GB Link’s Awakening will always be my preferred version since it has the easier way of handling those flappy armed octopus looking guys that mirror your movements (you can use the strength bracelet thing to grab the wall, move them all on top of each other and toward you, then take them all out with a single spinning sword attack - I think they’re only in the dream shrine but they’re annoying!)
7 Likes
Got my PC back and Lorn’s Lure got its first patch to take care of some potential game breaking bugs (hopefully) so figured it was time to get around to it.
…Whoa.
I could write a bunch of words (and good odds I still will) but my main thought is that I have a soft spot for when a smaller dev/team has a somewhat bigish idea that they just go for. Their prior game Hatch was a bit like that (TBF it seems less unique now because of the flood of climbing games over the past few years) but this… this game is a full swing. I put two hours and fifteen minutes in, had a full large scale (the scale in this is nuts) journey, basically played a full itch game that I’d come here to recommend to people… and that was just chapter 1 out of 8 or so. I walked in thinking the demo was chapter 1, it was maybe the first 25% of chapter 1.
Now some of us on SB (myself included) are very much on team bigger is not better, so X amount of length on its own isn’t necessarily convincing. This is where the scale comes in. Back to Hatch, that game was basically having to climb a single massive structure that reached forever into the sky, keeping tabs on the angle of each surface to figure out which were climbable as you tried to parse this massive thing while limiting your exposure to the sun (direct exposure kills you within 15-20 seconds I believe). Lorn’s Lure goes the other way, here you are an android climbing down through the ruins of some utterly massive structure (I’ve seen multiple people namedrop the manga Blame! in reference to it if that helps anyone here). Early on you get some pick axes which let you climb on certain vertical surfaces while your stamina holds out, but much of the game involves making your way deeper and deeper into the unknown while chasing some distorted thing.
There is a bunch to this. You can only survive so fast a fall (whether you live or die is based on your velocity, i.e. when your reticle gets three marks around it). You can only walk up so steep of ground before you start to slide, but you can jump and sort of make your way across slanted ground if you are careful about it. There is the pick axe climbing, including being able to jump off of walls, which let’s you move for a good thirtyish seconds and often has you wondering if you have enough in you to make it across some lengthy stretch.
You have a world full of pipes and surfaces that often don’t appear to lead in any definite direction, in fact there are times when one can go off in the wrong direction full of the same sort of stuff that is in the right one. Maybe you will find one of the blue crystal collectible dealies (which often require a good bit of work and figuring to get to) but often it is just its own little digression. It is very easy to get lost or turned around, at one point in the demo section I climbed up for a good bit before figuring out that I was supposed to be going down instead. You can press a button to have a waypoint flash on the screen, I tried to keep it to a minimum but at times I needed a bit of direction. Often the path isn’t clear even if you know where to go, you need to pay attention to what is there and figure out exactly how it could work out. If I am honest there were a few areas where I’m not sure if I actually solved the sequence in an intended way or of I just got lucky with how the physics played out.
It can be very messy, it is very messy. While it is impressive in what was built there is still a bit of jankiness to it, the environments sometimes seem to sacrifice readability for building a sense of place, in no way is it smooth. What it is is ambitious as hell. Chapter 1 itself is a massive place full of pipes and falls and just a constant digging down until finally finding something which is itself massive, very few of it easy to traverse but for me at least it rarely felt like something mechanical, a deciphering of a set piece. It felt like a journey, a struggle, a leap of faith to a tiny pipe (I fell… a lot), it was a mood and adrenaline, my mouth dry and my hands shaky by the end of it (it being chapter 1).
And there is more to come! I believe the top two topics I saw when I last checked its Steam forums were “chapter 8 is evil” and “chapter 3 is evil”, I know there are more ideas and mechanics and god knows what else, I know not all of them have been warmly received by all (which would not surprise me, again there is some messiness here), I was thinking I could take on a chapter a day but I wonder if I may need a day or so to recover, I felt spent afterwards today.
FWIW the demo is exactly the same as the first chunk of the game but it both feels like a representative slice while also not? I was left… not cool by it but wondering if the game would meet my high expectations, while the whole chapter left me going “oh my!”. I am not sure why exactly, I think there may just be points that are a bit too “so… up or down?” in it.
As is that was a hell of an opening chapter/itch-sized game that ended up as aimed towards what gets me perked up in indie games as I had hoped. There remains a very real chance that at some point the game’s ambitions extends enough beyond the dev’s abilities that it falls apart, but if it manages to stay on this tightrope it could be something special. To me at least, who knows about the rest of you 
22 Likes
The hacking challenges in Yars Rising as a mode seem to be coded horribly. After playing a couple challenges it gets slow, and has to be restarted. Whatever happened to the memory is not made right by quitting to the menu, or exiting to home and going back to the switch home screen, means you’ll have to close it out because it’s going to freeze if you try to select resuming game. Just a terrible switch port, not expecting it to get patched though since it was apparently not very popular.
10 Likes
What ultimately killed Sorcery! for me is that replaying the game to try different paths is very time consuming especially because of the (frankly rather tedious) combat parts. I’d gotten a good way into part 2 before I decided I had enough. I feel like Inkle’s other games are a little more player friendly when it comes to letting you quickly retrace your steps on new playthroughs and this one just wasn’t.
