Beware The Frog

2 July

Oh, Far Cry 5 on Game Pass. I don’t have it in me to shoot guns these days… but it has bows, doesn’t it.

# 2022/07/02 - 00:16 — published on @commandergaroo

1 July

The “Rez / Panzer Dragoon on a touchscreen” concept works much better than I’d ever have expected (even if the design of this particular game feels quite uninspired beyond the fact that controls are functional)

# 2022/07/01 - 14:11 — published on @commandergaroo

The “Panzer Dragoon on a touchscreen” concept works much better than I’d ever have expected (even if the design of this particular game looks very, very cheap)

# 2022/07/01 - 14:06 — published on @commandergaroo

30 June

Maybe they thought it’d make a great demo for their Unreal-to-HTML pipeline but you better believe that on a Retina screen it is very much not that — besides the horrible load times.

# 2022/06/30 - 00:45 — published on @commandergaroo

I kept forgetting to try MetaHuman now that it’s public and… are you kidding me, it’s a webapp?? A webapp that takes entire minutes to load? YOU’RE THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE THE GAME ENGINE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

# 2022/06/30 - 00:40 — published on @commandergaroo

27 June

Citizen Sleeper (PC) — 8/10

I was quite put off initially by the narrator’s voice (trying too much to be like Disco Elysium without the same flair) but loved everything else — the world, the stories, the mechanics, even if they were a little awkward at first. I do wish there weren’t achievements for the narratives endings, because they really cheapen what could be interesting player choices.

# 2022/06/27 - 23:42

Huh, PC Gamer doesn’t have an RSS feed anymore, and Feedly’s option to create it from the webpage requires a subscription upgrade. Oh well, guess I’ll go on not immediately knowing what’s up with games 🤷🏻‍♂️ It’s actually quite relaxing.

# 2022/06/27 - 18:25 — published on @commandergaroo

26 June

Before Your Eyes (PC) — 6/10

The ending got me, so I can’t be overly negative about the game, but it was a bit of a slog to get there. And if you’re gonna make a game that requires me to keep focused on the screen for almost two hours, you ought to make it a lot more enjoyable to watch than this. (Props for animating the cat so well, though.)

On a technical level, it suffered from the fact that I was playing on a crappy webcam with my PC (which is inevitably gonna be the experience of a majority of players) so it occasionally missed blinks, and immersion suffered. But this kind of experiment is going to become extremely interesting when we get VR headsets with eye tracking.

# 2022/06/26 - 22:15

I was gonna say it’s much better animated than many videogames, then I realized it avoids the deepest pits of the uncanny valley because it doesn’t try to have realistic skin. Or both can be true.

# 2022/06/26 - 14:12 — published on @commandergaroo

25 June

My totally realistic idea of the day is to make a game — solo of course — at the intersection of Outer Wilds and a Culture novel. Bear in mind, I could easily make it work as a mostly text-based adventure, but the problem is I enjoy flying spaceships around planets.

# 2022/06/25 - 23:09 — published on @commandergaroo

Tilt-shift City Sample is adorable