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

[GherkinForce]

I was hoping to finish of Black Myth Wukong before my flight tomorrow, but it seems I have been thwarted by the final boss. Most of the game is not too difficult, but it has some big difficulty spikes and the last boss seems to have jumped into Shadow of the Erdtree level.
I tried to do the secret boss for the true ending because I heard the weapon you get makes the final boss easier, but that guy is just as difficult.

Both of them have some really nasty gimmicks, like stealing your gourd if you try to use it to heal, and lots of showboating in unskippable cutscene counter moves if you happen to use the wrong move at the wrong time. Imagine if Promised Consort Radahn mocked you in an unskippable scene every time you missed a frame perfect dodge.

Anyway, the real challenge now is whether I will have the motivation to finish it off in two weeks once I get back.

[Felix]

the game really isn’t great outside of like a handful of moments when some NPC in a bar meets your gaze and tells you how much they’d love to finally get away from here and it briefly achieves a kind of poignance before reverting to junk. the combat is only good when you’re overpowered and the rest of the game generally feels better when you’re playing it closer to GTA than anything else, which is something they more or less conclusively failed to get across in its scope.

I remember the hour or so after the end of the intro being really bad and aimless; it gets OK again once you pick up the main handful of NPC questlines (they really like passenger seat exposition).

I never finished it though I still pick it back up occasionally because it’s so big and weird. I can’t recommend enough that you of all people play KCD2 instead.

[Grandpa]

I had a hard time doing Kiryu’s ramen mini game, keeping up with multiple meters all over the screen, so now I’m startin’ to sweat seeing the Normal level dance battles for Haruka…if they get much harder this is gonna be rough…

(I’ve only lost once and you can pretty easily just hammer the “damage opponent health” heat action as soon as you build meter again and again to make short work of them).

[Father.Torque]

@Felix

I can’t recommend enough that you of all people play KCD2 instead.

yeah well when it’s 20 bucks in 3 years I will.

[Felix]

in other news it took me like fully 6 months after moving to start playing games on the regular again which speaks to just how absorbing that endeavor was and moreover meant that I was not experiencing what it was like to run my little 4090 hotbox in my loft office while it’s a comfortable-to-me 83 degrees in there from like March to November, and… let’s just say I thought these fans were already at maximal suffering. they were not. seriously considering abandoning ITX now that it’s finally not to my advantage to have a free space heater.

[robo]

I started the e-Reader levels in Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (actual title) on mGBA.

The first few levels are remakes of Super Mario Bros. levels done in the style of Super Mario Bros. 3 done in the style of Super Mario All-Stars. It feels very Mario Maker.

Check it out: when you reach a flagpole, Mario slides down it and then you get control back so you can run and hit the mushroom/flower/star box (because it’s still Mario 3). Likewise, after you kill Bowser, you go and collect a frog suit or some such from a treasure chest because I guess that is also a valid way to end a Mario 3 level.

The couple other levels I tried featured elements from Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 2. I threw a turnip at a Chargin’ Chuck.

[Rudie]

I should play those, that sounds cool.

Is there a special rom or do you have to jump through hoops?

[robo]

There is a special rom. Not sure what the policy is for linking stuff here or even typing out the filename, but I can send it through other means if you need it.

The real hoops to jump are actually in game: you gotta select Single Player, then Super Mario Bros. 3, then Level Card (instead of Files 1, 2, or 3), then choose the portal-looking level icon on the map just before the castle, then you can choose your e-Reader level.

[meauxdal]

@robo

Not sure what the policy is for linking stuff here or even typing out the filename

filenames should be fine wherever, linking stuff should be done in the axe imo 1 2

[stylo]

just logging into eve 5 min a day to do my dailies like a good little bot

i don’t mind so much it’s barely even gaming, i’m set up rn in such a way that i just undock my ship, click scan once or twice, mine for 30 seconds, and dock up to claim my skill points. i’m not in a place to really put any time to gaming rn so you know, it’s good

actually not true the other game i’ve played a little is the 14 minesweeper variants or w/e it’s called. really good puzzler

[Rudie]

I got to play Dog Days in co-op again and that game is untouchable. Love that level design. Genius stuff.

Of course every time I got a headshot I went “The guns are inaccurate.”

[rubyquartz]

Lego Batman and Robin DS has a sort of involved mundanity and it’s quite good

[Tony]

I played The Adventure of Little Ralph (playstation one). I found it very, very difficult. I got through it abusing save states on my Vita, but it’s a masochistic game.

[winterk]

they will add anything to No Man’s Sky except a UI that doesn’t ask you to move a tiny cursor around tiny boxes and windows with your thumbstick

[notbov]

hey Zoop is (still) a p cool idiot stressful puzzle game

that’s it. Zoop is good.

[bib]

also if you upgrade the important lava-clearing story sword into the aurora sword it can then be upgraded along three different paths to become dragovian king sword or zenithian sword or sword of kings. talk about being playful with canon. zenithian sword correctly much more expensive than the others

[Grandpa]

After all the weird issues I had with Yakuza 5 suddenly running like shit on my Steam Deck (it got a little better with tweaks, but I kept thinking “goddamn I swear it was running better only a little while ago, what is this”), other games started running like shit, too. Fighting games with super delayed or extended inputs, Steamworld Dig 2 having super delayed or dropped inputs.

