i have it in real life
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Ah haha then Iāve got nothing sorry
gunlord is fun
king of the monsters is the dark souls of wrestling games
iām nearly at the end of tokyo xanadu!
with perfect timing
it really is the most important thing
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As I recall (itās been years), it is all about learning the rather generous timing on the parry mechanic and abusing that a lot. Getting a second player is good as well if you can. I should fire that up again sometime and see if I can get back into it, because in my memory, it is probably the Treasure GBA game I played the most.
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hereās the past like, month or so in video games for me:
i beat xenogears, had a lot to say about it but unfortunately i used all that energy up in an instagram group chat i made with two friends who have played xenogears called āthis is where i will yell about xenogearsā. one of them has also beaten all three xenosagas as well and i keep telling him to register here because he has a valuable perspective the world needs more of but he never will. um, xenogears did a lot of things i liked and a some things i didnāt like. what i respect the most is how grand of an experience it attempts to be ā iām the type of person that would rather experience something that reaches for greatness and misses rather than something that settles for less. itās a cool game. one of the more interesting and has-heart games iāve played from squaresoftās hefty output from the ps1 era.
after xenogears i was desperate for more deicide, so i started up shin megami tensei iv (which iāve beaten before), made it through naraku and then i dropped the game. i realized i really just wanted to listen to the soundtrack. someone on here posted a while ago about realizing that a lot of times the urge to revisit a game can be satisfied just by listening to its soundtrack and looking through concept art and screenshots ā thatās definitely the case here.
then i played persona 4, because someone cute iāve been talking to wanted to play it and i told them iād play it alongside them. it was both our first times. god damn did i fucking hate persona 4. right out the gate i gotta say i was appalled to find that the transphobia i had heard about in the game was even worse than i had assumed, so that definitely colored my perception of how open-hearted i was willing to be with the game as a whole. ultimately i did think the plot was fine but it got a little goofy towards the end in terms of the antagonistās motivations. i generally liked the interaction and growth of the crew of characters (and i yelped when teddie turned into an ubertwink out of nowhere), and i thought the message about having to explore and embrace all aspects of yourself was a good message, just one that was handled poorly in a couple instances. i had had the killer spoiled for me in a fuckin 4chan thread right when the game came out in 2008 and have never managed to forget it over the years, but i was surprised to find that even just the journey of deducing who the killer was, and how the game drip-fed me hints, was interesting.
worst part of the game was the fuckin dungeons. the battle system is way too simplistic, why couldnāt they just have made those two aspectsā¦good? like there are only the faintest semblance of puzzles in the dungeons, and everything else is justā¦grinding in monotonous corridors. for hours. fuck that. if they had jacked the full press-turn system from smt for use in this game it would have made the battles at least a little more interesting? but what they have is just the dust at the bottom of a cereal bag. i beat persona 3 maybe like, 6 years ago? and i truly donāt know how i did it, because that game is even more repetitive than 4.
p4 can be boiled down to a gameplay loop of plot developments - social link growth - dungeon grinding, and the dungeons are by far the weakest link to the point where i think the game would have been better off just as a visual novel. to be fair, though, iām soured because i lost a few hours of grinding progress in the last dungeon at one point from a random ambush and at that point i sighed and turned the game off and didnāt come back to it for about two weeks. sure, fusing the personas is cool, but i would do without it if it meant i didnāt have to go through those boring-ass dungeons.
i played and beat a short hike because everyone on here was getting really heated about it and i was curious. i thought it was charming, like a quick hug ā although erring dangerously on the side of being overly twee ā and a good use of a few hours but no more than that.
i started playing rain world, going in intentionally knowing nothing about it. i was sold by someoneās review that was like āyou have to approach this game like you are a chimp playing a video game for the first timeā. i think that that is a little too exaggerated, but i do like that this game is explicitly not a power fantasy. iām only one area past the start, but i am already really appreciating the sensation of there being a sort of tangible ecosystem in this game that exists with or without me there ā that sort of player-agnosticism is something that i last felt and loved in final fantasy xi, and itās refreshing to experience it again. at this point in the game i do feel like iām aimlessly wandering, just figured out how the gates work, slowly and cautiously exploring and waiting for more of the game to reveal itself to me. sometimes i feel like the map is too big, but having a grand space to explore in the midst of being mostly cooped up at home is pretty alright. i am for sure close to the bottom of the food chain, and iām interested to see if i can discover ways to mitigate that. i am also for sure bad at the combat, but maybe thatās the point of it.
i beat bayonetta. that game is absurdly needlessly horny to a degree that annoys the hell out of me, but also itās a game about being mixed and hating your dad so at least i have some level on which to relate to it. every cutscene was just so grating, though, they really canāt help but show you how sinfully sexy bayonettaās nipples poking through her hairclothes or whatever are. please spare me. uh so hereās the thing, the combat is cool but in playing bayonetta i realized that these platinum character-action games have the depth of fighting gamesā¦and i have always been unable to engage with the deep elements of fighting games, iām just not wired for it, and iāve tried (spent a couple months in the past diving into sf third strike and ggxrd with no results to speak of). so you know what i did? i dropped the difficulty from normal to very easy, treated it as a beat-em-up, and had a good time with it. not a great time, but a good time. i would certainly be interested in playing a platinum game that is more explicitly a beat-em-up ā is astral chain like that?
