no, Rogue City was like that too, it being one of the first big UE5 games
that’s the power of Unreal
2 Likes
Playing Fusion Mode against the CPU on Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, and I’ve reached that horrible skill plateau where battles against certain opponents can last like an hour, we’re so evenly matched. I’m shocked I didn’t just fall asleep in self-defense.
5 Likes
i’m playing Resonance of Fate
i got into a random encounter and died on the way to the combat tutorial
good videogame
22 Likes
9 hours into ruffy and the riverside and its starting to wear. Last post I assumed I was in the tutorial loop and the game would cut me loose shortly. Not really. Its a lot of “go here to do the thing” and you get there and its “thank goodness you are here, heres what to do” you go and do for 5 mins. "Wow you did it " heres a lil movie sequence. repeat. Game needs to shut up a bit. Let go of my hand plz
8 Likes
Ah, the true RoF beginning. Game rules.
4 Likes
Been on a Warframe kick of late.
Again.
Shoot, stab, teleport, play some game modes I haven’t really played in awhile or didn’t really pay much attention to.
Eventually I’ll get back to Project Warlock 2, as well. The whole multiple characters thing is kind of its bane, tbh. I think even the developer, in a sort of side-ways manner, said that they definitely over-reached their abilities, and it’s showing, I think.
1 Like
Pole Position (ARC) has advertisements for Marlboro and Pepsi and a non-centered steering wheel.
I also got to play that coin tossing game Game Center CX always does and was utterly baffled because the first lever is at the bottom moving the plunger at the top. Did win two little candies.
8 Likes
TOP GEAR RALLY
SHORT VERSION: A mid, slightly jank rally racing game that would have been fun to have back in the day, but doesn’t have much to offer now.
LONG VERSION: A slippy slidey rally game, this has a lot of the same issues of Top Gear Overdrive that I played recently, but a lot of the systems feel better here. I assume they were built with this game in mind since it’s the first Top Gear game on the 64.
As in Overdrive, you always start at the back of the pack (20th) and have to use shortcuts to make your way to the top. The other cars are more obstacles than competing racers, following set speeds and paths that you can’t knock them from.
Again as in Overdrive, there aren’t many tracks but you race them in different weather conditions. Like Overdrive again, the main game is also a championship mode with different seasons, with better cars being unlocked with each season. And again, each “better” car just gets faster and, by extension, more difficult to control.
BUT! You don’t blow up in this one! There isn’t a shonkey money system! You can modify your car to better suit your style and the race conditions! So, overall this was less frustrating than Overdrive.
As an early N64 game, the music is pretty bad (but better than Grindstone) and the visuals very basic, though I liked the oddly barren feel of the first track, like it had been half swallowed by a void. Or maybe that’s just how I feel about the countryside.
Ultimately though, it’s still pretty mid, with kinda janky controls and (floaty) physics that can’t compare to those in other games around the time like Sega Rally or Colin McCrae. But I would have fun with it as a kid, for sure.
The Legend of Banjo-Kazooie: The Jiggies of Time
An amazing amount of work was put into this game, full of easter eggs, writing that perfectly mimics the original games (and has a fun sense of self-deprecation), and areas of Hyrule impressively re-imagined for Banjo-Kazooie with lots of fun challenges and level design that rivals if not surpasses actual N64 games.
It’s let down by some VERY rough moments that almost made us stop playing (we were on original hardware so couldn’t save state), and the camera felt like it was specifically designed to hinder us as we tried to complete some of the already super tricky moments… and losing all notes if you die in these huge worlds, OOF. For the record, we found Death Mountain to be the most painful area of the game.
The final boss fight was also buggy on real hardware, making it impossible to complete.
So, really amazing in someways, but I definitely recommend playing on an emulator with save states. We managed to do it all on real hardware (aside from the final fight), but don’t recommend doing that.
Dangerous Dave
I love ya, John, but I hate this game!
Feeling more like a Speccy game than Mario (aside from “warp zones” and walking above the levels), there are certainly glimpses of Romero’s talent for level design here, but he still had a long way to go.
Pointless red herring collectables all over the place, RNG enemy attacks, requirement for pixel perfect jumping and timing, invisible hazards, clunky controls… I just found this game endlessly frustrating, with completing it feeling like a combination of luck, and trial and error.
CATACOMB
Technically impressive for the time with its fast arcade action and scrolling on DOS, this is a 10 level top-down shooter heavily inspired by Gauntlet, but has enough ideas of its own to give it its own identity.
