It’s in my backlog of turn-based squad tactics games, but I am a stubborn dumb bum who refuses to leave my Massive Chalice save unresolved.
Last time I played it, I got annoyed at the lack of UI feedback for stunpushes and disassembled the game scripts you see how many squares it was. Reading game programmer code sure is something, I’m glad they’re giving their employees an amount of value proportional to their salaries/wages.
CoP is a great way to ease yourself into STALKER for sure. It’s pretty relaxed but still essentially STALKER.
So in the 1444s the country of Manipur was a tiny, unassuming Pagan-worshipping tribe embedded in the mountains (that highlighted pale green country on the right side). They are the sole country with that religion which means every other country around them automatically slightly dislikes them for being different. Since they are a tribe they don’t even start with Feudalism giving them a tech penalty too!
So it’s pretty clear they are destined to being stamped out in rather short order. No expansion is possible even if they are quick about getting off their mountain.
O-okay, taking advantage of a momentary weakness in a fellow tiny tribe they are now faced with a strong combined force in that sweaty elbow of jungle and hills. Manipur’s army, already ravaged by attrition, is sure to dwindle to nothing beneath their might and
What the?! Deceptive diplomatic relations with the Tibetans and a surprise vassal divided up that cranny and are actively spreading their heathen religion into the valleys? The city of Manipur has grown unexpectedly and they are on equal footing. But surely being trapped between Ava’s tributaries, a strong Bengal (southern country in blue), and the Tibetan ally would drain their advantages away and become absorbed into the stronger cultures as history desti–
Betrayal!! Why don’t Bengal do something before it’s too la–
MANIPUR HAS BROKEN CONTAINMENT, THE ANIMIST HORDE DESCENDS UPON US. ALL HOPE IS LOST.
honestly i think you might need to take this to the UN as a solution to the dispute over kashmir. in fact just give the rectangle formed between islamabad, urumqi, chongqing, and calcutta to manipur. instant world peace.
I love EU4 stories so much
Played “Laser Invasion” after going thru Masato Maegawa’s mobygames profile. Playing it & clicking thru the full credits I realized there was a very obvious reason it felt so much like a Treasure game ( + shares a director with Contra: Hard Corps & Rocket Knight Adventures).
Definitely worse without a lightgun so I maybe understand the lack of general interest (although it’s still good!) but surprised that from cursory googling I couldn’t find anyone else talking about the clearly impressive list of ppl behind it. Especially considering ppl do follow Treasure/Konami/Etc. It’s interesting how clearly you can sense the continuity of their design interests regardless of explicit genre/theme. The Dynamite Headdy boss arrows pointing where to shoot appear here, for example, in the form of a helicopter hud.
it’s a chinese asset flip of the demo level “morning monday stroll” from gameguru, which is one of those generic 3d fps maker programs you can get on steam. i don’t normally engage with these kinds of things but the title and dev’s threatening usage of default windows fonts was really gripping so i paid $12.99 for it (this was a scam btw, refund pending!) and went for it. here’s what its store page has to say
i was excited to fight with the enemy from the perspective of god. i was ready to feel the unexpected or surprise encountered by the characters. i was ready to be threatened by growing crises
early on you pass by some machinery and loud as fuck train noises start playing, it’s actually legitimately ominous, because you can see every enemy on the radar so you know that someone’s ahead. every encounter has this kind of tension; you’re always struggling with the controls or lack of ammunition or the mostly-useless arsenal and the enemy are always more numerous or more competent than you. except this time a guy with a rocket launcher flies out from behind the wall and likely fucking evaporates you instantly before you can process whats going on. this never happens again but it always feels like it can
i remember when i had a computer with awful cooling and any budget slavjank fps game with no vsync support of any sort would make my GPU go up to like 95 degrees celsius or something. i assume BE THREATENED BY THE GROWING CRISES did the same
finished the story prologue part of genshin, and i d k if im gonna play the beta much longer, im locked out of 4 quests due to bugs and the rest are so obtuse i cant figure them out at all
Blame yourself or the perspective of God.
