Look Time and Eternity is great, but also deeply evil. The dungeons are extremely large, and repetitive. There are like 5 enemy types that do not have AI but a pattern. Even with the pretty good battle system, I am now doing the same button combo every battle against the same enemy. There is very little surprise to find.
Iâm in chapter 2 now, and have my choice of 3 pallete swapped halloween forests to run around and complete side quests in. Maybe it is time, to return to my old plan and see what it would be like to blast through the game as fast as possible. Had a great 90 minutes before the monotony set in though!
Mega Man for the Game Gear opens with the ill portent of four unskippable logos:
Freestyle Software, the actual developers of this game, were also the developers of Mr. Blobby for the Amiga, a couple GG poker games, and a couple GG sports trivia games. In spite of that less than inspiring track record, I donât think they were the weak link in this gameâs production.
(I played with the Roll-chan patch, which I didnât know existed for this game until a couple days ago.)
Despite being made by a bunch of brits, this game actually captures the aesthetic and gamefeel of Mega Man 5 surprisingly well. The jumps feel proper. Inching forwards works as expected. The only thing they seem to have bungled is that you canât jump out of a slide, but given the screen crunch you wouldnât want to do that much anyhow.
Really, screen crunch is the source of half of the gameâs problems:
Levels are 1:1 recreations of stages from MM4 and 5, with no effort made to shrink them down to fit the screen. There is a token accommodation to this, with the game panning the camera to a different location relative to the protagonist for each room, but unfortunately some rooms still require leaps of faith over pits to unknown platforms. You can change how the camera is panned manually, but the input for that is apparently⌠*checks notes* âŚholding the jump button down for like 3 seconds then pressing the directional buttons. (I did not know this until after I finished.)
(The GG2SMS hack probably fixes this issue well enough.)
The other half of this gameâs problems can be summarized by these four pictures:
You have 4 robot master stages, and 4 fortress stages. Three of the fortress stages are just robot master stages, and for one of them the boss doesnât even show up. And the last stage is literally just a hallway to the final boss.
Iâm not one to demand Content Quotas from my games (one of my favorite Mega Mans has only 6 stages), but based on recently discovered development materials for the game, itâs clear that the publisher took a hatchet to the gameâs scope to rush it out the door.
In spite of the shoddy camerawork and overcaffeinated bosses, I had a good time.
Do I recommend this? Not really. But the bouncing power-ups make me wonder what could have been, had the publisher not been as stingy and the developer given more latitude.
Kirby: Planet Robobot (3DS)
the mini-mecha is definitely a better gimmick than Triple Deluxeâs Infinity Inhale (and the decals you can find for it are likewise an improvement over TDâs keychains) but the everythingâs-mechanized-now-beep-buh-boop-beep aesthetic seems like it might get old fast this time around
I dunno, I think they added a decent twist to the usual fire-ice-cave-water level themes (e.g. the ice levels ended up refrigerator-themed), and they had enough all-new level themes on top of that (such as âcasinoâ, âcyber worldâ and âexecutive suiteâ) to round things out.
I liked the city level where you have to dodge 100 waddle dees commuting to work in their sedans.
Suddenly it just hit for me how perfect of a name âwaddle deeâ is for those guys. Whoever thought of that was a genius.
I co-dependently disassociated into a memory of playing SWAT 3, a game in Sierraâs Police Quest series today.
guys what video game should I play. I did a lot of starting and stopping shit for a while, now I ainât playin anything
I tried playing Fortnite for the first time ever yesterday because I wanted to try out Switch 2 mouse mode. It works well but the implementation of it does not.
The default controls are essentially the same that they would be when holding the controller normally, so âleft clickâ (R) is still cycling weapons to the right and then âright clickâ (ZR) is shoot. Itâs doable without remapping but annoying.
The thing thatâs truly annoying though is that the way they implemented mouse mode it completely disables using anything other than the mouse to navigate menus. You can still use the left stick to navigate the menu but you can no longer press the A or B buttons to do anything. It should work like other Switch 2 games that implement mouse features (turning the controller into a mouse when you put it down, going back to normal mode when you pick it back up).
Then I played a little bit with gyro mode and I think I like that better than the jank application of mouse mode.
Observation on Fortnite in general, there are a lot of people playing who are very bad at the game, and you can easily avoid their shots by doing a really tactical evasive maneuver called âstrafingâ.
Itâs especially funny when youâre shooting at someone so they start building a wall in front of you so you just⌠go around that wall and shoot them.
I know itâs mostly kids but even then I expected a little better.
Youâre first 3 games are against bots, hate to tell ya.
The bots play very convincingly like humans who donât know how to properly play.
Played Rambo: First Blood Part II on SEGA master system. You can be a peaceful war machine only shoot in the ending of the level, passing though the regular enemy pixel sprite without sudden death.
The camp in the game looks like a circus tent or the aftermath of Playboy stage.
HOTS. the answer is Heroes of the Storm.
This was the first ever game my parents bought for me (called Secret Command here), along with the Master System with Alex Kidd built in.
