My only real issue with the horizon games is the re-balancing patches modifying the physics in ways that subtly screw up my ability to do slide recoveries in cars I’ve already figured out. But its not a game for me. I just want to perfect my lap not wander a map.
3 Likes
I tried to play Siren New Translation on the Playstation Plus Streaming and would you believe a game of all blacks would look like garbage being streamed from a Playstation deep within Sony HQ? I almost want to give RE6 a break from before now that I have a comparative game.
What has captured my brain but not my thumbs is Genji for PS3. That magical era where games didn’t have to be good. It starts promising with these beautiful fire effects as the Heike clan attacks the Genji compound and I realize this game is not about The Tale of Genji. I should really learn the Genji Vs Heike story sometime.
Anyways what I mean by lost era is you’ll have an impressive 5-15 minutes of Cool Video Game at the start followed by doing the worst thing you’ve ever done. Just a very slow second character who can’t do combos walking very slowly down castle corridor grounds trying to find a key, followed by using a girl character with a yoyo and being stuck at a locked door because you’re supposed to go back and check a dead body that doesn’t look like anything, twice.
Like almost any 3D game from 2000-2009 will have this design sensibility and now I am almost nostaglic for it. I wanted to keep playing Genji until the giant enemy crab but this castle section goes on and on and on and let me stress this when you have to fight as anyone that isn’t sword boy it is very bad.
Game Republic, you made them just like everyone else.
12 Likes
Baseball Stars II (NES)
Finally found a baseball game I can fumble my way through and actually sometimes win an exhibition game as the best team vs one of the worst teams, if I get a little lucky. ; D
4 Likes
I am up to the final area (I think) in Narita Boy and there is a downright absurd amount of writing and lore in this game and it is all very “the technolords of the trichroma had to fight off HIM and his crew of stallion fiends to preserve the three beams which protect the source code” and I cannot overstate how little I care about any of it. Whoever made this game clearly cared a ton about it and I kinda resent them for it.
The game also late in the third of four (I think) areas gave you a new dash attack move if you press any direction after dodging while hitting attack. The issue is that you often have to dodge from one side of an attacking enemy to the other so for the whole game this was fine and now if you touch the analog stick during said dodge you’ll do a dash move right back to where you dodged from and will likely eat a hit instead of attacking their rear like intended. I’m not sure I can name another game off the top of my head where a basic maneuver was made noticeably finickier 75% of the way through before.
7 Likes
Oh no. I got gripped by Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth
Halfway through the game does a spoiler thing which rescues it for me.
Splitting the party and having Kiryu leave Ichiban in Hawaii and go back to Yokohama is doing it for me somehow. It starts as Nanba trying to cheer up Kiryu by getting him to do a bucket list and enjoy life before his terminal cancer gets him. It’s quite charming, as bizarre as it is. They even bend possibly the furthest the series has ever gone to justify context. Ichiban sees enemies as a Dragon Quest parody because of his overactive imagination; Kiryu just has cancer hallucinations to explain how this happens without Ichiban present.
One of the side activities is literally just going around and reminiscing about Kiryu’s long and improbable eventful life. Not only stuff from the main plot but notable side stories and minigames as well. It’s a genuinely sweet collectible of the improbably eventful life he’s led. It’s an entertaining canonisation of the main story Kiryu and the sidestory Kiryu. You have conversations with party members in place of Kasuga and most of it is Kiryu saying crazy shit and the party realising they are hanging out with a video game protagonist.
This is a lot better than the runaround in Hawaii. For one, Kiryu’s side of things has a much more straightforward set of activities that aren’t just games unto themselves and feel a lot more achievable. Also, I think I just like running around Yokohama more. I think the road width in America just creates a lot of dead space when travelling.
So yeah, Infinite Wealth just has another JRPG inside of it that I prefer. I really wish they junked the classes from 7 though.
10 Likes
God I want to read that but also don’t
5 Likes
finished Clyde’s Adventure… i guess
…thanks Clyde
(this was just for the second episode, i think my total playtime for both was like 12-13 hours)
this game is simultaneously a lot more interesting and involved than i thought while also not being something i’m sure i could recommend. it’s way more distinctive than Hocus Pocus (Apogee platformer by the some company more people have played), even tho it’s filled with things i’m not really sure you should do. i think i would have given up if i’d try to play casually but it does feel good to have like a mystery of my childhood totally unpacked.
and now i can look forward to the sequel with extremely wacky graphics that also look like it stripped out most of the interesting things about the first game
probably won’t bother to play too far into this tho
12 Likes
I’ve been playing Tritorn because I was depressed and needed something grindy.
