All this dang Metroid talk is motivating me to wrap up the ones I started.
It’s weird how Fusion is just really goddamn hard for the majority of the game, and then the final three bosses are a cakewalk? I mean yeah OK I was save-stating constantly (mostly because I just don’t have the patience to backtrack to bosses again and again), but that’s maybe the easiest Ridley fight I’ve ever played through?
Oh but hey, speaking of - fuck Ridley in Samus Returns. I realized I don’t have to funnel myself directly to that fight, so I’m teleporting around and trying to collect items when and where I can.
That game is…shockingly unmemorable? I’m going to through all these areas again and can’t recall anything about them, other than “oh this is where I got chased by the big robot” and “oh this is where I fought the big robot.” There’s just no real sense of place!
I mean, I guess maybe there’s more distinguishing features in these areas in this game than the pea soup original, but coming hot off of Fusion (and Super Metroid and Zero Mission before that), I feel like all of those have areas that I can recall, fondly or otherwise, where Samus Returns is “oh, I need to go to the kinda pinky-purple cave area, but not the one that’s too pink or too purple.”
I dunno, just…not a fan of that one. Maybe collecting all this bullshit (and tapping that amiibo that gives me an extra stock tank) will help me muscle through that Ridley fight. I sure hope so!
Thoughts from the first few hours of The Good Life: playing on keyboard with or without a mouse gets pretty cumbersome! Considering how central photography is, I wish I could toggle camera mode on or off with the camera button rather than being required to hold the key down.
Quest-juggling also gets a bit odd, since which quest you’re currently tracking may actually change where people are located. Kind of strange to talk with Elizabeth in the street (completing a side-quest), walk past her into the next house’s yard, and just as I turn the corner I see she’s now sitting in front of the building ten feet away because this is where she waits for me to complete the main quest that automatically replaced the side quest I’d just turned in. This may be a deliberate choice for her character, though, as she seems to appear and disappear quite abruptly.
I’m enjoying the cooking and farming. I’ll probably like this a lot more on console or once I have my Steam controller available.
Talk about those GTA remasters got me to go and play GTA 3 more seriously than I ever have in the past. I’ve probably more or less finished the main story missions in all 3D GTA games except 3 and the PSP games. I think GTA 3 is pretty fun. It’s a solid game about driving cars between blocky buildings while listening to drum and bass. Compared even to VC, there is basically nothing to do in this game except missions, so I am moving fast through it and will be finished soon.
But I kind of love how bullshit and frustrating these games can be. I tried to throw a grenade into a small apartment window like 80 times, blowing myself up, ruining my armor so that in the rare moments I got it in the enemies that showed up as a result just shredded me to bits. My solution was to crowd too many cars around their spawn point, and of course it worked. While it’s frustrating in the moment I also realize this is kind of endearing, sometimes funny, pretty much always surprising but also really obvious when you take a second and just think about how the game is like programmed. Of course putting your car in a certain spot will see it despawned when you activate a mission trigger! Of course that wouldn’t work, and, yes, you now have to hope to jack a really fast race car in the first few seconds of that timed mission, or else drive a shitty slow ass van to the finish line, sweating and swearing the whole god damn time.
It’s shitty fun. I like GTA 3 and am thinking of playing the others once I am done. Maybe even Vice City Stories?
I think if you wipe out, you start the game over with everyone at the level they were last at.
I actually find it quite relaxing. It’s pretty simple for sure, but the mechanics slots it into programming/auto-battler games for me, where you’re trying to “solve” the encounters and run as far as you can at max efficiency without needing to adjust anything, until the game throws you a new curve and you have to find a new setup. It’s also one of those compulsion games like House Flippers, because the main goal is to just color in a bunch of squares, with pesky monsters getting in the way.
Finally beat Samus Returns, after leaving it on the back burner for four years and going “oooh hot hot hot” after dying to Ridley again and again every once in a while.
Watched a video and as usual, per all my “Metroid fuckin’ sucks” fits, I’m moving too dang much. Turns out I just need to scoot and hop a bit for most of the stuff I get stuck on, and it’s fine, I don’t need to space jump like crazy to get out of the way.
