I bought and played Post Void, thanks to some posts in here. That game is pretty sick. But it’s a shame that it is so hostile toward people with epilepsy.
Also been continuing with The Silver Case and Death Stranding. Loving games right now.
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finished off demon’s souls, runs beautifully in rpcs3 with asynchronous shader compilation
i thought you got soulsucker for the bad ending, turns out it’s the good, oops
what a game!!! dreading an epic prepare to die chest ahead ornstein reference remake
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I’ve been yelling about this for 7 years and they finally heard me
Ogre Tale came out. it’s by the PBBG devs and it runs on the same engine and it’s the follow up to PBBG except now there’s only one plane so instead it plays like Muramasa Rebirth and Odin Sphere Leifthresir and it’s probably a better coop game than PBBG because your base powerlevel is much higher and there’s no skill tree/stat distribution to deal with (though there’s still leveling)
also both the original and English (which is doing its damnedest to get jokes and references across) scripts are out of control and the people who did them should be shamed and congratulated
hey, good news friend
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Mushihimesama is an excellent game. DoDonPachi Resurrection is great, but it’s as obtuse and player-hostile as Mushi is approachable and fun to learn.
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started playing Trackmania Nations Forever because it’s free and i always wanted to try out a Trackmania game
i was not prepared by just how bad the UI/menu design is:
like what the fuck is this? lol. it looks like some kind of pop-up ad that installs a virus on your computer. they have you go through the fuss to create an account and even feature a web browser within the game that is totally useless and unwieldy. even the screen for changing your car options felt totally strange/impenetrable to me.
the white, green, blue options are different tracks of descending orders of difficulty. why not just call it easy, medium, hard, etc??? it feels like you’re entering a strange world, not even sure if what you’re going to enter is the tracks themselves
as far as the controls go, it expects you to use the keyboard which is okay… but i really wanted to try using a controller. and none of the controllers i plugged in worked at all. i get this game is from 2008 so maybe others improved on that, but for something that still has an active player base i was pretty surprised about that.
before you start the race it hits you with this screen, which is confusing if you don’t know that these are staff ghosts and “none” just means you’re racing yourself… but it’s not an option that is turned on by default.
the options themselves after the race are confusing too. instead of “retry race” or something it says “Improve”. most egregiously there’s a “quit” button which just returns you back to the race menu. but i was afraid to click on at first because i thought it might quit out entirely to the main menu. “return to races” or something would have been much better lol. but that’s Trackmania for you
the tracks themselves are cool though. i liked this one. even though the controls are simple it’s deceptively difficult to control the car and keep it from flying around sometimes.
one funny thing is the game doesn’t restart you if you fall off the track - it expects you to do that yourself. i could just drive around in this water forever if i wanted to. it’s easy to restart so it’s not big deal, but it is pretty funny
i like how this track switches to first-person mode by default when you hit this half-pipe thing. the racing in this game can get really fast and intense without you expecting it because of how unassuming and frankly awful a lot of the presentation of the game is.
one other big thing that really bothered me is i like to play these kinds of games (i.e. more casual/timesink things) with the sound fx on but the music off, so i can listen to my own music library or some podcasts while i’m playing it but still get the feedback from the sound fx. as far as i can tell, there is absolutely no option to do that in this game… which is maddening. esp because the music is kind of generic trance/techno and i probably would prefer to have it muted even if i wasn’t wanting to listen to something else while i played.
i know this version of the game is from 2008 but this almost feels is the kind of odd Digipen shovelware nightmare i’d encounter in the IGF and just be like “what the hell is this?” and attempt to fight with the impenetrable menus for 10-15 minutes to get to the gameplay before giving up. thankfully Trackmania is an established franchise with tons of different games and i can look past this stuff because i know the racing is good.
and it is! i still quite like Trackmania Nations Forever in spite of all the shortcomings, because they don’t really interfere that much with the core part of the game. but i really didn’t expect some aspects of it to this unwieldy and stupid, lol.
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it’s like if the Amiga scene entered Dimension X in 1993 and has just come back to us after two decades of parallel evolution, wild-eyed and frizzy-haired
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Buddies Medals.
lol, not only does the game heavily emphasize having “Buddies” but there are a few tracks that are locked off unless you invite more friends to the game, or make a track in their editor, etc etc. i guess that’s not too unusual for a Free To Play game but considering this didn’t start out as one i wasn’t exactly expecting that.
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I had a copy of vanilla Monster Hunter 4 sitting on my shelf, and got a big MH craving on Friday so I decided to pop it into my 3DS. Ended up making it about a third of the way through the key quests in an evening. Decided to try out the charge blade for this playthrough as I remembered people saying it was overpowered at the time, and it certainly seems to be the case once you get used to the main mechanic. I still haven’t quite nailed the timing of the main axe combo. Half the time the monster is long gone by the time the finisher comes out.
Not sure how I feel about the map designs so far. MH4 is very visually impressive for a 3DS games and its maps certainly are a part of that. The maps lean into the whole verticality gimmick a bit too much to my liking, and I think past entries’ maps were better balanced.
