That wasn’t the end of the game. The side missions are getting tedious. The main missions are also tedious. Maybe it’s time to just mainline it until the end…
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After 15 long years of not touching Melee, I installed Slippi.gg today and sparred with a friend. If I had any less mental fortitude, I don’t think I would be able to accept that Slippi.gg isn’t radically changing the physics and input mechanics. Everything feels so fucked up! I can’t jump and move around as fluidly as I remember. I can’t string together combos, or hell, even reliably do basic shit like hop into a neutral A. It feels like 50% to 75% of my inputs are being dropped.
I know that this is probably due to a number of factors. Being older and having shittier reflexes. 15 years of rust buildup. Being ruined by Smash Ultimate, which is a much slower, more forgiving game, and which provides generous input buffer; as opposed to Melee which is intensely demanding, magnitudes faster paced, and requires precision input at all times, lest ye be punished.
My ego is telling me to buy a Gamecube controller and PC adapter because, surely, that would fix things and it’s just my hardware that is the problem, but I know that’s probably a cope. If it does help, it will only be because getting my hands on a properly shaped controller might allow me to access my latent muscle memory, buried under more than a decade, more easily.
SB, I am fucking washed. 
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oh sick stranglehold is on gog???
played through pc last of us 2 it was ok, sony first party stuff is still way too up its own arse though. the port is fine? (believe the first wasn’t)
also got a couple of hours into the metaphor demo, not bad
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i’ve been without internet for the last two weeks and it seemed like the perfect time to play the copies of mario 3d world + bowser’s fury and mario wonder that i bought ages ago and never touched:
3d world
wow, this is insanely good! constantly throwing new ideas at the player and none of them outwear their welcome. the feel of the platforming is fantastic despite the limited moveset compared to mainline 3d mario. the main criticism you can levy at it that it’s too easy and it reuses boss fights, but it has satisfying score and actual clever secrets. the kind of game that reminds you that nintendo can decide to just make a great game if they feel like it.
bowser’s fury
a strange choice to use this ancient wii u engine to make a “open-world” romhack with a somewhat annoyingly frequent kaiju bowser invasions that interrupt the disappointingly samey and small platforming segments. i like the idea of the gigantic saiyan cat mario vs. destoroyah bowser boss battles, but it feels under baked liked most of this enterprise. not bad, but not really worth going out of your way for.
mario wonder
i don’t entirely know how to feel about this. it’s the first 2d mario game that feels influenced by kaizo mario hacks, gimmick mario maker levels, livestreaming, retro-developed donkey kong(?) and wario land(!?) it generally feels good, is loaded with ideas (maybe too many) and has some very good level design. it’s charming, it’s “good”, and i certainly appreciate the ultimate award for beating the hardest level is unlocking goofy a capella sound effects, but there’s something missing here. definitely better than new super bros. though.
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cosign all 3 of these
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Yeah! 3d world is one of my favorites too, I posted a few months ago why exactly
As for Mario Wonder, I wonder (ha) if the problem is that confines all of its ideas within a rather repetitive system. Every level, you get a “surprise” when you find the special star and otherwise you never do. It’s so consistent about establishing an expectation and then going against it that it’s experienced as predictable instead.
If it had done stuff like one wonder that starts to infect nearby levels and keeps expanding… or a wonder that activates inexplicably even though I didn’t find the star… a meta-wonder you find in the overworld that alters the effect of all the other wonders… Nintendo should hire me
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I complained about it before, but it you actively avoid the Wonder Seed in each level (well, the ones you can avoid them in) and try to finish it out, the levels are pretty uninspired.
So like, yes of course, that’s the whole point of the game. But it also means strapping in for each level’s set piece thing…I dunno. I liked it, quite a bit! But I didn’t really want to replay the levels any more than I needed to. Between the number of levels that become on-rails sort of experiences and some of the gimmicks being fun like, once…I dunno.
Maybe I’m just old and sour…
Speaking of old and sour, I tried to play Pokemon Gold yesterday on my Anbernic and, wouldn’t ya know it, you really can’t go back. Just slow as shit.
I gave that game like 150 hours of my prime youth…maybe that’s all I need to have given it.
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I dont think they have been consistently inspired in their mario games in forever.
There is hat mario, I think that game has some hang out flavor and some genuine adventure moments that are refreshing and cool. I like that you just find those scooters and can have a great time blasting around on them. But its also an over-wrought mess of just things. Required things. Activities if you will.
I try to break down the new games I dont like (3d world especially) to bust myself out of any bias I might hold and no its just not there. I dont feel I have nostalgia for mario because mario has never really left the rotation. I have nostalgia for playing Mario3 on top of a pile of packing boxes in my best friend’s parents junk room. But I also played the game a few months ago and every moment is a minor joy. The theming and challenge are consistent. The level design inspires wonder and play. The tools and features are presented in an understated way and are completely not in your way. 3D world presenting me with like the completely game changing cat power suit is like banging a gong in my face by comparison.