It even has some things we would later see in Id’s FPS games like strafing and secrets!
It has some fun personality, thanks to silly messages left through the game (some jokes, some hints, some descriptions of areas).
Level design lets it down the most, with having to shoot walls to find secret passages needed to finish each level becoming tedious fast (with the final level being the biggest culprit). Enemies also move too fast, but the game gives you enough tools to deal with them.
Also, way too short! But at least it doesn’t have anything that feels like filler, unlike the sequel…
CATACOMB II
A.K.A The Catacomb (incorrectly titled as Catacomb in the GOG collection), this is a follow-up to the original 10 level game and is a small improvement in a few ways, but worse in others.
First, there are 30 levels now which is a much nicer length. Second, you can save which is nice considering the extra amount of levels (plus, like the first game, you only have one life). Secret walls also explode in a chain, so you don’t have to dig them out as much. There are also a couple new enemies.
Oh! This one has a lot more personality, too. The first game has some silly messages here and there but this time shitposts are all over the place, and at one point even dunks on Trump (back in 91). There are also hints as to how to progress in the game, since sometimes the correct exit is a bit of a puzzle to get to (but always rather simple ones). I miss shareware games where you could hear the developer’s personality.
The level design is still the weakest point. There are still secrets you have to uncover to progress (including finding tiny alcoves with keys in them), so shooting walls constantly is still a thing. There are also some very tedious levels, like big maze ones, or rather dull big open arenas when the Gauntlet-like combat isn’t interesting enough to justify that kind of design. There are also some very drawn out fights with bullet sponge enemies.
So, the original game was punchier with its 10 levels, but this one is more INTERESTING, at least, with some very fun levels. It’s just let down by some very tedious ones… but overall I think I enjoyed this one more just because it was more ambitious.
CATACOMB 3-D
Short version: A simplistic FPS with plenty of flaws, but with enough interesting ideas that it kept me engrossed throughout the short length, and shows the promise of the folks at Id.
Long version: First of all, I love the highly inaccurate but badass boxart they have on display on Backloggd.
Anyway, this is Id’s second FPS after Hovertank, and is a VERY faithful transition of the top-down game Catacomb to 3D, specifically Catacomb II. Like in that game, you go around shooting fireballs at monsters, shooting walls to uncover paths and secrets, collect spells and keys, and look for exits in each level.
The shitpost commentary from Catacomb II is gone, instead replaced with more serious text… every single area in the game has a name, giving the simple 3D visuals a greater sense of space and purpose, with your imagination filling in the gaps.
Also like Catacomb II, there is a hub area where you access different levels from. The aim is try to find a way out of the hub connected levels and find the lair of Nemesis, and this is done by exploring each area and collecting scrolls. Each scroll has a riddle on them which gives you a clue as to how to not end up back at the hub.
So, there is a little bit of an adventure game thing going on in here, though all the “puzzles” are very simple and could be solved by trial and error… it’s just that the clues help you skip said trial and error, which is a cool way to do it, I think. Having said that, even if you do understand the clues, you’ll spend a lot of time shooting walls trying to find paths and it gets a bit tiresome.
Mechanic-wise, it’s even more simplistic than Wolf 3D, with combat boiling down to spamming fireballs at approaching enemies, with only a couple with projectile weapons that you have to dodge. It also plays slower than Wolf (turning around takes for ages), and there are annoying fireball sponge enemies in the later areas who will mob you, but the game constantly throws healing potions at you so it wasn’t too bad.
The game is also quite short, but I think that’s in its favour… it ended before it started getting too tedious.
In the end, though it’s slower and more mechanically simplistic than later FPS games, I found it enjoyable enough in the short time I spent with it… the adventure elements were fun, I liked the room descriptions, each area felt different from each other (well, mostly), and it showed the promise Id had when it came to this style of game.
The Catacomb Abyss 3D
SHORT VERSION: Very little is amiss in this abyss! Mechanically stronger and more straight forward than the original (though having a weaker sense of adventure), this is still a fun if simplistic time today.
LONG VERSION: Made by a new team of non-Id people who would later work on Blake Stone (and one or two would go onto Duke 3D), this takes the original Catacomb 3D and polishes it up mechanically quite drastically.
