@irongrey said in What are you top 5 movies of all time?:

I thought of these five:

Zodiac
Summer Interlude
The Double Life of Veronique
How Green Was My Valley
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

I like this list

Five that came to my mind:

-Not on the Lips
-The Profound Desires of the Gods
-The Smiling Madame Beudet
-Distant Voices, Still Lives
-The Shop Around the Corner

There's a few dozen more where these came from. Not sure if some of these are even my favorites from their respective director, but they just popped into my mind so there.

Slowdown never used to bother me much. I remember playing Perfect Dark back in the day and thinking that it was cool that the game would go 'slow-mo' when lots of stuff was happening. It wasn't until I got into CS that I realized what was going on, and that it really impeded the ability to play the game.

Nowadays I'm not to bothered by it unless it's drastic, constant, or impedes gameplay in a major way. There are some games I won't play at less than 60 FPS, but they're mostly multiplayer games, and I don't play many of those anyways.

Input lag or buffer bothers me a lot more.

I recently played two games that were pretty similar to each other: Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon.

Nuclear Throne is straightforward, flighty, and a bit ugly, but I think it's the much stronger of the two. It's a fast, well-modulated experience that's formed around its running and shooting. Levels are the right size, are naturally paced with open areas and hallways littered with interesting enemy combinations---and builds, which are dependent only on character, passive upgrades on level up, and two found weapons, feel well-suited for some situations but difficult for others and fit well into the game's fast pace. You kill quick and die quick with no grace period of I-frames or consumables to lift your head above the water. It's volatile, and it gives the sense of surviving against the game rather than providing confidence or power over its play-space (like the next game...).

Enter the Gungeon isn't bad, but I beat it on my second run, which I don't think should ever happen in a game that has arcade or roguelike inspirations. Enter the Gungeon's levels are too big, with too much running around and too many rooms that are frankly a joke. There isn't a reason for there to be 5 floors---make it 3 so playing through the game doesn't take 45 minutes. Success in this one is (like The Binding of Isaac, its biggest inspiration) based around build: get a high DPS through finding a good couple of weapons and good passive upgrades, and make sure you can stand a few hits. Always worked when the game wanted to give it to me. Over time I learned to appreciate it a little more; there's a lot of content here, and the 'Kill the Past' segments are cool, but its fundamentals can't carry the weight of all of its rooms and guns and secrets and shops and bosses.

Enter the Gungeon is made for those who want a lot of a thing, Nuclear Throne is for those who want that thing to be precise.

@paulmci27 said in The way conversations are done in most games now is so boring:

I've been having the same problems as the Op but it's with daily conversations I've been having in real life. People just look at me & reply when they talk to me. Sooo to spice things up everytime someone wants to talk to me I blast some power metal & knee skid up to them. Brightens my day right up.

I don't think an appeal to realism is a smart justification for a lack of style or formal diversity.

L.A. Noire is an example of how bad the direction of games cinematics is. You've got the genre you're trying to be right there and they still mess it up. It has all the detail and art design, but it doesn't look like film noir in the slightest---there's no attention to how those films were crafted or even written (though that's a different issue). I think some of it was the technology though; the process they used to do facial capture required a lot of light, so everyone has washed out faces and the environments are very flat and pale.

I have friends who spend much more time playing games, but are far less interested in games than I am---if that makes any sense.

Moon getting a translation is all I ever needed.

Maximo: Ghosts to Glory

A really solid 3D platformer; I'm surprised it isn't brought up more often. Translates G&G's sense of empowerment and disempowerment really well, and does a pretty decent job of continuing the slow but high-stakes platforming loop that makes the series so notable. There's actually a very limited moveset, but the game is well designed around player limitation, introducing hazards and enemies that ask for timing and consideration rather than the accrual of collected objects that simply make you stronger (if you do collect powerups, you stand to lose almost all of them on death). Resources like money and keys ask for a similar consideration when you're tempted to use them up, as the game keeps those valuable the entire way through as well.

It isn't perfect (bosses are easy, camera screws up in tight environments), but I really like its focused design philosophy.

Zone of the Enders

Really good presentation, but flat storytelling. I get that mecha has to have a semi-reluctant teenage boy as the protag, but even as someone unfamiliar with the genre, its movements and character motivations felt really trite. Some of Kojima's more operatic sentiments pop in here or there (like the death of the game's villain for example), but his influence feels more decorative than anything else: the graphic design, the pacing (rather than the quality of) the dialogue. The combat could have been better thought out as well. Movement is pretty responsive, but the action mostly comes down to mashing square and changing up ranged and close-combat approaches. Blocking and throws never struck me as necessary, and a lot of the side weapons feel cumbersome.

I like that it's all one nicely realized location though. I like games that do that.

I've put a number of hours into Dragon Force, which I've had an interesting relationship with.

At first, it's super absorbing. Understanding the different systems, figuring out which troops best others, searching castles, recruiting captives, the little story segments that pop up in the first hour or so. It's attractive and it makes you look forward to what surprises it might hold. Then there aren't any surprises, or if there are, there aren't any in the several hours that follow the first. Once the loop is understood, it's a schematic, slow game that asks you to play it conservatively. There is just nothing keeping me on the line here, though I may turn it on one last time to see if it can pull something out of its pocket.