A PS4 Thread: Because You Had to Play "Knack"

I know I'm in the tiny minority but I don't really love the combat in these games, it just gives me hand cramps. On the other hand, I looove the stealth rooms.

arkham stealth > arkham melee > arkham knight driving >>>> spiderman combat which felt more like assassin's creed 2's open combat than anything else

My son played a bit of Spider-Man and the combat seemed just to be button-mashing. But I get that the game's appeal isn't its combat but rather its freedom of movement in the city. I still want to play it.

Spider-Man's combat honestly seemed less button mash-y then Arkham Knight to me. I remember dying a good bit in SM cuz I wasn't being smart about how I'd approach a room.

He just did through the (first?) Kingpin fight so I dunno.

lol i think that’s the first fight

yeah he played for like 20 minutes

Lol, that's just a little bit before where I made it, too, not because I didn't like it but because I got distracted. But yeah, the combat seemed less compelling than the swinging around the city. I could never remember the various combos and, like God of War, just did the best I could pressing a handful of things I knew worked for me.

It actually gets fairly tough! Definitely can't expect to spam a move or two and survive.

I kinda tired of the Batman formula by Knight. And wasn't crazy about the Batmobile stuff. Had a lot of fun with the first two however. I don't think the Spider-Man combat is inferior personally.

you don’t need to remember many combos in spider-man. a couple of dodges, that’s it really. pepper in an advanced move or two once you acquire them and it becomes incredibly satisfying.

in fairness i think everyone was at least a little tired of it by Knight, it was the fourth game in... six years? wow they pumped 'em out faster than i remembered. (Plus the various games that copied the fight system afterwards, like uh, that Captain America game, Shadow of Mordor, etc.)

the early Gotham Knights footage actually looks worse than AK, hoping that's because it's early footage. But, they gave it to the AA-team who did Arkham Origins, so I'm guessing the budget won't be as good... plus it looks like Destiny/Marvel's Avengers where it's going to be focus on co-op and loot possibly...

for my money, the spiritual successor to the Arkham Asylum is the Spider-Man game, especially wrt combat

Mad Max combat is very much like Arkham, although it feels less meaty.

In Spider-Man the in air combat is worth getting to grips with as that separates it from a whole bunch of dodge and mash games.

All four Arkham games are great imo. But I wouldn’t advise playing them back to back. And it’s undeniably true that the first is the best, so if you play that and don’t enjoy it then it’s not going to be worth continuing.

Trick to the combat, if you find it difficult, is to slow down. It’s got a very specific pace to it and when it gets difficult it can be easy to assume it’s because you’re not being fast enough, when actually it’s more likely you’re already going too fast.

I picked up Control again after a quick go a few months ago. I initially found some of the physics a bit clumsy, like you walk into a coffee trolley and it falls over like it's made of cardboard. Also not mad keen on shooters. But I have to admire the incredibly creepy office-punk horror atmosphere which they've got down absolute pat. I can only play a few minutes at a time - there's something so eerie about how the enemies seem to appear from nowhere - it's highly stressful; and especially how disorienting the Hiss / building movement device works.

PUBG and Street Fighter V free on PS+ this month. I'll probably play SF for half an hour.

Ooh, I enjoyed SFV a lot

there's something so eerie about how the enemies seem to appear from nowhere

there’s a horizontal red pillar of light when they appear, though?

spiderman combat seemed the opposite of button mashing to me? i really liked the assortment of combos.

it's a fun system. it's just that the Arkham fight system was like a 10 while the Spider-Man one is a 7

Arkham City's probably the game I've played the most, but I guess the fairly on-rails nature of Asylum develops a certain hustle to it?

I mean, I can't think of anything in Asylum as good as the last Freeze fight, or anything in City as bad as the Croc fight.

DL, I am very easily scared (I hate horror films and games), but while Control is absolutely creepy as hell, it rarely (if ever) goes full horror (although I think the new DLC is supposed to be closer to horror), if that distinction makes any sense (i.e. no jump scares that I can remember, thankfully).

there's one or two notable jump scares. One of which was actually an accident in development and came off so good they kept it in. ("His" face before you enter that area.) Most of the game is certainly unsettling lurking horror.