For one thing, the controls are better, with the powered-up zaps being much easier to access on the keyboard. There is also now a way to turn around faster, destructible walls are CLEARLY indicated so you don’t have to go shooting every dang surface anymore, there’s a radar that detects enemies (if you have the appropriate crystal for them)…
There is also much more variety, in both visuals and enemies. Lots, LOTS of new enemies, and though most are still melee attacking ones that hound you, there are little things that set them apart… water trolls that hide under the surface until they get near you, skeletons that emerge from bones in the walls, etc.
They environments are also much more varied, and with some enemies only appearing in certain environments… the water trolls only appear in the aqueduct level, for example. It does a good job of making you feel like you’re on a fantasy adventure, digging deeper into… well, an abyss.
This is also much more straightforward than the first game… there is no hub here, and no riddles. There are still scrolls that give you clues, but it’s mostly about where keys are on the same map which you would easily find, anyway. As a result, the game feels less mysterious. This one definitely feels more action than adventure.
And despite the many new enemies, you’ll still be fighting groups of the same ones for the most part… they don’t mix and match enemies in interesting ways often (they do a little towards the end, where the combat is more interesting with hordes of enemies) so fights can get a bit repetitive, compounded by most enemies having the same kind of attacks. They throw powered-up zaps at you much more than the original, though, making the damage sponge enemies much easier to deal with.
Level design is also a mixed bag. Basically every level is a key-then-exit hunt, but some have a nice sense of place and interesting design, while others (say, about half) feel like generic mazes. Nothing aggravating, just a bit dull… at least the varied environments and enemies left them up a bit. The maps in the first game were very simple, but I feel they had stronger senses of identity. The levels in Abyss also tend to feel much more cramped.
Oh, one more problem! Enemies don’t make any sounds… quite annoying when some spawn from the ground or come out from walls. The radar helps, but audio cues would have gone a LONG way to improve this.
Overall, I had a really good time with this. A simplistic FPS with a good sense of adventure, it’s just a fun time. Looking forward to playing the next two!
16 Likes
disagree! it also sounds nothing like any other early N64 game imo. it’s the only N64 game* with music composed in FastTracker, so that makes sense. it sounds like Amiga music!
you can download and examine all of the original audio files, which Barry Leitch shared at one point, here, including i think at least one unreleased one. they are the tgr*.xm files:
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&query=81340&page=2
this shit is so fucking good
* edit: actually it looks like a few other N64 games’ music might be originally written in FastTracker per https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Barry_Leitch, but i think they are all also by him
13 Likes
I think Nostalgia 64 and Jiggies of Time are by the same person? I’m interested in Jiggies once I finish Nostalgia.
Your description does seem to follow the path that N64 romhacks only recently got good though.
1 Like
Yup, same person, they are quite prolific with their hacks. We also played their Wind Waker one which was quite good (and short), and their Majora’s Mask one which is much shorter than Jiggies of Time (it’s just Clocktown) but also very enjoyable (and fewer frustrations than Jiggies of Time).
3 Likes
to prevent pokemon burnout, i spent today playing other stuff on the gamecube that i haven’t before. i started mario superstar baseball, and let me tell you something, brother, rarely is a game as immensely goddamn frustrating as it is the most rewarding thing you’ve ever experienced. going through the seven stages of grief at yet another pop fly. wondering aloud why yoshi is so slow to capture a base despite being the fastest runner in the game. letting forth a slew of insults as not one, but two infielders actively run away from the ball like it’s a fucking hand grenade. i was feeling like i was quickly becoming the bobby knight of cartoon baseball.
but it was all worth it to completely demolish bowser’s team 7-1 and win the mushroom cup.
14 Likes
Tainted Grail the Fall of Avalon continues to be a pretty good eurojank scrolls-like
thus far I’ve talked a necromancer into killing himself so that he could have a better understanding of death, debated a priest on the merits of masturbation, accidentally failed a quest by giving a gardener some pumpkin seeds I bought off a talking skeleton (the pumpkin seed grew into a nightmare plant that killed the gardener with its evil gaze), used a stolen child’s skeleton to gaslight an assassin, enabled a strange town guard’s obsessive war against seagulls, and pursued and threatened a teenager because he kept producing spurious armorsmithing guides that were making all the local blacksmiths angry.
There are so many quests and many of them have optional and unlisted solutions/routes/surprises. Some of these didn’t even get put into a quest log. They’re just things I can do. I haven’t been this enthusiastic about talking to random weirdos outside of a Larian game in years.
14 Likes
Bad news: the daily Set puzzle (https://www.setgame.com/set/puzzle) is still dead after like a week and a half. As a result… I’ve been forced to resort to… hrrrgh… Clues by Sam.
