Games You Played Today: 13 Going On 30

[Kilroy]

4h23m into Pokemon Sword. I got past the opening ceremony for the gym challenge that is for some reason not just fighting your first gym leader, and am now in a big mine on my way to the town where the first gym is. Pokemon gets less formulaic every generation but in ways that, with the exception of Ultra Moon, mostly just confuse and sometimes upset me instead of making me happy. Like these weren’t the parts of the formula I had hoped to see improvement on. Football hooligans is the second enemy team in the pokemon series to be a trivial threat rather than metaphysical terrorists, with the first one being Team Skull. It’s a lot easier to get money without fighting here but also you can then immediately bankrupt yourself on fashion, makeup, and hair, which is what I’ve done. But at any rate I’m making progress.

First gym badge at 5:16. Think I’m done for the night. They just sort of gave up on making these games as actual games as of this point. You could see them start to do it with Pokemon X, but even in Pokemon Moon where you get the Exp All immediately and everyone gets equal experience, even though you’ve been given 2 or more free, strong pokemon in every game since Pokemon White, it’s now at the point where like… I saved up to buy the Payday TM, then I caught a Galarian Meowth and it already knew Payday. It was randomly carrying a Sun Stone. I then found a Grass Stone on the ground. I didn’t even have to get an Exp All as that mechanic is now built into the game from the start. And periodically I find random candies that are not even rare candies but experience point candies, and instead of being like five of them in there entire game I had over 30 before the first gym battle. It is just entirely frictionless at this point. And that makes it worse, imho, that each game takes longer and longer to complete the main storyline.

Edit: The Boy and the Heron is on the 3DS, working. Dubbed version, because the trouble with the last attempt was the subtitles were misaligned. I think I have a poorly encoded fan dub of Kino’s Journey on here too and may have to try to fix that, or at least remove it, though even if it’s bad I don’t want to.

There’s really not a good reason to use the CIA install format for most videos. They are about 3-4x as large when you do them that way. The exceptions are sound issues, including getting off-sync, and subtitle issues. So if I care about it enough I will convert the movies I can to h264 with 3DS aspect ratio and free up some more space at some point. Though I don’t know for what anymore.

[Mikey]

I wasn’t feeling dexterous or mentally sharp last night so I decided it was Visual Novel Time. I finally checked out Coffee Talk, it’s one of those medium-high profile games I’ve been hearing about forever.

You’re the proprietor of a late night coffee shop in a version of Seattle populated by various fantasy races. You have basically no agency outside of deciding what drinks to brew for your clients. Sometimes they’re vague about what they want and you have to take an educated guess. So far this is most interesting in the case of one guy, a werewolf who has you experimenting to see if you can figure out a drink that will keep him calm during his monthly transformation.

The writing is a little clunky. The player character’s dialogue irks me the most I guess because those words are being put in my metaphorical mouth. I am also immediately disappointed in one piece of character development:

Spoilers I guess

Between your shop’s very odd late night hours and the player character’s implied ability to fight (and possibly an allusion to the PC being independently wealthy), I thought maybe a big reveal would eventually be that you’re a vampire. But no, one of your clientele winds up being one and it’s clear from the dialogue that you the player are not.

[GherkinForce]

Night Striker Gear seems pretty good so far and I love the visuals, but it has one major flaw which is that the projectiles are all fuzzy-edged energy balls, which makes it pretty hard to see where you’re shooting or what you’re dodging.

[vodselbt]

Maybe I’ll just replay Thief after Deus Ex. Maybe I’ll just do exactly that.

[Tuxedo]

I tried the three other sound novels in Final Fantasy Tactics.

The least remarkable one is about a search for treasure on a very remote ring of islands (it took 4 years to travel there by airship!)
Finding the treasure requires visiting the 8 islands in in the archipelago in the right order, to gradually unlock more doors, while avoiding the empire from Final Fantasy 2 (weird considering it takes 15 seconds to go around the world in FF2 but I digress), and doing so in a timely manner since fuel’s limited.

I knew these sound novels are not fucking around, so I took the choices very seriously, played carefully and wrote notes about each island to ensure a win on the first try. It’s a fairly standard tale in the end but I liked the double plot twist at the end.

