comicallycluttered

I’ve been playing Batman Arkham origins. Never played it when it came out but loved the other ones. It’s pretty good so far!

I really enjoyed Origins. It embraced the “detective” aspect a lot better, IMO. Also enjoyed the, well, origins of what essentially became Batman and Joker’s inevitable “love story”. Troy Baker played him really well.

Also, it’s pretty funny hearing Sonic voice Batman. I mean, I know he does a ton of other voices, but the contrast is always hilarious to me.

Anyway, onto me…

After taking a weeklong break from video games, I started playing something on my wishlist that finally went on sale again: Unheard - Voices of Crime. Detective game where you solve the cases by listening to conversations and identifying people by their voices/dialogue. The visuals are basically just floor plans and moving from room to room from a top down perspective in order to hear whoever’s speaking in that room.

All the recordings are binaural as well, so wherever you move your “character”, the volume and location of the voices change. It’s pretty interesting and not too long.

Today, I began Dungeons of Hinterberg. At first, super fun. Then got a bit bored because stuff felt samey. Then got interested again. I expect this pattern is going to continue. Despite being a dungeon crawler, it’s a pretty chill game.

Basically, think Breath of the Wild-type shrines mixed with Persona-style social sim gameplay. You do dungeons (or not, you don’t have to if you don’t want to) in the day, explore and spend time with people in the city at night.

What game is this even? I mean, why would any game need a graphic rape scene? Who is this going to sell to?

Don’t video games outside of Japan try to avoid getting AO rated any more?

Sounds like some typical David Cage bullshit. Wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was one of his games.

Edit: Considering the content of the games, and looking over her IMDb credits, it was very likely one of The Dark Pictures Anthology games, which was actually my second guess after David Cage (well, those or Until Dawn; same developers) due to some of the weird shit Supermassive Games add in for “shock value” because “horror”.

No surprise that she suddenly stopped working with them after House of Ashes, so that was probably the game in question, if I had to guess by context here.

There are only a handful of studios that’ll throw that kind of shit in their games. Quantic Dream and Supermassive are always the most likely culprits.

Maybe “very” was too strong a word, but I mainly meant the melee combat.

Although to be honest, other than the blackjack, people shouldn’t really be using melee much, so it’s not that much of a problem.

It’s mostly when the zombie dudes come into play that the sword combat can feel dated if you take them on directly.

No prob. The first game actually has some fantastic mods and also a ton of incredibly well-crafted fan-made levels.

You might want a few tiny mods for Deus Ex as well, though it doesn’t really require much.

Kind of funny that it was “too violent” because you can go through most of the game without even killing anyone. It’s my preferred playstyle, just sleep darts and stealth stuff.

Actually, you’ll have a bit of a rough time if you go in guns ablaze. A lot of people used to shooters end up being obliterated on the first level when they initially play it, which is what happened to me when I first played it on release. Came back to it years later after I’d discovered Thief and suddenly felt right at home.

Edit: Oh, and it’s also available on GOG. Most of the earlier immersive sims (Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock, Ultima, Arx Fatalis, etc.) are.

Do note that in your post you mentioned things that have aged well, and while I think it’s fine, they can feel a bit clunky, especially in comparison to some of the games heavily influenced by them (e.g. Dishonored, among others).

Edit: I’m mostly referring to direct melee combat here, and not the rest of the game. Truth is, you probably won’t find yourself using it much against humans, but the sword can feel a bit dated against some of the nonhuman creatures. And now that I think about it, Dishonored’s swordplay isn’t exactly super fluid either unless you’re countering and parrying.

You might want to add some mods just to touch some things up.

Also, while the second game is my favourite, don’t sleep on the third, especially if you like horror because one of the later levels is fucking incredible. I say all of this as someone who ordinarily hates supernatural-type horror.

And the third game also expands on the lore, which I like.

All of them are available on GOG and Steam.

Similar to Thief, the original Deus Ex is a great game which might also show its age a bit, but I think stands the test of time for the most part.

Thief 2023

I think you meant 2014, unless there’s something I missed from last year.

Played the three games developed Accidental Queens because I’ve been in an interactive fiction/detective mood.

Started off with A Normal Lost Phone and Another Lost Phone, then headed into their gem of a game they later developed called Alt-Frequencies. Super fun narrative-focused game with a cool time loop premise. Great voice acting as well.

It’s been nice playing these short little games lately. Enjoying them quite a bit.

Anyway I finished another game! This time chants of senaar. This game is sooooo good. One of my faves all time id say. Scratches the obra dinn outer wilds itch.

Yeah, really great game. Without getting into spoiler territory, I appreciate how there’s that one thing that every society in the game appreciates and it’s what brings them together despite their differences, most of which were down to (obviously) lack of communication. It’s just this simple, yet emotional touch of humanity that unites them all over the course of the game.

Anyway, as for me, I finished up Song of Farca, which was a fun little experience. Then I played Overboard!, a darkly humourous narrative/interactive fiction/puzzle game about getting away with murder.

Took me a little while, but I successfully murdered the husband, got the insurance, tied up all loose ends, and got a delicious snack as a bonus.

There’s a jazz/soul radio station in the first game that has some real bangers as well if you’re into that.

Song of Farca.

A fun little hacky detective puzzle game reminiscent of games like Orwell and its sequel, but with a more engaging cast of characters.

After taking a couple of days to digest the ending I got in Not for Broadcast, I’m hoping to go back and replay it differently sometime soon. One moment in particular, I need to approach differently.

Man, that game is equal parts hilarious and fucked up. Not much I can say without spoiling it, but it’s really worth a shot if you like dystopian fiction (especially the kind that starts just before everything slowly goes to shit), dark humour, satirical takes on news media, or just narrative-focused games in general with a fair amount of choices and consequences which gradually play out over time.