this morning i played a little ape escape 3 and the soundtrack is so fuckin good. i think my pvm is about to die though, when i turn it on it sounds like itās screaming for its life.
lastly, i started playing moon the other day, and it is charming in the right ways and i really fuck the sentiment the game seems to be espousing. there are many ~subversive~ games in which the player is told at the end of the game āhey, you killed things! youāre actually a bad person! think about your video game player actions!ā but moon starts out with that, and the rest of the game is about growing as a person, being accountable for the harm youāve caused, and the beauty of empathy. i think empathy is the most important thing ever, so a game that focuses on that in a way that doesnāt feel like getting punched in the face by some crying bloke with knuckle tats that say āYOUR MEANā and actually gives the player some sort of recourse for wrongdoings is very cool in my book!
i know i made that axe thread a while ago about the games i will play next ā i got a copy of bumpy trot steambot, so iāll get to that pretty soon and iām planning to do a silent hill 2 / siren double feature once spooky month hits. in the meantime iām making my friends play ps3 demonās souls and telling my friend who is playing arc the lad 2 to play front mission 3 because itās like arc the lad 2 but cooler but i havenāt played front mission 3. i should probably play front mission 3. iāll sooner play that than fire emblem 3h.
oh!!! i forgot the whole reason i started writing this. i started a new town in animal crossing this week after giving up a couple of months ago and iām giving up on animal crossing. fuck animal crossing, iām already employed, i donāt need another monotonous menial job. i have played basically every ac that has come out and always been stoked for them and always bounced off of them. when I had a fat tumor removed from my back in elementary school i was able to negotiate a copy of gamecube animal crossing for myself to keep me from dying of boredom during recovery, but i ended up dying of boredom anyway because it was animal crossing. i donāt know why i bounce off these games, thereās so much about them i want to love, but theyāre really just not for me.
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Broke out the olā N64, made a big bowl of popcorn (and a big bowl of w33d) and played EĢ¶rĢ¶oĢ¶tĢ¶iĢ¶cĢ¶ Ģ¶BĢ¶eĢ¶eĢ¶fĢ¶ Ģ¶BĢ¶oĢ¶yĢ¶sĢ¶ Ģ¶6Ģ¶4Ģ¶ WCW/nWo Revenge last night. A good time was had (and now I really want to compare WrestleMania 2000 and No Mercy. Iām thinking 2000 might be a happy medium between Revengeās relatively sharp simplicity and No Mercyās overstuffed extravagance but theyāre all pretty great).
Also dipped into some Rush 2: Extreme Racing, idk if itāll make my top 64 (N64 is over-represented as is) but itās great! Like @RT-55J said:
The low gravity, full rotational physics, and lack of air control turn every single jump and hill into a commitment that must be prepared for.
And the almost unpredictable way your car reacts to hitting the slightest bump, rendered utterly duck-dead in the air, praying to each jutting jag of geometry for deliverance from its carporeal form into the righteous manifestation of FIREBALL keeps things twitchy and exciting (especially going off road for all the elaborate shortcuts, jumps and collectibles (keys, Mountain Dew, SUBWAY RATS)).
On top of that, replaying Klonoa: Door to Phantomile reminds me that it deserves a spot on my list which is good because my other polygonal diorama darlings (Kirby 64, Bomberman 64) donāt quite have the gameplay chops to make the cut.
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For some reason the Tomb Raider videos have thousands of views while all my other videos have like a couple hundred at most. If my subs and comments are anything to go by, non-anglo-world normies really fucking love Tomb Raider. Who knows whatās going on there
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Someone on Twitter just spoiled what the last level of Tomb Raider looks like so I guess we have summoned it back into the zeitgeist or something.
Iām a little bummed I wonāt have my ~MiNd bLoWN~ but I guess the foreknowledge might keep me from bailing out of the game in 90 minutes
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really shoulda gone hard in that direction, the series might not have turned into the bland Uncharted Girl shit that it is now
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Hey uh, Steredenn is the most fun Iāve had with a shmup in a long time. It plays a bit like if you removed the platforming elements from Downwell.
As you make your way through levels you pick up swappable weapons (you have two at a time in various forms) and you also have a melee attack. Whenever you defeat a boss your lifebar gets refilled and you get to choose an upgrade (damage boosts, etc).
Enemy waves and bosses are somewhat randomized, and enemies have weakness/resistance to different weapon types.
