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

[crawfords_cat]

Enjoyed this pico8 puzzle game, Woodworm. Quite short. These simple hand animations
makes it presentation-wise.

[AutomaticTiger]

MORE TUNIC THOUGHTS

As before I oscillate between going “This is kinda neat” and “This is every action adventure video game”. It has the whole Soulslike Starter Pack of Estus Flasks, Stamina Meter, dodging, etc.

I do, in theory, like the manual stuff. I do, in theory, like how parts of the game are things you could do from the start because it’s a cool feeling to go “Oh, fuck, I could do that”.

I will give praise to all the bosses so far. Their health bars are not infinite. So far none of them have needed a mandatory parry mechanic. So far they react normally to the toolkit you have instead of negating it entirely. So far you just hit their weak points which are always available to hit as long as you can get to them. These are all things that many similar games do not do.

Also seeing how long the game appears to be, I’m also happy they don’t seem to have gone ludicrously overboard though I do have some concern that in order to get some kind of good ending I will need to find every secret.

Finding secrets has ranged from the fun of piecing together the games logic and manual and information, to just…rubbing up against stuff that’s obscured because of the camera angle. Which is cool when you figure it out from context cues, and less so when you’re just going “Fuck it, is there something there?”.

It’s just…I’m constantly conflicted by this. On paper the design is superb but it’s also really dry? I don’t really have an emotional hook to get into here besides wanting to solve the puzzlebox. But the puzzlebox also includes a simple Soulslike that isn’t bad by any means but is kind of…not really inspiring.

Gonna keep trucking a bit longer because I wanna see if it unfolds in any fundamentally different ways later or if this is just how it is.

[hellojed]

@Mikey

The Order: 1886

this game is the equivilant to a jazz album where they get a bunch of session musicians in to really just make some very technically good shit. Just unleash all that technical ability. The game developer’s favorite 3rd person shooter

[Brooks]

the only cute-animal-action-adventure vidcon i’ve played recently is death’s door, doesn’t seem like it’s drier than tunic?

[iguferon]

just have to do the rest of the missions, 20 vigilante kills and 20 fires extinguished on shoreside vale. 91 percent complete :')

[iguferon]

also import/export in this game is so weird, the first two sets of it on portland take almost the entire game to actually be able to complete especially the emergency vehicles one that needs a fuckin tank and then the one in shoreside vale can be 95% completed by blocking the road with a car and stealing them from right in front of the garage. the only car that takes any effort to get is the bf injection and it has a fixed spawn outside michael rapaport’s gf’s apartment. that being said I think it and taxi fares are the only activities in this game that made me feel anything resembling actual pleasure…I did ambulance and hidden packages purely for pragmatic reasons because they make the game way less annoying.

[falsedan]

imo Tunic’s presentation makes it look like it’s appropriate for a 9-year-old to play, but they just want to run in swinging and I have to work out how to introduce situational awareness, crowd control, spacing/range, stamina rationing, tempo into the coaching

I know it’s trying to evoke the feeling of playing Zelda 1 but the combat is significantly harder in comparison. I’d prefer dungeons to be a matter of endurance, not a series of hard skillchecks

some would say “turn on easy mode” but we have a certain bloodymindedness in this household

[meauxdal]

i enjoyed my considerable time with tunic (ngl, 80% of my enjoyment was the music and 15% was the isometric angle) but eventually i decided it really wasn’t worth continuing on defaults NOR turning down the difficulty

it’s just a game with an exceptionally bad “holistic vibe” (to me) i think. as distinct from the moment-to-moment vibe (which is mostly listening to cool music). one of those games that can make me remarkably irritated - i think it’s the presentation as falsedan alluded to. it keeps making me think it is friendlier than it is

[nettle]

my car spawned underneath this car after the game did the “new challenger” cut scene

i guess when it fell off, it got in the way of the other two because i still won this battle

also the Devil Road Run car you can buy kind of stinks, I raced it against the original and it has nowhere near the same acceleration. Rest of the game is good though, and better now i’ve got to the second “level”.

