The thing that most immediately marks when ff7r was made for me is how often you gotta pass through a narrow crevice to hide a loading screen
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Azure Dreams has a pretty steep starting difficulty, you canāt start trading stuff until you can leave the tower and you canāt do that unless you find a special item that lets you leave the tower. I have done like three runs and have not been able to bring anything back.
2 Likes
I always suspected that the game adjusted wind crystal drop rates the longer you played the game, pushing you to climb higher in the tower, but maybe that was just magical thinking.
There is a (intentional?) tactic that you can use to push the odds more in your favor. Because your character doesnāt have a hunger mechanic you can just spend turns on every floor killing monsters to level up. Holding circle and triangle automatically skips turns until a monster approaches you, so after you clear a floor of loot you can find a raised tile to park on and run out the clock farming xp. The only difference between using an elevator and the floor collapsing is that you can only do a mid dungeon save on the elevator. That way you can go several floors before needing to pull out a monster.
2 Likes
SPEAR OF DESTINY
SHORT VERSION: Id threw the spear of destinyā¦ and missed! Donāt bother unless you mastered the first game, this has a few memorable levels but the high difficulty often makes it an exercise in save scumming.
LONG VERSION:
A 21 level expansion for Wolfenstein 3D (including two secret levels), this adds nothing meaningful to the core game aside from the aforementioned maps.
The first five or so (known as The Tunnels) are boring as hell since they consist of so many tiny corridors becauseā¦ tunnels. But at least theyāre not too frustrating.
The rest of the game is better level design wise, showing off some fun and clever ideas that werenāt seen in the original episodesā¦ lots of traps where enemies can flank you and such, and tricky situations.
The problem is there are SO MANY enemies, and SO MANY of the white dudes and mutants. Youāll get shot 50 times before you can react half the time, and ammo and health isnāt as generous here (though secrets help). It turns into a case of trial and error, save scumming your way through the more tedious sections.
Itās a shame, because I really like some of the level design ideasā¦ but the enemy balance is way off. I still enjoyed playing through it despite the frequent reloading because, and that transition to the final level is VERY memorableā¦ but itās definitely a step-down from the first gameā¦ itās as if they unlearned some lessons.
13 Likes
playing no-one lives foreverā¦ i remember really liking it when i played it first over a decade ago, and then giving it another shot more recently and bouncing off. iām enjoying it again this round - i think itās a case of needing to realise it works on āspy movieā, looney tunes rules of stealth rather than the thief-y kind, lots of having to abruptly kill people because you turned a corner and bumped right into them, shooting guys in spotlight towers while nobody notices, accumulating heaps of corpses just outside the range of the nearest security camera. it was extremely frustrating to try to play ārightā but becomes fun again once you realise it expects to be played fast and more in the mindset of the kinds of movies itās referencing. although, i do wonder how much games of this period ended up being designed with the quicksave ability in mind.
still really like how the tone feels heightened rather than directly parodic and how focused many of the levels are. like a level will put you in a nightclub or a plane and just as youāre girding yourself for a sprawling videogame maze textured to look like a nightclub or plane, they turn out to be already over! amazing.
i also played some games at glasgow indie games fest over the weekend:
Agent Squidge - funny physics toy thing in guise of a stealth game, very untitled goose gamey in all the useless but enjoyable little interactions like being able to unroll sheets of toilet paper everywhere. the little blob guys are cute. lost me a little bit when the game part got more involved, dragging blocks onto things and completing puzzles etc.
