Watching a speedrun on Twitch/YouTube works too. Also you get to see the game mechanics at their peak level instead of your own sloppy beginner gameplay
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Still recovering from RSI but am trying to play games that donât require a lot of constant finger inputs.
Played through Panoramical and enjoyed noodling around a lot. I found it weirdly soothing just to tinker with and I really like that the game doesnât force you to experience any of its levels for a specific period of time. If you get bored of a level or just donât vibe with it, you can just progress. The game really wanted me to take screenshots so here we go:
Started Disco Elysium and like its approach to skill-checks, framing them as internal voices relevant to the skill. Also love the mundanity of a lot of the sidequests and dialogue options. The writing style is decent but Iâm not sure if itâll hold up after a full playthrough. Frustratingly I am encountering a lot of crashes in the first area which is killing my motivation to progress. Gonna play around with some settings and suggestions online but if it continues crapping out every 20 minutes I donât think Iâll see it through.
Planning on getting Dosbox up and running tonight so I can play Cosmology of Kyoto.
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it also has one of the alltime best osts
11 Likes
yeah this is the true bop
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- Broad, flat nails
I love everything about fighting games except having to defeat another human opponent.
9 Likes
tbh you donât need a CRT with the Dreamcast, you can track down a VGA box/cable and get a system usable on a lot of modern displays and youâre missing out official display support on only a few games
but flycast is good now so 
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I played N2O aka the crystal method game and it is⊠okay. it seems itâs at odds with itself, it wants to be a fast and furious shooter, but the way the scoring mechancis works means itâs best to let enemies level up and take them out slowly which really slows it all down.
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oh hereâs the new thread great
Went back to Control after watching Cuba play last night. It took me a few hours to do it but I finally beat Tommasi. My gaming Everest has been conquered.
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Axiom Verge is pretty good but all Metrovanias have a baseline âintendedâ route through the game and I felt it really struggled with that. It could be something along the lines of âhere you can take one of two paths, one will send you to the exact right spot in a few screens and the other will lead you around the entire rest of the map with no outward sign anything is wrongâ but I basically felt like I was just going the wrong way for large stretches of the midgame in a bad way. Other than that and a couple iffy boss fights it was otherwise fine.
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Speaking of games which never fail to delight me via visuals and audio, I finally played Samorost 3 and it was every bit as delightful as its predecessors. It didnât overstay its welcome either
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I told myself today that I was gonna skip playing Animal Crossing. IâŠdid not, and played Animal Crossing, and got lectured by Gigi about the cruelty of the âsilent treatment.â Damn frog sleeps in til noon and I work nights. Fuck this game.
I mean, with all due respect to it being good. But also? Go to hell, Animal Crossing.
Iâm a sucker and I picked up the Saints Row The Third PS4 remaster, because Saints Row The Third is up there with Symphony of the Night as âa game I will replay at the drop of a hat because, yeah sure why not.â
They went, uhhh, over and beyond on this one? I mean, at its core, itâs still Saints Row 3. But thereâs a really surprising amount of detail crammed into the textures and the lighting system. They updated, as far as I can tell, nearly all of the character models, while leaving your character looking like a big fucking cartoon character in the middle of them all.
Anyway, it being 2020 and this game being firmly stuck in 2011, a lot of the humor is some real collar-tugging âuhhhh yeeshâ stuff that has not aged well, uh, at all, assuming it was ever good to begin with. But! Driving around, shooting stuff, Return of the Mack blaring out of your garishly modified car? That stuff still holds up.
I also started up Maneater, andâŠitâs the coolest PS2 game to get released in 2020? Itâs clunky as hell, the targeting system only just barely works, and as an open-world sort of action RPG, there are (at least in the opening bayou area) very few distinguishable landmarks to let you know âoh yeah, Iâm here, I should go this wayâ when youâre, yâknow. Swimming through a series of little underwater ravines.
That said! Itâs goofy and pretty fun. I can forgive a lot of that clunkiness for it being something thatâs at least trying something new. Or, uh, new since Jaws Unleashed attempted it back in 2006.
8 Likes
Arrest of a Stone Buddha is very interesting, it expands the ideas of the Friends of Ringo Ishikawa even further and ends up as an even more experimental and divisive game as a result
The most immediately arresting part of the game is how the main character never runs, at any point, this is the slowest game protagonist Iâve ever seen
The game is divided between shooting and wandering sessions. Shooting sessions are not intuitive and the game doesnât communicate how to play them very well but they actually end up being a whole more compelling than they first appear
Hordes of enemies are coming from either side of the screen and the protagonist can mow all of them down easily but he has to let some come near him, so he can steal their guns (because he never reloads or steal guns from corpses) These shooting scenes donât really make sense but are very frantic with a lot of cool micro-decisions to make and I ended up really looking forward to them.
I like the health system; mechanically this is nothing special: the protagonist has like 4 or 5 « HP » (I donât know how many because thereâs no HUD), and everytime an enemy gets to shoot, the protagonist loses one HP.
Whatâs peculiar is how the game will only show the protagonist get hit with a fatal shot (1 HP to 0 HP) every other shot is shown as a whiff with a particular easily identifiable « bullet eating a metallic structure » sound effect.
This makes it so the protagonist dies in one hit like everybody else, but he still has a « health bar », and you still know easily when youâve screwed up and lost one HP
The wandering sessions are lethargic, ponderous and weighty, way too long on purpose. A few « activities » can be done there but they donât matter. Itâs all about waiting for the next assignment. The pixel art does wonders here, and I particularly like how the protagonist is relegated to the bottom of the screen with the vastness of the world seemingly crushing him. Also: every walking NPC looking as angry and suspicious as the hero
Watching the protagonist watch a painting reminded me very much of Jim Jarmuschâs The Limits of Control
Pictured: a typo
My main issue with the game is how the two parts clash; the megamurder mayhem of the shooting scenes is honestly too goofy to really work alongside the depressing meditation around routine and solitude. But thereâs a lot to admire here.
Tl;dr this is like playing Doom except you also play during Doomguyâs downtime and he lives a sad life and cannot connect meaningfully with anyone
22 Likes
I love that kind of mundane life shit when its in games that are otherwise quite videogame-y. Might give Stone Buddha a look. Is the MC just a hitman?
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Man it is really hard to keep myself from playing this not on stream
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Stream more.
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Yeah heâs just a hitman. The story is purposefully barebones so thereâs not much to learn beyond that
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nice. had been waiting for the port after reading
It will be released on Nintendoâs console following feedback received from the Steam version, which is out today.
