some recent azurelore… 
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I ended up dying only 3 times in front of my friends. I made a donation to one of the flood relief funds that was not the Salvation Army. Then we played Paprium and it made me so uncomfortable I donated to an LGBTQ Texas org.
Then @boojiboy7 played Dark Castle (Sega Genesis) and I cried with laughter as he was attacked by small bats and two-inch changes in elevation. Video Games are so good sometimes.
10 Likes
I finally got around to playing Life is Strange 2. It has started slow and depressing -to the point that I didn’t think I’d want to finish it - but it gained momentum and I am really liking it (I am now at the last chapter). It’s possibly even better than the first LiS (my former favourite).
Dontnod episodes (LiS, LiS 2) are so much better, imo, than Deck 9 ones (the others). Mainly, for me, it’s a matter of originality. LiS and LiS 2 are original stories that, to me, did not feel like copies or something I know.
On the other hand, while overall enjoyable, Before the Storm felt too strongly inspired by “Fire walk with me” to be its own thing, while True Colors started with a strong first episode and then just evolved into a stereotypical “girl against evil multinational covering something bad” (… At least it had likable characters).
If I have to move a critique to LiS 2 is that probably the protagonist gets beat up too much and this, at least in chapter 4, gets a bit too pathetic (for reasons I can’t spoil) and that’s also the weakest chapter for me. But overall it’s been time well spent.
9 Likes
I’ve become really good at pretending to like Fantasian over the last few years (release an artbook already ffs) and I remembered an interview with the clair obscura devs (a fake 2007 game) where they praise the REAL 2007 game Lost Odyssey. I’m a few hours in and wish either of those games had anything as funny as your character accelerating to ten times their base speed the moment they tell you where the run button is.
6 Likes
spending the last couple of weeks realizing what a mistake it was to believe that i was “too old” for pokemon after gen 1, completely ignoring the series until i got a copy of platinum many years later on a whim at my old job. see, i didn’t realize that the gamecube had it’s own fully 3D pokemon game with a mild apocalyptic setting, where you play as a dante-like cool dude man with his own pokemon equivalent of ebony and ivory: umbreon and espeon. i will need to play more of this, especially now that dolphin has gba support and i can play with all the pokemon i’ve caught in the gen 3 games.
19 Likes
that thing will follow me to the depths of hell
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i got anxiety playing the first game and had to stop like an hour in because of all the need to talk to people
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Defend Earth: Xenos Survivors: a fairly uninspired but competent Vampire Survivors clone. Only thing of note to me was that you have to actually walk over the XP orbs rather than you having even the slightest bit of ability to draw them to you from a distance.
Arrival: Zero Earth: Another game in the same genre, this one involves you building up a crowd of people to run around but it’s similarly kind of bland.
Bleh
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“cyber knights: flashpoint” is actually the closest anyone’s ever gotten to the cyberpunk 2020 corpo run experience in an turn based tactics game which you wouldn’t gather from the name!! it’s less about not getting caught at all and more about staying ahead of the security countermeasures that slowly build up as you try to accomplish your objective. the hacking doesn’t even feel like a drag because it’s a videogame and two things can happen at the same time!
i thought the gang creation process was cool too. there’s two quickstarts you can pick basically but I did advanced and it’s cool because no matter what kind of background and crew you pick it’s highly consequential
that’s just my character, the other four people in my gang have their own storied histories as well. so it’s that shit i love in games basically. i’m very enamored with this swordswoman in my crew who basically has CTE from having unfinished brain surgery and has to do drugs all the time or her brain will literally melt
trese brothers seem to make really interesting games but they all have complete mouthful titles that I can not remember to save my fucking life. I wanted to play “Star Traders: Frontiers” which at least has a normal title.
8 Likes
NITEMARE 3D
An FPS sequel to a trilogy of charmingly janky shareware adventure games, I remember playing this one back in the day but never got far on it. Revisiting it today, I quickly realised why…
The combat in this is broken as all hell! Specifically, any non-melee enemy has an INCREDIBLY over-powered hitscan attack that NEVER misses, and they can (and will OFTEN) hit you from around corners despite neither of you being able to see each other. Sometimes the attack will even fire without an animation being played, including when they are reacting to you shooting them.
