booted up shogo again today while talking with my friend. decided to extract the textures. here’s some of my favorites
it’s sooooo money
22 Likes
Jon Favreau?
I’ve been playing the demo for Yoko Taro’s Voice of Cards. The tabletop RPG visual and narrative presentation seems to be veneer over a pretty straightforward JRPG. And for that it seems… fine.
I dunno I think I’m 45 minutes into it. Unless there’s some twist introduced by the end of the demo, I might as well be playing an early Final Fantasy game or something. Feels like the only difference is aesthetic.
7 Likes
I feel like this sums up a lot of Yoko Taro side projects. Curious to try the demo soon though. As a resident hater of card-based worlds this feels like a challenge.
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Trying to blast through a whole bunch of stuff to prove to myself that I can do it and just abandon anything that doesn’t warrant my time.
Voice of Cards is a bit limp, and dull - constant menu confirmation and unlocking the area immediately in front of you. Let me just explore. Card format doesn’t do much for the game except make development scope a bit more manageable. The game really is just a basic JRPG with the barest hint of some kind of dark stuff happening beneath the surface. The game has a gamesmaster/narrator who doesn’t even bother to voice characters differently when they have dialogue. Nice to see the character art style from Drakengard return but I can just look at that online, I’m out.
Deltarune chapter 2 feels like I’ve grown too old for it and the general Undertale mythos. It’s got vibes and the game works hard to tease and reinforce our character relationships, warmth and fuzziness all round. Undertale came out in 2015 which feels like an eternity ago. My psyche has frayed and recalcified many times since then and I’m not sure the game does it for me anymore. There’s a lot of strong f e e l i n g s had by characters which is great but I feel like I just can’t handle its intensity. If it’s as short as the previous one I might power through but it almost feels like I’m eating a meal intended for someone else.
Nier Cogito is surprisingly great. I think this was a fan game that won some sort of competition to promote Nier Reincarnation but actually got ironically banned due to IP issues. Gets across the ideas of Automata pretty effectively and in a fraction of the time. However, there are no bountifully plump machine buttocks so perhaps the lack of sexy androids makes the themes less interesting idk.
You play an AI meant to guide machines through hostile situations by answering yes/no to data and other hypotheticals. It kind of implies that your program actually has an impact on some real-world events but doesn’t seem to ever confirm it. Does some cool UI stuff for storytelling, mainly through faux code and an implication of the UI being ‘two-way’.
It made me realise that Nier needs its own Animatrix. The world needs to be taken on by other directors to poke at for the fresh ideas within. Short form things like this would be ideal as an anthology. It’s less than an hour so give it a try NieR:Cogito by Silver Stitch
Final Fantasy VII (original)
Dang, you really just blast through these zones compared to remake lol. I don’t have much to say or a take that radically re-evaluates it. It’s definitely got that Sakaguchi thing of having some kind of new scenario or thing to do every 30 minutes. Dialogue is extremely hit or miss for coherency but I think this was probably true of a lot of localised games at the time. I like Tifa.
Wanna get out of Midgar since Remake (which I played first) has me wanting to know the rest.
14 Likes
pre-9/11 anytime you played as a soldier in a videogame they had to have assaulted their superior officer
15 Likes
Candyland as a setting for a Soulslike.
3 Likes
Voice of Cards : I quit the demo very early on because of how cards, when dropped on the game board, slightly turn to the right or left, which means that written text in this game is always tilted at a constantly changing and randomly generated angle. This drove me mad in about 5 minutes
I was very unimpressed by the rest of the game, even as a subpar RPG enjoyer
Speaking of, I’m playing this absolutely mediocre JRPG inspired by early Metal Max games, called Armed Emeth
Kemco is just churning dozens of C-/D+ JRPGs no one talks about because they don’t really deserve it, I don’t understand how they can keep doing it
The game is cheap as hell and the graphic design, mobile port artefacts, plot, lack of balance, and general lack of ambition all show it.
There are only two real draws : First the extremely efficient core Metal Max loop of : Hunt bounty → get cash → outfit your mechs → hunt another bounty, with regular JRPG exploration sliced in and a surprisingly complex mech customization process. Second the general game speed is ultra fast: people move fast, towns and dungeons are short, you can set battle speed to 3x, 5 battles and you get a level up, etc.
… I can’t get enough of it
12 Likes
Candymanland
2 Likes
got to the fight against one-wing sephiroth and cast all the usual buffs at the beginning of the fight only to have him one shot two party members anyway, outdamaging the phys/magic shields. i’m wearing what i assumed to be tough enough late game equipment. my levels are in the 60s.
i’m getting this bad impression that whatever i’d have to do to pass this fight is gonna be a lot of busywork of some kind.
2 Likes
Hey, lets do a podcast where we just play all these shitty Kemco Games.
6 Likes
That one’s developed by Hit Point, right? I have a soft spot for their games.
1 Like
So happy someone finally played one of these.
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Lol Armed Emeth has exactly 2 steam reviews
I wishlisted it thanks for the rec
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i’d totally play armed emeth if it was on 3ds or vita. but on a big screen? no thanks
Wish I could erase parts of my brain at will so I could play FF7 Remake first and then go back and play the original. That perspective would be absolutely wild
3 Likes
games i have fallen off of lately:
minit - there are tiny bits of mechanical intrigue here but not enough to carry me through. throughout my first couple of loops i thought to myself “it sure is nice that when i fuck up i’ve, at worst, only lost a minute of my life” but that quickly changed to “i can too easily quantitatively track how much of my life i am losing to this game and that puts me on edge”. more often than not, getting to the next little section of the game (i appreciated the mild non-linearity!) felt like it required more trial-and-error (i.e. more mana from the finite pool that is my lifespan) than anything necessarily intuitive or communicated. i think the cascade of Wholesome Games over the past couple of years has made me inherently distrustful of any game with a lighthearted, jovial aesthetic which kinda sucks.
deadly premonition - i got a few chapters in and the sarcastic snark is not my thing. more importantly, wow the game handles atrociously. i have never encountered worse driving physics. if i lived with friends and we could sit around a tv and play this while laughing at it i think that could be fun but that is not my situation and this is not what i want to play laying in bed alone at 2am.
splatoon 2 - i am finally admitting to myself that splatoon is one of those games that i like every aspect of besides actually playing it (see also: harvest moon, pre-rise monster hunter). i have big respect for the game design and art direction and i desperately want to like it but i really have more fun playing dress-up in the menus than i do actually shooting and playing. and yes, i’m playing with motion controls, with a pro controller at that! what’s fucked is when i watched the trailer for splatoon 3 my first thought was “i wanna run around in that world!”. i have the dlc for the game and i’ve heard it’s really good so i will try that out before i drop it for good.
happy birthdays - i remember being so curious about this when i saw the first trailer, but playing it is insultingly unstimulating. imagine if simcity only let you raise/lower terrain and then the rest of the game was fast-forwarding time to see what happens as a result of what you changed. that’s literally what this game is. perhaps more layers of complexity get added later on but i literally fell asleep playing it one night and never looked back.
rain world - this game is dense and demands the player to be actively questioning and learning and that is something i have a lot of love for but it’s so hard for me to keep up my end of that conversation in a 2d sidescroller (see also: me saying “oh i’ll get to that someday!” re: la-mulana for over a decade now). a massive aspect of my immersion in video games is the sensation of exploring a world with spatial depth, and 2d games fall flat (haha) for me in that respect. all the corridors and elevators in the world can’t make the same spot in my brain shine. if the movement felt wonderful i could have been persuaded to stick with it but, well, it feels like moving a slugcat around. diagetically respectable, kinesthetically repugnant. i applaud from afar.
this post is grumpy enough so i’ll save for another time my experiences beating limbo, inside, and sine mora ex and how much i hated all of them.
i have been playing mushihimesama and espgaluda ii (novice 1ccs on both so far; way too easy in espgaluda with the auto-bomb, i was bummed) as well as a master mode playthrough in breath of the wild which is a mixed bag in terms of being more rewarding to play vs being more annoying to play as compared to the game’s normal difficulty. playing picross s2, still trying to learn to love mega picross (after already finishing the 150 mega-p puzzles in picross s).
really wanna play mudrunner again sometime soon and very cautiously excited to see how smtv and the new metroid will be. hoping to pick up initial d extreme stage sometime and finally try that out and see how the v4 physics compare to v3. special stage on ps2 was a fantastic game so i have high hopes that i don’t think will be met.
video games!
18 Likes
I have to check out every game themed even remotely like E.V.O.
and this one hurt more than most
7 Likes
Honestly it’s pretty great to see the adaptation ‘in reverse’. The original ‘cuts’ so much stuff (dialogue, lengthy mission set-up)) and it still works pretty well but then it also has a lot more novelty moment to moment. I’m baffled they keep things like the simultaneous switch minigame before the Airbuster but then get rid of the fiddly church section where Cloud is Donkey Konging barrels on to guards while Aeris tries to regroup. On the flipside remake adds huge sections that explore Midgar as a place but the original glosses over certain things very quickly if at all.
The imagination often needs to do some heavy lifting to fill the gaps in places. Remake is generously lush in a way that makes me wonder what Final Fantasy VII really is. Some story beats, gameplay and tone only exist in the one or the other so what they share in common is coming out in a strange Venn diagram in my head that’s a thrill to predict.
8 Likes
yet another game that should be on nintendo online but for some reason 
isn’t!
2 Likes