sekiro more or less demands extremely aggressive play and it’s a big paradigm shift vs. other from software games. it’s not a souls game (it’s better imo) but it really does take some getting used to. enemies are much, much more predictable when responding to your blows than they are otherwise, so in 1v1 situations r1-spam-until-you-get-deflected is a valid default tactic.
there’s about a fifth of a second’s window for parrying. there’s no windup like there is in souls parrying, if you hit the button at the right time it should happen. you can hold block as usual and then let go and tap again for parries if that suits you better. hanbei the undying is invaluable for learning the timing! he’s also kind of fun to just chill with
Yeah, a really good way to practice is to wail on an enemy and track what they do to reject you and learn to identify how they message rejection and what they do afterwards
I one hundred percented Crash 2 back in the day without a strategy guide/Internet FAQ help, and I have no idea why!!! I can’t think of a single other case where I exhausted the content of a game that keeps track of your progress on the save/load screen like that, it’s just not in my DNA.
It actually wasn’t too bad to play to completion, except for a single gem hidden mid-game that i don’t remember being signposted with ANYTHING… the type of secret requires you exhausting every possible corner of the stage design to find. Like, I’m almost certain I pulled over my older sister who couldn’t have cared less at the time to explain how a crime had been committed. I’m almost curious to check out the remake to see if it’s as insulting to find as I remember, or if it the children who are wrong.
i played a little bit of loop hero. it’s… it’s fine? i really just wanted to watch somebody play it but i couldn’t find a VOD of anybody who wasn’t Full Gamer about the whole thing, so it fell to me and my fifteen dollars to see what’s up.
i appreciate the unique and pretty chill glorified tamagotchi game loop (sorry) and i really like the russian-magical-realism character art and tone a lot a lot! there’s lots of little incidental interactions between tiles that are pretty neat to stumble on. but i steamrolled the first chapter on my second run, and the mandatory grind is so steep that i can’t move on to the next chapter without being overwhelmed. mandatory grinds in a roguelite are like, the worst kind of padding and here it’s enforced by arbitrary caps on how many resources you can gather in a run and costs that are just kind of ridiculous and an intensity curve that really sneaks up on you. it’s actually kind of funny how easy it is to be caught off guard by time passing during combat.
i’m gonna keep with it for a little while to see if it manages to surprise me somehow, but otherwise the cute premise doesn’t allow the game to escape Roguelite Design Syndrome and it’ll probably wear out its welcome before long. i really should have seen this coming lol
I’m giving RE6 another shot. I powered through the part I was stuck on in Leon’s campaign the first time I played it. Whoa, this game turned into Left 4 Dead suddenly?
a couple days ago, i found out about a short-lived console in japan from the mid-80s called the super cassette vision. i’m surprised i never even heard of this, but i’m glad i did, because some of the games on here are pretty cool, and hold up pretty well from a visual standpoint. sadly, the emulator i’m using is not 100% compatible with all of the games, so there’s a few i couldn’t try out.
finished panzer dragoon zwei (normal ending, want to go back for true eventually) and locked in neutral alignment for the home stretch of smt 1. always cursed, always poisoned.
Yeah! Honestly though it hasn’t been that charming in the first hour? My main issue in Origami King is the condescension towards the player (the busywork being part of it), and a lack of overview, let’s see:
Constantly talking new helper character tagging along with Mario
Extreme linearity, you can’t even explore a little village or talk to people in the first hour
Lots of text but you can’t speed it up, it’s Xenogears all over again. I think this happened because different characters talk at different speeds and they really want you to see it! A menacing character talking slowly builds suspense, you see. L i t t l e m o n e y, as a feature
The first battle is a tutorial battle. Then the second battle comes 15 minutes later and is the exact same battle, and also a tutorial for the same actions again, just in case you forgot since the first battle. I haven’t seen another battle in 1 hour
The « holes in the fabric ». The holes are everywhere and either block the path / carry hidden stuff. You gotta fill them with confettis, which are available everywhere in unlimited quantities by just smashing environmental items around. There’s no friction, just time wasting. And after smashing environmental items it takes like 2 seconds for Mario to magnet confettis to him, so you have to stay in place a tiny frustrating time everytime you grind confetti
Also you can’t just grind confetti and be done with it forever because the more you have in your bag, the less you get. Need to grind every once in a while, it’s « part of the charm »
Screw this logarithmic confetti
Also as an aside
« Paper Mario is known for its extremely small RPG numbers » First battle nets you 506 coins huh
have only had time for two, maybe three games this gaming season. there’s a lot i want to play. nervous i will never have time for a jrpg (my love) again.
TOMB RAIDER
pure joy of platforming in this when it clicks. slide. jump. rebound. lara croft controls in a way that males sense. the decrepit ruins here have almost no sound, just footsteps and whatever is in the darkness.
imcredible use of geometry to hide secrets. requires.context knowledge of how simple 3D objects and sprites interact sometime.
i forget from watching my dad play every single ome of these as a kid but only first hand experiencing the marketing how just notnsexualized lara is. everytjing she says is a one liner about kicking or shooting someone in the dick.
LOOP HERO
the old world is imposibly large in its complexities. you cannot go back to it: you cannot have it back. maybe here in the darkness, some scraps of wood and our memories of how it could have been can build something better.
I’ve been losing a lot of time to Besiege lately. I consider myself pretty useless in an engineering context but man, over the course of 18 hours I went from building go-karts with cannons on top to a fully automated (but almost entirely useless) self-loading trebuchet design that works with all sorts of logic gates and sensors and things like that. It’s really good virtual legos.
