Recent reviews by VoRMiT

girls with autism: *excited lil hands*

boys with autism:

not in le head

Ulan alçak adi köpek her fırsatta Türklere Türklüğe, Ataya söven Kürtçü kılı orusbu cocu mahlukat şeyh saitin pici. Gel de menemendeki kardeşlerin gibi üzerinden tankla geçeyim. Kürdistanını .. yaptığımın avrupalı kopegi. Seni yakalamayım graund branç deden gibi asacağım seni. Kaldır o kurdistan peçini.

Took the car, went to mums, killed Phil. Sorry, Phil. Grabbed Liz, went to the Rosewood, had a nice cold pint and waited for the whole thing to blow over. 10/10

suppose, if this review required a title, it would be:

Realism vs Believability

I always dreamt of a massive RPG that tried to realistically emulate real life aspects of late Medieval/early Renaissance times – and here it is in the flesh.

But realism is just a word, right?Even the most realistic game – and Kingdom Come is definitely the most realistic 3D game I’ve ever played – is choke-full of conditionality. You heal slower than in most games, but you still heal overnight. You can get lost in a vast forest on hardcore difficulty where there are no markers, but it’s still only five minutes across on foot. You can fence with all the shaky camera immersion, but you are still not in control of your entire body.

But it doesn’t matter. Because any artform is smoke and mirrors in the end. It’s not about realism – it’s about whether it’s believable. The player has to believe it’s like real life. And when it comes to believability, this game has no peer.
Look at the landscapes of modern RPGs. You can see a few landmarks from each point of the map. Colors are vibrant, everything is set so that the player doesn’t get bored on the journey (the journey he’s likely to never take or take only once because of fast travel, but that’s besides the point). Kingdom Come is green during the day, grey during the rain and black during the night. It has paths that look the same, it has fields that roll across the horizon, it has streams that murmur gently and samely, and… It’s real. It’s actually not, because it’s so small you can’t really talk about a big world of any kind, but it feels real. Where in any other game a bandit camp would be marked by all sorts of signs like Shrek’s swamp, here it’s just a few small oddly twisted twigs on tree trunks along the path. In reality it would be like hanging up a neon sign: “HERE BE MERRY MEN”. By videogame standards it’s almost unnoticeable.
Or take the protagonist. A countryside simpleton – unrefined and dumb. Not stupid, not dim – just dumb. The game goes out of its way to show how much of a child he still is. As the plot progresses he slowly turns into his lord’s very own “human can-opener”©, a pragmatic down-to-the-ground problem-solver, not cruel by nature but not averse to using violence as a tool. In real life such transitions last years if not decades. Here it only takes a few weeks. But we see this process, it unfolds before our very eyes, and so we believe in it. And Henry’s reaction to the plot twist. No spoilers here. People say: “he should be angry, why isn’t he?!” But would he be – in real life? That’s the thing: he could be, and he could be not. But by not being angry he looks far more believable than he would otherwise.
Take the plot. Assassin's creed taught us that historical games are those where you meet at least a dozen prominent figures of the depicted period and get involved into the biggest of events. Nope - says Kingdom Come - a historical game is the one where you get immersed. And immersion is far more than just meeting cool people. Apart from Sigismund, there's pretty much no-one of international renown that Henry encounters. That's believable. I can only assume they are going to continue the story into proto-Reformational Hussite wars, so I suppose, historical events will be far more present and big in the next few installments, but still.

But then there is combat. And – believe it or not – combat in Kingdom Come is not believable. It’s realistic. Let me explain.

Now, local combat system got a lot of flak from the uninitiated and the uncaring, but not only from them, and the reasons to this aforementioned flak are more complex than it might seem. I would describe my relationship with it as consisting of four phases: first, I didn’t understand it, then I loved it while being bad at it, then I hated it while thinking I got good at it, and finally I accepted it for what it was and thus truly learnt it.

