Games You Played Today: 13 Going On 30

[shnozlak]

My fave thing we did in Time splitters 2 (GC) was custom death match maps.

We made one that was a single halway forming a square ringing the max map size perimeter. The lighting was pulsing red and blue light. There are several half height boxes down the hallways for cover. Each box has a sniper rifle beside it. Spawn points are in opposite corners.

The game is to try to guess which way the other person is going (full on screen look encouraged) and then engage them at max range if possible. You are dashing between light pulses to close the gap. Shooting down range to try to get a reaction and hoping you arent guessing wrong about where they are as you dash down a maybe empty hallway to get to the next corner.

[Kilroy]

I beat Dragon Rage. A review will come at some point.

[Rudie]

As I am now In The Castle of Castlevania clone: Chronicles of The Wolf I will give my thoughts on it. It is by the same team as Castlevania LeCarde Chronicles 2. I really really loved that game. It had thoughtful evil platforming and enemy placement. Each upgrade/levelup was meaningful and felt like clinging desperately to being just strong enough for the next objective. Then you had a full castlevania castle that was a little bit dissappointingly linear.

Now they have a full commercial game made on some ancient windows dev kit that they used to its maximum potential even as you feel it creak and groan. Also they smeared everything SuperEagle style which looks gross close up and fine from my couch.

Just from that, the whole thing has been a little disappointing. There’s been no sicko platforming. The enemies have either been there or wildly incompatible with my weapons/moveset. They like to use this dog enemy that goes under your sword/gun attacks and either just runs straight into and you jump OR pauses at the last second and you need to slide under. But if you decided it was gonna run straight you are stuck in the air and take the hit from the jump attack. When this same AI applies to a giant recurrant boss with an iffy hitbox, well.

I’ve collected a bunch of keys hiding as magical abilities, and you know I love that. They all cost magic meter which replenishes way too slow.

There has been 3 underwater areas I’ve neglected because the enemies all one shot you underwater and you’re taking chip damage. I suspect there is some important items in there, because the towns have been extremely unhelpful itemwise. The warp points are very hard to find and also inconvinent and all require a trek to go to and then a trek to wherever I was trying to go in the pre-castle.

The castle has a metroid 1 style vertical room which made me go “ah hell yeah.” It does not have the little spiney guys or invincible hockey pucks.

[Grandpa]

I slept on it and woke up and figured out exactly how to get past the part I was stuck on. Helped that I had to re-travese a prior area that was clue enough to what I needed to do.

The area immediately after that was the shortest I’ve encountered in the game so far, but was entirely dedicated to using momentum in such a way that I could not believe they accounted for it this whole time up til now.

I’m once again stuck but…I know I can do it. Probably.

Öoo is a good game.

[gary]

i love the play → walk away → come up with solution hours later loop of puzzle games

probably why i didn’t love blue prince, as many of us have covered

[username]

@gary

i love the play → walk away → come up with solution hours later loop of puzzle games

So my pick away at for a few minutes at a time every few days puzzle game for the past so many months has been Catrap for the Gameboy (someone here is the one who spoke well enough of the game for me to give it a shot, thanks to whoever it was!). I hit a point where I just wanted to finish it before the end of the year and thanks to a good run of luck I made relatively quick work of the puzzles that made up the late 90s and unlocked the final 100th stage which was… a lot.

(Yeah it’s a small yet way too clear screengrab, there ain’t a lot of them out there)

While the game doesn’t have a ton of a rep beyond “good GB puzzle game” it does have a small one of having a very rough final puzzle. Gave it a few shots, ran into obvious problems, then couldn’t play it for the better part of a week.

Last night a sort of mental picture of said stage popped into my head alongside an idea for an unusual but kinda intriguing opening series of moves. I figured it’d be at least worth checking out to see what it opened up and how it’d likely fail, just to get a better grasp on how the puzzle unfolds in general; the stage was beaten in under three minutes and the end credits rolled.

Sometimes one’s subconscious brain just bails you out.

Anyways it’s a really solid puzzle game, not just in a “it is a 1990 version of a 1985 release that came out right near the birth of puzzle video games” sense but in an actual just plain very good one. Looking into it it turns out there were a few follow-ups to the original 1985 version so I don’t know if they simply grabbed the best of the bunch for this one or they had just gotten enough reps in to know the best way to build them, but it just has consistently well considered puzzle design that both feels ahead of its time while still feeling a step away from what a more modern puzzler would offer. Definitely recommended.

