plays like the original games plus refinements, modding out the fluff and installing a demake isn't necessary to normalize the gameplay: Items are distinct with clear uses and no gimmicks, enemies reliably die when shot, the player has a decent chance of walking away from any given fight under default rules, and there's no neat-at-first crafting trap to slow the process of exploring, shooting, and trying out new stuff when you find it. Nice.

It has a surprising amount of the modern audiovisual stuff available too - models, textures, animations, and the like. It's not bleeding-edge like Gamma - shaders lack the same shine, emissions and psi storms aren't as flashy, and there's no tacticool 'aim head independent of body' button, but it cuts a really polished presentational balance.

There's also a compatible addon called 'Call of the Zone', which covers the greatest-hits of common Anomaly mods, avoids gating the northern maps behind the major raids, and overhauls the dynamic 'radiant' quest system to be much deeper and more interesting - threads and events are propagated via the A-Life system, which makes NPC gossip actually meaningful, since they can tip you off on various local happenings and quest details. Or even pass around urban myths that become open ended 'find the legendary doo-dad' quest entries!

It's much more inclined to involve other stalkers in your jobs too; in many cases the client and his mates will come with, resulting in more interesting sim interactions and a notably improved line of banter. It would have been awful under Gamma's 'tier one operator or die' rules, but NPCs are more capable here, actively shouting out compass directions for incoming threats and engaging somewhat intelligently. The increased party size and rigid NPC collision does tend to cause traffic jams around vendors, but that's solvable with judicious use of 'wait here' and the 'teleport party to me' button.

Traveler's Third Step

As will be the case until I finally conquer the CNPP, I started out as Free Stalker Lhan in Cordon / Rookie Village, with grampy's SKS and a few medical supplies, and picked up a couple of the usual Kill Car Park Bandits and Search This Stash quests. Did those, then participated in a Big Mutant Hunt alongside ~8 other stalkers, which decimated the local pig population, and downed a passing helicopter patrol in celebration. Great fun, that map is now a lot safer, and it's cool to see one of the hub towns band together to get something done instead of just patrolling all day.

I got chatting to the hunt gang afterward, and found out that there was a price on my head for killing the car-park bandits! Cue a surprise quest in the log, and new dialogue options with random NPCs asking after the assassin - most of it fun flavour text like "You're doomed bro, I heard he learned to turn invisible by beating on a Bloodsucker until it told him how", but also useful tips like "Yeah, I saw him in Jupiter up north".

Jupiter (a rather pleasant sprawling hill environment and power station) is 5 maps away, so figured I'd lay low and nap it out. Wake up the next morning, wander outside, and suddenly the thoroughfare is a warzone: It was the assassin! Lucky for me I hadn't turned in the hunt quest yet, so the chiki-briki boys were on-hand to swiss-cheese the man the moment he drew

[Several hours fly past...]

I've reached the north, and am ranging around the awesome Call of Pripyat maps doing handcrafted Call of Pripyat sidequests with a .44 Magum / TOZ Bizon / AK-104 combo that felt genuinely great to loot and trade my way into. More or less where I was after 50+ hours of Gamma, minus the Miracle Machine and Brain Scorcher raids due to altered main quest progression, and exactly where I want to be.

Also rocking a mint Monolith SEVA suit (the science bod's choice for anomaly diving) I got as a reward for sniper-steamrolling a massive battle with said faction during a stop-off around the middle of the world map. Which is sweet, since artifact spawns are much more generous, and treasure hunting is no longer a 'sometimes thing' as per Gamma. Piles upon piles of tradeoff buff-nerfs to balance and sell for big roubles.
And difficulty is -spot-on-; I picked Stalker (Normal) out of trepidation, and it's the perfect not-dying-immediately not-walking-through balance to soothe the burnout.

