just been floating around in eve shooting rocks while watching french videos
5 Likes
Been playing V Rising again, which is still more of what Iâd wanted out of Diablo 4, plus you get to build a castle. The most recent patch added more bosses (and some annoying random stats on some of the drops) which also required everyone to start their save file over again. Hopefully they figure out a way to not do that again; you get one full reset going from EA into 1.0, and I am not enthusiastic about working through an entire tech tree again for some number tinkering and 12% new content.
Anyways I always thought it was odd how V Rising, despite being a pretty normal diablo-style game, has a huge suite of features intended for people running persistent PVP servers. Well I finally looked into the other games the developer had released, and
Ah, so they were working on yet another MOBA, and then realised they could just make a normal game instead.
5 Likes
This game is on sale right now on Steam so I gave it a try and Iâm really enjoying it. Itâs a Cave-Story-like with a ton of charm.
I really like the NPC dialogue. These dumb little worm guys were so charming.
There are frequent bits where you get this great 90âs 3D CD-ROM aesthetic mixed in with the sprite art.
Even though itâs kind of story-heavy, it still leaves room for that classic NES platformer vibe where youâre suddenly just fighting someoneâs drawing of a cool dog for no reason.
15 Likes
I finally finished Shin Sakura Taisen.
Turns out it was all about Family. And that this guy and his female subordinates that are simultaneously a musical troupe and a demon-mech-attack squad are family. And they say family about 50 times.
I never fell in love with any of the animes, so while I found the romance parts impressive when the animes look directly into your eyes and you can hear their breathing, canât say it moved the needle. Also it was almost gone by the backhalf of the game. It is a game with a lot of different stuff in it. Including the Sonic Engine used for Combat! See if you can recognize some Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios animations! All the steam-punk Taisho-era (no politics) arcitecture was really lovely.
I mean it ends with 192X Japan, China (?), German (?), and England theater troupe-warriors coming together to stop a demon.
The bigger issue is I want to play a whole lot of Koi Koi now. Koi Koi fucking rules. Took me 4 hours and constantly opening the hands screen to get a handle. But once you can handle all the mind games involved it is fucking goooooddddd. Even against the computer. Once youâre holding your good cards so your opponent doesnât know what hands you are trying to make, hell yes. I got absolutely savaged at one point with a Boar, Butterfly, Deer set because I was too focused on the much more common Big Lights. I am still unclear (because the game was as well) what exactly a âseedâ set is.
A lot of games I won just by making sure the computer lost. Realizing how much you can manipulate the field was an important moment. Cool game!! There is apparently a good version on Steam and I guess Iâll buy it and never open it because I am not a PC Gamer.
9 Likes
demos today
okko the exiled - platformer with a very typical detailed moveset. great pixel art. feels competent. absolutely nothing in particular about it otherwise. you have attack combo, ducktales pogo, mmz airdash after the boss, a launcher move. it just doesnât feel inspired in that regard but WOW IS THE PIXEL ART POLISHED. very boring and normal tho.
primland the magus - oh hell yeah look at this mid aughts doujin game. fffffuuuck. big sprites. awkward movement. upgrades are very specific and awkward. deliberate move use. i like how the set-up is incredibly grim, just all these kids murdered. last surviving one curses all the adults into eternally suffering gore, yeah! monstergirl enemies will just have their nipples on screen, like, a full whole pixel per nipple at least! cool!
the presentation is also great love these anime episode splash screens for the stages
11 Likes
I mean, Iâm always down to figure it out if you know which version to grab.
1 Like
really really really like rematch
been keeping up with sloclap since absolver and this feels like the game theyâre there to make
3 Likes
Finally got around to playing the demo of Consume Me⌠Itâs great!!
Clever soup of mechanics and systems borrowed from dating/lifestyle sims, RPGs and minigame collections used to tell a story about disordered dieting/eating/exercise (the works!) and the extreme angst in general of being a teen girl with a very judgy mother⌠Strikes a really nice balance between humour and the darkness youâd expect to come from those themes too.
