despite thinking the game itself mediocre and repetitive i can’t help but keep playing totk, and keep getting lost in finishing random quests, upgrading bits of armor and exploring parts of the map i haven’t been to yet, despite the reward usually being very thin. i’m like 90% of the way too, since the literal last and only remaining item on my main quest list is to walk to the spot in the depths below hyrule castle and kick some ganondorf ass.
i just find the game kind of dull in general but also can’t stop playing it and that has never happened to me before, it has to be some sort of testament to how enjoyable the meat and potatoes of the traversal gameplay is. i think i also keep delaying the inevitable bc i feel like i’m never gonna replay this thing so i want to be as thorough as possible in this playthrough.
Getting back into magical drop III, reading about the competitive tech and watching videos. I can see a path to competency which is a new thing for me in a VS game.
When you get a match you send junk to the opponent.
Junk patterns are not just for challenge mode. Each character has a junk pattern they lay down when you get a combo. Patterns with more pointed areas are more likely to end the other player’s game. I had been practicing with what turned out to be a high level character so I feel like I need to start over with someone less aggressive.
Junk lines scale with rapidly decreasing returns. Frequent 2x combos are actually the best as they produce 4 lines of junk. But if you can get to a 6x you deploy frozen junk which is at least a little harder to clear. Anything over 6 is a waste.
I struggle to not go for a 3x or 4x so i need to reprogram some of my panic / flow routines.
I really need a better stick. than my mayflash. Or at least I need to put better guts in it. I have a sanwa in my sega stick but it bounces more than the mayflash garbage. If I can dampen the sanwa I think Ill have an easier time.
I don’t know why no one has a jog wheel controller for magical drop. It seems like it would be incredibly formidable.
Practicing at work raises my typing speed.
This game does have a small scene and people play it at fighting game events.
This just seems like Slay the Spire if everything was worse in every way unfortunately.
Runs take hours…
Negotiating as an alternative to fighting seems nice, but in practice it just means having to handle a second deck. In a roguelike. God.
Storyline throughout a run just doesn’t mesh well with the roguelike format. My attention is all on getting through a run, I don’t want to get distracted by dialogue. Feels like Hades had the right idea by frontloading all the story in a run.
And there’s random damage on cards… why…
Mario 3D world
Mario Maker 2 conflated Mario 3D World stuff within the (IMO very uncool) New Mario style, and I think this made me avoid 3D World for a while. But it’s actually pretty good. The Cat Suit as a central gameplay mechanic is much better balanced than the tanooki suit from 3D Land, which made me feel like I was noclipping through levels
I wish there was a way to disable the point tally at the end of every level + crown for the player with most points. This only works with players around the same skill level.
I’m getting annoyed thinking about the probably 10000+ jerks who played with their inexperienced close family and friends and still aimed for max points everytime and got the crown every single level until everybody else stopped playing
Tunic
I should have listened to the SB hivemind. I hate this Andrew Garfield in Under the silver lake shit
i slayed the High Dragun in Enter the Gungeon!! wheee!!
a lot of my win was thanks to the Hyper Light Blaster which only has 12 (powerful) shots but replenishes 1 every time you land a hit. The Dragun is basically impossible to miss cuz shes so hueg so i just didnt have to worry about managing my ammo for the whole fight, could focus on the crazy bullet patterns. and my character. its less relevant for Dragun cuz the screen zooms out for the fight, but i got sooo much better at this game once i turned off aimlook and just honed in on my character lol…
I still dont love the bosses in this game (Dragun is pretty cool, Beholster, Gatling Gull are pretyy cool and fair… the rest are cool but kinda bullshit) but its fun enough that ive apparently put near 200 hours in it lol oh no. Thanks for reminding me how short life is Steam. I will try to at least unlock the extra characters cuz they sound fun
I’ve been playing Narita Boy on and off for the past few days when not slowly picking away at Paper Mario (up to chapter 5 and I can sort of mindlessly pick away at it) and… I was always interested because I thought it looked neat, I know many are tired of that aesthetic but this seems to be a better executed example of it with some neat designs and choices in that regard sprinkled about. The issue is that it’s not a very good game at all, I was hoping for bog standard simply to not getting in the way of taking the world in but every aspect has issues that sort of feed into one another. The world has a serious issue in terms of legibility (especially with climbable surfaces which are often needed to get to important keys) but also has some real bad intended pathing where you walk back and forth between a couple places, so it becomes hard to tell whether you are missing a way forward or are supposed to just go wander back the way you came. Combat isn’t great but generally neither is moving through the world, your guy has too much inertia to the degree that I died several times trying to jump through a simple “gap-platform-gap” sequence as I couldn’t land on said platform. There is also a ton of talking and it is all very in universe and eye-rolling.
It also has an unskippable intro bit that takes I’d wager a good 40 seconds to get through each time one loads it up.
The problem is I keep playing it because it isn’t supposed to be too long and it does look neat if perhaps specifically designed to trigger photosensitivity reactions in people. I’d recommend others be wiser than me.
long hallways filled with, uh, small rooms. these rooms could be empty. they could be pitch black. they could have encounters with mid-high level enemies. or they could have pits that hurt the whole party. a few of them are teleporters. i will explore the rest of the center once one of my mages actually gets a teleporter spell, so i don’t get stuck.
