I bought a new monitor this week and it’s one of those not-real-HDR HDR400 displays but, well, that’s more HDR than I had before so I wanted something to mess around with on it
somehow this turned into playing through all of journey in Tetris Effect on expert in a sitting after having not played Tetris anything in probably a good year and a half
I feel like my brain has been touched deep down inside
I really wish Flinthook wasn’t a roguelike. I think more bespoke level design would have really suited this game a lot better.
The visuals are great, but very cluttered so threat-detection can be a real issue. And the hook mechanic is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth because it’s annoyingly easy for the hook to attach to the wrong thing. You’ll try to hook away an enemy’s shield, but wind up grabbing the grapple point they’re overlapping with and zipping right into their face intsead.
Putting this one down. Fun visuals and music, though.
TFW you finally reemerge onto the surface of SR-388 to find it’s now twilight and those carrion fly things are everywhere…
It makes me think Metroid 2 was the ur-Shadow of the Colossus in a way, both with the extermination quest and the quietness outside of the battles. Metroid 2 struck a different balance though: you couldn’t be quite sure whether you or Samus were meant to be uneasy or naively enthusiastic to take down the hideous menace
now load up citra or whatever and play samus returns, bask in the ridiculousness of it’s non-remappable 14 button control scheme, and scream at whoever greenlit the project
i feel this way about every roguelite
Eliza’s basic premise is just this side of a bad Black Mirror script but the execution is working for me. The irony that I’m relating to the protagonist and conversations is hovering at acceptable levels for now.
I played Yar’s Revenge for the first time. Crazy how such a limited platform can produce such a fun and even modern feeling game.
Playing some Running With Rifles lately. It didn’t click with me originally, back in 2016, but it did now.
Elevator pitch: isometric war-themed shooter, very lethal, level up your soldier, deploy materiel. Absolute meat grinder combat. If you turn gore all the way up (increases the amount of blood that comes off people, no gibs/dismemberment) then chokepoints become literally bathed in red, like you’re on another planet.
This game is a fucking bloodbath and battles (not even missions, BATTLES!!!) take HOURS to win if you’re a private. You’ll kill four, ten, twenty guys as you slowly advance into a point, and then one guy domes you from outside your vision and all that progress dries up as the friendly AI completely shits itself.
But as you rank up and get access to reinforcements, artillery, deployables, and basic squad tactics, suddenly you start making much larger impact on the field with your presence. Where before you were some private crouched behind a rock, now you stride battle with bulletproof vests and tanks and your own squad of privates.
All of this is on the vanilla campaign difficulty, which is also the difficulty the official co-op servers run on. But you can tweak this stuff for your own co-op and singleplayer experience. Want access to general stuff right away? Crank the XP multiplier to maximum. Want AI to be more like fish in a barrel, and less like terrifying perfect-aim terminators? Turn their accuracy down.
I’ve been playing this in the same brainspace as Verdun, as a pure slugfest shootgrind, and I think it works best either online or in co-op, pulling your friends (or randos) into chokepoint hell. Ideally with some total conversion that gives you Star Wars weapons or some shit.
Incidentally, it reminds me of a game I was fixated on when I was in high school: Infantry Online, the commercial SOE mod of Subspace (one of my Formative Games) that made all the ships infantry guys and gave it a boots-on-the-ground feel.
Glad I returned to it, gonna try and rope some friends into co-op play lol.
Played Toree 3d yesterday, short and simple 3d platformer with running and a double jump. There are 9 levels which all take 2 minutes at most if you’re speed running. Turning the camera while trying to cut corners can be really fun.
I would like more inertia…there are icy surfaces but either jump will solve this. I think you keep your speed on your first jump and it resets on the second? I don’t get why there is a run button, I’m always holding it. I’d rather be using that thumb to fuck with the Y-axis of the camera on the second analog stick when I’m not jumping. There are parts where you have to wait on a moving platform, but some moving platforms will active your foot sparks if you’re holding onto the run button even while standing still, so I imagine they’re tapping their foot furiously.
If you get good times on all the levels you unlock a character that goes faster, but maybe it’d be better to have the main character go faster or have more conveyor belts/wind currents. Reminding me of Super Mario Kart is the best thing I can imagine a 3d platformer doing. There are a few parts where you have to catch the first cycle of a moving platform or wait and I always hate that shit, but it’s actually not so bad. Also there are collectible stars, whatever, you unlock a character with infinite jumps if you collect all of them, whatever. You can already reach all the cool spots that have collision with the main character.