Finished Carrion and feel pretty warm about it. There’s a lot of potential there but it does feel a little undercooked. I really appreciate the short length though. Might even be too long for the ideas Carrion was trying to present (about 4 hours).
While travelling, the only game I have that I haven’t completed is the new Shantae. I have resigned myself to playing it until I get home. After like five(?) of these games they still insist on having barely any hints or direction to the next objective in a game that heavily gates progress based on new abilities. You end up going to the extremes of the map, as with any Metroidvania, but the game has long loads between ‘biomes’ and some of these loads lead you into a biome but its a dead-end that doesn’t lead anywhere. Also I don’t think I’ve even smiled once at any of the game’s jokes. I think it’s because they often end with a character sending you on a fetchquest. I know the correct option is to just stop playing Shantae.
after rinsing bloodlines, thought i would reappraise scv4 and still not feeling it
i appreciate the atmosphere and tunes but can’t get past that laggy sludgy sloppy feeling most early third party snes action games have
we just went into second wave lockdown round here so my head is too fucked to start panzer dragoon saga in earnest yet, the 30 mins i had a look round the starting area and ran the tutorial seemed interesting enough though
Much like playing a game I watched a friend get lost in Hylics 2 for like an hour and like boy. I guess replacing words with other words is a form of writing.
starting to get the feeling that I am the big sb Shantae fan and wondering what brought me to this point
What do you like about them? I played the first hour or two of the GBC game and, although I liked the sprite work, felt the movement and level design was a step back from Monster World IV*. I assume those two dents get buffered out with its sequels?
*I mention MWIV because it seems like that was the closest antecedent.
my advice is it play Pirate’s Curse and if you like that, keep going and if you don’t, stop
I thought Pirate’s Curse was mostly okay, except for how it was way too horny.
Pirate’s Curse isn’t horny
HGH, now that game is horny
pirate’s curse isn’t horny? did you forget the whole slave leai outfit stealth section? I wish I could
it turns out my laptop can emulate ps2 so i’ve been trying to catch up on some things i’ve been curious about.
gregory horror show: favourite thing about this is how weirdly straightforward the environment is. everything takes place in the one small hotel, at first only on the ground floor, which is just a big box - maybe 10 small rooms arranged around three corridors and a lobby at the bottom. nearly all the rooms only have one entrance, precluding any metroidvania style shenanigans, and are mostly just background for tracking the activity of the guests. but it somehow still works and feels compelling to wander around, even when nobody else is around. the way certain parts are sealed off or change meaning depending on the schedules adds a sense of mystery to what would otherwise just be boxes.
there’s a health system i feel ambivalent about where it keeps going slowly down throughout the day, although topping it back up again is fairly trivial. it keeps you on the move but is also just something of a nuisance-gauge. i like the in-game explanation that when the angry residents catch you they just show you a “horror show” which damages your resolve. this is somehow a more unsettling idea than that they’d just try to knife you or whatever. my favourite so far is the lizard, who you can spy on to watch them repeatedly plunging their enormous syringe into a mattress while pretending it’s your body.
haunting ground: aka “demento” which is probably a better name for the trashy giallo implication. i guess this is a game in the clock tower school although it loses a lot of points for having the first stalker enemy be, uh, a “hulking”, “child-like” giant guy who thinks you’re a doll or whatever. sucks completely. the second enemy is an evil cyborg maid lady who can’t feel pain, a considerable improvement.
anyway the main thing is just wandering this fussy castle environment, finding creepy and mysterious rooms which are all pretty fun etc. there is a lot of “opening up locked doors to create shortcuts to past locations” but the fact that you’re always being chased around trying to work out where the nearest hiding place is makes it a bit more fun and chaotic and less pedantic. the hiding stuff itself is very gamey although save states probably reduce a lot of the tension.
besides wandering around a castle the main pleasure of the game is in the main character’s commentary on what’s going on.
