I spent way too many hours over the past two days beating the knight’s story in Treasure of the Rudras. It’s not exactly a good game, but it sure has a lot of very high quality Content. Character designs are charming and have diverse silhouettes, and the boss spirites are peak religo-magi-tech nonsense. It would have been a lot of people’s childhood favorite if it had somehow been localized on release.
The syllable-based magic system is clumsy, opaque, and arbitrary in a way that feels just right for the experience of learning magic (i.e., kinda bad but edifying). You, the player, gather new spells by observing enemies, reconstructing damaged inscriptions from dungeons, and trusting what random townsfolk tell you. There’s very little indication whether you’re doing it right or wrong.
It’s a game that is totally, permanently ruined by spoilers and obviously made to be talked about on the playground. With that in mind, you should know HORNIHIMEL drops a building on enemies and I thought I saw a monster use MOENPERV but it didn’t work right when I tried.
The kings of the meh adventure. If you sit down one day and are like “man I want to play some point n clicks”, they’re fine.
Primordia is a standout imo, it’s definitely their best I’ve played. I checked their wikipedia and they’ve made like five more games since I last tried them, including this burrow thing, but it seems like they’re as mid as ever.
Yeah I have it not quite as bad as you; I have to avoid the vast majority of shmups but I’m okay with this one as long as I don’t run into like the electric skybeams in stg 1 and a couple later sections, which trigger a color strobe in the sky. = P
been meaning to try this for ages, finally did and i love how it feels! unfortunately i’m not a fan of the proc gen structure of it all… i mean it’s fine and had me hooked for a while, but i would have loved some hand crafted levels with an actual campaign to follow. maybe they are in here and i just havent dug deep enough yet
Oh that’s intriguing! I play most games in Mednafen with tblur at 90–99 depending on the game, but that tends to turn shmups into swirly soup where you can’t really make out the bullets. With Abarenbou Tengu I have tried playing it a bit with tblur on just as a test, and I did manage to turn the blur down some without ill effects, but then I saw that skylight strobe and it deterred me from turning it down any further. It’s neat to know that the rest of the game is less hazardous—maybe I should try playing some of the other stages and lowering the blur more. It’s kind of scary to even attempt though some things will do it to me so fast that even if I close my eyes right away it’s still too late, and shmups are probably the biggest offender honestly. I guess you probably remember me talking about this more around the time I first joined the forum
I’ve thought of playing that game for ages on account of being Square’s last turn-based SFC RPG! And because of the wacky magic system. It’s neat to hear some things about it—I imagine it must have a certain amount of historical interest as a kind of bridge between their SNES and PSX eras. Sometimes I think of playing all of their games between Secret of Mana and FF VIII or so in chronological order to get more of a sense of what was going on for them at that time. They have this charmingly quixotic quality in that period of striving kind of desperately to be on the “bleeding edge of RPGs” in ways that aren’t always that practical or functional but are often novel and interesting.
Yeah hitting the effect triggered by a hit from the electric beams is the only strobing I remember/noticed, although I could have missed/forgot something; each stage has I think some sort of timed beams that triggers that strobe if you run into them (and the sudden massive health loss it signals); hm you do get that health loss if you get crushed into the left side of the screen by cliffs or something in stage 2 or so but I THINK that just flashes your character sprite, not the whole screen.
The only other thing that stands out for sure in my daffy head is there’s a waterfall you fly past for a while in a cave in maybe the last level or so and the waterfall animation means the screen is a bit color cycle-y, in effect–but it’s not nearly as bad as a strobe.
Looks like Tale Of Immortal on Switch actually got a patch today that fixed a lot of the performance issues so i was finally able to get through the stairway to heaven without the game crashing.
Now I’ve broken through to Soul Formation, which allowed me to gain an ability that only the truly wise and enlightened can possibly achieve: the ability to defecate elixirs and reuse them.
Not sure how much further I’ll get in this game though, I’m already neck deep in Shadow of the Erdtree and SaGa Emerald Beyond.
Still chipping away at Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth. Jobs and new party members are sustaining me but I’m not sure what they’re going for here. It’s a mix of Hawaii-specific jobs, mundane jobs, and professional sports. There’s a lot of overlap in some of the archetypes which makes branching out feel redundant as well but the stat inheritance is a necessary evil.
