i have been told, but even so- it still bothers me. like, enough to where i’d have a difficult time enjoying the game because of it
seem to remember something about dusting the fan blades going a long way in reducing the noise, but i wouldn’t trust myself not to break something in the attempt
Ocarina of Time 3DS
One of the main guy’s default Jedi powers is audio logs.
Started FFX. Completely passed me by at the time I think I went from VIII to XV. Did play the XII remaster.
This one is SBs favourite I believe.
Installed Morrowind. Walked out of the starter town, entered a door to a cave, and was immediately stabbed to death.
That’s what you get for wandering into someone elses cave
Glad you’re taking after me Winker.
(I just played through it for the first time)
i talked to a guy who was like “watch out for thieves! they’ll kill you dead. why don’t you give me 100 gold?” and i didn’t have 100 gold so he killed me dead
it’s very funny when the dramatic music swells as I’m fumbling my way around someone’s tavern I accidentally stumbled into.
play hunt showdown imo. basically nothing to loot except the literal objective bounty. my go-to after i burned out on apex (last straw was them re-balancing the damage of the guns. i have no intention of reinternalizing how fast i can die if the end result is just playing apex again).
whenever it snows i wanna play n64 games cuz of nostalgia so i bought one of those switch n64 controllers last week and it showed up today. i haven’t actually played anything with an actual n64 controller in forever and holy shit it felt like the first time i have ever played a video game in my entire life. took me so long to bring the baby penguin to its mom in mario 64.
gonna return to smtv (maybe almost done with canon of creation) soon but i played so much of it while sick last week that i kinda wanted to do something else for a bit.
Adventure of Samsara is a metrovania by Brazilian devs ilex and published by atari as a sort of reimagining of the VCS title Adventure from 50 years ago. The game is weird and janky in a not euro way. It crashes a lot on the switch. The controls are laggy in a way that is predictable, like there’s a beat where your character’s knees bend for a beat before jumping when you press the jump button.
You rescue children held in birdcages that insist on the player answering a riddle or koan whenever you find one, and because your character never speaks the answer is always silence. Visit the sanctuary later and the guardian acknowledges that the children teleport back home when you free them from their cages and implies that teleportation is just a thing that children can do because their souls are not burdened and that your character learning a teleportation spell may either be a form of regression.
The character from the 2600 Adventure appears as an astronaut who has been summoned into the future across time as well as space. He has a sort of cloak that hangs down from his shoulder pauldrons giving him the square silhouette he had in the 2600 game. The dragons from the 2600 game are in the game and look sort of like trogdor but without the beefy man arm.
There are necromancer to fight, but about halfway through the game the necromancers are revealed to be the same as the dreamers the player is protecting but they are paralyzed by a fear of both physical death and mental decay. Then it’s time to enter the astral plane, which is also a toxic waste dump that necromancers and hollow people can’t access because the gates are mirrors and nobody who is vain enough to believe they are enlightened is able to see their own reflection.
The guy from the 2600 game directs you to an interdimensional ark. and then the game ends.
It’s low res and the controls owe more to castlevania than metroid because there is so much start up animation. It’s an ok game but I can’t recommend it unless you find games that are buggy charming
I helped to organise a narrative games expo called Adventure X. One of the perks was to get to play a bunch of demos and talk to devs etc. Here’s a bunch of stuff I played, mostly adventure games.
Panthalassa: Aesthetically a very strong identity. You’re a submarine AI that gets hacked and trapped in a sort of self-discovery narrative. The tech sounds and music are really good and I got to chatting with the developer about influences. Somehow I guessed that the text noise and music were inspired by many Grasshopper games like Silver Case and Masafumi Takada more generally. For the demo they got a gigantic stationary rollerball mouse to provide a bit more of that diegesis on the table. I found it a little tricky to use given my hands but really fell in love with the game aesthetically. My favourite of the show.
Contact Protocol: played this on a specially chosen retro keyboard complete with a cashier printer for printing out information about ships. The game has you checking ship call signs and idents to determine if an oncoming spaceship is who they say they are. The minimal interface works well to provide a lot of ambiguity as you only know the relative position of the ship and can’t see it since they are usually thousands of miles in the distance. Typing in and checking call signs is really just a matter of spot the difference and they try to vary things up by giving incomplete records that force the player to check other indicental information, sometimes making the decision whether or not to arm missiles (done in this case with a real physical key turn to unlock and prime the weapon) a bit more of a gut response. Works well but will likely get some polish for release next year.
Asocial Giraffe: Decent adventure puzzle game where you have to avoid people while doing an everyday thing. The happy mid-century advert people are like explosive mines that go off if a conversation begins. You get overwhelmed and have to start again from the screen before. It works well as little point and click vignettes and no action or scene transition takes too long.
Dark Tides: Neat Victorian adventure. You play as a fake psychic who actually gets psychic powers and is accompanied by a demon possessing a stoat. Feels like a very classic 00s adventure game. I didn’t get very far in. Of the games I played this had the most classic adventure game puzzle design with a lot of walking around to try different combinations of items on things. The clue is a generally more subtle than the more accessible approach a lot of games are opting for now but I think it just needs more time in the oven. Good expressive characters and tone though the devs say they wanted to try make the game actually scary at points which was an interesting goal given the game’s style.
Ghost Haunting: Really good pixel art and does a good job of making pixel-hunting accessible. You can just see all interaction points by holding a key and puzzles clearly owe a lot to Lucas Games. The main character is so smug and arrogant but this works for a little kid.
Trans Theft Horso: A bawdy, punchy comedy adventure. I didn’t fully grasp the premise at the time but the individual scenarios and writing carry themselves quickly enough that you don’t really mind. The writing often is very funny but it is a very strongly British flavour where lots of silly things happen. The title made me play it. Looked up the premise later.
