alligators, come out to plaaaay.
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Really wish Dark Spire wasnt like the one original DS game that I have the case and everything for but not the game. No idea where the game even is.
The Dark Spire is 100% the best dungeon crawler on the NDS, nothing even comes close
i’d be on team raccoon because i think raccoons would ultimately take over because they have little human hands and already live near our garbage, so they’re most likely to be able to adapt to our way of life and continue where we left off. they can drive cars and tractors and pump gas and cashier and style hair and stuff.
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they couldnt drive cars, the reason their hands are so dextrous is cuz they use them as eyes. their actual eyes suck
also the thought of raccoons keeping people around as chauffeurs is cute
im sorry i dont have anything on topic to add its because i rely purely on snob forum arguements for my game criticism
well, raccoons can make raccoon glasses, too, and then wear big platforms so they can reach the pedals.
or they can drive power wheels.
i’m driving over here!
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Somewhat related: Bennett Foddy had a twitter thread about games with a gazillion steam reviews but no metacritic reviews. Game journalism can’t keep up anymore
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Of the games Bennett mentions, Scroll of Taiwu looks the most interesting. Sounds to me like some kind of mix between Princess Maker and Sunless Sea, but with kung fu. The only thing that makes me hesitate to play is the quality of the fan translations.
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speaking of this… not strictly related but in the same spirit because i know Bennett has his whole blog recommending games and all that. i did a few “recommended games of the year” little graphics the last few years on twitter that are probably worth checking out.
these are from 2017, 2018, and 2019. these are by no means comprehensive given that i hear of new stuff from the past all the time, but it’s still a good starting place:
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This thread makes me want to just set aside like $10 a month to buy the weirdest games possible on Steam. The problem is that I…just won’t play them.
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The knee-jerk answer would be to also set aside the time to play them - I know that’s a lot easier said than done of course
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Yeah I have trouble setting aside time to do easy, fun things. But it might be fun to do something like this once a week or month and just stream a weird game with an open mind.
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I’ve been thinking of doing the same thing, actually. Just trying to even try a handful of steam games from my library on a regular basis.
I’ve been doing this a lot this week. I think sometimes I was holding off on playing games I bought in fear that they’d be a letdown, but it turns out that even when that has been the case I’m happy to have it off the backlog anyway.
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last year i did a thing where i played like a few walking sims in a row, a few metroidvania style games in a row, etc etc. i guess the idea is if i was disappointed by one i could bounce to the other instead of being discouraged and assume that playing random stuff i’m not sure about is always going to net that result. in reality i tend to have wildly different responses to unknown or newer stuff when i actually play it - there are things that i’ll kind of hate by that i assume i’ll love and vice versa… it often feels random to me.
with older NES or PC games or whatever i can reasonably assume that something can have good ideas but the implementation will be clunky/hard to get through at some level since that’s a reasonably universal problem. whether or not you really like something from that category kind of has to do with your tolerance to particular manifestations of that, and how bad it is relative to other things in the game. i will say with a lot of older games, esp in the 90’s - oftentimes the craft is very good at a base level even when other stuff isn’t… and that’s often not the case with a lot of newer stuff.
but with newer games i can’t make those assumptions, or really any assumptions about anything at all… because things can wildly vary from game to game. i guess most often the problem i’ll have with newer indie games is that they’re either kind of a boring and worse retread of something else or the story is overly melodramatic and bad (i’ve also played several indie games with HORRIBLE voice acting that’s taken me out of the experience completely though lol). there’s also plenty of one-dimensional gimmicky stuff but that problem hasn’t been as bad in the last several years as it was at the beginning of the 2010’s. so generally i can’t really assume things to the same degree as if i could playing NES games.
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I have fond memories of grappling with and eventually becoming good at Gunvalkyrie when it came out. Probably the hardest 3D action game I’d ever played up to that point and I still think of it as a great game though I haven’t touched it in well over a decade. Hunting down a copy and an OG XBox console (it’s not 360 compatible) is one of my Video Game Things To Do This Year.
I don’t hear much about it these days and it received merely average reviews (performed OK in Japan for an XBox game). Compared to Metacritic’s 73, it’s like a 95 in my mind but idk if it’ll live up to that these days.
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I noticed that Heaven’s Vault is absent from the 2019 set which brings me to a game that is to some degree maligned and to some degree just ignored. It’s easily as good as Outer Wilds (the closest comparison) but it has a middling 70something on metacritic.
Just another game that’s ignored outside its specific niche.
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i heard it was good, but didn’t have enough of a familiarity with it to put it on the list since i tend to either put stuff that i know is good on there or i have some suspicion is a bit weird/different. but honestly it’s semi-arbitrary what i included on these and what isn’t and i’m not sure how much it actually reflects real concensus on anything lol. i haven’t played 1/2-1/3 of these games anyway (maybe heathenish to say but i don’t have the time to do that!!), just trying to collate some best guesses based on my own and others’ experiences before everyone forgets about them and moves on.
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Streaming is a great idea! I’m thinking that something communal with a little bit of structure could be a lot of fun, like a book club (or the SNESplorationcast lol)
And the unexplored titles in my Steam library are mostly from like, 2013 and before so I’d be happy to try some new things.
okay so uhh i really wanted to like the warlock of firetop mountain on the nintendo dual screen system but it basically becomes not just hard, but impossible to play after the first boss. what gives lol
okay yeah i’m giving upon this, it’s an interesting curiosity but completely unplayable past the first boss i am gonna mark this as “the critics were right”
to sate my curiosity i went back and read old reviews of this one and i think i can definitely knuckle down and say the critics were right here - it’s not hard because of an innate challenge posed by the systems. it’s balanced poorly and for such a hard-stat based game seems to delight in constantly upgrading enemies and giving the player no chance to balance out. sorry selectbutton, but beyond the first hour this one actually kind of sucks
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