head cleaner from this years toxic yuri jam.
awkward girl gets possessed by a slimegirl who takes care of everything.
takes some dark turns without needlessly elaborating on them, just leaving the implications hanging without the satisfaction of clear cut answers
incredibly horny too. i mean, obviously.
also i played a lot of digital devil story megami tensei yesterday and got past the minotaur.
also played a fair amount of the sfc remake which feels a bit insulting. streamlining the experience is one thing, but the visual style has been updated to be more in line with the immediate sequel, using the same designs as mt2, robbing mt1 off a lot of its own identity. i donāt know if i need to play that much more because getting through the roadblock of the minotaur and out āinto the worldā may be enough. it is interesting how unlike the sequels there is no world map or 2d separation between first person maps. you just go through a door at the edge of the area and move into a new tileset seamlessly. so the game is like a mega dungeon that stretches in all directions? itās neat
Dead to Rights I came here for the Dog on Genital action and there was very little of it. At the point I turned it off I was doing minigames to collect smokes to give to a prisoner so that heād give me battery acid to short circuit the security system so I could break out of death row because I killed a Christopher Walken Impersoner. This is the worst game Iāve played in this current adventure because of how miserable those mini-games are, and they are there to prevent me from Use Dog on Genitals. Before I got in prison I had one non-tutorial chance to use the dog across 3 levels.
The truly remarkable bit of this game is how horrible the music is. There is also this extended strip-club dancing mini-game. I know this isnāt much better than the stuff in Vice City which somehow did it for a lot of us in 2001, but I couldnāt stop being confused and laughing at how it failed on every level. Then I noticed the damn music.
you could have played the xbox 360 one which is actually about having your giant wolf dog eat peoples balls. they even advertised that one by being like look the dog eats guys balls now because everyone complained there wasnt enough dog in the first two games. the original game is only for true minigame lovers and people with personal grievances against unions. namco is innocent of all charges
Pretty much underwater Journey but without the faux multiplayer. Makes sense as it was developed by some people who worked on Journey (and Flower).
Looks and sounds very pretty, with solid swimming mechanics, simple puzzle solving, and light exploration as you progress through the linear world.
The wordless story follows similar beats to Journey, and feels a bit cliche (especially with its treatment of an ancient culture) and shallow (pun intended) but itās intriguing enough for the hour and a half the game lasts, despite it seeming to believe that ambiguity makes a story automatically interesting. Also, sometimes you can āmeditateā which turns the game into a screensaver.
In the end, it felt too weak in both gameplay and story to be memorable, with it relying too much on the audio and visuals which I found to be a bit twee. Also felt like it was trying too hard to make me feel something, which of course ended up having the opposite effect. You know, like they are trying so hard to convince you itās a deep and beautiful and emotional experience? Iām so sick of that kind of game, they feel so insincereā¦ not to mention they have an air of self-importance.
Swimming around with fish and big mammals is fun, and it IS very pretty, but overall itās too slight and a very āwell, that was neatā and then forget about it kind of game. So, could be good if you grab it for a few bucks and want a chill, undemanding game! Just donāt expect something veryā¦ deep.
Drives me crazy that Abzu didnāt have a proper catalogue feature for viewing the species you ācollectā. You can only view them through a weird meditation mode you canāt control.
Was also very funny to me that this subgenre always requires a āonce proud long-dead civilisationā as part of its emotional tapestry. Like ancient cultures are somehow only sentimental in nature.
I got Dreamcore because of the aesthetic promise. I too am affected by the unconscious collective memory of tiled swimming pools as applied to empty cavernous structures. Dreamcore delivers on the aesthetic angle. It opts for a VHS filter by default to fuzzy the edges that would otherwise bring out the sharpy, uncanny Unreal 5 edge that is present in other liminal games like Liminophobia. You go up to the tiles in Dreamcore and theyāre scratched up enough that it doesnāt feel like a repeating texture. You canāt make out things in the distance which helps with the āI shouldnāt go over thereā and the āI mustā.
