Games You Played Today: Actress Again: Current Code (Part 1)

[GherkinForce]

Been playing a lot of different stuff while on leave from work:

Jet Lancer
I think I’ve hit a skill wall in this. It’s a great little game with some cool blue sky vibes, but the later missions just throw everything at you all at once and I don’t think I have the patience for it anymore.

Herzog Zwei

@GherkinForce

Herzog Zwei is fricking hard, took me 90 minutes to beat the first mission

It’s funny how easy this game got once I worked out how to cheese the AI
(it mostly picks one base to try to capture at a time, so just ramp up the defenses and watch it slam itself into a wall over and over while you take the other bases)

Judgment
I’ve completed a playthrough of this in the past week, I think it holds up pretty well against the Yakuza series and brings some cool new things of its own (flying around Kamurocho with a drone was cool). The detective stuff doesn’t really add much of substance though. Most of it feels kind of redundant and just ‘there’.

I kind of feel like this game has a lot more narrative padding than anything in the Yakuza series too, particularly with the mandatory side stories.
Some of these felt pretty off too, particularly the one where you convince a toxic couple to cancel their divorce because their kid is sad. It started to ramp up more towards the end though and I think conclusion made up for narrative shortcomings. Also I liked that all the cats Kiryu rescued for the Nyan Nyan cafe are still there.

Blade Runner
Just finished this right now too. It definitely feels like the best possible game that could have been made of this property, at least as far as late 90s PC game writing goes. I feel like I might have been dealt a weird hand by the plot randomisation system, I got horribly stuck in Act 3 and so went onto GameFAQs but none of the guides seem to describe anything that was happening in my playthrough. There was also a lot of suspects who just suddenly bolt and then get shot down by the other detective before I could react.

It kind of fell apart a bit in the last third as the detective stuff gave way to just running back and forth in the sewers, and the ending felt a bit limp. There seemed to be a lack of empathy all around from the characters, which is a shame since it’s basically the core theme of the book and the movie. It’s hard to sympathise with the replicants when they are massacring animals, and the humans didn’t seem to care much either. McCoy’s reaction to his dog getting blown up was more like mild irritation, and the ending was all wise cracks after watching a man die. I might try another playthrough later to see if I get a better ending.

Ring Fit Adventure
I’ve done about 10 days of this so far I think. I skipped today though. Jogging on the spot gives me weird muscle tightness and pain thanks to my flat feet. Surprising how just a tiny bit of generic Nintendo plot and JRPG trappings can trick me into developing an exercise routine.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
Only really started this but so far seems pretty good at least narratively, while the gameplay is a bit slim at the moment.

Edit: forgot to mention Ys: Origin . I finished a playthrough with Yunica, this game feels really good to just move around and hit things. I was expecting it to look a bit fuzzy on switch seeing how old it is, but it’s surprisingly sharp.

[captainlove]

@GherkinForce

Jogging on the spot gives me weird muscle tightness and pain thanks to my flat feet.

I’d recommend turning to Silent mode so you just kind of lightly squat in place to run. You can still switch to jogging on the spot or doing high knee lifts at any time (by just doing it, the game auto detects the action you’re doing) but as someone who suffered foot pain from impact exercise and flat arches I massively preferred it.

[loki]

aladdin is just okay, and not the amazing revelation the magazines at the time made it out to be.

earthworm jm has a lot of problems. when you jump, jm flails all his limbs around, and it’s not really clear which parts of him are going to connect with other objects. whether you’re whipping or shooting, the feedback on whether or not you’re hitting/damaging enemies is really unclear. i guess it’s mostly one problem, expressed in a lot of ways: it’s too concerned with looking well animated, to the point that it’s generally hard to read in ways that videogames need to be readable

[Mikey]

The Genesis Aladdin is basically a Flash game that time traveled to a cartridge

[meauxdal]

yeah, EJ is really really hard to make out what’s going on or where you need to go. you can’t “read” the levels properly, and stuff like the grapple+swing and trying to whip enemies are hugely hit or miss.

i would at least give both aladdin and EJ credit that they feel snappy. the animations are detailed but they don’t force you to sit there and watch them play out, everything feels responsive and moves crisply. there are a lot of nice technical elements.

but yeah, tbh this game design paradigm was never good and has aged like milk so most of what i get out of these things is listening to the music and admiring the spritework lol

[u_u]

i think preferring the snes aladdin was my first taste of having an unconventional yet demonstrably correct opinion about video games

