Needed something brainless to play on my steamdeck and tried out evoland legendary edition and it’s the same problem was when I played the original over a decade ago. The gimmick wears off very quickly and the gameplay isn’t very compelling. The constant “hey remember this” from better games doesn’t endear me to it.
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Well, the weather’s gotten colder and the evenings shorter so I guess that means it was finally time I cozy up with a blanket and try out the full version of Babushka’s Glitch Dungeon after really enjoying the demo from last year.
thoughts & prayers…
Still really love traipsing about the place as an elderly woman cleaning up her forgotten basement. Unfortunately, The Final Product feels kinda like it’s been designed to death… Having a map that tells you where to go really robs the exploration of any mystery and the near constant feeling of disorientation that was originally present in the demo has been ironed out for something much more streamlined. There are also boss fights with attacks to dodge and health bars to keep track of and, well, it already feels boring just describing these things…
I guess I miss the odd pace of the demo where you very quickly acquired the full set of wonky movement options early on, sending you all over the place before getting a proper handle on how it all works, reaching unexpected parts of the level geometry and accidentally stumbling into a new screen transition without much sense of where you were headed, whatever justification for you being there in the first place getting thrown out in the process. Just the simple fun and surprise of subverted expectations that actually managed to elicit that feeling of glitching outside the confines of a more traditional videogame instead of only having that be the visual aesthetic while the structure underneath is your usual, routine puzzle-platformer progression.
They even removed one of the more charming details of you being turned into a chicken-person for attacking the NPC characters with your broom… a real shame…
Seems almost like the developer got cold feet about things feeling too wild or maybe the pressure of having to corral some of these looser ideas into a “complete” commercial package led to this more formalised approach or perhaps this was just the plan all along, hard to say… Bit of a weird situation where I would almost suggest checking out the demo version instead, even though it feels a bit wrong to turn people away from financially supporting the dev’s work…
FWIW the soundtrack is still really enchanting, it hasn’t left my head since playing and has also led to me finding some other fun stuff by the same musician, so it’s not all bad…
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Finished Digimon Story: Time Stranger demo. Committing to buying it whenever it is at least 20% off. Started Pokemon Sword, my first Switch generation pokemon game. Already dislike some things but this is a commitment. Runs fine on Citron on Steam Deck.
Edit: Made it to the first Wild Zone, a zone so magical it gives you control over the camera. Then the game crashed. I guess I will have to save often but I’m still doing this. Done with pokemon for the night though. Might see how Armored Core 4 runs on Steam Deck, I’ve been wanting to play through that.
Played some Gran Turismo 3 after that because I got annoyed that I haven’t finished the Pro circuit yet. I found a car that can win in principle for Spider and Roadster, which is all I’m willing to do right now given how grindy it’s become and the fact that everything else is a 5-10 track race of 10-20 laps per track with each lap taking 2-3 minutes. And you can’t save halfway through and come back, it’s pause or nothing. I guess I’ll save it for when I have surgery and am in bed for three months. That and the endurance races.
Also messed around with my 3DS some more. Put every PS1 game of interest that’s confirmed to work on there, confirmed that Tony Hawk works. Couldn’t get Dino Crisis 2 working because something went wrong with the encoding though. I have 12GB left on here. Going to put ~2GB of music on here because I forget that playing MP3s was a thing, then going to retry for encoding some videos on for another 3GB, then will re-examine whether there are any more 3DS games I want to play. I deleted OpenLara, because Tomb Raider already runs as a PS1 game. I deleted a couple PS1 games that won’t run including Vagrant Story and C-12 Final Resistance. And I deleted all the badly encoded videos I had on there. It’s pretty well put together at this point.
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Resident Evil 4 (HD port) (PS4): nearing (i assume) the end of the Village segment but cannot get past the second giant. already died- sorry, D I E D- more times than i care to remember. enthusiasm (if any there was) beginning to curdle into resentment. maybe i should’ve just waited and emulated the Gamecube version instead- seems like it looked better, if nothing else.