The game has problems though and they are mostly to do with my expectations. I was expecting a purely experiential walking sim LSD-style adventure but itās actually just an enormous maze game. I think the reason itās a maze is because mazes are easy to design, and you can generate a lot of playtime by making the maze hard to navigate. To be clear, a map, a compass, or inventory would be out of place in this game and collapse the aesthetic but the realisation itās a maze also does this. Mazes just arenāt all that fun and the pool level is so large and my progress was not saved the first time I quit out that it completely pulled the wind out of a desire to complete it.
There are no enemies but the game does a good job of creating a sense of threat that you constantly doubt whether something is following you or about to happen.
The second level is an endless suburbia which has a day/night cycle and once night arrives the chirpy Americana muzak coming over the loudspeaker drops dead silent. After a long while going in and out of empty houses in a dark endless void an air raid siren plays. Walking is excruciatingly slow but running creates a relatively loud set of footsteps which is disturbing against the silence.
The third level is a bunch of play-space themed mazes and is basically a giant key hunt. I could draw a map but I think this wouldnāt be as fun as it is in games where the maze takes less than an hour to navigate fully. Thereās making notes and then thereās full on cartography/blueprintcore. Thereās the gameās real name.
It is also, in theory, a great podcast game but then the aesthetic aspect is nullified by listening to whatever. It just reveals that all youāre doing is holding W and doing your best to remember everything that can be taken as a landmark ā every room shape and staircase placement. Just overall tedious. And then you search this stuff up for help and realise there are dozens of similar liminal games all over Steam and the bottom drops out.
Iām surprised someone hasnāt actually built real liminal spaces and charged people entry. I would do it. I suppose youād have to limit access to a few people at a time or make it into a more limited escape room. Would be a better time than all these hedgemazes.
Reminded of playing in public servers of GTA Online where dudes would hire lapdances from the strip club and that game has a mechanic where you can talk with your microphone to the stripper to raise your bond with her and everyone would get quiet to listen to a guy obliviously dirty talk a polygon woman who canāt even hear him. I swear this happened every day I played.
Struggling (as I have for years) with Control, wondering if Iām grossly underpowered for my current objective, andā¦maybe?
I looked at a guide and Iām far closer to the end than I could have imagined. I guess I really ought to hunt down these side quests, bulk up my abilities some, before making a final push.
For what itās worth, Iām currently chasing down Ahti, to find a way to navigate the Ashtray Maze. Iāve got a side quest to take down one of the first bosses again, but consistently eat shit about 3/4 of the way through.
Iā¦guess Iāll try to do that side stuff. Just struggling with the map trying to find my objectives.
yeah buffing up your abilities make a big difference. the one boss youāre talking about was still a huge hassle for me, i either just kind of flailed at it blindly in the end or cheesed it by hopping onto the ceiling girders so everyone had to file up to see me. i didnāt use the shield much but i feel like getting good at that probably makes a difference
Magic Knight Rayearth is coming to an end. Searching for the rainbow amulets for sweet prizes. ā¦gotta get that Black Diary. Anything could be in there!
Maybe Ill write up a longer thing once I am over the finish line but what a sweet, tight little experience.
I recently learned that a copy of the US version of this game sells for like over a thousand dollars. I had one and sold it many years ago forā¦not a thousand dollars
Iāve been trying to come up with a more relaxed game to play since all my gaming recently is shit like ketsui or salamander 2 or rondo of blood, maybe rayearth would be cool. I played it for a while on my steam deck last year, maybe I should go back
Got linked to the puzzlescript game Single Block Pushing Game by Leaving_Leaves (hey I think that actually worked for once) and it is the rare troll game that actually does so with some clever if intentionally irritating design. Basically all you have to do is move a block off of and back onto the tile it started on, but while moving it off takes a single second and button press the layout is crafted so that itāll take you a good ten or so minutes of wandering back and forth all around this massive single screen to finally return it home. Had the effect of making me smile with how brazen it is, but the layout is legit well considered.
Starting a level with two dudes right in front of you with no cover?! Mines you can barely see?! Mecha Hitler just hanging out in random rooms?! A secret that can keep going back until it crashes the game?! Getting ācaughtā and losing all your weapons?! What WERE they thinking?!
And to make matters worse, it was inspired by episode 4. It is widely known and accepted that episodes 4 and 5 are the worst ones in Wolf 3D!
