Vermintide 2 on my xbox to use the double xp event to level up Sienna and Saltzpyre. My brother doesn’t play anymore so I a mostly playing solo when I do dip back into this game every few months. 7 years since release and I am only now getting a bunch of the characters to level 30 out of 35.
Takeshi and Hiroshi is a pretty lovable game. You play a 14 year old amateur game dev (Takeshi) making a game for their seven year old brother (Hiroshi) who goes through a bout of illness. The brother plays your cookie cutter RPG but because you haven’t finished the rest of the game and don’t want to face your brother’s disappointment, you control the other half of the game in real-time to sort of puppet the experience for him (with the white lie that you are doing homework while he plays the game). The exact technical details behind how Takeshi manipulates the unfinished game in real-time are suspended to focus on the sweetness of the story. It’s even implied that Takeshi’s homework conceit is something that Hiroshi sees through very early on but just enjoys that his big brother is doing something cool for him and gets to hangout.
It’s interesting in the wake of the flow theory discussion here as the game seems to subscribe to the theory for its central puzzle. You have to balance Hiroshi’s boredom with stress. The game can’t be too hard or too easy. Once an appropriate level of stress has been built up it converts to joy, that is, your score. So the goal is to figure out the right sequence and combination of enemies so that the ‘player character’s’ stats don’t completely decimate the enemies you send or struggle to keep up. It feels very much like a game design principles workshop made manifest plotwise but works as a sort of genre shifting of RPG convention to puzzle game which ends pretty much as the challenge reaches its peak and before 3 hours elapse.
Your brother is ill but the story ultimately avoids the terminal death plot beat that many other indies draw from to get you invested. Turns out he was just ill and got better and the game helped him feel a bit better while he recovered. The B-plot involves Takeshi’s schoolfriends where he develops a rival whose also into game dev who eventually helps out. The rival even shows you a game he made for mobile which is a little zombie runner which mimics the general vibe of an early student game very well. The rival is introduced by a slightly implied childhood love interest that Takeshi turns into an enemy design because he gets annoyed at her pushiness to get him to hang out more. The way game development brought a bunch of kids together is what’s special here.
Character dialogue is accompanied by little musical bits from a clunky xylophone and synth pitched to the characters speaking voice on a background of ploddy synths. Along with the handmade puppets it really has the production values of a made-for-TV puppet series for kids. Scenes do these pauses after dialogue that linger on an action or reaction that give you control of pace and makes it seem even less like a bunch of text to progress and more like a scene you play with.
Arranger: Another indie game that could have won the world over 10 years ago. This is a story based, Rubik’s cube like, puzzle game.
I am usually never in a mood for More Story in videogames but it fits the puzzle genre well. The endless escalating puzzle structure these games have is often a little too intense and the extra downtime here is welcome.
It’s another story about a teenage exploring the world, but the vibes are good and it’s very cute. Edit: yeah I dunno I didn’t care about the end plot
Wizardry the Five Ordeals: I picked the one five star difficulty user scenario just to see what it’s like. It’s supposed to be a « tournament », in practice it’s identical rooms with increasingly strong enemies. Pure fighting. It also completely breaks the Wizardry balance but that’s part of the fun. I wanted a taste of unreasonable and got a lot more than what I asked
Basic Wizardry has a logarithmic xp curve : XP required for the next level becomes astronomical near the end of the game but doesn’t go that much up there after. Leveling from 13 to 14 (regular endgame levels) takes ages, and it takes about the same time to level from 19 to 20. In this user scenario, the xp curve remains the same but the XP rewards have gone through the roof, which means leveling is very easy, forever. My fighter is level 45, which is completely absurd for Wizardry. The game requires it though. Every battle I have my two mages using NUCLEAR STRIKE every turn and it’s not enough. It’s fine, I’m playing slowly, upgrading gear slowly, doing therapeutic grind sessions here and there
This scenario made me realize that Wizardry advanced classes have been a total scam all along (except for ninja) The premise is that advanced classes start mediocre, but at the end they’re like another regular unit, but with extra spicy spells and equipment options. But the way the xp curve works they can never catch up. They always stay vastly outclassed by basic fighters
Also TIL that J Wizardry has some nazisploitation enemies
was dragging ass so bad finishing FF7 Rebirth that I had a moment of inspiration and remembered I was playing on PC and so installed a bunch of stuff from nexusmods to slut up the character designs. that at least motivated me to get through the nibelheim chapter.
for posterity it seems funny to note that I had this flash of insight while listening to Percival Everett do a great Q&A at a church in town. I think perhaps I haven’t had a sexual thought about a final fantasy character since the last time I had to sit in churches on the regular about 30 years ago and I experienced a kind of basement-level Proustian reverie.
