Speaking of itch games, I’ve been playing Slice & Dice, which is a rogue lite dice building dungeon crawler. I like it a lot!
It does a bunch of small things that make the game a dream to play. For one, there’s an undo button, which means I can try new things in peace without worrying about ruining my run. For two, dice have way less real estate on each of their faces than a whole card so its way easier to figure out what your “hand” does, and hence what future dice do. For three, while not quite a class tree, it has a class pool where you get better and better buds for your party with better dice faces as you go on in a run. Getting to the tier 3 in any class still hits my brain in all the right places. I guess those parts of my brain are over developed from years of Pokemon, Digimon, FF tactics, what have you. Oh and for four, it doesn’t have any of those gotcha moments where you just lose a run when you encounter a new boss or enemy type, I think in part because it has an undo button. I’d recommend it, I had a great time.
another nightmare clear, I think 6 units is “optimal”
brickyard and school are important to have ASAP so you can place bricks without spending turns and have goblins and orcs basically acting in stasis as the dungeon expands. as long as you keep your goblin alive it’s the only one you need.
I read through the list of changes made for this game and I had no idea Near had put so much work into this, holy shit. Comparing screenshots and just everything is slightly better or massively better. Really impressive stuff.
Anyway the battles are very slow but I’m trying to not fast-forward out of some sort of misplaced sense of “accuracy” (I am playing this on a handheld system using a fairly poor CRT shader in English with a patch that fixes bugs in the original game, this is not accurate, but here we are anyway). I’ve finished uh, 4 battles? Bout to storm a castle.
I played a little bit of Maken X on the Dreamcast and, what a weird game. First person mind control adventure whose reputation for wonky voice acting is perhaps only partly deserved. Some of the voice actors are doing fine and some have clearly been given no direction. Definitely ambitious for the time in its delivery of cutscenes and dialogue. The actual gameplay is very odd, and the difficulty seems to waver wildly; an optional boss I elected to fight was a pushover, while the main story has some much more difficult parts.
There’s also a body-swapping mechanic, “brainjacking,” which while poorly explained initially in-game, robs the people you take over of their “psi,” putting them in a vegetative state whilst outside of your control. One early point sees you deciding whether to accept a mission given to you by a character, and if you accept they offer for you to use their body to do so, knowing full well that it robs them of life. If you don’t accept, they just sort of stand there awkwardly, and it seems that you can either decide to kill them and take their body anyway (which the character you’re sharing a mind with chastises you for) or possibly walk away (I only just thought of that possibility, the game doesn’t make the next objective clear in that case, might have to see what happens there…)
Your first opportunity to brainjack as the player is presented as the only obvious means of progression, but it appears that none of them are actually mandatory, and the character you get there as might in fact be a better choice for the next few missions?
The actual combat is kind of neat, you have a lock on, which makes the single-stick controls vaguely workable. I’d have appreciated a quick 180º turn button, but no such thing is present. Most enemies will take critical damage from behind, so if your character can jump high enough, you can leap over them and attack from there. Once you’re in the rhythm of this it’s pretty fun. Some enemies know what you’re up to and will spin around quickly. There’re also some enemies whose pattern I’ve yet to work out, they attack twice in a row, which your block can’t handle, and they’re very difficult to hit without a ranged attack otherwise. There’s a trick I’m missing there for sure.
Anyway, it’s interesting, and I seem to be doing okay so far. I’m curious where it’s going.
Deleted my Animal Crossing island. I could have terraformed my island to hell and back, but I was just tired as hell of it, the animals on it, getting the same DIY cards every day.
“If I ever decide to play this again, I’m doing it right. I’m taking my time. Treating it as a get-away. Not min-maxing shit. Just having a good time with it.”
Cut to me rerolling the opening like ten times til I got an island that looks good, and immediately buying a wetsuit so I could scrounge around on the other parts of the island before Blathers gives me the pole vault recipe. Got enough money to pay for my first house upgrade before it’s even built.
I remember more than anything the India level being cool looking! Recommend taking the detour to see it.
I originally played this game on a cd-r and it was clearly too big, one of those games that had a 99 minute CD version out there. So the regular CD version had some music missing.
Later I got a Japanese copy and I swear it’s way easier than the American version? But I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere else.
To my surprise, sitting through the cutscenes in English is actually a better experience than trying to skip through them in Japanese. I had to be invested in the story/characters more than I initially expected to be able to have a good time with it.
Very much into Road 96’s structural ambition, but its tone is something else. Its fictional world revolves around a tyrannical fascist president whose five letter name starts with T and who loves building walls. Its very first dialogue (between a random bus passenger and a black policewoman who’s apparently escorting a teen to a labor camp for a crime of running away from home?) goes like this:
The second NPC I befriended in the game exchanged about ten lines with me before deciding to help me rob a diner, but once inside its storeroom they got distracted by a random newspaper talking about publically known historical events and immediately went:
The game is lovely in the ways it tries to contextualize IF-like ideas for narrative branching within Telltale-like presentation, connect unrelated story nodes in a roguelite-inspired way and use unexpected minigames as grace notes, but when the writing gets so unwieldy (and the direction follows suit 90% of the time) it feels disturbingly weird and embarrassing, like an AI Dungeon experience based on Dontnod/Fullbright/Campo Santo games that keeps going off the rails. Consider this last part an endorsement if you want to
i remember being curious about maken x because it was a time when console FPS games really hadn’t become standardized yet and there was a lot of weird shit like that out there. but i never played it…
broke 2000 points in Wratch, towards the end when heroes were spawning in every orifice I had to desperately pull a Dig Dug maneuver to spawn more walls to eke out the last few points while mages and my own dragons were destroying other buildings
