ive been playing dragon quest 5, half as a chaser to the fourth one (my first), half because i was intrigued by how it seems to sometimes be acknowledged as the “influential one”. i was one of those kids whose life was changed by earthbound exposure at the ages of 10/12 so it has been very enjoyable although the exact extent of its “influence” still feels difficult to suss out. the worst/most boring parts so far are the comphet. i will continue my studies.
okay I hate to say it but I might need a hint for riven cause I’m at the rainbow rocks to charge the book or whatnot part and I feel like I must have somehow missed or ignored anything in the game up til now that would of given me the first clue to start making sense of it.
Revisit map island and crater island. Map island should tell you where to place the orbs, and the colors associated with each island symbol. Crater island has gehns study which has some notes on how much charge each orb needs
If you havent figured out the island symbols yet, they are the symbol you see when you open an island’s dome. You can also figure out these symbols by looking out the windows in the big dome where you are doing this orb puzzle.
Edit I might have misremembered which island the color clue is on so my backup hint is that this was an underwater chamber with a bunch of buttons that turn on colored lights.
I kept trying to wrack my brain thinking where there was anything with colors and as soon as I saw
in your post I instantly remembered that room. then when I went there remembered the elevator puzzle and . but this thing where you slide the half discs across, I have no clue what I’m doing here. I remember the one back in the lab but whatever it was trying to teach me was lost on me. I don’t know where zero is on this thing, if that’s what the lab was trying to teach I tried that, but also I don’t know if there’s a button I’m supposed to hit when I’m done or what and I don’t even know what the last two numbers are. other than higher than 9 and going by the looks of the symbols I would guess one comes right after the other maybe. back tracking is not really fun in this game. you gotta rotate that entire room just to get to the dome. I get annoyed when I get stonewalled after making a lot of progress and feel like I’m nearing the end of a thing. that’s how summoned help on fromsoft last bosses get to be more beneficial than hinderance
Okay I’m working off my memory and the single page of notes I took for my playthrough of the remake, so bear with me if I misremember anything and waste more of your time
In Gehn’s study, there should be a device that takes a glowy rock as input and will start glowing at a certain energy level. This is your zero point. In my game it started glowing at an energy level of 9. Next to this device, there should be several pages full of notes. One of these pages has the island symbols paired up with + and - numbers next to it, expressed in d’ni numerals. What you want to do is add or subtract these numbers from your zero point to get the number you should set for each island.
More Bioshock Infinite, I’ve been introduced to Vox Populi. I turned off the console because it was boring.
In Red Faction I cannot unlock the area’s final mission despite doing a bunch of very boring side quests and missions. One of them is literally “drive a car from point A to B”. I do like the objectives that are “blow this thing up” because I get to try to get around level geometry to sneak around enemy forces - but then you have to leave the area after you blow the thing up, and your wanted level is always super high so it becomes a slog.
this is one of the biggest, most noteworthy disadvantages this new game has compared to the original. The original interface allowed you to just click past repetitive animations. They give you the option to skip vehicle and ladder animations in the remake but not the worst offenders that make backtracking so annoying. And simply the act of traversal takes longer than in the original since you have to actually walk across the islands in real time, and even the run speed feels too slow.
Binfinite did not save my progress from the hour that I played, which included many annoying encounters. My lack of patience has outstripped my curiosity. For Now.
I popped in the Forza 3 disc and started playing some races, setting the AI difficulty to “High” really makes it thrilling. The cars all feel like mush though.
Got around to playing through another Renegade Sector game, this time Thunder Kid. For those not familiar with their games they are self-described “Low-Poly Pulp Games”, or what I’d by and large call PS1-esque “let’s move this 2d genre into 3d” games. This one looks like this:
It’s basically a run & gun game where both you and the camera are eternally facing forward, a bunch of the review comments I saw compared the perspective to Crash Bandicoot and… not quite but close enough. You can only move, shoot and jump, every few stages adds in a new enemy type that is generally more aggressive (start with unmoving robots who fire a single shot straight ahead; eventually they end up mobile, able to turn and aim a bit and fire more elaborate patterns). Things keep ramping up until there is just a lot to deal with, it gets a bit hectic but generally still manageable. They also often have alternate paths that lead to gold coins that might do nothing, but I appreciate how it means the game isn’t entirely linear hallways. I believe there are five worlds of three stages each followed by a boss battle which are the tougher bits as… well this is the second one.
