Out of virtue of what the local arcades had and from me having a Playstation and not hopping onto the Dreamcast bandwagon until well after the fact, the Alpha series always felt more like the natural evolution of SSF2 over 3 when it finally hit.
2 Likes
Alpha 3 was definitely a new direction for that series when it came out and leaned into maximalism. i remember it being a bit jarring that it seemed lessā¦āserious,ā i guess is how i would put it, but after messing around with it for a few weeks i got used to it and now it just feels like the Alpha game i go back to the most. 2 is still good, but 3 just has more stuff to do. it was also the first SF game (after SF2) that i played on a home console first before ever seeing it in arcades, which was maybe better since the home ports had so many more options and modes.
anyway, having finished all the endings of NieR Replicant, i found myself looking for a new game to pour my time into. and being on vacation now, i decided iād go for Dragon Quest XI S.
i never ended up finishing XI (or getting more than about 20 - 30 hours into it), since S was announced somewhat close to its original release/seemed like a logical thing that would happen, so iām hoping to actually completing it this time.
2 Likes
alpha 3 was my late high school/early college fightman times and i sucked at it, but that announcer lives in my head forever and I am glad the audio of him is just on spotify.
I need to just DL this at some point and chop it into samples to use whenever in stuff.
6 Likes
downloaded KOTOR and then half an hour through the tutorial went āwhat the fuck am I doingā and uninstalled it
IDK what possessed me to imagine D&D: Star Wars Edition would be fun to play but I quickly reassessed my decision
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pretty much the whole game is like that, itās babbyās first skill check + very conservative EU fanfic
fun enough in 2003 but its reputation is a joke
12 Likes
the thing I appreciate the most is how cheeked up my character is
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A portent of asses to come
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Iāve been meaning to play Knights of the Old Republic since the XBox because of its reputation and because it lets you be a bad dude, but it always seemed like something I wouldnāt actually like playing, and it sounds like from your post itās something I wouldnāt actually like playing. I just wanna be the bad guy.
i mean, iāll do it. donāt tempt me.
you might try KOTOR 2, itās unfinished (without fan patches, anyway) but i watched daphny play it and it has a lot of weirdo charm compared to the blandness of KOTOR 1
2 Likes
I think I just hate Star Wars
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I knew it
these games take place in the various red light districts of a world where people think kissing is blowing air in another persons mouth
8 Likes
Iāve been moving through Dr. Slump very slowly, just enjoying the graphics, character designs and music. Gameplay-wise itās pretty much kindergarten homework assignments. Go to all the places and recover an item. You remember all the places, donāt you? Perform every ability in your move set to recover the items.You remember all your abilities, donāt you? Dr. Mashiritoās secret lair is my favourite area.
Note, Arale is wearing the unlockable āJordanā jersey (he was MVP, again, the year this was in development) and Iāll never take it off (Iām just noticing she has her brown hair in this video even though I played the patch with purple hair most of the timeā¦maybe selecting the alt costume switched it back?). You can see the high jump move at 0:16. If you hold the button down you can make Arale twerk. Thought that was worth mentioning.
Iām on the last chapter (Fairy Tale Land) and looking forward to wrapping it up soon because Metroid II: The Return of Samus is pulling me in hard. Been casually following the Metroid thread since Dread was announced and got a real hankering for that sort of thing. The Game Boy game was impenetrable to me as a 10 year-old, think I traded it for a Donkey Kong Land. Strongly vibing with it now on these hot summer nights.
There was a magical moment of moving my morph ball up the walls and over the ceiling, the psychedelic chiptunes measuring my progress as the camera swung into a rhythmic trance to keep upā¦it was the language of level design in a very abstract, understated, tactile way. I feel like Iām deciphering landscapes as lost literature and learning to converse in an alien language.
Eventually, along that path, an insectoid freak moves in a fixed circular pattern and I have to time it just right (using the magnet ball here) to get past, but thereās more terrain to cover, and another freak! With each successive one the stakes are raised higher and higher until I have my reward and can fall down down down and appreciate just how high and far I traversed. Beautiful stuff. I have yet to encounter a āgateā that spells out the need for some ability I donāt have. I get a new ability (which isnāt described to me in text or anything, I have to reveal to myself whatās been gained through playing with the buttons) and my understanding of my environment evolves. The world is the same but my mind has expanded. Maybe later the game gets more explicitly lock-and-key but right now Iām appreciating the graceful unfurling of an underworld.
10 Likes
Played through the lengthy demo of new The World Ends With You and, as someone who kept rolling his eyes at the reveal trailer, Iām in shock that it actually works somehow. Itās stuck in the same limbo the Tokyo Drift crew is in the Fast and Furious series, a bunch of goofballs from Shibuya who are now both a few years and twenty years older at the same time. Everyone whose thoughts you read have modern Twitter handles but still use emoticons like it was still 2007. The intro tries to look 2020 but sounds like a weird Japanese band trying to convey the entire stylistic breadth of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2ās soundtrack in 90 seconds. You get all these inventive, stylish, modern UX ideas that are also painfully Y2K at the same time, you get some of that Dreamcast feeling despite everyone communicating with LINE stickers and words like āsusā. Plus, somehow theyāve finally managed to translate the core rhythm of the original gameās combat into traditional controls and I still get addicted to maximizing difficulty to increase my loot chances and I still remember the goddamn lyrics to half of these songs
17 Likes
i talked myself back into playing more of Prey (2017) and thereās a point where youāre in the guts of the ship (itās called the āG.U.T.S.ā) and youāre using a propulsion device to float around. here you can either go right or left from where you emerge. apparently i went in the wrong direction (towards the Cargo Bay/Life Support instead of the Arboretum), ignoring all objective markers, but didnāt really understand that i was doing that. thereās a really really difficult monster you havenāt seen before in the other direction so i assume theyāre trying to use that to discourage you from going there. i assumed it was just a boss monster/difficulty spike. undeterred, i eventually just gave up trying to fight it and just speeded past it.
then thereās this whole section with Cargo bay doors and a huge open-ended area after that (Life Support). i spent almost two hours clearing out that entire area, including a large Water filtration room where the power was off. i spent the whole area navigating along with the power off, only to realize that the thing to switch the power on was at the front.
anyway, eventually i found another further area even beyond that. it was then when i realized i had spent at least 2 hours going the wrong way, and the game somehow let me do it. it was kind of nice to wander around somewhere not knowing where i was supposed to be, with no promptingā¦ but it also felt kind of weird. but i just assumed the game had opened up and i was in a more isolated/self-directed section! so that was a strange feeling.
anyway then i had to speed back past the boss monster, which i could now kill with some newly upgraded weapons and go back to where i should have been 2-3 hours ago (the Arboretum) and resume the plot. iām so used to these kinds of games more or less gating your progression to a particular path (even when they pretend to be open). so i was just really surprised that i could spend so long clearing out somewhere i guess i wasnāt supposed to be yet. unless that entire sequence was just optional in the first place?
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the one thing that new prey does genuinely, uniquely well rather than just very competently is sequence breaking ā iirc @B_coma was really impressed by how they wrote a bunch of conditional dialogue to explicitly support the possibility that youād hit semi major story beats out of order
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played The Virtual Museum Of Dead Wifery which is great, not even so much a straight parody of old early 2000s artgames as a wander around the whole culture bubble they both helped develop and developed within - presented as this horrible theme park of mangled history and phynance speculation and the ghosts of old forum arguments that people get trapped responding to forever. weirdly compassionate and melancholy while also very funny.
13 Likes