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shoot the boulder as soon as you enter the canyon, shoot the chains off the door with a shotgun, grab the key in the hut, exit the area. you can leave ashley at that point and come back to fight it on your own, which makes it a lot easier, or you can simply not go back. you also only have to do one of the routes and the one with the bella sisters might be easier than the one with the el gigante. or if you have 30k pesetas there’s a merchant right there and you can insta-kill it with a rocket launcher.
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TIL that Final Fantasy Tactics had a few hidden sound novels inside, that were cut from the international releases, and have only been officially translated in the new remake.
I tried the one about a gambler who gets the magical gift of finding out which chocobo will win the next race, by hearing from other people about every chocobo but the winning one (weird premise)
Intermittently this story gets -gameplay interludes- where you get 3 minutes, in a classic adventure game interface, to roam around a bar asking everybody about the next race, and thus deduct which chocobo to bet on.
It’s all fundamentally broken though, because there’s barely enough time to ask 2 people in these 3 minutes. The first person I asked was a dancer and she told me « I don’t have time to think about the race, I’m working here as a dancer » after about one minute of conversation. The text is excruciatingly slow and it repeats itself constantly, with no option to speed up, and I frankly thought the whole thing was an elaborate joke for the first minute. It was not. I picked the wrong chocobo and my gambler lost everything and immediately killed himself.
I suspect the text might be much faster to read in Japanese and the text speed was not adjusted for other languages. If that’s the case : lol
There’s no save system, only a suspend feature. I have to go back to the start to find a better outcome. So I decided my ending is canon and I’m not going back
As an aside I’d love if every videogame with a loss condition could declare after the first game over : « This ending is canon. Anything else that might happen after reloading a save is only an elaborate What If scenario »
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shoot the boulder as soon as you enter the canyon, shoot the chains off the door with a shotgun,
tried it. i mean, i used the Red 9 (only had one box of shells versus, like, three or four boxes of 9mm rounds), but yeah. do the boulders hurt El Gigante, incidentally, or just slow him down?
grab the key in the hut, exit the area. you can leave ashley at that point and come back to fight it on your own, which makes it a lot easier, or you can simply not go back.
i wouldn’t do that for the same reason i haven’t been continuing at the YOU DIED/MISSION FAILED screens- it’d feel like an admission of incompetence. have to do enough of that as it is
of course, the second thought is quick to remind me that by doing so i’m depriving myself of the intended experience, which- yes, i’ll probably have to delete this save as well. why am i like this?
you also only have to do one of the routes
not if i want all the treasure
or if you have 30k pesetas there’s a merchant right there and you can insta-kill it with a rocket launcher.
money’s not an issue, but there’s no room in my inventory- and even if there were, see above re: my probable feelings about spending hard-earned money on a Skip Boss button.
Edit: while i did eventually manage to slay the giant (as well as the chainsaw sisters in the other path- though that, contrary to what Gimelrey had hoped, was if anything even more obnoxious), i was unable to get past the fact that i have lost all will to continue
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3DS now has all the music I care to put on it, plus Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Everything Everywhere All at Once, the original Super Mario Bros movie, the original Sonic the Hedgehog OVA, Sonic 3 (the Paramount one), and Crank. I realize these are not games, however they had to be installed as CIA files rather than converted with FFMPEG so I say it counts. 4.8GB of space left. I might delete Everything Everywhere All at Once and Crank after watching them but will probably keep the rest. Really can’t think of any additional games to add right now, in terms of emulated games or in terms of 3DS games (DS games would actually go on the Ace 3DS card which has different storage limits, but I can’t think of DS games either)
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Playing modern campaign Quang Tri '72 by WDS, it’s a free game. Like most John Tiller’s games, it didn’t bring much innovation to the gameplay but the scenarios spark my interest in the Firebases during the Vietnam War. Build something miniatures like that must be fun. Also ordered an Ospreys book about it.
