I am playing Doom 2016. I am enjoying it, but “Hurt me plenty” difficulty is too hard and I had to move to “I am too young to die”. Should I be ashamed?
yes
2 Likes
this sucks to hear, especially as I haven’t done much of any story stuff in Act III yet
but quite frankly, I’m more up in arms that the fishing is some cast-and-pull nonsense and not like, fishing
1 Like
i thought it was fine in the moment but yeh it felt way weaker than usual
1 Like
Have been completely obsessed with the mobile roguelite Buriedbornes for like a good week now. Its strongest points are looking like a J-Wizardry and having like 50 classes ranging from things like Charon from Greek mythological fame, and a caterpillar (pictured). The game is all about making broken (or in the caterpillar’s case ‘baseline functional’) character builds and progressing through a fairly simple branching-path dungeon. The english version is a really inconsistent fan translation which adds a lot to the vibe too.
26 Likes
I really like the setting of Syberia, and the general premise. I do not like the plodding pace of navigation/puzzling, and some of the writing and acting are suspect. I read a plot synopsis and it sure goes some places! But after an hour or two I think I’ve seen as much as I feel like I need to personally.
3 Likes
played some GT Sport with my wheel this weekend in anticipation of GT7 bc I basically hadn’t touched sport at all since I got the fanatec and had mostly used it with forza / dirt (it is impractical with wreckfest and snowrunner, however enjoyable they are)
it is stately and enjoyable enough, they definitely didn’t have enough gas in the tank for a full entry at this point though I can see why they basically took the whole generation off to let forza run wild. I like how they start you off with like, a miata, an evo, and a golf, so you can pretty much get all the hits in
the handling model of GT seems pretty conservative at this point, though I like how your drifts feel earned
3 Likes
26 Likes
this is fun but are there really no friend leaderboards outside the weekly challenge nonsense (ok it’s cute but it’s not much)
i know at least three of you are playing it, can somebody make a thread, i want to have warioware high score fights
2 Likes
tales of arise is actually pretty good, like skies of arcadia levels of tastefully benign jRPG production design here
this month is probably the widest open I’ve been without having other projects I need to keep up on in like a year and a half and I think I may spend the next 3 weeks just playing this + deathloop + the battlefield beta + the outer wilds DLC
New Warioware is OK but it feels tired to me, like they’re going through the motions. There are still some pretty inspired microgames, but on the whole it’s missing the spark that many of the earlier titles had. This feels like the work of a team checking all the boxes and respecting the franchise legacy (I think this applies to a lot of Nintendo’s Switch games).
I miss the messy, weird kitchen-sink approach of the older games, where it felt like the team was allowed to spend time creating whatever odd gimmicks and bullshit made them excited. I’m thinking about stuff like the telephone in Twisted where you could find phone numbers, dial them, and get little strange recordings. The silly unlockable “souvenirs” and minigames are definitely the aspect I miss the most in this one. The multiplayer minigames it comes with are mostly pretty shallow. None of them are anywhere near the level of the Pyoro games in previous titles.
7 Likes
I wonder what new ground they could have covered using the switch then I remembered the 1-2-Switch launch title (by the same team I think?) that did some funky joycon-based things and felt like they wanted to steer away from being a sort of midlife tech demo. The microgames by themselves feel kind of samey but the goofy absurd energy is still there for me. I think going back through each stage with the “use all” option and being forced to wrap your head around using the weirder less mobile characters to finish games is where the fun/longevity in this one would be.
3 Likes
i played blue stinger on twitch last night, and this game is AMAZING (aside from the freezer section)
https://clips.twitch.tv/TsundereAmazonianBottleGivePLZ-9-PeIWgVOxWLa_m5
3 Likes
Similarly feeling underwhelmed at Warioware GIT. Needs more weird easter eggs and toys. Feels like a bunch of fighting games no-one wants to play once you unlock the party stuff. Weirdly it gives me Melee flashbacks where break the coins is its own unique minigame depending on the character. Except who wants to master all 3 levels of 200+ minigames with however many characters (18?). Surprisingly fun in co-op which I think is the assumed default mode.
3 Likes
yeah i do think the idea of a bunch of minigames where you control a little bud but each time you play you have a different little bud feels itself like it would be a side minigame in a full warioware rather than the centerpiece
but i still like it! just wish it had a leaderboard or two lol
4 Likes
i almost asked
don’t think i can follow you down this road though. “artes” may be a bridge too far
8 Likes
I also closed the game at the first save point and wrote a 2000 word mini essay on futility before I allowed myself to proceed
12 Likes
Select Button
15 Likes
Finished Harmony of Dissonance! I have extremely mixed feelings about it.
My summary is that this game looks cool, has like 3 real bangers in the soundtrack, and mostly plays like shit. I also got really, really stuck about 75% of the way through because there are five different kinds of locked doors, I only had keys for two, and I missed the one door I needed to open to continue.
