So, uhh. I’m Zandi.
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Five Finger Fillet in Red Dead Redemption is unnecessarily cruel, both in my brain never remembering the Nintendo button layout and having mild dyslexia making the thing impossible.
Wish I could just program a dang macro into the controller to knock it out, but I don’t think I have one where I could.
Never gonna get that Reyes Rebels outfit…was never gonna put it on, either, just aiming for completion I guess.
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Started up Yakuza Kiwami 2 instead of 0 just to spite people (actually because I assume it’ll come off better this way), stopped my mission to hopefully save my gang’s future to play some golf and eat at a local restaurant so yeah, it feels like Yakuza.
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Oooo i wanna check this out!!
Dont care about zenless zone zero but itll make a good thread title pun at some point
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I think I played a few too many big grindy games recently so besides doing a replay of Elden Ring for the DLC I’ve been playing a bunch of shmups and other arcade stuff.
I already mentioned ESP Ra.De but besides that I got the Aleste Collection which had been on my JP eShop wishlist for years. My only real gripe with this collection is that the games are similar enough that they sort of blend together a bit, so I tend to forget which one has which levels etc. Power Strike 2 stands out thanks to the Porco Rosso style setting but I think the GG games are where it’s at. I also got my easiest ever shmup 1CC on GG Aleste 1 just now.
I also bought the Taito Milestones 2 collection for Metal Black, but I think I’ve ended up playing more of Darius 2 and The New Zealand Story. The latter I had tried in the past on Master System emulators and never really got into it, but I think something has clicked for me now. I like how there’s no animation for the flying machines and the little chirpy bit at the end of the game over jingle.
I think I also like Gun Frontier more than I was expecting, despite it being a bit bullshit hard. Ditto for Kiki Kaikai. I tried one credit of Dino Rex and it’s as bad as everyone says. I think I’m glad it’s there as a novelty but yikes.
Another game I tried in the last day was Xiaomei and the Flame Dragon’s Fist. To be honest I think this game is more frustrating than fun. The hit detection is all over the place and the animations are wonky, especially with Xiaoyin’s crouch kick which often doesn’t even show the animation at all. The enemies all flood in randomly so you can’t really learn the level pattern and too many times I got killed after passing the stage exit because random dudes spawned in.
Oh yeah the voice samples are really annoying as well. The music is good though.
After that, I think I am in need of a good beat 'em up. Any good recommendations on Switch besides SoR4 and Ninja Warriors Once Again?
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I’m still pretty much only playing Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre, and Pile Up Poker.
The former actually has a bit more depth than I’d previously given it credit for, though it’s still buried under a lot of free-to-play cruft.
In the latter I’m starting to make real progress toward getting higher scores
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Super Mario RPGmake is a nice way to experience something I emulated 20 years ago
Actively hiding from Boomer’s Sniffit henchmen behind curtains might be the best comedy I’ve experienced in a video game for a very long time
Also Peach’s Stevie Nicks Welsh Witch dancing on the level up screen is an utter delight
Also why bother never running the classic BGM at all times?
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I played around with Zenless Zone Zero a bit further and I sort of enjoyed it? I’m one of the few people that completed Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode and there are many similarities (grind, hub design, overly complex loadout menu), but far less actual core gameplay per hour.
Once I got my head around the dozens of menus I’m left with a vague feeling of suspicion. Like either the creators are horrible cynics, or they genuinely think this is what the apex of game design looks like. Yes, it’s a mobile game but the genre graft of single-player action game and mobile grind is just being rejected by my host tissue.
There’s combat missions and exploration missions. Combat is combat, exploration makes you play a really basic Sokoban level until you get to combat or the level ends. The game would prefer you encounter combat as little as structurally possible. Not allowing a practice mode feels particularly mean as does the density and amount of text explaining key combat systems and stats. (Edit: Apparently you unlock training later but let me just play!)
The game has an aggressive marketing campaign that I apparently fall within the demographic for. You are inundated with character shorts, vignettes, and other things that gesture at this game being character and world driven but it all feels purely aesthetic driven. I used to joke with a colleague about how students started to fetishise the soft pastel anime of Genshin Impact as the norm for their own character designs. Hoyoverse seem to be able to wield pure art direction in a way I’ve not seen other studios do in quite the same way.
