i always wanted to love Raidou because the art direction is so good, but i had such a hard time enjoying the PS2 games when they came out.
in general, yes, they’ve made a game that has some very smooth edges, but i feel like they took a game i could not be bothered to play much of when it came out, and turned it into a fun and breezy action game. it’s a game i can see myself replaying a few times, but i have other stuff to play, so i’ll come back to it one day.
was not aware of the BABY DUCK ENEMA, so i’ll have to look for it next playthrough
With my kid, I’ve been playing a lot of Gundam Breaker 4, which is basically a fantasy game for him of smashing together different robots. It’s cool. He’s also been learning the card game, so that’s good.
On my own, I am slowly mapping out all of Shining in the Darkness (or, weirdly, Shining and The Darkness in Japan, which I kinda like more for being just a touch more nonsense). The game is really “what if Climax made a Wizardry, but made it much much less punishing/weird/etc.” and it works pretty well as that! I’ve almost gotten through the four trials, so then I get to go to the main labyrinth. It’s got that cute as hell Climax MD style, including a lot of super cute enemies. And some ones with some…well, names that really hit different three plus decades later:
the coolest thing about insisting on actually writing a dweeby ass bio for star trek online and like putting effort into your star trek costume is that two people have dmed me today to tell me they think i did a good job on my clothes or they like my bio, then we start talkin about roleplaying and they go off on me for 15 mins about their klingon space trucker and borg cartographer oc’s or whatever and it fucking rules
this game is so horribly antisocial most of the time there’s no reason to ever talk to anyone or group up outside like automated queues that it’s legitimately refreshin to have a brief convo with another human who isn’t just there to sink literally 800 dollars into making their ship do so much DPS nobody else can participate in group content. i would not be playing this damn game 15 years later if all I cared about was paying to get absurdly broken shit which is like the entire endgame of sto besides puttering around space.
if you don’t care about playing dress up with your clothes or your ship or coming up with a Star Trek Guy to pretend to be I can’t imagine why you would stick with it. You might as well go buy lottery tickets. excuse me actually I do want to talk about how my character became obsessed with anbo-jyutsu in Starfleet Academy. I don’t care if your ship has a button that makes it do +60% damage for 90 seconds. Please don’t talk to me.
I quite like Psychonauts 1 and 2, Headlander, Costume Quest, Stacking, and Iron Brigade. Brutal Legend is trying and it’s awkward but I tend to like games which are overstuffed and underpolished so I like it alright. Rest of their output is whatever.
The one I think about sometimes is Spacebase-DF9. Despite being unfinished and abandoned (no fault of Jp LeBreton, the lead dev, far as I’m aware), it did manage to be ahead of the curve re: space colony games, which is now a burgeoning genre with the likes of Space Haven, Oxygen Not Included, The Last Starship, Starmancer, Meeple Station, etc. Feels a little influential in that regard, like “shit this game didn’t go anywhere so now everybody is deciding to make their own.”
Double Fine has made several games that are good despite their game elements. A fan edit that removes most interactivity from them would probably be a better experience.
I bought TGM4 after letting sit in my cart for a month, seemingly cognizant of the idea that it would not end well for some 20-odd days
Insomuch that it’s self evident that TGM is Tetris for perverts, 4 is TGM for perverts
Absolutely banger soundtrack though. Why did they waste money licensing the Russian folk song when they have insane drums to make you realize your fleeting mortality as the gravity knob goes to 11
I agree. A fatal flaw of the original release was using both random battles and action gameplay, the two don’t mix. And running around talking to everybody with no objective markers got old in the later chapters where new locations become scarce
I’m pretty sure the baby duck enema is (spoilers for ruining dreams) an Earthbound favorite food kind of situation, where someone telepathically told the dog at the outdoors science lab that their ultimate dream is baby duck enema