[jujotech]

Iron Lung is cute, it ends on a rare jumpscare that feels earned yet feels cheap well it’s still a jumpscare. It’s very scripted and on rails and there’s not really much to it like you take photos of strange rocks and bones, whatever, but you can decide to get into it by the end, it’s fun to roleplay. There’s a bit of lore thankfully not much, it’s halfway between evocative and thin veneer of meaning something, it mostly works if you don’t try to think too much about dying light of dead stars and other lovecraft-flavoured clichés too much. It’s not bad, it’s a little stimulating and it’s very short, but it’s a little too focused on being a scary game for men.

I’ve always been really into the concept of games where you control a person controlling a little vehicle that you can walk around, one additional layer of perception removed from the world you’re navigating, and it’s very well realised here.

Anyway wikipedia tells me apparently the dev was unsurprisingly a bit of a misogynistic dickhead but hopefully he got better because he seems to have potential even though his other games look too boring for me to care about right now.

Five bags of Doritos.

[Rudie]

I got stuck in the castle for an hour. I think in the same way I got stuck in the fangame. There was a gate in the castle that the solution was “why don’t you jump over it.” I’m not sure why it was structured like this, after a full game of linear immediately behind the gate it started showering me in keys. God damn I had so many keys. Keys that disabled the 4 different instant kill rooms. A triple jump. A triple air-dash. An extra floor on the elevator I didn’t even know I needed. I even got 7 keys to “something smaller than a door”. Don’t know what that is about!

I’m pretty close to the end but got plenty of loose ends on the map to mop up. Good mediocre game.

[aggie]

i played like a dragon: pirate yakuza in hawaii for 17 minutes before asking for a refund

[Felix]

I honestly don’t know why I liked that one as much as I did, I think I was just impressed with the degree to which it was made out of spare parts and got moving quickly after infinite wealth which feels like it’s in a tutorial for as long as Gaiden and Pirates’ entire playtime

[aggie]

i thought my hiatus from the series had been long enough. i was wrong!

[OneSecondBefore]

Someday I’ll pick up Infinite Wealth again, but years after taking a break, my interest level is still hovering around 4.3%.

[daphaknee]

all new yakuza games have the energy of a cover band who plays at weddings and sweet 16s

[Cerium]

The live action cutscenes in that game made me more uncomfortable than every Hisayasu Satō film combined.

[lofia]

infinite wealth was a huge sandwich that i somehow finished all of and am still working off

but i also played through like a dragon and then 6 and then gaiden before i got to infinite wealth so it’s also kinda on me. too many sandwiches in me for a lil majima snack

[Mikey]

I’ve still been meaning to play Infinite Wealth but man I liked the ending of Like a Dragon enough that I almost don’t want to risk spoiling my feeling of closure

[Felix]

Infinite Wealth is super disappointing after Like a Dragon imo. like it’s still fun but it’s just like… not motivated or novel at all in comparison to probably the second best/most approachable game in the series.

0 and 7/LaD are still the easiest to recommend, I personally really like 5 and 6 but idk if I’d suggest someone get through 1-4 on the way there, Pirates and Gaiden are at least very fun and approachable, and the Judgment games don’t do much for me

I preordered Kiwami 3 because it’ll be on Switch 2 and that feels like a good way to play a Yakuza

[Felix]

the problem with 1-4 is:

• there is basically not a good version of 1 to recommend unless you played it in 2006 because the original is rough and the old localizations weren’t as much fun but Kiwami 1 is just boring right after playing 0
• 2/K2 are both super average overall and do you really need a very average game in a 10 game series
• 3 … wait for Kiwami, the original localization was bad and the early PS3 engine is gross
• 4 is also in the “ideally you played it when it was new” category, it’s probably the best of these first 4 and the US PS3 release was good in comparison to 3 but solidly below 5-7 and 0

[geist]

I’m really glad I tried zero and didn’t like it. one of those rare instances where pretty much everyone agrees zero is the best of the series, so if you don’t like that one you can just write the whole thing off and not think about it again

[GherkinForce]

I liked the Pirate Yakuza game too, but it definitely feels like the most skippable game in the series. Almost no new stuff outside the ship sailing / combat and the plot feels a bit phoned in.

Found it weird that at the end they float the idea of magically curing Kiryu’s cancer