games you played today chronicles X: ten things I played about you

[captainlove]

@Rudie

How is Yokohama after being to Yokohama?

It feels smaller lol. Seriously, I think I’ve got a new appreciation for how it lines up but am stuck in the South half of the map. Enemies are level-gating me from the Yamashita Park bit and Chinatown but I wanna do a full tour. It’s more clearly sutured together like Kamurocho and I think they capture Yokohama’s more laidback vibe well even though my experience of it is just the one trip (so far!).

Kamurocho, I’ve now noticed, doesn’t have some of the subtle slopes and inclines in real life Kabukicho presumably for general level design reasons in early RGG games.

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@Tuxedo

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

I don’t know much about the team but it often has that vibe. They go to great lengths ramming the point home which is why I hope it would end up doing something subversive and dismantling the whole gambit (they do foreshadow it a little) but I am not sure if the target market are interested in a ‘good end’.

@aislesgrises

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

I’m not sure if they had a hand in the scenarios but this same thing is present throughout DEA. It’s partially why I skip so much of it. Annoyingly some of the actual lore nuggets are tucked away in these scenes between walls of ‘hiiii’ and ‘haaa’

[Rudie]

PS Plus has given me the bounty of Lords of Shadow 2 and I again wonder how this streaming service works. Despite being Akumamajou 2 whatever it was completely in English for me which means the computer or ps3 in Sony HQ is reading my console settings. You can earn trophies in these games but they don’t show up on your stats.

LoS2 is a completely baffling game. I heard heard it was open world but in my two hours of playing I constantly as they say in Kingdom Hearts “cross the street” to trigger another cutscene that usually transported me to a new location and you wonder why they wasted money on an intersticial locale.

They announce WELCOME TO LORDS OF SHADOWS 2 COMBAT TUTORIAL and if I’d been drinking a drink I would have destroyed my television. In this tutorial which over explains basic concepts but under explains video game bullshit (you have to hit L3 to collect red orbs to use your magic weapons but only get Red orbs if you are very good at the combat (f that.))

It also quotes SotN twice for absolutely no reason outside of REFERENCE. I am glad Dracula is just a big dumb himbo who is just good at hitting stuff and being told to infilitrate a pharmaceutical company to find Satan’s Acolyte to then be immediately teleported into Dracula’s Castle as his mind palace so he can talk to the son who he never raised because he became Dracula and this son is simultaneously Trevor Belmont and Alucard.

My son informed me the Gorgons have my Chaos power and I need to get it back. That’s where I stopped and watched the rest of the games cutscenes on youtube which honestly is more coherent than actually playing it. I kept wondering when I was going to be playing the actual game and when it finally happened I was in a sewer and there were still cutscene flags constantly trying to pull me in one direction while delicious One of Five Health Upgrades were in the exact opposite direction.

There’s also shitty stealth sequences where I have to become a rat and chew electrical panels to avoid giant Gears of War men with miniguns. See my above post about Genji.

It introduced a new baffling mechanic every 5 minutes and yet did almost nothing to explain how to Uncharted grapple or how to do combos. But Block and dodge are on the same button. I kept yelling What The Hell Is This? the whole time.

[Mikey]

So I finished top 3 on a particular deal in Pile Up Poker and this happened

(My browser’s inverted colors have caused some issues but that says “You are invited to Fantasyland” and I have no idea what that means)

(ilopan is me)

Ahh apparently one of my hands will be a special one tomorrow, that’s exciting!

[LaurelSoup]

[daphaknee]

YOOO SOME TOP GAMERS IN HERE

[boojiboy7]

@Rudie

kept yelling What The Hell Is This? the whole time.

Yep, that’s Lords of Shadow.

[COINTELBRO]

i’m playing through dark souls 1 again. i appreciate how sparse and austere it is compared to its sequels. i started as a thief and took the old witch’s ring, then went to new londo ruins first and killed ghosts until one dropped a jagged ghost blade, ran around undead burg and dark root garden collecting twinkling titanite to get it up to +3, then went through the back door to blight town, through the great hollow and into ash lake, where i put on some nice music and ground the legged clam for about half an hour if you know what i mean and collected enough upgrade materials to upgrade the jagged ghost blade to its maximum level. the clam was a miniboss at my level but very manageable once i found a safe pattern; it’s like a slow motion low-fi mockup of an orphan or kos or a royal revenant. dodge sideways and prod the rear, every second or third prod makes it stagger so you can chain them for as long as your stamina holds out

i might try to beat the whole game with this short-range slashing weapon or i might be done with it now that i have a viable build. the first couple of hours of dark souls 1 or 2, as you navigate the gameworld to turn a starting character into something that can beat the rest of the game, are my favorite parts of these games. what if you could loop this and turn it into a whole game, maybe with a symmetrical loss of capabilities on the other side, maybe across multiple characters per run

i need to play another series of games again, i doubt i’ll ever quite understand how this one got its hooks in me so deeply

[wourme]

I just played through Growing My Grandpa in one sitting, getting both endings. It’s kind of a body horror narrative mystery. You can’t get much more weird indie game than this.