Asterism - some of the newer āhandmade assetsā games fall flat for me bc thereās a tendency to take all those lovely clay and wool materials and like, squeeze them into an asset pipeline where theyāre all very uniformly lit and hidden under UE postprocessing glow and all the distracting inconsistencies are carefully smoothed away. i liked this one a lot bc it gets that the real appeal of that stuff is to highlight the junky collaged nature of the videogame screen, with the odd mixtures of digital and real assets, changes in texture and detail etcā¦ the space theming makes it feel very Clangers-y. thereās an accompanying album by the developer and a lot of the game is like music video setpieces where the gameplay is cut to one of the songs, but itās paced in a way where shifting into music mode feels like an interesting shift in tone rather than inevitabilityā¦ i only played the first songās worth but want to check this one out on my own time
Daemonologie - a pleasant surprise, this one is a short adventure game where you are a witchfinder in a town of disconcerting british people, each of whom you can choose to TALK or TORTURE. the tortures are like warioware games with horrible sound effects. i played through it once and semi arbitrarily decided who the witch was, who then confessed after being maimed enough. not sure if thereās a real route, different endings, etc, but it felt kind of appropriate to hop in my little pilgrim wagon and shuttle off at the end without knowing. the real draw here are the kinda Haxan-y black and white dream sequences between days, with effectively choppy stop motion style 3d.
Ginger - i played this one a bit beforehand so didnāt play much of it on site, but i like it a lot. itās the new one by kevin du of ākevin (1997-2077)ā and combines a fully implemented, weirdly rigourous vocalisation system (you press keys to emit breath, open and close the mouth, move the tongue in different positions and i guess make glottal stops or something) with an indecipherable(?) conlang dictionary that seemingly has no entry point, where doing your best to vocalise the words seems to make something happen. extremely mysterious but delightful. there was a voting thing for game of the show and the first person i saw use it wanted to cast her vote for āthe language gameā which made me happy.
top games i watched over peopleās shoulders: faceminer, a universal paperclips kinda thing about automated face detection software; how a body sounds, a cryptic gameboy colour game where you get to use a mummyās hand as an inventory item.
21 Likes
I was curious about the original Call of Juarez so I wound up skimming through a Letās Play after playing just enough to realize I didnāt really enjoy the GameFeelā¢ and also I found the voice acting borderline unbearable. A few cool things in there. Reading from your Bible and shooting dudes is some top tier Video Games or like a fun pulp movie thing.
Funny to finally realize thereās an in-universe explanation for the āCall of Juarezā name. I want to give them points for trying to make statement about racism in the Wild West but I actually donāt know how well they handled it because I didnāt watch that much of the Letās Play.
To contrast that as much as possible I followed it up with a few hours of High on Life via PS+ and I actually had a decent time for a few hours. Then I reached a point where I was like āI could probably just watch Rick And Morty if I really want more than thisā because mechanically it wasnāt doing much for me. I did enjoy the talking guns I thought they did a great job with their animations too.
3 Likes
i always found Spear of Destiny to be a bit disappointing - maybe just because the levels are very labyrinthine and donāt have the variety of Wolfenstein 3D. but i did like the final boss and a few other things about it. i guess it feels like they continued on with where episode 6 of Wolf 3D was going (assuming they made that last) which is the worst episode because of the sloggy and difficult levels even if it has a few good ones in it.
i played the demo of this and i enjoyed it in the sort of 2012 free indie game personal project way. the music or interactive segments didnāt bowl me over or anything but it did feel really personal and i liked the handmade art style.
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Iāve been trying out a good amount of multiplayer games lately but these were my favorites:
This sits in a nice spot of skill and chaotic bullshit where u can be really big brained about it, or just try to swarm your opponent with 3 chess pieces moving at once. For the price of the game, its well-worth buying you and a friendādoesnāt matter who reallyāsince most people know the rules of chess and the game doesnāt have a great deal of unique mechanics that would filter someone.
The video below does a somewhat better job selling and explaining the mechanics.
But what beats cheap? Free!!!
This game harkens back to the simple, chaotic fun of a source mp game crossed with the compressed deathmatch maps of classic Halo. It also switches out maps every round, so nobody can get too good at the game and stomp friends trying it out for the first time. Lastly, with the sheer amount of maps and the low ttk, u can have ur less skilled friends get in on the action.