Happened with Ridley in Super, happened with the robot (security and slime face) and spider in Fusion, and now Ridley here.
FYI the PSP versions run flawlessly in PPSSPP and there are texture packs which upgrade their textures (VCS, LCS) to roughly match the PC releases of the games they’re remixed from, which is about as far as I’d want to push the PSP geometry anyway - really enjoyed playing through them at the native res of my iPad Pro with an Xbox controller a couple years back
Ooh that’s neat. After finishing GTA 3 I kind of wanted something a bit more modern than GTA 3 Set in Miami, so I jumped to SA instead of Vice City. But those PSP games seem like they incorporate some of the SA quality of life differences, and Vice City Stories looks pretty fun to play actually. I’ll set up PPSSPP and test this out. Thanks!!
Let me enumerate the bullshit moments I experienced, felt burned by, and loved during my time with GTA3:
Sayonara Salvatore – this mission you gotta wait outside the actual Sex Club for an Italian mob boss to show his ass and then kill him. The missions starts with the warning that he’ll leave the club in 4 minutes, so you gotta get moving and set yourself up out of site of his guards while you wait. I had to do this a number of times. But the bullshit was when I found a nearby roof to stand on, performed a risky jump to actually stand on the lip ledge of this roof to get an even better shot with my guns, and waited. When the boss showed his ass, an NPC spawned in on the ground below, came running up the fire escape up to where I was, and with a single shotgun blast launched me horizontal across the street, slamming against the building with like 20 health. I fall, lose 5 health, take 30 minutes to stand up from prone, and then three mob guards blast me with shotguns as soon as I do.
Silence the Sneak – aforementioned grenade tossing challenge. I tried this so many times that, instead of getting pissed off and killing myself deliberately to start things over, the run that I actually succeeded at things saw me tossing the stack of 26 grenades they hand you at the start, then, limping and armorless I went off to the nearby hospital to heal, then down the street to the AMMUNATION to acquire even more grenades and more armor, and returned to toss those nades through this dude’s window. I did this lap a few times that mission, ended up just tossing grenades into the mess of cars I used to block the garage which the target tried exit, and it was a smooth but ridiculous finish.
Plaster Blaster – there is a guy in a full body cast being transported from a hospital to prison in an ambulance in this mission, and he needs to die. When you get close to the ambulance you’re hit with an immediate 5 stars and are swarmed. My second attempt I just got out of the car, waited for the ambulance to approach me, and fired on it. A damn twist in the plot. “BULLETS WON’T HURT HIM!!” I got in my car and chased after the ambulance, all the way to the North side of the city. Then I realized, the dot of my target on the map was way south. Turns out, the target falls out of the ambulance and lays there wherever he falls. I race back, now with six stars on my ass, and see him parked underneath a pile of abandoned cop cars. I blow them up, he takes no damage. I drive my car into the smoldering rubble to clear access to him. As I do this, a cop car drives over him and I get a mission completed.
Decoy – fucking Decoy. I attempted this like more than 10 times. You start on one island and drive to another to even begin the action. The task is to drive police transport car for 3 minutes with six stars tagged to your bumper. So much wonky physics shit happened during this mission. Sometimes army trucks get posted in the middle of the street as a blockade. You can easily plow through them, most of the time. My method was actually just to glide between the opening in the middle. But this one time when I did that, my car came to a full fucking stop because I tapped the corner on one of these trucks, and one of the army NPCs posted next to his truck just pivoted on his Y axis like some inhuman digital freak and pulled me from the truck, and I was busted for life.
Same mission, Decoy, a later attempt, crossing the bridge in my hijacked Italian sports car (no carbon on the valves I assure you), I fall through the geometry into the water below.
