not a game I personally played but my wife is actually getting into ring fit, they get really inventive with the level types, it turns out that “exercise software with videogame design” is an extraordinarily broad niche once you go beyond basic-ass gamification
6 Likes
Yeah, it’s actually well put together and designed for longterm use. I’ve got a friend who recently started it and was somewhat incredulous that I had reached level 300 and that they hadn’t unlocked everything within 3 hours of play. Their assumption, I think, was that it was a phoned-in minigame compilation rather than a marathon balancing fitness with RPG.
1 Like
I bought it for my wife a couple months ago and she gave up after two days “it’s making me do boot camp stuff”
i mean i don’t want to do that stuff either, fair
iswydt
5 Likes
Dance Dance Revolution was the little-noted precursor to exercise software, I certainly used it intentionally for exercise in its heyday. It shows there’s a variety of game designs the genre could go with other than RPGfication
8 Likes
Coincidentally, a rhythm game was grafted onto Ringfit in a free update.
4 Likes
I lost all my lives crawling inside and dying
11 Likes
same thing. set time, Sega Saturn logo, black screen. disc is spinning.
I realized though that the AV cable is screwed. there are only 3 pins still in the plug. maybe that’s the problem here. but it does load up the boot screen w/ sound…
it could well be your drive if audio CDs don’t play
That’s normal for composite video cable…they correspond to yellow/white/red. the other pins are for s-video & rgb
ah, good to know.
I tried playing Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates today. I say tried as despite not appearing to be that demanding it seems to tax my older PC a bit more than one would anticipate resulting in some slideshow-esque framerates… but that’s only half the story.
For some reason the game runs across two programs when you start up and are in the central “hub” area of the central sphere and 9 surrounding planetoids. You transfer to one of those, find the swirly point on them and in theory go to one of the 9 utopias. The thing is this opens a third program/window and the odds of the game crashing or freezing at this point appears to be about 50% (When I go to task manager there are three different windows and three distinct processes).
The thing is that when it freezes at this point and comes back the autosave acts like you beat that section, so even though I’ve only successfully made it through one of these utopias without freezing or getting annoyed and shutting it down I currently have been given credit for beating 7 of them (I believe only 3 of them have even loaded up).
I would feel like I am missing out on whatever the intended experience is, but one that actually loaded up was an opening image with an audio track explaining what this society is like that cuts to a video of the developer explaining what he was trying to get across with this utopia. Clicking the right mouse button switches to a different tik-tok length vid of the dev taking a selfie vid in various different locations, and spinning the mouse wheel either speeds up or slows down his explanation (which runs independent of the videos). I sped it up as fast as I could and it still took several minutes for him to finish up explaining something about rituals. It felt so pretentious that I literally told his selfie video to fuck off at least a couple of times. Then the actual game part of that utopia finally loaded up and crashed when I touched the first glowy thing in front of me.
Also the controls are all mouse based with holding the right mouse button making you move and moving the mouse changing your direction. This was a bad idea.
I am going to be the only one to rate this game up on the big random bundle game spreadsheet and that might not be ideal.
Seriously though, if anyone can explain the logic behind the game running three simultaneous different processes I would love to know why.
6 Likes
i played heaven will be mine for a short while. sapphic gundam pilots in space is both very calming and anxiety inducing for me. it’s been a way for me to explore queer media that isn’t some exploitative moe fare. i like the writing a lot and told them so on twitter. their handle is a reference to chrono trigger which sort of erupted this hope in me that maybe i to can be capable of working on projects like this while being so obsessed with SE properties / being an ivalice diehard.
the art and atmosphere is nice. the audio is strangely loud but maybe it’s because i’m wearing earphones. everything seems to sync up perfectly beyond this. the artist might be the person who worked on we know the devil, but i’m not 100% on this. there’s a character that i really relate to and that helps immersion a lot. i can only play in fits in bursts because i am tragic and i’m always afraid that the alignment system is going to lead me to a bad ending but if you’re into this sort of thing i would def try it out. it’s on steam and probably itch.