I also got real mad at IGA after reading about the development of this game, since he totally shits on Circle of the Moon. Which is a better game!! Like, if you’re going to shit on a game in the series you work on you have to do better than this.
But after getting past the one horrible chokepoint, I breezed through the endgame and it was…fine? I had to look up a walkthrough for the last bits of Dracula because this commits a cardinal Metroidvania sin (letting you mark a room as visited on your map, but it still has something impossible to get to in it, making it basically invisible to me when I finally can go get it). But I dunno, it’s essentially an okay game.
Detailed thoughts and shitloads of screenshots
Basically, I think this game was built almost entirely as a reaction to Circle of the Moon. The protagonist is fast and has way more framed of animation, all the enemies are bigger, the game is bright and gaudy as hell, there are skulls everywhere, there’s a lot more dialogue, there’s a shop (that you still can’t sell things to), etc. etc. It feels like IGA thought this would be some sort of return to form after CotM deviated so much from SotN.
And it sort of is a return to form! But it lacks the level design chops of SotN and is astonishingly easy.
To the first point, the castle design in this game borders on atrocious. The castle is essentially four castles for the first half of the game, split by impassable chokepoints and the “two castles” conceit (which is really cool on paper!!), so navigating it is a lot of trying to remember which fast travel spot you need to go to get to this other place.
And since I did so much backtracking, it ended up becoming very apparent how poorly thought out the enemies and their placement are in this game. Enemies are basically meaningless after a while! And there are so many empty rooms!! Like, why make me spend 10-30 seconds navigating a room entirely bereft of enemies or…anything? It’s just a time tax and I don’t understand it.
The Chapel of Dissonance is full of this shit in particular. There are two rooms with elevators that let you skip the entire room because it’s otherwise empty! And then another room that should have had an elevator but doesn’t because…god-knows why.
I really want to hammer on how bad the castle design is. At the point where I got stuck, I visited every spot (except 1) where there was clearly a locked door that I couldn’t pass. Multiple times, I would open one of the doors only to be presented with a different obstacle that I could not pass!! Which is like, why even have the first door if the second one just has a different key. It feels so fucking bad and it happened like 5 times. And it’s not like there’s a little reward, no, it’s just like “here’s a brick wall hope you brought your brick wall exploding gloves oh you didn’t okay then just leave and come back later”.
Also, if you keep up with the equipment curve, the difficulty drops to zero for most enemies. I ended up taking 1 damage from most enemies for the last hour. Including bosses! Including Death!! Including fucking Dracula!!! So infuriating.
Like, don’t get me wrong, I really don’t mind easy games, but this borders on insulting and my mind just disengages.
God it looks good though, especially in the first half. The backgrounds are especially well-considered and dope as hell. I took so many screenshots of this, it’s ridiculous.
Here’s like, 20% of the screenshots I took:
The aesthetic is really clear on the split between the two castles as well, which was nice. I rarely question which castle I was in because the differences were fairly stark and internally consistent. This game is an aesthetic triumph! I wish it was attached to a better game.
I don’t have much else to say about the aesthetic except that it’s consistently pleasing and often psychedelic. It looks great with the built-in LCD shadow and an LCD shader as well. It’s really well-designed for the GBA. Also the LCD shadow kinda makes the screenshots look like shit, whoops.
The last boss is, again, shockingly easy. I took one hit and otherwise just spammed my magic about 25 times and he died. I barely saw any attacks at all. And to be clear, I didn’t grind at all in this game, and by the end of the game I was literally walking through enemies since they did so little damage and I didn’t want to spend any time killing them. Extremely weird design.
But yeah. I don’t particularly like this game but I don’t hate it either. I think it’s an almost-petty reaction to a game that I find very charming, and in that way I get annoyed at it. Especially when it makes some very stupid mistakes the other game avoided. But I can’t say I didn’t enjoy myself at all. I liked seeing whatever new shit it was going to throw at me, and the first half of the game is pretty alright. I don’t plan on revisiting this ever again though.
I think the funniest thing is that, before I replayed this, it was in my memory as a very hard game. Something about it stuck with my when I first played it as being challenging. I think the castle layout just really confused me though, because otherwise I have no idea what I was thinking. But it’s been 19 years soooo who knows.
I’m happy I revisited this though, despite all my complaints. It was worth getting a better sense of what IGA is all about, which seems to be style-over-substance (duh?). But I’m really looking forward to comparing this to Aria of Sorrow (and later SotN) more directly rather than filtered through the fog of my shaky memory.
On to Aria of Sorrow! I’m not sick of these yet.
18 Likes
I think Iga’s comments may have been an effort at the time to jockey for position as the series lead; yeah Circle is just better
2 Likes