💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › diary-3.gmi captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:11:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Recollecting memories of completing games during the earlier months of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
An arcade racing game with an interesting setting: a TV game show about driving through destructible terrain. Charge your power meter by drifting and drafting and use it to activate environmental effects like explosions, bulldozers, mostly more explosions, and optionally even colossal damage which changes the track layout. I saw commercials for this game as a kid and was super-hyped for it but could not find it on sale anywhere; now I got a change to see if it's any good.
Hard to say because my save file got corrupted after playing for about 2 hours, haha. 2 hours was not a terrible amount of progress but I didn't feel like replaying it, partly due to technical reasons (more on that later), but mainly I just didn't think the game was worth it. The following paragraph should be read with a grain of salt because 2 hours might not be enough to form a proper opinion, but...
Unlike Blur, driving skill did not seem to be too much of a factor, at least in the early game, and unlike NFS, there is no customization or much of a story mode. Understandably, the main strength of the game is track design, the spectacle of destroying stuff, and knowing the right timing for when to activate an explosion so it properly hits the car in front. But I'm not sure if that alone can provide much depth. Though I'll admit, having your car start sliding due to a huge shockwave is actually pretty cool, I have not experienced that kind of thing in racing games.
As of the time of writing, this game is very hit-or-miss when it comes to launching on Linux. I got it to work (though with a weird graphical artifact on the screen), it turned out to be quite laggy, so I rebooted into Windows and played it that way for a bit. Then I went back to try to play it on Linux again, and it could not load my save file. Save file corruption seems to be a relatively common issue according to Steam forums so I'm not sure if that's even Linux-related, but still.
Leaving out the rating for the end because the "playing it on Linux" section is relevant for this: it's not the best idea to put a rating for a game I've barely played, but considering my frustrations with the technical difficulties, I slapped a *6/10* rating on this. Might revisit at some point.
It was nominated for Game of the Month on the HLTB forums, and I've left some initial thoughts there, though that hardly counts as thought and more as rambling. TL;DR right libertarianism is a complete joke and I was grumpy about Sen. Armstrong's politics being incoherent, and some other minor frustrations with the story.
(originally this section contained a snippet of my ramblings, but I'm not very happy with most of what I wrote, and the stuff that I am "happy" with is well within spoiler territory which I can't format nicely in the Gemini format...)
Link to my rants on the HowLongToBeat forum
The gameplay is awesome, I'd started playing MGR:R just after I beat Bayonetta, expecting the mechanics to be exactly the same, but I had to readjust some gears in my head until it all clicked. This game is not necessarily about having dozens of combos and more about just keeping the flow of the action while parrying and aggressively taking health from enemies. Parrying was, in a way, easier than Bayonetta's dodging, since you don't have to press a separate button, just point in the direction of the enemy and spam the light attack key, which is basically more or less what you'd wanna do for your offense anyway. The game was exciting from start to finish, starting with a Metal Gear fight right off the bat and mostly only escalating from there. As fun as you'd expect based on the memes you might've seen.
Sadly, this was another game where my experience was influenced by technicalities, more on that in the next section.
Surprisingly this game ran much smoother for me than Bayonetta did, despite being newer. Since this is a DirectX 9 game and I have an AMD card, I could squeeze out some extra performance using Gallium Nine (apparently some older Intel integrated graphics can benefit from it, too?) Anyway, it was slightly painful to set up because Proton does not play nicely with it, see my ProtonDB report for installation instructions.
This a AAA game from 2013, which is not modern by most standards, but certainly is by mine! Thanks to Gallium Nine, I got identical performance on Linux and Windows, but this was still not enough to run the game at full speed... I'm honestly not sure whether that made the game harder or not. It ran at ~40 FPS on average, so it was basically slow-motion, but not very consistent slow-motion, and perhaps my very-very sub-optimal skill can be attributed to that, haha.
All in all, this was a great game, aside from the problems I had with its story (I came to appreciate it a few days after finishing it, but it was still painful to experience in the moment), controls in some of the Blade Mode quick-time events, and a disappointing Blade Wolf side mission. *8/10*
I've now covered all the games I'd completed since February, so back to our regularly scheduled international incident...
-- gardenapple 2022-07-29