Anyway despite my bitchposting I still recommend checking it out, it’s only a dollar lol. I really look forward to the next game hinted at the end of the credits!
Unexpectedly I found myself invested enough in Concrete Genie to play through the whole game in a single sitting. In terms of premise/plot this is basically some Laika/DreamWorks Animation C-team stuff but it propels the action forward. Like, the writing and the voice acting are definitely on the clumsy side. The art is nice but it’s easy to see the influences.
The majority of the action is painting (canned) pictures on the walls in predetermined spots, and sneaking around rooftops to avoid the bullies that harass the protagonist. It’s funny because they accuse him of cowardice but if I was bullying a kid and he escaped me with some parkour shit I’d at least have to begrudgingly respect it. Homeboy is climbing a damn abandoned crane in front of y’all and you’re still talking shit? Anyway, act surprised when they do eventually come around.
You’ll see every plot beat coming, most of the puzzles are very slight. The one neat(ish) trick it pulled is introducing surprisingly robust combat in the final act. Suddenly it turns into a very different thing which it carries off pretty well! Nothing revelatory, but I’ll admit I nodded my head in appreciation all the same. A bunch of the map gets recontextualized which is an added nice touch.
I fully expected this to just be some artsy fartsy thing with exactly one gameplay loop and at about an hour in I almost walked away secure in the knowledge that I was right. I was wrong.
Don’t any of you go rush out to buy this thing but if you picked it up from PS+ a while ago like I did it may surprise you just a little bit.
i was contracted to work on this and then they decided to do a huge redesign and i got furloughed while they figured out what they wanted to do and i ended up taking a different job while furloughed
they seemed like cool people to work with but that central painting mechanic was hard for them to figure out
Yesterday evening I played the built-in AM2R randomizer (maximum randomization level) up to the point where I got all the important items and the rest of the game would be a victory lap mopping up Metroids. Took about 5 hours, not bad for my first randomizer experience.
Before getting any non-missile items I went all the way down to the lowest area (where every enemy could two-shot me) in search of any passable entry point, then concluded it was impossible to my knowledge so I looked at the .txt manual for what I might be missing. It duly explained “walljumps or bombjumps are required on most seeds”. Ohhh right walljumps, that thing I never do because I’m so bad at it.
Then I walljumped my way to the right of the golden temple and was able to pillage the place from there, finding a bonanza of supers and power bombs (which I suspect might mean this was an easy seed, but I lack a sense of what’s common). Then I used the power bombs to explore a lot of bomb-blocked areas, which is an interesting randomizer-specific challenge because it means you have an exploration budget before you need to go back to the save point or farm enemies (and I did softlock my run twice by miscalculating).
In Hydrostation I found the spacejump in this spot:
After taking that photo as a reminder, there was nothing stopping me from going on the right side and using powerbombs to get to it, but then I realized that it was impossible to walljump or speedboost up there. This is a randomizer-specific conundrum because in vanilla, if you arrived there in late-game you would simply spiderball or powerbomb then highjump, and if you arrived in early game you could get it with bombjumping with a little more effort (bombjumping is easy in AM2R). After seeing Space Jump in this photo it was another 2 or 3 hours before I could get it.
Hydrostation also had Screw Attack (ceiling secret) and Speedbooster (the boss’s item) so it was a real item bonanza (again, easy seed?), and those two I was able to get without further dependencies. I was excited to get early screw attack thanks to access to the teleport pipes, but in the end they didn’t let me access anything important I couldn’t have reached by walking anyway.
There weren’t really any important items in the accessible parts of distribution station and the industrial zone, so the final key part of my randomizer run was in the Tower. Now like I said I never did much walljumping before and the Tower seemed potentially very demanding on the walljump front, so I was hoping this seed would give me any of one of the 3 spacejump-unlocking items somewhere else so I wouldn’t have to. But after poring over the map (comparing it to an online map with all item locations) and exhausting every other avenue of progress, there I ended up facing the steep wall of the tower.
Before trying to reach the top I realized I could check (without picking up) the 2 items inside the tower to determine if one of them was bombs/highjump/spiderball, in which case I would fight the boss, otherwise not bother to challenge it. I “only” needed to walljump about 5 screens high to reach the morphball crack on the left side of the tower. My first check (powerbombing to reveal the item I can’t actually reach without beating the boss) didn’t show bombs/highjump/spiderball but it did show me this:
Well, it’s not what I was looking for but it’s another mandatory item, so after going back to pick up known supers/E-tank locations plus charge beam and gravity suit (I had lost them by dying/softlocking) I challenged the tower boss. It was a huge pain in the butt to fight it without space jump nor spazer, but gravity suit and screw attack also made it basically impossible for it to kill me either, so I eventually won the battle of attrition.