[meauxdal]

shit this sounds good… is it time to play this

[Mikey]

We feel very similarly about Tunic and I think you will probably walk away at the exact moment I did so I await your continued updates of you care to give them

[Mikey]

I have a beef with it, I feel like I am frequently struggling to make the player character do what I want him to (transitioning between pieces of cover, for example, just never seems to work at all after the tutorial section).

[AutomaticTiger]

I did look up a manual translation because like, I think I have enough pieces I could translate it if I put in time but obvs not gonna do that.

And it’s like you can’t just squish the plots of demons souls and dark souls and bloodborne together and not have me notice.

[shrug]

Thanks to parker for reminding me of the dick in The Order 1886.

I don’t know that it has any other virtues.

[Mikey]

There was also a tit

[iguferon]

we entered the world of survival horror in arma because the flood are in the halo mod. it kind of rocks they maintain their weakness to fire and shotguns, the infection and carrier forms actually work and they can raise corpses into combat forms like post-halo 1 flood. and they even have the horrible jumping melee attack. it’s very funny to be playing a regular guy because it’s a tactical shooter and then panicking in horror as they start jumping over walls and coming in every fucking direction in packs of 30 or more, and basically one hit means you get turned into a zombie before or after you die. love using 400 bullets in one engagement

anyway we rescued the only survivor and got the resident evil 3 ending

[bib]

if you go to the tavern between chapters 3 and 4 of dragon quest swords you can see your one-armed burnt out legendary swordsman dad seducing some woman in the back corner and if you talk to him he’s like “come on dude i’m trying to enjoy this little treat… i mean my drink!” and if you talk to the woman she’s like “what do you say, want a new mom” and you get a yes/no prompt and whatever you say she’s like “lol come on kid it was a joke” and then when you go the castle for your next quest you get news of a monster attack in the east and your now-wasted one-armed burnt out legendary swordsman dad stumbles in and shouts at the knight captain guy like “ill take care of it!! unless you think i can’t handle it…” and the captain’s like “on the contrary, we’d all feel better if you took it on,” and then your dad’s like “oh good, my son’s here! he can come help out his old man haha” and then he pulls you aside out of earshot of the captain and he’s like “no seriously, between you and me, i really gotta go lay down”

[MintyJuffowup]

@bib

dragon quest swords

So what you’re saying is, I should try to play the copy I own.

[username]

Seemingly approaching the end of Infinifactory (just opened the last section on the bar on the left side of the screen) and while it has certainly gotten markedly more involved over the course of playing it it doesn’t feel like it has really approached the difficulty level of the prior two Zach games that I played (Spacechem and TIS-100). I do appreciate how everything has felt more physical due to making it fully 3d and placing you within that space, and it is much easier to internalize how every tool given to you works thanks to that. This may just be me speaking from a beginner perspective but every puzzle now feels like breaking the object you are trying to build into three or four parts and figuring out how to produce them independent of each other then trying to paste them together.

I always appreciate these games the wrong way as while the enthusiasts are impressed by making an elegant, efficient solution I am much more entertained the closer they get to becoming Rube Goldberg devices, I don’t try to game the system I simply build what seems like the solution in my head… it’s just when they sprawl out in some overly complicated manner I view it is a bonus as opposed to a flaw. Infinifactory feels more like this in the moment compared to the other games of theirs I’ve tried, seeing all these various blocks being sent on various conveyor belts twisting and welding about but it almost feels like there is a baseline gravity in play that pulls things towards a certain minimum required level of optimization for it to even work. In Spacechem I occasionally produced madness and in TIS-100 it felt like I was often dancing with failure, here even my sloppier designs end up right in the middle of the performance bell curve alongside everyone else, and while it sounds silly that robs me of a bit of the thrill?

Still pretty good IMO, just makes me wonder if there was a way to shift some things around slightly to make it a touch more compelling.

[bib]

i won’t be able to say for sure until i play a few more hours but so far it’s kind of alarmingly cute. i can’t barely even break B ranks in most of the minigames