I am young Bayonetta, proud navigator of inscrutable PS2 maps and I refuse to do your tedious time trials bookended by huge load times.
I will do the final secret boss and that’s it!
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(Took a quick look at the input timing for the two-button attack in TMNT JP actual arcade version and it just seems to want a rather precisely timed simultaneous two-button press. So, pretty easy to whiff, gargh.)
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real boring non-phone video games:
that there Visions of Mana demo: this seems like a good game? they built nice, sizeable areas to run around in and brought back mounts (which are cute wolves instead of a chocobo with rockets grafted onto its legs) and the combat seems actually balanced by default instead of being a cakewalk until new difficulties get patched in 6 months later after somehow selling a million copies (Trials). looks nice, sounds nice, pretty much my only complaint is the cutscenes look like they were all mocapped by insane people
Marvel Rivals beta thing: this is Overwatch except without 8 years of cruft and also seemingly 8 years of balance lessons
no, I think it’s cool that Magneto becomes a harbinger of death against the backline if someone else on the team picks Scarlet Witch, tanks should just be able to two-shot supports. I sincerely like the relative lack of crowd control but also hey that means dive comps are kinda strong? I love that Adam Warlock brought back Mercy’s old ult where she hides like a scared child and waits for the team to wipe and then brings everyone back and the fight resets except he can also throw hands
I like it but it’s gonna be fun watching balance shake out once this goes wide. and it has everyone’s favorite Marvel character, Jeff the land shark. you know, Jeff! everyone knows Jeff!
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Q*bert (NES)
The title screen of this US-only port by Konami seems to imply that they owned the Q*bert trademark and copyright but that doesn’t seem to be the case as far as I can tell: Columbia held the rights, and Sony, who still holds them, acquired them in the same year in which this port came out. It was the last version of Q*bert produced for 10 years.
You can remap the directional inputs but my orthogonal brain gets horribly confused by this UI so I just skip through it and rotate the pad 45 degrees clockwise. 8P
Got this version because unlike all the others I know of, the screen does NOT flash bright green when Q*bert jumps on a disc. So my crusty ol’ eyes can actually play it. (On the other hand, it doesn’t have the gibberish speech samples when Q*bert croaks or whatever.)
So I got further than I ever have–not that far–and eh eventually you get to stages where if you jump too many times on a cube, its color cycles BACK to the original color, so you have to jump on it AGAIN; but then you also probably had to jump too many times on the ones around it, so~~~
And the FAQ says eventually there are stages where you can accidentally cycle the cubes back through THREE colors. : P
And of course there’s that little green jerk who hops down from the top, reverting all the cube colors it touches. ; PPP
This game is mean. = ooo
3rd hardest game on NES? The Electric Frankfurter: The Top 30 Hardest NES Games Ever. Conclusion (#2 Starship Hector, #1 Ikari Warriors)?
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Played a lot of Flipwitch, a game someone pointed out to me a while ago that you should only look up at home, curtains drawn, when the kids are asleep (it’s a game for parents that love each other very much).
Jokes aside, the horny stuff is whatever. The art design is pretty good (it’s so damn colorful, too! Just a lot of bold neons and stuff), the gameplay ain’t too bad. It’s maybe a touch floaty in that way that makes some of the platforming have a sort of, uh, “should I be able to make that jump, or when I made it that one time did I just sort of clip onto there.” Combat is pretty challenging - you don’t do a ton of damage, but you do take a lot, so it’s a lot of rolling and positioning and taking the swipes you can.
So far a lot of the game is just doing side quests for various NPCs, backtracking all over the map and then uhhhhh uhhhhh ʸᵒᵘ ᵍᵉᵗ ᶠᵘᶜᵏᵉᵈ ᵃˢ ᵃ ʳᵉʷᵃʳᵈ.
Anyway other than that I’ve broken up sessions of that game with more Arkham Asylum (god the writing in this gets worse every time I play it) and Yakuza 4. I hooked my Steam Deck up to my TV and tried to play Hitman and it sounded like it wanted to die. Kinda ran like it, too. Y4 ran great, though.
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you did that’s why I specified that I was talking about the nes game, also I could tell from the graphics
the two button attack doesn’t stun them in the nes version either, they just have a second where they’re in an OOF animation and you just loop jump kicks for this. the two button attack on bosses is not something I ever do you just seemed to want to do it
also dive kicking just kicks ass
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Yeah in the NES version I jump kicked so much I felt kind of embarrassed about it later. ;=D
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I beat Double Dragon 2 NES back in the day spamming the Spin Kick/Hyper Knee.
No shame, no guilt, just Turbo Rapid Fire baby!
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And yeah I also jump kicked non-stop in TMNT Arcade NES. Oh the repetitive mundanity we had time for in the 80’s/90’s.
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I blame owning this specific version of Q*Bert as a child for my lifelong disinterest in arcade games as “engines of continuous frustration.” It’s an unfair characterization, not least because this is an NES game, but I can’t get over it.
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I think it is a fairly faithful reproduction of the arcade version’s gameplay, so I don’t know if it was that unfair. (I have not looked into a comparison of the two at all–but the NES version’s FAQ refers liberally to the arcade version’s FAQ as having completely relevant information.)
And yeah after playing this I was thinking gosh you know I think I like games where you’re always making at least tiny bits of incremental progress ^ _^ rather than being able to like, lose progress like you can here with colors getting flipped back. ; D (And like being able to lose rank in Virtua Fighter Quest modes–fear of that used to put me off playing those modes entirely. ; ))
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DD2 for NES is kind of a jerk of a game–stick it to it as much as possible, I say.