Is the game jank/flawed in some areas? Most definitely, most of these games are to various degrees. Bosses are bullet sponges, depth perception when having to jump onto the occasional moving platform over spikes isn’t great (stages are for the most part rather short and often put checkpoints before these at least), when homing missiles get introduced it feels like you aren’t 100% equipped to deal with them readily, etc. Even accounting for that the highs aren’t super high.
That said I’m glad that they keep getting churned out and am generally happy enough whenever I come across one of them. Dig the look and energy of them, they are nice bite sized (this game took me a bit over an hour to get through) throwbacks of the type we don’t get a bunch of, more to the kind of spirit of that era than in specifics.
A while ago @dylan and @aggie were singing the praises of Yakuza for the PS2 which made me want to check it out. I just finished it. Beautiful game. I’m surprised by how much of the Yakuza formula was there fully formed from the beginning.
The PlayStation (2) can produce mind-boggling effects (sincere)
Also recently played the Mario 64 mod Decades Later, in which all the levels from the original game are charmingly remade from the creator’s memory, and often elaborated on. There’s something nice about romhacks being able to engage with the pure form of the 3D platformer as opposed to the only apparant alternative which is to commodify it as an indie game, where the creator is obliged to concieve of a unique mascot character and an evocative title, which to me is ultimately a distracting artifice. Isn’t it more satisfying to see someone sample the assets from Mario 64 and in doing so establish their own style, rather than someone painstakingly reproducing the “vibe” of the era like you’re supposed to be in awe at a feat of legal compliance.
Anyway. Decades Later is made by BroDute, a prolific kaizo creator who benevolently reined in the difficulty for this one. The camera is unclamped at all times so the game doesn’t care if you angle it and see through walls. BroDute’s OC even shows up sometimes to urge you to switch the camera to Mario Mode when it would make things easier, like going down slides. I appreciated the game’s attitude about this: it wasn’t enforcing a particular use of the camera, but it also wasn’t tempting me to exploit it, it just left it on the table for me to negotiate on my own terms.
Most of the stars in the original game have an equivalent in Decades Later, but it’s not entirely 1-1. When the game deviates from the original it’s largely up to BroDute’s whim or critical disposition. As declared in the romhack’s description:
Stars or sections that felt too repetitive or just weren’t fun in the eyes of the hack creator have been replaced with newer stars or been reworked to play out differently.
Most of these were probably good calls but I lost interest on the occasions he replaced an entire level with one of his own invention. BroDute evidently didn’t care for Tiny-Huge Island, not that I miss it, but all he did was slap a Willy Wonka theme over the general layout which did absolutely nothing for me. On the other hand, Dire Dire Docks was reimagined into an industrial port district resembling Ricco Harbor from Super Mario Sunshine and that was probably my favourite level.
No screenshots because my N64 emulator doesn’t let me map the screenshot hotkey to a controller button.
. but this thing where you slide the half discs across, I have no clue what I’m doing here. I remember the one back in the lab but whatever it was trying to teach me was lost on me. I don’t know where zero is on this thing, if that’s what the lab was trying to teach I tried that, but also I don’t know if there’s a button I’m supposed to hit when I’m done or what and I don’t even know what the last two numbers are. other than higher than 9 and going by the looks of the symbols I would guess one comes right after the other maybe. back tracking is not really fun in this game. you gotta rotate that entire room just to get to the dome. I get annoyed when I get stonewalled after making a lot of progress and feel like I’m nearing the end of a thing. that’s how summoned help on fromsoft last bosses get to be more beneficial than hinderance
