early 2000s falcom games are so chill, i love xanadu next and zwei
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Its on sale on Steam now. Should I but it for 8 bucks?
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The world of Xanadu is very easy to get lost in. The exploration loop is highly rewarding.
Itās a lot like Zelda. Itās more of a Zelda game than any Zelda game after the first.
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got into newest version of stellaris since my friend got it and every time i play a campaign the gameās mechanics are completely different
currently on a slow conquer path across the galaxy. i conquered another species and peacefully integrated them into my empire and iām not doing anything icky. however, everyone must become synthetics. those are the rules sorry.
the gameās estimation of my empireās power is making me feel stronk. also the fact that iāve never lost a battle
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Zwei!! has one of my favorite Falcom tracks.
Thereās just something nostalgic about it.
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please just keep adding one of these with no comment every ten posts or so
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Last time I spoke to him, Arthur was working in the latex field.
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What of you, H. E. Pennypacker? You now play party to their plot?
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i remember banning everyone for doing robotic stuff, because i didnāt wanted more people, i was gotting a lot of imigrants and i scared of what robots would do to space.
played streets of rage 4
was hesitant because 2 is a Perfect Game and iāve always found the first v atmospheric and beautiful in its own way and this seemed like such a departure but itās really good and smashing cops heads together with floyd rules
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Old king allant is an exercise in demoralization
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before they nerfed death cloud one playthrough I beat him by casting that, running away and going for a shower while the dot killed him
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Yeah at this point I wish I had a build where I could just cheese him. Iāve lost nine soul levels and counting. After the first few levels my equip load wasnāt high enough to fast roll anymore and itās been downhill ever since. And the elevator going up to him is pointlessly long and slow!!
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Yeah that run to Allant is pretty brutal. Fast roll is worth going with for that fight since a lot of his moves are inherently avoidable so it doesnāt matter what your defense is so much. Mag Def shield for blocking and get ready to run when the nukes launch.
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Demoralizationās Souls
i hate the run up to Allant, one of the worst in the series. my other big problem with him is that he takes foreeeever like even once you get the muscle memory down to beat him he has the most hp and resistance in the game and itās a very drawn out fight. an ominous presaging of the hp inflation to come in the later games
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Tower Knight 1,365 HP
King Allant 5,967 HP 
Watchdog of the Old Lords (Bloodborne) 28,000+ HP
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I did it! I beat Demonās Souls. In the end, I lost around 20 levels to Allant. I did what I did every time I feel like Iām up against an insurmountable obstacle in one of these games: took off all my armor and my shield, held my weapon in two hands, and learned how to roll through and punish all of the bossās attacks. These are the fights I like best in these games ā humanoid enemy with a weapon whoās a little bigger than you, has a distinct moveset, and hits hard. Reminded me of the Fume Knight fight from the Dark Souls 2 DLC, which I loved when I played it years ago.
Now that Iāve finished Demonās, Iāve beaten all of the games in this Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro lineage. Demonās was a hefty enough experience that Iāve got to let it marinate for a while, but my gut reaction is that itās up there with Bloodborne (and to be fair, the first half of Dark Souls 1 up to O&S is also up there, but the second half falters enough that it drops off the top spot of my list) as my favorite of them all. The atmosphere in Demonās is so very palpably dense, both in terms of the visuals and the game design. I definitely did my part to lean into that ā I played on a small CRT with the brightness turned pretty low, and as such the darker areas of the game were a real claustrophobic nightmare that always had my heart going.
