I got Goemon’s great adventure (the N64
2d one) at release and it was my favorite game on the system. Wow I guess I already was a vidcon connaisseur / meganerd when I was 12
The game is akin to good Igavanias, with a low focus on platforming level design, but a lot of fun extras
The 2,5D makes it one of the very few good looking N64 games, it’s gorgeous IMO. Ebisumaru making enemies fly offscreen with his paddle was amazing, though I rarely used him since Goemon is the only one with double jumps (the balance wasn’t great)
When I was little I convinced my mom to take me to toys r us to buy the second Goemon N64 game but when I got there I saw Turok Rage Wars and changed my mind and convinced my mom to pay the extra money for that game instead.
God I’m still so mad about the glitch that kept you from getting all 50 (or however many) badges in Rage Wars in the original production run of cartridges.
Y button! I’m testing it in 4 now, and it seems like in that game it kicks in after a couple seconds of holding & running. But it’s so subtle… There’s no animation or visual cue of any kind, everything just scrolls a tiny bit faster, and jumps are easier. I had to do like a scientific test to make sure it was even real.
Currently my thinking is somewhere in the middle of “Back 4 Blood has god awful writing”, “actually real people aren’t endless quip machines or meme generators so the characters constantly saying dumb, cringy shit is realistic, Joss Whedon has broken everyone’s brains” and “I am not a very happy bunny” (an actual verbatim line from the game)
Far Cry 6 is maybe the first game to make me envy the PS5, strictly on a mechanical level. There’s nothing like taking my dune buggy with a big fan strapped to the back of it, launching it into the air, and hitting constant 5-10 second hitches as the world struggles to load in.
Granted, this game is absolutely not “hey I’m gonna spend $600+tax on the impossible to find giant game machine” worthy, but it sure makes me wish I could win some sorta fucking Taco Bell contest or something. Give me the PS5 that says “HERE’S A NASTY CHALUPA BOY” in purple and teal, I don’t give a shit.
i rented this game as a kid because either it got some buzz in a game magazine or a friend recommended it. i didn’t like it that much and gave up on it pretty quickly though. i guess i didn’t have the patience for that style of game at the time… which is funny considering how predominant that kind of shooter would become later. but something about N64 Winback felt kinda experimental and not fully formed to me yet i guess. i sure did rent out Iggy’s Reckin Balls multiple times though.
i got a free copy of Far Cry 6 that came with the gaming laptop i bought at the end of last year… lord knows why that game in particular. wish i would have gotten a free copy of Deathloop instead. but i might have to try it just as a morbid curiosity.
It’s one of those games I have no memory of buying or anticipating as a kid (Chameleon Twist was another) but it was on heavy rotation, we played a fair bit of the multiplayer at the time. I seem to remember it being billed as the N64’s Metal Gear Solid which is pretty unfair. There’s not much of a story or personality to it but the (shooting) action is better imo!
I like to think that nostalgia doesn’t have much to do with my interest in these older games but I guess it does explain my fondness for primitive 3D action things where you can feel the seams and see all the moving parts, no frills or FX gloss, just honest geometry and dreamily sluggish framerates. This one is dead simple, aesthetically it’s as generic as can be, but it feels good as an off-rails Time Crisis-lite whack-a-mole thing where you’re both mallet and mole. Like, the levels are very boxy, but the enemy placements are thoughtfully composed and it does a good job of creating the tactical tension of gaining ground crate by crate while wasting bad guys (I actually like how they reuse levels starting you from different points with a different goal to get to as you backtrack and strategies get flipped, makes me appreciate the design of these little low-poly dioramas (I guess what I’m saying is this game is all about level design and rhythm, it’ll probably succeed or fail for you on how satisfying that feels because there’s not much of interest beyond that (oh, also there are some laser traps that have very iffy hitboxes, the only thing I really dislike about the game and now that I’m hallway through, I’m praying they don’t go the cheap route and double down on those to increase difficulty, just crank up the enemy encounters!))).
It’s charming how a brief cutscene introduces the enemies getting into place for each of the multiple encounters in any given mission. idk if that’s to kinda ease the learning curve of navigating 3D environments but it makes everything legible on a mental level initially, then with that information you create the pathing from point to point from a boots on the ground perspective. Sometimes, they’ll hide a guy in a spot to keep you on your toes and encourage you to always be moving with intention and intensity until you’re 100% sure you’ve cleared the area. Really, I could imagine one of the devs watching their children playing make-believe irl shootout games with other kids and thinking “Hey…”. Or else watching an action movie or whatever, basically I think it was inevitable that this kind of cover-based shooting thing would come about once 3D did.
And the fact that it was so ahead of it’s time, I mean RE4 straight up stole the laser sight in 3rd person shooting? I can see it being a bit too bland for a lot of people but I think it’s great!