I solved the daily Clues by Sam (Jul 21st 2025) in less than 12 minutes
4 Likes
I would never lower myself to playing Clues by Sam.
Never.
3 Likes
I’m only 8 years late to the party but I finally started playing Stardew Valley because I had a bunch of airplane time scheduled and needed something simple to focus on.
Of course everyone explained what a relaxing nice hangout game it was and that there is no real time limit but my brain started mapping efficiency strats almost immediately (if I time my route perfectly on day one I can meet everyone on day one to get the 100g bonus and then never talk to them again; I need the 100g bonus to rush to the fiberglass fishing rod so I can start using bait on day 3 to catch as many catfish as possible so I can get 2000g to get the bigger backpack for starting mining on day 5; if I plant everything i need for the spring harvest town hall requirement on 1 spring I can get speed grow for strawberries on 13 spring which can get me 20 3-harvest strawberries before the end of the season; if I can get the copper pickaxe by day 8 (need 2000 gold/day from fishing) I can get 15 floors a day in the mines to get enough iron/gold bars to get 40 quality sprinklers in time for a massive blueberry harvest on 1 summer etc etc) and now I’ve just replayed the first 28 days like 6 times.
I also guess there is some social aspect to the game with the villagers but I’ve ignored them completely up to this point in order to maximize profits and minimize downtime. Stardew class traitor
14 Likes
I played a bunch of Fatal Fury: City of The Wolves. I am not inspired to play more but the game is pretty mechanically deep. Unreasonably deep. It takes the opposite direction of most modern fighting games to accommodate the aggressive tendencies of pressing buttons to make things happen. There’s a bunch of mechanics that help make fake outs, combo extensions, and combo routes much more complex than they are in its contemporaries. It also feels pretty good to hit things and to chain EX stuff. Unlike Street Fighter 6, the Modern control mode equivalent doesn’t really do it. You lose too much and the core combo tools get completely removed. This is unfortunate given it is a four button game, but they just force to many macros only with ‘smart style’.
Color edit is fun, not sure why SF6 doesn’t just let you do this. Reminds me of some of the terrible color patterns from Ninja Blade.
Ultimately the game is likely very rewarding but also hinges on you wanting this to be your main fighting game. This is offputting for a few reasons for someone like me but:
- Mechanical depth and input density are generally high requiring more than average dedicated practice to get the intermediate level
- There are very few people playing it. Matchmaking takes about five minutes to find me an opponent.
- The game is just lacking an extra bit of oomph in the presentation. I know it shouldn’t matter but it does. The arcade mode cut scenes are really stiff and Episodes of South Town is just endless grind bookended by text.
The crown jewel problem, almost literally, is the Esports World Cup in Riyadh advertising being front and centre on the training stage. I don’t think Saudi Arabia’s association fully explains the lower sales but it’s certainly part of the picture. Feels like a game I might try and watch instead but is unfortunately a bit dry if you value your fingers.
Lately I have been playing a lot of things that I feel like I don’t really enjoy and have been working through my backlog with obligation as the main motivation. This is the wrong way to do it:
- Fatal Fury: City of The Wolves (see above)
- Death Stranding 2 (I wasn’t a huge fan of 1 and this is just dredging up a lot of unpleasant similarities)
- Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket (I need to quit this, getting way too invested in flipping coins)
- Umamusume Pretty Derby
This last one is interesting to play to see the appeal but the game is not for me. I really don’t enjoy training marginal gains in stats for a racer. It is amusing how much detail is poured into this project but horsegirls is not for me. The most impressive thing to me is that the race scenes are genuinely exciting and they do a great job of getting your heart pumping about the outcome. They pretty much nailed the narrativisation of a race.
Ultimately it’s left me with the realisation that in the same way that you can get fatigue for a genre - say RPGs - I think stuff that has gacha elements naturally creates this fatigue faster than any other genre. The long-term investment question forces the decision too much for me and so gacha elements force you into examining the actual game content for the hook. Getting Pokémon cards in PTCGP or costumes in Nikki is thrilling. Scouting horses is strangely dull by comparison because I can only use one for an extended period of time. Even skipping all the dialogue I feel like I don’t care about anything.
