I am going to go to blacktown. I am going to buy a GameCube.
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Disney Speedstorm is a solid kart racer buried under one hundred tons of gacha machine progression hell but on the other hand I got my ass smoked in a super tense race by a Kermit the Frog playing on his smartphone called $P33D B]TC# so who can say if it’s bad or good
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good amount of Skin Deep and Clair Obscur today. great stuff. I have maybe 1/4 of the time that I would gladly be putting into videogames right now.
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I don’t know why I do this to myself, but every now and then I give myself a “reflex check” and play a session of WarioWare and see how far I can get into a given set.
Every year I get worse and worse…I just don’t have it like I did when I was (lemme Google this)…oh god, 16…
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Finally have an uninterrupted afternoon to play some Skin Deep. I am already dreaming about future playthroughs where I push things even further. I am also trying more complicated things instead of just trying to brute force levels. This is a very fun stealth sandbox and the way the game telegraphs and sets up wacky ways to dispatch enemies is incredible.
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Played 3 new ZZT games today. They were all made by a couple fellas who just randomly showed up out of the blue after like 20-30 years to go on a nostalgic bender. (I highly recommend you do this.)
The Secrets of Raventhorpe Manor by gazillion is a classic Town-like purple-key-em-up. Uncover the mysteries of the eponymous Manor by collecting the 6 purple keys to its gates.
While the game has a rather plain look to it compared to a lot of modern releases, I think that’s ultimately to the game’s benefit. It manages to hit a certain austere, classic vibe quite well. The game is carried largely by the strength of its writing and some interesting structural choices. The game took me about 45 minutes to beat, though apparently I missed 2 points somehow. Alas…
Smol Game by Liz is a single-board game where you live on a small brown planetoid, and you have a hankering for some chardonnay. Alas, your cupboard is locked, so you need to look around for wherever the key ended up. This should take you no more than 10 minutes.
Being new to the community, the author gave this game the 
tag out of an abundance of caution. Having played the game myself, the only thing I think might be objectionable is that the characters speak Australian English, with all that entails.
(For some reason the museum’s webplayer throws some weird errors when you attempt to load the world, so (at least right now) you need to download the world to play it.)
2125 (also by Liz) has you go through a day in the life of some bloke in the bunker/mine of one of the last remnants of humanity. This is a short 10-minute vent-game relating to the recent Australian election, but before playing this game I did not have enough of a working knowledge of Australian politics to know whatever this was specifically lampooning (but now I do know, which just goes to show the educational power of Video’s Games).
(The author also gave this game the rating for Australian Content, but again it’s just dialectally-appropriate use of the c-word.)
Anybody can ZZT.
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No in Australia everyone speaks Vietnamese
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i haven’t been gaming very intensely the past few months but as of last night i found myself playing a few games that shared a connection, a connection of being modified, altered, remade, rereleased.
the first one is super mario bros 2 USA. from its origins as “doki doki panic” on the famicom disc system to its american NES release with mario characters swapped in, to its SNES remake and later GBA version and i’m sure there’s more. i’ve been playing the SNES remake and while it’s obviously still pretty enjoyable (i’ve posted before about this but i have a lot of fondness for this game in general) i do often feel it sometimes lacks a charming mysteriousness and vagueness that the NES game has, and i feel that the sample-based SNES soundtrack is a downgrade from the square and triangle waves of the original… there’s also the GBA version which has a lot of weird stuff going on but most irritatingly the addition of nonstop “bing bing wahoo!” tinny compressed PCM voice clips that the series has been obsessed with since the n64
the second one is dark souls 2… another Classic. my fav version is “vanilla ds2 + scholar of the first sin content” dark souls 2, which i’m not sure was released anywhere besides ps3 / 360? i also like ps4 scholar of the first sin fwiw but i’ve never had a problem with vanilla ds2 even if i love the extra NPC invasions added all over lol…
the third and fourth are in the team ico collection on ps3… i’ve long heard rumors that this version doesnt support the 4:3 aspect ratio of the ps2 original but this isn’t true! both games do! im playing them on a big 4:3 standard-definition tube over here and i promise they do
the release history of sotc in particular is pretty fascinating to me… it’s often the case imo that the ~canonical~ versions of ~canonical~ games are on their original consoles (another example would be imo shin megami tensei 3, my favorite 1000 page scifi-fantasy novel about Killing God And Becoming The Most Powerful Creature In Every Universe Across All Time of a videogame where the later unity engine versions are pretty good but noticeably less than perfect). after clicking on a bunch of search engine links to random forum posts etc. there are a number of differences from the ps2 original like reduced bloom and wander losing grip / shaking around more because of a difference in character handling physics that are supposed to be related to the internal game logic being tied to framerate
from time to time i think of the bizarre “are games art???” discourse which seemed to not just be a hot subject on message boards in the 2000s but also in various gaming magazines and also like mainstream media to some extent? with roger ebert being one of the central guys in the debate lol… and how shadow of the colossus often figured into these conversations