Now if you spammed elbow through DD1, that might be a bit sketchy. ; )
(Or wait, actually it’s been so long I can’t remember if elbow is cheap in the NES version. I don’t even remember at what level you DO get the elbow. Do you get the elbow? Oh heck well I actually have a cart of NES DD1 on its slow way to me (why did the last 4 games I got off eBay all have to come from GA/FL ie max continental distance??) so hopefully I’ll be jogging my memory soon.)
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this is a very interesting thing i think
i don’t think you are unique in this reaction, and the concern has a relatively understandable shape even to those who don’t share it
like, the reaction is such that it suggests parameters for engaging in the broader (videogame) category of play in the first place, involving perhaps-unspoken expectations, and when those parameters are violated, the compact as a whole is broken and the result is a total rejection of the game/mode/etc.
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Flicky (Genesis - ROM from “uncompressed ROMs” folder installed by “SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics” on Steam)
Wikipedia says Sega of Japan was originally going to call Flicky “Busty” until Sega USA explained to them that maybe that wasn’t appropriate. Then they were gonna name it “Flippy” but evidently shame about that being too close to the Namco game they were intentionally ripping off, Mappy, led them to change a few more of the letters around.
The tiny sprites don’t impress initially but with the slightly glidey movement, score-chaining of the chicks you’re rescuing, and constant pursuit of hefty time bonuses, it’s got that “one more go” thing.
The main game is simpler than Mappy and I dunno that it’s better, but I definitely like Flicky’s bonus stages–catching chicks–for some reason launched from teeter-totters by cats–in a butterfly net–better than Mappy’s trampoline mazes with their nebulous timed deadlines.
Not too fond of the awkwardly drawn small lizard who comes along after a while; they can run along both the tops and bottoms of the platforms, then drop down right onto you, and it feels like they move just a BIT too fast to react to. Or maybe I just have to get good, I dunno. But dang them lizzies.
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I keep coming back to this thought. The battle system is unusual but pressing the buttons doesn’t feel particularly good. It does have Square PS1 energy. We gotta make it different.
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I’ve got a whole post in me about the taxonomy of toys and games versus what normally gets held up as signs of quality design, but I’m at an Earth Wind & Fire concert at the moment, so it’s going to have to wait.
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I used to go to earth wind and fire concerts like once a year when I was a kid cuz they always played free shows at the santa Cruz beach boardwalk (gotta be there… hey!)
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Tried The World is Your Weapon and this game absolutely delivers on its dumb premise
Even though the whole premise is you can equip absolutely everything as a weapon, there were still things I passed by 10 times before thinking of equipping it as a weapon
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Yeah. I remember 5 being a Dark Souls Big Club girl within a game engine absolutely not made for Dark Souls Big Club. It’s still sort of enjoyable in its own way
I remember the characters shockingly well considering how little I played of the game which really does speak of its strength. Going from memory:
- Ace : Card throwing blonde guy, feels too complicated, he’s doing the Kingdom Hearts card deck battle system nonsense, also the character you start with
- Jack : Katana joker guy, extremely slow, you have to just roll around all the time to move, does humongous damage and can bait for counters for even more damage
- Queen : Valedictorian glasses girl with a sword, can use the Queen’s Cross which is a huge light cross rotating around her, this restores MP right?
- King : Super tall punk kid with a mullet, stays in place and shoots with his 2x handguns, hell yes
- 2 : Flute girl, looks like a healer but she can absolutely wreck foes with the flute
- 3: I forgot
- 4: Halle Berry girl, has elemental guns, can shoot while moving around, feels way too mobile for the game, hard to go back to other characters afterwards
- 5: Aforementioned Dark Souls Big Club ditz blondie
- 6: Interchangeable white hair girl, has FFXIII Lightning energy plus a chain sword, she can use the chain sword like a hookshot and other nonsense
- 7: Interchangeable white hair girl, more of a goth + has a scythe
- 8: short hair punching guy, good but you can bet hit detection is going to be a pain
- 9: can’t remember
- Machina: they ran out of card names. Machina is an uncharismatic protagonist but he uses dual drill swords and can just keep holding the attack button to continuously drill the enemy
- Rem : Extremely Squaresoft 00s girl protagonist, also the black mage
Edit: I forgot the shy bow guy and cocky dragoon, I still remember this cast better than Persona 4’s which I played 10x more and is all about character interactions
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It’s really dumb and I cannot reasonably explain it, but having a Steam Deck has suddenly made my Steam library “real” in a way I guess it hasn’t been all these years prior. Console kid brain, I guess…
(There’s also something to be said for the Deck being a, uh, let’s call it a “Steam Machine,” to dust that term off. Easier to play games when I’m not glancing at Discord or whatever constantly.)
Found out last night that if I really don’t care about battery life, I can turn on basic ray tracing for Hitman, which looks great. Grinding out levels on the Bangkok hotel level, which continues to grow on me. It’s got some irritating bottlenecks, and the change they made a while back to nix the easily accessible security computer blows, but it’s alright…
Also dabbled some with The Saboteur. Took a little doing to get the controls working, and it has a weird thing where you can set it to the Deck’s native res, but it defaults to 720p letterboxed because of the refresh rate. I’d rather keep it at 60 FPS, so 720p it is.
Was reminded this was one of EA’s “Project $10” games in the saddest of ways (some games net you extra missions or whatever for buying new/paying $10, The Saboteur…lets the strippers in the cabaret be topless. I think that’s it.)
Game is OK, I guess. Still too early on to say, probably not much further into it than when I played it years ago. The “stark black and white with glowing red Nazi armbands and flags that gives way to full color when you liberate an area” is still a neat effect.
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