10 Likes
check out how badly they fucked up the wrath of khan away team jacket in sto. this costs 75 dollars. im going to say that a lot in this post. look at those delicious ps3 game textures
i did not spend real money on this i got it from another stupid thing because they gave me account bound lootbox keys i was not allowed to sell to the complete suckers who actually enjoy gambling in this depraved piece of shit game
imagine spending real money on this. imagine spending 75 us dollars on this and having it look like this from behind WHICH IS WHERE YOU ARE ALWAYS VIEWING YOURSELF FROM ON THE GROUND
a woman wears this for 90% of the movie and i cannot believe this stupid fucking game that my entire crew of women have clipping errors wearing it or the jacket itself is bizarrely stretched. not a one of them looks good in it. my captain (1st pic), who is the only one who seems to have an ass capable of not destroying the model, looks ok in it besides the fact that even she is on the verge of clipping through it but itās still fucked up looking at the bottom. I canāt like find the slider to make peopleās asses smaller AND ITāS FUCKING STUPID THAT I EVEN HAVE TO LOOK. 75 dollars to earn yourself more busywork in busywork: the game
perhaps if I had instead made a crew of men and then manually corrected their disproportionately long arms and fingers and distended bellies and weird crushed heads like you have to do with every character in this game I would have at least earned the courtesy of their clothes fitting. Itās too hard to add womens to videogames :(((
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the chess game reminds me of a flash version of this called ākung fu chessā where the concept was basically the same except every time a piece was taken theyād play a bunch of bruce lee vocalizations and a bunch of punching and kicking sounds and it was great
5 Likes
After three games of stabbing people in the neck with arrows and getting impaled dozens of times in the Tomb Raider games I shifted gears to Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation and god what a palate cleanser. What a nice little game.
Love how much of the gating is in line with Shinnosuke being a little kid. Wandering around at night and people in the village will eventually send him home after a while. Some doors are inaccessible because he canāt reach the doorknob.
You can hold a trigger to run and he just wiggles his ass rapidly as he scoots around.
17 Likes
Spear of Destiny: Mission 2 - Return to Danger
SHORT VERSION: Best return this to sender! Breaks all the rules of common level design senseā¦ that could have been interesting in the hands of a better designer, but here it just leads to a boring, tedious, incredibly frustrating set of levels.
LONG VERSION: An expansion for an expansion, not done by Id this time, but by Spearās publisher. They should have stuck to publishing!
At first I was going to say this was mid at best with even a couple levels I liked (level 10 was a highlightā¦ except for a compulsory secret), but no, 80% of this is terrible.
They constantly hide keys and compulsory paths behind (unhinted) secrets, there are pushwall mazes, you can softlock if you pushwall the wrong way (rare but itās possible), they throw a billion (high level) enemies at you at once (even worse than Spear), there is an awful bit with bubbles (vines) that hides enemies, and the levels are a messā¦ at first it had kind of an āoutsider artā charm, but all the mazes and lack of flow ended up being boringā¦ especially since they had no idea how to make interesting battle scenarios, leading to lots of standing by doors and shooting people who walk in. Itās boring, tedious, and frustrating.
They also changed a lot of the graphicsā¦ some of itās hilariously amateurish and garish, but they DID add a bisexual wall textureā¦ and replaced the mutants with bats with guns?!
There are new sound effects too, which is the best thing they did because theyāre unintentionally amusing.
But yeah, give this a miss!
Spear of Destiny: Mission 3 - Ultimate Challenge
SHORT VERSION: More like Ultimate Dogcrap. Slightly better than the previous mission, but still awful and not at all worth playing through.
LONG VERSION: Marginally better than the previous mission, which isnāt saying much considering how abysmal it was. More cohesive and coherentā¦ doesnāt hit the lowest lows of the first one, but also none of the (very few) highs.
But ultimately it has all the same problemsā¦ huge maps with no flow, pushwall mazes, keys and compulsory paths behind pushwalls, terrible combat encounters, etc. And this one also has a new habit of putting enemies right around 90 degree corners. Thatās not clever!
