in all sincerity tho this is probably my very favourite role playing game, playing it as a 33yo ex-rave burnout queer felt resonant in the same way playing mother 2 as a precocious closeted headcase 12yo was
i will be thinking about The Pale for an extremely long time
starting a Riki playthrough instead of Emelia. I like that it starts you out with five party members. Havenāt really figured out how monster absorbing works yet, but having a party member just suddenly turn into a skeleton is pretty funny.
congrats, you went from the worst character to the most difficult character, hope you are enjoying saga frontier
what the fuck! I love saga but what the fuck
yeah Iām enjoying it a lot, I like each encounter being a meaningful puzzle and the āwhere we droppin boysā toybox world design
this is by far my favourite saga game but my advice to anyone playing it (in the other thread) is basically ādo riki last or second to last, and only do emelia at all if you really want to have cleared all 7ā
you have lots of other great options that you are not taking!
I see 7 characters on the title screen Iām just gonna pick one, āpick this pick thatā damn how about I pick a trash can to put this game in (jk)
The SaGa Frontier character select screen is a game of russian roulette and choosing Riki is picking the bullet
im playing euro truck 2 like ryoga from ranma. i can only go places if a job takes me there, so basically my fate is entirely dictated by whatever town i end up in. ive been trying to get to spain from poland for the past 20 hours but i keep getting sucked back into central europe whenever i get to france. i just wanted to go to a car dealership in lyon but the only jobs available in the town i was in all sent me to belgium, so i spent 4 hours getting back down into the south of france where ill hopefully be able to buy another garage in marseille and then finally go to spain! i heartily endorse ryoga modeā¦until my poor sense of direction places me on a ferry to turkey ._.
literally exploring the vast reaches of space and time in order to build up a proper move set because some dickhead at square electronic arts thought it would be a good idea to make you do a solo run in trinity base again and have to take on another robot boss that can do 500 damage per shot, and can attack more than once per turn. i do not know who said dickhead is, but i hope his wife left him.
i also meant to point this out when i saw it, but why does the manticore enemy look like demon kogure
I got about (I think) 3/4 of the way through Hotline Miami before deciding Iād seen enough. Itās pretty cool I guess, if you want to play something twitchy. I donāt know why youād ever equip any mask other than the one that lets you kill people by opening doors into them, that one is overpowered as shit and lets you really cheese a lot of the setpieces.
The kill by punching one is powerful in certain circumstances. I think it letās you punch dogs when normally you need a weapon.
I will admit I was salty that the door thing doesnāt seem to work on the dogs
festival judging has meant iāve played some things i wouldnāt have otherwise that were interesting.
this from a Korean indie dev. itās kind of a āgame about a gameā. the dialogue was apparently all recorded by the developer, which is extremely impressive. itās done in a very cinematic way - reminds me of Fellini or something, though the presentation is very abstract. i also think it takes a concept that is often done in a totally corny, affected wayā¦ and makes it kind of genuinely funny and insightful. i need to actually finish the game, but itās definitely kind of a hidden gem.
i guess several trigger warnings are in order for this game, because there are some questionable things in it. that said, it kind of used a garish/bad IMVU/second life/flash type aesthetic to convey the sort of emotional state of a fucked up high schooler really well i thought. itās fucked up in a way thatās kind of funny and also emotionally honest. with all the interest lately in like dating sims and visual novels that are super wholesome and often weirdly sexless, this one kind of subverts the high school dating sim trope a lot by making your main character an incredibly unlikable fucked up person in a terrible environment. itās very adolescent, but in a self aware way. definitely recommended.
i agree here - i feel like this is where several different parts of the indie sceneā¦ or just hobbyist development in generalā¦ always seem to end up. i think itās also just this feeling that if youāre not putting āgameplayā in something you have to go so immensely against the flow of expectation every random person might have for your thing. and thatās exhausting. youāre permanently stuck in some sort of like weird space where people can antagonize you forever for not making ārealā games. they can forever see your work as not as legitimate as something that better meets peopleās expectations for what a game is supposed to be.