7 Likes
yeah, it’s all the same people as WKTD.
i only ever got one ending, but i don’t think the alignment stuff ever really pushes you towards a ‘bad’ ending.
1 Like
ah thanks. i only got one ending in we know the devil and i just was not compelled enough to continue. thanks for letting me know about the ending stuff, now i’ll be able to play without worrying so much, haha
1 Like
Grabbed by the Ghoulies is the #1 Kick a Butler in the B*lls Simulator.
6 Likes
Silpheed: The Lost Planet
I owned this game. I owned its shiny box. I have played it more now from a burned copy than I ever did on the real thing. I am all the worse for that experience.
There’s hardly anything to its design which is especially stark when compared to its contemporaries. You can equip different shots to the left and right of your ship. This would be cool if any but three of the shots felt useful. Late in the game, I acquired this plasma ball shot and thought, wow this is gonna be great. However, it barely does any damage and shoots out only every three seconds or so. There’s a scoring system based on how close you are to an enemy when it is destroyed. I hate it. I don’t want to memorize where ships are going to be. It’s not fun.
The level design is glacially slow. There are these large gaps of time where no enemies show up at all and you just get to watch the bland scenery. The levels also take a long time to complete and you must restart if you die. Playing this game feels a lot like waiting for your number at a busy bank. It actually awoke memories I had of when I lived and China and would wait for an hour or more so I could send money through Western Union. I remember one of those times when a white woman came into the bank and just immediately sat at a window and started talking about her vacation or whatever. Please, take a number and wait like everyone else. Anyways, Silpheed is worse because I can’t pay my student loans by playing the game.
I actually kind of liked parts of the levels near the end. There’s a neat part where your support ship that heals you midlevel gets corrupted by an alien parasite and its actually a fairly tough boss. Also, the writing inbetween levels is reminiscent of ZeroRanger’s technobabble about impossible odds and decimated capabilities. I wish I had a pic of the last screed because of how impressively verbose it was.
The next three games didn’t burn well so I’m going to be emulating them. Those games are Aqua Aqua, Timesplitters, and Ring of Red. Ring of Red actually tied with Midnight Club but I consider @meauxdal’s opinion to be an antivote. At this point, I trust them to be correct about a lot of these games.
15 Likes
i would like to give aqua aqua another chance, and try to “get good” at timesplitters
my aqua aqua experience = i love wetrix (though i haven’t played it a ton), i was excited to try out the ps2 version. popped this bad boy in. first thing is the tutorial, ok, no sweat. i’m having trouble controlling the game, it’s too sensitive or something. i check the controls but don’t find anything useful. the tutorial takes awhile and i get bored. eventually i realize i just have no way to competently control the cursor and give up. i may have been missing something though!
timesplitters i stopped playing after i realized i couldn’t beat the second level lol. that game is way way harder than goldeneye. lots of enemies, hard to completely avoid damage. it’s fun because all FPS games from this era are fun to me, but it was also tuned way too high on the difficulty. i should spend some more time with it, though.
i think i spent most of my time on the first level, trying to beat it on the harder difficulties. shit’s hard
fuck midnight club. it’s worth noting that this was one of the best-reviewed games of the US PS2 launch, so honestly i’d be interested to see what you think of it on those grounds
3 Likes
Honestly messing around in multiplayer and using the level designer for an early PS2 game is the real appeal of Timesplitters. The campaign is stupid hard but not impossible it just requires lots of running and cheese. Later Timesplitters improve the campaign a lot but if you can somehow get a save file with everything unlocked just play multiplayer and level maker.
5 Likes
maybe it’s because i’m sleep deprived but i forgot to mention another reason i love the writing and character set up is because it reminds me of sailor moon and astrology stuff! it’s not done in a cookie cutter way so the stuff you’d expect isn’t what you get per say. like pluto ( who is my favorite ) is really powerful and i love her os and the way her powers are explained but also she’s a huge sweetheart. really glad we didn’t get the ’ pluto is evil and bloodthirsty and insane ’ trope that some many astrologers love to dish out. just pls buy the game, i want the devs to continue making things.
i came here to post that i have these tho:
7 Likes