The second sound novel is a Little Women-esque story about a a teenage noble girl living with her sisters in the summer. The days are long and lazy. The heroine is the youngest sister. She feels that she stands in the shadow of her siblings. She has a crush on the gardener’s son, and wishes to run away with him. But she’s very timid, has trouble mitigating her emotions, and lacks perspective (as a noble) The writing’s very good at putting you in the shoes of this naive girl, getting you attached to her while still making you groan at her teenage nonsense.
There’s some Depression Quest-like non-choices, where you can pick a cool action, but the girl will be too shy and awkward to go with it, and instead just fail to react properly and curse herself for it. It’s great.

Eventually she, as a narrator, says that her heart is beating « two hundred times faster » than usual when she’s with the gardener’s son, and the number 200 appears on screen.

This is the Longing stat. Choices can increase or decrease that number. As soon as I understood this, I tried to min/max, by going for maximum angst and drama everytime. I can’t help it, sorry. I got a sweet ending anyway.

The last sound novel is called Oeilvert. The in-game description says this book « holds the potential to rewrite the pages of history »

After a very confusing beginning, Oeilvert starts from the point of a view of a woman listening to a close friend, Pablo, who’s trying to write a novel. Here’s the first choice in the game : (important)

It’s rare that I can be still really surprised by videogame writing, but this screen made me gasp. It’s not a joke by the way, you can end Pablo right there
Oeilvert is absolutely full of premature endings (danger is everywhere and it’s initially unclear what we have to do to survive), and as usual, losing means going back to the very start of the novel. So it has really tested my patience. Rereading does help understand the bigger picture though. The writers have left enough crumbs to make the second, third viewing meaningful. Maybe not the fourth though, and I’m getting tired. I still have not gotten a proper ending, but will come back to it. I need to know what could possibly rewrite history in here

All these sound novels made me want to try the ur-sound novel, Otogirisou for the super famicom (which got a translation patch recently)
Well while the sound part is great, the novel part, unfortunately, not so much. Too old to avoid terrible tropes, too basic to be scary or endearing. Can’t recommend that to anyone

[strangelilfella]

@tacotaskforce

I still don’t like JSRF’s soundtrack; it just doesn’t have a cohesive energy to it. It’s all b-sides.

I guess you could argue it suits the more austere vibe of Future in general. I also hung out with people in my early 20s who got really into minimal techno as a result of the town we all grew up in experiencing a kind of cultural death off the back of increased privatisation, so… I at least appreciate the commitment to accuracy! But yeah, I also much prefer the first game’s soundtrack…

@tacotaskforce

As much as I disliked the paint motions in JSR removing them entirely just made the entire game a checklist. I think JSRF is where I first got the inclination that open worlds are not inherently good, sometimes you should only make the good parts of the game.

Yeah, it has a lot of that empty busywork that seems to be synonymous with open world design and is definitely also missing that frenzied pacing from the first game. I did kinda enjoy exploring without the time limit though, even if a lot of the environments felt overly large and a bit empty. I remember getting very lost in the sewers in particular. It’s a shame it isn’t more engaging to play because I did enjoy the overall atmosphere of most of the spaces you explore…

I’d still love to see another sequel that tried to fuse the most interesting aspects of both games together. I found it pretty disappointing/ironic how Bomb Rush Cyberfunk’s plot completely binned JSR’s whole anti-capitalist angle and made scrapping with police secondary to a bunch of interpersonal drama and petty competition between the gangs… soured me a bit on playing further… Last I heard, Sega’s own Jet Set Radio 3 is planned to be some kind of live service multiplayer-focused thing, so I dunno how likely it is that I’ll ever experience the kind of sequel I’m imagining in my head.

Kinda wanna play through Zineth again now and see how I feel about it after all this time…

[tacotaskforce]

Started up Dragon Quest 4 at the meetup, and now that I’m in Chapter 5 it’s the longest I’ve spent with a DQ in over a decade. Now that I have the boat I have a list of places I can safely visit, places I can sort of survive in, and places I definitely should not be. I am liking that there’s a sense of legitimate adventure as I try to figure out how to track down some quest threads.

[Felix]

the only hard and annoying part of 4 is Baalzack because you get to him just before you have Zing or Oomph or can wear the Falcon Knife Earrings and so you’re not quiiiite at full Dragon Quest bossfight strength unless you grinded a bit (or tracked down the Zenithian Armor), otherwise it has a really nice and natural difficulty curve

Estark who you fight only a couple hours after that is actually way easier because in those couple hours you go from like 50% to 80% of your regular DQ kit

[tacotaskforce]

@tacotaskforce

Dragon Quest 4

Recruited the stand up comedian.
The only skill he knows is Snooze.
Well… I laughed, at least.