Finished Arkham Asylum for the who knows how many-eth time.
I think my enthusiasm for the story and whatnot has Bruce waned significantly over the years, but going through it yet again, I’m still impressed at just how jam packed the levels and areas are, how much they sort of shift and change with the events of the story.
Wildly anticlimactic ending, though. The bad Poison Ivy boss fight into some combat gauntlets and then the terrible Joker fight.
I ran around for a bit collecting the Riddler stuff but figured, nah. Nah. Why. I’ve done it before. I’m good.
“Grandpa you’re free now you can play something new, or one of those games you were almost done wi-”
Went right into Arkham City. Gameplay feels so much better, snappier, but then you get the unnecessarily huge world, only made worse with Knight.
Oh well!
Other than that it’s the same ol’ same ol’. Hitman, Dorf Romantik.
Tried the Kunitsugami: Path of the Goddess demo and I really misjudged it. For some reason I initially assumed it was multiplayer when it was first revealed and later thought it would be a tedious strategy game that required too much fiddly micro but it’s kinda nice. I like that there’s no dialogue. There’s very small-scale levels and a tight focus on an unusual goal. The PS2 energy sustains me. Has there been a bit of a resurgence of this but in a less bombastic way than the usual retro framing? Inscrutable UI, an abundance of fonts, and all-in on a conceptual core. You don’t seem to have to be particularly adept at combat but more just gelling with the whole system, it kinda feels like filtering lanes of balloons for popping, and you can control a central popperman and station weaker poppermen around the area. Dang it I might have to get it.
i had the shareware of this game Clyde’s Adventure growing up and it always intrigued (and terrified) me. it’s sort of a 2d platformer puzzle game for DOS where you have to collect all the gems and a treasure in each level but you have a limited amount of energy to do so. also levels are filled with random traps and Deus Ex Machinas there just to fuck with you. my 7 year old brain was not prepared for this, but my 37 year old brain is prepared to this after playing tons of Trackmania and getting used to have to optimize every single movement for being able to successfully complete a track without wiping out. it’s similar here - any wrong move can easily fuck you in many different ways.
the shareware episode is mostly doable though for someone who isn’t a child who just wants to jump around and shoot things outside of the surprisingly difficult first level. unsurprisingly, the extra retail episode is way harder and some levels really really test your ability to optimize every single moment and not make a single mistake. it feels very much like adulthood, in this fact.
anyway my ulterior motive for finally playing through all of this game is that i’m thinking of starting some kind of youtube series for weird niche games that have stuck with me over the years (and perhaps other media?) so i figured i’d at least finally give this whole game a go and capture some footage since it’s relatively low stakes to do so and wouldn’t be a bad test run first episode. so maybe… stay tuned in the coming months for more about this?
Clyde has officially entered evil mode. this level caused me great trauma. you literally had to move perfectly in it as far as i could tell, with basically no room to spare. you can screw yourself in this game by even running into a wall too much and zapping your energy. not to mention falling and slapping your ass on the ground zaps 10 energy, one of the worst culprits. i’ve had to resort to a walkthrough now a lot more than i’d like to find some of the more obscure locations i just assumed you would not need to find by trial and error. and even one youtube walkthrough of this game just decides to turn on cheats sometimes (i have yet to resort to using any cheats though). this is true DOS gaming.
most of the way through the second episode i suddenly realized that you could scroll down on the list of castles and witness that each episode has, in fact, double the number of castles that i thought and i need to go back and finish the shareware episode now. i’m assuming that it won’t be as bad but we’ll see. i’m now feeling slightly ill at the prospect of turning this game footage into something. i’m going to have to think long and hard about whether or not i wanna put myself through this when it’s all over. maybe not all of us are cut out for making edited youtube videos.
also this game sure does have some incredibly sparkly areas in it (CW: flashing lights)
went to the LI Retro Games fest this past weekend for like an hour due to circumstances too dumb to recount here, but i picked up some stuff while i was there (will only talk about what i’ve played):
Akumajou Dracula (FDS) - always wanted this version; i think Castlevania 1 with a save feature is a much more humane game, plus you get a little bonus song on the file select screen. i beat it once, beat it on hard, and now starting my third playthrough. hard mode is pretty funny; i’d never tried it before, but if you love bats and medusa heads, this is the version for you because they’re everywhere and even in places where they didn’t used to be. makes the game feel a lot more like an arcade game, tbh.
The Match of the Milennium: SNK vs Capcom (NGPC) - game is great; previous owner unlocked everything but i decided yesterday that i need to delete all their shit and start over bcause it’s my game, now. it plays more competently than most 2D handheld fighters i’ve put my hands on and the sprite work is really expressive and fun. also seems like it’s loaded up with systems and choices and styles, another unusual thing for a handheld fighter.
i also picked up a CIB copy of the Wonderswan port of Final Fantasy IV because it was like $30, but i probably won’t play it very much because finding a good light source by which to play a Wonderswan is tough in my apartment. beautiful box/objet d’art, though.