Even the marios ported on the advance added little mario screams and hups like a George Lucas special edition. Like no-no mario was ALWASY meant to be screaming we just didnt have the technology yet.
The STUFF gets me. It infected mario Kart. Why did we need 100 kinds of kart? And flying and boating? Am I an old old man…? I just don’t wanna min-max a mario game with equipment tuning.
Its like if Mario 3 came out today the frog suit or the shoe would be thrust upon you with literal trumpets and confetti. You don’t discover its weirdness on your own and use it for fun or comedy, you are gonna get on-boarded baby. This is REQUIRED FEATURE. its ON THE BOX.
So I have no incentive to go try out the weird thing I found. Its not a cool spot with a rope swing by the stream you can go back to. Maybe Ill do a flip this time. Its a playground feature you have to navigate to get to the rest of the park. And you WILL do that flip. And we will CLAP everytime. Maybe its the best part, but you don’t get to make it YOUR thing because its THE thing.
Its like the games’ focus shifted from that of a child in the woods to a school administrator planning field day.
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Tried Overwatch 2’s “Stadium” mode, which has a buy phase in between rounds so you can theoretically do “builds” like a MOBA or something.
In practice, this is just like every other contemporary multiplayer live service game: you have a “job” and because teams are meticulously balanced if you don’t do that job well the rest of the team suffers and you lose. Requires hours and hours of study and practice before you can start to maybe have fun. Wins and losses feel the same. We lost three games in a row. I’m tired of doing homework so I can hang with my friends.
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Yup-yup! I was one of many marks for that game, won over by the promise of a “real” sequel to 64 and one that seemed to be less confined feeling (not being booted out after each star/moon collected, less finicky platforming challenges and more wide-open exploration of fun locales) but the to-do list quality of collecting moons really killed it dead for me…
Also playing it made me miss 64’s particular type of early-3D eeriness. There is something legitimately oppressive feeling about navigating the interior of peach’s castle. The blank feeling of certain rooms and hallways, the illogical floor plan, the reverby room tone and your echoing footsteps… It really feels like a place of evil or at least somewhere where something terrible happened (kinda how I feel about real world castles too…). It’s unsurprising to me that this eventually got mined for creepypasta stuff. The only thing similar in Odyssey is the hyper-realistic fake new york and that one level with the dragon that felt like momentarily stepping into a From Software game. Also uncanny in its own way but nowhere near as interesting to me…
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I think this is impossible to reproduce in the modern age. I’ve seen some attempts but they always lean too far into being intentionally creepy. It’s something that can only come out of 3D being new tech that they aren’t sure what they’re going to do with it.
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Yes spot on. the thing I miss most about Mario 64 is how nothing is required and the levels are just kind of there for you and you can do as much or as little as you want. You don’t even need to go to the ghost house if I recall right.
I think they tried to make sunshine spooky at first but the way they turned down the sunshine made it look like day-for-night filming in a 70s movie. I didn’t find most of the castle super spooky but I also dont find abandoned houses spooky even though thats apparently the default way to feel about them.
I like getting kicked out after a start for several reasons:
- Creates a natural break in the action.
- Sets you up for a choice to continue the stage or try something else without having to actively quit a stage. I think forcing the player to ‘give up’ to restart or exit a stage is deflating.
- Creates a pleasant repetition ("bah-bah bah bah-bah Lets-A-Go!) that resets the energy even if the last star was a real toughy.
If I can arm chair my own setup Id have made some stars open a corresponding warp pipe and have some stars change the level and some stars require previous stars / changes.
Then you could have mid level hang out zones. Like for example a little toad house on a cloud high over the stage. (jump off and see if you can land in a bucket of water a worker is carrying down below, there is no reward for this)
*im saying star in place of moon, you get it.
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I wouldn’t say impossible or that it’s specific to the time, necessarily, but I agree that a lot of modern attempts to do the same lean into the spooky aspect a lil too hard and so it comes off as kinda cheap imitation.
I will say Anthology of The Killer has some environments that manage to pull off this feeling quite successfully (and takes it a lot further as well!!), if you’re looking for a modern example!
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Y’all Mario 64 missers need to play B3313.
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How obnoxious is the whole “this game is going to eat your soul” stuff and how much of it is locked behind obscure collectible bullshit?
Parts of it definitely intrigue me but I also worry my patience may be worn thin…
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The creepypasta stuff is like ahhh Jump Scare You’re dead now. It happens maybe once every 90 minutes. There’s a lot of references to Weird Mario 64 Youtube which I have watched Zero of and it is more like “oh that’s cool.”