A colourful western fantasy adventure, to save trans joy! Adric Belfonte embarks on a happy nightmare into the wild and bewaffling West. Explore the maddening desert, defy the admirals, ride the animals, fight the haters, and save the missing hormones!
In their Shoes: Mostly text-focused but the art style is an interesting lo-figurative scene setter putting you in the shoes of a bunch of regular people. 7 stories for 7 characters leads to 49 with a special 50th at the end. I only played the one story but thought it did a pretty good job of giving you compelling options within a mundane work conversation.
Mithra: Mystery adventure game that has pretty nice art and progression. I didn’t really get that far because I encountered a puzzle that requires you to order six different pieces of music whilst also looking for signals within the pieces of music that require you to reverse or slow them down. It was a lot to take in after just getting to grips with how to navigate an environment and inspect items.
Dolos: the interface resembles work training and management software quite accurately. Possibly too accurately? It actually becomes a bit unpleasant to look at and play. You’re essentially tasked with assigning people job roles based on aptitude tests and ratings. It’s sort of a satire of real-life systems that are used in schools or job centres to align people’s skills to the employment available. It recalled a memory I had of school where I took a test that said I should one day become a ‘paper technologist’ or work as a farmer. The actual game itself I think is too complicated. I often found myself just dragging and dropping things out of frustration and didn’t really feel that compelled to really read through the entire interface and see what the system was trying to get me to do. Again, I think it’s used to closely to real business software that is just a UI deluge that requires being compelled by employment training to become proficient at.
The Dark Queen of Mortholme: Reverse Dark Souls bossfight where the continuity of the hero’s attempts at the boss are made diegetic. You play as the Dark Queen and have a bunch of boss moves. The player levels up a bit every time they attempt to fight you again and there is a little bit of dialogue in between each attempt. There are multiple endings in the game is very short, but a good execution of the idea. It doesn’t really need to be more than just this one scene. I got the impression there some kind of romantic edge to what’s going on which I feel like is a good angle to explore in terms of the naturally sadomasochistic relationship you have with most Souls bosses.
The event itself was really fun and chilled out since the exhibitors tend to be much less corporate than typical games events. Had more of a grassroots community feel. The only downside is that narrative focused games tend to demo very poorly in an event environment because they take a while to get going and you just feel like you’re holding things up or need to get to other places. Hopefully they return again next year.
I’ve found a new favorite thing in Helldivers 2: You queue for random, and join some Johnny “I’m 12” Numbnuts’ second-ever game, and this guy is in way, way, way over his head. He is in a death spiral.
You essentially take his hand through a few objectives, picking up new players along the way, until you have a full team. The team comp is now [NumbNuts, Lvl 0], [TheGodOfPissing, Lvl 12], [Me, Lvl 80], [避孕套破坏者, Lvl 120].
We are near cap on number of deaths, the Level 0 and the Level 12 making every single possible mistake for the first time ever. They are desperately racing toward the extraction calldown, fleeing legions of bugs or bots.
You leave them to their cowardice, and charge for the last three objectives on the opposite side of the map. THE LEVEL 120 OF COURSE FOLLOWS YOU TO CERTAIN DEATH.
What follows is the most nail-biting shitshow imaginable as only two divers throw everything they have at two heavy outposts and like an ICBM launch. You are all the other has. This is true comradery.
As you reach the second of these, the final countdown timer starts, because of course the Level Nothings have begun extraction without the full team. This puts a 2 minute timer on your efforts, you split up, blowing up the second and getting to the third just in time to desperately help your teammate fight off the enemy as the extraction shuttle is closing its doors. You complete the objective, you give them the open hug emoji, we embrace, doomed in body but not in soul.
It’s self-evident and unnecessary to state that most of the things you post are very characteristically ‘you,’ but I think it’s an important preamble to this statement: I’ve never seen you post something so characteristically you as this anecdote. It is the essence of Mothra.
The most poignant part of this for me was the very end, you have to hellbomb this robot base with winding cement walls. I’m running to meet up with the last guy, he has bots out the ASS and clearly just ran past them to get to the calldown spot. We can’t possibly kill them all, I’m just shotgunning through things in my way to get to the top of the tower. I get there in time to keep them off his back long enough for him to plug in the combination on the console, the hellbomb winds up, we do not move, I just open my arms and he hugs me and the blastwave vaporizes us completely.
A beautiful moment… perhaps love can bloom on the battlefield…
help. stop. you are making me care about computer games again.
stop. just stop.
I tried to skip some exposition, and Rin got so mad at me the entire game window’s color palette swapped. And then she went ahead and unspooled on me all ~twenty pages of exposition anyway
Got into He is Coming
It’s chill and quick. Just fun to do run after run. I’ve mostly been relying on luck and gotten into the hard mode of both levels but haven’t been able to beat either yet.
I don’t usually leave the music on for games but I have really been enjoying this one. In the second level you can go to different areas and each one has a different really good song. The game over music is a standout which really softens the large volume of failed runs I’ve been having.
I’m sure you can go big brain on this one but I am enjoying the bone headed approach. I also enjoyed what I played of 9 Kings from this developer. I think this is more suited to my style but I’ll have to compare the play times when I feel done with this one.
Sorry, We’re Closed is an interesting game to have bought alongaside Evil Tonight. Tonight makes up for its lack of ideas by doing the “2D Resident Evil” thing extremely well. Meanwhile, I’m not sure the gameplay of Sorry would be enough to make the game tolerable if its characters and scenarios and aesthetics weren’t conceptually really appealing. I’ve seen it described as “gay Silent Hill”, which might be the case? I’ve never played a Silent Hill, so it mostly makes me think of Killer 7.