Like, there are 14 main endings and within all of those there are also “mini news stories” which play out over the game that have a wealth of different outcomes themselves. The amount of variables is pretty impressive, honestly.

Anyway, now I’m playing Do Not Feed The Monkeys for a similar darkly humourous experience of “fuck with the people on the other side of the camera”.

Yeah, that definitely sounds like something that I’d love to sink a bunch of time into. On to the wishlist it goes!

Oh, now that looks interesting! Immediately wishlisted.

Thanks for letting me know about that!

That’s that procedurally generated detective game, right?

I really need to try it because it seems right up my alley. From what I understand, it can get pretty intricate when it comes to the detective work which seems really interesting.

Got some stuff in my cart, but need to play some demos first before I hit the “buy” button. Surprisingly quite a few games I’m interested in have one available, which is nice.

In the meantime, I’ve started Case of the Golden Idol because I loved Return of the Obra Dinn and I know it’s highly recommended for fans of that.

Don’t know if I’m really feeling this as much, though. I’ll carry on, of course, because I still enjoy the detective puzzle aspect. But it isn’t drawing me in the way Obra Dinn did for some reason.

I remember first trying the original when I was like 11 or something.

At the time, I didn’t really understand much beyond “shooty shooty” when it came to games with guns (it would be shortly after this that I’d find stealth games and have that passion ignited), so I was given guns, used them how I usually did at the time and proceeded to get obliterated in the first level and gave up.

A few years later, after I’d gotten into stealth games, my love affair with immersive sims began.

Along with playing the Thief series, I went back to give Deus Ex a try and it all just clicked. I think it and Thief II were instrumental in cementing my love for the genre.

After playing and enjoying the first one, I played them all over the next few years and Mankind Divided is probably my second favourite after the original. Loved every moment.

Then fucking Square Enix does their bullshit, and then fucking Embracer ruined it for good.

All in all, I love Deus Ex and I’m super glad I found myself getting into stealth games and immersive sims, otherwise I would have missed out on it so many other of my favourite gaming experiences, Deus Ex being one of them.

What’s weird is that it’s like the only Looking Glass/Ion Storm/Eidos Montréal immersive sim franchise that doesn’t have a clear spiritual successor. For System Shock we got not only BioShock, but Prey (2017) as well. For Thief, we got Dishonored. For Ultima, we got Arx Fatalis/Libertatis (and early Elder Scrolls to a very lesser extent).

But for Deus Ex, we’ve got… I don’t know, Cyberpunk 2077, maybe? But the whole open world thing doesn’t really fit in with the usual gameplay loop of Deus Ex. There are a fair amount of great cyberpunk games, but none seem to really scratch that immersive sim itch. I guess Prey is pretty close as well (in addition to its System Shock influences), if you consider some of the body/power upgrades, but it’s not all that similar thematically.

I’d love for someone to come around and pull a Thanos by just going, “fine, I’ll do it myself”. If the franchise is dead, maybe now there’s more motivation for that, since, before a few months ago, we were still clinging to what little hope remained for the third Adam Jensen game. Or maybe someone already has and I’ve missed it.

Was getting all set up for another playthrough of New Vegas, mods and all (even made my own, though I ditched it last minute), and then I realised, “Wait, why am I doing this? I don’t actually feel like playing this at all right now, even with the new mods.”

So, now I’ve downloaded some stuff in my backlog, but don’t know if I’ll play any of it at the moment because I’m kind of burned out a little.

Not exactly playing, but learning my way around the GECK to create a few personal radio stations for New Vegas. I’ve learned how to do most of it, I just now need to sort the audio files and add them. Too cold to sit at my desk and finish this, so I’ll do all that later.

(Before anyone says “why not just use the mod that lets you add your own music files”, it’s because I need separate radio stations with unique names that I can switch between, each with their own chronological order, rather than one giant one which basically works by saying “random bullshit go”.)

Kernels shouldn’t be a problem if you have the backports repo enabled (you can enable it during install, otherwise add it to your sources.list).

You do first have to specify that you want the kernel from backports (or set up APT pinning preferences), but after that, it’ll keep that specific package updated whenever you run sudo apt upgrade and there’s a newer version.

If you installed the generic Linux image on installation (usually the default, I believe), the quick way to upgrade is basically just:

sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64

It should be noted that backports is not Sid or Testing, it’s stuff built specifically for current Stable that people might need newer versions of for various reasons (e.g. hardware, limited feature updates that don’t affect the base system, some development libraries, etc.), so it’s quite small in the amount of unique packages it has. Like, you can get newer LibreOffice packages, but you’re not going to get Plasma 6 or whatever.

Right now, the kernel is on 6.7 in backports, while Stable is on 6.1 and Sid is on 6.8. So you’ll get them a tiny bit later, but that’s in terms of days/weeks, rather than, you know, the usual two-ish years (not counting security updates).

Side note: if you want all this enabled by default, Spiral Linux is just straight up Debian Stable with a bunch of firmware packages preinstalled for easier installation on a variety of hardware and the kernel is updated via backports by default, so you could give that a shot as well.

It’s not like “a distro based on Debian”, it is Debian, but set up with conveniences for modern desktop users and also sets up btrfs + apt snapshotting by default, similar to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s process.

I did mention it as a smaller, compact alternative, but I maybe wasn’t specific enough with regard to the scope of gameplay.

Probably should have specified that I meant Outer Worlds as an alternative to Starfield mainly for people interested in a game set in space with the familiar approach to worldbuilding that Bethesda and Obsidian seem to share a bit, and also because it’s not uncommon to hear either of them referred to (maybe a bit unfairly) as “Fallout, but in space”.

Then again, most people interested in that would probably already have played it by now (although lots of new Fallout fans this year, so maybe not).