[aislesgrises]

hellnight is so very specifically stressful. hide/run from monster thing but the monster has an invisible activation box, seemingly the same width as a corridor, which when you enter it just immediately kills you (or your partner) in a canned animation. like, this leaves absolutely no ambiguity of how fucked you are when you reach a dead end and turn around only to see it blocking your exit.

it’s a bit goofy, I mean it’s terror born from videogame jank, but a lot of horror games at least grant you some uncertain hope that you can turn things around or escape a bad situation. here you just wait to be killed if you are trapped and the anticipation is dreadful.

also, look at this wonderfully dark corridor! there’s nothing like this in echo night but the ps1 can do oppressive darkness just fine! hearing the breaths and growls of that thing while you can barely see a few feet ahead of you is a feeling all right

[meauxdal]

the fm versions of the movie tunes in md aladdin are so fucking good, i can largely give the game a pass on the basis of these alone

- YouTube

- YouTube

- YouTube

- YouTube

[a_new_duck]

Been playing Fire ‘N’ Ice on my Retroid Pocket and, tbh, my life’s been missing a device where I can just pick up and play a few Fire ‘N’ Ice levels whenever the whim strikes me. I think this is one of my favorite puzzle games.

I, uh, also have just learned that each set of stages has a boss stage at the end, which I have somehow missed in my last 15 years of playing the game.

[Mikey]

Lord almighty, what possessed the developers of The Red Strings Club to litter their game with tedious mini-games, especially that pottery wheel shit. I’m not doing all this busywork.

[Tony]

Is Blasphemous really as good as they are saying here?

Blasphemous – Hardcore Gaming 101

[Felix]

@Brooks and @Tuxedo both liked it OK iirc

[idiot]

there’s a demo nowadays if you’re interested

[Brooks]

it’s an unremarkable metroider considerably elevated by presentation so naturally i was well into it
select spanish vo without fail

[captainlove]

Gotten a bit further into Sunset Overdrive and I wish the air dash had unlocked earlier since I’ve now built up a lot of movement habits to compensate for the lack of a second jump/air time extender.

The game functions well enough as a kind of Devil May Cry but with continued environmental traversal boosts your style and passive bonuses. The weapons are very familiar if you’ve ever played Ratchet and Clank but are frequently fairly basic compared to their visual designs. Some weapons are also more like secondary effects like the freeze bomb since they don’t really do damage and are meant to be used in tandem with other attacks. This is fine but weapon-switching always takes a second for you to be able to recognise what’s been equipped.

The game goes in hard for a ‘meta’ style in the vein of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim but it is frequently flat and I can’t put my finger on why. Many of the the ‘this is a video game and video games are silly’ jokes have the structure of jokes but the delivery is often awkward. I think the game gives up on treating its world with much depth because that’s frequently the joke. An odd criticism but I wish it would take its comedy more seriously. The best joke so far out of the incidental dialogue (i.e. I actually laughed): a support character explains a plan and then trails off, the main character prompts them for a response and they casually excuse themselves by saying they were just checking Reddit. Not an amazing joke but I feel like it was one of the few that had good delivery and was funny in the moment since the player character was actually in a desperate situation for once (flying a barely functional glider through an aerial minefield). It worked because the circumstances aligned because there are a hundred similar jokes elsewhere but some element or other just collapses and they all feel ‘bleh’ because of the lockstep rhythm of jokes throughout.

I’m not really sure how you could make it funnier. I think it’d be nice if all the jokes weren’t surface level absurdities and actually made formal subversions and surprises as they relate to the systems of the game itself. It’s ostensibly open world and feels very much like a prototype to Insomniac’s Spider-Man so I don’t think comedy was their major goal despite it being plastered everywhere. If comedy reveals truth then making a more cutting parody of open world would be interesting but I suspect the budget and length of the game precludes it from being too radical. The total effect here just leads Sunset to feel very empty and it doesn’t feel very self-aware of that emptiness.

The UI is atrocious since there’s very little confirmation of choices and so equipping amps and upgrades is confusing to navigate through even with trial and error. I will probably play more since I am curious to see how much more they can keep the humour going.

[LWJoestar]

Fire ‘n’ Ice is excellent, I binged it to 100% over the course of a couple months something like 15-20 years ago.

And I’d do it again.

[wourme]

I just played this, a short game by someone I know (released about an hour ago).

