sucked into the early mmo ramblings of ff11 still. here’s a shot of some multiboxers i ran into. i kinda miss multiboxing, actually; back when mmos were slow enough you could run multiple characters at a time with macros so easily that anyone could do it. not so much these days.
Necromunda: Hired Gun. Get much more stable framerates now; just stutters during big loads now instead of constantly. Close to perfect achievement score.
Command and Conquer Remastered. Finished the GDI campaign on hard (after a FOUR HOUR LONG final mission, good god) and did some console missions, including one (Secret Mission) that feels designed by an 8 year-old, but in the best way. Here’s the map for it:
That’s 10+ commandos in the bottom left. NOT THAT YOU GET TO USE THEM REALLY.
Risk of Rain 2, since they added a new character and I felt like something kinda mindless. It’s exactly how I left it, and still identical to Risk of Rain 1, and I still love it.
Highfleet. No thoughts yet other than “wow pretty”.
Orcs Must Die 3, which is just another Orcs Must Die game, and that’s okay. I like having popcorn tower defense games, especially when they’re actually trap defense games (like Dungeon Warfare, which is Orcs Must Die without the player character killing stuff).
PSP didn’t really die, it just wasn’t the force that the DS was. A lot of JRPGs and ports and stuff wound up on it. It also definitely unfairly maligned, though, I remember people calling it the “Piece of Shit Portable” before anybody had touched the fucking thing, like it was heresy that Sony would have the audacity to enter the handheld market. It was a wicked emulation device at the time, too, the Go was definitely underrated.
Yeah the DS overtaking the PSP was a shocker and the first year of DS releases was rough. Fall 2005 brought some good shit but I do not recall much pro-DS sentiment online. I don’t think folks really dumped it until, like, post iPhone.
Like, at Japanese PSP launch units were being scalped for $800+. There was tons of hype for the fuckin thing, it was some nutso tech for its time. It had issues with the square button and those gifs of UMDs shooting out of the tray if you very slightly twisted the unit really made the rounds but I’m pretty sure it was nothing compared to how often I saw that one pic of the 8 hands playing PSP while an unloved DS sat in the middle with “Doesn’t anyone want to play with me? :(” or some shit written on its screen.
US PSP releases were some real Playstation All-Stars Shit, just watered down franchise after watered down franchise. even the stuff that’s regarded as good is like, the worst of its peers by far (tactics ogre, peace walker).
wipeout and everybody’s golf were fun and it got a bunch of unoptimized emulator ports early on, was pretty cool how if you bought a Memory Stick Pro Duo™ it was the first handheld of any kind that could run PS1 games, but except for some interesting later JP-only releases it pretty much steadily fell off after the first year. my friend had one and I enjoyed setting up all the unlicensed executables for her but I’m pretty sure if I’d owned one, it would’ve been one of those consoles where I only ever had a single commercially released game card permanently lodged inside and everything else I used it for was homebrew or piracy.
That’s right (after being ensorcelled by Metroid II and then starting Thief Gold (which is pretty cool so far but…well idk yet)) I did beat Dr. Slump.
Do you like Dr. Slump?
Do you like low-poly minimalist dollhouse dioramas?
Do you like doing kindergarten-level homework?
If you answered “yes” to any of those Q’s I can recommend playing Dr. Slump (if you answered “yes” to more than one I insist).
I thought I captured the ultimate battle with the cock-cannoned Mashirito bot but I messed up and the video came out blank. Some gifs:
Love it when a game let’s you hang out after all is said and done. Everyone in Penguin Village congratulates you on beating the game and asks to see your cool moves to further boost your metre which can be spent on more frivolous (but appreciated) things like “change the colour of text boxes” or “change the transition wipe to a star wipe”. Chill hangoutable game this.
I played this under the ideal circumstances possible (outside Japan) with a friend visiting over the course of a week. It’s a shame that co-op MGS dead ended here. Peace Walker’s hybrid MGS3/4 sandbox in the hands of two-to-four Snakes set up goofy practical humor and a new dimension of the classic enemy AI manipulation.
Sandwiched between MGS4 and Ground Zeroes it also felt positively jubilant. The production values were absurd on the PSP in a way that I’m guessing echoes how MGS felt on the PS1 - credits over the intro mission gameplay, original score so good they just reused it in V. We laughed so hard we cried at the final boss (“Pacifica Ocean,” not Peace Walker itself.) You could put non-unique codes in to wear the Uniqlo tie-in shirts in game. The Japanese version had Doritos product placement but the US version did not so Snake eats tortilla chips.
It has one particular instance of unforgivable misogyny in it that comes to a head in Ground Zeroes but much less misogyny than 4. It’s more sincerely interested in mlm connecting with the Sandinistas and FSLN to stop nuclear proliferation.
Portable Ops is truly awful, though. Fulton recovery is silly but far less silly than dragging a half dozen bodies back to a truck to meet Roy Campbell.
It even has the sorty prep screen, FOB invasion multiplayer, and later MGO so I have to assume it’s a cut feature. It would have made a lot of the repetition and traversing the map work.
I beat Kowloon Highschool Chronicle just now. Gosh darn this game likes to ramp up the difficulty exponentially with every chapter. I ended up switching to easy mode just so I could finish it off without having to grind for more hours. Still reasonably challenging at that level I think.
I got three girls including the teacher to fall in love with me, which I was hoping would set up some joke ending where they beat me up for being a sleazy womaniser or something. This didn’t happen, but seems I may have gotten the ‘bad’ end anyhow? There’s a whole section of the dungeon I couldn’t get access to, so I’m guessing the answers lie in there. The only FAQs are in Japanese and are a pain to navigate, so I think I’m just going to leave it as is.
Nocturne is on sale now, which is really bad timing because after this game and all the SaGas, I feel like I probably don’t have the energy for another super challenging RPG, but everyone raving about it on here has got me interested. Lucky I have Sakuna, so I think I’ll buy this while it’s hot and grow some rice in the meantime
i think peace walker suffered hugely when it was taken out of it’s portable context with the HD collections, but that must be where 90% of people have played it at this point.
