Italian captains of a group of mercenaries were called Condottieri (just one is condottiero/condottiere) which means “contractor(s)”.
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i started grandia 2 by getting to the first town and bouncing into barrels (there are two sound effects for this) and running past but not going into doors causing them to creak open and SLAM shut.
then i found four barrels with stone and gravel ground between them. stone and gravel make two different sounds when you walk on them so im making those noises while bouncing barrels and slamming a door over and over and over again
i am going to continue doing this for like 15 more minutes until i find the noisiest path through the first town possible and THEN I’ll go into the church to talk to the girl who wears a dress with sailor moon hair
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I played through that game like 4 times. It was/is a good first jrpg. People mention the walking sounds and I am terrified to play it again and have my misophonia obliterate my body.
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feel like I’ve played all of half an hour of everything I’ve tried since about April of this year, not much of flight simulator / hades / ck3 / bg3 has actually been sticking (though I do still want to play 4p halo 3 campaign at some point and I’ve yet to start squadrons) but I gave paradise killer a shot last night in the tub because it’s like a perfect gamevice use case and I’m finding it pretty enjoyable. so far it seems like a relatively slight work, like an outer wilds (mostly) without the time loop conceit and with suda’s aesthetic, and the characters don’t really register beyond being stylized, but the geometry and the mystery are good.
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Trying Invisible Inc. again and starting with way more rewinds. I uh have now learned the rewind quota resets for each mission so I don’t have to play the game with 5 rewinds total.
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independence day (1996, saturn) is fucking great. i love the carefully-edited footage from the movie since they don’t have the rights to use will smith’s voice or likeness lmao
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Playing ranked Rocket League (big mistake), both my teammates dropped out after less than 30 seconds. Ended up playing 3v1 for basically the entire match.
Orange team got a goal in the first 30 seconds, which is when I realized I was alone. At first, I was like “If this gets to 0-5 I’m quitting too, but I’ll have fun in the meantime.” But then I launched the ball across the field and…they managed to turn that into an own goal. They scored shortly thereafter and made it 1-2, but…
These 3 orange dipshits were so incompetent that I managed to drag the game out to a 2-2 overtime. I got my one legitimate point by stealing the ball and driving it into the undefended goal. I only lost in overtime because I fucked up my final 2 (!) chances at a goal. They crowded the ball, never defended the goal at all, smacked into each other constantly, and made every save as easy as possible. I mean, I shouldn’t short myself - that’s the best I’ve ever played! But it was absolutely hilarious watching these three stooges fall all over themselves to make sure they never got any points.
I don’t think I’ll play much ranked because out of the 4 matches I played, at least one my teammates dropped out of 3 of them. But that one game was amazing.
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I don’t know why it never occurred to me sooner, but you’re the perfect person to play this.
I get the feeling that to really assess everything about Undertale one has to do at least two, maybe three runs with different approaches (I did as I was told and didn’t kill anyone), but while I’m glad I spent six hours with the game and mostly enjoyed it (ultimately, neither the humor nor the Big Themes really landed with me, as much as I respect the craft and ingenuity), I didn’t enjoy it nearly enough to want to spend twice or thrice that.
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I played it once, thought it was great, and definitely missed/skipped a bunch of stuff in that playthrough and I still feel like I’ve earned my opinion of the game. So for as much as my say-so may matter to you, you don’t need to play it again.
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You can pretty much get the complete Undertale experience in a single trip if you’re careful; you’ll know that you pulled it off if the final antagonist pops up to suggest that you could have spent more time with a particular character (Alphys) and suggests you reload your final save game to do so. (The game then sends you some phone calls asking you to come see Undyne to deliver a letter, you go on a “date” with Alphys, and after that you’ll have to take an elevator from the lab to the True Lab, and this final area is a ton of spooky fun.)
The alternate route (genocide) is deliberately kind of a pain to play through, and it’s barely a challenge, but it does have a couple of the most satisfying boss fights in the entire game. It provides extra lore/nuance, but it’s more of a B-side than an actual part of the core Undertale experience, imo.
Obviously, none of this is actually required, but I spent a long time thinking I’d played less of the game than I actually had.
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Ohhh B-Side is a great way of describing it. Or like, really bizarre alternate recordings of songs.
But yeah one of the joys of Undertale is that there is so much weird crap that you won’t see. My favorite small touch was finding out that if you kill Goat Mom, then load your previous save game and don’t kill her, Flowey will chastise you for killing her then backing out of it. I literally never would have seen that no matter how many times I played.
I think Undertale is (ironically) a lot about letting go of completionism and ownership anyway so, I don’t think there’s a wrong way to play it or that you’re missing a core part of the experience by not digging super deeply into it
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Yes! I hate how many people go to Undertale streams and then insist the steamer needs to “do xxxx”, because so much of the experience can be so different, and the differences are such a big source of the game’s fun.
My first time through, I remembered that they suggested you might have to fight sometimes before a monster would be willing to accept a non-violent outcome, but I didn’t realize that this also meant your attacks would become more damaging, so I accidentally killed Toriel during my first fight with her. It so obviously seemed set up to have that outcome that I didn’t consider that there was a way to get through without fighting until later in Snowdin, by which point I figured it was too late to justify reloading. Your experience was probably completely different!
Then there’s stuff like the Lesser Dog (whose yard later on will be different depending on how much you pet it) or the Shyren encounter (which includes a personal and professional rise and fall for the both of you if you keep humming past the point at which mercy is possible.) Hell, I never realized until just a week ago that you can get into Sans’s room , which is unlocked through such a weird, yet entirely consistent and appropriate process that I would never feel good spoiling it for someone just on the off-chance that they decide to test those actions for themself.
The point is, there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had no matter what level of engagement you want to pursue, so feel free to spoil yourself once you’ve decided you’ve gotten out everything you wanted to.
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Rated E for Everyone
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yeah i don’t think unterdale was made to be a game you replay over and over (which much as i love it, it’s not really a game that stands up to perpetual replay), in fact it insists that you only play it once and guilt trips you if you delete your save because you’re taking away everyone’s happy ending! it seems more like it was something to be picked apart by a community players… which happened very quickly because it became unexpectedly white-hot popular
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I think it really benefits hugely from going in blind; I can’t imagine how deflating it would be to have been told there were things called “pacifist run” or “genocide run” ahead of time. I played it as a very standard rpg the first time, had a lovely time, then the game suggested to me (without shaming!) that I may want to play without killing anything, which I did. An excellent experience I’d recommend to anybody. Undertale doesn’t get enough credit for letting you play the way you want. It’s more like Deus Ex than Earthbound in a lot of ways!
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It is possible that part of my issue with Undertale was that the pacifist run was literally the first thing I remember seeing about it.
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Playing Undertale before it had a vocal fandom was probably the best way to enjoy it. Going in with any expectations would ruin its best parts. I still marvel at the Papyrus boss fight training you to jump and then subverting it moments later by extending the jump duration to tell a joke.
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revisited nier automata, seemed much breezier than my first playthrough
craving content… now might be the time to begin saga scarlet grace in earnest…
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