ah I missed the blank in 7. also I take it back, no cascade from (9,9) now that I check again
2 Likes
I see a mistake at the bottom of the 4th column. Youāve got three 1ās there, but the third from the bottom should be a 2.
3 Likes
i completed shinobido 2! definitely recommended. an excellent game thatās vita exclusive, and really shows off the luxurious feel associated with the system
after deleting, i installed the x-com remake. in contrast to shinobido 2, it really feels like the vita is struggling with this game. it doesnāt look anywhere near as good as shinobido 2, either, looking closer to a psp game, so i assume thatās down to a quick and low-priority port. itās not as bad as, like, some console versions of civilisation or sim city 2000, though. itās still definitely playable. it mostly seems to be strugglin on the base screen tbh. and all of the cutscenes look like garbage.
something else to mention is that after like 4-5 years since i modded it, my vita has started reporting trophies to psn again. from what iāve read, as long as you donāt use cheats to unlock all of a gameās trophies at once, sony donāt actually care if youāre pirating on vita anymore. at all. so i guess iāll just allow it to do that?
7 Likes
Been playing A Game About Digging A Hole, I guess subconsciously chasing the void left after finishing the Steamworld Dig games.
Iām apparently near the end game (itās pretty short) which requires a very different style of play from the rest of the gameā¦not sure if Iām up for it, but Iāll try a few times and, worst case scenario, look at YouTube or something.
Really hoping I donāt have fucking COVID right now, but if I do, Iāll use some sick time and try to get back to Yakuza 5ā¦
6 Likes
Xenoblade 1ās battle system was basically wack-a-mole with the moles being big on-screen shiny skill buttons that you press when their cooldown is over
Sometimes there are QTEs!!
Xenoblade X is the same :
ā¦ except you get a special gauge that allows you to reduce the cooldown to 0. The gauge recharges after every fight and expands by exploring. This allows for some strategy, at lastā¦ā¦. But not a lot.
I found a pretty good skill, put all my skill points into it, so its damage is big and itās cooldown is short, and I have my character use that one skill over and over again. Cooldown time is so low that I can use it like 15 times in a row with the full special gauge as of right now. With DMG+ passives this allows me to kill monsters 10 levels higher easily.
So the battle system is basically SOLVED at this point. I started to focus on exploration instead. Turned off most HUD elements so the game doesnāt feel like a 2010s lawnmower anymore. This is vastly inefficient but makes me appreciate the world geometry a lot
Modern games canāt have these PS3 surfaces
Everything else about the game sucks and the lack of any intelligence in the writing is really starting to get to me. Itās embarrassing. It makes me reconsider whether Xenogears was at any point actually good.
One really funny thing about this game is how affinity quests cannot be canceled once theyāre started, and turn main quests off entirely. Once youāve started one youāre stuck with it.
Iāve had four affinity quests already that had completely unreasonable demands.
Like an early affinity quests that asks for five of an item that can only be gotten, sometimes, as an extra complementary reward to the salary paid to the main character every 30 minutes, -if- theyāve found enough probes and have had them extract materials on key critical sites, on the entirely ignorable probe map layer. Basically some insanely niche nonsense, and it took me about three hours to complete this part.
Another affinity quest sent me to the other end of the map in a region full of deadly enemies, when I didnāt even have any giant robot yet. I find a lot of charm in this clunkiness. At this point Iām accepting affinity quests for this sick thrill
19 Likes
āYes.ā
6 Likes
Xenogears is no more dumb than a pulp scifi novel.
I think its presentation, art, sense of timing and shot composition is petty good.
The battle system is not complicated but is very fun and visually engaging.
Text is slow but you can get patches and game-shark codes for that.
2 Likes
BeamNG drive will regularly update or āremasterā older vehicle models and typically add fun things like new variants or chassis. This time theyāve redone the āSunburstā which is the standin for the Subaru Impreza. They added a wagon variant, which brings the number of wagons the game has to 3. In addition thereās a slew of new subvariants like rally wagons, newer body kits, and more extreme rally cars.
They also threw in a (tasteful) Itasha version
11 Likes
Itasha should never be tasteful
6 Likes
Its literally āpain carā or ācringe carā
2 Likes
Predictably jumped from Marioās Picross to Marioās Picross 2.
Afterā¦ten or so standard 15x15 puzzles, the game throws you into the meat of it, which seems to so far beā¦15x15 puzzles, but in a 2x2 grid in order to make a larger pixel art scene.
