Pokemon stopped being for me when it left the Game Boy/Color, which is why I only play Gens 1 and 2. I keep trying FR/LG, but I just enjoy the looks of the Game Boy games considerably more.
Lavender’s pink and blue palette is probably my favorite.
There’s this, but that dialogue is dire.
I would also like to be the bad guy.
I know Blue Kaizo has a bad rap because yes, it does a bunch of shit that is purposefully frustrating like rearranging routes so you can’t go back and heal once you’ve started a line of trainers and whatnot or sometimes crank up the encounter rate to max (1 every 4 tiles), but I think the combat design is remarkably good in a regular non-Nuzlocke playthrough at testing how well you understand every facet of the gen 1 mechanics (including the bugs!) and there are a bunch of neat flavour touches in the revised gym leader lineups
Blue Kaizo is up there on my games of the year list, haven’t decided if it gets #1 or #2 spot yet.
has anyone played that open world game on pc that’s set in a pokemon-style world, but its dark and edgy, and you use the monsters as living shields and force them to work in weapons factories?
it seems strange that there hasn’t been a pokemon dungeon crawler yet. and only one strategy game!
anyway what i actually came into this thread to say was: king of fighters 2000 is so fucking cool.
Disco Elysium on Switch: The port is not great. Though arguably the low port quality makes the experience better:
—————
I think one of Disco Elysium’s greatest strengths is an unwavering will to always be the opposite of a power fantasy.
A particular standout Freeing Yurt in Demon’s Souls- like moment is when you call your precinct to report losing your badge and get viciously mocked for it by all your peers with no help offered - A brutal but normal reaction from cops I did not expect at all, because of years of videogame conditioning
Even if you try to escape becoming one of the kinds of washed up loser weirdo Disco Elysium wants you to become, the game will call you boring. This rules
—————
I was initially frustrated by the barrage of information from the game that I couldn’t immediately internalize … Yet I think I would have found this captivating as a younger person. I even -liked- that about Planescape Torment back in the day. This might be a part of getting older, less patient, less curious. Something to keep in mind and actively fight against
After a month of experiencing burnout to increasing levels of smoldering ash, I finally caved. I have played video games. My first sip of water was Picross 3D round 2. I love it as I knew I would. The 3d models look like Playmobil dioramas. They are very sweet. My main gripe is that it’s too easy for me to accidentally pick blue paint when I meant to pick orange. My other gripe is that it is all consuming and I cannot put it down once I start.
I’m also starting to dabble in the Gameboy library. I love how the first few releases are so simple. Even one of the more complicated games from its first year, Final Fantasy Legend, still seems to have very rudimentary numbers. It’s opaque without being fussy. I’m looking forward to playing it more.
Here’s a couple more that I liked:
Revenge of the Gator - A HAL Laboratory joint. The boards are nice and dense with switches, safety levers, and bumpers. The bottom board is devious. So many of the angles you hit with the flippers will flip your ball straight into gutters or the hole. Choosing an alligator theme for this sewer-green screen must have been divine inspiration.
Motocross Maniacs - This just feels fun to maneuver around. There was so much that I was missing until I read a manual. If you flip in certain spots, you can gain the ability to boost midair and basically fly around the course. In other spots, you find mini-bikers who follow you around. Cool and quaint.
Heiankyo Alien - This is a remake of a 70’s arcade game. It rules. I love the way it looks when you are devoured by the aliens.
Bases Loaded - The computer pitcher consistently throws three balls before sending them down the middle. Fielding feels just right. The soundtrack mimics a stadium’s sporadic musical cues. It’s delightful.
Penguin Wars - You can play as a cow. No notes.
Great music too
halfway through panzer dragoon orta. i love that it’s not only iterating on the rail shooter design of the first two games but also incorporating and reworking the dragon form switching/leveling and 3d spatial positioning + movement meter mechanics from panzer dragoon saga in a completely different genre. the boss fights feel more dynamically nuanced and individual as a result, and the emphasis on 3d movement in particular sometimes feels like it’s straining the limits of the form in these brief dizzying moments. adore how gracefully and confidently it develops from a perfected visual style heavily determined by the glittery scrolling impressionism of saturn rendering into the vivid solidity of “modern” 3d on more powerful hardware. all those textures of lush mirror sheen water and sega blue skies and saturated pink aurora borealis reflecting on cool blue snow, all with a heavy undercurrent of muted xbox goth. absolutely gorgeous boss designs too. it occupies a uniquely compelling uncanny valley as an unrealized next step for “outmoded” design principles and forms of ambition rendered at luxurious scale for basically no audience.
the P03 game is so fucking ugly, I hate looking at it. It’s just a muddy blue mess and it also lags
edit: yeah I guess that’s the whole point huh. I’m not as slow as one (I) might think
Anyone else playing Age of Empires 4? I feel like I’m way too bad at plate spinning to ever get good at anything more complicated than Herzog Zwei but I’m having a weird impulse with this game. At least the campaigns have been really fun so far, with little mini-documentaries about things like how fucked up trebuchets were in between missions.
I’ve apparently logged about 27 hours in Deathloop thus far and I’m still digging it. I can appreciate how some people may find the repetition a little too much but I’m actually really getting a kick out of gradually getting to refine my approach to a given area and time period as I progress through the storyline and nudge ever closer to the goal.