5 Likes
Sorcery! is unfortunately bound to the constraints of the original, analog gamebooks. Whereas later inkle games benefit a lot from making subsequent playthroughs radically different from the first. How 80 days has routes that are only available in ng+ and how all the language puzzles in heaven’s vault are much more complex than in the base game
5 Likes
picked up the serious sam remaster collection and played through 3 again
feels much slower paced than the FE and SE and slightly more tactical… i enjoyed it and finished it despite it frankly getting pretty repetitive and feeling like the designers ran out of ideas pretty early, but it was a solid “turn brain off” game. i like how early on you can tell they were using assets from their canned military shooter before it just turns into old school serious sam
i played the SS3 DLC afterwards and loved it though! much more interesting and varied design that make use of the enemies better, plus they let you play with the jetpack in a non boss fight situation
i kinda want to try SS2 again but that ain’t ever getting a remaster. wonder how cheap it is around the eshops
2 Likes
still playing an hour or two of ff16 when i get chance but not really sure why lol
it has some really nice graphics and music i guess
also randomly booted up breath of the wild in cemu (my only full playthrough was on the console) and yeaaah nice, no shader compilation stutter at all these days either as it’s async out of the box
4 Likes
SS2 is only worth playing if you can get an unpatched version where you can weapon swap-cancel reload/recoil animations and the double-barreled shotgun becomes the best weapon because you can shoot it as fast as you can swap back and forth
also it has very good boys in it
5 Likes
Well then — Inscryption.
That was a cool children’s card game, well well well.
(stealth edit: took me 16 hours to reach the end, and guess i will continue playing it, because as it turns out, i kinda love stacking attributes on cards!)
2 Likes
The start of the game up through your departure from Ward 13 is 100% getting whacked in the face by trees until you can find the forest.
It doesn’t take too long, but it is obnoxious and overstays it’s welcome about 30 seconds into it, but again, this is such a tiny part of the game that it’s just… not the game?
Also, there will be (a lot) more classes.
1 Like
This is the only good part of SS2
2 Likes
3, for all intents and purposes, obsoletes 2 because they actually get the mix of linear idiot arcade game dumbness they were going for in 2 and the usual SS shenanigans
they try to do a lot of “hey we’re making fun of those AAA shootbangers” with 3 (and 4) but 2 is them trying to operate in that mode and its worse for it
also 2 is holy shit racist but that’s another conversation
2 Likes
Finished Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Managed to find all the echoes and am only missing two hearts. That’s probably about as complete as I’ve done any Zelda game. Some side quests left to do, but otherwise, that’s that.
8 Likes
i actually really like michael schneider as terry. he basically captures the weird nuance of his japanese acting, and both the intensity and casualness—but he somehow manages to ground it all in a warm, good-natured sincerity that frames terry’s classic goofiness as just a self-secure boyish enthusiasm.
to me schneider’s terry feels so recognizably and accurately terry, but also like more of a real person than ever. if anything, his performance extrapolates the character’s terryness and fills in the gaps to illustrate how that theoretical personality terry has always had can work in practice.
it’s almost like a really good movie adaptation, that brings a comic book character to life in a way that causes everything about the character to make all the more sense.
like a huge jack-man wolverine
i also totally buy how terry’s arcade-mode run-in with “not o.k.” ken (got to love how zoned-out and confused ken sounds on meeting him again) would lead into ken visiting south town a while later in cotw, feeling like he’s got a true bro down there who cares and doesn’t pity him.
in sf6 you can set voice dub on a per-character basis.
a lot of classic sf characters just sound odd and wrong to me with an english dub. ryu and chun, obviously, but even characters like guile don’t sound like themselves when dubbed by a native american actor, no matter how good the performance.
some newer characters, where the english and japanese actors have both defined their personality from the start (juri, aki), i can prefer the english dub even when it misses some aspects of the character’s background.
like, overall there seems to be no rhyme to which characters speak with an accent. dhalsim and zangief, yes. chun, ryu, no. (weirdly.) this also holds true with “modern” characters, so aki will have an accent while juri just sounds like spinel. but the english performance is still them, in that it’s complex and they have always sounded that way, right.
japanese would sound weird and arbitrary from rashid, even though his english dub seems to indicate he grew up in san jose. 
so from a distance, terry seems like a character so defined by his goofy japanese acting that his j-dub feels like it should be an obvious choice. not even a choice, really.
schneider, though, somehow nails it hard enough that his terry almost feels more terry than terry. and in practice, it fits better than the japanese. amazingly.
7 Likes
A videogame thing I think about a lot is one of JP Terry’s between match lines. Just the intonation on ‘You down for… one more?’ is sublime. The animation that goes with it is so lovable too. He extends his hand to his downed opponent as he says it.
I have similar problems with the En/JP inconsistency overall though. It’s why I like Tekken’s approach of including lots of native languages you don’t generally hear otherwise by default, but they have their own inconsistencies like a large number of non-Japanese characters speaking Japanese because they have protagonist energy (Lars, Alisa, Lee).
8 Likes
terry was one of the few characters i felt too unsettled hearing ‘buster wolf’ 2 leave on English but more broadly they really need 2 go back to the drawing board with Dee Jays voice, i wouldnt mind some changes to his design in general if i trusted capcom to handle it well (dont) but at the very least that fake jamaican accent has got 2 go
5 Likes
i like christopher lee here as a villain. he’s so much more of an snk bad guy than a typical capcom one.
7 Likes
didn’t really “play” it but after having to watch some life is strange videos i’m convinced that the french should never be allowed to make games about american culture
13 Likes
I think europeans (not just the french though they are the chief offenders) need to get a source on american youth culture that isn’t random episodes of joss whedon shows
7 Likes