I love the visuals especially, simple and crude with a tonne of personality. The bouncy, optimistic soundtrack also does a lot to keep the illusion of things being a lot lighter seeming than they actually are in reality. Curious to see where the story goes later onâŚ
Iâm usually not a fan of RPG/simulation âmanage this characters lifeâ type games, but the way those mechanics are subverted here in order to serve the narrative really worked for me. I actually got really sucked in to managing the day-to-day checklist of chores to do just so I didnât have to see the protagonist suffer so much (unfortunately she does anyway)!
Some of the anxiety-focused minigames reminded me a bit of an old prototype I made years back that I never ended up finishing about sitting my Irish oral exam as a nervous, teen wreck⌠Honestly quite validating to see another developer touch on a similar area! (maybe I should revisit those ideas someday⌠
)
17 Likes
You should
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it is time to once again phone game post into the void
Snowberk: hey they finally gave Nita a 5 star exosuitframething
Nita is, for reasons, the least popular character. only us weirdos like her. her original 4-star version is just, the worst. itâs so bad. I canât even begin to describe.
itâs not even that sheâs brown (sheâs brown), because we have another brown girl that everyone likes and her 5-star version is really good and usuable
anyway Iâve been waiting for this to happen for 2 or 3 patches (each patch cycle is about 40 days) and Iâve been saving up currency to pull and build her and
sheâs⌠free? like, youâre giving her out to everyone?
whatâs the catch
the catches are/were:
- okay they drip fed her power; instead of having to pull dupes or farm shards to power her up, she has drives that were timegated until she would feel âgoodâ
- sheâs completely redundant if you have Siris (Ksana), a character that plays almost exactly the same and scales on the same stats except she came out a year later. if, for whatever reason, you have followed my phone game idiocy, you know I have Ksana. so!
on the upside, she murders enemies by punching them and unlike a lot (well, pretty much all) of recent units, you can just smash the skill buttons, she actually has a timing mechanic on the punches and it feels good to play (this is ignoring that the kit they gave her is 90% a kit I thought up in my brain as a joke, a damning indictment)
her launching has been kind of a wet fart for me. then next (the current) patch, they added another busted off-field support. yes I want to do too much extra damage please, thank you.
also, hey. anime makers. you can give brown people dark hair. itâs okay. you donât have to give them white hair. I donât need the contrast to make my eyes feel good. itâs overdone.
Genshit:
they added a character named Escoffier, sheâs literally a chef girl and her outfit is unironically a naked apron design. also she has long hair and itâs not tied back or in a hair net and I donât think thatâs very sanitary.
showing off her important angle
sheâs important because she was made to lift one of the elements of the gameâs combat, cryo, out from the grave and they did this by just over stuff her kit with damage, healing and too much damage boosting/defense shredding, thus making Furina, the most potent off-field damage buffer, work in any cryo team because she requires healing to be present
itâs almost as if she is some kind of canary in the mine of upcoming balance decisions being sold to me, John Q Phonegameplayer
so anyway next patch (this patch, 2 days ago) they added Skirk, an on-field cyro damage dealer who can only be played in specific teams and whose damage is kneecapped if, for whatever reason, you did not have the foresight to pull Escoffier (IIRC the numbers were like, her teams have ~20% less damage without Escoffier present. itâs probably more than that because phone games have made my brain swiss cheese and I have misremembered.). so thatâs cool.
this snippet means she needs all her teammates to be ice or water or she donât work good.
also please Iâm begging Hoyo to hire a technical writer
also sheâs quadriplegic. itâs fine, she makes arms and legs out of abyss energy. she is the first handicapable Genshin character though! she doesnât let lacking limbs stop her from being the 2nd best DPS we have (if you have the Escoff/Furina and one or both characters arenât tied up in other teams and Iâm sure thereâs some other stipulations like how the gear set made for her isnât even her best option unless you vertically invest in her heavily? seems fucked up.)
also she just rolls around in a nightie. thatâs anime privilege I guess.
also weâre getting a boss fight mode where finally whales get to flex and they can show off that they have way too much damage by unlocking⌠a shiny weapon skin that only lasts 30 days? thatâs it? tens of thousands of dollars and you canât even let them keep it?
