why would I talk about good things
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I finally got a CIB copy of English Super Hydlide, and itâs the first copy Iâve ever had where someone actually beat the game.
Hell yeah, Ruffano, you rule. Welcome to the collection.
22 Likes
PAGANITZU
I had the first episode of this Apogee puzzler as a child but never beat it because I was a dope but as a SMART ADULT only the last couple of the 20 puzzles gave me any guff.
Then I got to play the other two episodes, which also had 20 levels each!
So this is a goofy game, with your character named ALABAMA SMITH (because Indiana Jones). In the first two episodes you can find secret panels that do little comedy bits like ancient Mayan commercials, and sometimes hints for later levels. This goofiness is countered a bit by the EXTREMELY GRAPHIC death animations (which I also found funny).
(ironically the love interest is a babe from paganitzu city)
The puzzles themselves involve wandering single screen over-head areas collecting all of a certain item then making your way to the exit, while avoiding hazards or getting yourself trapped along the way.
The first episode is Tomb Raiderish, with giant spiders and spike traps to contend with, the second episode is set in a more supernatural world with fire beings and the like, and the third is set in the realm of the dead which is more surreal.
One thing I want to note is the feeling of adveture this game has⌠the first ep does feel like running through a trap filled temple, and the second ep feels more mysterious due to the supernatural stuff, and the third ep feels like a trial to earn your life back due to gargoyles that help guide youl
Not only does each episode have its own unique aesthetic, they also have different mechanics (though some later ones are iterations on earlier ones). Overall I found the puzzles a lot of fun and cleverly designed, if a bit easy⌠I didnât have too much trouble with the game so people who are actually good at puzzles will probably plow through it.
There are some problems⌠first there is a lives system and no undo (which makes sense as other entities move in real time) BUT this isnât an issue because you can save at anytime. This was very much appreciated and was the sole reason I got through it. I would have quit early on otherwise, especially since some puzzles require tricky timing.
Secondly, there is some BS here and there. The main thing that stuck in my craw is that sometimes there are destructible bricks. Under them can be vital items and other times it just opens a path that is needed to solve a level. I hated this because I like to see everything I can use at the start of a puzzle, plus I would keep forgetting and get stuck for ages because I forgot I can destroy a wall or whatever. Some of the secret panels drop hints about these, but they shouldnât be there in the first place IMO.
Luckily the third episode drops that shit, but has some terrible RNG section right at the end (or at least I think it was RNG⌠there may have been a pattern I missed). The third episode also gets a bit too block pushy for me, and is more scattershot⌠there are some cool, challenging levels and a few filler ones, too. Overall I found it the most enjoyable on a challenge level, though.
Oh thatâs another problem, the difficulty resets with each episode. I would have also liked to see mechanics from previous episodes used in later ones⌠could have been some fun combinations.
The ending cinematics are goofy fun (the final one goes on for like 20 minutes) and have some fantastic EGA art. The game ends on a sexist joke unfortunately, but considering all the Mayan stuff, itâs aged pretty well otherwise.
Iâve written too much about this!!! Pagantizu is a puzzle game that has some rough spots and dated concepts, but was still fun to puzzle through thanks to the save options (and the puzzles just being fun to solve). Itâs a bit hard to recommend since there are a billion other puzzle games out there now that do more exciting things, but if you like EGA art and goofy humour, this is still a good time.
EXTRA INFO: This is a sequel to Chagunitzu which Iâve never played so I canât compare the two. Also the side-scrolling action game Realms of Chaos was originally a sequel to this? The designer did a bunch of work on Build engine games and works on Borderlands now, bit of a fall from grace.
11 Likes
I had a look after seeing you post and enjoyed a lot of the weird aesthetics, but most levels just seemed more of a game I didnât care much for in the first place so didnât stay for long BUT I think itâs really cool it exists and is still active for fans of the game⌠especially since Iâm sure people could say the same thing about games I like, such as Glider.
1 Like
Ok for REASONS people probably will understand if they read the mental health thread, itâs been hard to enjoy things this week.
But now on the other side (and Webutrin withdrawl seemingly receding too), I felt I was finally in the mood to give more time to Skin Deep after bouncing off it.