Nobody should ever play Tritorn, at least not without rewind and save states. It’s some real bullshit. Hilarious, but real bullshit. Enemies I don’t even get XP for killing will just wipe me out in like five hits. All the power ups are just shit that appears when you beat enough of a single kind of enemy. I have no idea where to even go, lol.
Thanks EGG Console.
9 Likes
I’ll say captainlove doesn’t spoil anything that big story trailer didn’t show.
4 Likes
Cooking Mama 1 on the DS tonight. I am shocked. Mama is intimidating and cooking, tbh, has never felt so stressful. Maybe if Mama ran a restaurant and was training me as her protege but I presume I’m just one of her children she’s teaching in her own kitchen.
None of this is made easier by the finicky controls. I’m an adult and stressed out. Makes me wonder how children might have felt when it came out.
9 Likes
Watching Amelie Doree video essays made me want to dip back into something in the VN realm but maybe something more adult and theme-y. Also this kinda thing gives my hands a break.
The last AVN I played was Kindred Spirits of the Roof back in like 2016 which was alright. Its premise was yuri ghosts from the 50s matchmaking yuri schoolgirls in the present and it was quite long. I had heard buzz about Dead End Aegis a while back, from Doree included, although it mostly seemed to be due to shock value. For whatever reason the premise stayed in my head even though I don’t believe I am the target market for this fetish genre but apparently am for the plot? So yeah, I’m making that argument. This thing has me all over the place with thoughts.
!! CW: NSFW, rape, sexual assault, extreme sexual violence, guro, body dysmorphia !!
Menu sound design already signals I’m probably gonna have a an unpleasant time as the ‘back’ noise is this goopious porngulp. Anyway.
Humanity is spaceborne and one day discovers a hostile alien race near Uranus. This is not played as a joke. The aliens are extraordinarily powerful but their ships are entirely organic and have never established contact of any kind. They are like enormous spaceborne jellyfish. They decimate colonies across the solar system until the government deploys literal magical girls against them. The girls have superpowers strong enough to do extreme amounts of damage (one uses the Earth’s moon in the frontline battle fending off the threat, permanently destroying it).
Over the next decade, all of Earth dedicates a large proportion of its resources to extra-terrestrial military defense spending. Our protagonist Minori is a prospective candidate for becoming a supersoldier, motivated by having been saved by one as a child. Despite being a good candidate, she is socially awkward and has almost no friends and huge self-esteem issues. She gets recruited successfully and sent to the frontlines.
The alien planet is contained in a pocket dimension only accessible through ‘the tube’ where humanity have stationed ONE forward spacebase which is continually under threat but also houses the only weapon (the girls) capable of fighting the aliens. It’s not long before it’s revealed how sinister all the coverups surrounding the situation are. You have an industry of female cadets transported in cryoships to a destination no-one else has any reason to travel to, stationed entirely by men. There are no military police or direct comms to Earth/Solar system and lots of things are classified. I certainly hope no abuses of power are happening.
To get superpowers is an extreme process involving deliberately deceiving the all female cadets into being airdropped onto the alien planet where 1 in 4 will survive being brutally raped by tentacles and being impregnated with an alien organ that somehow gives them superpowers (and magical girl costumes, it’s not super clear why). The ones who break free, fly back, and survive are returned to the station and kept under control through prior conditioning from their training through an alarm system that prevents them using their superpowers against their military captors. Proceed to sexually invasive battery tests checking the interspecies fusion is not going wrong and a ‘hate me if you must’ mea culpa from the male commander.
Men cannot get the powers because no man has ever survived the implantation process. Our gambit is established, even though the deliberate mass murder and bestial rape of hundreds of young women (and men at some point) is unconscionable, there is literally no other way to continue to defend against the alien threat. Aliens are too fast and powerful, and are resistant to all other forms of warfare/tech. This is all kept under wraps from the public for their own morale, the need to recruit (low survival rates are presumed anyway though), and presumably because this allows them to get away with other crimes against humanity.
This trolley problem has drawn comparisons to Warhammer 40K’s emperor though it reminds me of a more extreme version of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, but with hentai. There’s a healthy dose of Christian reference (Space station = Cathedral; Alien planet = Paradise Lost) but it all gets a bit hazy. The illustrations aren’t the worst thing if you’ve ever spent any time on more salacious or shock-factor obsessed parts of the internet. It’s the length of the scenes where things draaaaag out the uncomfortable feeling and it’s the voice acting that really does it. These women are screaming and retching for like 20 minutes straight. It is both an incredible performance and extremely unpleasant. Like I sometimes listen to noise music for fun and can deal with violent scenes, but this is sort of impressively disgusting such that I kinda need to skip ahead.
