The world 4 one is among the game’s best surprises. I had wondered whether it might be Bloodborne but it’s not.
Funny how most of the big games they chose for those levels are ones I’ve never had the slightest interest in playing but I like them well enough in this form.
You have to outrun the langoliers.
I saw some comments on the Internet about Astro Bot being “too easy.” I think anyone who says that is kind of missing the point, and some of the challenge levels are not that easy.
There’s one I haven’t yet managed to beat and I don’t think I’m even going to seriously attempt that other thing I won’t spoil here.
Also, they’ve said there is going to be free DLC this year. At first I heard it was going to be just extra hard levels and speed run content but fortunately it’s also going to include normal levels.
Having a savepoint game like Yakuza 0 crash to desktop twice after an hour of playing is pretttttty demoralizing
oh huh yeah I’ll say
I played 0 on console but k2 on pc and both were rock solid iirc
This is PSP and Vita erasure.
Oh god there’s a Lumines level isn’t there.
Despite having no way to play it, i feel the reference-laden aspect of Astro Bot isn’t a negative cuz that’s just how video games are. Saw someone contrast it negatively with Mario Galaxy 2 as if that isn’t the exact same thing for Mario heads.
When every other new release is a “loving homage” or “spiritual successor”, or people casually use the term “Metroidvania” and get hyped up about a bad clone of Gauntlet as saints row mini game . Astro bot is cleared of all charges for the non-crime of being unambiguous with it.
Nah I feel you are comparing Scream and Scary Movie and saying they are the same thing. Or more accurately Jumanji:Welcome To the Jungle and Epic Movie.
Crying while playing Matt Hazard on PS3: what a triumph!
i think matt hazard would have been improved if they said “oh this is a Final Fantasy level” isntead of "oh, this is from when you were licensed in japan for the ultimate climax farting fantastic universe " or whatever (see: kingdom hearts). But obviously the issues with that game run deeper than the concept of a parody game, nobodys callin out frog fractions/Warioware. But all those games point to the fact that so many games are already unambiguously ‘in conversation’ with other games that its the premise on which they’re sold.
U can say this about other things but while u could live ur life without seeing a nonfiction or comedy film and u may wonder how they’d do it in movie form, the terms would remain parseable as long as u had a concept of human laughter and ‘reality’. “Role Playing Game” could apply to any game on earth if u take it literally & not as a reference to a certain set of games w/ mechanical affinities (& it kinda used to, as w/ “first person” being used for driving games only) . I feel with games that are sold to people who play more than one game a year, this sort of dialogue is presumed whether explicit or not.
idk, having a series of minigames in a 3d platformer that play just like Ape Escape but dont ever make reference to Ape Escape & change all the nouns is fine but honestly, if you do like Ape Escape, i dont see it being an issue that the game is explicit enough that anyone picking it up can quickly understand: oh, this is pointing to a specific thing I can engage wih.
Would bloodstained be more transparently Castlevania if it was officially licensed as a Castlevania game ? or if shovel knight wasn’t in it? i dont see it as a fundamental difference to have a game that riffs on the shopkeeper from wonder boy but also says ‘here’s the shop keeper from wonder boy’ vs like the (more respectable?) Cuphead method of having the shopkeeper from wonder boy but not saying ‘this is the shopkeeper from wonderboy’ . Or at least, i dont see it as a world of difference.
Scream and scary movie have very differnet tones… i d say, hey, is Scary Movie a more appropriate title than ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’, imo, lil hard to say
I bought a handful of pixel game maker games on sale hard to say about a lot of em but this one easy recommend if ur an adhd head or baby or sympathetic to either. Ur a baby hitting huge sprites with ur toy hammer & everything pops off with a big colored "BANG!"and also have infinite jumps that turn u into sonic ball & ur attack is a limitless airdash/wario shoulder charge that can be used on diagonals and also is constantly picking up more speed & power as u play.
Music is good. Colors are good. Ur goal is to navigate inside of a big poo that ate u by finding/defeating a series of poo minibosses to weaken it (through doors etc.), altho u can enter the final fight door whenever, i’d say for me it was not doable after beating 2 (of 12) poo minibosses.
stumbled on this interview (autotranslated?): Fully employed mother of 6 makes a game in spare time; I ended u
Made by a mother of 6 on the laptop running Windows Vista who had otherwise only made rpgmaker stuff while her husband worked at a restaurant at night & did child care in the day. 
Easy to detect the “this is a game for my six children and also i’m stressed to be making a game while having six children and loud enough to be noticed by them” undercurrent in the game itself
fuck it i’m in a vampire mood so i’m playing soul reaver again. the kain series is still incredible. really enjoying how there are so many easily missed, completely optional dungeons that have just as much care put into them as the main ones, if not more.
even if you aren’t using that hd patch that came out some years back, the dreamcast version still looks great on its own:
I’m glad I didn’t correctly predict it.
played a little shadow of the ninja reborn and haunted castle revisited… it will come as no surprise that as someone who was recently posting about how great like, shadow dancer 1989 is that i greatly enjoy both of these games
Yeah baby
Flushing the grimdark Batman outta my system by playing a lot of Bakeru. Turns out I wasn’t missing much with the plot after all by playing a bit of the Japanese Switch version, but it is goofy and lighthearted enough that it helps.
