I completed a playthrough of Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection on the ez difficulty(squire).
The most interesting and fun part was the boss fight with the 3 dogs in the 2nd Ghouls n Ghosts type stage, I’d like to see if they changed anything significant there on higher difficulties or in the next loop.
The worst parts are when you have to wait on dragon rollercoasters, jumping shouldn’t be homework. The hammer is a great weapon, but I felt it wasn’t tested against Beelzebub. Trying to hit them while they were big mode or deflecting their swarm form was annoyingly impossible. Then when I switched my weapon to a crossbow and it was surprisingly piss easy.
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That’s interesting. Lemmings, GTA1 and Crackdown seem at first like they have nothing in common but they do share strong core game loops, a desire to create something fresh and new, and most distinctively, a self-consciously edgelordy violence against innocents (tempered by cartooniness)
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Seriously considering an Everdrive 64 now for Body Harvest/Space Station Silicon Valley on my CRT after I finish Crackdown.
kind of amazing how the genesis version of valis 3 is a pretty good game, and the pc-engine version is extremely unplayable bull shit that sucks
can’t believe i’m getting my ass kicked by a fucking bell
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the Genesis version of Valis 3 is awful in comparison to the PCE version because the PCE version understands that you came to Valis to suffer and also the soundtrack is better
besides, if you got to the bell, you got past the worst part (I mean, the ice level is also fucking bullshit but it’s less fucking bullshit than crossing the canal). it could be worse; they had the PCE version in Kusogrande and no one got past the second level because they didn’t know to slide over the one gap you can’t jump (it’s a thing that makes perfect sense once you Valis your brain into submission)
Haunted Junction is a bawdy comic about some kids in high school who have to keep the ghosts under control with the gimmick being that one is Christian, one is a Buddhist and the other is a Shinto priestess. it’s bawdy because of things like one of the ghosts is a high school girl who seduces guys in the bathroom and the female lead is a pedophile and creeps on the little boy ghost at the school. it was turned into a cartoon; said cartoon actually got released in America because we didn’t know better or cared (you’ll be shocked to hear that I own a copy)
now tell me, what kind of game do you think they would make from this
you guessed wrong!
just stare at it
tell me what the fuck is going on there
try
what if you had Puyo but you had four wells and pieces can come from each side of the screen and the game penalizes you for not playing perfectly by shrinking the field that you can actually move the cluster around in (assuming you don’t take one of the control settings that let’s you open and close the circle and spin around the edge of it) and every side has two sets of gravity working upon it after you drop pieces and of course the game expects you to set up chains and shit
if you let it sit at the title screen there is literally like, 25 minutes of “how to understand this nonsense” tutorials
playing it puts you in a different mind space
it’s a good game
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I was visiting the itch store for reasons (one of the bundle games has an awful memory leak I was looking for help with) when I noticed a game featured on the front page made late last year with a name I couldn’t ignore, and was playable within the browser, so I decided to play game inside a game inside a game inside a game inside a game inside a game
It starts as a simple “get orange block onto green goal spot in under par to win” game, i.e. golf. In this golf game you move the orange block by positioning the mouse to show which direction it is hit, and move it further or closer to the block to determine how hard it is hit, i.e. like golf.
As shown in the above screenshot it starts to get less golf-like when it starts introducing recursive properties where you see the same playing field contained within itself, and a gap that allows you to hit the orange square into either larger or smaller versions of its own playing field.
It then gets a bit trickier with multiple green goal spots that must all be touched at the same time (while under par) to win along with various arrangements of playing fields that begin to feel a good bit more chaotic and require some different literal “outside the box” ideas to pass.
Okay, I included a pic of this one just cause I thought it was pretty.
Anyways it does a good job of playing around with the the concept for its 15 stages, it adds some nice little wrinkles that can make it a bit tricky at times but in general it is manageable enough for the 15-20 minutes it takes to pass.
The reason I mention it though, beyond it just being a neat curiosity, is that the game has just about the most satisfying conclusion I’ve come across in a game in quite a while. I actually don’t want to spoil it here as I would like people to experience it for themselves, but I know many of you won’t. So! If there is a chance you are gonna play it yourself don’t read this, but if you surely never will none of the stages are numbered while you are playing them. The final one looks like any other, but when you go to shoot your square through the gap in the playing field like it appears you must it starts chugging as the playing fields are laid out in such a way that it starts throwing what appears to be hundreds if not eventually thousands of orange squares of all shapes and sizes everywhere. The framerate slowly dies, the music starts chugging, the puzzle would technically be beaten as all the goal squares are occupied but it never is registered as the game itself literally seizes due to all of this, a stray single musical beat emerging every so many seconds before even that ceases to be. You are left with the game frozen and unable to do anything besides staring at the unmoving sight of the game literally flooded in orange, here is a pic https://i.imgur.com/eYwKKCT.png
It literally put a huge grin on my face.
