Aperture Desk Job: I kinda feel like this should come pre-installed on these things. It’s not the longest or best game, but it is a very decent primer on how to use the Steam Deck and what it’s capable of. Now I finally know how to take screenshots and use the gyro! How does…how does this thing know I’m touching the right stick just barely, anyhow? Anyway, always fun to get back to the world of Portal, too, so, y’know. Pretty good.
I Made A Game With Zombies In It: I am not going to type the actual name. Anyway I haven’t touched this since…Jesus, who knows. Back in the early 360 days. Got a lot further now than I did then. I think I’m good.
Hitman: World of Assassination: Hitman…in bed. What a time to be alive. I gotta grind out three more levels to be at 20/20 mastery in Marrakesh. Maybe I’ll do some of the bonus missions. Irritating level.
Batman: Arkham Asylum: This got me to download the other version of Proton, so I guess that’s good. It’s still Batman. It doesn’t look like shit like those weird UE4 ports on PS4/Xbox One. I guess you could argue it looks like shit from an art direction/UE3/inevitable march of time perspective. I think it looks…like Batman, baby.
Dorfromantik: Goddamnit I’m supposed to be hitting the backlog not playing the game I’ve already put hours into already (do not ask me how many hours I’ve played Batman, or Hitman, or Red Dead…).
And back on Switch…
Undead Nightmare: “What if we did a funny zombie take on Red Dead Redemption” could work, if you remember to make it funny (like RDR) and good (like RDR), and not suck. Alas, it seems they went that second way.
to the point where if you want to swap them out with the replacement hall effect sticks, you have to desolder and resolder the cable for each stick that handles this
Surely to no one’s surprise I dig Nintendo World Championship. It’s the Mario 99 (except it’s 8) of that old 3DS NES Remix game.
I still suck at clearing that first Kid Icarus stage though. I’ll hit my personal best on it with no major screwups and still come in 4th. Somehow I’m better at Donkey Kong than I ever knew though.
Bummed Rad Racer and Tetris aren’t here though. Them and Mario 1 were the actual 89 championship qualifying games. If only I were better at Rad Racer when I was 7…
My initial instinct was to go with Taboo as a goof. Then I thought I should be honest and go with Zelda 1. Then I was thinking I should plug my slightly left of the dial favorites with Super Dodge Ball or Willow or Strider or whatever the hell that Godzilla baseball game is called. Then I remembered with my handle I should probably split the difference and go with my number 2 honest choice of Castlevania 2.
tried the demo for happy saint sheol. it’s a vn where you are a newcomer at a church’s corpse disposal unit in a world where bodies just kinda keep moving after death. almost everyone seems kinda suspicious and our friendly protagonist promised this shaky nervous girl early on that he will help her with anything at all if she needs it and i can only imagine that backfiring marvelously.
it’s obviously a very content warning game, both gore and sexual violence at the very least. i don’t know if it’s good or not, but whatever i wanna know whats gonna happen
Back in the trash with season three of Netflix Games’ Too Hot to Handle. It’s awful, I can’t get enough. This season mixes things up a little but it’s still just forced melodrama.
The game’s age range slider will only let you go up to 40, which I very nearly am. Revealing this fact to the other contestants drew typical “you don’t look like it” lines, I was hoping someone would find my presence problematic
Tried Exophobia yesterday and wound up playing it for 6 hours. From the art, I thought it was primarily a fast and twitchy shooter, and it is that, but I was surprised to find out that it’s 2/3rds puzzles and exploration.
Some puzzles involve checking the map to figure out the relationship of different rooms, and others involve tricky movement or use of your weapon abilities. It also has the multi-level structure from System Shock where you can travel to any floor on the elevators and need to get things from one floor to progress on the others, plus some genuinely new ideas like your map runs out of battery if you look at it too much.
I did things in a weird order and managed to get myself softlocked but the dev is on it and replied on the steam forums that they’ll fix it on the next patch. I’m not that annoyed by that, it actually speaks to how many sequencing choices the game has that one fell between the cracks.
finished the demo now and i guess i’m looking forward to the release? the demo seems to be the non-adult version. just got the impression parts of scenes were missing, as the script would sometimes refer to considerably worse things happening than i ever got to read (and the one horribly gorey scene was totally censored)
so like, you get brought into this church organization in order to fulfill an arranged marriage for reasons not entirely clear, meanwhile dealing with the horrors of body disposal, a supernatural disease that spreads through a changing miasma, nightmares of gore and angels, the scorn and contempt of most anyone, getting traumatized by being molested by some homophobic woman. that she gets executed for pre-marital sex a couple days later does not make anything better. things are bad and i’m interested
so uh… why are people sleeping on custom mech wars? it controls infinitely easier than armored core and the customization is fucking amazing? like it controls like an edf game on foot! this fucking rocks! im excited to stream it tomorrow
like even if you pick the little mememobiles like tank legs or bus legs you have so much boost you can just fly through the air the second you get fucked up and accidentally go backwards
IT RECHARGES SO FAST and i only have like level tutorial baby gear!
