I played the hell out of this back in the day. Good game
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Jak X: Combat Racing: this game has too much talking for the tonka trucks slamming into each other it is. In the tutorial (which fucckkkkkkkkkkk) I got stuck upside down stuck in the geometry.
Trico: Still the third best Fumito Ueda game, still a miracle it came out. I would put it on a top 100 list just to annoy folks. When the stupid cat-dog-bird gets its head stuck in the hole you’ll fall in love again. I still get annoyed that the world doesn’t make any sense and that’s because it is so close to real. What the hell is this top of a canyon pillar mountain city? A Video Game???
Uncharted: Lost Legacy: You first meet a young girl with a father just to let you know what you will destroy every time you will soon put hundreds of bullets into hundreds of men while making quips with a woman who inherited a PMC.
Troy Musou: I could get behind this. I am middle aged now and can appreciate Musou as more than mindless. This being about something I know 3 or 4 of the characters involved is easier than 3 Kingdoms stuff.
Aquanauts Holiday PS3: I honestly kept thinking about Ecco the Dolphin: Defender Of The Future and how that’s like a better representation of sea life from 5 years before this and that game is all about violence. AHPS3 looks…fine? If you want to look at polygon fish. The actual environments is where you see they didn’t have enough. Was surprised how well it performed with streaming.
Ape Escape PS1: was shocked how Arcadey it is. All the stages are less than 5 minutes long.
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Lost Legacy is the best Uncharted game, though…ya gotta stick it though, it’s just long enough and does pretty alright by Chloe and Nadine.
Beat Arkham City. I think my beef with the game is that there are so many side missions, but if you goof (and you will, chasing the Bane side mission in particular) you get funneled down the endgame very, very quickly with no way out but through.
Then the end credits dumps you into one last Catwoman segment, because this was another game of that era where you got more content if you bought it new (and had to pony up $10 if used), but the content had to be kinda superfluous to the main game.
This last segment still drives me nuts because Two-Face is so squirrelly and spots you very easily. Also I never pump any upgrades into Catwoman so the last few big brawls are tough as shit.
Dunno why it took me til now, 2024, to realize Troy Baker’s weird cadence of promising whoever kills Catwoman will be “his right hand…guy” is just aping Nicholson’s “number one guy” line.
Anyway! Replaying this back to back with Asylum, it’s remarkable how much better the game looks, how much better the story is, etc. etc. The final twist is goofy, but also knowing it you can see all the tells throughout the game.
Guess…guess I’ll keep the Batman train going…but first I’m gonna mop up these side quests.
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Jak X was a middling game that I tried to play through because I enjoyed the main trilogy and should know what happened to them, but it turns out you mustn’t play with autosave on as it’ll crash during it fairly frequently, often taking your whole save with it. After that happened I said nuts to that and just looked up the cutscenes on youtube, which weren’t that great.
Trico is wonderful and I will die on this hill. Camera is a mess and the button prompts were unfortunate (and yes don’t think too hard about the layout of everything) but I love that darn thing.
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I’d need to play it again, but I think the reason the city doesn’t make sense as a liveable space is because it’s not really a ‘city’ as such, but more of a factory for prolonging the life of whoever is in that sarcophagus / living computer thing. The layout probably still doesn’t make sense from that perspective though.
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Drakengard’s way too nice to you, would be better if there was only one weapon and you didn’t have access to the dragon (at most a dragon quarter-esque system that locks you out at least three of the endings). Didn’t know 3 (not played 2… yet) has the same final boss. Now that’s a funny joke.
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The Puzzmo community hit 1 Trillion in the collective winnings pot, and Pile-Up Poker Pro has been released. It’s played on a 5x5 grid instead of 4, uses the full deck (+ 1 Joker per game) and the “corner hand” now also requires using the center square. Full Houses have been added to the list of scoring hands
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I’ve coveted the PS1 Phantom Menace game for over 20 years and having played it tonight it’s pretty cool. Obviously a disappointment if you wanted something good but as is pretty hilarious that a super janky action slash adventure game came out of disputes in trade negotiations.
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More action games should have that camera angle imo
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I started playing that search action Prince of Persia. It’s surprisingly good so far although the last one of these I played was Bloodstained.
Did another game do the adding screenshots to the map screen before this because that seems like a real good qol thing?
Nice accessibility options - so for me big parry windows.
I’ve just got the first traversal upgrade, the air dash. Platforming seems like it could go real sicko later. And you have the option to just turn platforming off if you want. Neat.
I think I would recommend this but I skipped that period when every other game was one of these.
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Yeah that game is great. I gotta remember to try the DLC soon, hopefully they add in what feels like should have definitely been a boss fight in the main game.
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a few months back i’d picked up a copy of Maken X for the Dreamcast - only one problem: my Dreamcast has spent the past 20 or so years slumbering in a box at my mom’s place.
so this past weekend i was up there and finally retrieved my DC (along with all the games i cared to replay, because it’s been a while!).