I switched to handheld mode because, hey, maybe my Xbox controller suddenly decided to give out (?), but nope! Input delays were present locally, too.

Had a gut feeling I knew the solution and sure enough - factory reset took care of it. Wonder if I had too many games on my SSD and that was choking r/w speeds or something, I dunno. I’m not much of a computer know-how guy.

Anyway, Cania was right, Steamworld Dig 2 is great. I just had to, y’know. Literally dig a little further for all the new stuff to pop up.

[vegetables]

when you’re learning pinball, it can be pretty expensive. barcade near my work is 75 cents a game!! Walt’s is only 50 cents, but it can get real crowded in there. So my partner got pinball FX and pinball fx3. I do not know what the difference is, but I think we only play fx3 on the steam deck for whatever reason.

It is incredibly fun getting to learn all the different tables. It definitely isn’t as fun as playing one in the real where you can sorta smack the flippers and bump the table, but it scratches the itch. The first pinball table I really liked was Medieval Madness. I think because it has very clear objectives (destroy the castle and trolls). Sometimes, when I’m overwhelmed or flustered while learning something, my brain kinda shuts down. But so with these pinball simulators, I’ve been learning Monster Bash, the Champion Pub, Star Trek:TNG, and Theater of Magic.

Monster Bash is cool because you get to release Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, etc and get them to play in a band. I really like the stupid looking Creature from the Black Lagoon because he wobbles around in this jello stuff as the ball karoms off walls. It’s hilarious. I still haven’t gotten the whole band together, but I can get usually get two.

The Champion Pub rocks because you fight this dude Knuckles O’Brien. I have not beat him yet, the ramps in this one are real weird and the ball comes back oddly off of them sometimes. Plus it has the ball save function that’s like a big button that blocks the middle of the flippers which I don’t really like.

Star Trek is the best because it’s fun to do the different missions and hear Worf say stupid shit like “5 million.” Or have data tell you that has the balls trajectory been better or whatever, then you wouldn’t have crashed the enterprise. I’m getting p decent at launching the probes and can more or less get where I want to go in this one.

But the one I’m best at is theater of magic and maybe it’s an easier table, but I have much better control over the balls in this one. I know how to like stall em or catch them in a way to set up my next smack. It’s fun to not totally suck at it. I doubt I’m ever gonna get good enough to win the local tournaments, but it might be cool to play some just for fun. Gotta keep my pickpocket fingers nice and supple anyway

[Tuxedo]

Arcana of Paradise - The tower :

This looks like Slay the Spire, and it is technically a roguelike deckbuilding game, but fighting happens in real time (!) and you can refresh your stack of cards at any time with no cost. So battles are often a mad dash to play all the attack cards and refresh, occasionnally healing / shielding up. It is super sloppy in a very endearing way, especially since it draws a comparison to the dry elegance of the standard deckbuilder roguelike.

I love the setting which uses motifs from every Japanese game. A giant tower, cursed children, monsters to fight, selective amnesia, a search for paradise. Music and graphics are beautiful. It is appropriately mysterious and silly.

I also like the way characters look down when descending stairs like they’re slightly disembodied

The kids debate whether god exists, and the answer lies at the bottom of the tower. I am pretty sure the ending will be a cop out, and whether god exists in the end will depend on whether the player chooses to believe in god

Each run through the tower takes one day, and each day, every child needs to eat one loaf of bread. Bread is everything in this game. It is a common reward from beating enemy encounters. Bread x 1, bread x3, bread x10 if you’re very lucky. You can offer bread to a sacred tree to build amenities, including an oven (which cooks bread) When choosing to descend the tower you can choose whether to do a bread run to get bread, or a regular run to explore the tower. If you choose the bread run, you get a card to teleport back with your bread at any point. I mostly do bread runs. The worst thing that can happen in this game is rescuing another child, another child being another mouth to feed. What happens if you run out of bread? I don’t know and I never will know. I am stocking up on bread and will not let this happen.

Because I like the kids! The game even told me I liked the kids

There was a special event when half the team wanted to donate to the gods all the 100+ loaves of bread I had painstakingly accumulated, and the other half disagreed. I went with it just to see what happened. Well the whole stash did fucking disappear and I got no rewards.

Each run, I have to choose two kids to descend the tower, and each kid comes with their sets of cards and stats and traits. They are not equal. Some kids are just worse in battle than others. That’s life. The first two kid are an incredibly badass one armed girl with enormous physical power, and a loser hero with magical stats but no magic card. I love this duo. Real FF7 flashback vibes

The overall card roster is small for the deckbuilding genre but there are a lot of hidden effects. Hit a drunk thief with a fire attack while he’s drinking and he’ll explode. Each enemy has one interaction that will lead to a super special effect + them being added to the in-game library codex thing, but I have only seen two such effects so far. I have kept trash cards around to use on everything just for the funny interactions, and had once had the better of my team get kidnapped + killed for that impudence

[Grandpa]

God this reminds me that I need to see if there’s a way to pirate the entirety of The Pinball Arcade…I wanna play those Elvira tables again, but I don’t wanna hook up my PS4 to do it.