As a kid, I always thought the POWs you free in those tents were dancing around because the charred ground was burning their feet, and the missile pickup they give you was some kind of speech bubble showing a well, because they needed water
okay it has been too long since I have phone game posted so I am forced to, against my better judgement, phone game post
Snowbleak: okay so the game has pretty much settled in what an update entails so every 40 days is just the same olâ but new now go grind the new currency stupid, which is fine because the daily commitment to the game is maybe 5 minutes 6 days of the week.
also I guess at some point the 2nd anniversary happened. we got a version of flirty femme fatale Katya where she is famed Gundam giant robot Heavy Arms where she has a chaingun and I like this because my monkey brain enjoys the simple act of aiming and shooting and we were coming off like, months of units about smashing the E and Q keys
let me veer off track for a moment. they have settled in a place in on-field unit kit design where now they all need access to 1. a way to bypass reloading if a shootbanger; 2. massive single target damage for bossing because the sole endgame mode is killing a boss as fast as possible; 3. a button to do AoE/frontal cone damage to vacuum up trash mobs in non-boss content; 4. works with the supports we have (or get). theyâve been in this design lane for a good year or so and a lot of the work on them is rearranging the pieces w/r/t how the kit actually plays but they all end up in the same place. so you can pull whomever feels good/you are horny for and the only thing theyâre absolutely needed for is their specific shill boss
anyway let me confuse everyone by complaining about how horny the game is now. it was already pretty horny, owing to being saved by horny. and perhaps I should delete the text file I placed in the gameâs directory that turns off the steam censor stuff Mr. CCP asked the devs non-threateningly to implement.
the joke here is this unit is actually covered up because sheâs a launch unit
but like, 2 of the last 3 units just have the shortiest skirts and theyâs asses is hanging out and, even as an assman, Iâm just âreally guys. what are we doing here.â
but they keep adding units who need aiming and Iâve kept to my insane commitment to pull every shotgun unit so here I am, still playing and gambling. hell, they combined the two things and I got a shotgun character who requires aim and ignore that her kit would have made her more suited to using a lever-action rifle because sheâs fun and why the fuck is she licking me as her post-mission animation
Duet Night Abyss: okay this is a new game and unlike other games and inspired by the game itâs ripping offno we can just say itâs ripping it off, Warframe, thereâs no character gacha*. anyway, itâs anime Warframe and unfortunately it came out a week before a weekend where I was scheduled to be locked in a room playing movies so I got a bunch of grind time with it.
I am an idiot and I enjoy the simple act of grinding, so I enjoyed it until I decided to poke at the Warframe-iness of it and build a character in a stupid way where I would ignore their kit and make them a musou character
at which point I figured out that actually the character building in the game is so restrictive that the only sane way to build every unit they have so far is to just smash as much skill damage stats on them as possible because this gives them the most damage possible and survivability is taken care of by âlol donât get hit stupidâ. so you have to play characters by their kits and this even getting into the imbalances caused by the few support units (the best support in the game is murdering everything) and the two poor characters who scale on HP because some overworked designer did not give them enough math to be good (or the classic âwell, since they scale on HP, we had to balance their offensive power with their survivabilityâ swerve)
so once I had this realization, Start>Add or remove programs>yes I would like to uninstall the game
ZZZ: okay I was just kinda going through the motions on this for a while because, eh, dunno. pulled some gloomy schoolgirl who does the good buffs, but I missed her good friend the rabbit girl whoâs so rich that she throws away the sword she just did a big attack with and then pulls a new one from the 3D printer she was on her back. skipped Obvious Foot Fetish character and dragon girl whose tail holds the soul of her unit commander (Iâm sure the story I havenât done explains this)
fast forward to Current Patch, where they added quirky support girl for HP scaling sheer units (itâs okay they actually know how to make HP scaling units in this game) and Yidhari, who is a lady with 4 kraken tentacles coming out where a tail would and she has big hammer and her combat plan is:
- charge up a spin which drains her HP and fills up her meter
- spin on a bitch
- if the enemy is rude enough to attack you while spinning, you press the special attack button and you parry their stupid asses and then smash them with your big hammer and some tentacles you summon because youâre a kraken
they have chosen a sound effect for the parry and put so much goddamn hitstop on it that it directly touched the pleasure center of my brain
Iâm back baby, video games are good again
Genshin: oh boy.
