Quadrilateral Cowboy sure is a fun 3D puzzle FPS
3 Likes
Got this on the cheap at some point ā should really get around to trying it. I got the impression itās programming-adjacent. Is that the case, or is it just an aesthetic?
That is the case, though it isnāt a zachtronics game by any means
2 Likes
About the most complicated bits of programming is working out what handful of commands to save so you can run them away from your deck, itās usually exit; aimbot; fire;
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Played Hyrule Warriros: Age of Calamity demo and I think itās kinda turned me off the game. The combat feels a little light and finnicky and thereās a little too much finger fumblinā and double-checking in the menus to make it a breezy, laidback musou. Itās framerate is also pretty variable. The key draw really is the plot which now involves canonical time travel which makes BotW more complicated than it needs to be. The little robot that kickstarts the whole thing is very cute and Impa makes me want a straight up Sheik game but I need more than whatās on offer in HW:AoC.
Bought DEFCON and played precisely one game of it hoping to see what nuclear war feels like a bit. It was pretty great and successful in that it was creepy, depressing, and heavy and I never want to play it again. Watching the enemy seep in on the fuzzy rim of my radar made me feel dread in a way I havenāt in a game in a long time. The persistent, harrowed sobbing of a faceless woman in the background was the garnish to the loss of San Francisco.
Played the demo for Pixel Puzzle Makeout League, another in the growing number of hybrid visual novel-picross games. It gave me my picross fix for a bit. My favourite thing that happened: you play as a superhero whose power is the ability to see and solve the world as pixel puzzles a la picross. The first time this happens she sees an object and the puzzle grid pops up where I was expecting a tutorial. She just uses her powers to solve the thing at high speed and I thought it was a neat little subversion which also made her power feel kinda disturbing. This woman is cursed with picroception.
10 Likes
Burly Men at Sea is pretty cute, but feels very slight. Thereās apparently some extra branching paths and a few mysteries to uncover but idk if I feel like the āmainā game earned enough to ask me to start digging through it.
I give it credit for having a pretty neat control scheme on PS4, though.
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yesterday I played ninety nine nights and was uh, kinda shocked that a musou game had a character that didnt care about murdering kids. The game definitely framed her as wrong but yeah wasnt expecting that
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Played a little over ten hours of The Evil Within, getting to about the half-way point on the normal difficulty. Had to abandon it. As far as I can see it, all this game has going for it is a strong aesthetic based in convolution that feels present in the pacing, even in the movement of motifs between visual and plot elements. Without knowing any of the details behind it, the tech and presentation is also really damn impressive. The environments are sometimes very beautiful. But other than that I think it is a boring, sometimes frustrating game to play. I am confused as to what it was designed to make me a player feel, because all aspects of how it plays seem non-complimentary and totally out of tune. The combat is not satisfying because you never can tell how much damage you have dealt to an enemy unless their head explodes since they hardly react to anything, taking bullets to the head like it was nothing at all, which is a huge ding against it coming from the director of RE4. The tension stemming from the low resources could have been cool with different balancing, but this is clearly an action game with large amounts of bullet-sponge enemies with pretty much no other alternatives to fight with. It gestures at having phases for styles of play, moving from stealth to outright combat, but stealth is just a way to reduce enemies before you have to fight them and that often takes way longer to do than simply shooting enemies in the head. The pacing is interesting but only because it makes it hard for you to predict what comes next, which has the negative effect of destroying any modulation of tension created by understanding or potentially misunderstanding your position, your dis/advantage, your progress in a chapter or the over all drama. This game is truly a mess and unfortunately it is barely even an interesting mess.
Worst moment in the game happened as I was going through a maze. My partner was posted with a sniper on a wall above me, saying things like āI got your back, keep going.ā I ran into two ogres, giant dudes with swinging hammers and a lot of heatlh, and the whole fuckn time this dumb ass partner didnāt fire a single shot. He just stood there!! And, no, I do not think heās dumb I think he was designed to not shoot in that moment. But why???
The Evil Within 2 looks like a better game but it also look really generic, something that could be fun just to chill out in and marvel at.
8 Likes
I wonder if they scrambled a lot in the last year of development, because mechanically it feels absolutely indebted to Last of Us (*Evil Within came out a year and a half after, so already deep in development). It feels to me like they thought Last of Usās camera, resource, and stealth loops would fix horror tension back into the Resident Evil 4 model. But they kept designing elevated, direct-action scenarios that just play worse without the more deliberate action grounding 4 and its successors built.
This is super-important in Last of Us and later allowed the Resident Evil 2 remake to work ā obscuring health and randomizing it a bit makes the enemies much more dangerous and less gamey. In a lot of ways, I think the Resident Evil 2 remake gets to where Evil Within was trying to go.
