games and eroge you played today 12 times the fun and the excitement!

jujotech · April 17, 2025, 3:31pm

Consensus among critics as to whether Book of Memories succeeded as a dungeon-crawler in its own right was not reached.

MimeParadox · April 17, 2025, 3:32pm

After an incredibly dubious start, the e-reader stages of Super Mario Advance 4 fortunately improve as they progress, incorporating actual level design and some interesting ideas. While most of them still feel like Mario Maker levels, albeit enjoyable ones–there’s even a couple of speed run stages!–there’s a few that wouldn’t have felt out of place in actual Super Mario Bros. 3. I especially like the stages “Bowser’s Airship 1” and “Bowser’s Airship 2”, the latter of which begins directly where the first ends, inserting into the game an approach to narrative that, while very un-Mario-like, nevertheless feels welcome.

notbov · April 18, 2025, 2:16am

Phantom Breaker BattleGrounds Ultimate came out today

correcting my notes, video games are good

username · April 18, 2025, 5:51am

So I was really starting to worry about Void Stranger’s length moreso than I had before, turns out I saved right before its at least initial “end run”. Glad about that, 200+ floors was enough, end bit was neat.

It then looped right back round to the start and the first ten floors seem identical (minus some flavor text missing), I will probably give it to the first “break” but if nothing changes by then I’m just gonna admit defeat and start looking stuff up. Worried I was supposed to learn something/this is the penalty I get for “voiding”.

I will say that near the very end of run #1 I accidentally learned you can wander onto the status bar at the bottom of the screen and that copying/moving stuff on it causes the game to fake crash, which served no strategic purpose but was neat, I found a giant hatched egg in the massive darkness by listening closely.

L · April 18, 2025, 6:01am

That thing you spoilered actually has one extra trick to it that does have some strategic purpose, which may be helpful if you somehow missed the thing that was different on floor 1-10. Here’s a big hint: you can interchange sets of digits with none the wiser.

hater · April 18, 2025, 7:45am

Super Mario 3D Land: continuing the emerging theme of “then-wildly-popular/now-forgotten-games-tim-convinced-me-to-buy” i guess?

still feel like it’s the superior 2D-but-3D Mario- not certain why. possibly it’s the use of 3D, possibly it’s the fact that 3D World’s Cat Suit offends me in ways the Tanooki Suit never did

Gears of War (360): completed the Casual campaign, for what that’s worth; still missing four or five dog tags. will at least try to complete Hardcore and Insane as well before moving onto GeoW2

Random Thoughts: still a better space marine game than the actual Space Marine game, despite your guys being neither marines* nor in space**; i will be disappointed if 2’s campaign doesn’t allow you to choose your character; shotgun > torque bow > sniper rifle; what do you MEAN, i can’t use the SOL on the final boss?!

*technically
**except in the same sense that pretty much everything is in space

Tuxedo · April 19, 2025, 1:03am

Super Mario Wonder

This is Mario as a Streamer Game. One little surprise every level, way less of the platforming substance of earlier Mario. However, credit for finally making a New Super Mario type game that’s cool. I would never have expected a cool New Super Mario game to materialize. I had a great time.

The credits are nice :

Luigi’s Mansion 3

Finally I try a Luigi’s Mansion.

It’s boring! There’s nothing there. Except for the power fantasy of vacuuming mouses and spiders. And that’s way too suburban

Wild to see a Nintendo game with a 90s zany american cartoon aesthetic (but I would be happy to never see that overused aesthetic ever again)

lmao this sold 14,25 million copies

Xenoblade X

I got to the part of Xenoblade X when you finally get that mech, 30 hours in. It’s a defining moment for sure. You move 10x faster and jump 10x higher and can now handle enemies 20 levels above you.

I had half expected that the game was withholding The Fun for 30 hours, like a new GTA that would only allow on-foot movement for 30 hours before Tony Crime the protagonist learns how to steal cars (wait maybe that would rule) But in Xenoblade X, after the post-mech acquisition euphoria, I feel like the opposite is true; the game almost feels more suited to human mobility than mech mobility. Travelling time is reduced to almost 0 with mechs. and the whole game now feels like just constant fast travelling from quest marker to quest marker.

In a game of total excess, one of the things impressing me the most in its pointlessness is the constantly updating pinboard detailing the relationships between every character. You can click on either the characters or links themselves for details.