The ship designs are a little bland looking but everything is clear and readable, I never felt like I was getting hit by invisible bullets I couldnāt parse from the background. Soundtrack is electronic-tinged metal riffs that isnāt anything remarkable but I kinda dig it.
Iām trash at this game because Iām not very good at Shmups but I think itās just forgiving enough that I might actually be able to get better at it, and the semi-randomized structure makes it a little less of a chore to repeatedly play. I might actually keep this one around for a while
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according to my sister the new tomb raiders and the order 1886 and horizon zero dawn and hellblade and last of us 2 are all great and sb has itās head up itās ass, especially me most of all she bets
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i played Thief Gold for the first time in 2018 and was kinda shocked how much i was immersed in it. i also wrote this huge article about it for its 20th anniversary after that. i would call it one of my favorite games ever if it didnāt drop off a lot in quality at the end of the game.
aside from more Trackmania 2020 (i ended up subscribing for a year and some of those Track of The Day tracks are incredibleā¦ i will probably write more about them later), i tried to play a bit of a game called Lovely Planet from 2014 that i bought on a Steam sale. iām always kind of interested in any game that attempts to be a Jumping Flash clone, even though the game felt a bit simplistic to me so i checked it out anyway. Lovely Planet is from 2014 and really feels like the whole trend of 2010s indies being structured around short levels where you have to have one good attempt, and you restart quickly if you die. the game is ostensibly a āshooterā where you have to eliminate a bunch of enemies and not shoot the good guys, otherwise you fail the mission. really though i wouldnāt call it a shooter, since the shooting is really just about performing the correct inputs before moving on. itās more like a twitch 2D platformer in the Kaizo style or whatever, and the floaty Jumping Flash feeling doesnāt really add that much to it. the levels are way too small and simple to have any feeling of exploration or wonder that you get form Jumping Flash. i also think the visual style is almost overly simple and cartoony, to the point where thereās nothing really interesting to look at. i will give the game this though - the music is really good. reminded me a bit of the Katamari games. though itās a bit weird that it feels like way more effort was put into the music than the visuals of the game.
Lovely Planet basically feels like a slightly more polished flash/free game from the late 00ās that is meant to be kind of a fun twitch platformer distraction. the 3D element feels more like an experiment and nothing that really adds that much to the core of the game. itās nothing particularly special in my mind.
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would love to see ella guroās curated list of trackmania 2020 levels
i can say right now - from the Trackmania Summer 2020 campaign: #22 is definitely my favorite. i also like #10 and #23 (tracks where you start up on a high point and go down are generally favorites for me). i like the length and pure speed element of track #5 also. there are probably others too, but they blend together (not in a bad way though).
from the Track of the Day tracks: July 22nd (āDiversionā) is fucking incredible. as is July 20th (āWormholeā) by the same author. July 15th (āTatooineā) is an amazing concept also. July 14th (āYumi_05ā) is a great slightly more conventional map. i havenāt gotten past July 22nd yet though and my wrists are hurting from all the using keyboard to steer cars so iām taking a break for a bit and iāll come back later.
so i will say: i played some Trackmania Nations Forever custom maps and felt generally really unenthused by them. the default tracks in that game are way superior. iām guessing itās because the editor is limited, and iām not sure if thatās also the case for Trackmania United Forever which is the paid version of that game that has way more content than Nations Forever, or if that editor is also limited. whenever more of those TrackManiaĀ² games or Trackmania United Forever goes on sale i might be tempted to check them out out (especially the non-stadium ones like Canyon or Valley) but the 10 bucks i paid for a 1-year subscription to Trackmania 2020 is all i want to dump down on Trackmania for now.
anyway it seems like whatever editor Trackmania 2020 provides you with is way, way more powerful because quite a few of these maps are using custom block graphics and like shaders to give a completely different feel and stuff. i am also pretty surprised by the sheer amount of stuff there is. the curation from Nadeo in the Track of the Day setting really helps - because i have more track authors to look into once iāve played through all the Track of the Day and campaign stuff.
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yeah, to be honest I always felt like this series constantly failed to actually do One Solid Release ā I almost got into nations forever at the tail end of its support, then I almost got into 2 at the tail end of its support (somehow both of those seemed to peak in popularity at the two times in the last decade when I wasnāt using a windows machine very much either), and 2020 finally seems like the best of all possible worlds, even though it presents initially as a cheapo F2P menu UI
i think the fact that it is limited to the stadium setting (although the setting is definitely a lot more varied/pretty than before) and the subscription model is wonky (itās confusing as hell, who knows how long theyāll support the game, etc) means itās still not the best of all worlds. itās still very good though! the subtle shift in the visual style of Trackmania 2020 from the previous games slightly more realistic AAA looking art direction to the slightly more Nintendo Switch-y flat-shaded colorful astroturfy setting was definitely a really good one though and fits the tone of the game way better. it feels slightly more like they know what kind of game theyāre making now, lol.
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Steredenn is real good
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Bring your sister to sbcon so we can all shout at her and have a struggle session
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