[username]

Finished Paper Mario tonight, the final dungeon/end run definitely took a good two to two and a half hours. I think I used two, maybe three items during the entire game and I stocked up my inventory with all the big “restore 50 of one stat or 25 each of both of them” items so just sorta abandoned strategy on the final boss and bludgeoned it to death. TBF it was rather tanky so this was probably a decent idea.

Ultimately I think I appreciate a bunch of the things the game did to deal with the aspects of jrpgs that generally irk me. Every enemy is on the field so no random ones, in dungeons they don’t respawn unless you go well off track, numbers stay low which keeps things manageable. The badge system is a neat one that I can see leading to a few different approaches, I am a bit salty that it cut me off at 30 Badge Points but there is all likelihood I’d have ended up with too little HP for the end run so perhaps it was for the best. As is I had maybe two “spells” tops for Mario, the rest bumping up my defense or letting me focus much better. The one FAQ bit I did end up getting was being told right before the final dungeon run where to find the quick change badge which makes your buddies markedly more useful (generally switching one for another in battle uses up their turn, this removes that so you can use any of their abilities at any time).

That said it still never really hooked me? Backtracking became an issue at a few points, battles could end up rather rote for long stretches of time and the focus system resulted in you being rewarded for stretching out battles against low level enemies to top off your HP and FP which had a negative effect on the pacing. I can get why some would dig it, but it is still too much like a genre I don’t care for to overcome all that.

Also I generally have some sort of idea what game I’ll get to in the immediate future even if it is just a rough notion in terms of “big game”, “AAA something”, “indie darling” or “randomness”; for whatever reason during this and Narita Boy I didn’t look ahead and hence got no clue what to do next time I feel like doing some gaming.

[Mokushka]

Playing Fortnite with my bud, and this season/patch has the fucking Cybertruck, which grosses me out every time I see it, but also we were driving around just now, and RATM’s Killing in the Name is now apparently part of the radio mix, and the whiplash is just too much for me.

[LaurelSoup]

I kind of feel like 100% of people should have gotten the fastest possible time here.

[Felix]

Wukong kind of feels like a PS2 game

very vague environments, kind of irrelevant enemies, weird dodge timing, made interesting by a ton of powerups and transformations

I think I’d sooner finish the second half of ragnarok or whenever I put it down

[Grandpa]

Finished Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. Cotton candy ass game. There but not filling, fine but fleeting, would wash away without much thought.

I figured it would try to set up, y’know, The Warrior Within, and the wild turn that took, but the prince only wears the armor from that game and is just the whiniest, snarkiest little shit. If the setup intention was “we’re gonna make you hate this dude” then mission accomplished.

Edit: OK, I never actually played Warrior Within back in the day due to the bad word of mouth about the whole, uh, aesthetic change, but holy shit they really just grimdark’d the hell out of this thing, huh?

[Mikey]

Yeah. The GameCube version was bugged, during all the Dahaka chase sequences (my favorite part of the game) Nu Metal is supposed to play but I’d usually get a two second snippet and then no music at all which oddly I think was more effective

[Father.Torque]

@Grandpa

holy shit they really just grimdark’d the hell out of this thing, huh?

It sucks so bad

[crawfords_cat]

Have been playing the experimental Time Bandit Part 1: Appendage of the Machine. True amateur weirdness. You work a boring job for an evil company doing block-pushing puzzles where everything takes ages - to the point of quitting the game and waiting in real-time for a single move to finish. A cigarette-smoking, Marxist scuba diver, “Longtail Duck”, turns up and tells you he has a plan to uncover a conspiracy and steal back your time.

A few thoughts:

• Some of the characters feel like wasted opportunities, but the Marxsplaining scuba diver is a really funny creation. Unfolds a projector screen and starts quoting sections from Das Kapital at length. Having to sit through this maybe one of its most powerful frustration effects, hehe.

• The other text it draws heavily from is the postcapitalist manifesto Inventing the Future, published in 2015. There’s actually a cool experimental film that adapts the same book, also called Inventing the Future, by a young talented Canadian Isiah Medina. It’s an intriguing & unusal idea to adapt a video game from a non-fiction work - especially a theoretical one. It raises unique questions, like: “what happens to the work when its source’s arguments start to feel shaky, and intellectual discussion moves on?”

