i really wish any of those kinds of hyper-polished “AA” Oscar-baity indie games had any of the whimsy of something like those Artdink games though. (also if i haven’t mentioned i hate Journey, haven’t played Abzu though).
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when did you play journey? I whipped through it on like, launch day and found it quite pleasant, but between the PS4 port fucking up the best shaders and the iOS followup gamifying it into the worst treacle, I can’t imagine wanting to revisit it
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I just spent an hour finishing off the warehouse level and then I watched the remade intro with all the skaters and got chills watching like, fucking leo baker and shane o’neill in the same video as like, steve caballero and rodney mullen? tony hawk losing his shit after lizzie armato grinds the lip on his own damn half pipe??
how does this even exist in 2020? and how is it making me feel the exact same fucking way about skateboarding more than two decades* later? I’m like, 15 minutes away from grabbing my board and going outside while the apocalypse descends on us
this game is a goddamn miracle
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I’m extremely interested in sm64 hacks, but isn’t n64 emulation still pretty bad?
I too blasted through it on launch at a time in my life when I was in a toxic relationship and it was a nice escape for a few hours.
I played it a second time to be my PS3’s send-off before I got a PS4.
Damn shame about the shaders thing, I’d probably play it again sometime.
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try the latest version of mupen64plus in retroarch, n64 emulation is really quite good these days
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Been playing Mario Odyssey a bit. Is it me or does this game control like ass, I can’t make Mario do anything I want him to do and the hat never goes in the direction I meant. Maybe it’s a joycon stick issue? I hate these goddamn joycon sticks
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it is
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I’m no expert on the subject at all but I use Project 64 to run SM64 hacks and it’s fine
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Dang wish we’d had these hack experts for a More Mario 64 Like Mario For Wii U
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Literally the only Let’s play I still watch are Mario 64 hacks, I love to see new Mario 64 environments and it’s immediately satisfying to watch someone go through a level and see how they use Mario’s huge palette of moves to handle new situations
If you want to see absolutely wild Mario 64 hack stuff I suggest checking the Halloween patch, which is only 7 stars (but so difficult it’d definitely take longer to beat than to 100% the main game)
I love the cauldrons around 14:00
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I recently got an iPhone SE after years of using Android.
I rarely play mobile games, but with my move back to iOS, I redownloaded the small handful of games I used to play on an iPod Touch between 2012–14: Canabalt, Dodonpachi Blissful Death, Fairune, Final Freeway 2R, Minesweeper, and RayForce. (I used to have a couple more, but Bug Princess is incompatible with my phone, and I guess Ziggurat got delisted?)
I fired a few of the games up:
- Canabalt: It’s wild to me that this game now has stages and modes. But I don’t care for endless runners anymore.
- Dodonpachi Blissful Death: This used to be my favourite of the bunch, and I even nominated it for the SB top 64. But playing it now, I think the game no longer speaks to me.
- Final Freeway 2R: I still like this better than OutRun in all aspects other than music.
- RayForce: 6–8 years ago, this game never really clicked with me. But now I think it’s awesome, like a top down Galaxy Force II. It’s a 10/10 iPhone app.
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Use the custom soundtrack.
For me the music is my favorite version of Splashwave.
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So I decided to give Super Mario 64:Last Impact a shot. Less than 3 minutes in:
Now, it’s actually been mostly enjoyable, as long as it sticks to Serving The Verbs. The latter half of this video is not serving the verbs unless “seduce” (obtuse A.I. into a pit of mud that sucks to be in and get out of) is one of the verbs you really believe in (to save a rabbit son (I am sensing the worst influences of character-driven Rareware fetch quests waiting in the wings (of course there was the “save lil baby penguin” mission in SM64 but you got to SLIDE DOWN A MOUNTAIN HOLDING A PENGUIN in that case))). Anyway, the beginning of this video is COOL. A call-back to Yoshi’s Island, fine, but the world pulled apart by its polygons! Nice. Will keep playing.
There’s also a F.L.O.O.D. power-up which might feel better than Sunshine…it doesn’t cut momentum as much and you can only initiate one burst which makes it less of a crutch and more of an immediate extension of The Verbs.
Speaking of Rareware…something about the level design…I can’t put my finger on it…
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Thanks for reminding me of that feature. Unfortunately, nothing happens when I press Select iPod Music now 
My recent time spent with Nintendo Switch:
Xenoblade Chronicles
I took a break from this just as the party started crossing over from the Bionis to the Mechonis. I’ll come back again sometime.
I like running around the world, and I like the story and music.
I wish the battle system relied less on managing cooldown counters and health bars so that I could actually pay attention to the action.
Witcher 3
I finally finished the main story. The final hours of enchanted isles, hopping through worlds, and confronting the Wild Hunt made for an enjoyable payoff after feeling less enthusiastic about the Novigrad and Skellige threads than I felt about the Bloody Baron/Crones stuff. The ending I got really pulled one over on me.
I enjoyed this game overall. I even enjoyed the combat, though the Imlerith boss fight was the only encounter that felt exciting.
Eqqo
I got this free from a publisher giveaway. Eqqo is a point and click adventure puzzle game with some on-the-surface similarities to Ico. The narration can get a little melodramatic, the puzzles are very straightforward, and the threats are more menacing than dangerous. But the art is gorgeous and the plot is engaging. I spent 3-4 pleasant hours playing through this.
