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

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

Yeah, I like games with storytelling, too. Which the Soulsborne games definitely have, but it's so elliptical and obscure by design that it just adds to the oppressive atmosphere; "gnomic" is otm, but beyond that these games are just so lonely. Which is def. not for all tastes, especially since beating them, while satisfying, does not provide any sort of real ... well, satisfaction. I haven't played any of The Witcher yet, but that one seems like a hybrid of D&D style RPG and storytelling.

Witcher isn't that D&D, its narrative isn't structurally different from the RPG template that's been set in place for the last decade. Divinity is much closer, however.

is divinity worth a play?

i was bored by it when i played single player, and absolutely adored it when playing 4-play co-op campaign. holy shit, that was maybe one of my top 3 or 5 gaming moments of ALL TIME. unfortunately the co-op campaign ended after about 25 hours due to IRL conflicts

do you need PSN to do that?

PS Plus (not PSN), and it is required for online multiplayer.

oh actually - i should clarify - we all played on mac/steam. i haven't actually played the ps4 version. but it's supposed to be pretty good!

A few xposts, but dl, I think I really do recommend playing those Souls games with some sort of guide or walkthrough. God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Last of Us and now Arkham Asylum have all been relatively straightforward without a guide, with a few rare "what am I missing?" exceptions. Dark Souls, on the other hand, offered a seemingly insurmountable challenge every few minutes even *with* hints, and there is so much awesome stuff I would have missed without them.

Yeah I'll definitely give DSIII another shot one day. I think it's the unrelenting grimness + difficulty level + (so far) linear gameplay and lack of tangible story that puts me off. It's a really well made game, but I feel a bit like a machine carrying out thankless tasks sometimes. Never was into bondage. Yes, all games boil down to this, but the illusion of a good game is that it tricks you into believing you're doing more than this.

i always thought the secret of the souls series is that they're basically puzzle games

execution-heavy puzzle games suck ass though so i don't think that's the right way to think about it. if something's actually a good puzzle the satisfaction should come from figuring it out and stating the solution, executing it is unnecessary busywork

souls games are just action games

i always play them like they're puzzle games and i always enjoy them! Sekiro and Bloodborne were much less puzzly an more action oriented.

The "puzzle" in Souls is how best to beat each enemy, even the basic ones. Which can get frustrating. (Like, Batman right now, most baddies take nearly no thought or effort, which is a nice balance to the grim design.) The real puzzles in the Souls games are fewer and far between, but there is lots to discover and explore on the journey, and as you get used to the lonely bleakness (even Batman is super chatty by comparison) there is an odd beauty to it all.

Or avoid each enemy, more often. Or discover new terrain. Or understand how room x or door x or ladder x or enemy x or item x help provide an easy answer to move forward.
you can absolutely brute force your way through any DS game but there's almost always multiple elegant solutions to each issue if you want to think laterally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Ek7AsO-og

Still enjoying Batman, but it lacks (for better or worse) much on the way of boss fights. The same was true for the last few games I played, iirc, which def. cuts down on the challenge. Which, tbh, is non existent in this game so far, which is admittedly fine.

One of the fights in New Game + might change your mind on that.

given the ongoing Souls talk, has anyone tried out Mortal Shell as yet?