can’t believe our literal threedee pornographer bbp hasn’t commented to put the topic right yet
Most of what I remember about Primordia now is that there was some math-based puzzle later in the game that a lot of people hated but I didn’t think was too bad.
It doesn’t live in my heart like Full Throttle but yeah, still probably the best of all the modern pointnclicks I’ve played, and definitely the best Wadjet Eye game. Man, I remember so little, maybe I should replay it…
I thought this was the Guilty Gear Strive matchmaking screen for a second
The Wonderful 101 is a blast. So good at raising the stakes both in terms of spectacle and nudging players to learn the nuances of the battle mechanics. There are few awkward moments both narrative and gameplay wise, but the good far outweighs the bad.
No but you can choose Japanese or English VA
Honestly I love it
I tried to get back into MGSV today but after 10 minutes decided it was too fucking complicated and decided to resume this course:
instead.
I think my main problem with W101 is that I was hoping it would be more action Pikmin than an actual platinum action game in a different format. My first impression of it before I played it was that I was gonna be a sentai team leader coordinating team attacks and such. There’s some of that but its more flavor than a hard core of the game.
My verdict is in even though we haven’t finished it yet: It Takes Two is excellent! Most fun I’ve had with a coop game, ever, easily. It’s not as hardcore as playing Halos coop and might be too casual for some but it’s just such a fun ride regardless. The game just goes on. I don’t know how many hours we’ve played up to now but it must have been way more than the 12 hour figure I keep hearing. It’s not like we’ve been stuck on anything either. It’s just a legit long ass game. And so varied! I’m still in awe at how many fucking assets and environments are in this game. How many gameplay systems and styles. I don’t know how they did it but they hella did it
Criminally overlooked game imho. Expect to hear more about it after we beat it. But even now it’s a clear recommendation from me
did the writing win you over, or is it just that the mechanics/gameplay/co-op is that good?
It’s a bit of both. The writing isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things for me with this but it is done nicely. I appreciate that the plot first sends you in the wrong direction and then course corrects. That was fun. And the relationship between May and Cody, the main characters evolves nicely and most importantly slowly. Because it’s a long game that dynamic has more room and can introduce more subtle changes.
One segment, the snow level, where the couple rediscovers an old location that’s very meaningful to them was genuinely heartwarming and that’s achieved mostly through the gameplay. You start to turn a frozen and empty place into a lively, vibrant wonderland and it feels so good, totally rules. The dialog during that is also very good but it’s really told through the environment, the world.
On the gameplay front, yeah, it just wins you over because it’s so creative and varied. I don’t want to spoil all the cool sections though, so I won’t go into more detail.
The whole game also has this really breezy, digestible feel to it. You’re moving through it so quickly that it’s almost a waste of art and assets and manhours, but that feels really… rich. The phrase “an embarrassment of riches” comes to mind. No gameplay system or gimmick ever overstays its welcome. If anything you always want more
I really don’t have anything bad to say about it. There are a couple of puzzles that are almost annoying but they’re over before that can happen, even if you relatively suck at the game, probably. And there are so many great puzzles that you don’t even think about that. Some bosses in the first half of the game were a bit frustrating to fight. But even that gets much better and I greatly enjoyed almost all of the fights later on.
It really is a game that had a lot of care put into it and it shows. It’s really polished, plays, looks and sounds great. It cares for you, the players, too. You can feel that. It’s not wasting your time and just 100% focused on providing an entertaining time. And for my girlfriend and me it totally succeeds at that.
It’s also really astounding how the game goes back and forth between puzzles that require you to be verbal and either give instructions to your partner or let them know what you’re doing and puzzles that you just have this silent understanding on. Sometimes you just watch the other player and you “get it”, you get a feel for how they move and what they’ll do next, what they’ll need next. That’s really deep somehow! Like I’m not saying my girlfriend and I understand each other better as human beings now or whatever but we understand each other better as two people holding a controller, playing a game.
This Dr. Slump game is a treat so far (only about an hour in). I can tell it’s probably not going to do anything to blow my mind or even challenge me but it’s one of those low stakes, low poly diorama things (Klonoa, Kirby 64) I enjoy hanging out with, a good match for Toriyama’s (compact architectural/vehicular) design sensibilities. The tunes go a long way in that regard, super chill stuff:
A lot of the manga’s personality is lost in translation though. No scenes crammed with weird little creatures and knick-knacks and goofy brand names in that fun Richard Scarry way, but the swimmy textures are tasty and the sparse dollhouse vibe is charming if you’re into that sort of thing. The character models look good but probably fare the worst in comparison, like the intro scene with Senbei. In the manga he’s rendered in different styles and with exaggerated expressions for dramatic and ultimately comedic effect. Here he’s just a stiff model with a few mouth poses, not that I’d expect more from this period, but some of the scenes written around Toriyama’s original illustration style go to show how 3D can fall flatter than 2D.