Started up Expedition 33 again after a big hiatus (I only got four hours in before a hand injury took me out) and I really need to just stick to games I enjoy playing. This game is really giving Chrono Trigger good competition for pacing. The presentation is a bit rough. I don’t think the painting aesthetic works in Unreal, not without further stylisation. Every thing just ends up looking really muddy behind so many VFX and sword swipes. I’m reminded how much I love characters talking over each other, more games need to do this. I find it more impressive than super realistic facial capture. This and Death Stranding 2 are two recent games where there is no audio pass on voice recording such that everything sounds shiny perfect like it’s recorded in a studio (we are meant to forget this!). The sound really does not fit the environment and its becoming a big bugbear for me. Get some echo or a bit more of the local timbre in the voice.
Finally found a game that relaxes me and I can just throw myself into without too many qualms. It’s been a really qualm-heavy time. I don’t wanna be that miserable qualm-having guy. Enjoy your game.
13 Likes
The Procession to Calvary: Delightful. The aesthetic of just taking Renaissance (or thereabouts) paintings and cutting them out and making little paper dolls out of them is such a good one I can’t believe it hasn’t be done before (see also: Drakengard OST). One whole different song per screen! - such generosity! - the beauty of using public domain music for your indie game! A classic comic point n click. Got some Monty Python in there, some Monkey Island, a funny take on Jesus as a conman, which is made funnier by it being a little side plot and not the driving thrust of the narrative. I love that the avatar is a murder hobo who is only interested in murder, it’s always so good to exploit the amorality of a videogame protag. You can bypass any puzzle in the game by just drawing your sword and slaying bodies, which is hilarious, but if you do so you’ll get a “bad ending,” which, you know, is probably appropriate, though the “good ending” is also very good. Some of the jokes don’t land, especially a couple fourth wall breakers (just don’t please, having God talk directly to the audience is too Monty Python), and I thought one (1) puzzle had poor signposting. Short and sweet too, respect. Not quite an all-timer, but I definitely had more fun playing it than a lot of pnc revivals, it’s definitely in the top tier of that new wave.
11 Likes
CATACOMBS ARMAGEDDON AKA CURSE OF THE CATACOMBS
SHORT VERSION: Armageddon sick of this one! It sure made me curse a lot! Lazy, dull level design makes for a boring FPS that’s a big step down from the previous entry.
LONG VERSION: The second installment in the Softdisk Catacomb trilogy, this one takes the focus on action even further. Hint scrolls are ditched all together, nor are there any messages on walls in this one, and most levels are very straight forward.
In this case, by straight forward I mean boring. Far too many levels have the design of “find a key on this side of the level to unlock a door on the other side of the level, which gives you a key for a door back on the other side” which I really hate. None of the levels are that huge so it’s not TERRIBLE, it’s just dull and saps the levels of any mystery or sense of place.
The only interesting puzzly bit in the entire game is a tiny maze with invisible walls that I found fun to work through.
Destructable walls are less obvious than the previous game, so its back to shooting randomly at walls a lot. I mean, they are all still oddly textured walls, but the game is more sneaky about them. Also, at one point the only way forward is through a normal looking wall with NO indication it can be destroyed, which is a real dick move.
There is also too much waiting around for static enemies to start moving (so you can attack them), though this is used in a clever way on the rare occasion. This was an issue in the previous game, too, but it feels more egregious here.
Okay, so here are some things I liked… there are new enemies and texture sets, some really cool and fun ones. There are giant ants that twitch their legs after you kill them, there are mutant killer rabbits, and there are trees that set on fire and stand in place after you kill them, still damaging you if you touch them (the damage is minor so it’s not a big deal if they block a passage). As with the last game, there are some texture sets and enemies that you only find on a single level.
Some levels have basic structures like cottages you can stumble across, they added a nice sense of place.
There are a couple hub-like levels which tend to have more interesting design than the others… some still suffer from the key-door-key-door problem I described above, but the layouts at least tend to be better.
You fight combinations of enemies more often, which makes battles feel more interesting even if most feel the same behaviour-wise (still mostly melee enemies). They don’t make the most of mix and matching for most of the game, with only two levels (including the final one) making actual interesting combinations. The non-final level is a more open level rather than tiny rooms and corridors, full of both melee and projectile enemies, and it’s actually really exciting and fun! It’s a shame they didn’t do that more often.
One thing about this trilogy I forgot to mention in my last review is that, unlike in Id’s game, chests aren’t points anymore, they contain items since scoring is ditched (good, no one cares about points in FPS games unless they’re the… point).
Anyway, yes, a big step down from the previous game and the worst of the four games I’ve played so far.
10 Likes
This game was good I’m glad someone else finally played it. I did get the bad ending and frankly it feels like the real ending because the protagonist is such a psycho
4 Likes