thereās fundamentally just a lot of support behind the idea of throwing traditional āgameplayā into something, and i think thatās another reason why people get pushed in that direction. itās part of this process of being seen as more legitimate in the space, and if you canāt reckon with that itās seen as a weakness. i think thatās also part of why i sensed a sort of āretreatā in the indie world to more conventional approaches/gameplay in the later half of the 2010ās. like whatever excitement that did exist over experimental stuff seemed to bottom out.
the thing is, like youāve said, there is still like those droqen gamesā¦ or like old Michael Brough or increpare games that interrogate gameplay in interesting ways. i donāt think āgameplayā has to be a boogeyman at all - itās just another element of a game. but people arenāt even interested in that most of the time. the power conventional genres hold is really strong hold over people. and big companies and franchises sort of becoming a slurry of a few different approaches over and over again and kind of erasing the past have a lot to do with it. people lose their reference points for doing anything any differently.
semi-related but the reason i kept evangelizing one or two Doom wads (ALT and Sacrament) that i thought were interesting and unusual partially because i feel like that community had been dominated by people who thought likeā¦ making relatively conventional maps was the best thing you could do, and fuck you if you try any other different approach. what gets celebrated by that community often baffles and depresses me. it felt like such an obsession over a very particular kind of style thatās justā¦ not that interesting or new at the end of the day. but so many people in that community were just totally immersed in that and couldnāt see outside of it. and who was i to come in and ruin their fun? even though it was actively excluding and discouraging people from making other things and just trying out whatever (because itās free to make maps, so why should people just be allowed to do whatever without getting shamed for it). anyway thatās something i really struggled with.
speaking of adding gameplay through obligation,
Genesis Noir is Calvinoās Cosmicomics as a series of animations and game toys, and it inherits all the moments of beauty and frustrations of the book. Itās cosmic science and history personified as personal relationships. Calvino described the project as building new myths to reflect science; re-creating gods in the image of man for the cold world we started to understand. And in bare moments, his stories of particles under attraction and fish preening to walk on the land make the world knowable and breathtaking. But more often a story about Uncle Gravity and Aunt Weak Force fighting and kissing and making hot interaction love is just silly. It has trouble getting to funny because itās too attached to the earnest metaphor and it canāt get to sublime or insightful because itās too removed from the concept.
So if some web designers ineptly rewrote Calvino you get Genesis Noir. Like all my dreams it extends past the death of every living human and imagines the time beyond time.
Itās incredible to look at, though. Itās built out of staged scenes, the players posed and frozen, like much of Oikospiel. Scenes are usually full of frames within frames - snapshots of other scenes, true depth of their own, panning and orbiting as you look around. And almost everything is built out of layered textures. The closest visual comparison is really El Shaddai; itās like a dozen add/subtract/multiply texture swatches built up on each scene, always reacting to touch.
The interactive moments are brief; successful when they encourage touch and play and unsuccessful when they want to be a puzzle or a musical expression or a too-long platformer segment. If it stops moving it dies.
An unfortunate third act introduces voice acting and drops the blue & gold jazz score for rainbow Sayonara Wild Hearts; I can only guess the designer was done and wanted to move on and at that point so was I.
Iām going to be mining this for visual reference for years
the concept of the pre-time singularity is represented by a woman with a butt that wonāt quit
the butt starts the fight that starts time and thus the end of the universe
Lāorigine du monde but for anal
I think the driving in Deadly Premonition is giving me RSI.
Having played this twice over my plan is to get Yorkās Car and then just burn through the story. See the tiny useless new bits.
iāve played some of this game and it really is a marvel visually. iād been following the game for awhile pre-release mostly because of that. i like the concept of the story but it is a little dumb in execution, though i guess not as dumb as a lot of prestige indie games. the gameplay being basically in the minimally interactive Windosill/Metamorphabet kind of mode isnāt the worst thing but i feel like they still could have done more with it. i was hoping youād actually get to do detective-like things. i was almost hoping the story would have some interesting twists but it sounds like it doesnāt. hearing that thereās voice acting later on in the game really scares me, since the no voice acting thing is one of the things that sold me on the game to begin with.
