Time change and the start of seasonal depression means I picked an RPG from my steam backlog so I didn’t give in to urges to resub to WoW for the first time in a decade.
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right now i’m making droning music with heavy reverb and periodic noisy interference in bespoke synth in honor of seasonal depression, that and drinking lots of tea. i think i may end up reading fiction and playing wargames separately instead of playing a crpg
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Thinkin’ ‘bout building another Banshee Prime in Warframe. Partially ‘cause I can and mostly ‘cause I just like that Warframe.
Also playin’ DaemonXMachina: Titanic Scion. Finished up the recent expedition in No Man’s Sky. First one I’ve completed in awhile.
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I’m up to Junon in FFVII:Rebirth
They shoulda called this game “Fuck Off Chadley” with the amount of times I have had to yell that to the screen
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Press start 5 times to skip Chadley.
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Is that a thing? I hope that’s a real thing
The next game needs a menu toggle ‘Chadley: on/off’
Not really a fan of his pop idol girl clone either
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To be fair neither is he.
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i keep tryign to play this game because a good friend really loves it but Junon is the worst worst AAA shit from start to finish. please stop trapping me in dogshit minigames. i’ve never pined for a fucking dungeon in these but please, please, take me to the depths. anything to free me from this shit
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It would be good if you could just go straight A → B through all the main story points and ignore the side stuff, but the giant snake in the first area destroyed me on the first attempt which made me assume they’ve balanced it around getting as many Chadley Points as possible to level up before moving on.
Queen’s Blood seems poorly designed as well, if you don’t play the right cards you end up sitting there skipping multiple turns while the computer just keeps going until all slots are filled
Also not really a fan of open world games that have a treasure detector thing that makes you feel like you have to stop and hunt for it every time otherwise it’s going to make your brain itchy
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I have two gym badges now. I think I did the gyms in the wrong order, the first was much harder and also the gym leader had more pokemon. I also defeated the first colossus, proving my dreams were prophetic. As a reward I obtained the first legendary sandwich, which I fed to my motorcycle to make it go faster.
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yeah when i got the objective to do every mini game at gold saucer i quit and uninstalled
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played some Wheel World -
super charming game if you’re into bicycle fandom - very endearing side characters, sort of like a short hike but for bike nerds… but the framerate absolutely plummeted once i got off the starter island, 17fps and is now unplayable for me 
the cycling mechanics are also a little underbaked, it has a little “press x to go fast” type vibe, I would have liked to see a little more focus on actual cycling mechanics like preserving momentum etc.
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Played Dispatch (up to ep 4/8)
I forgot to mention how much Critical Role are embedded in the project. They provide some voice actors but also seem to be launching a multimedia campaign. I’m enjoying the game a lot but not sure if it’s worth a transmedia push.
In episode 3, members of the team get fired which is a nice way to create drama and additional challenge later in episode 4 since you’re working with a smaller team that resents you. People refuse to work or hold personal grudges. Playing through workplace conflict as a team leader feels a bit too real to me. Robert (you) seems unusually good at office dynamics and pep-talking but the overall co-worker dynamics are good. The writing definitely feels like it leans towards office dramedy with incidental superhero aspects. It feels like [Alan Moore’s] Top10 at times but it’s just set in normal-ass LA with no hint of far-reaching worldbuilding.
It’s growing on me and I like that the consequences of choices show up in the minigame. This feels like a good evolution of Telltale, like there’s more of an actual game and it gets more adult from time to time. Episode 4 starts with a pretty raunchy sex scene which integrates superpowers and workplace character drama pretty well. There’s more strange scenarios like pointing out to your line manager that her areola are showing which feels like Telltale would never.
The foreshadowed romance choice feels a little ‘eh’. With only two options and it feels like a bit of a vanilla good girl/bad girl decision. The most interesting wrinkle is that they are both co-workers and you’re essentially choosing whether to sleep with the boss or sleep with a subordinate.
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yeah this is pretty good, I’ve been playing it too
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Ninja Blade is also canon with RE6 after this horrible in the dark subway level where something explodes and it runs at single digit fps.
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dreaming in an empty metal gear online lobby
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You know, I don’t really want to criticize Pokemon Violet. I am just in the position of not knowing how to talk about it exactly without doing so. But basically my impression right now is that, Pokemon Sword was a game with some bad ideas, which they tried to use to cover up the fact that most of the game reflected no ideas. Whereas Pokemon Violet is a shotgun blast of ideas with no cohesion. I don’t know if this was just a deliberate gesture to use it as a sacrifice to get differential opinions about the popularity of features for future pokemon games, or if it just needed more time to cook, but either way I respect Pokemon Violet a lot more than Pokemon Sword. The thought processes that made Pokemon Violet could have made a good game. Possibly they could have even made Pokemon Violet a good game. But I am not of the opinion that Pokemon Violet is actually a good game.