In terms of mechanics, I ended up being a huge fan of the archstone system in lieu of bonfires. Demonās has this vibe of a constant journey into the unknown, like an expedition. Thereās always a feeling of constantly pushing deeper into the world as risk/reward in these games, but with the Dark Souls games the bonfires are much more plentiful (DS3 had a truly absurd amountā¦) and as such the concept of having a checkpoint in the world is devalued. Knowing the bonfires come in abundance always makes me play a little more recklessly in those games, as if I can just run past enemies in the right way I can, a lot of the time, get to another checkpoint. In Demonās, though, the archstones are only available after defeating a boss ā each level came across as a region Iām supposed to cautiously probe and learn a few times before gaining enough confidence to determine an optimum path and go for the boss. I think thatās the intent behind exploration in all of these games, but it comes across best in Demonās to me.
I was initially bummed at the lack of interconnected world like Dark Souls 1 had, but I do like how it truly felt like I was exploring drastically different kingdoms, like there were five distinct areas with a palpable problem that Iām there to get closer to and eventually solve. And they do truly all feel very distant from each other ā I think Dark Souls 1 does a great job with tying its world together via a labyrinth of pathways, but because of that a vast majority of the game has to share a similar visual design language and in contrast to that I appreciated the variety Demonās offered. Dark Souls 2 had a lot more variety, but it felt weird because of the specifics of how the areas were connected (the elevator up to the Iron Keep is the prime example). I know Dark Souls 2 can fall back on the āno, itās all a dream, youāre exploring someoneās memories of the kingdomā explanation but Demonās pulled the sense of variety off in a way that was coherent enough to draw me deeper in to the experience.
Ultimately, yknow, most of my interest in video games is exploring worlds that people have created, and itās all the better if I get emotionally involved in the experience whether via plot or atmosphere. Demonās Souls sucked me in to the point where it took me back to this place I would get in sometime in my teenage years where I was hungry enough my stomach was growling but I was so engrossed in a game that I couldnāt pull myself away. That rules!
Whatās next? Diving into the Kingās Field and Shadow Tower games, I suppose. But first Iām gonna eat some blackberry peach cobbler and bask in finally beating a game that plagued me for over five years as a game that took me four solid attempts to finally have a playthrough that got to the end.
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For me, the space between the archstones works as liminal worldbuilding the same way screen borders does in an early Zelda game: it implies a larger, unknowable world thatās a lot more real and interesting to me than a tightly-packed corkscrew world of a Metroid or Dark Souls.
I just finished another playthrough of God of War (for work, yes, and I have the dozens of pages of notes and videos to edit for it) and they have an uneasy compromise with their world. The game is very long but spatially condensed and itās never clear how much space itās supposed to be representing; it will state that a dungeon is a ākingdomā, but later play a vista of corpses as mountains; monumental backdrops next to dollhouse level spaces, but implying a similar thing. I think theyāre patterning their world scale off Dark Souls (God of War should go down as the first expensive western game to truly respond to From) but with all the characters as gods and so many rural areas, it throws off that world-as-capital justification in Dark Souls.
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Congrats @yarusenai!
Played Jet Lancer and I canāt really say much bad about it. It feels like a worthy successor to Luftrausers. It can get a bit visually messy but an otherwise great little shooter. I am starting to worry that stage-based indie games always hit a point now where a victory condition for the sake of variety threatens to kill the momentum of the game. The orbital laser triggered by weapon fire in some Jet Lancer stages is irksome.
I also started Shantae and the Seven Sirens despite vowing to never play a Shantae game again every time I complete one. It is more. of. the. same. shit. A serviceable McVania wrapped in cheesecake. I assume Wayforward make most of their money from licensed titles (which have been better than Shantae lately) and keep plugging away at Shantae as a passion project? It never really stretches itself as a series and Iām not sure how popular it is outside of fanservice. The animated cutscenes are new but also pretty rough around the edges.
Matt Bozon does it again I guess.
Not even Yoko Taro could make a compelling mobile gacha. Have basically left SINoALICE on auto mode and the content never really goes beyond the weapon stories from Nier and Drakengard. The fairy puppets take the piss out of the gacha but itās still gacha.
Tried booting up Cosmology of Kyoto but canāt make a save due to filename errors. Might play it through in one sitting if itās short enough.
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