Maken X is really, really cool. the voice acting is also pretty terrible, and it’s clear that no direction was given and no one knows the context of what they’re saying or why they’re saying it. but that’s sort of charming these days, tbh.
it’s always interesting to me to see how FPS games are handled in an era where twinsticks were uncommon, and Maken X mostly relies on a lock on system which works surprising pretty well. the biggest challenge is in getting used to how to look and strafe (holding L or R respectively), and i wish we could change the sensitivity and make all of those things faster, but part of the game’s built-in challenge seems to rely on the idea that you can’t play this game the way you would on a keyboard.
i’m not sure if this was Atlus’ first foray into 3D models, but it feels like this game laid the ground work for what their PS2 output was going to look like, and it’s cool to see what they were trying before getting back to their RPGs.
i wasn’t expecting that we’d be switching bodies with other people every stage, but i guess that’s what we’ll be doing? i wonder where the original girl’s body is while i keep doing this…
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Belated thanks for this, just what I needed. Don’t know if I’m going to go back to bash my head in figuring out what I need for the other ending but it gave me more of those “art object I wish I made” feelings I guess I’m seeking out now. Motivated to go after Garage and those outsider FMV point-and-clickers in a similar vein.
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What I think made the difference was making two blood offerings (I’d initially done only one) and giving him both of the assembled paper figures. (You can grow a third tentacle but I imagine that’s just backup in case you miss one. I did all three, though.)
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somneone’s made a version of the board game tiny epic kingdoms with a cpu opponent for pico-8. it’s very easy to beat, but still a nice little distraction for a few minutes.
also i got ion fury in a sale a while ago and got around to trying it yesterday. you can tell it’s from the duke nukem team, which isn’t a compliment. unsatisfying weapons, bland enemies, and lots of boring wandering around trying to find the next thing you’re supposed to interact with. just made me wish i was playing doom 2, so i did that instead.
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I saw a yellow leaf on a tree today, and fired up Bloodborne. finally beat the Watchdog of the Old Lords in the cursed dungeon with a killer strat of “stand in front & bonk it on the head”
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Messing with the Steam Deck continues…
Arkham City: I forgot how much the side missions kinda drag. “Explore every weird nook of this huge city to try to find people with their faces cut off, good luck” sucks. A lot of these Riddler puzzles suck. I think I’ll knock out the two I’m close to finishing, play the super short DLC and call it.
Visions of Mana demo: Bailed because a combo of my stubbornness (JP voices) and being old (it’s one of these new style S-E action RPGs where everyone constantly talks and it’s hard to follow the subtitles and voices at the same time). I switched to English and the game reset itself and I figured I was good.
Epic Mickey demo: Never played the original but this seems fine? It’s hailing from Purple Lamp, the company that did a hell of a job remastering that PS2 SpongeBob game, then made their own that was… serviceable I guess. This looks great and plays alright, gotta assume as well as it did back when, but with standard aiming controls. Definitely hails from the Moral Choices era of games - a little gremlin dude told me to fill a motor, “paint works best but sometimes thinner might work, too, with surprises!” I put thinner in it and he scolded me for destroying the tea cup ride. Sorry man!!
DuckTales Remastered: I fucked up in the first level trying to get some out of the way treasure chests and bailed. Very cute that they got Scrooge’s voice actor back for it - I remember reading he was in his early 90s at the time but was super excited to do it. Seems alright, certainly has that certain WayForward…I dunno, kinda overloading simple things more than necessary.
Butcher Bay: Cleared a microSD and installed the Heroic Launcher, letting me get at all the GOG and Epic and Amazon stuff I’ve gotten for more or less free. Riddick seems to work better than most of the GOG stuff I’ve tried. Pretty sure it has full controller support, but all the on screen keys are keyboard. Probably gotta disable the mouse input, I guess.
I should get back to Yakuza 4…or Fallout New Vegas or whatever else is in limbo. But Batmanning it up for a week or two was fun.
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Started up Neon White as someone told me it was about as close as one is gonna get to more Mirror’s Edge time trials and while that isn’t quite true (Mirror’s Edge had more physicality, mastering subtle moves and denser well designed spaces) it nonetheless feels like a game I’m gonna end up dumping a ton of time into. Each stage has a loop of get through, get through faster, find/be told the trick for ace (i.e. better than gold) times, find the hidden gift, move on to the next one. They are all fairly short so far but there is seemingly nearly a hundred of them so that’s a good amount to dig into.
The game also talks a ton between sets of stages and unfortunately it’s not good.
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I promise I won’t post a rant about how the scale of everything in Arkham Origins is super off again, how Batman is 6’2" and has side tables and desks the come up to his chest inferring they’ve gotta be at least four feet tall, that all the doors to even regular buildings are twice his height, why is everything so big what happened here…
Anyway! Batman continues with my also firing up the PC port of Blackgate, the game by Armature that shoehorns the Batman gameplay as best it can into a side scrolling search action type game. It is…clunky as shit. Whatever you wanna say about the predominance of Batman style combat in the last 15 (Asylum turned 15 the other day, just so y’all know) years, this game…tries to mimic it but mostly fails. The levels twist and turn in 3D as you run around them, but you can only navigate them in a very unclear linear fashion, so it lends to this super disjointed feeling of having most of the movement tricks of the other games with absolutely none of the agency to use it.
For both of these I’ll say - Roger Craig Smith is a pretty good Batman, glad he’s getting another shot at it with that VR game I’ll never play.
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