I played Spirits of Xanadu today and managed to screw things up in a pretty impressive manner. Summary time!
The game is your basic “show up on an abandoned spaceship and have to figure out what went wrong” set-up, complete with Half-Life 1-esque docking sequence to start (except shorter and not as good).
The docking light turns green and I leave my ship and everything is dark as heck. I see a lit… spaceport desk with a gun on it and a white light on a door, so I grab the gun and press ahead.
I enter the spaceship proper and can barely find my way through, stumble into a transporter and emerge in a dimly lit hallway, see an enemy that fires at me that I kill but around a corner stumble into a blue “charge at you and suicide explode” fellow that wipes me out.
I wake up in the brig, leave, the room outside has enemies and I die again.
Realize that I have a flashlight I can turn on with a button and can now see a bit more, still die in the next room every time even though game is set to easy.
Switched over to “the robots don’t attack you and you can’t die” difficulty level, begin wandering around the ship trying to figure out what happened. It is a very pick up audio logs and read pieces of paper experience.
Game freezes, have to reload. Upon reloading my flashlight no longer works and everything is pitch black. Look in my inventory to see if I accidentally deactivated it or something, no dice.
Check online and piece together that I never actually picked up the flashlight because during that opening docking sequence I wandered around my little ship looking at things and hence didn’t see a compartment open near where I was initially standing and instead just saw the door open and left.
That said the game has a programming quirk/mistake where if you are killed by an enemy and taken to the brig the game thinks you have the flashlight even if you don’t, hence why I was able to use a flashlight. The thing is that by the game freezing and having to reload a save it “fixed” that bug, leaving me deep in the ship unable to see anything as it is very dark.
Fortunately all I have to do to fix this is die and get taken to the brig again.
…I set the game on peaceful mode and enemies aren’t trying to kill me anymore.
I fixed this by upping the difficulty again and feeling my way through the dark until I can make out the red lights of a robot and fire blindly in its direction; it charges and kills me.
I set the difficulty back to peaceful now that I have a flashlight again and check the map on the wall to see how to get back to my ship. I skip everything along the way to get back there and emerge back in the spaceport.
The game won’t let me pick up the flashlight as it believes I already have it simply because I am currently using a flashlight that doesn’t actually exist.
I find the closest save point, mentally make a map of the path back and reload my save, leaving me without my bugged flashlight and letting me pick up the real flashlight. I save and reload to check if everything is working properly and it is.
Resuming my exploration and if that blue suicide robot didn’t kill me early on I was a room away from where you can repower the lights for the entire ship, making the flashlight useless.
To be fair the combat is unusually tricky early on and they put the brig on the opposite end of the ship.
Also by the end of the game I had gotten annoyed and looked up what I was missing to finish it up (it was one thing) and read that the game had two (well three but that one wasn’t available on peaceful) endings and you just needed to save right before the ending choice. It turns out the guide was wrong and the game deletes your save upon triggering an ending, meaning I picked the wrong one and killed 4.6 billion people by mistake.
As much as Ive been plying anything Ive been playing Grandia on Saturn after being disappointed by the lazy HD remaster.
Im only about 10 hours in but its been a very fun 10 hours. Very 90s anime vibes and a presentation between Xenogears and MegaMan Legends. The battle system has somehow been both easy and tons of fun. I just find every element and character incredibly delightful and have been taking my time to see every element all the dialog I can. There are a lot of pleasant little camera moves if you hit C on random things. Its the first thing in a long time that evokes the childhood feeling I had where I longed to visit a fictitious place.
Despite whining on about it earlier I dumped like 30 hours into Troy because it’s still Total War and I am still a fiend for it, but then it royally fucked me with some bull ass shit and now I am DONE.
was wondering wether this is a scripted event you’ll experience sooner or later, but I prefer this alternative that the game just has tons of possibilities that you are likely to never see
Secret of Mana+ and Brink of Time are excellent remix albums. If I can ever come up with a good name for my website I want to do an article on all of the weird video game remix albums that came out in the late 80s into the mid 90s.
started collecting Sega Saturn games again, for some reason, but also playing stuff i’ve had for years.