To be fair the game loop is pretty compelling but Dodonko and Sujimon are a bit too sweaty as side ventures to me. Seems like the dungeons might actually be the best way to make money/grind simultaneously but I do miss a simple money minmax minigame like the business empire one in 7. These dungeons are really basic. The plot also just isn’t keeping me on board in the middle part. I might take another hiatus until I’m in the mood.
I think having and improving a single character is more fun compared to the way party-character progression works in the RPG LADs. Characters just don’t feel distinct enough to me.
SAME, and also you should check out the user-created levels, it might scratch your itch for those hand-crafted levels that you’re looking for! there’s one that’s essentially a bike park that was really fun, i did so many runs down it
i actually gave up on Corn Kidz because the item requirements to move to the next area at the top of the inside of the tree were so strict and i didn’t want to scour every part of the level for more hours just to move on. i still think it’s the most interestingly designed of those 64 platformers by far, but maybe the way to spiritual salvation isn’t through N64 nostalgia platformers after all. much to consider…
yeah, i liked that it had an actual sensibility and it didn’t do anything specifically i found annoying, so it was weird that like… just the feeling of controlling a perpetually bouncing little cartoon guy in areas with the spacious feeling of old n64 levels but with like 20% more fussiness in every platforming requirement, would gradually make me feel on edge. if i wanted to be a design pedant i’d say maybe that mixture of tightness and sprawl was something i found hard to get a handle on but i also wondered if i’d just played too many of these things at the time and my body was rejecting them… i think more than anything the n64 resemblances were claustrophobic to me rather than inviting, even though they seemed more thoughtful than most of the mascot platformer callback things in tying them to the scene kid / mtn dew / smalltown nowhere zone aesthetics
i think Corn Kidz was way more snappy and interesting as a sort of hyper detailed sandbox and had far more of its own design identity than Cavern of Dreams, which was more of a “i’m not sure why this exists” even tho that weirdly had some really good visuals in parts. but both inevitably made me ask “maybe you all like the late 90’s a little too much?” which is where i’ve been at with a lot of this stuff lately (retro fps games, indie immersive sims, resi clones, etc as well)
There is a lot of tutorial text and it isn’t bad but I sure felt like it would be way less fatiguing and the actual character dialogue way more notable if all the how-to shit was way more dry and plainly written, that’s my thought on CornKidz
Also when I see the “box art” in my Steam library it makes me not want to play it at all, that’s my biggest issue with the game, seeing the art (sorry, not to my tastes, it looks good in-game!!)
it’d been a few years since i beat Castlevania: Bloodlines (not since i played it, just since i’d made a concerted effort to finish it), so i decided to fire that up last night on the Genesis. it really is one of the strongest titles in the series, and i still enjoy it as much as i did when i was a kid. i think this game also really benefits being run through composite - makes all the lighting effects and other gimmicks a lot more effective, and gives the sprite work a rounded, bulbous kind of depth. Bloodlines feels more like Castlevania 1 to me than almost any other game in the series.
i also love how it has my favorite rendition of “Theme of Simon” that is only in one area that lasts for about 5 seconds, so to hear the song, you’d have to purposely just stop and wait to listen to it.
before that, though, i put in some time with Alien Soldier. i’ve never beaten this game - i only ever really tried to get good at it back in college, ages ago, but still only got good enough to understand the basics. i made it to the sewers this time around, but i feel like maybe i can get better at this game if i put in some work every day. will i? well, i still have some weeks of summer left…
wadjet eye games were noteworthy back in the late 00s because the lucasarts/sierra style graphical adventure game was all but dead and the games they put out at least had a passing resemblance to those games. The feeling I had back then was “that wasn’t so bad, maybe they’ll improve the next game and I can actually recommend this to people” but it seems like they hit a plateau of quality and nothing they put out was ever better or worse than anything else.
Going crazy trying to knock out the last few mastery levels in Colorado in Hitman. Doing challenges I haven’t done in the 8 years I’ve played it (did you know you can put on the scarecrow outfit and snipe four bells hidden on the map and be able to walk around setting everyone on fire? I didn’t!), still falling short. Do I need the final unlocks? Especially when one is “a giant block of C4 that blows up a whole room and I’ll never use it”? No. But also yes.
Doesn’t matter, next level is Hokkaido, “The Best One.”
some things will do it to me so fast that even if I close my eyes right away it’s still too late, and shmups are probably the biggest offender honestly. I guess you probably remember me talking about this more around the time I first joined the forum 