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GAAPS: games as a pyramid scheme
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The only game I’ve been playing is Picross 3D Round 2. Alien bug brain time.
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Don’t worry, this has not changed at all for the latest one that just came out. But the game is as good as it ever was.
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Just finished the Parade chapter in The Silver Case, and I am wondering if playing more Suda51 games will ever lead to Suda51 games being less confusing to me. There’s the strangeness of his plots and style, but then there’s the way conversations happen and maybe some translation stuff too that just exaggerates all the confusion. It’s a cool and weird trip to be so confused, but I also think if I ever had a great understanding of what is happening I’d probably find the games just as cool… idk. Kill the past, I guess, right on…
But, wow, Parade was a fun chapter. This game looks great in monochrome like that.
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Couldn’t really figure out how to make this a thread but I miss game manuals. Sure, they were a way to experience a game on the way home from Blockbuster while I was still in the car, imagining what all the screenshots would look like moving on a TV screen and how cool it would look when I press down+jump to make my person roll on the ground. But manuals themselves contributed to the personality of a game. The layouts, the graphics, and the writing style, and the decisions on what information got included (and excluded) all informed my first impressions.
Some manuals looked like tomes for a fantasy game, some manuals looked like sci-fi logs. Some manuals were irreverent and some were matter of factual. But I think they served a similar purpose to the lines at theme parks which are designed to draw you into the atmosphere before you hit the ride it self (after waiting for 3 hours).
I was wondering if bringing manuals back would lead to less tutorializing in games and maybe better pacing when a game starts assuming you’re going to start using particular techniques, but on second thought I guess games can still go out of their way to make sure you understand how they want you to play.
But I want cool manuals again.
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that whole anticipatory architecture that formed such a huge part of being a kid
The intensity of child want is terrifying.
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Games stopped having meaning like that the moment I could buy more than I could ever play
The PS2 bargain bin carries a curse
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Since someone mentioned awful UI design, I have to mention the random bundle game I played earlier today Tessa’s Ark: Chapter 1 as I feel every decision they made in this or any related regard was a mess.
This is the main menu where you press the A button to select one of those four options, then either press X to confirm it or B to not. Note how it states how starting a new game will erase your previous save. Now know that if you scroll down to load game but don’t press A first, pressing X will not in fact load your prior save but start a new game as since you never pressed A you never switched the selection off of new game. Guess what I did? Fortunately it didn’t matter much as it is basically a visual novel broken up by math puzzles and you can skip all the text at any time with a press of a button.
There are a few tutorials that explain how the math puzzles work. Generally different colors mean different things (add, subtract, multiply, etc.) except that sometimes you deal with lasers and have to combine colors in different ways in order to accomplish either a similar math process or instead have them split along multiple paths or get blocked from moving further. The thing is there is no tutorial puzzles, it is all told in these unchanging text boxes that only have the graphic in the upper right change color while they are explaining something. They explain all of these things in a row across several different text boxes… and then the puzzles only have addition and subtraction for a while. There is nothing on the puzzle screen indicating which color does what, and no place to check in game to remind oneself what each random color does.
Normally one would just go experiment for a bit to figure a new thing out, except they wanted to add rpg elements so you take damage if you have to take back moves or warp to a different section of the puzzle (it’s dumb, don’t ask) so they basically punish you for messing around with things like that. When you solve a puzzle you get a bunch of XP so you can eventually level up (which is handled in a menu that works as sensibly as the main one) and a new puzzle appears that looks exactly like the previous one, just with different numbers. Solving that only gets you about 25XP, at which point another very similar looking puzzle pops up. After solving four or five of these I noticed that there is something near the top right that says to press X to next, which takes you to the actual next puzzle. I didn’t notice it as…
…it is up there all the time in the visual novel parts (that’s how you skip all the talking to get straight to the puzzles) and I half think it is on the puzzle screen at all times as well. I’d check but I took no screenshots of the puzzles, instead focusing on all of these odd portraits (the puzzles are all bad). Honest to god, I’m not generally someone who really pays much attention to this aspect of game design but I honestly think this might be the game that got every single bit of it more randomly wrong than I’ve ever seen before.
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Strong XBLIG aesthetic, makes me want to play it
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It is short and available free to play, but it’s honestly rather bad. It’s basically a poor Matrix knock off that repeats itself a lot despite being under an hour long and ends with no real story resolution with about as poorly implemented math puzzles as I can recall and I’ve seen a lot of them. If you want I do have a bunch of random out of context screen shots if you’d like to see more characters. Here, have the main villain:
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The Silver Case and 25th Ward in particular are very stream of consciousness. I’ve collated the factual plot in my head a dozen times and am convinced that it works more as a thematic mood piece than something to be properly cohered. Suda (and Ooka and Kato) like very ideas-focused writing and love to write naturalistic rambling tangents about the smell of coffee or why a character hates Tuesdays for some reason which is then counterpointed by supernatural killers who are literally immortal/the embodiment of crime itself.
The mixture of styles, the music, the thunderous staccato clacking of the text interface. The sterile empty environments and the uncanny character portraits. It’s a trip for sure, you just let it submerge you.
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