Games You Played Today: Actress Again: Current Code (Part 1)

onefear_nofuture

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I have been thinking about Unity Asset Dump games infesting actual consoles and how I am the #6 best player of Sword of Fortress the Oznomium because I think @dylan defeated two knights. I love to pull out that trash when folks are over.

I bought another one of these because it looked like a Myst-Clone on Switch. I am drawn to them because they store pages are always baffling. They always have a “real” price of 15-20 bucks. And I go “what the hell is this?” And while playing it go “there has to be SOMETHING here this can’t be it?”

It somewhat taps into childhood wonder. I know almost all the video games at this point. If I see something for the master system in Super Potato I am at least vaguely familar with it. Every PS1 game has at least one video. Unless it’s fucking lattice.

Unlike Steam or itch I still hold the console marketplaces as having some standard for what is a game (I am wrong.) So I am a fool and there goes my money and all I get back is bafflement and dissapointment.

Edit: ah fuck I was going to make a joke about needing harder stuff and how I will never insist pc-8801 games are good.

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please keep an eye out for Saturn Music School 2. there are multiple versions, one of them came with a giant keyboard and is probably way too expensive, but there’s one that only came with the MIDI adapter and i saw @la_ciel posting about it and now i know my life’s goal

https://twitter.com/CobraYouFools/status/1316413042410872832

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just for the record there is NO HOMEBREW for this. for this to actually be useful for making music i would have to learn how to code for the sega saturn lol

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Orphen: Scion of Sorcery + Bonus!

I took pretty pictures of a game I don’t like.

I don’t know who these people are and barely understand their motivations. They’re trying to go somewhere but accidentally went somewhere else, Chaos Island. The voice acting is so atrocious that it’s almost enjoyable. Orphen is a huge jackass, showing open contempt for his companions every time he opens his mouth, but the game seems to think he is cool.

It’s a bit frustrating because there’s a lot of ambition here. You start off on a boat and the story can branch depending on whom you decide to follow. Chaos Island shifts through different time periods (the stupid reason being that Orphen occasionally steps on a time shard or whatever by accident). I saw three time periods: a time of ruin with crumbling facades, a time of calm where everything is orderly, and a time where everything is frozen over and slippery. The combat is unconventional too. You don’t have hp and mp like in a typical rpg. You don’t take turns with the enemy. Instead, it’s about timing different styles of attacks and blocks. You can even target features in the environment to effect the enemy. There was a cool moment where I lit a torch and the swarms of wasps that had flown over me started to congregate over the flame.

Unfortunately, moments like those are rare as it is actually really hard to read the action. In encounters with multiple enemies, I couldn’t tell which enemies were gearing up to hit me and which ones were just flying around. I never lost because of this because I just spammed magic attacks until they went away. Big set piece encounters could be really confusing too since ranged attacks are aimed at the point when you first press the button. I had a number of tedious back and forth spats where I would miss the enemy but successfully dodge their attacks.

After two hours with this, I had to wash it all down with something.

@captainlove, thank you.

I think I’ve finally come around to Tekken. For a long time, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the character designs, the rigid input windows for combos, the long command lists. I wanted more Virtua Fighter.
I was playing as Nina when it all clicked. As I worked my way down her command list, I made it to a sequence where I had to rock my thumb between square and triangle before forcefully pushing forward with square. It was such a specific movement the game suggested I make,and when I did, the game complimented my movement with a smoothly choreographed animation. Now I want to internalize more of these movements and dance along with my avatar. Now I am a fan of Tekken.

Now we’ve made it to the autumn of 2000. Sony launches the PS2 around the world and things are starting to heat up. More games released means more to vote for. I’ll be playing the top five from this poll.

  • Aqua Aqua
  • Dance Summit 2001: Bust a Move
  • Midnight Club Street Racing
  • Ring of Red
  • Silpheed: The Lost Planet
  • Sky Odyssey
  • Smuggler’s Run
  • SSX
  • TimeSplitters
  • Unison: Rebels of Rhythm & Dance

0 voters

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Timesplitters is pretty dang great for a console FPS even if the first one is the least good one. Enemy death animations, weapon variety and the character select screen are highlights.

Yes, this dance is the joy of Tekken. Glad you gave Tag a shot. And that music!

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I forgot to mention that the music is my favorite part!

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no wait

can I change my vote to Unison

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Now you got me interested in the later TSes, only ever had the first one. I made a lot of bad levels with strobe light corridors, but the level editor probably yielded some of my fondest memories of that game and probably my first recognition that some of the same people worked on different games I liked (whoa this is kind of like Goldeneye lol)

Can’t find a good photo but Aqua Aqua gets a vote for me because if you build enough pools into your puzzle landscape, rubber duck models spawn in some of them. This might’ve also been a Wetrix thing.

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You can vote for up to five games so you don’t even need to change!

2 and 3 are definitely worth looking into if you enjoyed the level creator. They even let you make some rudimentary scenarios with triggers and AI spawns but the UI is pretty impenetrable. 2 is probably the best experience overall with lots of fun arcade events but 3 probably has the most coherent campaign. They both have great music.

I can’t seem to add a new vote but SSX is also an early PS2 classic.

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This poll is going glitchy as hell for me for some reason. I meant to vote Sky Odyssey not Silpheed and I can’t change it or vote for anything else!

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Yeah when I try to vote, the list duplicates itself :man_shrugging:

poll won’t work for me at all so please +1 to sky odyssey, ring of red, smugglers run, ssx on my behalf when it closes. i’m not in much of a mind to really engage these days but i do wanna say i love what you’re doing, yr thoughts are fun and the photos are gorgeous

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Oh god! I don’t think I can fix it :sadpig:

fraudulent ballot drop box for ps2 game choices

nvm i just got it to work, the bubbles aren’t getting filled in when i click them but if i click them all and hit vote then it counts my vote

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those orphen screens are so gorgeous I don’t want to believe it might be a bad time. I just don’t want to.

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wow this one is rough because several of these games are highly busted

silpheed is bland, slow, and not very fun? the box art is shiny though. i bought this and excitedly posted to sb1 about it and several people were like “that game sucks”. i wanted them to be wrong. they weren’t wrong lol. i heard silpheed on segacd is pretty good though

aqua aqua’s controls seem busted to me. you can’t move the cursor with any sort of precision that i’ve found, which essentially ruins the game wholesale lol

midnight club street racing is technically impressive and a truly miserable game. i think i actually hate that game. it is a racing game with open environments so it should be up my alley but everything about this game is appalling to me. aesthetically, mechanically, visually

timesplitters 1 is fucked up lol. everything feels kind of shitty and off and incorrect. it’s interesting but i found it to be too fiddly and everything past the first level started getting dreadfully difficult and not too terribly fun to me. perfect dark and TS2/3 are a million times better imo. didn’t try multiplayer

smuggler’s run is alright, better than midnight club in 2020 but still hinging on kind of bullshit difficulty most of the time.

sky odyssey is definitely the pick afaic

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i really feel like up until the release of metal gear solid 2 that the ps2 had a lot of questionable games, then it just caught fire and there was hot shit every month from then until (what feels like) a few years ago lol

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