It doesn’t help that only one of your weapons is hitscan, and the rest are slow projectile weapons that are often hard to aim accurately due to the jerkiness of movement. No nice auto-aim like in Wolf 3D here, you gotta line that shit up. At least the projectiles are fairly large, but still.
As a result, you’ll be dying a lot, and it sucks. It sucks so, so much.
BUT… there is some interesting stuff here. Sort of. See, the designer tried to get some adventure game stuff in here. Some examples (and these will be spoilers)
- You can push some objects around, leading to some sokoban style puzzles, and there is one “clever” bit where you push boxes to block turret fire.
- Some walls are shootable, and sometimes you’ll have to shoot one from over a barrier to gain access from the other side (I like look-but-can’t-touch design, which pops up here a few times).
- There are unique scenes like where your gun gets jammed, and to get past some enemies you have to run and turn a radio on to make them dance out of the way
- You can find combinations to open safes and such
- You can move between floors… this actually just warps you to different parts of the map, but they make it feel like a different floor by using different texture sets and level design (such as going from living room style areas to bedroom style areas), which I enjoyed.
- There is an eye icon that changes when you are near a secret, which was a huge help.
- The final level isn’t a boss fight, but actually just a puzzle with only two very weak enemies.
But unfortunately…
- I was stuck for ages on a level because I didn’t know you could push certain tombstones AND you can softlock yourself if you mess up the sokoban puzzles.
- I was again stuck for ages because the game doesn’t tell you that you can shoot certain walls. There is something that indicates where secrets are, but not which walls you can shoot.
- The solution to the final puzzle is incredibly obtuse, I had to look up a guide (you can also kinda find the solution in the read me file)… and you can softlock it, too. Hope you didn’t save after messing up, or time to restart the entire game!
Other issues…
- There is a map, but using it drains a resource
- Many compulsory paths are behind secret walls
I like the cheap looking art, it’s charming in how amateurish it is (version 2 changed to less charming but still amateurish 3D pre-rendered art). One of the texture sets feels like the backrooms, while most of the other feel like an old haunted house, and there is thunder ambience and you see lightening out of windows… it does a nice job of feeling spooky, and has classic horror enemies to match.
Anyway, that’s episode one. A terrible game to play, but it had some interesting ideas… so I decided to use cheats and play through the final two.
Episode two mostly takes place in maze-like caves and prison-like areas, and are mostly just dull key hunts with nothing new. The enemies are also boring, just skeletons and human guards (who turn into flowers when they die because this game is for kids?). They also throw HUGE groups of enemies at you, which this game is NOT designed for. I’m glad I had cheats.
Eventually you get out of that area and into a computer core area with robot enemies. Level 7 is cool as it has four floors and it feels like going through a big tech structure. You can find computers to turn off turrets and open locked doors (which may unleash enemies on you, so I hope you saved first), but aside from that, there isn’t anything new here adventure game wise… this ep is just crappy combat while looking for keys in boring mazes.
Then episode 3 takes place after blowing up the core and reality is torn asunder, and you end up in some space between dimensions and go between them, often ending up in some kind of hell-like one. It is NOT as cool as it sounds, but it has cool aesthetics.
Gameplay wise, the enemy crowds are more manageable but now we have enemies that can only be killed with certain weapons and that sucks. All the levels are mazey key hunts with no adventure stuff we haven’t seen before. The only new mechanic is that fire is on the floor sometimes, making annoying pain mazes.
Then there is a very boring boss fight and the game sets up a sequel that never came out.
SO YEAH, this game blows. There is some interesting stuff, but it’s all in the first episode pretty much which also has the best level design (it’s not great, but eps 2 and 3 are just mazes with poor flow), and there is too much bullshit in between the neat stuff. One of the lesser 0-Y-Axis FPS titles by far.
