Thinking about pirating San Andreas and writing an essay about this, and how the data of games doesn’t actually change but our memories do, and replacing them like this just seems like a deliberate attempt to undermine any kind of historical awareness among even casual gamers of the medium.
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You should! It would be a good essay.
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went through the rigmarole of digging out my ds3 controller and getting pressure sensitive buttons to work (nowadays you can just install sony’s playstation now which will recognize and install official drivers for a ds3 and you can use that with pressure sensitivity in rpcs3 but pcsx2 does nothing with it so you still have to install some dumb garbage) so I can finally get to Ace Combat Zero. I didn’t know this but apparently there are three kinds of aces
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Oh yeah, I was thinking about it. It would definitely be less structured than the PS2 thread (which I have not forgotten!). I definitely want to talk more about Final Fantasy Legend and all the good-bad games that are on this brick!
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I’ve been wanting to write about Yugo Puzzle but I don’t want to until I finish it, and there is one puzzle that has had me stumped for two or so weeks now. It’s taken me so long that the creator has coincidentally added in a hint system that offers two clues for each puzzle. After two weeks I figure that’s the time to use said system, and the first clue confirmed that my basic notion that I figured must be correct was in fact so which is good as it means I’m not losing my mind. The second clue stopped me cold as on the first day when I busted out the pen and paper to try and figure it out I came up with a potential structure which would work but is sadly impossible to form; that it turns out is the correct structure.
So yeah, while I have guidance now (which I am thankful for, problem is when you get stuck late in a game few are playing it is hard to find hints) I put a bit more time into it today just trying to figure out how it is in any way possible and am still lost.
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I played Psycho Dream (SFC) today really not knowing what to expect, and had a good time with it — beat it in one sitting, even. More than anything else, it’s an incredible tone piece.
I like the way the game juxtaposes the mundane with the bio-horror stuff — like with radio towers covered in goopy monsters that rise out of the ground in the first level, with an elevator made out of alien flesh going up an otherwise normal skyscraper, or with the final level where the foreground looks like sorta Geiger-esque but the background is pretty much that Disneyland castle. All very memorable imagery.
There are a few places where you can enter random doors and they take you to dead-end rooms that seem to serve no purpose other than to vaguely flesh out the place. Also, it seems like there were a few places where the game would loop me back to the beginning of a room until I paid attention for a second and found a hidden exit. Very peculiar level design choices there (I dig it).
As an action game, it’s perfectly serviceable. I never quite got used to the weird hitboxes on the dude’s weapons, but I enjoyed the basic cadence of the action well-enough. (Granted, I didn’t figure out you could run until I was well over halfway through the game lol (I ran into a boss whose attacks I could dodge and was like “there has got to be a way to move faster”))
The final boss is some grade-A nonsense though — so much harder than the rest of the game that it’s kinda funny, actually.
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i rolled my eyes really hard at the open worldiness of smt5 (they ripped off koroks!!! not that felix is gonna notice etc.) but this is a really pleasant world to explore and fuck around in? i’m legit compelled to investigate everywhere but the current objective
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oh boy day 1 of this ps3 driver thing telling me every day, alt tabbing me out of anything I’m doing if it needs to, that this no longer maintained software is in fact up to date
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played thru samus returns and wow what a surprise it’s a bad game.
every boss fight was an intense exercise of tedium and I never felt good about beating one, i only felt glad that the experience was over.
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also holy shit the 3ds has terrible form factor. this console is actively hurting my hands and that made the experience just more miserable
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Just cataloging more bugs I’ve encountered in GTA 3 Definitive. On the third island now and I’ve noticed several spots where the texture or object in a particular spot is at the wrong elevation and therefore floating either a few inches or several feet above the spot where it’s supposed to be sitting.
Also since yesterday I’ve noticed some weird animation glitch when exiting vehicles. Basically, it appears as though when you press the button to exit a vehicle it very briefly shows the final frame of the exiting animation where the character is standing next to the car before showing the whole animation of the character exiting the car.
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reading about the animation bug gave me a weird sense of deja vu … i think that might be in the original?
I’ve seen this in a bunch of videos it seems to be a popular problem. they should go full saints row 1 and just set you on fire for exiting a moving vehicle, or allow you to ‘mount’ cars by standing on the roof and hitting the get in button and just clipping into the driver’s seat… give the people what they want
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I don’t think so. This is the first time I’ve encountered it in any version of the game.
I have been trying this in every GTA game as I’ve replayed them, wondering which game I was able to do that in, but damn, it’s from Saints Row???! Loved that thing.
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I am doing this too but with San Andreas. The GPS in that game is absolutely broken. I am near the burger icon up north while my destination is the blue triangle. This is pretty much normal, the kinds of routes it always suggests.
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Yeah it’s the same with GTA 3 as well. These games didn’t originally have a suggested route on the mini map. That only started with GTA 4. If you rely on the GPS route during some timed missions you’re likely to fail because the game was designed with the expectation that you’d take shortcuts over non-road areas and between buildings and such, and not just follow the quickest, legal route. I had to pretty much just ignore the GPS while doing the side jobs because you will almost always run out of time if you stick to the suggested route.
I don’t know how these types of systems normally are designed. Is it all just an algorithm or whatever? The computer looks at the road layouts, the directions of the lanes and where all the intersections are and then just spits out a route? I’ve played these games long enough that I don’t need to have a route to follow but I imagine it might be very confusing for new players who don’t already know the layouts.
My advice would be to turn off the GPS if possible and just do it the old fashioned way of getting to the map icon however you can do it.
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I am used to navigating without it from my time with the old versions. I wish there was a way to turn it off. I think these are kind of bad because they make it so easy for people to never develop directional or spatial awareness of the environments in games. You may never learn the city or how things connect! I slip into it a little bit with this one, but ultimately resist it because the routes are total nonsense. The yellow lines just clutter the minimap, which is annoying.
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I’ve been trying all sorts of stuff from Gamepass on PC lately, including Unpacking. This is a lovely little game. Each “level” is a new room, apartment, or house where you are tasked with unpacking moving boxes and setting the place up. As you progress through the game it becomes clear that you are undertaking every move in the entire life of a single person. You set up her childhood bedroom, her college dorm, her first studio apartment, and so on. There’s actually an understated but compelling narrative here. You can infer a lot about this woman’s life by the places she’s moved into, the objects she’s brought with her from place to place, and the new items that she’s acquired between moves. The game is very perceptive about this kind of thing, and I found myself reminiscing a lot about my own moves I’ve had.
There are a few pretty clever moments where the gameplay and themes intersect, e.g. at one point the main character moves into a new boyfriend’s apartment, and you can tell they’re not a great match just from how his place is set up. It’s this totally dry, black and red modernist apartment that completely contrasts with the main character’s aesthetic. He didn’t give her enough room for her things, and as you unpack you have to really work to find places to fit her stuff. His walls are all completely covered. You’ve been hanging up her framed diploma in a few previous apartments, but this one offers no space for it. You are forced to store it under the bed. In the next level, she’s moving back into her childhood bedroom at her parents’ house. One of the items in her moving boxes is a photo of a man and woman, with a pin stuck in the man’s face. If you try to hang the photo on her pinboard with her other photos, the game counts it as an inappropriate placement and you have to store it out of sight in a drawer in order to complete the level.
It’s a very cozy, relaxing game. I love its Windows 95 edutainment pixel art aesthetic. If you like Happy Home Designer, this scratches that same itch very well. It’s nice and short and doesn’t wear out its welcome.
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