Also, it is deeply unfortunate that this is based on the 1997 remake. I will not accept blonde Taro. It’s cool that the patch comes with the option of Arale’s original purple hair but I NEED his pompadour restored, it’s just wrong as is.
Also, the controls aren’t very nuanced or anything but Arale dashes around at a nice speed in that classic pose of hers. Looking forward to snacking on this one for the next few days.
EDIT: And of course you can find and touch poop
Amazon Japan had A-Train All Aboard! Tourism for like 50% off and that made it a somewhat more palatable ~CA$60 when delivered with some other stuff (it’s discounted again now but by less - I’m not sure what the deal is with the price fluctuations there???)
So I’ve continued from the save game from the demo, and I was right; within a couple of weeks of in-game time I’d attained the other objective and completed the first scenario.
The second scenario immediately ups the ante; atop the railways and cargo from the first, they give you access to buses, road construction, subsidiaries, the stock market, government subsidies, and line you up in a sleepy rural area with a budding theme park subsidiary and the goals of 200K tourists and an IPO for your own company.
Back on the topic of cargo, remember this?
Well, suddenly it works just fine. I have to find myself wondering if it’s just that the demo never saw late April’s v1.0.5 patch which, uh, among other things, fixes:
Cargo trains do not load and unload resources as specified.
True to their word, my cargo trains now, er, work. So that’s nice! They aren’t particularly profitable at this stage, though, and I’m not sure what exactly I’m doing wrong. More experimentation is needed!
The good news is the second scenario sets you up with a handful of subsidiaries out of the gate which are pretty profitable on their own, so there’s much more of a cushion for your mistakes to not immediately kneecap the company than there was in the demo, which almost makes me wish these were the other way around somehow? Even if they didn’t introduce the subsidiary management/purchase mechanic in the first, it would’ve been nice to have a modest revenue stream you couldn’t ruin quite so easily.
Micromanagement of vehicle schedules suddenly becomes much more clearly important with the introduction of road vehicles, as they’re much more fussy about timing and sharing of bus stops. In a way which is obvious if you think about real-life bus stops, but feels odd if you’re more used to less-hyperspecific simulations like a Transport Tycoon, buses can’t share a stop. If two buses want to use one bus stop at the same time, they can get stuck. Trains, to their credit, don’t get caught in a far-too-polite standoff of meeting in opposite directions on the street and indefinitely giving way to each other for access to the station, potentially bringing an entire street to a stop for days on end if you don’t notice.
Performance seems broadly unchanged from the demo, which I didn’t expect to change much, but I still do find myself wondering if a PC port is forthcoming. It could help a bit with navigating the world, as on the console the fastest ways to move are the touch screen (naturally, but TV mode feels more comfortable most of the time) or to open the full map and scroll the cursor along that, which moves maybe 2-5 times faster than normal scrolling. The game does at least progress at a sedate enough pace that you don’t feel too stuck.
That being said, the sedate pace feels weird. Perhaps it’ll make more sense once I’m further into the other mechanics, but I spent a lot of the later period of the prior scenario in fast forward mode, and so far this one is feeling pretty similar as I chase consecutive years of profits in order to pull off the IPO.
One other thing the full game reveals is that there’s a full-featured scenario editor, as well as online scenario sharing. I knew the former was the case, and I’d also read that apparently you can even construct the little dialogue scenes with the game’s cast of characters. It should’ve been obvious in hindsight, but I believe this plays a large part in why save games are locked to a particular language, as scenarios are as well. Unfortunately, this means that as of today there are a grand total of about twelve user-submitted scenarios available if you play in English. Total. And at least two of them seem to be basically spam.
In all I am definitely finding it a charming, odd, and very interesting game! Worth a try, and possibly worth the import if the price lands somewhere that works for you.
Doom 3 is great to play for 3 minutes every 3 months
there’s even boss fights you defeat by touching all the poop.
Suppaman is well implemented
hell yeah, can’t wait
playing bioshock for the first time lol what a piece of shit
the first time i played it as a kid i really liked the arcadia level and then got to a part later where you need a specific item to progress and it just wouldnt work, idk if anyone remembers but bioshock had this fucking terrible audio stuttering bug on launch too so after spending hours trying to fix that this happened…i decided bioshock SUCKED. a few years later i actually replayed it and finished it and decided 10 year old me was right except the part where an NPC engulfed in flames runs by and yells “IT’S THOSE GOD DAMN FANATICS!!!” totally owns
I picked this up back when you mentioned it but didn’t try it until this week. It’s like a twin-stick shooter ZZT game. Very nice.