When it comes to Wolf 3D, itās time to say Liz BYErson to Liz Ryerson!!!
A huge 40 level mod for Wolfenstein 3D, Chemical Warfare takes some inspiration from Episode 4 (with references littered about here and there), but on the whole is very much its own thing.
Each level has its own identity and ideas to explore, and are clearly designed by someone who knows how to maximise the limited mechanics of Wolf 3Dā¦ itās full of clever combat encounters that can catch you off guard, plus most levels are interesting to explore.
While there is still plenty of wall-humping, the look-but-canāt-touch secret design that Iām a fan of is employed quite often.
The bulk of the game features very solid levels, but that kind of disappointed meā¦ I was expecting something a little more experimental from Liz. Luckily, there is a series of āweird shitā levels starting from level 27, and I had a great time with them though I wasnāt a fan of how many mutants were thereā¦ but I get why they were used from a narrative point. I think your character was high on chemical fumes or something around this bit, given some of the environmental hints.
Itās a challenging set of levels but very much doable. Ammo felt scarce on a few levels compared to the amount of enemies, but I managed to pull through every time (sometimes thanks to secrets), and health items are balanced well. The levels towards the end tended to feel a bit too cramped and mazey at times and disorientated me a bit, but again, very doable! I never felt too frustrated like I did with the later levels of Spear.
Some things to keep in mindā¦ save before going to level 13 (trust me), and save before level 29 as that level can have sometimes glitch out.
Anyway, one of the big new additions is a rocket launcher! It has no splash damage or anything BUT does kill any minor enemy in one hit, and does lots of damage to bosses. I only used it on the latter or when in desperate situations.
There are also mines, which are very well camouflaged with the floor colour. I was very confused when one kept killing me until I realised what was going on. Thankfully they arenāt used obnoxiouslyā¦ usually they are there to make you navigate an area more carefully, or add more danger to an encounter, or an obstacle to find a way around. They are used infrequently enough that I would keep getting surprised when I walked onto one because I forgot they existed.
Visually there are some enemy reskins but everyone acts the same. There are also some new textures here and there, and a new boss or two. Iām pretty sure these are all ripped from elsewhere (I recognised a boss from the shonky Spear of Destiny mission packs), but they still add some fresh flair to the proceedings.
But yeah! Has a few rough spots here and there, but overall this is a solid and challenging collection of levels for Wolf 3D. INFINITELY better than Spearās Lost Levels, and I think I enjoyed it more than Spear of Destiny itself.
One of the my pledge games this year was Grandia 3 which has been for 20 years since the Penny Arcade comic. Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia were my first RPGs. Iāll say Grandia 2 is better in 2025. I keep thinking āI wish I was playing Grandia 2ā while playing this. Letās hear from Tycho:
āThe stories in most of the JRPGs we get are fucking garbage. Is this a controversial statement? Only the most dominated nihongophile recoils, straining on his Eastern leash. These āstoriesā are challenges in an of themselves: like a hulking boss creature, they are trials against which the human mind must strive. Exhausting existential retreads that course through the meat of the brain like poison.ā
Every cutscene in this game is a misery. Just boring Anime. With Anime Jokes. I feel a little part of me die. Iāve thankfully skipped the cutscenes sometimes. There hasnāt been a real dungeon yet 4 hours in. Iām crossing a continent on a boat which is also something you do in Lunar.
GameArts is absurdly bad a budgeting stuff. I saw the exact moment they ran out of money when the talking head cutscenes stopped being CG and switched to character models. This game is 2 Discs. How many other PS2 games can you think of being on 2 Discs. All those Big RPGs fit to one.
The shining light in the characters is Miranda. A normal dressed woman who hates all this anime stuff. I love her.
When the game stops being talking heads or CG it is beautiful. I wish this beauty was in a different game. I got feelings hearing the opening notes of the Grandia Theme. Donāt worry the music is unmemorable as well. I swear I recognize animations from Grandia 2. Which doesnāt feel real or true.
I should save myself and quit the game tonight and never return. Just take it out of the ps2 and put it in its case. At least I played it in Japanese. The English dub/translation would only make this worse.
I should play Grandia 2. Or One. Both of those are good games.
