played Stretch Panic and unfortunately leaning towards the conventional wisdom that it is indeed pretty bad, so far, in both basic and surprisingly gratuitous ways (what on earth is with the point-acquiring levels??). one thing i like a lot about the Treasure games i’ve played is the way they treat vgame graphics as very malleable things to be rescaled, recoloured, stretched, spun around and duplicated as much as possible, favourite example is in Astro Boy Omega Factor when the generic trenchcoated “gang members” start appearing in screen-filling quadruple-size variants of different shades. it is fun to see the start of a similar approach to 3d in this one, both with the emphasis on simple bright-coloured shapes and also on pulling around and deforming everything. anyway will probably keep going until i get to the one giant head boss that looks very cool.
i’m glad there’s now a better version of the native lady in highpool in Wasteland 2, vultures cry, who pretends to be a stereotype because it makes it easier to deal with the white settlers. you only find that out if your character has high enough intelligence (which is dumb for obvious reasons) and they frame it like you caught her act slipping or whatever which i don’t like either. the only stuff i could find of her dialogue is guys who never bothered to actually talk to her enough to get her to talk normally, plus the dialogue option is predicated on her still being imprisoned (ugh) … so most people just got to hear the racist ass like noble savage dialogue instead of the extra, “normal” voice set they recorded for her
I finished the Last Remnant.
The graphics were very ornate, and the music was good.
When meeting a boss, I was excited to beat them. In that way, it was like SMT 3 and 4.
The side quests had clever, funny writing.
The home stretch (maybe the last 15 or 20 hours) gave you a lot of great battles, to tweak your set up and have fun too.
The battle system itself was convoluted and arbitrary in a way that was still intuitive. I never felt like it was pushing back at me in a way that made it difficult to enjoy.
Is Last Remnant the one where if you’re not careful, or engage in too many battles you can sort of screw yourself over and make the game unreasonably hard? Or was that something else? I feel like I’m always getting this mixed up with something else and also whatever the game is with the convoluted gun combat is (which my brain is telling me is called Deadly Premonition but I know it’s not that lol)
Resonance of Fate
End of Eternity
Yeah Last Remnant is the one with anti-grind mechanics in place. (It’s basically a SaGa game and all SaGa games post 1991 have had scaling enemies)
I think the game got a scary reputation because people fought crabs for hours then got owned. In practice the mechanics are not that punitive, especially since bosses scale more slowly than random enemies. I’m pretty sure you’re at a higher risk of getting screwed over by enemy scaling in a Bethesda games like Fallout 3, where levelling up to 2X means every enemy now will not die before eating 50 bullets
I have all the same aversions you do and fall asleep 30 minutes into these types of games, but I was okay making the exception for this one only because
-it’s short, especially if you don’t try to exhaust the side missions, so it didn’t get to the point of feeling stretched (maybe more so cause I didn’t play the original game)
-miles is likable the whole way through and I liked listening to his performances
-you eventually end up having a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the cops and just end up trying to avoid them, helping people through a silly app and it at least avoids feeling too much like vigilantism.
-60 fps
The story might (mild spoilers but I’m being ultra vague) rely too heavily on a trope with a morally grey character, but it hits its beats very competently.
I love Treasure and I only watched someone play this game one time back when it was new. I never felt compelled to seek it out myself after watching…but its visual language+weird hub/stage layout are more memorable 15 years later than actual games I have played, probably.
Also, the strange way that the hand occupies the halfway space between being a mouse cursor and existing on any kind of Z axis is deeply unsettling.
I got rescued!!!
…Turns out there’s a boss at the end who summons several of the hardest monsters so I got swarmed and knocked out with no option to use my last rescue request
Seems the only way to beat these dungeons is to use all the advanced systems to craft high level items and hope they spawn. I don’t really have the patience for that so I think I might be done with this for now
Geneforge looks good! Have actually started playing Avernum today (or I guess one of the many remastered versions of Avernum) after a different RPG I was thinking about turned out to be too much for my laptop. Don’t have much experience with this kind of WRPG other than Pillars Of Eternity, which I liked at first but then found a bit overwhelming, once I had 6 party members to keep track of and got to the big town the prospect of combing through it all started to seem a bit grim.
Avernum is nicely condensed feeling by comparison and I like the art more - it’s funny how evocative some weird mushroom trees and textboxes in a little tile world can be, compared with a big prerendered backdrop to crawl around - but some nice world stuff aside, it’s also starting to be very upfront about “this is a game about meeting and doing favours for various mayors.” But the setting is appealling enough that I am willing to put up with some MayorQuest rp to see if it goes anywhere.
Maybe? I don’t know if the remaster is rebalanced over the original but what I played was never really that hard. Some of the gamefaqs posts did mention that this could happen but then I don’t know if those players were using actual strategy or not. If anything, it got easier towards the end.
im definitely gonna start getting the new remakes of spiderweb software games! geneforge 1 is selling really well (according to the excitement level of the developers posts), so hopefully they’ll keep being put out
Do you think there’s cool stuff in Metro Exodus worth looking past its generic open world qualities (just assuming it has this problem like every game these days). After playing Far Cry 2 and doing some recent reading about STALKER (have played these) and kind of letting myself get into the pleasures of new open world games like RDR2 I’m looking at some of these games with more open mindedness. And Exodus is pretty cheap on steam right now.
espgaluda is so good
finished genealogy!!!
it’s maybe a little too long, there’s a ton of inventory management busywork and like a lot of these games the difficulty dissipates in the endgame when you have a bunch of units with 90+% evasion etc. but there’s a bunch of weird mechanics and interesting map design (the maps are huge but they’re mostly broken into clever setpieces) and it became one of those games i was thinking about when i wasn’t playing
nintendo are still the tory party of vidcons though ok
My favorite Cave game is Guwange and I got pretty decent at it at one point, but I was only ever able to 1cc the first 4 stages. That one just insanely ramps up the difficulty in the final stage, and even moreso in the final boss specifically, seemingly to make it so that 1cc is a proof of shmup godliness. I’m not sure exactly how common that is, but Guwange being the first arcade game I made a serious effort to get good at discouraged me from the dream of 1cc’ing much of anything else.
I’m going to call bullshit on the invisible paths with the snowflakes in the Crystal Cave, From Software literally wants me to kill myself but can’t decide if it should be in game or irl
It’s ok now, I deleted the game for the second time. See you in 2022??
yeah i highly recommend making “getting into cave games” a thing you do
In my example it’s not the invisible snowflake bridges that hate you but the slippery crystal platforms before it where the sense of traction belongs firmly in the laps of the gods of RNG