It’s such a clean looking and colorful game. I keep trying to get the achievement for beating the first boss without getting hit (it’s not hard, it just takes a while), and keep messing up right at the end. Sloppy…my Dark Souls skills are regressing…
Otherwise I’m still playing Gundam Breaker 4, thinking of giving up on Sands of Time (hit that first “protect Farah” fight that, if you don’t get through the previous trap gauntlet with enough health, you kinda have to restart from the beginning of that gauntlet to be able to survive).
I also on a whim started playing Getsufumaden Undying Moon again…it’s not nearly as good as Dead Cells, but damn do I love the look of it.
I didn’t know this game got an English release! It looks excellent!
playing random ps1/ps2 games for 3d character movement references
tak and the power of juju 2 - aesthetically horrible and goopy. surprise patrick warburton voice jumpscare. movement is so adequate that it instantly cures you of any fond memories of the time period when stuff like this felt like the most baseline form of videogame… it has an incredibly parsimonious double jump / glide that looks kind of funny bc it just locks your guy into a static determined looking pose as he hovers around. quit shortly after the tutorial
threads of fate - very cute but wasn’t really feeling it for some reason… i kept thinking “this is charming” but never really being charmed. BUT i do root for anything that even tries going for charming as a quality when in a way it’s easier to simply be impressive. feels like this and brave fencer musashi represent a form of like, focused and oddly modest character action game that never really ended up appearing, almost the idea of a deliberately minor work that’s able to be more specific as a result. is more crap what we need?? unfortunately the camera gave me motion sickness so i was never able to find out. but another time maybe
ape escape 3 - having the little kids announce “sony computer entertainment america!” chirpily in unison at the start felt cursed. fun but ran very slow on the emulator for i presume mischievious ape related tecnical difficulties.
james cameron’s dark angel - i didn’t even know james cameron HAD a dark angel?? this one has a pretty fun if inscrutable jump button which will situationally bounce jessica alba right off a wall to kick someone behind her OR do a weird slow motion roll of uncertain utility… the rest of the moves were fine but the enemies were really spongy to let you show off all the different moves, which is never a great feeling in the very first level. it’s presented as grim but whenever you finish knocking three guys unconscious the player character will deliver a really chirpy and inane oneliner to nobody like “guess he missed gym day!” or “you had an appointment with my foot!” which was funny whenever it happened (5 or 6 times). the setting is the distant dystopian future of Seattle, 2020 and you’re beating up cops so i presume it’s going for kind of a WTO protests feel, which makes it funnier that the heroine is dressed in the single most undercover agent outfit i have ever seen. the fucking baseball cap!!
according to the intro movie she’s like a catgirl or something too. i guess he has a type.
i-ninja: sort of felt like a transmission from the flash game / stickman fight animation universe of cute little ball guys dismembering each other. in the opening cinematic your ninja finds a mystical ninja steroid and gets so riled up he sticks a sword through his mentor’s chest, who punishes you by making you do a tutorial level. the movement was a little more fun than i was expecting, there’s a walljump and a hover and some little ninjas to chop up, but it had this really grating tone… i guess they were trying to get away from earlier and more cartoony style in the prototype, which is a shame since it honestly looked really pretty
red ninja - i actually found myself really liking the character movement in this one? like i’m not necessarily that interested in “expressive movement” more generally but it was exciting to play a game where it felt built around a particular theme rather than just a kind of plodding one-size-fits-all of whatever seemed easiest to design levels around. you are a ninja so you run everywhere at crazy ninja speeds and race up walls and stuff with a sonic-like flexibility that feels sort of startling. your default weapon is a neat pianowire thingy you can shoot into people and then run around them to dismember their colleagues with. when you swim around you can press a button to motionlessly breathe through a little reed, which of course makes you invisible to enemies. i was delighted by the dedication to this ridiculous ninja fantasy.
unfortunately it kind of makes you play it out inside cramped grid-shaped stealth levels where you have to sneak everywhere so you don’t sonic dash into someone around a corner and where the awkward camera becomes a bigger deal. also it has some of the most gratuitous panty shots i have ever seen in a videogame. BUT it is pretty fun to climb through the attics and things and i’d like to see if i get used to the gameplay so i’ll keep giving it a shot for now.
this is my report…
Astro Bot is actually just a game jam. It feels like everybody at Team Asobi were given some basic characters and mechanics and each person used those to start making whatever levels they wanted, which were then collected into a single package. That’s why the mechanic are constantly changing every level and there’s little continuity or progression in level design.
I had the demo of this that came with Final Fantasy 8 and I felt similarly about it way back then. It seemed like a good game but not one I really cared to bother playing.
The song that plays in the demo area remains one of my favorite video game tunes, though.