• One of the best moments: Longtail asks you to meet him tomorrow in the city square - and he literary means you have to schedule an actual real time the next day, and commit to what you promise. Stressful!

• I find myself wishing it went further in its sadism… the jail mechanic for example lets you off pretty easy. I’m only in the mid game so it’s possible it ramps up further on. Curious if anyone’s played it to the end?

[Rudie]

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of The Godess will be the best game I do not play this year.

I’ll write more later!

[sleepysmiles]

the most buckwild synergy ive ever gotten in Gungeon lol

orbital bullets (makes some missed shots orbit)

• angry bullets (makes some hits fire off another bullet… which can count as a “missed shots” for orbital bullets)
• ice bombs (makes 3 bombs orbit around me and explode when they hit anything destructible… including oil barrels and treasure chests lol)
• the helix gun which fires 2 lasers in a helix pattern
  i also have the mega buster and sunlight spears. which are powerful but have big distracting lighting effects

most of the hits ive taken are cuz i cant tell what the hell is happening onscreen i just bumble into a room and explode into a disco ball and everything around me dies
edit: and right after posting i picked up roll bombs which means now i drop lil Samus bombs whenever i dodge roll. beautiful

EDIT2 THE ORBITING BOMBS BOUNCE MY CHARACTER AROUND WHENEVER THEY GO OFF AND THEY FROZE ME IN DIALOGUE WITH THE GUNSLING KING AND I HAD TO RESET LOL

[Polygonzo]

my friends’ little game club has a spread sheet of themes collected over the years and my friend chose one of mine dubbed ‘Chill Happy Hangouts’

Schim - I didn’t choose this one though it looked cool enough in development over the years. the shadow puddle jumping is a neat visual hook but its used to follow an irredeemably boring generic coming of age story, like I don’t think they needed to make this a Nintendo-designed-into-the-ground puzzle thing, simple exploration would be fine, just make an interesting world and characters! but nope. (NOT CHILL)

Gardenarium - I held off playing this for years cuz I thought it was VR only but it’s not! Beautiful hand drawn animations and geometry so abstractly flat shaded at times that you get a nice kind of sixth sense navigating some of the spaces without any real texture indication as to the shape…just a laid back exploration where you collect more soda to jump higher. (CERTIFIED CHILL)

Grow Up - I really dug the first one and we didn’t dig far enough to explore the extra gadgets and stuff added to this sequel but climbing on and growing and extending phallic flora up, up, up is still fun even if the tutorialisation at the beginning is less than chill it’s (CERTIFIED CHILL)

Wide Ocean Big Jacket - My friend added this one randomly and…it’s a really barebones like visual novel with some walking around…split between dialogue on a black screen and low poly flat shaded wholesomesque camping trip spaces. we were pretty bored once the novelty of making fun of it wore off (tbf this is not my kinda game at all and probably not best for a group setting). (NOT CHILL)

Katamari Damacy - What more can be said? Well I can think of one thing: the Steam remake suck ass, piss poor framerate! Even with the time limits it’s always gonna be (CERTIFIED CHILL)

Catlateral Damage - I wasn’t paying as much attention to this, another one added by my friend, you are a cat in first person swiping physics objects in a house to create maximum damage and I think there are objectives but the art style and music (HR onboarding videoesque) are so generic…yawn. (NOT CHILL)

Map Collection - I’ve raved about Room Map to my friends but hadn’t played the others in the Map Collection WOW! We all had a transportive experience with these. I tried to explain how these games rewired my brain re: geometry and exploration and intimacy…I think Apt. Map is my fav now! (CERTIFIED CHILL)

Noby Noby Boy - I brought my PS3 over to play this one and we couldn’t get the network connection to work initially. Still, we had fun, this game still looks amazing, just a delight to watch someone play and let the colours and smooth polys and tunes soak into your brain. Then, we decided we really needed to connect to the 'net and with some help from a friend over the phone (the network router at their house was very temperamental with the PS3 for some reason) we finally hooked up and…I’d never seen the “Girl Has Arrived Back At Earth” end game! I was moved! As we read the letter about living in a game world vs. the real world and being happy and being sad and connecting across the world…I teared up…almost lost it! What a beautiful gesture of a game. (CERTIFIED CHILL)

Pokémon Snap Yeah I coulda watched my friend play this for another hour at least but it was getting late at this point. The Pokémon as paparazzi groundhog day gameplay loop is good. (CERTIFIED CHILL)

[parker]

by some illuminated miracle I finished the final draft replay of alan wake ii, that thing seemed 100x buggier than it was day one.