It makes my Top 5
Super Mario 64 Sin and Punishment DOOM 64 Star Fox 64 WinBack
N64 had a tonne of garbage but…also some absolute bangers and 3D-pioneering games that laid the groundwork for things to come, still an interesting one all these years later.
gotta say the evil within 2 continues to impress me. with the caveat that it is very flawed in many places, I still highly recommend checking it out. it’s a shame it’s so slept on. it basically takes the base mechanics and gameplay loop of the last of us and runs wild with it, dropping you in little fishbowl sandbox environments and letting you figure things out on your own. due to how unpredictable its world is, it even often manages to be genuinely scary. once you get past the (painfully bad) initial exposition the writing is surprisingly solid and funny. I really like how they just went all in on making sebastian an unapologetic petulant asshole and the game has a lot of fun with that.
it still has the same overarching issue as the first game, where there are very solid mechanics and setpieces sandwiched between comparatively stale and cliche hallucination/chase sequences. but in the sequel the hallucination/chase sequences are briefer and generally more inspired, and the meat of the gameplay is dramatically stronger. the monster designs and art direction are also excellent. even if they are still riffing on the same tired horror tropes, there is just so much more personality here and that makes everything work despite how disjointed it all is aesthetically. and so far there has been a delightful amount of optional content in which genuinely insane shit happens with no explanation. I’m like 20 hours in and it still hasn’t stopped surprising me.
tried the monster hunter rise demo on steam, a port i had no clue was a thing until today, and was very confused but somehow eventually managed to wrangle a monster, accidentally capturing it after VERY accidentally mounting it. not entirely sure what happened but this seems cool and it runs nice enough on my laptop, so maybe i’ll get it when it releases next year.
After some research (one trophy tied to beating a race on Extreme, rewards the same regardless of difficulty) I dropped Hot Wheels Unleashed to Easy
It’s staggering how much of a difference that makes. Being in 5th at the start of the final lap and praying you can make it to first, or being in first and having a giant hamburger car knock into you and send you to 10th place in the final stretch of a 9 minute race is…maddening, and I’m just here to unlock more cool toy cars, so. Doing races where I’m in first the whole time and can fuck up and still hold the lead? I’m OK with it. Life is hard enough as is, I don’t need hell from these little guys.
Besides, it doesn’t lower the difficulty of Time Trials, which are still harrowing in their own way.
Disco Elysium: I have restarted this game like 5 times because I don’t know what sort of cop I want to play as. I have never been this paralyzed by character creation before. I only know I want 0 magical realism right now so Inland Empire and Shivers are out of the question
Dungeon Encounters: This is the mega cheap looking new game made by Final Fantasy veterans. How does it feel to be the FF6/9/12 director and see the Squareenix board give you one millionth of the budget that was attributed to their trash MCU games? I hope they all just wanted to make a chill little game with no budget from the start, for their sake
I have the same problem with this game as with Wizardry: for such a minimalist dungeon exploring experience, the battle system could be way more engaging. The game handles HP/Defense differently but this doesn’t translate to interesting battles so far.
I’ve had a good stressful time exploring though, especially getting my party wiped and having to slowly retrieve it with another weaker party - note that the game autosaves + party members are limited (they’re all unique), and if you carelessly run out of party members it is game over forever, save deleted
Most party members have serious backstories but one is a Gamer with a delightful bio
I played the “Let’s Get Vaccinated” game wherein I went to Walgreens and got the first jab for Covid and figured “What the hell, let’s get the one for flu, at least I’ll have symmetrical bandaids.”
Then I played the “We should get a couple pizzas” game wherein the 15 minute wait turned into an hour wait 'cause they sent our pizzas home with someone else by accident. I’m kinda glad it happened to us 'cause at least I could make sure not to blow up at the frazzled young lady who came over to apologize. They remade our pizzas and, well, we have pizza. That was tiring, but the payoff was pretty good.
Also played some Star Trek Online and got into a bit of an argument with a fleetmate who seemed to take it personally when I pointed out that all the power they sell (things like upgrades for Mk 15 “Epic” gear and super powerful, character-locked gamble box ships and ship traits) is mostly wasted as none of the regularly run “endgame” PvE requires any of it to be run competently and that most of that power is just a honeytrap for folks that get told/think they need it when they do not. The most common refrain I hear is “But if you’re not able to contribute an equally ridiculous amount of DPS, then you’re just leeching” to which I usually find myself of the opinion that if one ship/character is able to do the job of 5 in what is ostensibly group content aimed at requiring the cooperation of 5 people, then it’s simply become a single player mission and the other 4 players are just redundancies in case the superstar drops. I’m not going to fight my teamates for kills or parse numbers or whatever (same thing in Warframe, I’ll go play my goddamned space guitar rather than try to keep up or compare to the character that is killing everything in its spawns as it spawns).
Also played some Genshin Impact. The foggy island is an order of magnitude more enjoyable than most of the quest stuff in 2.1 to me.