I think IWP + CotZ might well be the golden apple - it's re-reinvigorated the game entirely

[m.sniffles.esq]

Ouch, which mutant is it? Bloodsuckers (cloaking game over screen guy) can be abused in a pinch by crouching in a corner (or narrow tunnel) and heal-spamming; makes their run-up swipe miss occasionally

It's one of those, and since it spawns in the tunnel with me (it literally spawns doing the leaping strike thing), you just have to eat the blow (which I HATE when games do). The second shotgun barrel does knock him on his ass for a second, then he always spawns behind me. So I guess I'm supposed to run ahead and do... something. But the trial and error of attempting to discover what that something is (thus far, it's usually 'find invisible line where you no longer exist to enemy') was frustrating the shit out of me.

Did I mention that I hate when games do the 'forced damage' thing? Because I do.

[Lander]

It's one of those, and since it spawns in the tunnel with me (it literally spawns doing the leaping strike thing), you just have to eat the blow (which I HATE when games do). The second shotgun barrel does knock him on his ass for a second, then he always spawns behind me. So I guess I'm supposed to run ahead and do... something. But the trial and error of attempting to discover what that something is (thus far, it's usually 'find invisible line where you no longer exist to enemy') was frustrating the shit out of me.

I've had Aris' stream of 2 on in the background today, and suckers do seem much cheaper this time around. They always did the predator cloak hit-and-run routine, but didn't used to turn into The Flash while invisible. It looks very binary between "can't see or hit me" and "doing damage bye", alongside the new stun and knockdown moves.

and stutter does not happen in moment-to-moment play. That's unprecedented

Haha. Ha. Ha. This is only true prior to hour ~20, after which the shiny new engine ticks over some internal world complexity threshold and starts stuttering horribly forever.
So much for Lander's Enjoyable Modpack Minus Anomaly... Now the second 'M' will have to stand for 'Mitigating'

And yet somehow, I'm not that cut up over binning another lengthy playthrough. I wonder if this is what going mad feels like - the ski mask-clad face of god is so close, I just have to reach a liiittle bit further...

[m.sniffles.esq]

Heh, I saw this directly after throwing my controller down

I did manage to find an invisible line where I cease to exist to the monster. BUT it's on a path that leads to an exit to the cave, and not to the goal. The other available path branches off to 25 different dead ends where I corner myself and quickly die since I'm already bleeding to death from the hit it forces me to eat. I guess there's one correct path that I'm suppose to kill myself a few dozen more times in trial and error attempts in finding (or pray I luck out and find it in merely a dozen deaths). But instead. I choose to say "fuck this" as it's not enjoyable at all*.

Anyway, now that's (allegedly) in some sort of working state, it seems my initial suspicions are confirmed. I thought that any game that proudly displays the number of times you've died like a badge of honor must be aimed squarely at the soulz crowd. And thus far every challenge in my path is surmounted by spending a large amount of time increasing that number. Maybe you'll get lucky... You probably won't. If I was 19 and my parents were supplying me with hot pockets and tuition, spending two hours to defeat a monster or to walk 100 virtual yards may fill me with an enormous sense of accomplishment. But unfortunately, I'm not part of that demographic. It's kind of a shame, because the universe itself is neat. But the game that takes place in that universe is a drag.

*I realize I could look at a guide. But memorizing a video of someone running from a monster, then dying at least 12 times attempting to replicate it, also doesn't seem real enjoyable. If I wanted to follow instructions, I'd spend $50 on an Ikea chair. At least then I'd have a chair, which seems like a better use for time and money than evading an imaginary monster.

[Lord British]

I'm not an FPS guy normally, but I picked up Gun Grave G.O.R.E. on sale for $6 on PSN and I feel I've certainly got my $6 worth. It's an FPS that feels like it was made on a fancier NAOMI board. Wasn't aware of it's PS2 prequels either til recently, so if you're unfamiliar, the gameplay is just being a walking tank that's constantly shooting. Has it's flaws for sure but I've found it pretty gratifying so far. Check a vid on it.