Espresso-2-Go – this one has you drive across all three islands in the game on a mission to explode coffee stands. You have 10 minutes to do this, which sounds like a fine amount of time, and it probably is, but the idea of doing a 10 minute task over again drives the tension in this mission. Anyway, I consider this one GTA 3’s final act of hazing for me. Completing this was like graduating. I became a made man in the psycho circus of goofy physics and aggressive AI. I raced across the whole map. Had to swap cars like 4 times cause they are so fragile in GTA 3, to the point I wondered if this was like a Dark Souls 2 weapon degradation being tied to the framerate kind of situation, but it’s not. Taking out the 2nd to last coffee stand I had about 20 seconds to make it. I drove blindly through sprites of trees in hopes that there would just be roads or through access on the other side to the final street where the coffee stand was waiting. There it was. I gun it like I always do. You only need to drive your car into these things. But I just bounce off the coffee stand. It’s car-proof. 5 seconds left. I get out of the car and madly hit L2 and R2 trying to find my grenades. I shoot my pistol. I switch to my grenades as the clock hits 00:01. A second passes. The grenade goes of… Mission Passed: $40,000
I remember GTA3 feeling like the absolute hardest of the three (3/VC/SA) if only mostly because a lot of the mission design still has some GTA2 influence in it and also anything involving shooting anything other than a sniper rifle is extremely hard with no free aim.
Your memory rings true to my experience. Luckily, there were many missions about just driving cars, and that is where I think the game is most fun. The shooting is a nightmare. Anything requiring precision… I remember Vice City being frustrating in the same way. There’s a mission where you have to rush to a garbage dump to save someone from dying, and it’s like a racing mission, a shooting mission, and it’s all timed. Just, what the fuck!
This is precisely why GTA3 is my favorite of the series, it’s just all the right amounts of stupid and janky without the self-serious posturing of the later games.
I will honestly be surprised if the remakes are anything more than the types of updates to graphics/controls they’ve already received for the ios versions.
I’m mainly skeptical of any remakes because music licensing is an absolute nightmare and the original soundtracks are an integral part of the experience.
There are a million good reasons for the game not to have the song anymore, but hopping into the car outside of Rosenberg’s office and not having it tune into Billie Jean in the newer versions of Vice City…it doesn’t feel right!
Didn’t Rockstar eventually cough up some money to reinstate the Russian songs into GTA IV? Only after everyone complained for years that they took them out? I know Vice City got hit hard, particularly with the Spanish station.
bought a copy of Blazing Rangers for the NES/Famicom a few months back, and received it a couple days ago
it’s pretty fun, and kind of an interesting “what if” scenario where the what if is “what if a game looked and felt as tight as an early-90s NES game, but had gameplay like an early-to-mid-80s NES game.”
put out fires that reignite, rescue the kids by dragging them to the exit (either for points or for time/points, depending on the mode). that’s basically the game in a nutshell. there are some items, but i don’t know what they do because their effects don’t seem obvious and my manual is in Japanese and i don’t read enough to understand it lol.
mostly i’ve just been into collecting carts of new old games that look competent, and this satisfies.
Yeah it’s ostensibly a map coloring lawmmower game, the maps would be too convoluted, empty and huge for no reason otherwise. Plus the bonuses for filling maps are massive
The difficulty does ramp up pretty significantly though
Here are a few interesting things about the game :
The game tends to give you full partywide status immunity as passive skills, before you even see the status you’re given immunity against.
But running status immunity costs ability points. Usually you’ll equip the immunity, but spend the next 20 floors wondering « do I -really- need immunity against getting consumed alive? », then you’ll remove the ability and get immediately eaten by a shark the next battle
The game starts murdering you with overpowered enemies a few hours in, and it could take a while to realize what you’re supposed to do to avoid them.
Basically: Literally everything on the map appears as hexadecimal numbers, black numbers representing monsters encounters. The overpowered enemies have high hexadecimal numbers (ex : 7f when most enemies are around 20)
This is hard to notice because hexadecimal numbers are not particularly intuitive, and because you’ll probably stop paying attention to them after the first few floors
Defense and magic defense act as damage buffers instead of damage reduction. Physical attacks « hurt » defense directly, and whenever defense is depleted, any subsequent physical attack will start damaging HP instead
Defense / Mdef fully recover after battle, HP doesn’t
Weird system
The whole soundtrack might be electric guitar covers of public domain songs. I heard Wagner’s ride of the valkyries as a battle theme plus other obviously famous songs I can’t quite place
Square enix doing this like they’re one 15 year old guy working on a RPGmaker