I need to catch you, person reading this who doesnât care about the game, up massively.
okay, they finally added an endgame mode thing that has a decent challenge and itâs fighting 3 bosses with some changes to their kits and itâs interesting even though they are constantly trying to shill Character What You Can Currently Gamble for (1.98 - 475.20 USD please) by introducing mechanics that new characters conviently perfectly bypass, but that just makes them interesting problems to solve. well, until more recently, but thatâs later.
okay for the 5.x patch cycle, we were puttering around not-South America and despite being hyped up as a nation of war, Natlan was bright and colorful and exuberant and showcasing a people who didnât let their neverending war against pure evil stop the party
players did not like it very much
so the game is currently having a kind of âboots on the groundâ moment where weâre taking an entire year off from advancing the main plot to 1. go back the gritty(?) roots of Genshin 2. actually explain what the fuck is going on in the story because 90% of the lore is sequestered away in quests and anciliary text a majority of the playerbase has never touched
so in 6.xVersion Luna, weâre off to Nod Krai which is like, uh, itâs a border country of not-Russia, so I guess itâs like not-Ukraine or not-the Nordics to find our sibling and also our spaceship (okay so now itâs a thing that the Traveler and Abyss sibling came to Teyvat on a spaceship 500 years ago. donât worry about it.) and oh god, please player, hereâs whatâs going on, hell one of the characters straight up goes âhey you should read some of the in-game books my dudeâ
along with all of⌠that, they shoehorned new reactions based around the moon. the Lunar reactions are different from their non-Lunar counterparts in that they get a fancy font when they proc and only limited characters have access to them, which is a choice but look the game is here to make money. they also took the time to design new enemies and bosses to shill their new toys which
okay, I get that the game explicitly exists to get you, the player, to pull for shiny new toys to play the game with and implicitly to get you to spend money in the process of doing so. in the previous two nations, Fontaine and Natlan, we had some mechanics baked into units from their respective regions that, you know, if you had them, they made some bosses or enemies easier to deal with or let you speed along getting to damage phases, but there were always other options in dealing with them and sometimes, the best way of dealing with a problem wasnât in those mechanics (an example: Papillia, a boss players fucking hate, comes online with a shield that breaks once you apply X amount of elemental damage instances to it, a process that can be sped up by Nightsoul, the Natlan-exclusive mechanic. except there were a number of teams/reactions that were faster than most Natlan units, one of which could be done by a team entirely made up of launch 4-star characters). players jokingly called these racist mechanics and
what theyâve added in Nod Krai are zombies, who donât die even if you kill them (they have two HP bars), except if you have enough Nod Krai units to advance the teamâs Moonsign to Ascending Gleam, letting you skip the part where you have to kill them 2-4 times over. a new boss starts with a shield and you have to break it with damage instances again except it then gains immunity to damage element that did the most work, which is an interesting problem and evolution of a previous design, unless if the most damage was done by Lunar reactions, at which point it doesnât gain any immunity
hey these ideas are bad and I get that they got bills to pay but restricting team building to pulling new characters, having insane amounts of brute force or shoving whatever characters can solve the problem into a team and hoping it works is kinda not fun and probably not healthy and also way more racist than what weâve had for the past year
on the other hand, theyâre adding a dragon boy and heâs going to buff a bunch of 1.x characters who were dead in the ditch and also Fischl, who seemingly cannot go 12 months without something in the game being added buffing her
the Prinzessin is simply too strong for everyone around her
anyway Iâm sure all my complaints will go away once they start adding characters I want again (my critiques of Nod Krai design philosophy absolutely have nothing to do with me not wanting to pull any NK units so far, not even the hot kick lady with the Egyptian theming who, like, she doesnât have to be brown or black, I understand Egypt was a melting pot and being from Africa doesnât mean youâre brown but like, câmon, throw me a bone, this isnât even about like âI demand representationâ, no I just like brown ladies)
Urban Yeti
be honest: you know youâve done something to deserve it
okay I spent so much time yelling about racist boss mechanics in hit phone game Genshin Impact that I forgot to mention that they added Roblox to the game
they added Roblox to the game
they whole hog grafted a mode onto the already bloated Genshin install (I think a day one install should be around 120-150GB) thatâs casually (I mean, you would barely know casually) introduced as an item you get at the end of a main story interlude and it turns out the item you get is just a whole little world and you can build stuff in it
so you click the icon on the UI and get punted to customizing boy or girl (cheekily named Manekin and Manekina) and holy shit you can make a black person in Genshin call the newspapers
anyway, people can make games. people have made games. theyâve made platformers and roguelikes and Rocket League and Iâm sure someone has made Steal a Brainrot. they gave the phone game playerbase an editor and Genshin assets to make whatever wild shit they can think of.
it also has dress up but holy shit the dress up is its own separate gacha from the main game and itâs split by gender so 4- and 5-star outfit pieces are gender locked and and the gambling banners themselves are split so they somehow made dress up gambling even more expensive and limiting
Iâm happy for them that they shoved Roblox into an unrelated game, Iâm happy for the people having fun making or playing games with their friends in this context, Iâm happy that exists for everyone who wants to interact with it. I donât care about it because Iâm very much over the idea of every phone game trying to be the one ur game that a player plays exclusively. Mr. John Hoyo, if I want to play Game X, I will just go to Game X instead of Game X in Genshin thatâs there for a week or Game X but someone made it in your Roblox mode
Iâd ask you to do more combat stuff, but, well, I see how thatâs currently working out
Have you tried Helldivers 2, I know you love a grind
Iâm gonna say play Gujian 3. Dunno if thatâs your kind of thing, but I feel that itâs a game that should be played by more than the 10 people that bought it
Someone must have played it bc theyâre doing another one!