Sleeping:
ZZZ hit 2.0. it happened during the Switch 2 launch and also when I too many 12 hour days at work so I have no idea whatâs going on other than you went to the cityâs Chinatown and they added a panda man. also some mysterious, powerful girl with long white hair who happens to have the same Japanese (and probably Chinese) voice actor as Skirk. I donât know, you hold down attack and her bird does some shit and enemies explode. seems good.
6 Likes
BANJO-KAZOOIE
Played this for the first time in decades recently⌠and it still holds up! Really well, actually.
For one thing, itâs full of personality. While I could obviously do without the casual racism and fatphobia, I really enjoy the dry, sometimes snarky sense of British humour, especially compared to later Rare games that got too cynical, juvenile, and mean-spirited. This one has a really nice balance with its âattitudeâ.
The banter between Bottles and Kazooie is fun, and Banjo works well as the straight, kinder man against the snarky Kazooie. The random rhymes from Grunty also add a lot of personality to the game, and the other characters you meet are usually fun.
Though the world themes are usually cliche, theyâre tightly-designed, just the right size, fun to explore, and the challenges within are mostly well-designed too. There are some very frustrating parts, namely that one bit in Rusty Bucket, but for the most part this was smooth sailing. The transformations are also fun (I wish there were more of these and that you did more with them), and the season changing in Click Clock Wood is a cool idea. Oh, the game still looks great too, imo.
Notes not saving is annoying (this is changed in the 360/Rare Replay version), but death doesnât tend to come swiftly⌠lots of health around and very few instant deaths. There are of course camera problems here and there, but not nearly as much as I expected for such an old game.
The hub world is very cool, and I like how it gets more dangerous the more you play, though itâs also easy to get lost in⌠it doesnât flow as well as Peachâs castle.
Oh, and the final boss fight is kinda tedious but at least itâs not too difficult.
But yeah, just a really solid and fun 3D platformer!
Itâs interesting noting the differences between this and Mario 64⌠Mario is all about movement and the game is built around challenges by using your starting moveset (aside from hats), whereas Banjo is about unlocking abilities and then using them to solve challenges, making it feel more puzzly. Also feels more âsafeâ as Mario 64 had many worlds over voids that could easily be fallen into, which isnât the case in Banjo.
Well I could write heaps more about the differences between the two, but my first point is the biggest one, I think.
10 Likes
Finished Doom the Dark Ages. It felt strangely lacking in confidence compared to Doom Eternalâs hyper-focused design. They took a huge step-back in terms of weapon diversity by essentially having most of the weapons be really good, and obtaining more ammo for the weapons extremely easy. The shield is decent enough fun, but I found the game too easy to be forced to utilize all of its functions, besides obviously blocking, parrying, and opening up doors.
The enemies, which while are serviceable enough, lack the immediate sort of prioritization in terms of danger that other doom games have. You donât have an immediate hierarchy of who you should kill first in most cases. They try to rectify this by adding boss enemies that require you to either take out a large amount of enemies before you can damage it or ones with a flag that strengthen the rest of the enemies and force you to rush it down. Its fine, but only feels like a start, and its not something that happens for a majority of encounters.
Another solution, is that they tried break up the normal gameplay with these dragon and mecha sections. The mecha sections are enough spectacle to be solid, but the dragon sections are so tedious that they patched it in so you can complete the sections faster by always firing the bullets necessary to destroy the ships.