I know no one reads these, I write them for myself so there
22 Likes
I read it Skyel.
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I just tried to see if I would even like them but Psuedoregalia, Curse Crackers and Heaven’s Vault seem really good! All 3 I went “I want to play more of this.”
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This looks vaguely familiar, I reckon i had it on some shareware collection CD my dad got from a shop that came with Wacky Wheels or something. I probably played the first level then ditched it
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there was a moment in final fantasy 7 remake that had me and my roommate screaming ln.
in the first shot in a cutscene, aerith grabs cloud’s arm because she’s afraid of ghost enemies.
there’s a cut to the second shot, which is a closeup of tifa’s surprised reaction to aerith grabbing cloud’s arm, a shot which is especially short in duration.
there’s another cut and then tifa grabs cloud’s arm too… and then the game resumes player control of cloud, with both girls still on each of cloud’s arms. you can rotate the camera and they’ll still be attatched to cloud but if you move the left stick they get off of him. perfect romcom shit happening in this final fantasy… also glad that this game has some stuff for the tifa / aerith shippers too…
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I think the remake was especially good with very seamlessly developing the trio’s relationship like this. It’s absolutely my favorite part about the whole thing!
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Finished Spider-Man 2. I mean, I still have a lot of side stuff to clean up, but the story is done.
It was alright. Pretty much what I expected, probably better than I cynically wrote it off at first. I think the promise of the first game, nodding at a future game with both Spider-Men, that was dabbled with in Miles Morales and finally realized here, was pretty dang good. That said, Miles is just a lot more fun in pretty much every way compared to Peter. I don’t think the MJ segments were very fun, but giving her some combat capabilities made them a little better. They manage to slip in a few surprise playable characters in some of the side quests, though the big fourth character segment…I guess it was OK, but playing as a grossly overpowered, tank-y Venom is kinda boring. I mean, it’s a power trip segment, and the boss fight with Kraven is a cinch, but I don’t know how they were gonna angle this into a Venom spin-off game…doesn’t make sense to the plot, and now with Tony Todd gone, maybe it’s best they canned it.
I appreciate the post-game lets you use the first black suit and the gnarlier symbiote suit, though you’ll still have the white cum slime attacks from the end-game Anti-Venom suit.
Definitely gonna finish this up, unlock all the costumes I’ll never use, and then free up 150 gigs.
5 Likes
Penny’s Big Breakaway is really worth every penny, it feels effin’ good to move around town and hit the cute dorky townfolk with the Yo-Yo. Real SEGA vibes left and right 
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Doing this again. This is a bigger tournament for Shadowverse Worlds Beyond. It is a digital collectible card game. It is published by the same guys who put out horse girls. As far as I am concerned they are now the #1 developer in the world, because they let me experience some of the thrill of gambling even though I do not have any money.
This game is much better than Steam reviews indicate. People were upset by how stingy the game was compared to the previous Shadowverse but buddy I didn’t play that and I now have every card in the game so far and all it took me was dumping dozens of hours of my life into it. So that’s all fine and good I think, what else was I gonna be doing with my sick time, this is definitely healthier than those times I binged all those Adam Sandler and Mike Myers comedies, or when I watched every episode of Entourage, this could all be so much worse.
So far I went 3-2 in my first tournament. That was not good enough to qualify for “A Block” aka “The Winner’s Lounge”. Also maybe I went 2-3 I can’t remember. I once again forgot I was playing in a tournament during one game. I got distracted mid-game reading about horses and thus lost my “competitors’ edge”. I chose the “aggro Dragoncraft” deck. That has a card with a drawing of a fan on it, and if you wave it around and discard a card you get a chibis knight who will block enemy attacks. It’s a good card. I stomped the games where I drew it. I lost the ones where I didn’t. Hard times without chibis…hard times…I was going to write more about this but I had to interrupt my playing to pick up 2good2go bagels and now I lost my fire, have a 30% winrate in this, this is miserable, good game though, you should give it a shot if you like card games, fuck my life though fuck my life
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