FUCKI CANNOT BELIEVE THE LEVEL OF COLOR CUSTOMIZATION AHHH
AHH
the color customization is so fuuunnnn, you have an eight color channel for the overall robot with sliders for “METALLIC” and LUMINOUS and like “TEXTURE” so you can turn down the texture and metallic and make everything look like gunpla, you can shit glow. its badass. and then you can go to every part and color them individually IF YOU WANT
the colors are on a little ms paint graident, it saves like the last 15 you used AND theres a favorite colors tab but ive only added things to it on accident i have to look up and see how to actually do that
sorry if this is redundant because of armored core 6 i havent played that
Finished up keyg and I had to look up tips/help several times as the puzzles that were there were often more of the word puzzle variety (even that is an iffy comparison) and I’d have likely been stuck on said rooms for ages trying to figure out exactly what the dev was getting at. There is also one action room near the very end where you are trapped within a 3 key space (S, D, F) and have to move about it smashing buttons all around you corresponding to the surrounding 10 keys, basically you would have to move from S where you hit Z and W to kill spawning enemies before they attacked over to F to hit the G one before it gets you; I am not a great typer and this gets rather hectic and I was so thankful when I was free of it.
That said very glad to have played it, it is an odd beast like nothing I’ve really played before. It is uneven, not every idea works or is a good one and if genre exists it jumped between a few with little rhyme or reason but hey, I was always curious how it worked and now I know!
Trials of Mana Remake remains adequate. So let’s try that Secret of Mana Remake for a second time. I think pre-pandemic I bought it during a closing game store and immediately came to my senses upon booting it up going “I am never going to play this” and sold if.
Now it is years later and I can appreciate its totally borked arranged soundtrack. I think that is really funny. What isn’t is…it’s just Secret of Mana? Why would you remake Secret of Mana and not try to fix it?
They didn’t. And there is the idiom that games aren’t released they escape. This feels like it, except it is a ship of Theseus where they remade the exact same shitty boat but worse. And I think SoM is an awesome broken mess of a game.
They added Voice Acting but if you have a custom name in it plays this horrible noise every time Randy’s name should be said. The world design is exactly the same but 3D and with very unclear boundaries because it is also 16:9. There is a 2-3 second pause for all screen transitions. Just enough for your life force to leave your body because this is an early SFC game so the screens are pretty small. It is a recent S-E rush job so the font is horrible in Japanese. There was no option to play in English which is rare for a Square Enix game.
There are a lot of button errors. i Think this is some combination of PS4 game on PS5? So Japanese PS4 game = Circle is confirm but PS5 game = X is confirm. You hit x to talk to people but circle to make a decision but X advances text BUT X cancels the decision screen.
I do thank the game for not explaining anything, but also the menus are much harder to read than on SFC and this is Secret of Mana. The Menus are completely fucked in SoM.
If you tried really hard you could play this Remake but you are better off with the original. Trials? Well it seems okay.
Had a go of the Parkside: Decayed Soul Manipulation demo. Watching the trailer I feared it looked too much Deus Ex hand-me-down. I thought back to the Gloomwood demo, which thrilled mechanically, but rubbed me the wrong way in its on-the-nose establishing “bona-fide” lineage to such a familiar title. (Its ending with the stain-glassed / ornamental rug interior “reveal” as well as the campy baddie greeting tipped me over).
After playing Parkside I feel I was too harsh with Dillon. This one really plays (sounds, looks) like a Deus Ex checklist but with two thirds of the items missing. Stacked a bunch of boxes to get to a building’s roof, but had to jump down and walk in the front door because there were no other routes. Threw some things to distract some guards to no avail. I keep pressing “E” on its computers, which just ends up with me carrying it around uselessly like a brick bashing the rest of the decor. To be feature-light wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t invite such close comparison.
The main difference in design: triphop over techno. Also spaced out saves (ala Gloomwood), which led to a questionable style of play where I’d power through and pick up all the loot locations I’d learnt on previous attempts. The designer seems to have played Cruelty Squad (second or third game I’ve come across this week with reference to “divine yada yada”) but taken the wrong lessons… most pertinently: a game needs its own sensibility!
Story mode in Sonic Origins is some real sickos only stuff.
Start playing 1 and my first 2 thoughts are oh great 3 acts a zone and Scrap Brain act 3. At least the final boss is easy. This is the first game I ever beat.
Start CD and my first thought is how much I hate Wacky Workbench. Although for some reason it was actually the Metal Sonic race that caused my problems this time. What a great game to think about and not play. Hope the soundtrack is still on Spotify. Got a Good Future in 2 acts at most.Got the past several other times but just end up back in the future in about 10 seconds. The Demons Souls style bosses are good. I remember my brother borrowing a friends Mega CD for one weekend with this and Ground Zero Texas. Wow!
Started 2 and my first thought was how much of a drag Metropolis Zone is followed by the dread of realising I’ll have to do the last boss again. I still remember me and one of my brothers talking my mum into getting it in Woolworths because we would share it - so I was Tails. I have never got all the Emeralds in this and I never will.
Not got to 3&K yet so thinking about the ‘good’ stages. Reckon Sandopolis act 2 will be the first thing I think about when I finish 2. Second will be wishing the blue sphere stages were in 50hz. We never owned either of these but I do remember some family friends had them both with cleared games in all the save slots. A better memory is a friend bringing round &K back in the day. He could get to Doomsday zone but not complete it and I did it first time. That’s a good memory. We were still best friends up until his death at 18.
I implore everyone who has not heard the Secret of Mana remake’s music to go to your favorite streaming music stream hellsite and listen to the boss music, where it goes to the natural conclusion of the original’s sonic identity
i bought one of those newer anbernic handhelds recently (the one that looks like a gba SP) and i christened it by finally playing Chrono Trigger for the first time all the way though and the snes jrpg vibes are immaculate. some minimal slogs for grinding but once i got all the characters, it started moving and endgame was so fun
after my time with the Mario RPG remake and now this, i could totally play a remake of CT in that vein with some of those quality of life changes/refreshed look
might continue with the snes jrpg run and do Secret of Mana, a game i have never touched
