All I knew about The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship was that it was basically impossible to buy – even for ready money. It wasn’t clear to me at the time that it was Pandemic: Middle Earth, because if it had been, that’s a beg, borrow, or steal scenario. Imagine having that shit over the break! That’s what Mork was imagining, no doubt. And he will continue to.
You gotta get your mitts on this Pragmata: Sketchbook demo. I think it’s only for PC currently, and it sounds like it is in some ways an actual test of the software as opposed to just a marketing salvo, but it’s definitely doing both. After Monster Hunter Worlds, I can see why Capcom might be a little tender about performance.
One of my favorite games is called The World Ends With You, which its adherents call TWEWY – an utterly nutball slice of Square doing Square things. They used to do a lot of Square things, and then for some reason they thought the right play was to buy a bunch of Western developers and make games for the West and then sell it all later? I don’t know how it works. But I’d be surprised if the answer wasn’t to simply remember what they do better than anybody else and do that instead. Oh. They’re doing that? Anyway. What was I talking about?
Twewites such as myself can definitely go into the story, and the rad pin battle minigame, proof of Aliens, and how the mechanics hook into trying to connect with another person. The most obvious thing, though, is that this was a creature from the wooly Nintendo DS days – where platform idiosyncrasies could lead to experimental (read: “weird”) gameplay concepts. Here, it meant playing two games at once: one on the upper screen, and one on the bottom. And they change them sometimes! It’s wild. I haven’t seen something that gave me that feeling again until PRAGMATA.
Aside from the really strong industrial design and the smooth, clearly Platinum derived movement, the machines you gotta put down all have a little puzzleboard that exposes enemies to damage. You can certainly shoot them without hacking them, if you want, but they don’t really care that much. All it does is exfoliate them really, revealing the bot’s freshest layer of neodermis. The best such attacks could do is to prepare them for an imminent date.
You travel through these grids using the face buttons, and you want to travel through beneficial icons and avoid bad ones. It’s very simple stuff, but it’s on top of a tight combat system with your perfect dodges and weapon choices. The pace is so nice. I read that it wasn’t coming out until April, and began to weep.
Because there is a man in the game and a kid who he likes and must defend, I wonder if we’re gonna have to endure another round of people who feel it necessary to describe one of the most common, salient relationships on Earth as somehow suspect in creative work. I’d like to think that these idiotic performances are something we’ve gotten past, or that the proponents of such orthagonal-to-reality horseshit have fewer and fewer places where their stupidity is honored in public.
Look; all that lets me know for certain is that you don’t have kids. Which, I mean, good on ya I guess. You can have those things on accident, so way to maintain the streak. But denigrating fatherhood isn’t some amazing flex. Mostly, it tells me way more about you than I’m interested in knowing.
(CW)TB out.