I’m not sure which rankles more, braindance or IDM but I’ll listen to it
4 Likes
This is also how I felt about Wattam, which is interesting because I still really love Noby Noby Boy to this day. I think maybe it was the very hand-holdy quality of it (“go do this, now do this…”) and the sorta moralising included as part of the ending, whereas NNB just let you loose to enact chaos and that final letter felt more ambiguous and reflective than just an opportunity to teach you about right and wrong…
Sometimes I worry Keita Takahashi’s exposure to California types has had an irreversible effect on his whole sensibility… The stuff he’s worked on since doesn’t quite have that same bite to it in the way Katamari and NNB did for me… Makes me a bit concerned about To a T…
5 Likes
Tried a few different games on my og xbox but the one that stuck the most to me was this 3rd person shooter called Gun Valkyrie. Despite the genre label however, its unique focus is placed dashing around and aiming your character towards the enemies with your generous lock on, rather than the explicit aiming and shooting that you might expect from the genre label. Pretty cool. I like the detailed lore dumps you’re rewarded with each mission.
I really gotta play more sega games. They’ve been hugely consistent with what I’ve been trying recently.
16 Likes
playing final fantasy 8 damn this game is cool as hell
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HOCUS POCUS
This game is FINE. That’s about it.
You hop around these dungeon-like levels, trying to find all the crystals so you can exit. The puzzles are extremely simple and most boil down to finding the right switch combination.
Combat is also rather janky, with just firing as quickly as you can at hordes of enemies while dodging attacks. There is lots of opportunity for cheese by attacking from positions enemies can’t get at you. The enemies can sometimes spawn on top of you and can generate you if you don’t quickly move away.
Once you finish the first episode, you’ve seen most of what the game has to offer… the later episodes don’t add many mechanics apart from elevators and some new enemies (and different “bosses”), but mostly it’s just more of the same but the levels are bigger and can feel a bit repetitive.
Having said that, the levels never become too large, and have a sense of flow due to good use of keys, and it never felt repetitive enough to make me stop… it was enjoyable enough for me to plow through (having no lives helped). The later episodes are also more generous with the machine gun powerup which is nice.
Oh, and they were nice enough to show the areas altered by switches RIGHT NEXT to the switches… no going back and forth over a level to see what changed which I was so worried the game was going to do.
My favourite part of the game was the passive aggressive asshole wizard, but he starts being nice after the first episode, boo! The game also has a goofy story, with comedy bits in the ending scenes.
BUT I could imagine this game being scary as a kid… the first level is in this fantasy world with beautiful giant mushrooms in the background (the backgrounds look great), but then you get surreal nightmare aesthetics, and the second episode starts in some kind of hellish location with weird enemies. Also there is a level aesthetic where giant smiles are everywhere.
And the boss of the first episode are these creepy monks that do these evil laughs! None of the other bosses came close to being as creepy.
Also some of the levels have space dildos in the background.
I heard this has a Doom mod and it could work well… I mean, this game is just running around dungeons, hitting switches, collecting keys, finding secrets, and shooting enemies. I hope the mod also the passive aggressive wizard and you have to find orbs to finish a level rather than a single switch.
Anyway, once again I wrote too much about a mid game. This game is fine… generic, simple, and repetitive, I would have still enjoyed it as a kid on DOS.
NOTE: I believe this is a spiritual successor to Clyde’s Adventure (which would have an actual sequel in 1995), except that was more puzzle orientated and had no enemies.
15 Likes
You can certainly just play this Xenoblade Chronicles X game very easily despite how much everything it has.
Text is way too fucking small on the wii U version I constantly have to get up from my couch to squint at it on my 42 inch TV.
8 Likes
the Doom mod is substantially better than the original game. i think it’s because the graphics are the main kinda neat thing about the game, which obviously translates to the mod. i will say i liked Hocus Pocus perfectly fine as a kid - but there’s nothing really to come back to as an adult. probably one of the DOS platformers i played as a kid that i find least interesting as an adult.
it’s the same main developer as Clyde’s Adventure but the game is quite different. Clyde’s Adventure is a much more intense puzzle game where you have to optimize your movements and Hocus Pocus is clearly more oriented towards kids and in the “action platformer” realm. there was a sequel called Clyde’s Revenge that came out after both games but it’s pretty bad. the only thing to recommend in it is some very wonky visuals.
Clyde’s Adventure is really interesting if you don’t mind a specific older kind of tedious puzzle game - one of those that def punches above its weight and has a lot of character to it. i was going to actually try and do a video about it some time and recorded my playthrough of it but keep putting it off.
9 Likes
ASS
ASS
INS
CREED
Shadows:
Ubi-Account-bullying aside, cool that this game offers an option for an audio mix of portugese&japanese instead of fully dubbed in a single language.
Wo Long is trying hard not to be Souls Ringbourne and fails miserably at that. Yellow turban army/Dynasty Warriors vibes aside, it’s not really doing much in the first hour or so, since i am horribile at reading the dodging/parrying windows of the first boss so far.
Cool character creator though.
9 Likes
I’m 2/3rds through now and looking back this criticism might seem inexplicable to people who played the game a long time ago. This seemed notable at the beginning because the first thing tutorialized was stealth and the first few areas were large and open-ended, with the chance that you might always double-back on the same path or return to the same room and in doing so encounter a monster you previously failed to permanently kill. I thought this is what the entire game was going to be like but then it just dropped the stealth mechanics and became a fully linear action game a third of the way in. When it did, the obvious use of matches became that they’re really grenades and you use them to conserve ammo by shooting an enemy in the leg so they’ll fall over and then tossing a match on them to finish them off.