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Love that someone out there has Crank on a 3DS
btw I’m curious if you’ve played Fuga since you were posting about the other games by those people the other day? I checked out Tail Concerto last year too and i’ve got an unplayed rom of solatorobo sitting here waiting…
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I’ve played a little bit of Fuga, but it made me sad and I felt like a failure after the first moment that made me feel sad so I stopped. I would eventually like to finish it, but maybe after looking up a walkthrough so that I can pre-emptively steel myself.
Solatorobo is the most brilliant game they’ve ever made imho. I hope one day it gets ported, but that would probably be difficult. I think of Solatorobo periodically when I’m in a bad mood and it’s actually one of my comforting-media-delusions.
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iirc, the developers did an interview in which they stated that fuga was designed to make players sad, or something like that
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Where’s the Furry Games Direct Showcase?
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Played some Ninja Gaiden 4 since I could do that without Microsoft seeing a penny… A truly inspiring tutorial level that’s just a straightforward corridor WITH the R3 button always telling you precisely where to go AND a large amount of yellow paint scattered liberally on every object placed on the critical path AND the protagonist saying “harrumph! this is not where I should go!” when you approach an obviously locked door. Swagless in a way that only underscores the sadness of Itagaki’s passing, the guy always had a strong idea of what’s cool to him and this game feels like a fanfic written by a teenager who’s nervously copying other people’s homework on what’s cool. You could tell me the cyberpunk city setting is from Ghostrunner and I’d believe you.
The first female character you see is dressed exactly like that white clothes blue ribbon anime goddess everyone was cosplaying a few years back except her clothes are even more overdesigned and she has like 20 ribbons now, including one running straight through her cleavage. Someone paid a lot of attention to stressing how her breasts are constantly wrapping themselves around it but nobody seemed to get why it’s sexy. The protagonist certainly doesn’t, he’s too busy being a brooding Shadow the Hedgehog type with zero personality, just whining about how the boomer Hayabusa always had it easy and zoomers like him are fucked. Anyway, the lady made me think of the part of Database Animal where Azuma analyzes a common type of anime fanservice where something’s not sexy by itself, only as a set of hyperlinks to stuff otaku say are attractive, and presents Di Gi Charat as the ultimate example of nonsense hyperlink sexuality, just this huge katamari of animal ears and loose clothes and cutesy accessories.
The gamefeel, animations, UI etc are all extremely Platinum, which is kinda sad considering Ninja Gaiden always felt like a distinct breed of a character action game to me, one wholly separate from the Dante/Bayo lineage, even trashy bosses could be argued to make sense as a puzzle forcing you to approach combat differently for once. But at the same time, this is Platinum trying to do their own Ninja Gaiden 2, and I’m afraid it kinda works on me. The RNG-based limb losses force you to adjust your approach on the fly and lead to RE4-style i-frames galore flashy cinematic finishers, which is just pure crack to me, my favorite central idea for combat design of all time. PG’s approach has way less personality than NG2 (the chuuni crow wing Jack the Ripper mode is superfluous as hell) but it’s way more responsive in that player-friendly way, and after a dozen of repetitive takes on Bayonetta it’s refreshing to finally see one where enemies pose an actual threat at all times. But the boycott is still on, and Sigma 2 Black mod is still a way better use of your time.
(Oh yeah, you use a “NinjaCoin” cryptocurrency to unlock new techniques?)
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Curious if it suffers the same problem as Bayonetta 3 in that the new character plays worse than the series protag. From what I can tell they’re not all that different
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from what I’ve heard it’s the opposite, yakumo has most of the tools you’d expect and ryu has a gimped dragon sword-only moveset
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Weird choice! I guess that’s one way to get people to prefer the new kid
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I played a couple of games on my Steam account out of curiosity last night and they were such nothingburgers I don’t even want to write about them. At least they’re off the backlog now!
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isn’t that sage?
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