I tried that one today, but it wasn’t depressing enough. It felt like it might not be the worst idea, and so Demon’s Genesis (as the fanslation calls it) has my depressed back.
6 Likes
Entirely insane game. Every actual creative decision made is incomprehensible.
The strategy for beating the championship seems to have been “have a Kommo-O”. Chairman Rose, an evil long-termist, whose plan was to summon Satan to provide unlimited clean energy, which the regional champion would have been fine with but wanted to wait one day to do, and Chairman Rose wouldn’t. But when everything goes wrong he just says “huh, guess that didn’t work. Sorry. Thanks for helping to fix this”.
The battle against Satan, which consisted of two legendary pokemon, a level 68 Kommo-O who has direct type advantage over Satan, and a Dubwool, resulted in Satan focusing all of his energy on the Dubwool while the other pokemon completely annihilated him. (Maybe Satan pathologically attacking a sheep is intentional though, in which case it’s actually kind of funny). I am not even sure if he successfully knocked out the Dubwool. But I have Satan in a Pokeball now, which I guess makes me like Saudi Arabia.
Minor things that seemed noteworthy at the time but now basically don’t: I enjoyed redoing the Arsenal Gear Tengu fight on octagonal elevator but in the pokemon setting.
The music for the chairman rose fight reminded me of the final boss music in Radiant Silvergun. It was the most epic music in the game, even though he is just a guy, and all his pokemon got one-shot by Kommo-O
Ok, I take it back. The last fight against the champion was marginally technical, but by no means even the hardest battle in the game. I had to use all my pokemon though. That closes off the quip I was going to make about how I went through thick and thin with my team, camping with them, playing with them, giving them nutritional supplements and carefully tweaking their battle strategies to work together in tight complement only for two Pokemon caught in the last three hours of the game to carry everything. Those pokemon only carried most things, so it’s ok.
20h38m clear time. I had hoped for under 20 hours, but since my initial expectation was 26 hours I still feel ok.
On to Pokemon Violet. Just not tonight.
Edit: Oh I forgot, one other very silly thing: The game heals you between each battle in the championship. This removes basically the entire challenge of the traditional elite four, which required, if not entirely continuous battles, at least careful item management and PP management. When most opponent’s teams consist of five pokemon and you have 5 uses of Close Combat (7 after PP Up), and you also heal between opponents, strategy collapses to linear complexity in a really pathetic way.
11 Likes
Saw a handful of people say that the original Super Lucky’s Tale is better than the new one. I’ll make this quick - it’s not, Lucky just runs on all fours in it, which I guess is kinda cute. It’s worse in every way. Folks just like that little fox trot.
7 Likes
Alien: Isolation (PS4): will never understand how anyone can just enjoy [thing], [hater]!
spent most of an evening with this, and by the time i woke up the next day i’d gone right off the whole idea- like the psychic equivalent of overdoing it at the gym and/or buffet
my malfunction(s) aside, game’s design seems pretty fundamentally wrongheaded imho- the worst thing a Survival Horror can do is actually make good on any of its threats, but A:I, at least on Hard, has next-to-zero compunction about doing exactly that
spotted by the trigger-happy survivors? Enjoy your bullet-riddled death, commie!
cornered by homicidal robots that eat headshots and crap assbeatings? Tut, tut.
titular alien actually present and looking for you? Game Over, man, etc.
12 Likes
I decided I was done with thaht game when someone told me the worst thing you can do is crouch around and that you should actually be walking everywhere cuz otherwise the alien zeroes in on you way faster and I was like what the fuck lol?
10 Likes
this was the problem I had with amnesia. the spooky goo or whatever it was would chase you and either you’d run fast enough or it’d touch you and then you’d die. and I was like ‘ok.’ it all felt very rote and trite to me
AI did not really make me feel like this, but the effect was the same. the alien was so well done that I was too stressed and the game was too hard, so I just stopped. like I’m in a small medical area full of bright lights and the xenomorph is just walking around and if it hears anything that fucker is sprinting at you. I’d hide in a locker and the thing would walk across the entire area, enter the room I was in, and just open the locker and eat my face. I’m like ‘well, yes, I suppose that’s what it’d do?”