So, here’s where I’m stuck with it. People are turned on by these scenarios and I’m not gonna judge them. My problem is more formal. The eternal struggle of pornography is one I see as being akin to games where their formal function and their actual semantic content do not often support one another but when they do, they can bolster each other (even though this doesn’t need to happen in all cases). There are also the knife edge cases where sexual assault, or even violent murder can arguably be incorporated into at least interesting pieces that try to say something about the most difficult parts of us without needing to be fun/sex for commercial reasons. I’m not sure where Dead End Aegis falls but I think that is interesting. Its most extreme scenes feel like hobbyist spice challenges that covet the novelty of a billion Scoville pepper, or they’ve simply become numb to other sensation. In some ways I feel a version of the game without explicit scenes would be compelling to read but on the other hand the sex is arguably for the pervs and the morbidly curious since it is part of the plot. I don’t find it arousing so all that remains for me is sex as a thematic point of shame and manipulation in an unusual power [im]balance. At some point, with pornography this extreme, I wonder how much I can enjoy something that isn’t really for me in that way. I find the premise abjectly compelling, and it fails for me as porn, so it makes it hard for me to assess it thoroughly. Why should I? I am probably giving this a lot more thought than I maybe should.
The writing takes time to outline Minori’s own body dysmorphia and aversion to sex and companionship, initially she sees them as stifling her career and its moral character. She is a really sad character because she has ambition in a world which seeks to exploit it in the worst way, and her main redeeming quality is the strength of her hope in adversity. She focuses mainly on survival and thinking through what she can tolerate without giving up and dying. So, it sure does become a pickle when the power of your force-field-generating alien tissue is directly proportional to your horniness. Minori is eventually revealed to be a prodigy in power level terms but sexually repressed which sets up the expected ‘awakenings’ and inherent tension. Either become a sexually depraved living nuke or maintain your dignity and become a war statistic. Heterosexual relationships on the station are basically awful so many of the girls, including Minori, seek refuge in each other as friends and lovers, the only way they can seek companionship that isn’t totally warped and the only time the player really feels happy for her.
The writing gives an appreciable amount of worldbuilding at a pace I find unusual for VNs of this length and questions are regularly answered where other AVNs would probably not bother. After the set-up it’s explained that the magical girls have paranormal senses to ‘see’ great distances and because of their power must normally fly in formations where they are 100 miles apart from each other because collisions are so lethal. The moon’s destruction leads to lunar refugees affecting politics back home. The plot eventually teases a rogue magical girl soldier and what they might do given nobody back home knows the truth. Most magical girls die in their first few years of operation and they’re hinting at something Cronenbergian happening to the ones who are still in service longer than this. The idea of the girls going on strike or staging a mutiny is teased throughout despite the risks it would pose to humanity, you are kept going by wanting to see specifically that happen.
The morality of the core situation is obviously terrible, but the writing does at least reflect this beyond a ‘how horrible’, ‘yes, we love being horrible, ho ho ho, the sex!’ conflict. The dynamics of a forward military base isolated from the rest of humanity are extremely toxic and the writer seems to be tapping into the historical problems the culture of the military causes due to gender segregation in the military. This kind of stuff raises its head even when not locked in the depths of space.
Minori is written to be outspoken and rightly appalled by what is happening. She attempts to report sexual assaults and racist abuse, and objects to general conduct on the station and even when she starts to get Stockholmed, gaslit, and manipulated she still clings to the idea of reporting every crime after the war is over. This is the most relatable the game gets for me as someone who works in an organisation that is constantly doing the wrong thing and won’t listen to my constant objections (in one case actually trying to improve reporting mechanisms for students dealing with sexual assault). The sexual assault claims are thrown out due to the limited personnel being required at all times due to no easy way to replace staff. Though it’s largely due to everyone being all in on perpetuating hell to shakily justify the war effort. There’s enough to have some arguably interesting discussion about the toxicity of military ethic in places with no oversight or how negative self-perception meshes with motivation to blindly follow your idols. I am frequently reminded of what happened in Sandhurst, as inappropriate as it may be to draw the link.
Remaining chaste and resisting horny urges in the first couple of choices means you eventually die a horrible guro death against the aliens and the moral of the story is that getting horny in the worst way is the survival route.
I think what also keeps it interesting for me is my continued interest in fiction about superpowered humans in an otherwise realist moral world of great stakes, the stuff that gives you a pit in your stomach because they are partially cosmic horror. Watchmen, Akira, Miracleman, The Lathe of Heaven, It’s a Good Life… These generally tend to be most successful when exploring the sudden upending of power to one group or another rather than only an excuse to see what kind of violence (or sex) is possible in such a world. I have not read/seen The Boys or Invincible and maybe I should. People apparently want to see horrible things happen as a result of abuses of power in fiction. Maybe because violent parody of Superman is easy edgy but maybe there’s more to it.