It’s not a problem to have shallow or 2-dimensional characters but many of these characters feel like they are missing parts. More broadly the game is a mechanical engine running despite the absence of certain critical components. I wonder to what extent localisation is also an issue since characters really blast through punchlines and plotpoints like they’re worried the player is bored (yet don’t seem to think narrative interstitials are already too long?). Characters say things in an overly complicated manner during many plot points and there is an overwhelming number of world-words like ‘association’, ‘hollows’, ‘proxies’, ‘ether’ etc which seems to keep a convincing illusion there is a sufficient amount of ‘lore’. Hollows are dimensional pockets that make the world look like a construction site. Fighting can only happen in a construction site. Despite the amount of story missions, I’ve tried I don’t feel particularly closer to a setting.
The combat is sparse so the aesthetics end up having to carry the experience through the grind, but these are also more sparse than the constant dripfeed of marketing would have you believe. Every cutscene tool is used. Fully animated 3D cutscenes, static comic panels, the VN character dialogue with meaningless choice for particularly padded sections. Even just a black screen describing a character going in and out of a building.
It’s a frustrating model, to make a good-feeling action game and aggressively lock it away behind bulkheads of prep. And I know that this is the point, but is this the future of character action? The genre has been languishing for a while aside from the occasional gasps from Platinum and rarities like DMC5 or the studio-shuttering Hi-Fi Rush. Endless codes will pacify us into thinking the developers are actually incredibly generous while the hopelessly out-of-touch try to unpick the economy design.
Long live MiHoYo
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Pleasant comic-esque animation-heavy Elizabethean(?) platformers/puzzle-platformers/interactive narratives i have played semi-recently and enjoyed
2 browser games By Studio Seufz
Murder -, basically a branching choose your own adventure but with time-based gameplay mechanics (get away w/ murder - avoid being murdered by timing charged stabs and stop moving/catch prospective murderer by glancing at the right moments)
Lucky Tower - I played this because I saw a bit of the full version of this they’re releasing being played (out later this year i think?) and I liked that it seemed unclear to what degree it was an action platformer with a decent amount of agency vs. a delivery system for hand-animated gags. Especially since that one is a roguelike.
This is a bit more straightforward, it reminds me a lil of like the karoshi games in terms of being slapstick murder puzzle platformers. Although this is much more on the - ferrying a character between animated gags end than a puzzler. Anyways, I like Murder better as a succinct thing but this is endearing in a way where it really feels like they had the desire to keep stuffing in gags and ideas into their flash game, varying quality but I like the aim.
Game that made me make this post (different dev):
Haimrik:
(on sale for $1 for the next 20 hours altho i got it on xbox on sale for $3 )
I liked this quite a bit and completed it over about two days. The base gameplay is walking through vertically arranged single-screen arenas that are ‘narrated’ with text overlaid on each floor texture (like a manuscript) which triggers events on certain words. Your character (Haimrik), can pick up words in the environment to manifest them as items, use them as adventure game keys on other words, etc.
So, as you walk you might see below you “Haimrik needed his trusty sword in order to defeat the troll that appeared”, walking over “A troll appeared” will summon a troll in the environment that could kill you, but being sure to grab a sword from the word “sword” first gives you something to fight it with. This develops to a certain degree of elaboration & the base focus of this gameplay kind of shifts at different portions of the game.
It never really pushes to like a point of ‘wow! that is unbelievable’. But it remains interesting and its got the feel of a bunch of ideas of where the concept could be taken stuffed in rather than a few ideas developed to perfection. I think this helps with pacing quite a bit in that there’s always a bit of an uncertainty about what the next gameplay sequence will be rather than ‘ah, 10 more puzzles of careful reading’. But a bit of a double edged sword in that it’s sort of an adventure game where the path forward rarely became particularly difficult/obscure. So I think in its ease it loses a bit of bite.
but I really enjoyed this as a pleasant short (<4 hours) experience that really didn’t outstay its welcome. It petered out a bit at the end(video game disease) but it wrapped up almost instantly at that point so no big stain on the experience. I also generally liked the look & sound of it & the pacing is really helped by a sense of freeform/shifting presentation.
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oh you don’t even know the half of it
meanwhile I’m salivating over being able to finally get S-rank drive discs in two days. then the real hell will begin
honestly, compared to other idiot phone games but especially their own, ZZZ absolutely drip feeds introducing new mechanics and features. yeah, it aggressively railroads you into systems so you actually invest (again, I feel like they have numbers showing that not enough players are actually engaging in character building and related systems), but they don’t even give you gear rolling until you’re around the two-thirds mark of the story content present in 1.0
ironically this is plastered against the frictionless retention (you can literally do your dailies in 2 minutes) and all of the quality of life compared to previous efforts (the likes of which make me bristle at not having quick deploy for team building while Genshin and Star Rail do)
John Mihoyo is powerless against my hot hands
love to bulldoze content because I’m good at gambling
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I beat “Jokerless”
The big things you need are at least one smoothing voucher (+1 Discard, +1 Hand, +1 Hand Size), and a planet card source (blue seals, Planet Merchant or Telescope). Another big strat is stockpiling The Fool in your inventory, waiting until you roll The Hermit, then copying it immediately for up to +$60.