[MimeParadox]

Finished “The Struggle”, the Resident Evil Revelations 2 side story starring Moira Burton and Old Man, on its hardest difficulty level, and if there’s a tactic for beating it that does not involve stealing Old Man’s ammo so you can stockpile it and return it to him in the final level after he inevitably runs out, I don’t know what it is. Fun though, both on a gameplay level and in terms of having a strong story concept.

[username]

Played through Alan Wake’s American Nightmare as it is spooky season and I played the original for last Halloween. I had mixed feelings for the original (some nice ideas, wasn’t very spooky, lot of encounter design was just sorta there) but felt the DLC episodes were a marked improvement so perhaps that trend would continue with this expansion-esque follow-up; it did not.

I did not know it was gonna be a time loop game so playing through the same three smallish areas multiple times was kinda boring, they tried to switch things up a bit and shorten the return visits but ultimately it felt like I was doing the same things over and over. They toss ammo at you regularly so it wants to be more action-heavy, but again the combat wasn’t a strength then and is only mildly better here; I died a few times but never in the same place more than once.

I guess if one was a really big fan of the original it might be worth checking this out, that’s about it though.

[Kilroy]

About six hours into Pokemon Sword, just got my second gym badge. Lots of evolutions, but also my team was not deliberately assembled at all and has horrible type coverage and move distribution. It’s something like Fire, Flying, Dark, Dark, Water, Normal. That’s obviously not ideal but I am going to go as long as possible without caring.

Finished another race series in Professional in Gran Turismo 3, also made sure I had the mandatory cars, fully upgraded, for three more car specific races, but didn’t start any of them because they are all series races.

Basically completed unrelated to video games but I am making a shadow the hedgehog AMV tonight. I will post it somewhere else when I am done, probably in “talk about your visual art”

[thecatamites]

have another interminable autumn cold which finally pushed me over the edge into dreamcast emulation. i’ve never tried it before since for some reason i thought it’d be a mame-level pain but it is pleasingly straightforward. i started Seaman and was able to see the first stages of his bleak life cycle… going to try to keep it up, assuming i configured the mic properly in the emulator. i like that the manual encourages you never to lie to him. lest ye be judged.

have never been a fighting game person but a little more curious recently bc i like how expressive the character action can be. my vague reading of the format goes from “unplayable unless you memorise the combos” (street fighter 3 3rd strike legacy fighterz midnight in the garden of good and evil hot shots part deux tournament edition) to “interesting things happen when you just kinda mash buttons” (marvel v capcom 2) to “games with like 3 buttons that you have to be very careful about pushing” (all the ones with swords in em). preference runs to the latter but it’s been fun trying them all out. my favourite so far is Project Justice for the goofy rival schools theming and 3d characters, but i’ve also been enjoying Power Stone. the single player feels impossible bc the cpu will just get the stones and turn into their PowerStone Mode and kill you instantly but i like how chaotic it is and getting to pick guns off the floor dynamite cop style. i briefly tried Power Stone 2 but it was impossible for me to even parse at my current power level. i’ll keep trying…

throwing apples at people in dynamite cop is the true power of the vgames medium. i also liked falling into the meat locker and having to bash guys dressed as crabs.

napple tale is cute and kinda talky. i do like the wretched clown helper and the fact the main girl’s name is “Porch”.

[Mikey]

I played about another hour of Coffee Talk and I just couldn’t take it another minute. Uninstalled it and moved its sequel off my backlog as well. (I guess I got them both in a bundle or something). I do love a twofer

[Sykel]

what’s bad about it? it’s on my backlog too

[Mikey]

The writing and the art would be nothing to write home about in a webcomic, and adding the plodding pacing of a visual novel to the mix makes it painful. The game mechanics such as they are also fail to add much.

[Rudie]

@Mikey

The writing and the art would be nothing to write home about in a webcomic

Holy shit

[iguferon]

i started playing planet laika at @haley’s behest and this game has got me losing my mind its so fucking good. been shooting radio waves into my head steadily over the past two days

quintet bankrupting themselves making a weird ass psychological horror adventure game for ps1 ftw. all humans have dog faces because we gave our faces to martians and it made them all die. no one knows why. theres purple miasma that shows up and makes everyone start going fucking crazy. i could describe to you what the (rare, not the focus at all) “combat” is like but honestly i think that should remain a secret between the player and laika

[Brooks]

dqxing has begun, i am a big red woman who needs some warmer clothes i think

[Father.Torque]

We must play a moegadon in every game. It is necessary.