If I play more, it’s gonna be a question of stomach.
8 Likes
Through copious use of save states and rewind, I fucking beat Tritorn.
Did I have to go find some old style Japanese FAQs to figure some stuff out at the end? Yes, because this game is silly bullshit. But I did it. So enjoy this end screen, which is the only time the game gets a second song instead of the ten second loop that plays the rest of the time.
12 Likes
I like how when you said twenty minutes of women suffering horribly voice acting I immediately thought of the gerogerigegege and then right after you mentioned noise music (they have a bunch of albums of porn clips of women having an awful time)
4 Likes
How is Yokohama after being to Yokohama?
2 Likes
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is such a weird game. It directly references The Sands of Time, so I guess it must take place directly after it?
The writing sucks though. Very “well that just happened” and other snark. Maybe it was more fresh in 2010.
The puzzles and traversal stuff is good, though! Like, the gimmick of “freeze water to swing off a spout, unfreeze it to pass through a sheet of water, run up the wall, refreeze the sheet of water, and jump to and run up that” is good, that’s not bad.
I am kinda curious about the other versions of the game. Sounds like they use different powers and abilities for slightly different versions of the plot. I feel like I remember the Wii version being particularly well received.
I dunno. It is “totally OK.” I’m probably more than halfway through, I’ll probably finish it in the next day or two and completely forget about it. And…that’s fine I guess.
7 Likes
It reminds me of right wingers asking « would you say the n-word to save the world » = extremely far-fetched scenarios to justify bad things that (transparently) appeal to the authors
3 Likes
looking at the staff, this has the same main artist/character designer as gore screaming show, and he also has some undefined script writing part in dead end aegis.
in gss he was also a script writer, but only on the porn scenes, which were terrible, regardless of content, because he spends almost all the textboxes typing out moans and screams rather than anything descriptive and i’m so annoyed at having to scroll through all of that
3 Likes
I never reported on my summer Wii retrospective. I played Endless Ocean, Sin & Punishment Star Successor, Crystal Bearers, and Little King’s Story. I’m holding off on Opoona until I can apply the re localization patch.
Sin & Punishment was far more exciting than I had remembered it. I had owned it since 2010, but I never got a feel for the action. Turns out the action isn’t that complicated. I might have been trying to play it like an arcade game, treating Continues as verboten. It’s not an arcade game and they let you continue for a reason. I adored the variety in each stage and buffet of Treasure gimmicks.
Crystal Bearers is an excellent 6.5 game. You will know if you love it at first sight. There are so many little details you can notice by constantly grabbing and yanking. There is no grinding. You just hang out.
Endless Ocean made a fantastic first impression, but it wore off a bit as I realized out as not going to give me as much as Ever Blue. “I can’t wait to tell my friends how happy I feel.” “Diving with you, I am so grateful to be alive.” Yes, this is the power fantasy I am looking for.
Little King’s Story is another spectacular 6.5 game, even more tailored to my taste. It’s sort of like Pikmin meets ActRaiser. There’s an ambition to squash the engine into different genre shapes. It reminds me of Psychonauts in that way. Your quest is to conquer various kingdoms. Each king has their own theme. There’s a drunk, a glutton, a TV-set, etc. The TV king challenges you to a world geography-based game of hide and seek. The glutton turns into a pinball that you have to launch into a fork. The cutscenes were bonkers and beautiful.
17 Likes
Tiny Tina Wonderlands caught me off guard with how many of the NPCs are female, but eventually I figured it out. All the NPC actors in the game are doing Ashly Burch impressions, because Tina is the game’s DM and voicing all the characters.
The original Borderlands is still a game I find interesting, mostly because of the two different versions of the game that are fighting with each other. I like the idea that the rest of the universe in Borderlands is a normal sci-fi universe, and there’s just something about Pandora that makes people weird.
I always remember my original experience finishing Borderlands. The premise of the game is that there’s a vault on the planet that has treasure, and the entire game is spent opening boxes and stealing people’s shit. So you eventually open the vault, and the only thing in the vault is a big squid that’s going to eat the galaxy. You kill the squid, and in the original version of the game, it just drops loot from the normal enemy drop-table, i.e., trash. There’s no material reward for finishing the game.
Anyways at some point between that version and “GOTY Enhanced” they added 8 treasure chests that show up after you kill the squid.
12 Likes
Today I played Hydrophobia: Prophecy. Don’t make my mistake.
4 Likes