Game seems pretty neat so far.
7 Likes
I’m sitting alone in my apartment, sincerely laughing out loud at how violent my party is. I come up to this castle early on and everyone there says to go away, stop bothering them. After wrapping other things up, I come back and the steward of the castle has killed the king. I chase after him, he begs for his life, and I kill him in one attack. This picture shows what one of my team members says to the corpse. Turns out I’m roleplaying as arch-monarchists who value and avenge royalty even when they’re greedy jerks.
8 Likes
A couple of things.
Got to the final boss in Metroid Dread, decided to venture around for power ups, and now I am at the final boss again. My doctor the other day told me to make small but meaningful changes in my life to reduce stress (in hopes of lowering my blood pressure), so I am smiling serenely at these instructions that say “just before hitting the wall, store your shinespark, then make three perfect jumps to the top of the room and you should have a tenth of second to dash through the bricks” and letting them slip through my fingers like grains of sand.
Played more GOTG and am still having a really good time with it. Honestly I feel like the designs carefully skew away from the MCU versions (Benicio Del Toro’s Collector might have been cooler if he had a gigantic cartoon spike of hair like the character does in this one). In fact, you can unlock the MCU costumes, and most of the blurbs that come with are the characters talking shit about them, haha.
At the very least, I’m not getting the awful stunt double vibe that The Avengers had going on with it.
Also have spent some time with Rider’s Republic. I think RPS described the tone of the game as “an extreme sports purgatory” which seems apt.
I dunno, it’s kinda fun. A lot of the events seem impossible without better gear, but the game is generous enough to reward you even if you really fuck up, so getting better gear (and, presumably, pulling off these seemingly impossible bonus tasks) is inevitable.
4 Likes
this is great, i’ve been curious about this series but haven’t had the chance to figure out how to get into it yet. it sounds like it is even more interesting than i thought it would be.
btw the company that made it is from taiwan, though they did open up a branch office in beijing a few years ago.
i know very little about game companies in taiwan of this era, but i can only assume it is companies like this one that inspired the video game developer subplot of the movie Yi Yi
4 Likes
Yeah, I haven’t found the right moment to mention that in my initial post. It’s amusing how wuxia fans seem to often insist that the greatest works within the genre are the domain of HK and Taiwan and even videogames seem to reflect that (and I love Yi Yi, that hopelessly melancholic developer figure really resonates with me)
Oh yeah, one more thing I really like about the game is how it refills a large (but not full) part of your MP/HP bars after each battle, sparing you item management between small fry battles but encouraging it before the big fights. It’s a bit -too- easy and streamlined and broken in usual JRPG ways but forward thinking in many unexpected ways, an utter UX delight by the standards of the era. It’s always so satisfying to play a PC title like this or the old Tony Hawk’s games where you’re allowed to instantly skip all the showy cinematics or menu transitions and get to the meat of the experience as quickly as your button presses allow you
4 Likes
i beat am2r for the first time today. good game, the shinespark stuff wasnt anywhere near the difficulty of the stuff in zero mission, which is great. lots of nice little touches show how much of a labor of love this was
5 Likes
After browsing the PC-98 section of romhacking.net I noticed this game 魂の門 ダンテ「神曲」より / Tamashii no Mon Dante no Shinkyoku yori for the first time, with a partial (non-dialog) translation patch released a few months ago. So I decided to play it. An action adventure platformer about an enterprising Italian man somehow transported to a strange parallel world, his interactions with its strange creatures, their dastardly overlord, and an elusive beautiful woman. 
I first got it up and running with the Neko Project II Kai core in Retroarch, a perfect excuse to try out the “AI Service” OCR/Translation/Text-to-Speech functionality they put in a year or two ago, for the first time. Pretty magical, a big wow thing. You can either, like, local-host some kind of Python server shit, jack in your Google API key etc.; or like me, just one boy, you can sign up for and use a free Ztranslate.net account. Once setup, you assign a hotkey that takes a screenshot, uploads it to The Internet, and what returns is very-functional if often charmingly-hokey auto-overlaid replacement translation-text right there in your game-window. Wow.
Anyways, I messed around with that for a few minutes.
Then, from a guy’s youtube playthrough, I also learned of a build of the standalone Neko Project II emulator that has ‘text hooking’ support patched in. This allows a helper program like, say, Textractor, to read the live text data loaded in ram or whatever, and also Google translate it in its own window, etc. Yippee. Less magical, maybe slightly more practical, basically instant.