The game also runs out of new things to show to the player around the 10 hour mark, and thereâs like around another 10 hours of game left. I geuss its nice for value, but the encounters felt empty after a while. And the only unique boss fight, you fight twice with small changes.
It just feels like such a strange missfire after Eternal that I wonder if something happened during development. I hope in later years stories trickle down about it.
Weird game. Hope ID doesnât make doom again for a while. It seems theyâve exhausted the ideas for this modern gameplay style.
P.S Why do they let u change all these values for health and damage and pickups like this is sonic frontiers?
4 Likes
I think (and am not surprised) that they took a lot of the feedback from Eternal the wrong way, to mean âthis game is too hardâ rather than âthis game is too circumscribed.â I half expected this to happen given how far Eternalâs reputation was from its reviews, because as much as I would criticize it, I still think it (along with nu doom and neufenstein) moved and played like almost nothing else, whereas Dark Ages feels like garbage out of the gate
2 Likes
Runs like garbage too. Such a shame that they sold out to Nvidea to sell new graphics cards with the core engine level RTX integration. Everything is rendered with RTX btw. I understand the benefits that come with this approach, but I still donât think the performance hit most games have deem it a worthy enough.
1 Like
yeah. I mean⌠I think I probably have less of a bone to pick with id or with Nvidia than most people, insofar as Iâm not any kind of 90s shooter head and I have a lot of experience with and insight into high end GPU hardware, but imo Indiana Jones â which is afaik on the same newest id tech and had this same requirement â had vastly better art direction to justify it, whereas Doom just feels like a massive step backwards. having upgraded from a 1080 series GPU about a year and 9 months ago at last, I think they are borderline in their rights to require RTX for AAA going forward (mesh shaders which shipped at the same time are basically a new generation, they just donât talk about it that way anymore), but Doom has only recently had AAA audience expectations and I think theyâve just mothballed them again
1 Like
and in general I think the number of old or old ish franchises that were shockingly successful once again with PS4-ish hardware and PS4-ish budgets was so preposterously large that itâs hard for them all to get credit â Final Fantasy, Zelda, Resident Evil, Hitman, Metal Gear, Doom, etc were all suddenly better than theyâd been in a decade â and it was statistically unlikely for that to continue
1 Like
Started playing The Operator since it was the Epic freebie of the week and seemingly only like 4 hours long and I had no other gaming going on atm. It took me about 20 minutes of wondering if I was going nuts/experiencing deja vu to remember that actually I played a demo for it a year or so ago and was not in fact psychic.
3 Likes
When people talk about Bokosuka Wars, they might mention how the design is inscrutable or how its incredibly luck-based. Or they might make a âWow! You lose!â reference.
What theyâre less likely to mention is that the game runs at a brisk, locked 3 frames per second. (Not an exaggeration. I measured it.)
Just thought this info should be on the public internet.
16 Likes
Echoing previous posts about Fantasian. The Demo crashed on me 2 hours in which, well okay. Not enamored by the dioramas as others were. I think it was the utterly dismal low budget shadows. Coming off Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon I just felt that Mistwalker stench had no love for it. Especially went on the completely unnecessary Visual Novel interludes. Rudie stares to camera.
I thought that first town music was really good. The rest of it I wondered what exactly Uematsu was doing here.
Watching every Vita Game Youtube earlier I was reminded of Chaos Rings. That felt like something that went into the memory hole. 3 PS1 ish RPGs by Square-Enix for Phones.
2 Likes
Iâve sampled and discarded a whole bunch of stuff lately.
I was playing Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 since I got it through PS+ and the load times on a base model PS4 are brutallllll. And I was finding getting knocked out by track hazards mind-meltingly infuriating so for the sake of not spiking my Dualshock I decided to uninstall. Love to see all the lovingly modeled toy cars though
A bunch of stuff on my phone, including a game called Heroll which has some Dark UI stuff going on but I always get sucked into those.
Twelve Minutes? I dipped in 2.
7 Likes