if you have freemcboot and OPL set up and haven’t played NBA Ballers or one of the insane career modes in the Smackdown PS2 games you don’t know shit about videogames and need to fucking get it together imo, I agree with you 100%. There are way too many good videogames to play in the world at this point. Nobody needs to give a shit about AAA ever again when you can spend all day playing the PS2 Evangelion visual novel* that takes place entirely in the 5 minutes that the show turns into a slice of life anime or the Inuyasha isekai JRPG made by Quintet.
rushed through the last fifth (?) of Carrion and can’t help feeling like i’d have enjoyed it a lot more if i’d just kept taking my sweet time. the game’s overworld is pretty obnoxious to navigate regardless, however- a “map” and/or “fast travel between save points” upgrade would’ve made hunting for those containment chambers a lot less tedious
It’s artistic. It’s really beautiful. It’s one of those creepy-horror wannabe games, without basically any combat, but what really stands out is the art style. I highly recommend it f you like Rpg Maker games.
Right now I am playing OFF and it’s also very good.
Speaking of similar games, the first two that come to my mind are To The Moon and Undertale. These two are masterpieces (considering all videogame types), and as such, Ib and OFF cannot really touch them, but they are very interesting and pleasant in their own right.
the ps2 really was the dvd of videogames. you could go into town, spend less than £20, and come home with a bunch of weird, fun games that none of your friends had ever seen before.
and there were so many games out there that you could keep doing this every week
I’d say e-shops generally are. Really poor quality control but lots of nuggets to find.
For me, the PS2 is mainly characterised by a time before the standard analogue stick configuration and button layouts were settled upon. So you’d have all sorts of weird control schemes like God Hand’s dodge attached to right stick or games where you have to press square or triangle to jump.
I miss the weirdness of certain experimental control layouts.
I think nika might like battle royale games? but only ones that don’t involve shooting - she plays a lot of tetris 99 (much better than I could tbh) and now she’s gotten obsessed with fall guys
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PS4) - going back to this so soon was a mistake- visiting the barber and fiddling with the hairstyle customization has set my OCD or whatever it is right off
In contrast, I played an hour or two of Fall Guys today and I had a good time. I like that it lets you enjoy the battle royale structure with low-key, kind of funny gameplay. It seems fairly shallow, but it’s fun in a mindless sort of way. Games are short enough that there’s a kind of “just one more” compulsion. I anticipate it could be a good game to mute and listen to podcasts or music while you play.
i played like 20-30 minutes of Katana ZERO awhile back and i honestly couldn’t find myself caring less about a videogame. to me it is 100% basically a less interesting Hotline Miami, a game i like but don’t love and is also somewhat soured by the developer telling me to suck his cock to my face. i would say Katana is even extremely a Hotline Miami ripoff, except it rips off a slightly different game from the creator that Hotline Miami ripped off of.
i.e., the game Hotline Miami ripped off (okay, “was inspired by” or whatever):
yeah i get if you’re going to rip off someone, at least rip off someone good. i just am salty how much the inspirations for a lot of big indie games come from game maker and flash games no one seems to know about or give much credit towards
Speaking of which, maybe someone here can confirm something I have long suspected, that Estonian developer Karel Pool’s freeware Game Maker game Medieval Clash was the very first that had you send autonomous workers and soldiers from two sides into a common area to gather resources and fight. Which would later lead to games such as Swords & Soldiers.