The art you wind up making is very nice! But it also makes the individual puzzles seem more abstract til they get stitched together.
That, and the style of pixel art in those initial 15x15 puzzles is really damn cute. Itās almost a pity they pivot to the big puzzles right away.
8 Likes
tgm4 is sick and beautiful. i am well below average at it as i am with all other tgm games (s3 in tgm1 for context)
the soundtrack is by shinji hosoe aka sampling masters mega, who i know from iidx. he makes fun electronic music. it looks like he also did or majorly contributed to all the other tgm games as well? all i know for sure is the sonic landscape of tgm4 really wallops. goes way, way too hard for a tetris game.
i was playing tgm normal mode and, as might be expected, but the songs change as the level increases. iāve made it to level 450-550 or so, enough for i think two song changes? it all blurs together; the game melts my brain. anyway i had a beautiful moment that iām headcanoning is prescribed, etched into the code as intended; upon nearing the threshold to the next level barrier, the song that was playing faded out and i was harddropping prerotated z blocks in silence, only the bespoke audio cues indicating the next piece keeping me company. tension built as i worked to get another line clear and cross over the level barrier. then, finally, my two brain cells sizzling, i notched a line clear and transcended. the drop speed increased instantly andā¦boom, boom, boom, boom, the next track kicked in.
just that one moment finally fulfilled the visuospatial-neurohaptic-aural dream iāve had since i heard of rez over twenty years ago, so i cannot claim anything but that tgm4 is sick. i think tetris effect pushes towards stuff like this as well, but i will never play it because it doesnāt use the arika rotation system.
tgm4 is sick!
20 Likes
I am so gladdened to hear that Arika can still deliver.
3 Likes
I naively hoped all the effusive praise for Blue Prince in media would mean the roguelite elements are very much secondary to the puzzle-solving and then I got hit with a game about determining which very literal build order has the smallest chance of permanently ruining your run, the kind of RNG mitigation I hate the most combined with the kind of progression Iām always most naturally suspicious about since I never feel particularly good about my last run but am always hoping the next one will be The One, the worst kind of āaddictiveā gameplay. How many more times will they force me to solve elementary school-level math problems on this dartboard. The vibe is neat and the detailed rooms with a lot of mysterious props suggest there are rewarding discoveries to be made but if youāre particularly sensitive towards the ways Balatro or Vampire Survivors gets you to keep playing, caveat emptor
23 Likes
@lonelyfrontier: Howād you end up feeling about this game? I want to play exactly one Metal Max game, and Iām torn between Metal Max Returns and this one. MMR has some really fun spritework, but I also feel like any refinement they made to this would probably be for the better, hence the DS version might be a more fun playā¦
4 Likes
i played ddr and felt absurdly pleased to get a b on a slow boyzone song on the easiest difficulty. theyāll never take this from me. iām going to start talking about frames and how casuals are ruining the scene.
20 Likes
randomly decided to reinstall and play through the Granblue Fantasy Relink campaign
thatās a fun game, they made a good game
āokay, you beat it on a new file. so youāre stopping there, rightā
well, when you think about it, the endgame grind is also the epilogue and
2 Likes
played Dredge with the fella the other week when we had a cold. itās quite fun to watch and quite boring to actually play. we got to some kind of good-ish side ending and havenāt really picked it up since to play through the endgame, oh well
5 Likes
Iām chewing on Blue Prince since I made peace with how much I wanted to play this since I literally played the demo until it stopped me. I continue to be conflicted!
See, I can tell part of how itās got itās hooks in me is the just one more time roguelike loop. How the gambling aspect is why I keep wanting to go again, to try another time. But what is incredibly frustrating is that mixed in with that is an increasingly satisfyingly complex set of interlinking logic puzzles the full shape of which I still havenāt managed to suss out.
Thereās multiple areas I thought I understood that I definitely did not understand. Thereās a series of wordplay puzzles that seem really important but I donāt understand yet. The deeper I go, the more context I get, and the more context I get, the more the euro-game-esque nature of the tile laying becomes apparent.
I also suspect that the game is designed to start seeding you some better tiles as you go, since Iāve noticed that as I go longer better runs seem to be more frequent as Iām playing it.
Iām engrossed but it does feel extremely weird to be trying to figure out how much of it is the puzzle and how much of it is the gambling.
15 Likes
Finished A Game About Digging A Hole. There are a couple of achievementsā¦well, for the whole game, really, but a few that Iām missing, and Iām gonna let 'em go. I got my $3 worth out of it/10.
2 Likes