2 Likes
This is almost word for word what @Telengard and I talked about on a podcast years ago. Of course now that dude loves Evil Within 2.
1 Like
I had similar issues with The Evil Within but pushed through to the end. My common complaint about most games is that they are too long but Evil Within really pushed it at something like 16 hours. Itās got that cool Mikami scenario variation but very often it feels like a slog. When I played it back near release on PS3 there were extremely long load times which came after deaths in a game where instant deaths from traps are quite common so yeah. Pretty ambitious final boss though (at least visually).
I played the demo for 2 and felt like they didnāt really know what they wanted to do with the game. The setting is somewhat at odds with its gameplay since you enter into a collective mindscape only to shoot and stab everything (even surreal nightmare monsters).
3 Likes
got my first clear of hades but interest dropping off majorly now
also watched a pal steamroll the first few hours of sfc tactics ogre after immediately deleting all of the initial characters and having denam + canopus hit each other for 20 mins
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The best character (and perhaps, somehow, the most sympathetic) in The Little Acre is the dog. Somehow I think he got the best animation
I enjoyed The Evil Withinās much more tightly focused DLC packs. The primarily stealth stuff in the first two? packs is actually really good. The pure action of the last one isnāt too bad. Kinda like playing a modern day Splatterhouse.
3 Likes
I played a bit of Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town last night while my internet was out, again. Itās not bad so far. Fishing is a bit more viable in this version vs. past versions, where youād sit around waiting a lot longer for fish to bite so Iāve been trying to make at least 600g off of fish per-day, conversely, though, mining (at least, early on) isnāt very viable. Theyāve made it so you can actually see how much fatigue and stamina you have left, which is great because itās one thing fewer you have to worry about every day. I recommend the chicken suit for fishing just because it looks hilarious when your character is jiggling to reel in a fish in a chicken suit.
I really like most of the re-designs, except that most of the male characters didnāt fare too well. Gray, for example, barely resembles his former self and looks more outgoing, likewise with Cliff. The two new characters (Brandon and Jennifer) both also donāt really look like they belong, though, Brandon looks like he could be a male version of Nami from A Wonderful Life.
I got Elly and Marie to Purple hearts last night before bed (Elly really likes Toy Flowers which grow all over the mountain in Spring and donāt sell for much, so you can just save them for Elly, and Marie really likes Wild Grapes, which grow under the Honey tree on your farm in Spring) and the egg I incubated from the chicken I bought has hatched so I can start giving Popuri, etc. eggs.
I just donāt understand why a game so heavily focused on NPC interaction still has so little NPC dialogue. Sound is bad (I muted the music because A. Iāve heard it all enough over the past 19 years and itās all mostly grating and B. they just used the SEQs from the PSX game with a slightly better instrument library, but without the BGM you can really hear how dire the sound effects are). Outside of character art, the game is aesthetically stinking of a budget title (it looks like a GameCube game). Still should be as fun as the original game, though, since it seems to stay fairly close to the original game, just shaking up some of the charactersā likes a bit and stuff.
The people in this town must be real flakes if the new guy who just barges into peoplesā houses wearing a wet chicken suit is the first person you hand your kid brother who might be sick off to.
I prefer Baker Elly from HM64 to Nurse Elly because thereās something comical about her stopping by your farm while youāre in the middle of doing heavy farm work to give you a full-sized cake that she insists on standing there and watching you consume the entirety of in one-bite.
The Last Remnant is overly complicated, abstract, ultimately pretty simple, and a lot of fun!
The music kicks ass too
Grab it for cheap
7 Likes
how do you get past the first extremely hard boss battle about 6ish hours in? i smashed my head against it for a few days then gave up. i think itās at the end of a long cave (actually i donāt think the cave is even that long, come to think) and starts with a cutscene. canāt even remember the boss now, but i donāt think i came close to defeating it even once
Iām 90% sure youāve run out of healing herbs. Itās hard to notice when this happens. Itās a very SaGa way to get stuck
Buy a ton of herbs and rely on them a lot and you shouldnāt have too much trouble, at least until the end of the game
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howās the console remastered version of that? any improvements over the steam release?
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i am looking at guides trying to figure out exactly where i got stuck. 6 hours is probably too low, could have been closer to 20 or 25 - i had passed the gaslin caves and ruins of robelia without any issues, but thereās some later boss that is just absolutely putrid. not sure about the running out of herbs thing, in retrospect i donāt think i even remember how healing works in that game but i recall the issue was the boss would just do ungodly amounts of damage and slaughter everyone and never die
i was enjoying it a lot until that brick wall so maybe i should give it another shot. and yeah i looked and no i still canāt tell you what area or boss i was stuck on but it was so difficult that it seems like other people would definitely have gotten stuck in the same place