I’m playing Crisis Core. Who said not to play all the missions instead of the hideous main story?
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I can only speak for the remake, which made the game play more like a normal game, and thus further exposed how minimal the game elements of the game are. But if you’re not getting anything out of the insane nonsense script of the story missions I don’t think you’re going to find anything else in the game worth seeing.
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I recently abandoned a play of Crisis Core Reunion because I couldn’t handle Zack being so excited to continually murder an oppressed people like it was some kind of competition.
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finished the crimson diamond. what a lovely, charming game. incredibly well-paced and with genuinely satisfying puzzles that ride the clever/absurd adventure game puzzle line deftly. i think that for being text parser based i would have hoped for some more developed dialogue with the cast, but this is a very pleasant time.
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Top Gear Pocket 2 is the platonic ideal of a GBC racing game. Colorful. Cute graphics with “real” cars. Challenging but not sweaty. An actual sense of speed. There’s even jumps. The scrolling road effects are excellent. Games on portable systems with the word “pocket” in the name are just perfect
Top Gear Pocket 1 is great but not as good. It does have a rumble effect which is neat.
Racing games of this era and platform were top down which was disappointing or like F1 Race which had a cleverly faked scrolling road effect.
First game in a very long time to leave an impression on my thumb because I was holding down the A button so long
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Played through Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and if one just assumes that there will never be a part 3 (feels safe at this point) then it really isn’t a cliffhanger and that qualifies as an ending, a fairly dark and depressing one but still.
After playing through all of these finally I think my thoughts on the Half-Life 2 games is that they are really strong at set piece and scenario design but ultimately I don’t really care for shooting guns in these games and that kinda lowers the ceiling of my enjoyment a good deal. I know some here have said something similar over the years but I am honestly not sure if it is because of the engine or… well, the fact I used a mouse and keyboard. I’ll likely be labeled a heretic for that latter thought but just clicking on folks to make them go boom isn’t as satisfying coming from this lifelong controller user.
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half-life 1 shotgun alt-fire was the apex imo
today i switched from dark souls to sekiro, which i have not beaten yet. in 2019 i got to genichiro and was getting him into phase 2 consistently, then my laptop’s gpu died. i had a second save right before the chained ogre and that fight was a bracing reintroduction to the game. across enough attempts to give the sculptor dragon rot, i had to gradually relearn to prefer jumping to side-stepping, and then to only take evasive action only in response to unblockable attacks and otherwise to keep attacking and deflecting. once i had internalized this and killed the ogre, the general in the next encounter fell on the first attempt. i also chatted with the reformed bandit merchant and entered the memory of the hirata estate, apparently i had gotten the prayer beads in the last session. this game’s evocation of post-trauma is already resonating a lot more than it did the first time around. i know it’s a cliche but it’s a cliche because we just lived through a plague etc under conditions of media hyper-reality which is a serious impediment to processing anything. maybe i’ll beat it this time and then go back and beat the end boss of the elden ring dlc with the deflecting hard tear
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genichiro rules and I actually had very little trouble with him, he is a high point, but my perpetual gripe with sekiro is that they tutorialize everything up until genichiro so very badly and obliquely that the first third of the game is way more frustrating than it needs to be until it finally has you on the track that it wants. many of the most foundational mechanics (like jumping and dashing rather than dodging, and waggling your sword for successful sloppy momentum swings) are inexplicably taught worse or after far more situational stuff
it’s maddening, like I think the average person who successfully gets halfway into the game could sit down and do a much better job of remixing/messaging its first third
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it’s kind of funny because they make more explicit gestures at tutorialization (like in this session when i was fighting the mooks in front of the ogre i glanced over and saw that the game was telling me to use charged attacks instead of just spamming light ones; there are full-screen popups that pause the game and show you the text of new items you pick up) but ultimately it’s just giving you a big box of loose tools with no model of how to deploy them well, just some very unevenly punitive enemy designs
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that’s the especially wild thing! it has all these explicit callouts that make it feel far more heavy handed than a typical souls game, as if they had to add them last minute after playtesting, except even those callouts seem to emphasize the wrong stuff so you’re even more thrown about what’s actually important.
I really really loved it by the end but whenever I get reminded of the order of the first ~5 bosses, my opinion of it plummets
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iirc it’s:
- guy who makes your available dodges seem way more like punchout-esque hard counters than they are
- ogre who you basically have to fight like a souls boss, unlike every other boss in the game
- spear guy who actually does require you to unlock a hard counter which is very fiddly to use against him specifically
- drunkard, who you also can’t really parry (the core mechanic) and who has very unpredictable range and timing
- fast mounted guy who you have to run flat out to avoid getting 1-shot by, another mechanic that recurs nowhere
it’s like they came up with a bunch of gimmick bosses and couldn’t figure out where to use them so they put them all at the very start of the game before you really learn to play it except by that point you’re totally befuddled
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this is something I intuited right from the start so the game was surprisingly easy to me and I was shocked by how different its reputation was when I finally stopped playing and looked at the forums all those years ago.
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you’re forgetting “bull that you have to run around constantly to avoid getting gored” a boss I beat on my first try because ‘run around constantly to avoid getting gored’ is actually a supreme sekiro strategy that lasted me all the way through NG+3. Playing like a timid idiot is suprisingly top tier in this game.
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yeah, it actually has an incredibly fun sensibility that way if it’s managed not to confuse and frustrate you too much to internalize it
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i mostly recall being delighted that you could deflect the bull. unless that was just the horse guy
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the centipede guy and lady butterfly are the first two really good bosses that seem designed with the rules of the game in mind. I would encourage anyone to try to get at least that far so it clicks.
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The centipede guys are where I finally realised parrying is better than attacking. They have the most explicit rhythm and parrying is the best way to deal with them. But then the quickdraw swordsman at the top of the castle is consistently beatable by dodgin to his left iirc. I think Sekiro is about being a tricky bastard who will throw dirt in your eye or run away until they win.
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Small thing but I enjoy how Super Mario 3D World is playing with videogame level naming conventions. I’m surprised I never heard about it.
It starts with 1-1, 1-2, etc as usual
but the world 1 end level is not 1-9 but 1-castle
Then we get like 2-A and 2-B for mini-boss levels, then eventually 2-tank?
I lost it when the seventh world was just a giant castle named world castle
Until the inevitable Castle-castle level
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3D World was probably overall my favorite Mario of the last… 20 years?
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Last week I talked to the coworker who convinced me to try Sekiro in person for the first time in ages, at an after-work work event. He’s still disappointed that I stopped at Genichiro. Funny thing is, when we talked about the game briefly another coworker overheard and said he also got stuck on a boss and quit. Also Genichiro.
I did beat Lady Butterfly and I agree that one is a good boss (if a game must have bosses). Hard, but I could see myself making progress and so I didn’t give up. Genichiro, on the other hand, was a lost cause and I only ever saw his second form once in many attempts.
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