i can see how that could happen honestly. it frustrated me in ways i don’t appreciate but at least it was doing something, y’know?
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My favorite part of Aria is always getting the pistol. I laugh every time, because I HAVE A GUN IN CASTLEVANIA is always followed by “oh wait it sucks”.
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I found the figments to be a lot easier to find in this one though there are still some levels where they blend into the background too easily, but not nearly as bad as the first game.
I actually did start a new game after making my last post and blasted through up to Hollis’s mind. It moves at a pretty good clip when you skip everything so I’ll probably just return to this new save from now on whenever I feel like playing it.
Sonic 06 is delightful/awful beyond my wildest dreams
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started a new game of nocturne, maniax this time
blessed playthrough, recruited a will o’ wisp on my first attempt in my first encounter
caught myself thinking “maybe i should hook up the ps4 and play natural doctrine again”
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Come out of morbid curiosity, stay for syntax like “there was someone called Tails who was helping,” excellent music, and big empty spaces without texture filtering.
2006 as fuck
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Is there any sex music…
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This is the best I can do
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Hell yes.
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Just wait for the boss with the camera flip mid fight. Or the part where you can’t get hit even once.
Someday I should play the other story paths.
I really didn’t intend for this to happen
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looks like a sick as hell passphrase generator
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I played a little more tonight and found all the figments except for a few in the Cassie and Bob worlds. I ran through those once more with no luck. It’s difficult to stay too long in the Bob one due to that irritating voice that repeats the same lines incessantly. (Which is a shame because the visuals in that area are nice.)
Edit: Disabled voices and found the rest. The Cassie ones I was missing were in books and the Bob ones were all in the island area (several under exploding plants and the last one hanging from a tree).
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I’ve been playing a bunch of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 & 2 remake recently and walked into it with certain questions I only had murky answers for beforehand, so gonna go over them here in case anyone else wondered similar things. Most important question first…
Do the games hold up?: Yes, very much so! I was a big fan of them back in the day and would have listed the second game in my personal top 10 but there is a chance revisiting them twenty years later that they have aged in noticeable ways, particularly the first game. Going back to the two minute time limits is a bit of a shock and the second game is still stronger than the first, but the stage design is still as strong as it ever was and the controls and physics are still dialed in.
Does backporting the added moves from 2 and 3 into both games mess up the balance?: Kinda! For those unaware the second game added manuals (these let you more easily link ground tricks together, each trick added to your combo increasing the score multiplier by one) while the third game added reverts (these let you link more air-based tricks to the others with similar benefits). In practice this meant it was much easier to link tricks together in the second game than the first, and from the third game on with practice you could link almost any elements of the stages together. You had to learn the stages and work pretty hard to get decent combos and hence scores in the first game originally, in this version it is much easier and hence I feel you have less need to learn the stages as well. That said the game does give you an option to switch to the controls/moves from either the first or second game if you want to which is very welcome… but there is a caveat.
Were the games significantly rebalanced around the expanded moves?: The first game was… kinda. The stages in the first game had five goals for you to try and achieve during your two minute runs (you don’t have to do all of them in a single run) while the second game’s stages had ten of them. One of the big changes to this remake is that they added five additional goals to all the stages from the first game to even it out (in fact I think they altered at least a few of the original ones due to this), which is actually one of the things I was curious to check out. These added goals are fine if not earth-shattering (you have another set of five things to track down each stage!) but the biggest one is that you now have three goal scores to try and reach as opposed to two, with the highest one per stage roughly being about four times the amount asked of you in the original version. This is fair increase given the expanded combo options the backported moves offer, but if you switch back to the original controls for the game these numbers aren’t adjusted which means the difficulty has just jumped through the roof. Remembered what I said above about the expanded controls likely resulting in less of a need to learn the stage layouts? The original controls now result in you needing an almost intimate understanding of them and how to best exploit them in a limited amount of time. It’s actually a really neat challenge if you are experienced with the games (like I am) but it does mean that there really isn’t a way to get a truly “authentic” take on the first game. The second game’s scores are slightly elevated to account for the addition of the revert (I checked a random stage and the top score is 25% higher) so opting for the original controls makes them slightly trickier but is otherwise much more faithful.
Do these balance changes detract from the experience? Not really! Worth touching upon again is that the stage design was always surprisingly strong, with every one built for both beginner play and for experts going for insane high scores and combos. It was always built with an eye towards the player gradually having to realize how various elements can interact with each other (each stage has many not explicitly pointed out “gaps” between various elements that give you extra points and +1 to your multiplier if you can link them together to help foster this) so making it easier to do so doesn’t really force you away from that. This also means that building to higher and higher scores/combos was always intended so even with much higher goal scores the stages are more than capable of producing them regardless of what moves you have available to you. The balance is now different, but it still feels fine and I don’t think someone jumping into the series here would be thrown off by them in any way unless…
Did they change anything else that was a mistake?: They combined both game’s campaigns into one long one (although you can jump between either game and make progress in either from their first stage on) and in doing so made the stat increases your skaters get carry over from one to the other. Before you’d pick your skater with their default strengths and weaknesses and find various stat pick ups across the stages that let you add a point to things such as grinding ability or hang time until by the end if you picked every single one up you’d have max everything. What this means in practice here is that if you play through the first game with a given skater and then move on to the second you start with much higher stats in likely every category which does make them remarkably easier to a degree that is honestly a bit much and feels very much like an unforced error. Technically it also would make the later stages in the first game a bit trickier as well although that stood out less. It is a minor mark against the remake, I’d say if you played this to play through each game with different skaters to get around this.
The remake added a ton of universal “extra” challenges, are these worthwhile?: This was actually the main reason I wanted to give this a shot, in theory it would add a bunch of extra tasks to try and achieve in one of my all time favorite games. Having put a good amount of time into it I would say that they are pretty good. There are hundreds of them, some skater specific and some open to anyone. Some are low level ones you will knock out relatively quickly without even paying attention and some of the skater-specific ones are fairly cut & paste (you have three starting special moves so you have three challenges that are “do X special move” and three “do x special move in a 60k point combo” ones), and there are a few kinda lame “grind for an hour total” or “do 10k total flip tricks” that end up basically meaning “play the game for a long ass time and these will eventually trigger as complete”.
That said there are a lot of challenges that are much more interesting that range from “okay that’s an interesting combo to try and pull off in that stage” to “oh good you’ve been playing this game nonstop for the past twenty years, go pull off a ten million point combo”. The hardest ones are simply beyond me, but for someone experienced with the games it gives me a good selection of interesting and challenging stuff to go try after I played through both base games a few times and wanted to try something a a bit more advanced. For me, someone who played the hell out of them back in the day but hasn’t touched any of the games in fifteen years, it adds enough that it elevates it beyond “just” a remake to something with more value than just a fresh coat of paint.
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I finished No More Heroes 3 and grinned a lot.
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I don’t know what I expected out of Death Stranding but it wasn’t Norman Reedus and Guillermo del Toro being gay dads
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Sam, to hot lady Fragile: “Don’t touch me, everything I touch turns to shit, time to go off and do brooding loner things”
Sam, to large soft boy Deadman: “C’mere you doofus and give ya boy a big ol’ sloppy hug before I head to the incinerator-hospital and deliver our baby we made together”
Sorry Bachelor I love this game
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You didn’t expect this?
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After playing Bloodborne for awhile I revisited Dark Souls today. I think DS > BB.
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