if i could say something like this, i would.
4 Likes
itās a bummer that every skate game has a worse map than the one before.
1 Like
Sorry to hear you didnāt make it into the pre-alpha 
2 Likes
I might tbh
2 Likes
I have made it to Dracula in Circle of the Moon. There has been so much heinous trickery up to now. There have been bosses at least a dozen of rooms away from save points. The sewers full of freezing bullets only became slightly better after I changed the blood into water. I am constantly feeling underleveled yet uninterested in grinding.
There is a system using magic powers in this game but first you need to get cards that only have a 1% chance to drop. Most of the magic is useless. It just adds a graphical flourish to your character.
Iām committed to beat this odious filth.
11 Likes
I often wonder about those GBAvanias because they have multiple successive bonus-playthrough methods that each require beating the game to unlock the next.
If I played it again Iād probably want to try magician mode where you start with all the cards.
3 Likes
The others might be more rewarding to dig into since the world has more detail and your character is more expressive.
CotM has many enemies that are merely palette swaps across a rainbow of elemental alignments. Each section of the castle is barely distinguished aside from having different wallpaper.
There are sections of the game where I felt elated because I realized I would never have to play them again.
6 Likes
I think cotm was the first castlevania game i ever played
3 Likes
i canāt remember exactly how you do it, but thereās a gltich whereby if you do something like activate a card power, then immediately pause before the power starts happening, you can move the card cursor to the slot of a card you donāt have yet, and that power will activate instead.
another bad thing about circle of the moon is that as you level up, enemies giver fewer experience points. so thereās a point youāll reach before the end of the game where even the toughest enemies are giving single digit exp for killing them.
7 Likes
only hearing good things about cotm itt imo
i think itās the first castlevania i ever played too lol
7 Likes
have you played Session?
1 Like
CotM is very interesting to me. such a polarizing game!
it has a very lonely feeling that i appreciate. itās more bread and butter feeling than later games, like someone spilled some castlevania 1 in my symphony of the night castle. itās weighty. the music is pretty great.
i only really like Harmony of Dissonance (best GBA soundtrack ever, probably - better than Mother 3? possibly. possiblyā¦) and Order of Ecclesia of the 6 GBA/DS CVs. but iād put CotM in third, probably, above Aria and Dawn. i havenāt really played Portrait. i started it up and wasnāt into it
5 Likes
Amid Evil: Quake but not as good. Played on difficulty 3/4 and it was not hard, though Iām not sure I wouldāve wanted it to be harder either. The weapons are interesting, with a balance between damage and ease of hitting; for each basic ammo type there is one weapon that has wide spread or gentle homing and another weapon that has pinpoint accuracy and high damage but no aim assist. Then the higher level weapons are both aoe (a rocket launcher and a BFG). Itās got a cosmic fantasy vibe (rather like Doom Eternal ironically enough) and all the weapons are modeled as some sort of magical melee weapon rather than a gun, even though they all shoot; in practice this means they all āswingā before a projectile comes out, which means there is a very slight delay between clicking and actually firing. Sometimes this feels like something with a high skill ceiling, other times it just feels annoying for no reason.
The game is split into worlds, each 3 levels + a boss, and each with its own art direction, coloring, vibe, and a full suite of enemies. Gives the game a very modular adventure feel, like youāre traveling to faraway lands and seeing the corrupted remains of different cultures. What little writing is in the game is functional-to-bad and blessedly most things are communicated to you purely through level design.
The levels! The levels. I get the impression that these were the real centerpiece of design. The game really wanted to communicate both an evocative sense of place but also that these were cool places to navigate and fight in. Some obligatory platforming and tricks & traps style levels of course. Itās aboutā¦ 75% successful. Monumental architecture gives a real WHOA feeling at times, and later on the game takes a (totally predictable) wacky/twisty/Lovecraftian/ānon-Euclideanā (n.b. not actually non-Euclidean) cosmic horror turn, which is more or less successful. Certainly if youāre using say Doom Eternal as your point of comparison it is WAY more interestingly pleasurable than anything in that game.