I cannot fault Microsoft first party’s emphasis on having local multiplayer. One of the things they have the right idea about even if the individual titles are usually not ones I’m interested in.
Wondering how much of this opinion is because David Hellman also did the art for this one (which itself suggests at least one thing about the pitch for the project)
i climbed up into the 2nd floor of a warehouse in avowed and there were three people silently dancing to like stock tavern ambient noise while a silent woman sat stone faced in a chair next to them robotically sipping her flagon of ale and occasionally snapping her head in their direction and it was the most boiling point road to hell thing i have seen in a videogame in years. too much fire water for this gringo
It’s been a bit of a Triple-Wukong season at the moment, as I keep jumping around between 3 different Journey to the West themed games. Well, more like 2.5.
The first one is of course Black Myth Wukong. I’m enjoying this one more than I expected to and the presentation is really top notch, but it definitely has some issues. I’m not a fan of how the heavy attacks are handled. Unless you string it into a combo properly, the heavy attack feels like it takes a full 4 or 5 seconds to trigger. You’re supposed to hold the button and build up focus points before you unleash it, but it mostly just feels unresponsive. All the special moves you have feel a bit like concessions to the fact that the combat system is a bit janky, ie they all just do things like give some time to get some free hits on the enemy without having to deal with the wonky timing and sluggish movement.
The other thing is the level design, where it’s always doing the thing where there’s branching paths, but all of them look like the right way so you’re constantly second guessing whether you missed out on something and should turn back.
Besides that it’s pretty enjoyable and probably the easiest soulslike I’ve played. The enemy designs are all really cool and there’s some nice looking trees and rocks.
Next up is Oriental Legend from the IGS Arcade Collection. I really love the aesthetic of this game. Not sure how to describe it except maybe it’s like some cursed bootleg arcade game you’d find in a back alley or something. Lots of bright clashing colours and a weird mix of art styles. Sometimes it reminds me of those banners with faded, traditional artworks you always see in Taipei diners. Like all the games on the IGS collection, it’s frickin hard and feels designed to eat as many coins as possible.
The last game is Oriental Legend Spooky, which is pretty much the same game as above, only with a level select and twice as many characters. Now you can play as some of the boss monsters like the elephant and the fish dude. These guys are cool because unlike the previous characters they don’t drop their weapon when they get knocked down.
Anyway, I feel like I should probably get a hold of a collection of the unabridged Journey to the West book, so I can finally understand who all these guys I’m killing actually are.
In the parlance of UFO50, I trophied Armored Core: For Answer today. I eventually landed on a build that required no finesse whatsoever: a heavily armored, tank-like frame with laster rifles.
I was very excited by one of the final missions because it pushed me to tinker and try out ideas. There were 5 or so heavily armored crafts, each with a single weak point, a hatch on the top. I tried several different ideas, but I would either run out of ammo or explode. Finally, I equipped my frame with explosive swords. I flew right into the hatch and swung once. It felt so good to see it work.
The world of For Answer is astounding. The world is ruled by corporations. They work with and against each other whenever it’s convenient. Everyone dies an ignoble death.
I totally couldn’t justify it between having too much to play right now and it not even going on sale when I thought it would, but I bought KCD2 anyway on the strength of the PC gamer review and it is so good. like a combination of Witcher 2, RDR, and Morrowind. imsim and vintage RPG fans absolutely gotta get on this one – I think it’s being slept on because the first one had some crank discourse and because it looks dry for the budget level but it is very very videogames
also yeah 4A rules unbelievably, I think it’s by a big margin the best reason to emulate a PS3 now