So I started a playthrough in this fashion, which you may watch above.
I got killed by a sassy Red Arremer. Cool game.
20 Likes
Felipe Pepe (who known Spanish, English, Japanese and others etc, this guy is a monster on language) once wrote some articles about East-Asia CRPG video games except Japan if you wanna know more.
https://felipepepe.medium.com/before-genshin-impact-a-brief-history-of-chinese-rpgs-bc962fc29908
https://felipepepe.medium.com/rpgs-in-south-korea-a-brief-history-of-package-online-and-mobile-games-759478508a1c
16 Likes
the crpg book that felipe pepe edited is in itself a marvelous ludography
2 Likes
I’ve had this sitting on my computer, installed and all set up for years, and your post is finally making me want to give it a proper go
3 Likes
I usually never make a sound when playing a videogame yet I audibly gasped at the end of Disco Elysium when the phasmid showed itself
I loved this game… I’m glad I learned about the Paris Commune 1 year before playing this because it’s the most obvious influence behind this game’s setting. My wife had learned all about it in school, I expect that I got a right wing history teacher who glossed over the subject. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying any attention in history class
7 Likes
The way some people are drawn to the familiar shittyness of Hallmark Christmas Movies, so am I drawn to D-Tier Indie Platformers on Steam. Today, Pinstripe.
I’ve played about 30 minutes of it, and woof, just very little to hold appeal at all. Whatever mystery the game my hold, wherever its story is headed – I don’t care.
4 Likes
Two other text-based games with a similar premise I’d recommend are Caves of Qud and A Dark Room, in case you haven’t played them yet.
4 Likes
i got five skillcapes now in melvor idle, next skill up to master is cooking! now that its owned by jagex, the art is getting updated so its no longer corporate vector art, like chunky assets all floating around eachother
i love the update because the art is the worst thing in this game
also I hope you all started accounts when i linked it cuz oops the game getting bought by jagex means he charges for it now (which is good, its one of the best idle games ive ever fucking played. its up there with spaceplan and cats who stare at ghosts and idling to rule the gods) so if you dont have a cloudsave you gotta pay
i love that the game has the experience keep going after you hit 99 too! i hope there’s a cape for getting a bunch of my skills to 200 mil xp haha
2 Likes
I beat Sylvie’s game “Cute Jump” this week. According to her spreadsheet, it’s a 10/10 challenge. I would agree with this assessment! It borrows the physics/structure of Maddy Thorson’s 2004 GameMaker classic “Jumper” but features entirely new aesthetics, mechanics, and levels.
Cute Jump is a pixel precision platformer with eye-blindingly pink levels. It also features a wide variety of midi music covers “stolen” from various midi sites (as stated in the credits).
The game incorporates some “unfair” and bizarre mechanics, for instance “Luck Blocks”, which have a random chance to go away when you touch them.
She uses this mechanic to directly compare difficult platforming to random chance. On this screen, the right path is significantly easier to navigate than the left path, but at the bottom it has an 85% chance to block you from continuing. Which path is worth your time?
This screen features another mechanic – timer blocks – which start a timer when you touch them and disappear when the timer reaches zero. Here, you can choose to attempt a difficult platforming section or simply wait a certain amount of time to skip that section (each of the timers is longer than the previous one).
She tells you about the checkpoint mechanic in the fourth world. That would have been nice to know beforehand!
Since your character moves 6 pixels a frame, sometimes you are not aligned correctly to fit through some gaps. On this screen, you need to take a very roundabout path so that you can push into a wall and get the correct alignment (or wait an amount of time equal to whatever “QT” seconds is in base 36 (0-9A-Z)).
The whole 5th world is impossible to look at!
Anyway I really liked this game and it’s probably one of the hardest game I’ve ever beaten. Here are my final times:
(It asks for your name and what you think about the game when you beat it, and then puts that info on this screen which is a cute idea!)
15 Likes
off topic but have i ever posted about how i had to look at ~250 of these for work
17 Likes
have you listened to david roth and jeb lund’s podcast? you’d probably enjoy it
1 Like
oh, I understand so much more about you now
1 Like
A Dark Room was probably my personal game of the year the year it came out
3 Likes
I know it has its own thread, but I regret letting all the amiibo card stuff scare me away from playing Happy Home Designer on the 3DS, because this Happy Home Paradise stuff in the Switch game is great.
1 Like