9 Likes
The worst thing A:I did in my opinion is not ending after you get rid of the first alien and keep going for another billion hours
9 Likes
can’t say it isn’t faithful to its source material
11 Likes
I’ve probably said this plenty of times already, but I feel like the weakest part of Alien Isolation is the Alien, because it’s a known quantity. You know how the Alien is a threat, and you know when it is no longer a threat. The working joes, on the other hand, are human simulacrums, and would have been significantly more interesting as a primary antagonist. They act predictably, but their personality or physiology could change at any time. Who knows what they’re carrying inside those overalls. Potentially any part of it could be destroyed or severed, and start moving again.
8 Likes
Beat Shadow of the Colossus for the first time. It was good. In some ways, it was the same plot as Drakengard 3. Just, soberly, deliberately, and eight years earlier. Drakengard 3 is my favorite game of all time, so of course Shadow of the Colossus is also excellent. Ueda is excellent at using emptiness evocatively. Nothing is wasted in this or Ico. Might have to consider playing The Last Guardian now.
7 Likes
I’m a bit confused why Outer Worlds 2 is failing to nail the visual direction and the movement and the other things that Avowed did well because I figured they were effectively sharing their art/shader pipeline and was excited for OW2 pretty much entirely on the basis of it being Avowed with better roleplaying, but so far the combat and the graphics are both as flat as the first Outer Worlds? kind of a missed opportunity if they did in fact make two halves of a good game in the same engine in the same year. maybe I’m not in the right mood for it though, I’ll give it a couple more tries. KCD2 still completely untouchable in this space in 2025 either way.
6 Likes
Started Pokemon Violet but got some sort of mental nausea. Too much Pokemon for right now, or maybe I’m just tired near the end of the week. Game also runs weird on Steam Deck but is still playable so I will ultimately power through.
This game is silly. In the last one you couldn’t do anything in the restaurants or most of the stores, so in this one restaurants and stores are 90% of the original content.
Also, I am concerned Pokemon might be casually transphobic now, which is another good reason to stop after this game. My evidence for this is three things though:
- The fairy type gym leader in Sword, and her actions and relationship towards Bede
- A nonbinary coded student character in Violet, referred to by others with she/her pronouns, who this game’s Team Evil were literally trying to recruit
- A plotline from an episode of the more recent anime where Meowth tries to court a Purrloin only for it to announce “I’m a guy”, with the normal 90s shock reaction ensuing
This could ambiguously also just be very clumsy representation, and also with all the real problems in the world I don’t really care, except that I am presently talking about Pokemon and this is Pokemon so I am talking about Pokemon.
6 Likes
The grind in this game is hilarious and BULLSHIT. Like each new enemy you meet is basically “be ready to grind another level or two to be able to not die to them instantly” and new enemies just show up for like every five steps away from the starting town. I made it into the bandit cave to rescue the women from the town to maybe be able to get a second party member, and there are now skeletons that wreck my shit.
Hilariously, thers is no better armor I can get yet, and the only way I can get better weapons is to rent them and pay for them each day. And the guy who rents them will come to collect every time you stay at the inn, and it’s really hard to make enough to cover that every day. Days pass way too fast for that.
THIS IS SO FUNNY AND JESUS WHY DID THEY MAKE THIS GAME.
I found this guide image that I am spoilering below because it is gonna teach me some shit I think. Also it gives you a sample of how batshit this game is:
19 Likes
Enemies stop spawning in a zone if anyone exceeds the upper limit.
OK, now I understand why this game ends with Lucifer telling you to kill God. It’s not a sequel hook for a followup game, it is the game telling you that only a fallen world could produce a game like this. It expects you to kill God in the real world.
10 Likes
seaman journal week 1
23/10/25
loaded up seaman in flycast and put the eggs in the tank, where they got eaten by the ammonite. the ammonite was so cool.. eventually it started flailing around the tank emitting ink at random and after a kinda graphic death scene where it crawled out of its shell, four little seaman larva(?) climbed out of its stomach.