And yeah, this was engineered in a lab for a Tigress. Literally the only thing that could have more specifically targeted at me would be if Nina Pasadena was also a cat.
Also a rare example where modern game design theory is applied in such a way that makes it feel less mechanical in some ways than games itâs riffing on. Nifty.
IE: SOMEONE ACTUALLY BUILT ON THIEF AND GOT WHY THIEF IS COOL WITHOUT MAKING IT A AAA GAME!
12 Likes
Got the itch to play on my modded xbox and decided to throw on Burnout 3⌠Man. Never got racing games before this, but this game had my heart pumping! I especially love the single lap trials. Forces u to drive like a complete maniac! I love that you get faster by driving dangerously and flooring the boost has got an effect like the wind is blowing in your face. Its so freaking immersive for a game that old. Makes me wanna get a vr headset and test out racing games.
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Burnout 3 and Paradise are the only racing games Iâve ever been able to get into much at all, aside from F-Zero on the SNES.
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Burnout Revenge (basically Burnout 4) on 360 is spectacular. itâs good on Xbox et al too, but the best version is 360-exclusive
I also have a soft spot for the PSP->PS2 title, Burnout Dominator. it has 4 different versions of Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne - apparently partly as a developer troll? unclear. need more data
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I was just saying to a few SB folks that song is excellent for video game drifting bgm
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Black Mesa: pretty hilarious to do all this work to improve Xen, justifying its original length, and then making it too long again. Maybe theyâre even more dedicated to the spirit of Half-Life than I thought
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I started playing The Evil Within for the first time and got excited when Shinji Mikami brought back the burning bodies so they donât resurrect mechanic from RE1 remake thatâs been absent in every subsequent RE game, only to slowly realize that monsters donât resurrect if you stealth kill them, donât resurrect if you headshot them, you can crush their heads with the melee attack while theyâre down, the torch will also set them on fire, and every area so far has been completely linear and it doesnât seem like Iâll be revisiting any of them. The total veneer of gameplay depth.
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all the fun stuff in the 1st one is always happening just out of frame in the letterboxed areas!
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I actually like the aspect ratio but if there hadnât been an option to remove camera bob this would have been unplayable
3 Likes
no thank you I think Iâd rather not randomly agree that I will only sue you in cyprus to play whatâs probably a worse version of stalker. I made the mistake of actually starting to read eulas a few years ago and now they just all piss me off
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The bullshit with this one keeps on coming. They seem to have botched the GOG release because Iâm missing the other two games in my library, and none of them even show up in GOG Galaxy. Plus now thereâs a giant fuckoff banner ad for stalker 2 on the main menu which is ugly and annoying!! I did not agree to the EULA at least.
Regarding the actual game, itâs so fucking weird and bullshit that they removed the CNPP plant sign because itâs named after Lenin and I guess that had to go, removed all references to the Soviet Union unless it was overlooked like the hammer and sickle in garbage, changed money from RU to SR which is funny because itâs still fucking Soviet Rubles, removed all the old Soviet-era posters to replace them with generic art, and put bird shit on the Lenin statue near the end of the game I guess. Itâs clearly motivated by nationalism at the cost of like, you know, a big part of what made the game special to people, not to mention the weird revisionist history angle. Iâm not trying to be inflammatory by pointing this out, part of me feels loath to bring it up because itâs a heated issue, Iâve edited this post a lot trying to speak as delicately as possible. I just donât think you can argue that they arenât trying to punish a specific group of people when you look at all these changes together.