X-Men vs. Street Fighter - this game is still a lot of fun and it’s nostalgic for me because it was one of the first Saturn games i bought, back when EB was selling Saturns for like $70 on clearance and ALSO selling imports from Japan for like half a year. i know it’s totally broken and has been replaced by Marvel 2 in terms of relevancy, but there’s something neat about this game being the first of its kind
Rockman 8: Metal Heroes - i’ve owned the PS1 version since the day it came out, but i was always jealous of the better music and extra bosses and modes present in the Saturn version. so, i finally picked up a copy. it’s basically MM8, which i like, so i’m happy with it. also, it being a game aimed at kids means that it’s pretty easy to translate and i’m having fun doing that.
Grandia - i hear the Saturn version is supposed to be the definitive one, so i picked it up on the cheap off eBay. only popped it in the drive to test it out, and it boots, so that’s good. kind of wondering how well i’m going to do as a non-fluent speaker/reader, but it seems like a fun challenge for myself.
working on mega man x3, lovely version. people downplay the anime cutscenes but i find them a riot. also been playing metal slug 1. the copious slowdown on saturn makes it feel friendly and generous and gives you more time to appreciate the absolutely killer music and spritework
yeah, there a definitely a bunch of Saturn games that i think have more inherent charm in their ports than just, say, playing an arcade-perfect ROM or conversion.
i really like the port of MMX3 on Saturn, though the ultimate version of this game would allow me to choose which soundtrack i want.
I hooked up the Saturn I acquired a couple years ago just a few days ago and found that it won’t read any games… I get the start-up logo and time-setting menu but just a black screen on trying to load a game. lens not working? these are the things I’d ask in a saturn thread
metal slug doesn’t, i believe you are thinking of KoF95 and Ultraman
there are hacks for both of those games now that allow you to use a normal 4MB ram cart
oh hey i also like mech-hisui. probably because i have not played as any other character yet because why would i ever want to be anything besides a robot raid?
this could be too many things to speculate, really. it could be the optical drive, but there’s no guarantee. the saturn is a complicated machine and there are a lot of things that can fail.
I started playing Silent Hill. The first 15 minutes are really good. Nothing like chasing your kid daughter through thick fog in a strangely empty town. I like how the enemy audio cues sound like an unanswered telephone screaming underneath layers of dirty laundry. That part where you get ambushed by gories and then come to at the café with the lady cop and the radio and then get ambushed again by winged gories was cool. Maybe my favourite part so far is these cameras angles here:
Still, once my next objective was to head for the school and I was constantly being blocked (5+ times???), my map filling up with X’s, I started losing interest. I probably will continue when I’m in the right mood but I bounced off in favour of…
Sonic Adventure DX and WOW is this game some virtuosic jank. Playing the Steam version and I’m constantly wondering if it’s this particular port that’s broken or if that’s just how the game is (I only ever played the killer whale part circa 2000). What if SM64’s camera had a mid-life crisis and developed an amphetamine addiction? It works sometimes but it’s contently pranking me, gaslighting me. Lots of character collision jostle and jitter. Also there seems to be a good deal of SFX missing in cutscenes? Or else they’re mixed terribly. And that voice acting, yikes! I don’t like how Sonic feels to move around (outside the race course flow), he’s too fine-pointed and frictionless. The rings should be a brighter yellow. In fact everything is too washed out (in a way I enjoy in other Sega games of the Dreamcast/XBox era but not for Sonic (though I dig those marmalade sunset skies in Station Square). The plot and my objectives are beyond nonsensical, I always end up going to that glowing dot that tells me what I’m doing next because how the heck am I supposed to read this game’s mind? Everything feels like a first draft. Why is Tails’ plane so hair-trigger sensitive!? Gross. Pinball at the casino was the only time I felt like I was playing a polished game.
Ad yet, there are moments where it clicks and I’m like “Hell yeah, Knuckles is here” or I’m being chased by an avalanche (a sequence which benefits from being more straightforward re: the over-caffeinated camera and jarring jolt-abouts elsewhere). Being in a tornado was cool. I’m going to continue playing it because it is interesting. I was trying to remember the second game which I’m pretty sure I beat when it came out but couldn’t recall much aside from those Knuckles stages where you’re in Halloween world hunting for gems which sucked and is probably a good indicator of that game’s place in my heart.
Finally I ended up playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles lol. Now THAT’s a Sonic game. All the speed and character drama and vibage the Dreamcast version lacks, utterly confident. Fits like a warm glove whereas Adventure fits like a pair of pants full of squirrels (not an experience to write off entirely that is).
