Games You Played Today: 358 Threads Over 2

[notbov]

BIG HAND

[LaurelSoup]

We were just strangely premature with the Circle of the Moon talk coming mere days ahead of the surprise reissue.

I’m still chipping away at it as free time allows, and used some of the full screen DSS attacks to cheese my way through the Grim Reaper and Camilla. I didn’t get the card with all the close range shieldy effects that I should have used against both until I was backtracking to all the old super jump spots.

[RT-55J]

@scross

I’m… just someone who really liked Super and Fusion and would want another game that feels inspired or singular

This is your programmatically generated reminder to go play Vitality.

[Felix]

interesting to hear. the current round of remakes (from the past 2 or so years in particular) seem really to have left me behind in terms of anything I could really get interested in or endorse as not a strict downgrade of where they were a decade ago… feeling those mid aughts doldrums sneaking back in.

[Mikey]

I’ll be honest I think I have a pretty big appetite for big-budget, in-house Fan Games so I’m probably going to eat this game up with a spoon when I get around to picking it up.

[Tuxedo]

I could not resist buying Banner of the Maid, the Fire Emblem-like TRPG about the French revolution, made by a Chinese team, with Chinese only voice acting, anime artwork, translated to English (not French)

Here is our little moe troubadour calling for war crimes

The men in this game range from Realistic to Anime, while the women are All Anime. Women being in the army is of course ludicrous, as are some of their outfits : hope you really like breasts. And thighs, if you look at the in-game gallery. Surprisingly though,against all odds, the maids aren’t like, maids in the Japanese sense with hypersexualized costumes, but more of a reference to the maiden of Orleans

Every character is a super young general in the French army and the game does have magical women with superpowers, but otherwise the game is less unhinged than I expected. The plot focuses heavily on the political in-fighting between different Parisian factions (Royalty, commoners, Team Robespierre etc) and most of the discussions are grounded, almost too dry, like the game follows history too much instead of trying to focus on its own narrative (100% a good thing IMO though)

The first thing I wondered is where does the game lie, politically.
Overall so far it -tries- to not really take sides. I’m surprised by how it didn’t paint Robespierre, or the royalty, as obvious villains. You are trying to improve your reputation towards all of the Parisian factions (by doing sidequests and picking the right dialogue choices (which unlocks items etc)) and none of the factions are obviously evil. But, well. The nobles are pitied a few times, Napoleon is a real badass (though kind of a goof with the ladies!!) Robespierre feels a bit too ruthless, and you don’t really directly interact with the commoners, they’re mostly all just seen as a violent mob. It’s not super great.

In a very videogame way, war against foreign enemies, including invading Italy, seems to just be something to do and is never really questioned, which I guess fits a game that puts Napoleon on a pedestal. The heroine also starts the game with an identity crisis about how she doesn’t want to sacrifice her soldiers through the war but eventually resolves it through some JRPG dialogue about soldiers trusting her or something. You are not fighting for real, non-nebulous ideals

Since I got the DLC and it’s a Chinese game I also got a cool Chinese pirate lady joining the team as a general for the French army, why not right

Battles are simple and focus on movement over skills (FE influence over FFT) every character can equip 5 passive + 1 active skill but I tend to just ignore all of them all the time and it just works. There’s a class type square instead of a weapon triangle that’s constantly stuck on the upper right side of the screen in battle, yet I can never remember which classes beats which. Triangle = OK, Square = Too much

Balance wise, men suck and women rule. The French army circa 1792 is men run by girlbosses

I’m frankly impressed by the UI and backgrounds, the whole game looks good. Battles go by quickly too, maps are well done, and you don’t get punished the right amount for losing an unit (no permadeath, but you lose a lot of cash) The music sorta makes me feel comatose though and I feel that’s unforgivable in the Slowest Genre, the TRPG

[Titus]

Spilskinanke, “an American city circuit affected by seismic activity” is the final course of Wipeout 2097/XL, and is probably the highlight of the whole series. It is absolutely balls hard.

• Blinding lightning flashes on the course surface
• Pitch black tunnels
• Jumps into 90 degree turns
• The course is literally broken apart

So yeah. I got bronze and that will do for now. I’ll get the gold another time.