It plays smooth but the jump is a little low and gravity a little light which gives this feel like youāre on roller skates, which was often irritating when the game wants you pay attention to your feet while youāre fighting, which gets more and more common. Despite its slick presentation and high-speed feel the firing delay and odd movement make it feel sort of sluggish and less responsive than Quake.
It was likeā¦ good enough. A Mid Evil, indeed.
10 Likes
Got that Ruffy and the Riverside
What is it?
Its a fairly polished 3D puzzle platformed with painless puzzles. Its 2d buddies in a 3d world (my fave). Its the cutest and the goofiest. It does one of my favorite old game things. It has infinite draw distance, no fog or focus blur at all. Everything is sharp all the time. All the 3D movent and texture animation is smooth with a lot of frames. Gives that sega arcade low poly feeling. All the 2D art is hand drawn and extremely expressive. I love to look at this game. It could be a lot worse and Id still have fun just hanging out in it.
The main gimmick is the ability to point at something, adsorb its texture and material qualities and then point at another object and give it those attributes. For example turning a water fall into a wall of vines you can climb.
This game is (so far) excellent at keeping its momentum and rhythm. Its got some mario 64 and some bajo kazooie in it but not too much.
I get the impression they had keyboard and mouse in mind for the powers but the pad controls are excellent.
It runs at high framerate on a potato.
19 Likes
Fragrance Point
Its a 3d platforming adventure in an inscrutable world. It grooves like a Y2k arty webpage. The movement is slippery and clumsy.* Its like if Osamu Sato made a dreamcast game.
You get things to collect, places to go, puzzles to solve. You mostly just figure out what a thing is by bumping into it, shooting it or chatting it up. Is that a creature, a collectable or a machine? Use the talk gun to find out.
I thought about playing this while stoned but the movement is too frustrating at times. You cant see it in the screenshots here but everything moves to the beat all the time. Its a mushroomy game.
It doesnāt look right on video because it is compression poison.
* about movement
the issue with the movent is that the gravity is seemingly too high and the designer tries to overcome this by giving you a ton of thrust. The result is you get momentum killed on some small slopes but on the flat or down a hill you can accelerate waay too hard. This makes fine movement tricky as its easy to misjudge a jump. You really MUST aim with the camera. The jump SUCKS.
The game looks like a hostile hell space but its mostly indifferent to you being there. It doesnāt want to hug you like Ruffie, its more like an absurdist shopping mall / McDonaldās play place and youāre loaded to the gills on fake weed.
Runs fine on my potato and controls as well as it can with a game pad.
21 Likes
I like Fragrance Point a lot. Itās alien in the right ways. When I was playing it a few months ago, I eventually reached a point where I just had no idea what to do next. After a couple sessions with no progress, I guess I set it aside. (I think I was supposed to find some hidden creatures but Iād run out of places to think to look.)
Maybe if I loaded the game up again now Iād be able to make some progress.
5 Likes
I was supposed to pick up some workers for their boss but the thing is I know where one is and its down a hole that is now blocked. So I have this nagging feeling Iām soft locked in the back of my head.
2 Likes
Iām in it for the pain. Every nadir is a pinnacle.
2 Likes
I canāt seem to put Dungeon Clawler down, Iāve completed runs with like 9 different characters, who all have (fairly minor) gimmicks that you can build strategies around.
After completing the first run you can start doing harder runs, mostly I guess just for the extra challenge, Iām not sure thereās unique content it just cranks up enemy strength.
One of the benefits of completing runs with all the characters is this unlocks the ability to graft the gimmicks from other characters into each other to create hybrid characters who are more potent and able to tackle the harder difficulties.
Iām into it! I actually had uninstalled the game a few times when I felt like it was feeling repetitive but then immediately changed my mind and jumped back on. I just canāt quit this game, been a while since Iāve felt that way tbh.
8 Likes