I feel like I’m fairly close to being able to pull off the “kill only the visionaries in a time period” achievement and maybe even the “don’t bother with a gun” achievement, and I’ve just had some story revelations show up and suspect I’m about to hit another important beat… and I’ve attained the means to group three visionaries in one time period and two in another, good stuff
The invasions are a fun injection of chaos into your best laid plans, but I fear I’m more inclined to stick to single player mode for the ability to pause the game, as in either public or friends-only mode it treats the game as multiplayer at all times. It’s a shame but really, given how long it can take to stealthily make your way through an area it just feels better to be able to pause when I need to.
I gave playing as Juliana a go a couple of times and I’m not sure it’s something I’ll sink a lot of time into, you’re not really given much in the way of help figuring out where Colt is headed or what he’s up to (which does make narrative sense; Colt isn’t really helped in finding you either) but that, combined with the fact you spawn into a map at a random point in Colt’s wandering means a lot of hanging around waiting or simply bumbling into Colt having done some laps. I did kick his ass a few times though.
It’s nice that they at least let you switch. Tired of games that literally won’t let you pause even offline cough dark souls
After picking up a “buy the entire franchise for $10” pack, I finally got to see how bad Flatout 3 was. I had to look into the developer to find out where that single game’s overwhelming eurojank flavor came from, and I think the most surprising thing about Team6 Studios is that they have been making that exact same bad game, at least once per year, since 2002.
In 2005 they made an open world car combat game with on-foot segments. I assure you this video is worth watching for the audio Decisions made on the main menu alone:
Cut off on that video title card, and on the video itself, is the setting for the game’s 4th stage: the Ultra Violent Gamers Convention.
yeah, you switch in the sort of between-session lobby, and in “single player mode” you still get invasions, just by a computer-controlled Juliana, who is admittedly not incredibly bright, but difficulty of AI is not this game’s point, so it works fine, and you can pause!
I definitely found that player-controlled juliana invasions were like, 80%+ of the game’s difficulty, which is consistent with a lot of other aspects of deathloop being these perfectly reconciled versions of other games’ mechanics that wouldn’t work any other way, so idk how I’d feel about this
I just don’t like that there is that one-hit kill machete move every Julianna invader knows. I don’t even mind being instantaneously obliterated by someone with a swiss army slab, that’s actually cool, but that machete move sucks.
maybe this is different with keyboard and mouse, but I definitely don’t feel like it’s as much as 80% from my play time
Beyond Oasis is really cool
Played through the original Legend of Sword and Fairy/Chinese Paladin since I realized the original version from 1995 was made freeware and fantranslated (the previous fan TL project of Windows 98/XP remake seems to have been silently dropped but it doesn’t seem to be too big of a loss, people seem to be more nostalgic for the DOS version, and as much as I appreciate the remake’s prerendered early 00s aesthetic I much prefer DOS-CRPG-meets-SNES-JRPG pixel art and brisk combat). Now I don’t know much about Chinese gaming, but the game caught my eye since it seems to be one of its most iconic titles – a beloved TV show adaptation that helped in kickstarting a few important careers (the main character was played by Hu Ge who “ranked 24th on the Forbes China Celebrity 100 List for 2020” and will be the lead in Wong Kar Wai’s new TV series, the love interest was played by Liu Yufei who starred as Mulan in Disney’s recent live-action movie), big orchestral arrangements of its soundtrack on big Chinese gaming events, a lot of merch including Nendoroid figurines of every playable team member, yadda yadda. And… I kinda adored it?
In many ways, it is a perfect combination of 90s PC games and SNES-era RPGs. Its combat system is like a simple the best of compilation of early Final Fantasy titles, a mix of substantially different skills (a variety of buffs, fun summons, special attacks tying into limited resources and so on) and figuring out various weaknesses with simple but effective attempts at cinematic quality (I particularly love how a lot of attacks interact with the combat field, which means every earth-shattering power wave leaves the ground scarred in a specific way and every time you summon a rain of swords the blades surround the boss for the rest of the battle). At the same time, you’ve got all these key bindings which make the cumbersome menu navigation a non-factor and a very 90s-PC-software general focus on making every interaction as brisk as possible. The big story beats are all handcrafted in pleasant/personal ways and take their cues from classic wuxia stories and personal experiences instead of other games, think a first act that revolves around a Dragon Inn-like scenario where mysterious interlopers involve you and your aunt’s inn in a bigger-than-it-seems political/mystical plot, while the level design is sprawling and user-hostile in ways that can be annoying at times, especially towards the finale where having monster repelling items is a must, but isn’t afraid to make you feel lost in the best ways and break the boring established rules to enhance the sense of Adventure. And hey, no random battles, constantly changing party members with different gimmicks, only 10-20 hours to reach the ending!
In general, one of its biggest strengths is building a FF6-like sense of drama using limited visual fidelity: evocative enemy and stage designs, grand yet understated gestures establishing love stories and tragic storylines, attempts at Dragon Quest-like contained smaller stories that are often meant to operate like Buddhist parables. Really feel it’s a must for anyone who loves 90s JRPGs, one of the most accessible Chinese games thanks to the methods it uses to ground its fantastical story, and it’s a shame there’s close to no writing about it in the Anglosphere internet. Of course, the fan translation is kind of recent and admittedly clumsy, but it’s way more understandable than the atrocity Sword and Fairy 6’s official translation was, and its quirks arguably enhance the retro vibe a lot of times. If you want to give it a shot, it’s available on Internet Archive as a ready-to-play package, complete with an emulator that makes it painless to play on modern Windows systems. Just remember to copy the contents of win_files to the main folder.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience with this. I’ve been wanting to try the series out for some time, particularly these older sprite-based entries. It looks like such a labor of love.