[Broco]

That’s interesting, the French Revolution doesn’t attract the interest it deserves in most western countries anymore so it only comes up as like one entry in history-focused franchises like Total War. But it probably has more resonance in a country that went through its own revolution not as long ago

The current version of Chinese communism takes a more measured view of the emperors as I understand it, so it makes sense that the game wouldn’t paint French royalty as pure villains either

[Drem]

I tried out Hell Let Loose, a new game on PS+ this month. It seems like a more grounded take on Battlefield with the classic WW2 setting. I spawned at the start at it took me around 4-5 minutes to reach the front lines. I played for about half an hour and never saw a single enemy, but I did die several times even though I have no idea where I was shot from.

It’s probably a decent game.

[Father.Torque]

This is a very serious contender for The Best Game

[toups]

have we talked about evil within 2? I’m playing it on the eager recommendation of a trusted friend and god damn it is one hell of a videogame. not like the original at all, which I still liked despite how bad it mostly was

[u_u]

oh btw i don’t usually get hyped for video game music these days but this track is definitely a highlight of the game for me

- YouTube

i love how it sounds like the soundtrack to a live action japanese tv show from the 70s or something. this vibe is missing from a lot of ff games but i feel like it adds a lot to the atmosphere lol

i keep listening to later versions of it to try to find one that makes the horns just like rip in the way you can tell they are supposed to from the original, but they’re all too smooth

[notbov]

do you see this hitbox

this is what good games look like

this ain’t even the real broken shit

[RT-55J]

truly, that is a sequel to slap city

[Annetts]

This has been my suprise hit of the year.

It takes a while to understand the game because there is absolutely no tutorial or hand-holding, at least in the PC release. But I’m almost 200 hours in at this point and don’t see myself stopping any time soon.

Granted I am the exact target audience for something like this but it is just consistently good fun.

[parker]

you ever jolt awake suddenly in bed filled with inspiration and rush to your computer and yes, yes by god it works

4k twin peaks pilot running through retroarch with crt-royale

[hater]

abandoned my current attempt at GTA5 in the planning stages of the first heist mission

[Grandpa]

Coin toss on whether I was gonna go in on Ubisoft Formula 6 or Metroid Dread this weekend, and the answer was “the sequel to the game I didn’t completely hate.”

That, uh, means I went with Far Cry 6. Fuck Samus Returns.

Early going but it seems like, just maybe, they learned their lesson from 5? Y’know, the game that had some killer teaser trailers and then wound up daring to ask “what if the people who buy Jim Bakker slop buckets are right?” Also the game where you’d play and explore for a while until the game declared it’s time for some story and had you assailed by religious fanatics who could shoot you no matter how well you hid with magic drug laced bullets.

New Dawn kinda course corrected by being somewhat weird (radioactive animals with bark growing on them is kinda cool), focusing on the only thing people like in these games (there are a bunch of bases you can take over, over and over again). But it also felt like they took the cries of “this game is racist! You kill conservative white Christians ” by having, uh, two women of color as the villains? Which feels bad?

You know the tone is off when your crew of good guys are sitting around singing America the Beautiful on an acoustic guitar and the quote unquote bad guys are blasting Action Bronson and, from the sounds of it, having a good time.

Dunno how to work this into this diatribe but the humor in New Dawn was fucking atrocious. The game single handedly hammers the final nail in the coffin on the 69 joke, with the horny old woman sniper who claims that’s the number of men who have enjoyed her “fish dinner.”

So! 6! So far it seems OK. Giancarlo Esposito is hamming it up hard. Outside of the grim opening everyone is goofy as hell. The “Guns for Hire” have been replaced with “Amigos,” and it looks like instead of having boring human characters and that redneck dude with a rocket launcher, they decided to go entirely with animals, the first of which is a big alligator in a little windbreaker.

On a more mechanical level, the shooting feels a lot better? There’s more feedback, overall, when you land shots, so, y’know. Possibly better all around. We’ll see!

Also played some Monkey Ball. I know it’s jacked up with bad Unity physics, but finally, I can play Monkey Ball.

[stavekoff]

trying new characters is one of musou’s greatest joys

[notbov]

AHAHAHAHA

THEY MADE THE RELEASE VERSION OF BACK 4 BLOOD EVEN HARDER

THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER