games you played today chronicles X: ten things I played about you

[Khan]

@Mikey

orders of magnitude more than that which I haven’t figured out how to accomplish

the biggest thing is bet hedging and planning with the corners and discard. before any of the multipliers you get at the end, the corner hand is worth x2 and the discard hand (which obvs requires getting every other hand) is x3.

im not brave enough to go for big swings on the discard hand yet cause you get so little control of it by nature so i mostly end up with trash like pairs in it, but i generally (spoiling just in case folks wanna entirely reach strategies on their own) try to start building the first half of a strong hand in the corners on the first deal because theyre the most important for setting the tone of how you play the other deals (and they overlap with half of the normal row/column hands so if you dont try to build the corners first you may end up without good hands to make in them) and then like. obviously the mults for getting more hands is big so a pair in some random hand is better than nothing in it. im generally sitting around 4-5k but ive managed to get into like 20k on a few occasions

[MintyJuffowup]

@Rudie

You’ll probably like it. It is password based terrible Zelda 1. It’s Zelda one without any friction to the combat. You can end up just having the infinitely spawning enemies on top of you eatting at your health because your sword only deals damage away from you not on you.

Nothing the PC Engine hasn’t prepared me for.

[loki]

iirc, i wrote the first english review of the movie upon which mystery of the ghost lion is based

[MimeParadox]

Playing Phantasy Star IV, my second taste of the series after a brief attempt at playing the original game’s GBA port, and also my first real Genesis RPG. Not knowing at all what to expect, I was surprised by its aesthetics, both the part where the characters aren’t squashed, Square RPG style, and also the portraits to illustrate scenes in more detail. I also quite appreciate just being thrown into the middle of things, both with a lead character who’s already experienced–and fun!–and a menu that seems mildly antagonistic–oh, the days when reading instruction manuals was expected and necessary. I’m enjoying it!

[username]

People here mentioned Shadow of the Tomb Raider a week or so back and I had no idea what to play after finishing The Longest Journey, so I went with that. I feel like the conclusion of the intro section was supposed to have some degree of seriousness/pathos but I instead found it hilarious, the big bad going from smug “I’ll just take that artifact you just found” to “wait, you just yanked it out without care and triggered the end of the world? Great, I better go deal with that before you kill us all” (and then the game sells this as true as opposed to myth by a tsunami coming by and killing thousands) is such a shift from how this kind of tale usually goes. I’m here for Lara the destructive idiot who thinks nothing through.

[username]

Also I finished APE OUT and I feel like a dang fool for not playing this years ago and walking in with middling expectations, that was basically 90 minutes of gloriousness. Scared me a bit early on as the last level on the first disc is much harder than all the ones around it, but it turns out it may have been the hardest stage in the game. I might like jazz now, definitely love monkey murder.

[Father.Torque]

Ape Out rules insanely and I should remember to bring it up more when people generically talk about Good Games

[Tulpa]

finished up that riven remake

It’s uh… it’s good but not revelatory. I think I still prefer the original. Myst '21 was more successful than Riven 2024 but only because it was much more straightforward to remake (and even so, they only nailed it on their third attempt). They changed certain puzzles in the game to new ones and simplified a lot of the more repetitive actions you would need to do in the original. The new puzzles are good, but they don’t feel as organic as the originals. They involve something that feels more video-gamey than diegetic to the setting. It’s unavoidable because the original Riven depended so much on the slideshow movement that the conversion to full 3d necessitated some compromises.

Streamlining repetitive actions may sound like a clear improvement, since flipping five levers isn’t any more of a puzzle than flipping one lever, but it changes the feel of the world. This is especially the case on the first island, which feels much less hostile now. That being said, I like how much easier they made a certain orb puzzle. That was always the silliest part of the original Riven, so simplifying it doesn’t bother me at all.

However, this remake does have a major flaw: the fmvs looked much better than the motion captured 3d models they’ve been replaced with. This game had way too modest a budget for what they were trying to accomplish and so the character animation looks stiff and veers into the uncanny valley at times.

Overall, it’s worth playing, but its not going to replace the original Riven.

[GherkinForce]

90 hours in, it seems my journey in Tale of Immortal may be at an abrupt end. To get to the next cultivation level i need to get through the Stairway to Heaven, which is a 10 room dungeon where you need to complete at least 6 to clear it.

Problem is, each room has over 100 enemies which in the Switch version means after a couple rooms the framerate drops way down and progressively gets worse. It persists even when the current room is cleared of all enemies.

If the game doesn’t crash in the meantime, then it seems guaranteed to do so at the end results screen. This dungeon is mandatory to complete the game so basically it’s unwinnable and broken on Switch.

Pretty sure the devs have abandoned this version as well so i am not expecting any fixes at this point.

Oh well, guess its time to check out that DLC for Elden Ring

[ellaguro]

bought a bunch of cheap games on the Steam sale against my better judgment. started with Psuedoregalia because i finally wanted to see what all the fuss was about was after witnessing a certain type of person online jizz themselves over this game in particular. and hey - it’s cheap, so definitely a good value.

after a slightly rough start with a obligatory souls-style boss battle that went from annoying damage sponge to trivially easy once i remembered you could heal at any time (i just don’t know why people bother with this stuff at all!), it definitely opened up for me more. it’s a very solid 3D Metroidvania and the sensibility of the game reminds me a bit of something like Castlevania 64 or whatever, also definitely (sigh) Souls-esque again.

the main reason everyone jizzes themselves over the moveset/controls in this game is it’s really the main distinctive thing it has going for it. it is fun to have 3D platforming be the significant factor in the game like this, and it usually uses the multidimensionality pretty well, even though it is easy to get lost or hung up on trying to get somewhere you don’t need to get. but i’ll take that for the open-ended ness the game has. even the moveset is still a bit more jank than SM64, it’s still way better than these types of indie games that use more default character controllers usually have. some of the enemy designs are pretty funny too - i like the barfing tuba thing that spits out musical notes. the enemies are kind of a non-factor other than to farm health in though. and even though the visual design isn’t anything particularly astounding, there are some nice memorable areas you come upon.

i forgot to take any screenshots, so here’s someone’s on Steam. this was probably one of the three or four particularly memorable rooms so far.

about 4 hours in and i’m starting to see the seams a bit though. it’s feeling really 7/10 even in spite of being generally enjoyable. it’s just yet another Metroidvania, and the Souls inspiration seems obvious, and i feel like i’m playing a bunch of things i’ve already played through before playing this. i’m really just sick of Metroidvanias at this point. and i don’t feel like i ever need to play Dark Souls now, because everyone in the world seems content to just copy it and tell me how much they like it constantly. i’m getting a bit of the vibe i got with Vomitoreum, another 3D Metroidvania that i enjoyed when i played it but didn’t really retain it much at all… though this one is a little better than that. i am just depressed by the lack of creativity in the amount of sources people are borrowing from in these types of games. that’s the thing that makes me saddest of all.

hopefully some of these other games i bought in the Steam sale will make me feel better about that, though. as it is, Psuedoregalia is feeling at about a 7 or 7.5 out of 10 so far. but i’m having a good enough time to play it until the end to see if my impression changes at all.

[ArOne]

Tried to play a little game I picked up on a random humble bundle sale.

It markets itself as a rhythm puzzle game but after spending less than an hour with it I don’t believe it at all. This isn’t a puzzle stacker with tunes to enter a flow state with. It’s a competitive bubble wrap popping exercise. There’s 4 buttons, A is shoot or basic pop. A stack of circles of various colors and icons fill your field and this pops them one at a time and you can move the cursor around to guide to it. Your field is being populated so you keep shooting. X is a command button and pressing it sometimes clears part of your field. I think it takes out trash blocks. B is shield, this seems to use a bar to delay how long trash and junk orbs from your opponent fall down. Y is called rumble and I think this is going to be the meat of the game. There are command inputs like from a fighting game or stratagem inputs from helldivers that do certain things to either clean your field or attack the enemies. It’s a very doujin spirit I haven’t experienced in a while. The main menu has a manual button that does nothing at least on steam deck. After a quick scan of the steam forums it turns out the manual is a file in the directory and has pages of lore for the characters that I’m actually being warned about spoilers and it doesn’t unlock in game until you complete the scenario mode that it does have.

I find it almost impenetrable but want to give it another go to see if there is an actual game in here for humans.

[L]

Played some Netrunner online (jinteki dot net) and actually won a few games for the first time ever. I like the Esa deck. Feels like a slightly more interactive version of what I assume Noise was like back in '12 or '13.

[ellaguro]

just finished Psuedoregalia now. it’s fine! honestly i’m glad it didn’t outstay its welcome. i was feeling hopelessly lost and getting quite frustrated with the game there in like the 5th and 6th hour. but once i was able to get over the hump and find one or two things i missed, things started picking up a lot more quickly. i did have to look up a walkthrough for a couple of those key locations though. the jumping also could get really frustrating in places in the late game. tho i didn’t have the wall glide until close to the very end so i’m sure that didn’t help. but i’m honestly glad it ended when it did, because i wouldn’t have tolerated much more escalating difficulty in the platforming. it’s definitely a lot more demanding on you than a lot of 2D Metroidvanias where you can sort of be on autopilot. i guess the enemies being a non-factor is almost there to compensate for that.

and the ending was a bit abrupt/anticlimactic. again, the two boss battles feel a bit pointless and obligatory here. and the story was nonsensical/nonexistent compared to what it was set up as (it starts off aping Ico and then just quickly seems to dispose of that premise). even Vomitoreum’s plot felt more fleshed out. just another thing that feels slightly obligatory and i’m not sure why it’s there. but i guess i liked how much it didn’t try to do a half assed attempt at a coherent plot and left things very cryptic. i’m sure someone has tried to dig into The Lore and argue it’s very deep or something, because that’s the type of person who usually plays this type of game. i think that’s probably full of shit, and the developer just didn’t care to spend much time on that. but at least it being very thin reminded me that this is still a smaller indie project at the end of the day.

it’s interesting how much polish a game like this has in its attempt to be like a full fledged accessible Metroidvania, but then how much it’s clearly straining at the edges in a lot of other aspects that feel kind of half-complete. i kinda wish it was weirder and more messy. i kinda wish people making these sorts of projects would make more bold choices in general in this sort of game. it’s a bit baffling to me… something i have to blame on the apparent total blanketing influence of games like Hollow Knight and the Souls games over a particular generation. but it’s definitely not the worst of the games of this type i’ve played… and i still feel fairly positive towards it. probably 7.5ish out of 10.

but yeah, reminds me of Crow Country in being one of those games that hints at ostensibly weirder aesthetic sensibilities but in actuality plays it super duper straight and safe, to the point where you’re left kind of more confused if anything by that.

[Polygonzo]

I think these are fair critiques even if I personally wouldn’t saddle it with all those comparisons to other games cuz the total dev time was about 4 months: 2 months for a metroidvania specific game jam and then another 2 expanding on it and then they were on to something else (while also implementing a map that everyone was crying out for lol (I read that their game after next might be a more fleshed out spiritual successor to this one)) and personally I embrace this approach with open arms if the dev produces something of this quality each time

[ellaguro]

i mean, people can make really meaningful and impactful work in 4 months or less. i don’t even need point out the amount of important indie games that were made in that time or less. i think it’s valid to criticize something for what it is and the choices the developer makes, regardless of how long it takes or the price. especially given that it’s already out there and already pretty popular and influential. and i’m not going in saying “gee the developer made this in 4 months” - most people don’t know about that. i certainly didn’t (even though i figured it was not more than like, a year project).

if anything, i’m glad the the game is not longer and i kind of would be less interested in a more fleshed out version. my issue was the lack of the creativity in sticking to a weirdly straight Metroidvania formula, not that it wasn’t long enough. that’s not something that is a result of time, but conscious choices being made. and i think it’s indicative of a trend of a lot of these sorts of games i see. it’s not “saddling it” with anything to say that - again, because this game has already proven quite influential and popular within a certain subset of indie games world.