A lot of people go for 5-of or Flush House in this mode, but I don’t exactly recommend it because it adds extra cards to the Planet pool. You also have to pivot to it in ante 2 or 3, whereas Straight can be ridden from round 1.
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i finished Cavern of Dreams. i like that the boss battle tried something different with having you go through a linear bullet hell type stage i guess instead of doing a straight boss battle. there were a few other things in there that surprised me. but otherwise there’s really not much to say about it other than it’s a decent but forgettable game with some top notch N64 textures and environments. i really wanna see someone do an N64 giallo-style horror with textures and environments kind of like this game. i feel like it could really work. games like these really make you imagine what could be when you’re bored by what it actually is.
right now i’ve been enjoying using my Corn Powers in Corn Kidz 64. so far this is easily the best of the retro 3D platformers i’ve played. it’s got a sort of punk off-beat sensibility while still being tightly, smartly designed. and most importantly, it feels like its own distinct thing and not just a pile of different references. it feels like an actual, coherent game! with actual personality instead of just a weird void there. which the past two games i’ve played really haven’t really.
i also like that this game manages to feel more 90’s than the actual 90’s 3D platformers i remember playing. most of those didn’t have enough going on to really have a distinct style, and most were for kids anyway. this obviously references a bunch of games (the Banjo games and Conker’s Bad Fur Day etc) but you can also tell it’s made by someone with more experience actually developing their own style. someone who made Lyle in Cube Sector 18 years ago. someone who designed the prototype of this game 13 years ago in a completely different time/place. it’s kind of why it’s sad so many people quit indie game dev - cuz there are a lot of games that aim for this sort of experience but don’t actually achieve it at all. they just sorta act as if they do. it helps to know what you’re doing.
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after all these years I finally made it to the riven cover art
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Yeah it’s not quite as egregious as most of the market but it does remind me of the long ante-game things like Candy Crush use where the game is mostly playable for a comparatively long time to ensure that when the trap snaps shut you are invested enough to pull through.
I feel like I’m being gaslit. ‘Immersive Storytelling’ is no different from the rest of the game/narrative structure up until this point.
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the best way to immerse me is to tell me i’m about to be immersed
and really there’s nothing more immersive than gacha anime phone games so it’s some double duty right there i’m melting straight into the floor
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Had the Elden Ring DLC bought for me, liberating me of the financial guilt of probably not liking it.
Playing through new content the first time with the understanding of the base game’s open world-ly tricks really has made it clear how much this game is made to be played once. Cool bosses in minor dungeons that I know almost certainly are normal enemies later, but for now, they’re novel and interesting. Repetitious goodies, but new ones.
It’s been an interesting experience. At this point I’m genuinely not playing for the, like, gameplay anymore. It’s fraying at the seams with all the big gamer boy bullshit they’re pulling. Bosses are nigh universally miserable if you’re not willing to use every single tool at your disposal, but if you use those tools, it might be too rote or easy to feel good. The fromsoft-players arms race has officially fucked me off, and I spent at least two bosses so far (just reaching the second plateau) fantasizing about fighting them as the one-armed wolf. ALL THIS SAID! There is still cool shit to be found, enough to make me keep going, just barely. Just, just barely.
Love to hop in co-op and then spam meteorite of astel 
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Bought THPS 1+2 on the last day of the steam sale and it completely dominates my brain now in a way I definitely did not expect it to, jeeze.
The part that is actually getting to me is as a kid I didn’t own any of the console versions, just the GBA port of Tony Hawk 3 and fuck, my twenty-year old reflexes nearly completely transferred over.
I guess those games were really good ports or something???
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exactly, even against stronger normal enemies there’s no room for expressive play, you find the key that opens a particular lock and you use it exclusively or get punished
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Yeah I have found that you either struggle to survive the first 50 seconds of a fight for several hours or you do it right and the boss goes down within the first 3 minutes. Something about that doesn’t feel good to me.
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this is them telling you you’re being transported into the special Unity scenes where only what they want to happen can happen
ask me about Genshin world and story quests breaking because Character X is Busy waiting for you to run into their sphere of influence trigger
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