Phase one. Being the village oaf that you are, you can’t fight anything, and it’s only through a lot of trial and error that you begin to present even a fraction of a threat to a desperate armed peasant. Here is where people not keen on putting themselves in drop off, claiming that combat is awful.
Phase two. Soon enough, you discover that captain Bernard is the best man in all of Bohemia. Because he can teach you combat. Every day. All day. You can spar, and through sparring you will actually level up your fighting skills! You know, like in real life? I cannot stress enough, how good this design decision is! You can literally lose yourself in the sparring arena for days, advancing your weapon mastery, kicking captain’s buttock and getting your buttock kicked, learning combos, feeling proud if you managed to pull off one of those on your ultraskilled teacher. And then…
Phase three. You start getting into fights. And that’s where all of your knowledge about combat that Bernard taught you washes away. Because this game’s system is built for duels, and even two versus one is already a problem. Enemies have no honor. They will spam left mouse button on you if they flank you with no hesitation. You will be lucky if you manage to pull a single combo at the beginning of the fight – before you have to feverishly block, reposition and chop out of harm’s way with little rhyme or reason. It’s utterly frustrating. And even when you get to fight actual duels with a skilled opponent, they can interrupt your fancy combos at any given time with master strikes. Woe… Utter woe… @#%$ this game!
Phase four. And then it hits you. It’s not a tournament we’re talking about. It’s a dirty, nasty fight to the death! So put your opponent between yourself and his archer friend! Pincushion them with arrows from afar! Take advantage of your horse and fight from the saddle! Sneak on them and do terrible things to them from the shadows! Reenact that scene from Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex! Pretend to give up and attack suddenly! Buy the Woman’s Lot DLC and let slip the dog of war! Combo-loving posers don’t live long. Win by clinch. Win by feints. Win by treachery. Win by brains. For better or worse, Kingdom Come’s combat is not believable, it’s literally like real life. All is fair, and no quarter will be given.
I suspect there is a phase five where you discover a meta, but I probably won’t get to that, neither do I care.
This progression – from an absolute zero – to an eager beginner – to a cocky graduate – to a cocky graduate who’s been handed his bottom line to – to a fully functional man of war – is the best thing this game has to offer. And trust me – everything else it offers is very good, because every system here is designed to be unique, believable and fully synergetic with other systems.

Kingdom Come is the game I love for its flaws. And that’s because where its design principle is believability, its biggest flaw is actual realism. I think I applaud.

PS
That English translation of characters' names though... Jindřich turning into a generic Henry... Right...

PPS
Also, if approached really slowly, this game gives off a certain feeling. I don't rightly know how best to describe it. I suppose, I only really had it one other time in my gaming experience - when I was playing Gothic as a child, so maybe it's just a personal thing and shows how much I am fond of this game. I would call it a "surrogate Heideggerian Feldweg feeling". As in: not quite the real deal, but as close as a game can take us. I don't know, maybe any massive RPG can evoke this feeling, but I love The Witcher 3, and it didn't give me that, nor did Oblivion, which was my first TES game, and those who know, know how much a first TES game can mean to a person- no matter which one it is. I don't know. It's probably personal. I thought it might be a curious observation anyway.
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R.I.P Ken Block 1967-2023

First, Rocket League is the most fun you can have in a game since Team Fortress 2. It's like a sport for fighter pilots. I break controllers playing it because it's so intense. I'm told I make ridiculous facial expressions while going for a kick or block or aerial dogfight fenderbender. I'm pretty sure I have mild carpal tunnel syndrome from it. I adore this game, I want to play it forever. I don't give two ♥♥♥♥♥ about football or cars, but Rocket League is A+ and then some.

Having said that, Psyonix's capitulation to Epic Games is an extreme disappointment, even personally heartbreaking. I'm from Hong Kong and spent the last year watching firsthand my city turning into a police state on the orders of the Communist Party of China. I've had tear gas in my apartment, friends with broken bones and concussions, and rule of law no longer exists here. I have PTSD from filming our now crushed pro-democracy movement, and tens of thousands of young people here have it a thousand times worse, even if they're not in jail already. Half the city is in a state of shock, depression or worse.

Tencent owns 40% stake in Epic, hence the absurd amount of money it has to buy rather than earn its share of the market (GTA5 for free must have cost billions). Maybe Psyonix needed the cash, and I honestly want them to survive and thrive, but it should be clear by now that any company in China of Tencent's size and scope operates under the auspice of the CCP. People finally know the dangers of Huawei, but Tencent is no less an arm of that state, the world's most powerful and technologically advanced authoritarian dictatorship.

I refuse to give Rocket League a bad review. The game itself is amazing, there's so much love in it that I can't not still adore it. But this is a stab to the heart, and frankly you guys deserve the tsunami of negative reviews you're about to receive. I wish it never came to this.

yarak kürek gamesin en iyi oyunlarından

I live in a Cabin in the Canadian wilderness. I play game about surviving in cabins in Canadian wilderness. 10/10

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