Not to mention a bunch of awful AI upscaled textures:
The hud elements here kill me; the way the font looks improperly spaced all the fucking time on the ugly upscaled textures, the way the zeroes are seemingly being cut off at the front for some reason, what the fuck is going on here?
after 18 years of this game being out the new team at GSC has managed to make a remaster that looks like a mod from 2012. Narodnaya Soljanka 2009 looking ass fucking shit between the insanely ugly foliage and the fucking vaseline filter on everything. look at the fucking distant garbage pile in the 2nd screenshot i cannot believe how much dramatically worse it looks than the 2007 game. everything looks like youâre looking at a fucking 720p video of the game on youtube!!
is it so hard for them to stop fucking taking a huge shit all over this game at literally every opportunity they get?
honestly i feel slightly bad having so much vitriol for it, i felt like i was really negative about stalker 2 because itâs obvious the new developers and I got very different things out of stalker, so I tried to be cautiously optimistic about this cuz like how badly could you really mess it up⌠but now I just think theyâre actually bad at making games. Itâs crazy that this version has technically been out on consoles for ages and this is the state the pc version is in, just completely fucking butchered. the only way I could be more disappointed is if this had replaced the old version outright
11 Likes
Resuming my playthrough of Tomb Raider 2013 from a few months back and goddamn do Laraâs friends suck.
I donât mean that in any sort of sneering âsince when did Sonic have all these friendsâ or whatever kinda way, theyâre just super shitty, constantly. She busts them out of a cage hanging over a flaming pit and they bitch at her. She tells them âhey all those weird chants in Japanese mean we canât leave the island, notice how every plane and boat crashes hereâ and they tell her to shut up. Points out how the guy who obviously has been constantly been betraying them has been constantly betraying them, and they tell her to can it.
Itâs telling I guess that the only one of them to make a come back (that doesnât eat shit over the course of the game, anyway) in later games is Laraâs big Polynesian bro. I think they relegated a return of Sam to a comic book.
The set pieces and weird floaty gameplay are still pretty fun, like a lot of this stuff holds up pretty well 12 years on. Just less so when characters start talking.
4 Likes
honestly so relatable
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a few years ago i started a replay of killer7 on dolphin but didnât get past the first disc⌠now that i have a giant vacuum tube screen i felt it was a good time to play it all the way through, which i donât think iâve actually managed to do since middle school (iâve been âonlineâ for a long time). you can see the wiiâs IR emitter bar in these pics, also. i think the wii library was kind of not very good in part because it feels like nintendo had some kind of policy that mandated semi-functional at best remote flailing controls in 99% of games, but it actually has a nice build quality and form factor and makes a nice gamecube that can play isos off an hdd imo
playing this and ico back to back is providing great evidence for my belief that putting right stick dual analog camera controls in every game in every genre around the time ps3 and xbox 360 came out was an evolutionary mistake in game designâŚ
actually let me get on my orange crate for a moment here which i love to do (and you can skip this whole paragraph if you donât want to read some âshooting from the hipâ) and talk about how i donât actually play a lot of indie games (tho i will play more psycho patrol, which is amazing and also kind of impenetrable and seemingly huge in scope) but my impression of a lot of indie game development now that retro ps1 style throwbacks are big is that while itâs cool that theyâre into certain like extremely 90s pop cultural aesthetic traits like fuzzy indie / alt guitar rock (overrated but enjoyable genre) and breakbeats and certain fonts etc. etc. i wish they took a little more inspiration from the lack of like, convenience and approachability that 90s games sometimes revel in, which includes not being able to point the camera anywhere you want and maybe not even being able to move the camera at all, idk! like if nothing else i think thereâs a lot more a lot of games could be doing with concepts like âshot compositionâ, which tends to break down if youâre going to give the player full autonomy over the 3d camera
this game has a number of great line readings like âa social security code like EAGLE doesnât existâ and âwhat is âunited statesâ?â and is generally full of Actually Very Good Voice Acting imo (worth noting i think that despite being a japanese game the english voice track is the only one that was recorded)
oh yeah itâs also ridiculously scary at times, i think that this is, among other things, a Great horror game. even though you can kind of just power up your girl and make her into an automatic instant kill spot lockon sniper machine like around the second level and also run past everything with invisibility it still manages to have scary as fuck horror game moments lol. also i love the level layouts and the way the networks of tracks youre on circle around and over each otherâŚ
this also has some of the all-time great sound design, cursor chimes, gun sounds, etcâŚ
one of the true Legendary Games imo
30 Likes
Your post reminded me of the âcinematic cameraâ option for driving in GTA. It takes an intense amount of concentration to not crash in that mode, but thereâs something there.
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