I guess it’s frightening to me in much the same way as Inland Empire is frightening. I’m getting to grips with it now, but it’s that feeling where you’re not quite sure what’s going on or what’s going to happen round the next corner. All the while, there’s that quaint, sinister feeling I remember from being a kid and having to go back into school after everyone’s gone home because I forgot something, and it’s totally empty save for the sound of the caretaker’s floor polisher

great post dl :)

it’s totally empty save for the sound of the caretaker’s floor polisher

If the caretaker was Finnish, then good knowing ya because your life would be a creepy video game.

I ha'e only played Arkansas Knight and like spiderman's gameplay a lot better.

Arkansas Knight needs to be a game right now.

And I will play it in two years.

And I will play it in two years.

dying at Arkansas Knight

Started Arkansas Asylum last night, it's OK! Great atmosphere, and if it's not as smooth as, say, Spider-man or God of War, it is about 100 years older than either of them in game-years. If there's a (very early, minor) criticism it's that I often find myself forgetting I am in detective mode, so am maybe missing out on the look of the game.

Started Arkansas Asylum last night, it's OK!

If it's OK, wouldn't it be Oklahoma Asylum?

Arklahoma Asylum

it was down in arklahoma, just about a mile from texiana

Whoever upthread said the key is to take your time, no kidding. At least early game, those gun-toting thugs can take you out!

being The Batman is about silently choking out dudes

Parappa the Rapper 2: worth playing in 2020?

Batman's alter ego should be Vent-man. And yeah Choke-man. Still, I'm liking this. Nice mix of dark and spooky and super-hero. Just beat Bane.

Parappa in 2020 (or 2018 in my case) ended up being a horrible fight to try to get my tv and speakers and wireless pad to all work in sync with each other, a fight which I ultimately lost. Made it unplayable, sadly.

(Rock Band/Guitar Hero etc came out when those things had already started being an issue and so they had pretty decent calibration tools built in. The parappa games don’t because back then wired pad + crt + built in tv speaker was already pretty robust, timing wise).

thanks for letting me know, i had a feeling something like that might come up

yeah it’s a shame. i have an original parappa disc that works in my ps3 but the timing is off.

but iirc um jammer lammy is/was available as a download? surely those issues were sorted out for that?

I feel like a lot of these older PSN releases are just straight ROMs with minor to no optimization. Which is usually fine but not in this case

Yeah I didn’t try um jammer but it was the psn download version of parappa 2 that I was banging my head against so I doubt the others are any different.

I wonder if PC emulation works? I'm kinda too lazy to set that up these days anyway. My last experience with this kind of thing was trying to play Mother 3 several years ago and the beat timing at the time wasn't good enough; I bruteforced my way through the battles.

mother 3 timing works fine on some emulators but iirc the most popular one at the time (visualboyadvance i think?) botched it so it got that reputation

i think some of those PSN emulation rereleases are actually running in the cloud? which would explain latency if that's one of them. feel like they shouldn't need to do that for PSX games though, just PS2

mother 3 timing works fine on some emulators but iirc the most popular one at the time (visualboyadvance i think?) botched it so it got that reputation

i couldn't get the timing right despite having a pretty well-tuned retroarch/retropie setup. i was using the VBA core through a BT controller though...

though my latest experiments with jackd to eliminate audio latency on the device have been looking pretty good. rhythm tengoku's test/calibration screen shows pretty good latency

Not 100% on this but the general rule for previous formats on ps4 is that ps3 games stream while ps2 and ps1 games are actual downloads which play locally. There may be exceptions though.

Batman seems to be the perfect bridge between Ratchet and Clank and Bloodborne (assuming I play the latter next). It's not particularly challenging, at least most of the time, since Batman is pretty OP, but it is a lot of fun, and the game design is dark, detailed and spooky. My fave aspect so far (I assume I'm still pretty early in the game) is how equally OP any goon with a gun is vs. the run of the mill goons. You enter a room with like 10 goons and you think, ok, no problem, I'll just beat them all up. But then you enter a room with 10 goons and one goon with a gun, and you have to stop and think, hmm, what's the best way to take out the goon with a gun before I beat up the rest? Also, Batman is always so grim and serious and dramatic that he is (ironically) innately silly, which is fun, too. Spider-man has fun swinging around, but Batman is all business. At least in the front: his cape kind of turns him into a human mullet.

I like the idea of an openworld Castlevania game, but the idea of Bloodborne leaves me cold. I gave Dark Souls 3 a try and the whole thing seemed gnomic and unfriendly. Hyper-difficult action combat is well and good, but it lacks Witcher-style storytelling and exploration, which is primarily what I'm there for as opposed to just walking along and killing baddies