While you do want to get stars and explore I would say actually trying to beat it is a fools errand and it is entirely about the will to explore and poke. For a normal person it is entirely too deep to keep track of. I tried to map out the world and it quickly sprawled into madness. Which was fun.
Just do not hit the Yellow Switch if you find it because it randomizes all flags in the game. Or do. Just you should know I “lost” a save to it. I also restarted the game 4 times for various reasons but that didn’t really affect how much I enjoyed it. Which was tremendously.
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To your second question: the Hat Switches are deep deep deep within the castle and would be on your OBJECTIVE list along with 12 or so Super Special Stars but without spoiling your main focus on the game should be self exploration and getting lost and just stumbling and bumbling forever. That’s the truly great feeling of it.
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Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics (Steam)
12 Arcade or Super Famicom games in this Unity-based collection, most of them made available and even translated for Western home play here for the first time–which is super cool! Well not so much the Unity part maybe but the menus are set up pretty much like the NES/Famicom collection that came out on console a year or two back, and more or less do the things you’d expect for basic emulation. (Okay so having to press both “bumper” buttons together on the menu screen to access DIP screens for basic settings like game difficulty for the arcade ports is a bit much.)
There are two basic flaws in the set-up, though:
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None of the games with a jump function default to having Jump mapped to the bottom face button on an Xbox-style gamepad (my DualSense works but still shows Xbox-style button names ; PPP), which to anyone who has every played Super Mario Bros. or a game made by anyone who has ever played Super Mario Bros. will feel absolutely psychopathic and require immediate button remapping.
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You can remap the buttons per game but doing so for game buttons “1” & “2”–“Punch” and “Kick” in Shadow Force, for instance–will also remap the Accept/Cancel functions used to navigate the collection’s menus while in that game, rendering navigation of the collection’s game management menus incredibly confusing and again making me wonder if the UI engineer ever played an actual game–because this is horrible. I posted about it on their Steam forum and hold out a tiny hope that they’ll fix it but yeah probably not.
The games themselves are maybe not all so great. I liked these three enough that I’ll try playing them more:
Super Dodge Ball (Arcade)
Probably has the same basic problem the NES version has when played 1P which is that all the passing and fakeouts are useless against the CPU so you’re just kind of doing the same throws over and over and hoping the CPU decides not to catch them. But unlike the NES (and SFC, see below) version, it runs at good speed; and the graphics in this, Technos Japan’s final game before their bankruptcy, are insane, in a good way–ESPECIALLY since the bright screen flash that accompanies every single special throw hit in the MVS arcade game seems to have been either removed or extremely toned down here, so I can actually try to play this version without risking a migraine. = DDD
The Neo Geo version only came out in the US, in arcades, and in very limited release! I stumbled across it once in an arcade and as a formerly NES-Super-Dodge-Ball-obsessed kid was super excited but had no idea how to play it; turns out the super throws require inputting Street-Fighter-style fighting game motions like for fireballs or uppercuts, rather than being timing-based; I’m not finding any other than the basic one each character has (uppercut motion) anything close to intuitive, but it feels like maybe they’ll become manageable with some practice. … For attracting casual players it was probably a bad idea. R.I.P., Technos Japan.
The Combatribes (Arcade)
Hard-hitting, wacky moves, high enemy count.
Shadow Force (Arcade)
Controls are a bit funky maybe but hey, cyber ninjas! (The final sentence in the collection’s “Story” summary is fabulous: “They were ninjas reborn as cyborgs to fight against evil.” YES.)
I didn’t like the rest of the games = P :
River City Renegade (SFC)
Bad (and badly-paced) dialogue, hard-to-read new Western font, very sluggish action in which you just mash a single button for all your moves, bad AI to the extent that having a CPU teammate made fights a lot harder because the ally barely hit the opponents and always drifted right in between me and my opponent so I just ended up hitting them instead. : P Probably better in 2P I suppose. Inscrutable quests and direction. Got mugged like twice on every floor of my starting hotel (how does a high school kid afford this life) which was impressive considering each floor is a 50’ hallway. Rather ugly graphics.
Kunio’s Dodgeball Time, C’mon Guys! (SFC)
NES Super Dodge Ball was a smash hit so let’s add 10x the menus, take the old playfields and give them undecipherably muddy and dithered detailing, make the sprites muddy, indistinctly rounded, and boring, and make the gameplay run maybe even slower than it was on the NES! Horrid.