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that’s cool as shit but definitely not the intended ending, because there’s a stage after that. the trick to that stage is to get all 4 little ones to land right on the edge of the internal smaller stage, then gently tap each back in to get 4 squares all going the right direction. It took me a bunch of tries, and I ended up getting close to situations you were seeing except not nearly as cool. This is how I got it to work:
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I started replaying dark souls two again. It’s always been my least favourite soul’s game (although I now think blood-borne probably is). I want to revisit just because it seems to me to have a certain flexibility that the other games did not. I can’t really play anything that requires quick reactions and coordinated button presses and Iammostly just walking around the early areas.
Just being able to look out at the sea in Majula gives me some small measure of control that I feel that I’ve been lacking lately that games tend to provide for me. Just pushing how little I can do, mainly just pacing about Majula, has actually been quite therapeutic to work through my feelings about why I play games and why without them I feel like I have nothing to do. This is a whole complicated mess but for some reason dark souls two brings me a measure of peace even though, like I say, I can’t really play it.
My work brings me into contact with a lot of young gamers and their gamer opinions which I think is really grating on me. Conversely when I come here to read about what people are playing it’s interesting but also I feel completely disconnected from it based on a weird sense of participation which derives its power from, I don’t know, playing a videogame every day or something. Being a good consumer or whatever. Soothing myself with dark souls two by not really progressing in it seems to be working well to subdue this nonsense feeling of obligation to media consumption.
Since I can’t really fight anything that isn’t a basic mob, I’m trying to turn my attention to imagining how my character feels moving around. The sunlight in Majula feels warm and hits my bare knees when I peer at the sea. My weapon’s heft is a mixture of solid wooden stability and metal chungot. I can’t sit down to gaze out over the cliffs (I don’t have the emote for it) and so my ready stance always makes me feel a bit tired after looking at it for too long.
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i ordered a dreamcast vga cable so i’ve been messing with that. hydro thunder looks amazing in 480p after growing up playing it in 240p on the N64. i’m using a shitty old monitor from work that has VGA and it looks pretty decent for what it is. part of the reason i set it up on this monitor is the thing rotates pretty easily so i’m going to see if the latency is or is not too miserable to play, like, ikaruga on this thing
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Majula is such an amazing space to be in. It’s made even more amazing by the way you first encounter it coming from the beginning area. It’s cool to read that someone else likes just hanging out there!
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I was partly thinking of Majula when I switched my title to this long phrase last year
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Oh.
…I like the ending I got better, but that’s still good to know!
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the last remnant is so fun now that I have an 18 person squad and the game is throwing huge battles with multiple waves at me. If you hear this song, it’s on
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If I had the know how I’d steal Majula and make an entire small game set in it. Just a mod where it’s me living in a run down town with a talking cat.
I think it would be top tier.
Almost all my good feelings towards Dark Souls 2 come from that town.
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Been playing a lot of Hitman 2 and thinking about Teardown.
Both are what I call “diorama games”; they present you with a meticulously-crafted level, with many intricate parts that combine in interesting ways, and then give you one specific goal (kill this person, grab this item) that tests your knowledge of the diorama. The environment is everything.
edit: To kinda clarify here, I think an important part of what separates a diorama game from other games is the planning period where you are given lots of time and the freedom to explore before you commit to a strategy. Once you commit, you have to time it perfectly, so that all the little watch gears click together in your favor. It’s not about fighting for long periods of time or making the best of a bad situation should things go wrong. In that respect you could call them “heist games”, but it’s the relative lack of risk in the planning and the rigidity in execution that separates Hitman from, say, Payday. That’s why I call them “diorama”, because at their core they are basically a toy.
I genuinely miss when Hitman was briefly an episodic game, because I feel like that format really lends itself well to the genre. Level mastery is such a core component of Hitman, and by giving you a month or two between levels, the game encourages you to master the levels you already have before you move on to the next one. Now, it has to do so with a really annoying “hey! play through the mission again!” prompt every time you finish until you’ve completed all the “Mission Stories”.
Anyway. Paris and Sapienza still rule big time. I love how ordered they are and how they introduce you to important mechanics. Also, all the Hitman 2 levels are pretty good, none stoop to the level of Colorado from season 1 so that’s good.
Holding off on Hitman 3 until the inevitable Steam release. I can wait a while, I haven’t exhausted my current pool of Hitman yet by any means.
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As an outsider looking in this always seemed like such a smart move on their part. All the remixing of objectives and making the most of the really complex level design was always really cool to see.
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Spent a big chunk of my Friday (Saturday) night playing a burned copy of Cleopatra’s Fortune on the Saturn with my duder. It was fun to learn the game together and take turns progressing through the Mystery mode. I really like that all the characters are bouncy dancing and looking like they’re generally having a good time.
Looked it up on e-bay after, which was a mistake. It’s hard to stomach spending over $100 on a little puzzler and, man, why did they have to sexualize this very obviously young girl.
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the ps1 version can be had for pennies, i think
do yourself a favor
never get a perfect
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