Been playing Sky Odyssey for PS2. It’s an extremely chill Pilotwings type game, no combat, just flying, but with a much more fun hook than just Getting a Pilotwings License.
The idea is you’re an explorer charting these treacherous islands in your biplane looking for pieces of a treasure map to some Lost Tower or another. It’s a great hook for flying through rings and dodging stalactites in caves and the mission structure so far has kept things very varied:
–you have a fuel leak and need to maintain speed over a refueling train on the way to your destination
–find a spooky cave entrance and dodge falling rocks til you can find a landing strip that nets you a piece of a treasure map, then exit the collapsing cave and find a runway along the coast outside
–you need to make it from one island to another before nightfall but the only way you can do that in time is to ride high altitude air currents that can be treacherous if you don’t surf them properly
–you have to make it through a snowy valley and then over a tall mountain but your plane is too heavy unless it jettisons fuel before the ascent which you need to time just right to have enough to make it to your destination
There’s rings to fly through that are sorta on the way to where you’re going but appreciably there’s no real flashing hud showing you exactly what route to take. You have to pay attention to the mission briefing so when it says “Follow this river northwest til you see a cave entrance”, well that’s what you have to do. You won’t quite get led by the nose when you’re in the air.
It’s an early PS2 (2000) game so the graphics aren’t exactly the tops of what the PS2 could pull off but they definitely work well enough. I’m super charmed with this so far and would kill to see another just like it with say, Ace Combat 7 tech.
finished silent hill 3: too much fear for me. opening areas too immediately oppressive feeling. and I completely forgot about all those underground tunnel and construction site levels inbetween the mall and offices. probably all thematically significant for the teen pregnancy silent hill but not as compelling to me. this one I’d prefer to just read someones analysis next time than actually play again.
good to know that I’ve been completely unchanging and trapped in a block of ice for 17 years though. guess I’ll see if I can actually finish 4 for the first time next.
I’m up to Chapter 3 in The Witcher and it feels like this is the moment it is forcing me to pick between the two sides and… they are both just the worst. The one side feels very racist against non-humans so I feel like there is no way I can side with them, so of course the other side appears to be an actual terrorist cell that kills random people seemingly more often than they go after more justifiable targets. I think the latter is still the better, but mainly I hope they both kill each other off.
I found Spongebob’s house in Maneater. This after finding the frozen banana stand the other day. You can tell Tripwire had fun making this one (probably a nice break from updating Killing Floor 2 all the time).
I’m…pretty close to having a full evolutionary set for my shark! Which just means that my shark now teleports around and electrifies everything.
Also finally got revenge on an orca. I mean, obviously not the same one that killed me before, but just, y’know. In concept.
this is why I’m waiting for a retroarch core before I dig into ps2 emulation
honestly this is part of why the SNES original is better, the pacing is pretty much uninterrupted start to finish because there are barely any lategame sidequests nor is there an explicit “okay time to do sidequests” portion of the game.
(this is, incidentally, one of the things I liked best about FFVIIR)
@bib the PC port I think just has a fucked translation for some bizarre reason and ugly mobile phone menus. just emulate the DS version or even better play the SNES original with the namingway patch. I can send you the patched game if you want.
also finally started anodyne 2 and I don’t think I’ve fallen in love with a game quite as quickly and deeply as I have here. wish I hadn’t waited so long to get it.
you can run pcsx2 in native res/software rendering for authenticity and use reshade (i think most of the popular retroarch crt shaders have been ported?)
I tried looking up the crt shader situation while I was playing silent hill 3 because it seemed like this is a big missing piece of ps2 emulation and it’s really needed for native res but it looked like my options were a rinky dink scan line filter that’s better than nothing at native or x2, a passable shader thing that only starts looking okay at atleast x3 resolution but now the rest of the game is wrong looking, and a bunch of people complaining reshade doesn’t work with pcsx2 for them.
I didn’t look too hard into the reshade thing much though since I don’t know much about it and usually when it comes up I get annoyed since it usually seems like it’s in the context of somebody jacking with a games colors to make it “look better.” yeah let me just go watch casablanca with a hires texture pack, or watch manhunter and jack with the contrast and colors cause what the hell does dante spinotti know about photography anyway
Have been playing a fair bit of GTAV (which I got free from EGS) which bounces between “Wow, this is pretty great, I love all these little touches” and “Wow, in 2020 it’s kinda amazing how well playing the behavior of cops completely straight is” before taking a big ol’ shit all over everything and causing an “Oh, right, this is a R* GTA game so of course it has to have R* ‘humor,’” moment.
More recently and more generally I’ve been playin’ NFS: Heat a bunch as of late and it seems capture all my favorite things about NFS: Carbon and Midnight Club: LA into one neat package that makes it quite enjoyable. Most of the events I’ve unlocked thus far have been pretty enjoyable and the game seems to make finishing a race generally worth having done it even if you don’t end up in first, which is neat. Doesn’t generally stop me from restarting and running the races to perfect them, but it’s a nice feature when I don’t really have the energy to beat myself up trying for 1st.
I have no idea what I’m doing in the drifting events but that’s probably fine as, at least on medium difficulty they’re all have generous score limits and little to no punishment for oopsies.
Currently driving a '70 'Cuda and loving every minute of it… and was the main reason I was even interested in it, lol. Was figuring it’d be a late unlock but being the first car available after picking from the three starters works fine for me.
I know I have a stupid unique habit but somehow I fell into pretty good CRT settings for PCSX2 so it is out there even if I have no idea how ReShade works.
oh yeah please do that would be great, that’s what i’m really planning on playing, just thinking about checking out the ds/steam version as a curiosity later on
i’m on disc 3 of ix right now and the menus and fonts are so, so great, whoever is responsible for jamming those mobile game menus into all these rereleases should really have their career destroyed
so I tried to do this last year with silent hill 3 and I couldn’t find the crt royale shader on reshade and I don’t think there are any other crt shaders that come close to that? everything I tried looked weird and also reshade was an enormous pain in the ass to use, my settings never saved, according to the internet this was due to windows permissions issues but I literally only have one admin account on my installation and I manually set everything in the reshade/pcsx2 directory to have full permissions and it still wouldn’t work and then I nearly destroyed my OS installation trying to just globally force my entire drive to have full permissions, so I just kind of gave up.
this was like, less than a year ago, I guess it’s possible crt royale has been ported, but all the ones that existed last I tried were just scanline overlays that honestly looked like shit
The Namingway translation is fine* but Final Fantasy IV has like nothing interesting going on mechanically so all the shit that restores the Japanese version’s difficulty turns a real breezy game into more of a slog.
Easy Type 4 life.
*Actually wait many of the item and name changes irked me – it should always be Phoenix Down…!!
lol I didn’t mean it like that exactly but it definitely reads that way. I just mean photography didn’t seem to have an effect on painting in that world. Like, paintings are rarely realistic in the game. Every house has multiple paintings, few have photographs. Maybe I am wrong to feel like this but it seems like photography didn’t create the same splash as I understand it did when it became commercially accessible tech irl.
this isn’t true at all imo I actually think with the original difficulty restored it’s a very tight strategic ATB game. just because you can’t build your characters out doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have depth. the boss designs are consistently challenging as well as the unexpected ways they change your party loadout. to me it’s actually a really cool design decision to be put under restrictions like that, and while the game doesn’t do quite enough with it I still think it presents an interesting challenge throughout.
if anything easytype is the boring iteration of the game, it feels so much more devoid of substance. and the original difficulty isn’t grindy or anything, you just have to think a lot more strategically with resource management and boss encounters.
