They have this “forever” version
Ive no idea if the online still works. Though reviews from as recent as today seem positive
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i used to play a lot of Trackmania 2020 and initially you could play the base levels without a subscription but they stopped allowing that. i paid for a year of it because i played it a lot and it was like 5-10 bucks. i would say it’s worth paying for but you can’t go back and play old seasonal levels they made which is really dumb. i do like the look of it more than other Trackmania games.
also afaik there are still people playing Trackmania Nations Forever/Trackmania United (the paid version). Trackmania Nations should satisfy you probably perfectly well if you just wanna go back and play some of that again. i pirated an old version at some point to mess around with because they used to have a bunch of extra features other than the base racing that they steadily got rid of. Trackmania Canyon was pretty fun too.
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The Game Over system in Zelda II - you have three lives and losing them all dumps you back at the starting area with all your major items but no experience - puts a kind of interesting structure on the game when you know you’ll be wiping out many, many, many times.
Clearing each palace isn’t just about surviving the dungeon: you have to get there without wasting unrecoverable resources on the way and without it making you want to die. It makes dungeons intensely stressful even when the only thing left is a relatively short dive to the boss.
This doesn’t even touch how collected power-ups (XP, the ~4 extra lives in all of Hyrule) don’t come back after a game over, so you’re always gambling that this is the run that makes good use of them.
Also my 12th go at Volvagia ended in the lava after delivering the final blow, this game is so good
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Wait, is this how it worked? I remember trying it out and thinking that, despite it being called a subscription, it looked like it was actually just equivalent to a season pass system: it just gave you DLC for new tracks throughout the year. If it actively removes the new stuff added every year through the pass/sub, that’s really dumb.
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i’m not sure if they actively remove older seasonal pass tracks to where you can’t play them anymore with a subscription because it’s been awhile - but as far as i remember they did. it’s possible some subscription level would make you able to play them, i dunno. but in general a lot of the ways they’ve handled these games over the years have made no sense to me.
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Yeah, I love Zelda 2. Also this retry system has a strong synergy with the “bad” enemy design of the knight-style enemies, who have very short windup animations on their RNG attacks.
For the majority of us who can’t get rid of a little bit of lag on our reflex reactions, it means it’s hard to come up with a method to traverse a room while taking zero damage, even if this is your 10th time through it. You can use the fairy spell and just fly over everything, but that’s a limited resource.
That’s what makes Zelda 2 boss runbacks significantly more nail-biting than, for example, Demon’s Souls boss runbacks, which appear very hard at first, but lose their edge when you learn 100% reliable tactics to take no damage.
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well, since it was free on PSN, i am now playing Balatro
i feel like people had all the discourse they could about this a month or however long ago it came out, but i’m playing it now, so here are my thoughts
the game is really easy to just pick up and play for hours at a time, but like, what would one expect?
to be honest, i think it’s actually kind of cheating to just mix gambling with roguelike mechanics. the things they add to the game give it depth, but also mimic the feeling of “winning” that one might get in a casino, so in essence, it really doesn’t feel like they did very much work to achieve the game loop. i’m not saying the game is bad, but it’s possibly unethical for a number of reasons lol
edit: oh, the only actual complaint i have about the game is that the CRT filter makes no sense. i don’t understand what feelings it’s supposed to evoke in me, because the game doesn’t look like a retro game, nor is there a tradition of this type of game from the 80s or 90s, specifically. the animations are all too smooth, etc. - might make more sense if the animations were limited and it looked like strip poker or something
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playing a romhack of final fantasy 6 that is more or less “the authors oc’s hanging out with popular pop culture characters.” it’s pretty funny, just to see what pops up next, and the surprising amount of effort taken to make them look like they belong in a final fantasy game.
there’s also a moogle named “kupac.” i don’t know if that’s racist or not.