When I stopped crouch walking around everywhere because I no longer needed to and the game announced itself as an RE4 clone it made me realize that everything in this game feels bad. The sense of inertia to player character movement relative to your inputs, the camera, the aiming mechanics, the sprint mechanic, menus, saves, item and upgrade economy, all of it feels janky and awkward. If I were trying to be generous I would say this is the closest that a game with fully 3D movement/camera has ever felt to classic survival horror tank controls. But the truth is that it just sucks.
8 Likes
I don’t suppose anyone here happens to know how the anachronox custom resolution thing works. there’s a bunch of folders with files for specific resolutions and then a custom resolution folder with the same files plus an ini with no resolution numbers or useful information in it. and in classic getting an opengl game to run in 2025 fashion, no instructions. I’ve got the game working in 3840x2160 fine, I was just wondering if it was possible to run it in 2880x2160. it might not even be possible, by custom resolution they might just mean custom 16:9 resolution. it doesn’t even occurs to these people someone out there might want to respect the original material here a bit. little ted turners, every one of them. anyway been thinking about the half-life 1 to max payne 1 era of pc games lately so that’s what I’ve been messing with.
6 Likes
I’m gonna do my best not to be annoying as shit about this and get it out of my system in a single post, but: for all the “oh you’re gonna regret it, running Linux with an Nvidia card!” stuff I read, I’m getting better performance out of damn near everything I’ve thrown at it than I did on my Windows 11 install.
Could it have been my slow SSD (that I wasn’t running games off!), or my slightly corrupt failing SSD? Maybe. But stuff is running faster, so, neat.
Anyway some quick hits:
Mortal Kombat 1: I dropped the game before Takeda came out, so I played through an Arcade Tower with him. Game still sucks, but it looks nice maxed out, and it runs a whole hell of a lot better off an NVME than standard SSD. Holy shit.
Hitman: I’m getting rusty…I’ve been away too long. The ray tracing looks pretty good in this game but it tanks the frame rate. It’s also maybe a touch overblown (I don’t think a bunch of unmounted glass panes in a dusty construction site are going to have a perfect mirror sheen), so I’ll probably pare it back.
Control: Fuck yeah, this game still rules. I keep taking a nibble once ever few months, but maybe now’s the time. Learning to leave some of the sidequests be (can’t even do the last one I tried without a pretty significant traversal mechanic, and the last one I encountered straight up told me to just do the story).
9 Likes
I was playing the Ratchet & Clank reboot from years ago, and I approached it with nearly no prior experience. I played about an hour and my initial impressions were:
- The writing is too wink-wink-nudge-nudge
- I like the character designs but almost everything else (vehicles, environments, wtc) wasn’t doing it for me
- For a game that is supposed to be all about wacky weaponry they are sure making me spend a lot of time with a handful of pretty tame guns
- The weapon upgrades and level up systems all feel like they belong to separate games: some you pay for with currencies and others are xp based (and more or less invisible xp, at that). Also at least in the early going they don’t feel like they make much of a difference.
- The quasi lock-on targeting is not so great and I think I’d prefer to just aim myself, maybe that’s a menu setting but I didn’t look
- Traversal/exploration is not particularly interesting
Wow I came away with way more negative sentiment than I realized. And I was going to try to avoid posting about games I didn’t like so I could stop crapping up this thread with my hatin’
11 Likes
@hater need to hate post to take the heat off Mikey.
5 Likes
I agree this was bad but the PS5 one was weirdly decent
3 Likes
Reboot is a huge nadir. Most other RnCs outperform it
4 Likes
Wasn’t feeling much excitement for any of the gaming options I had considered to get to next so decided to play Hob as a killing time/see if my mood turns around later option as it seems both pleasant and unmemorable so if a poor mood spoils it no great loss. It seems perfectly fine (well the combat isn’t but so far has not been important), it does some neat things with macro-scale transforming world design but it mostly pleasant and frictionless.
4 Likes
Went back and replayed Yar Rising. It’s kinda weird that I didn’t really like the actual game as much, but the soundtrack keeps me sticking with it. Megan McDuffie knows her chops, and the challenges are pretty neat even if the main game is sorta dull.
6 Likes
I started Xenogears today.
I can see why I decided to stop playing it 25 years ago. Trying to get your bearings can be hard because while you can rotate the camera on the horizontal axis, you can’t on the vertical, so you’re just swinging the camera around trying to figure out what fucking direction you came from and what direction you’re trying to go. On top of that, random battles in some dungeons can be really obnoxious while you’re trying to do this. Also, the way it handles loading into the battle scene is really annoying – there seems to be a delay where it’s loading in the background, so you can stop walking, and start rotating the camera only to be thrust into a battle while you’re stood still; or you’ll try to access the menu and it won’t respond because it’s about to put you into a battle. If you’ve just exited a battle or something, there will be a delay before you can access the menu, as well (bringing up the menu also takes way longer than I would like).
It’s very influenced by Evangelion. Everything from the giant robots to the arbitrary references to Western religion to a red-haired girl. The characters so far are also pretty bog-standard. I don’t think the “platforming” was done very well, either; I usually have to make several attempts to do the “Big Jump” (the jump you do when you run and then jump) because it won’t register the jump, so you wind up just running into the side of something or sliding down something.
I’ll probably try to give it another hour or two.
14 Likes
Wasn’t feeling much excitement for any of the gaming options I had considered to get to next so decided to play Hob as a killing time/see if my mood turns around later option as it seems both pleasant and unmemorable so if a poor mood spoils it no great loss.
I will forever love Hob for its transforming world, its soundscape, and its absence of any boss fights.
3 Likes
Hob is one of those black sheep games that’s unexpectedly great and no one cares about. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it’s called Hob.
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