Untitled Dungeon by terribleben

[notbov]

finished up the No Future playthrough. a large chunk of the last 15-20% of the main story had me thinking the game actually bleeds with some bosses I just ran wild over and then I hit penultimate boss and

well, it’s not that he was hard

it’s that my AI party members could not into boss mechanics (a lot of bosses in the game are just action RPG versions of MMO raid boss fights, to be blunt) and that complicated things

last boss wasn’t too bad, though being given a 20 minute time limit was scary for a second

post-game depends on the characters you pick and whoops two of my characters have to do one-on-one fights and now we’re just playing an action game (Angela has to do a solo fight and she’s ostensibly the mage of the game and oh you poor soul if you decide to cast magic during her Class 4 quest fight) and every attack kills. the actual not-getting Class 4 (yes, they just call it Class 4, who cares (I mean, they characters call it that diegetically, who’s going to stop them (you know, I’m starting to think the game has bad writing))) part of the post-game where you murder some angry lady witch is a slog through a dungeon where you just blow up regular enemies and the you fight witch lady and they give you half an hour, which is just way too generous but also she can just teleport behind you and blow you up and it’s funny (well, I mean, it would be funny if it didn’t kill you)

the other great part of No Future is they updated the item seeds to give even better endgame weapons except it’s “random” what you get (it’s in quotes because you can’t savescum it) and you end up getting 4 of an armor and 3 of a helm and just fucking let me have the gear you assholes, I played your fucking mad challenge, throw me a bone

anyway, good game, maybe I’ll play it again and hate myself even more

Golden Axed: this probably would have been good if they made a real video game out of it. doesn’t quite get the weight right but I think they nailed the cadence of GA’s combat

Streets of Kamurocho: this is like dying and you wake up and a copy of Streets of Rage 2 is there and you go “this must be heaven!” but then you beat the first stage and it keeps looping over and over and over and you realize you’re actually in hell

that this was released in the same year as SoR 4 is a sick joke and a crime

[sleepysmiles]

I completed Thief The Dork Project Gold. I loved it! If i’d beaten it before the 64 games competition, i absolutely would have nominated it

I really liked the last couple of missions where you’re avoiding freaky island of dr moreau critters. i found them genuinely unsettling, their weird low poly gait and menacing childlike voices. it’s also fun to get to cut loose and actually use fire arrows and bombs, since garret doesn’t give a shit about killing them

Favorite mission was Assassins which is just like, a cool little short story on its own. Garret avoids an assassination, trails them back to their boss, breaks into his mansion and robs him blind, then sneaks home. it’s your first lockpick mission and almost every room you unlock is loaded with treasure, so it’s highly satisfying to sweep the place. i think it’s neat that you can avoid the sneak home if you’re good enough not to be seen in the mansion. i like that your specific goal is to nab the purse off the belt of the guy who ordered the hit on you. The first five missions are all about showing what a competent and ballsy thief Garret is and assassins does it the best

It’s also just an extremely cool game. i overuse that descriptor but it fits, everything about Thief is trying to be genuinely cool and stylish and it pulls it off. Garret rules, i love his voice and the little quips he mutters to himself and the way he calmly breaks down his plan at the start of each mission. i love whenever there’s a cutscene in this vaguely steampunk fantasy game and the soundtrack turns into some fucking awesome shoegaze rock shit. It’s such a confident aesthetic.

[VastleCania]

Been in a real comfort food mood lately, so I’ve played:

Fantasy Life

I’m an archer this time. Love to shoot arrows. Great game very charming love it thanks

Eldritch

First person shootery roguelike dungeon crawler type thing? I wish it had more but the atmosphere is real cool. Feels PSX-y, a bit horror-y. Rewards caution and has a couple of really, really great enemies. (Specifically the Lizard Statue, which is essentially the angels from Dr. Who but like…it’s really unsettling and difficult to deal with, y’know? Discovering that these statues were what was killing me the first time I played this game was a highlight.)

But yeah, real minimalist game in a lot of ways and I wish it had more interesting interactions, but I do dig it. I like constantly descending.

Revenge of the Titans

Horror tower defense is how I would define this. There’s no set path for the monsters so they can attack your towers very quickly and unpredictably. You carry money between missions so you gotta walk that line between saving money and actually defending yourself. Very ominous music and overwhelming numbers. Pretty good.

Captain Forever Remix

This is a bad game, I think. Honestly, if you could just like, swap parts rather than having to disassemble your entire fucking ship when you need to replace a single part, I think that would solve everything. Otherwise, the cheery tone conflicts with the sheer frustration of trying to swap out one part and suddenly getting attacked while nude and dying.

Plants vs. Zombies

Almost too good. It’s so perfectly balanced in terms of when you get plants vs. when certain zombies appear, that with a little bit of thought this game is a cakewalk. I wish it was much, much harder and required extremely bizarre combinations of plants. But I adore this game anyway.

I’m also getting an urge to return to Sonic Adventure for the flumpteenth time, as well as Terraria. I’m resisting the urge though.