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out on bail, fresh out of jail, figaro dreamin…
soon as i step in the cave, i’m hearin’ espers screamin…
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I immediately thought: video poker, the pokies
the animation is too smooth for these old machines, as you say
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I love new game or just sprites or even just a website on CRT but simulating it seems mildly weird in a new project.
I think the “retro look” has been around long enough to become a signifier completely divorced from the original context. Video poker does make sense. Might be kinda cool to make a balatro pokie with custom art and glowy buttons
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fwiw I also immediately assumed it was trying to evoke video poker, which also confused me because it didn’t do anything with that framing on a thematic level. Just a convenient way to give the game a somewhat faddish art style I suspect, given that it would play just the same with like, a Windows 95 solitaire look or any other look for that matter
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yeah i mean i thought of these too, but again, the game doesn’t really do much to mimic this look. the game has its own unique style, which is totally fine and even kind of nice, but “why make a CRT filter?” is the question i still have. it just sorta irks me!
this is ultimately what i also believe is going on here, and that is why it irks me haha.
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Originally playing the game I enjoyed how it did seem to have an identity as an existing game you were discovering? Sort of like finding a weird machine in an arcade and not knowing what it’s all about. The poker theme kinda added to that for me because there are a lot of random playing card games that have strange rules
I dunno if it was what they were going for but Balatro presenting itself as if existing in an obscure niche of playing card game canon worked for me
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low res crt filter games should also be 4:3 aspect ratio
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except when they aren’t, like when it’s the main section of a LucasArts point and click or a game in tate mode or something like Darius.
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learning to mod the newest wwe game
i am desperate to de-wwe-ify every part of it
to turn jelly roll into the fall
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Because of SB and the fact I need something to distract me from the inescapable vortex of riddles that is Void Stranger (I do not recommend it, it is one of those “noble failures” where the good to bad ratio is just too heavily shifted to the negative) I have decided to give Dino Crisis 2 a shot. I’m a bit over an hour into it and it is definitely interesting but I am pretty bad at it, it has strong “I wish the targeting was at least 10% better” energy.
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oh fuck this i got to the part where i am reminded that this is a romhack of final fantasy 6, a game nobody can fucking hack in a way that doesn’t piss me off
anyways all the references are funny in a stupid ironic way, too bad i have to spend 20 goddamn minutes on bosses with 3 million hp and attacks that give you every status effect at once. whoever fucked with, sorry, i mean “balanced,” the doom train fight to personally hurt me can die in hell.
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I finished Slave Zero X, barely. It is a fantastic little cyberpunk-fighting-game-as-one-plane-belt-scroller. All those little things that usually annoy me got a pass here. The gibberish Japanese signs felt like (and I have no-basis for this) because this is Cyberpunk there should be gibberish Japanese signs. It has great sound design in between the fights you are just bombarded with audio information from the environment.
All that is really cool. One stage 6-3 (the final stage is 6-5) nearly broke me. It did basically break me. I spent about two hours on it. See as it is a fighting game, basically, even Justin Wong would have trouble if it was suddenly versus 10 simultaneous opponents who cannot hit each other. Very easy to get stunlocked and then watch your health drop as you are bounced around. You can cancel out of falling to the ground but without any major i-frames that is more a signal for another of your 10 opponents to hit you and stick you in stun, again.
Enjoy that tragedy here. I couldn’t leave it so I managed to skirt by about 10 tries after this and I think it was entirely luck. All the high level play I could find was boring as shit because it was just spam this one command move. Which yeah okay great I’ll do that once these 10 assholes get done playing volleyball with m-oops I died the second I stood up.
For the record there is no block button, there is something of a dash, and a minor use parry system that only builds meter.
Stress again the game is quite cool. If you play it don’t count on beating it because 6-3 will ruin you over and over. I should have written more positive things about this game I like instead of complaining. I may try and beat the impossible early game boss (basically the “final” boss but you are supposed to lose.) problem is you can’t retry so you have to play an elevator stage every time you want to try.
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