There are already 100+ people there and 95% are people from 1 quest I’ve already forgotten about. Does this game think it’s Tactics Ogre? No one cares

Rudie · April 19, 2025, 2:01am

Rudie · April 19, 2025, 2:30am

hey running Drakengard 3 at 60FPS is pretty fun.

Edit: https://youtu.be/wGLxIO1IauA?si=8ySf5ouIB9lkYDgW

Cerium · April 19, 2025, 2:43am

Drakengard 3 shouldn’t be played higher than 6 fps tho

scratchmonkey · April 19, 2025, 4:41am

I was hoping that Blue Prince was a King in Yellow reference, I’ll hold out hope that there’s something in the iceberg that reinforces this.

(Fun fact: while talking to Tulpa about Blue Prince, I said that it kind of reminded me of a book that we had at our family cabin when I was a kid, I eventually found it after ten minutes of internet searching: Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle - Wikipedia and turns out, it’s a direct inspiration for Blue Prince.)

I’ve played like an hour of Vivat Slovokia, a slavjank GTAalike set in 1990s Slovakia, made by Slovakian devs. So far it’s very uh, janky in a way where it’s really not clear if they’re making it deliberately bad or it’s authentic. Given the huge hitches as you move around the city, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. Will have more to say about it later hopefully, I will say if you play with the English dub, they are not holding back with the slurs, so ah, content warning for that. Hilariously, opening doors/trunks on cars will fuck up the car model about 50% of the time, with things just getting bent/glass breaking when you do so. Driving cars unfortunately is completely toothless, and not having just tooling around being pleasurable is kind of a strike against a GTAalike.

I’m up to 2061 in my current Football Manager save as Union Berlin. It’s running considerably longer than it usually does because after delaying the FM25 version multiple times, Sports Interactive just threw up their hands and said well, it’s canceled, and then hopefully there’s a game released sometime this fall? Turns out migrating a weird game with tons of numbers and then also a 3D in-match engine to Unity is harder than might have been anticipated (anybody who has ever worked in games/with Unity is making a face right now).

I’m still going as there’s still a bit of challenge to it…well, at least in Europe, where we’ve won 5 out of the last 12 Champion’s Leagues, which while still fairly dominant isn’t actually that far out of line for really good teams in real life, and there’s still some additional frisson there because I made the serious mistake of selling a cohort of players that I thought were really-good-yet-not-good-enough to Real Madrid, and it turns out they may have actually been good enough as they’ve handed us our ass in many of the CLs that we didn’t win, and also beat us in the final of the Club World Cup, which is a nonsense competition yet also the only one that I haven’t won in this save (partially because it takes place over the summer between seasons so the registration rules are horribly confusing so a fair few of those we were basically showing up with mostly youth teams). The Bundesliga, on the other hand, we’ve won 21 years in a row and even this season, which us having one of our worst overall performances in decades, we’re still 7 points ahead with 10 games to play. Bayern did win the DFB-Pokal season before last as well, so that hasn’t been a complete whitewash.

My original manager got old enough (72) that I retired him and created a new one RPing as a retired Mexican midfielder who’s has the second-highest number of league games played for Union, which also involved a complete change of tactical systems and a subsequent overhaul of the first-team squad. Switching to a new manager is a good reminder of how much political capital my old manager had acquired, as I suddenly had huge sections of the squad kicking off over perceived slights and the board not being complete pushovers absent having to deal with a club legend making dictatorial demands.

Here’s what we’re running currently:

The idea is that in possession, the Half-Back drops into the backline as the two flank CBs split wide to cover pretty much the whole of the pitch, and the Libero essentially swaps with the HB, moving all the way up to the edge of the opposition box. The Deep-Lying Forward also plays wider, aiming to create overloads with the right wingback, hopefully opening up space for the Complete Forward and the attacking midfielder to make runs into.

Real Madrid beat me in the Club World Cup again, and it’s something that only happens every four years, so I’m going to have to keep going until I finally win it. I just have to!

OneSecondBefore · April 19, 2025, 5:32am

Fucking YES, when this game came out the usual subset of journalists who go full hypeman-mode over every big new game were rhapsodizing over how fun it was to explore the haunted hotel, so I eventually picked it up with one of those Nintendo vouchers and I was sorely disappointed. Incredibly dull, vapid game.

Mikey · April 19, 2025, 6:22am

I liked the 3DS one

Kilroy · April 19, 2025, 8:00am

Playing Armored Core 1 on the 3DS. So far I’m just failgrinding to get all the human plus levels but after that I will attempt a full playthrough, with save scumming to ensure 100% mission success rate.