(and the team ico games seem like one of the closest precedecessors of the souls series which is interesting given their prince of persia / out of this world vibes even tho the souls series ends up with much pulpier vibes and more arcade game-like character handling, maybe it shows most in the sound design which has continually returned to motifs like wind sounds, leaves rustling, fire crackling)
imo the closest cinematic points of comparison for sony-bluepoint’s remakes of both shadow of the colossus and demon’s souls would be something like the 1998 remake of “psycho”, or any number of worse english-language remakes of non-english cinema… i also thought of the infamous star wars special editions, l’immagine ritrovata’s obnoxious michael bay-style color modifications of classics like king hu’s films for video distributors like janus / criterion, green snake (1993) rereleased with CGI snake graphics in place of in-camera effects, etc…
(some video games that might fit into this category are like, silent hill 2 which has had multiple ersatz rereleases, the upcoming metal gear solid triangle, a ps3 version of mgs3 that is also arguably imo missing some of the vibes of the ps2 version, the original halo, idk)
i bring all this up because for as much as gamers have continued to argue that videogames are art! they’ve seemed a little hesitant to like, actually treat them as such? with a movie for example, even something like tinted colors or a modified aspect ratio are a valid basis to claim artistic compromise idk
one of the central titles of the games are art! debate less than 20 years ago is only in print as an american remake of a japanese game lol…
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the old mainstream games as art debate involved so much defensive outward projection when the primary obstacle was the way the industry and gamers themselves treated the works rather than lack of public acceptance or any deficiency in the canon. the modern remake seems like the logical endpoint of this paradox, where games are simultaneously canonized as art and permanently degraded as interchangeable technical product.
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After reading the previous two posts, I opened my YouTube app to be immediately presented with this thumbnail lol:
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been on a Game Gear kick, recently.
replayed Sonic Triple Trouble for the first time since probably i was a kid. i think it holds up pretty well, and feels like they’d ironed out most of the issues with the earlier GG Sonics. still going to replay those, though. didn’t get all the emeralds, but honestly, if “Fang the Sniper” wants them, why not?
also picked up a really cheap copy of Ax Battler on eBay because they hadn’t tested if it worked. it does work, and this game is really neat. kind of like Dragon Quest meets Zelda II. my only complaint is that taking a single hit of damage knocks you out of battles, which means you need to fight flawlessly if you want to collect any vases (for magic and inns). still pretty fun, though, and wish i’d played it as a kid.
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you should really try the game gear power rangers games discard 30-year-old prejudices and you will be surprised by how good they are
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i’m like 70% sure i had the first GG one. i need to look through some crates at my mom’s place
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Beyond Citadel is probably the premiere pervert’s FPS that will be released this year. Yes, it resembles Marathon in many ways despite having more in common with the design sensibilities of something like Outlaws instead…but the hard sell for a lot of people I think is going to be the eroguro elements. It’s designed to be off-putting to the kind of person who plays retro shooters. This is truly a game and an eroge I played today.
There are strange giger-esque statues of the protagonist in many places with her innards visible… when you die you get eviscerated in first person. there’s guts everywhere, bisected corpses, everyone gets completely shredded, sometimes enemies don’t die right away and you just get to view dismembered anime girls overcome with ecstasy from their wounds before you canoe them. There’s little podiums everywhere that have United Nations logos floating above them that unlock CGs which are sometimes very horny…you can turn off the nudity in the gallery though which shows different, sometimes funny art instead. A mysterious game.
I cannot recommend it to anyone even though my friend is the one who made me play it. Lol
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Oh hell yes, I have been waiting for this
…sigh.
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when you have a concept like that it’s a guarantee only a true freak will make it. and this time it happened to be a japanese guro artist. what can you do, I guess. it’s super easy to dismiss from the outside but my actual experience of playing it is dramatically less pornographic than any way you can describe it. this is why I posted about it! its a weird game!
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i think its good there’s at least one really elaborate fps for a certain type of girl out there, it’s just a shame it somehow is too resource intense for this computer
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i have a pretty good computer and every time one of the sardukar guys from david lynch’s dune explode into gibs it makes my game freeze for a second lol. also this is a great example of what I mean that despite how it looks and sounds the games major anime influence is actually Jin-Roh. most of the enemy troops you fight are along those lines, armored and faceless until you blow them apart. There’s undeniably an erotic bent to his art but like when I’m actually playing the game and standing in a room full of gore and body parts I keep going ewwww this is disgusting. It has a really deeply unsettling atmosphere which I actually do kinda respect.
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ok, I got to the point you were talking about, and wow this is ridiculous
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