After getting ice beam and exiting the tower on the right, one big advantage that I hadn’t even thought about is that I was now about 2/3rds of the way up the tower, having gained some height indoors, plus I was now on the right side with more grip locations. From there I climbed finally up to the top of the tower (something I had tried to do from the bottom a couple of times, but kept losing my rhythm, then seeing my skills degenerate further due to thumb fatigue). Then there it was plainly visible in the top-of-tower-E-tank location, those purple bombs that I always took for granted before trying a randomizer.
I quickly did the morphball maze to grab them, went back for spacejump and finally reached what I recall twitch randomizer speedrunners call “go mode” (which for me is actually “stop-playing mode” because I don’t see the point of backtracking everywhere to kill 25 Metroids with overpowered late-game equipment, seems a bit dull if you aren’t speedrunning).
I restarted Octopath
It starts great and rapidly becomes forgettable and dull. Insipid lethargic cutscenes, a repetitive structure, a faux-deep battle system that always amounts to « find weakness then exploit it »
Frankly all the games from the Bravely team are pretty dreadful, but they all have some great systems and mechanics in there that I like to see shine by finding the special challenge conditions that will make them wortwhile. Octopath’s battle system has a lot of merits (but it really needs to be more finely tuned) and the path actions are nuts. To think that every one of the dozens of talking NPCs per town have:
The way I found to make the game good is skipping every cutscene (obviously) and only playing with two characters (I mostly play with the thief and the mage). The game… actually owns now, it just needed a lot more friction. I need to play cautiously and really thoroughly use the path actions I have access to. Also stealing from every NPC including children never stops being funny
I read all the NPC dialogue and bios because they’re still interesting and I think I get part of why the Bravely writers are bad at their jobs. Simply put they’re probably conservative lol. The game obviously tries to be apolitical but these bios transpire a vision of life aligned with conservatism, and it’s not like I want every game to be anticapitalist propaganda but this one seems to have a really shallow grasp on people and systems
You can use R1 to run. I got the character for collect all items, pointless aye but I did find a few little easter eggs in the levels.
In the demo I thought it was really funny that the NPCs had these bios but seemingly no names. Is that still the case in the full game?
I think I bought Sleepy Dogs PS4 around the time I got a PS4. Then it sat because I had played through it on ps3 and played two hours of it on PC.
It’s definitely a PS3 game gussied up to PS4 but it owns. I am still getting used to the near-one button battle system. I keep hitting Triangle which is counter not Heavy Attack. It really drenches you with an atmosphere as soon as you start. You can eat ice cream and walk around without pants. The AAA game loop hadn’t been codified yet but I like here how you have something to do right by every mission finish. After how much Days Gone made my eyes roll I like there is an ounce of nuance and inference in this. It’s setting up some Dominos.
In short @anothergod game owns did you get it?
more FDS stuff!
jeez, The Mysterious Murasame Castle sure is great. i’m pretty sure i’ve posted about it before, when i started playing the fan translation a few years ago, but playing it with a real NES controller dpad has made the whole experience much more pleasant.
i really love what they do with the code/framework on Zelda 1 here, and it makes me sad we never saw a release of this game or any kind of follow up to it. still, definitely one of the stand-out titles of the FDS; it really takes advantage of its medium, fully.
Yeah I got it. I need to spend more time with it, though. What do you mean by setting up Dominos? Didn’t… United Front go under?
Oh I am real sad about not getting Sleeping Dogs 2.
I mean the plot and characters are setting up future confrontations and problems from the start. With 2021 vision I love how fast the story moves and how it is efficent with it’s story telling. We learn Whei’s backstory when he is not in the room, twice. Then we see tiny details and learn a bit more about our main character.
And having played this before, knowing how it shakes out (roughly) I am paying more attention to character motivation.
The Octopath battle system only really gets to shine for the optional extra job bosses at the end of the game, who all also give you ridiculous battle system breaking abilities. Those were pretty fun and tough but otherwise a lot of the game is a slog and I still haven’t finished it because it just wanted too much for a game that was relatively simple otherwise.