24/10/25
the seaman larva float around making baby noises… repeating the baby noises back to them is the only way to communicate at this stage. the rest of the eggs die and disappear like the nautilus carcass. i read the manual which tells me to hypnotise the babymen by circling the cursor around their heads. you can also pull them out of the tank, but i’m still unsure what purpose this has.
the manual directs me to a website “meet seaman” which someone apparently stopped paying the bills on a while after release:
25/10/25
first spoken words by the babies - they say “seaman” “fish” “play” “yes” “no” “hey”. if you say “nautilus” or “shark” they respond “fish”… if you say “english” they say “what for?”. otherwise baby noises and single words only.
26/10/25
not much change
27/10/25
the babies have turned into sullen teenagers and have also started drinking each others blood through their head tubes. after a while there’s only two left, and they have different personalities - when you ask one what’s up he says “chillin’” and he also says things like “girls are pretty.” the other one says “don’t talk to me” “i’m mad at you” “what!! >:(” and when you try to find out whats wrong he sullenly swims off.
28/10/25
the seamen got much larger overnight and now speak in deep voices and talk to you a lot more. one of them asked if i was a boy or a girl and then misheard the answer and said “excellent.. you Know i love the Ladies.”
leonard nimoy says i can give them a name but when i ask they say “no. go away”
one of them asks my birthday and then says “betty ford was also born on april 8th.. i’m SURE you have a LOT in common” and then swims away smirking
29/10/25
seaman now has a name… “bart”, bc for some reason my partner is on a simpsons kick… he also now poops, by firing it out of his head protuberance into the screen. unsure if there’s anything i should be doing in response. he also tells you about the insect cage, which contains little seaman-shaped caterpillars.
30/10/25
i asked if seaman respects me and he said “mm… not really. but don’t fret. seaman is your friend.” he also asked if i knew my partners bday and when he misheard the answer said “that’s fine. with skills like that you’ll be broken up by the end of the week.” he was pleased to hear i dont plan on having kids, since this means i can devote more energy to seaman. i’m not sure if it’s some quirk of the microphone parser but he responds to a lot of comments saying “you WOULD say that, freak.” it’s an interesting and growing relationship.
30 Likes
Anyone have opinions on Valheim, and what makes it unique against other multiplayer survival/crafting games? Something about the things I’ve vaguely heard give me the impression it’s a little more imposing and slow than other examples, which intrigues me. I’m not looking for anything hardcore. In fact, it would be cool if I could play it with my partner who isn’t too dexterous with games.
2 Likes
Just as a counterbalance to all this hater energy I feel that Isolation is a really brilliant game (definitely 2x too long though) and I love the way that the alien and the synths complement each other as threats in just this way. I also found the alien’s AI very strong but in a really compelling way, I never had these problems with it. I felt the alien responded terrifyingly logically and if you took your time you could manipulate the environment to your advantage. But then I never had problems with the stealth sections that people complain about in Amnesia and SOMA either. Games just for me I guess.
6 Likes
Yeah loved Isolation too. It was so stressful and could only play 20 minutes at a time. I think I would have enjoyed it more had I not cared about beating it.
1 Like
I love Isolation and would sooner say it’s too capable of achieving the survival horror experience it sets out to do than say it was anything close to dysfunctional. Seriously, the only problem I have with it is that it is way too long. Survival Horror games should be short but Isolation is like close to 15 hours long.
2 Likes
Before DQ showed up today, I managed to actually clear everything on this map. The “get the wooden staff” tip is super important because Speed is the most important stat in the game. You might think the short sword you start with is stronger than the wooden staff you can buy, and it is, but it is way slower, so yeah.
I got another party member. And also got the ability to summon a slime to be a third party member. The slime is way more powerful in terms of magic and such than me. The new teammate (the PC’s childhood girlfriend) has more magic than me. Whatever. I basically had to grind to level 9 before I could do a lot of this. Also as part of the plot, Girlfriend’s grandpa died making me a potion to kill the Bandit King. So.
Oh shit, I forgot to say, to learn magic, you have to rent the spells, then have the character read the spell, then return it and pay the rental fee. No, I don’t know why.
This game is so bad it’s amazing.
8 Likes