Downtown River City Baseball Story (SFC)
I’m terrible at every Japanese baseball game I’ve ever tried and this proved no different; thought I had a chance at first since the fielding, which I’m usually useless at, is highly abstracted, cutting directly to a zoomed-in view of where the ball goes and who auto-fields it–except sometimes I couldn’t tell what the little zoomed animated clips signified, and other times I couldn’t tell it was my 1st baseman who’d picked up the ball, so my following throw to 1st went to nobody. ; DD (And once I cottoned on to this I couldn’t figure out how to make my 1st baseman run to tag his base so that didn’t really help. ; DDD)
Perhaps even stranger is the pitching/batting, where you choose your pitch/swing from a vertical list of up to 8 or 9 types–which SEEMS like a lotta variety, but the game doesn’t show which one is currently selected, so you have to remember how many times you’ve pressed up or down: like, I want pitch #7, so I’ll press DOWN 7 times (the first option is #0) and hope I don’t mis-press too fast so it isn’t counted, or accidentally hit UP at first, which I somehow kept doing and then wasn’t sure if the selection wraps down to the bottom or not (I THINK maybe it did?). Probably this was done so that your couch Vs opponent couldn’t see which pitch/swing you were selecting–there’s a confirmation tone for each up/down press but I suppose you could try blindly juking your invisible selection up/down a few times to throw your opponent’s count off…and maybe your own as well ‘p’–but other sports games did this MUCH better by making play selection as a single direction-plus-button input instead.
Kunio’s Oden (SFC)
Columns-like, but maybe runs a bit too fast. I’ve never been able to get into Columns and this felt worse.
The Combatribes (SNES & SFC)
On its own, a mediocre-feeling SNES beat-em-up; compared to the arcade version also in this collection, horridly slow and chunky, with vastly reduced opponent counts. There is no reason to play it after that initial comparison.
SugoroQuest++ -DICENICS- (SFC, no English translation)
Heavily text-menu based so not particularly playable if you can’t read Japanese. A 4P board game; in 1P you can’t skip the 3 CPU players’ turns; I mashed through two or three turns and nothing remotely cool seemed to happen for any player, we were just going around a board and numbers would appear over our heads. The Mode 7 playfield makes me feel nauseous when it animates in rare transitions, but the pixel art is gorgeous. May have some market appeal in Japan–which did have a prequel on Famicom–but its inclusion in the Western release can only be read as padding the game count. (Oh hm okay the Famicom version got a translated console release earlier this year; ah that’s right, I think I’d seen it and rules it out–maybe because it looks kinda boring, and has some mildly flashy/shaky FX–nice sprites again, though.)
DunQuest (SFC, no English translation)
Pretty much the same situation as with DICENICS (though no obvious Mode 7, thankfully) but in “action” RPG form. LOADS of NPCs in the generic starting castle/town to talk to in Japanese; once I finally found my way out and fought a tiny critter, the action was delayed to feeling kind of like it was turn-based, except it wasn’t–like, pressing the sword button would work once every five seconds or so, and I couldn’t tell when the opponent’s attack would happen, so I slowly and boringly got sliced to death by the first, tiny creature.
Xain’d Sleena (Arcade)
Unattractive and jerky. Sci-fi run-n-gun but I got killed repeatedly in a screen or two by rocks and space geysers.
China Gate (Arcade)
Feels like they tried to see if a single-screen-ish beat-em-up was feasible. Not so much: the action isn’t horrible but also isn’t great, and becomes extremely repetitive; graphics are a bit squished and muddy. Might be a bit of fun in 2P 'cause you can throw the enemies into each other–except you have to switch buttons to throw them forward instead of back, and in practice I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around that at all. ; D
~ ~ ~
So overall, not a great collection. Weirdos like me may appreciate having legit ports of MVS Super Dodge Ball (and especially the removal of its original screen flashing effect), Combatribes, and Shadow Force–but even I’ll admit that $30 for those three, essentially, is a bit steep. (There’s supposedly online play but I didn’t try it.) And the menu navigation getting remapped per game is inexcusable.
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Void Stranger: Now I have a sword which feels like it could be useful, although not so much in the most immediate floors after. Am about 150 floors deep and still alive but am concerned about how harsh some of the later ones will be with limited lives and no undo.
Outer Worlds: I appreciate how many times you can just opt out of combat as I keep forgetting to check my pickups and switch to better guns.
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Searching for my next visual novel to read after Tsukihime, I browsed around people’s recs on vndb and tried a dozen or so, abandoning most of them within the first 15 minutes. I made it 10 hours into two battle royale investigation ones (I guess I like that formula), but eventually they both started to feel too repetitive and predictable and I lost my desire to find out what happens next
Then, earlier this week I realized the Tsukihime devs recently released another one-shot visual novel called Witch on the Holy Night, and its Steam version even has a working language toggle. Its prose style immediately struck me as way more textured that everything else I had tried lately. The prologue started as nostalgic and relatable before taking a sudden turn toward the disturbing, and then in the first chapter it’s quietly and methodically establishing the setting.
I’m concluding Type-Moon is it then, the one consistently good visual novel dev
What inspired me to take screenshots in Witch’s first chapter was the reflective walk up a hill on a rainy afternoon. The art feels grounded in a very specific place, time of year, and character POV:
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