[Polygonzo]

my reply, well it’s just a me thing, and I don’t think I land too far from your enjoyment of it myself (I’d give it an 8/10 probs ha) and am also

@ellaguro

glad the the game is not longer and i kind of would be less interested in a more fleshed out version

and the rapid manner in which it was made and the choices made: what tropes to go with (search action abilities), what trends to include (thicc furry), what aesthetics to mix together (ICO, Castlevania 64 etc.) and where to innovate (that wall kick) and even the probably misguided, obligatory combat that reads to me like insecurity at just doing one thing well (especially when the barebonesness is a strength) enhances my appreciation and maybe I feel some of the comparisons/external indie market dynamics and stuff is a little unfair BUT! like I say, that’s a me thing, I’m not trying to like call you out or whatever just floating my two cents from a different angle (angles…I should boot it up again and do some wall kicks)

[ellaguro]

@Polygonzo

maybe I feel some of the comparisons/external indie market dynamics and stuff is a little unfair

i think the thing is i’m not attributing that to the developer, just to the reaction/context where i’ve seen the game framed and sold online. i obviously don’t know the developer, and that’s something developers don’t have much control over anyway. but when a work proves influential that tends to happen.

i do like that it feels more personal/idiosyncratic in some ways. but i’m just frustrated by how many indie games overwhelmingly stick to a formula (esp Metroidvanias which i’m just so tired of at this point) when they demonstrate a clear capacity and ability to do something at least slightly weirder. i don’t blame the developer for that as much as just feeling a bit confused by and frustrated by the current ecosystem and context a lot of these games come out in.

[Tegiminis]

I loved pseudoregalia and my favorite thing about it is that it made this extremely toxic gamer furry guy I know rip snorting mad because he couldn’t figure out where to go and has a puffed up sense of his own skill in videogames.

More relevantly, I don’t think the souls comparisons are at all salient. Castlevania 64 for sure though. The willingness to let you get lost is my favorite part bar none. Wandering around figuring out what things you can do funny movement tech to get to vs what is impossible without an upgrade is a lot of fun for me.

Perfect little slice of fun, well executed, cheap, smartly made. I do think Crow Country is a good comparison because I walked away from both of these games feeling satiated in a way most games can’t achieve these days.

[geist]

man, the riven remake is wonderful. looks exactly like it should look

[Grandpa]

One thing I forgot about Red Dead Redemption, good as it is, is that it’s…much jankier than I remember it being. Lotta odd stumbles, some camera quirks when aiming, things like that. Doesn’t help that I mess up the ABXY presses, playing on Switch but having the 360 in mind.

Still a pretty good game, though! Almost certainly have written about it before, but I kinda forgot about the random little events you can happen upon, and was surprised by the one where two lawmen shoot at a fleeing criminal. Hogtied him to their thanks, start to walk away, and they unload several shots into the guy and spit on him.

Maybe even better is the guy who invites you to sit by his campfire from a distance, and as you close in, he cackles and opens fire. Only when you get close do you spot all the human remains, and a person tied up begging to be released.

Some day I’ll move onto Red Dead Redemption 2, I just gotta set aside a few hours for that opening and try to remember all the weird controls and systems.

Also messed with a game called Vivitter on Switch, which is free, but has $35 worth of DLC they’re eager to encourage you to buy. It’s a kinda clunky game in the Wario Ware vein about, uh…edging is not the word I should go with, but sure.

The first mini game sees your avatar in a guillotine, and your goal is to hit the button at the last possible second to stop the blade. The second involves filling a power meter just enough to slide a drink to the end of the bar (without hitting the woman at the end or having it fall short) - I could not for the life of me beat this one. Last one I messed with has you stopping a stopwatch timer per the number printed on a Cup Noodle package, only for a cat to start moving around in front of the watch, so you gotta keep time as best you can.

It’s neat, I guess, but clunky - failing a game sends you back to the mini game menu, and there’s no way to skip the intros on them. Makes trying to clear a given game take forever.