Sky Force Anniversary
This was a present to myself for finishing 2.5 years of professional training.
Anniversary is very similar to its followup game Reloaded: one-stage-per-session, visceral STG action with persistent upgrades. The grind in these games is very well tuned because the gameplay is so mechanically satisfying and each upgrade incrementally improves the effect and look of your arsenal to just the right degree.
I also like the prevalence of gem blue oceans in Anniversary after coming off of Reloaded’s predominantly industrial deserts.
Super Mario All-Stars
All-Stars is my favourite way to play the old Mario games. 16-bit is 2x better than 8-bit.
Grid Autosport
This is my favourite game on Switch, and I play it almost every day.
I recently switched from digital triggers to right thumbstick for gas and brakes. This took a while to wrap my head around, but analogue acceleration feels so good around corners.
Online multiplayer was recently patched in, which is fun. Though clean racing is hard to come by. Seems a lot of players either struggle to control their car or blindly follow the dynamic race line without regard to traffic. But I rarely encounter anyone that’s purposefully trying to ram others off the road.
There’s a whole online progression system for buying, upgrading, customizing, and maintaining cars that was completely absent from single player. The economy seems tuned for microtransactions, but I don’t think there are any. So I guess it’s just a grind, but you can ignore it and loan a car each race. Loaned cars incur a damage fee from your winnings.
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i knew right from the start you were one of the good ones
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I know it probably seems like you have finally burst to the surface after being buried in Witcher 3 but… both of the DLCs are really good, especially Blood & Wine which is probably the best the game gets imo. Sorry to have to inform you of this
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Yeah I look forward to playing those too. But right now, I need a break.
Sorry about this but just needed to dump word vomit I horked out tonight on two of these, thinking they would be in this week’s top 64 bracket because I can’t read.
Demon's Souls
Voting Demon’s Souls despite my dumb Sega brand loyalty. I got DeS after reading the first few posts on SB1 about it in mid-2009 when the Asian version was found to have a rough version of the final English in-game text. I think the aura of mystery around the game that initially drew me to these games faded for me as it became established in its own genre and From/Bamco openly flaunted its difficulty as a marketing strategy, e.g. Prepare To Die edition. Or maybe it was more that I wasn’t part of the cool in-crowd any more because the games went mainstream.
I’m shitty at games generally and was never really interested in skill checks. This game came out just before the wave of fan wikis, clickbait articles, YouTube videos and Souls games in general were widely understood, so it forced a level of digitally mediated human interaction on me that I usually shied away from in that I had to lean on early adopter SB folks’ findings and helpful summoned people online to complete the game. The first game I spent a lot of time with in this loose continuity was Eternal Ring, gifted to me shortly after the PS2 launch. I never got far as it quickly reminded me of being bitten to death by spiders in an untranslated PlayStation Underground demo of Shadow Tower that I think I ended up with from Pizza Hut somehow. I recognized the bleak, lonely, somewhat janky feeling within ER and its family of games had been inherited by Demon’s Souls.
Seeing that SB has a particular fondness for the more off-beat (in context with the rest of the games) DeS and Dark Souls 2 reminded me that I was playing these games more for the atmosphere than (Miyazaki-enforced it turns out?!) masochism and I just wanted to be able to exist within those slightly off-kilter Japanese mid-tier-game-budget dark fantasy worlds. Also preaching to the choir that the Bluepoint remake looks awful and if they don’t let you toggle back the original art assets at least it emulates really nicely now.
killer7
No matter how the Metroid ga Gotoku vote would have turned out I was going for killer7. It is singularly unique and and can be engaged with on multiple levels:
- on the surface as a beautiful mood piece with wild tonal and style shifts, a visual aesthetic partner to Nocturne
- as an indictment of real world U.S. hegemony from post-WW2 to, uh, it feels a bit tacky to bring this up considering what day it is but 9/11 and its aftermath/the US reaction to it. Even in this game’s funhouse mirror alternate reality where the internet and air travel is banned and 9/11 was satirically substituted by endless laughing mutant suicide bombers controlled by a personification of evil, America still only cares about its allies/tribute states in the dehumanized capitalist terms of the resources it can extort out of them and, when met by a materially weaker but actually competent adversary subverting its systems from within, it flails uselessly or overreacts, dragging the rest of the world down with it.
- a bitter video game coffee blend of the 70s wave of neo-noir/political conspiracy movies, over the top anime and Japanese direct-to-video movies, sentai shows, and hardboiled fiction,
- a commentary on personal agency/mental illness, human trafficking, child abuse/grooming, masculinity, tech startup Tesla/Rakuten-like fanatic corporate cults and obsessive fandom,
- a personal tale about a compromised/repressed guy living with his abused disabled grandpa who is delusional and/or manipulated by forces beyond his understanding that are locked in equilibrium forever,
- a severely minimalist fusion of Mikami’s absurd survival horror weird-object lock-and-key puzzles, point-and-click adventures (I sort of hamfistedly point to D2 as an ancestor of this bare-essentials-on-rails style) and the hardboiled killers and supernatural forces of Suda51’s early crime drama visual novels.
That’s a lot for me to puke out in my limited capacity so basically I hope killer7 and DeS make it as far as possible. But jeez there are some hard votes coming.
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