Edit: Ok, more specific. I hate how this game spontaneously adopted a bunch of skinner box style video game design elements, even though it did result in it’s modernization and increased playability. World of Warcraft is in here quite a bit. Breath of the Wild is a little bit in here, but really it’s a pretty generic open world RPG and I don’t know that, aside from the focus on natural landscapes, it has much to do with Breath of the Wild in particular. @Gimelrey said it reminded him of Persona with the school setting. It’s a bit silly that this is the one region that spent billions of dollars on what is effectively just a trainer school, something that every other region has exactly one of, in the form of an old single-room schoolhouse, with the entirety of it’s knowledge written permanently on the blackboard.
I don’t like entering Crystals to fight raids against superpokemon. I am ok with the dungeon raid to raid boss mechanics of fighting Team Star, mostly because the final battle is a normal battle, if it were not I would be pissed. I was deeply moved to see Tauros finally behave in-game in a way that was previously only ever described in it’s pokedex entry, from Gen 1. Someone or multiple someone’s waited over 25 years for that, that’s a triumph of the human spirit. There are too many damn items on the ground. Making TM’s breakable again but offsetting it by having a billion lost items per acre in game is not sensible imho. Like what does that even imply about the universe. Sorry, average pokemon trainer does not drop 600 items per mile of movement. Average pokemon trainer drops 5 items per mile of movement. Drops Items Ace, who drops 150,000 items per mile of movement, was an outlier and should not have been counted.
I will think of more. This is the second game where I don’t really like my team and no clear preferred pokemon appeared to me in the course of the early game.
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The HD-2D in Stray Children is killing my enthusiasm. I was ready for frustrating game elements by design, but I was not ready to not have an unpleasant time just looking at it, not care about seeing new environments, etc.
Thinking about it, 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds have existed for a while, as has dynamic lightning on 2D sprites. As far as I know the only unique and defining feature of the « new » HD-2D is looking like a kid messed with your TV’s color / brightness / contrast settings and you can’t go back to normal. It does look really good in trailers and screenshots though !!
As far as Stray Children goes, I was a bit surprised by it starting exactly like Moon where you’re sucked inside a game cartridge.
« Are we really doing a Dragon Quest parody again in 2025 » Yes. Fortunately you then get sucked into ANOTHER world where adults have gone mad. I like it.
You can Undertale enemies, but the puzzles required to guess the correct sequence are already head scratching in the very first area of the game, and I had to brute force them 3 out of 4. Or I can just beat enemies, which makes them respawn
I’m liking the vibes but again, the HD-2D is just spoiling it
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I feel like the big problem with HD-2D is the lighting makes the form of the sprites even more obvious and contrasts with the baked-in lighting of the sprite art itself. In many cases characters have a reflective sheen on them because they are laminated brick people rather than evocative art.
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I’m not sure it’s really going for the HD-2D effect so much as trying to emulate the visual experience of playing something like Moon on a ps1 in 1997.
Lots of hand drawn elements converted down to low res sprites and static pre-rendered 3D images as flat backgrounds, although I get the impression that they’re actually just hand drawn backgrounds made to look like pre-rendered 3D in this case.
I think what confuses things is the heavy use of bloom and actual realtime 3D this time around which makes it look a bit similar to the HD-2D stuff, but I got the impression they were just trying to evoke the rudimentary 3D of early ps1 titles and the glow of a CRT screen, which would make sense given the connections to Moon so far.
Honestly the bit that’s irking me slightly more about the game is it being more of a straight JRPG than Moon or Chulip were. I know those games had their own fair share of frustrating design decisions but I feel like this feels somehow more tedious to play by adhering so strictly to those genre conventions. I actually miss the relative freedom of being able to puzzle things out at my own pace instead of getting locked into a random encounter every 30 seconds that makes me alternate between bullet hell sequences and trying to solve a confusing word salad if I want to go the compassionate route a la Undertale.
The erratic difficulty around talking things out with some of the enemies really makes me think something must have been lost in translation somewhere… It varies wildly between being aggressively obscure and demanding a bunch of trial-and-error to some solutions being almost totally arbitrary feeling (“put these things in alphabetical order…”)
With all that said, I am enjoying the character and plot stuff. This whole idea of towns of children engaged in various forms of self-torture and formed off the back of the unresolved trauma of an adult’s tortured soul has been pretty compelling so far. I hope it can stick the landing…
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