Just fyi your plan worked, you got me good. I had totally forgotten that game existed. If someone had asked me “do you know Concrete Genie” I’d have stone cold said no, what’s that but with the Astro’s image I could actually remember what that was
(Never heard of Robinson: The Journey though)
all of my favorite Sony games, like IP they don’t own, third party game, tech demo and franchise that was left to die even though they seem to like the character they made for it (of course my wife Kat is in the Playroom, they had to bury her body somewhere)
hey I played some demos I had downloaded to my Switch and forgot about
Touhou Spell Bubble: what if Puzzle Bubble/Bust-A-Move except when you get big combos it becomes a music game so you can make even more garbage. this felt like it wouldn’t work as I went through the tutorial and then I played it and it totally fucking works and since the game is score/time based instead of an outright knockout system in traditional versus modes, things can actually stay competitive or silly
Mad Rat Dead: you are a rat and you died but the cute anime Rat God brought you back and you decide to take revenge by platforming to the beat of music made by your exposed heart suspended in a hole in your chest. this is a game that fully commits to a absurd gimmick and is immensely playable as a result. also I guess it belongs in the Combos as a Means of Traversal thread but I’m too lazy to post it there
Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory: this is just bad Theaterhythm and the fact that they use the Theaterhythm art style in loading screens makes me just want to play Curtain Call instead. maybe the next time Yoko Shimomura wants a game to be made out of her music, she’ll ask for a good one
How to play Godfall (2020), a third person hack and slash game.
When you attack enemies, not only do you damage them but you also cause a portion of their remaining healthbar to start glowing. This is called Soulshatter Buildup. If you hit the enemy with a heavy attack, you can deal Soulshatter Damage and “cash in” that Soulshatter Buildup, dealing a large chunk of damage in one hit.
If you kill an enemy using Soulshatter Damage you will Soulshatter them, causing a large explosion whose effects can change based on your equipment.
When you attack an enemy, you deal Breach damage and fill their Breach bar. This is a separate bar from their health bar. When their Breach bar is full they will become Breached, stunning them in place.
If an enemy is Breached you can do a Takedown on them, a canned attack animation that can do lots of damage. Takedowns can cause special effects based on your equipment.
You can have two weapons equipped at once which you can freely switch between. However, if you attack with only one weapon you will charge your Polarity bar. When it is full, switching weapons will activate your Polarity Attack, causing a large explosion and giving you a temporary damage boost. The explosion and the damage boost mode can both have additional effects based on your equipment.
You can equip an item called a Banner which you can place on the ground and activate special effects based on the Banner you have equipped.
Each weapon type has two special Weapon Techniques, called a Northern Technique and a Southern Technique. Each Weapon Technique may have a separate meter you need to charge or they may share charge bars. The Northern Technique will cause a large amount of Soulshatter Buildup while the Southern Technique will deal Soulshatter Damager.
You can equip and item called a Life Flask which can restore some health and cause special effects based on the Life Flask you can equipped.
There are 12 Valor Plates you can equip, special armor that changes the way you look and sound, and provides you special passive effects and a unique Archon Fury ability.
Archon Fury is a super mode you can activate when your archon meter is full. It gives some general stat boosts while active but each Valor Plate also causes additional special effects upon activation and during the mode itself.
If you land many hits quickly then you will enter Rampage mode, where you deal extra damage.
After an enemy does an attack, for a few moments you can see a glowing dot somewhere on their body. This is a Weakpoint, and if aim your reticle directly at the Weakpoint when you attack you will deal extra damage and knock the enemy down.
If you kill enemy by attacking their Weakpoint, it will count as a Deathblow. Deathblows can cause special effects based on your equipment.
Your Shield can be used to parry enemy attacks, leaving them open for retaliation. If you have the proper skills unlocked, you can use this opportunity to do a Takedown or attack their Weakpoint.
When you Shield meter is filled, you can do a Shield Throw at a group of enemies to knock them down. If you press the Shield button right when it hits the enemy you can teleport to them and do a Spectral Blow attack.
When your Shield meter is filled you can also choose to instead do an Arcing Shield Throw which knocks down enemies in an arc in front of you. If you press the Shield button right when your shield comes back to you, you can release an Explosive Wave attack.
As you Parry or Block enemy attack you will charge up your Shield. When it’s charged, your shield will become a Primed Shield and reflect damage to enemies whenever you parry them.
If your Shield meter is filled you can also charge your Shield Throw to do a Charged Shield Throw to do extra damage. If you have a Primed Shield your Charged Shield Throw will do extra damage.