It has all the same graphic and audio modifications, including re-using all the bosses. There are only new textures and a new enemy sprite on the final level, which has some kinda sci-fi thing going onā¦ it also includes UAC textures that look ripped from Doom, so perhaps they were trying to tie the games together. Badly.
Another one to give a miss!
9 Likes
these episodes were broadly hated in the Wolf 3D community (yes i was part of the Wolf3D community at one point) and i am primarily familiar with them from people (including me) liberally taking assets from them to use for their own Wolf 3D mods.
if youāre a real Wolf 3D freak youāll play all 42 levels of my set Chemical Warfare. i dare you to. itās definitely better than the lost Spear missions!
14 Likes
Continuing the discussion from Random game names (Part 1):
Played through Alien Squatter twice last night. Got a bad and good end.
I totally hooked up with that slime octopus.
Its sort of a street smarts animal crosser / routine optimizer / s-linker. It has a Karma system where evil comes in the form of short cutting and being selfish rather than just like kicking a puppy to please the devil.
Game play is all about decisions, probability and path optimization.
Nice sprites and good sound design.
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Iāve been playing the BATTLEFIELD 6 beta for some reason. I havenāt played any of these psycho milsim fpses in like 20 years, and this is probably the first time Iāve ever felt old while playing a video game. when you boot this shit up it is disorienting. there are so many menus and boxes and itās always screaming at you about so many different advancement systems or whatever the fuck is going on. the first time I opened the game I could not figure out how to play. I could not see where in the nest of bullshit I was supposed to go to be able to click on the bad guys. anyway eventually I figure that out and make the wise decision to not try to figure out which of the fifteen scopes I want to add to the 12 different barrels of my 6 different assault rifles or whatever. so I start playing and thereās always a radio with a british dude yelling at you about the capture points or the enemies or be advised or hey the game is still going on maybe you are winning or possibly losing would you like another update in the next three seconds. no I would not. anyway I pretty much finish last every game because by the time I can even tell whether one of the people is a bad people or a good people Iām already dead. I think games like this are popular because nothing you do matters at all, at least in the 64 player mode, which why else are you going to play this game, of course itās the 64 player mode. sometimes you die, sometimes you kill, sometimes you get revived, if you donāt itās whatever you just respawn and run forward and click some more, you got 1000 lives who cares. suddenly it makes sense why all the players of these games seem to hate skill based matchmaking. itās not a game for skill, who cares if youāre good or not. go play counterstrike if you want to be a milporn fascist and also be good at video games.
anyway the explosions are pretty good and it runs well, even though they removed dlss from the beta this time for some reason.
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Is the 64 player mode a total free for all or could you not play it with several friends and try to be a real squad?
Sounds that PS3 game Massive Action Game, or MAG for short. I played that beta back then and thought it would have been better if I had a group in all that chaos. Kind of curious about B6 now. Maybe Iāll try a match over the weekend. But I am in the same boat as you, the last time I played a milsim fps online was a few years ago when I played a few rounds of COD war zone or whatever it was with my brother. I was not performing particularly well overall but did manage one really awesome match where I brought us back from the brink of certain death by Iām sure equal parts good reflexes and pure luck.
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I played quite a bit of Bad Company 2 right after I got out of college and that is probably as much as I will ever get into this kind of game as an adult. Even if bf6 had all the stuff I liked about bc2 (huge maps, destructible buildings, spotting, classes with weird options like shotty recon, dedicated servers) thereās no way they possibly resist slathering on at least two currencies, a battle pass, and brand tie-in skins
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itās just classic battlefield, two teams. you get placed into a squad within your team though so yeah presumably you can make a squad with friends
1 Like
i think posts by you about navigating modern game UI for the first time is my favorite genre of post
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I remembered that right after the battlefield post I was like ok maybe I felt old when I first tried nikki too, but at least once Iām running around in nikki Iām not also dying once every 2 seconds
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