If your Shield meter is full you can do a Petrifying Slam which deals damage to enemies nearby. If the Petrifying Slam Breaches an enemy, they will become Petrified. If you have a Primed Shield, you can follow up the Petrifying Slam with a Primed Petrifying Slam.
If your Shield meter is full, you can do a Shield Bash and knock down enemies.
If your Shield meter is filled, you can do a Spinning Blast that will break through unblockable attacks. If you have Primed Shield and the Spinning Blast Breaches and enemy, they will become Petrified.
After you do an attack, you can properly time a light attack to do a Weapon Timing Attack. If you do heavy attack, you can do a Heavy Timing Attack. If your Rampage mode is active, Heavy Timing Attack will consume the Rampage mode and do extra damage. If you press the Shield button, you will do a Shield Uppercut attack. If you have a Primed Shield, the Shield Uppercut will do extra damage.
After you Parry an enemy, you can press the Shield button to do a Shield Counterstrike, which causes Breach damage to enemies in front of you.
You can do Sundering Slam, a special move that causes enemies to take more damage temporarily. If you charge the Sundering Slam then enemies will take more bonus damage.
You can use a Siphon attack on an enemy and drain health from them. If you defeat an enemy using Siphon then a copy of them will appear and fight by your side.
You are now ready to play Godfall (2020).
i was gonna do sound design for concrete genie but they did a big redesign and i got furloughed during it and then ended up at sanzaru oops
The way you’ve written all this out has me thinking I could just design some cards and play a rule-based simulation of Godfall to get around buying a PS5 to play Godfall.
Switch continues to be where I go to waste money and then be disappointed by the game.
Toups oft talked about Elliot Quest is okay I guess. Then the first NPC after the first dungeon goes “you shouldn’t steal every treasure chest you come across. Those sort of things have a habit of catching up to you.” Thanks Video Game. I love being given an anxiety for playing you. What does that mean? What does it imply?
Steam reviews for EQ are strangely well written actual reviews and confirmed what I feared. The math on upgrades never works out. You will get an upgrade proceed to a level to only find out you need another key. Maybe unjustifably I got mad that the Steam Page had so much more story and context for what was happening than the game (though the game had no shortage of unadvance-able cutscenes).
I couldn’t figure out where to go so I tried another thing to annoy me.
Donut County’s writing got into my craw and dug in. Every item you push into the hole gets a little witticism for the Trashopedia. I guess it is written by the raccoon that works at the donut shop? They read like 500 tweets written on the toilet at a Chinese Buffet. A palm tree is just a stick of wood with a salad on it. 99% of seagulls are criminals. A truly treacherous one about coffee that Travis Mcelroy suggested in a DM.
Then I looked and saw I bought that Mario Collection and couldn’t figure out why I did.
Now the next day I got A super sore wrist because the switch is too heavy so I am off games for a few days (hopefully). Thanks video games you’re the best.
Finished Killer Is Dead - I liked it, good length of action game with some elliptical thematic stuff wrapped around it. Even without necessarily tying up completely, the different little bits of weird information at least felt like they bounced off each other in enough ways to feel interesting to think about. I saw people saying that the ending was an abrupt To Be Continued - I don’t think so but do think it’s so straightforwardly negative that you’re left waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some additional complicating factor.
The moon in the game’s cosmology is something like desire - source of mystery and power but also loss of memory, repetition and slow collapse into the lower instincts. Bits and pieces suggest the literal in-game moon has become increasingly colonized by human life - energizing industries such as tourism (people heading up there on pleasure jaunts), art (pop composers get a new lease of life from moontech), the military (Area 151) and I guess personal appliances (the main character can’t remember getting a blood-drinking artificial arm specifically, he just seems to wake up having always had it). The humans mutated into monsters by moon energy are kept in line by a special ops team themselves increasingly reliant on militarised moontech, leading to inevitable blowback, etc. I guess this is also playing on the James Bond thing of the pop-art, playboy spy/cop/assassin idea of the postwar years - the idea that an increasingly libidinized society would involve increasingly libidinized (unaccountable, autonomous, stylized) forms of state repression prone to going out of control. The dark side of the moon.
IDK this is a weirdly moralistic reading and I don’t really get the stuff about the dream lady etc. But am always a sucker for vaguely occult political allegories and also enjoyed it as an action game. So am glad I played.
A pretty interesting reading. I only recall a few details but I remember the Sun being interesting for how nobody gives a shit about it. Felt like something significant about how people were overlooking the real shit. I didn’t love the game overall but there were some glimmers of good ideas here and there.
ugh this is the best thing ever
WHOA that rules!!
oh my god
One of my favorite parts of Godfall is how every time you level up the camera suddenly snaps behind your back and disorients you. It will also then cut out whatever battle music was playing to play a 10 second segment from the main theme.
Also someone forgot to update the names of the stats and their order of appearance on the equipment screen.
Completed Thief 2: The 
Age
This was a lot closer to what i thought Thief would be like. The original was constantly surprising me and trying new things. It’s less of a stealth game and more of an action-adventure-first person archer hybrid with a heavy stealth bent. Fans and critics seem to hold it as a flawed experiment that was obviously improved on with the sequel. Maybe i’m weird, but i really enjoyed the tomb raiding and zombie/beastman fighting, so there’s a part of me that was prepared to be a little disappointed that this ones more of a straight stealth game. I wasn’t, though, because it’s a hella good stealth game! it trades the variety of what you’re going to do from level to level for making every level about sneaking and infiltration, but in a variety of different cool places. Wanna rob a bank? How about a shipping port? How about a cop shop? How about a museum, and also you get to case the joint first (in a mission literally called Casing The Joint lol) and then smoothly re-enter using all the secret passages you learned about before. T2 takes the already great core stealth mechanics from 1 and barely even refines them, more like doubles down on a proven good thing. It’s one of the more clear cut examples of a sequel that undeniably improves, but in no way obviates the original. They’re both stellar games that i had a blast playing, and they’re both in my personal canon now.
Scattered thoughts
-i liked the plot better in 2. The first one is a macguffin hunt that ends with you defeating a pulp fantasy chaos demon lord. That’s cool! but this is cooler. more noir, more about the City and its various factions. love the way the Mechanists and their impact on the world is slowly introduced — overheard chatter about the trees and crops dying, the air getting choked with smog, the massive towers blotting out the sun…
-LOVE Karras, he’s a fun sinister villain and you gather a lot about his motivations and psychology before you even know who he is or what his plans are. It’s a gutsy move to make the villain and his mechanical army sound like the Impressive Clergyman, but they really pull it off. the children of Karras are so CREEPY just chanting his megalomaniacal sermons as they putter around. apparently he has the same VA as Garret and OL’ BENNY, that’s neat
-really cool that you can lean into doors to hear footsteps and conversation more clearly and i appreciate the story beat where you have to do that. Also like that mantling is less of a crapshoot though Garret still has a weirdly hard time with ladders and ropes
-Favorite level was Life of the Party which i gather is just about everyone’s favorite. I’m a sucker for exploring a city block through unorthodox methods! gimme a rooftop! gimme a vent!! but unlike 1 which felt mildly dragged down by the Thief Gold levels i don’t think there was a single in this that i didn’t enjoy. Also really loved the aforementioned cop shop, bank and museum levels. The endgame level goes on a bit longer than it’s interesting but it’s a more appropriate gameplay challenge than the ending of 1. the second half of it is more dense with incident than the first half, which kinda felt like trying to assemble ikea furniture by running and collecting parts from the far ends of an empty warehouse
Just like Invisible War, Deadly Shadows was on sale for a buck a few weeks ago, so once again i get to play the compromised consolefied sequel to a sublime PC classic lol. Looking tentatively forward to it. (will only play the widely-hated reboot if i can find it at a similar bargain bin price)
I also want to taff around with fan missions a bit, including the whole-ass fan campaign where you play as a lady thief. Please feel free to suggest to me your favorites!
Bought canned air to clean my left joycon’s stick. Seemed to work for a few minutes before it started drifting again. It’s at least not automatically drifting now, I can just continue using the directional buttons uninterrupted. Got Mr. Driller to celebrate.
I like Deadly Shadows a lot more than Invisible War, though it’s less ambitious. Lots of good nabbin’
I recently got Mr. Driller as well! Are we Switch friends? I’d love to compare high scores (I’m bad)
Unfortunately, Deadly Shadows is Thief with everything great about Thief made really bland.
i did start and play a little Thief 3 right after i made that post and it’s immediately disappointing (no sick intro or briefing cutscenes?? why did every xbox game UI look like a bad early 2000s anime web shrine??) but at least Garrett is still a badass and now i can zoom out and watch him be a badass Thief oh no Garret why are you crabwalking over to lockpick that treasure chest
In support of your continued Thief exploration, if you want I have an unredeemed Steam key I’d be happy to give you. I… kinda enjoyed the reboot, up until I got to sort of a boss encounter thing that I was just banging my head against a wall with and eventually I got mad enough to quit. But it’s interesting to see it side by side with the older games I think
