ok this might actually make me try it out
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Me and @VastleCania beat Metal Gear (MSX) last night… FUUUCK that game. if it wasn’t for save states I think I would have just given up. I know games at the times would just put in brutal deaths for no reason, but I found myself getting very demoralized. But we pushed through, and it’s done!
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second one’s better
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it’s such a troll game. the fact that key 1 (out of 8) still gets used at the very end of the game exemplifies that, given that you have to test each key individually. it definitely seems mean on purpose and I respect that but boy it was annoying by the end
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Had a sudden desire to see the shotgun cock sync up to the music, which only happens the first time you play Doom 2016 and doesn’t happen when you re-play the level, so I started a full playthrough from scratch. Game is still so good it’s tempting me to try giving Doom Eternal another shot, which is a bad idea, but it’s downloading, so here we are.
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It’s a good title, Eternal is about how long it feels after the relative punchiness of Noom
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Played Neva and, while visually gorgeous, it has quite unoriginal/boring gameplay imo!
Has anybody else played it?
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They boot up the game on the phone while onanistically chanting “gambling”?
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far be it from me to recommend a gacha game to anyone but wizardry variants daphny has some of the most interesting artistry and friction I’ve seen delivered within a business model that tends to murder both. the prologue shows a brutal demise in the depths of dungeons (wizardry → dark souls → wizardry lineage is evident), ending with a long timelapse of your corpse slowly decaying and your equipment being gradually stripped away by monsters. the tone is not afraid to get depressing and nasty whenever the creators sense that might be interesting: I picked a quest where I had to save some knights from their deaths and the combination of autosave and being underleveled forced me to leave them to die, I killed a random thief trying to rob me and was stopped on the street by his mother who saw me wearing his mask and asked me to “tell my boy to come home” when I see him next time.
yusuke kozaki’s anime designs are neat at giving a friendly face to a game with atmosphere that’s anything but (the idea for dwarves doing elaborate stylizations of their beards that obscure their faces with like, webs of braids is super inspired imo), katsuya terada’s monsters are like platonic ideals of each generic crpg enemy archetype, hitoshi sakimoto’s music hits all the east-meets-west RPG notes you need it to. the presentation with weighty FPP attack animations and teammate models constantly jumping in from behind the camera is incredibly well done and inspired. the structure with a long dungeon instead of typical gacha bite-sized mission nonsense is crucial, the game is often way more forgiving than it seems to be but it makes sure not to break the spell where it counts, skillfully building various types of tension through limited information and leaving you to google stuff for yourself if you want to have the usual boring spreadsheet optimization experience. and I’m sure the game will eventually degenerate into a grindy FOMO nonsense but the first few hours are worth experiencing, they feel like beamed in from an alternate universe where people with both great taste and immense resources keep working on blobbers.
19 Likes
I’ve yet to play an out and out bad mainline final fantasy, though I haven’t gotten to XI or XVI yet. A lot of people hate FFX and FFXIII despite both of them being great and only having the flaws the most of rest of the series has had since VII (bombastic, ambitious, aesthetic trend chasing to the point of incoherence, attempting to appeal to The Youth to an extent that can feel cringey especially if you are not The Youth). But I think they’re neat.
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yeah X is the last one i played, but it was close to the time it came out. although i don’t remember a whole lot about it, i do have generally positive memories of it. the main thing that felt disappointing was the lack of any real exploration or non linear parts. that is the one that has no real overworld map, right? but i also i think played through it on like a borrowed ps2 as quickly as possible so i probably missed a lot of the ‘extra’ stuff if there was any.
i did try xv a few years ago but it really just didn’t hold my attention at all. i am willing to give it another shot, though it just felt so devoid of the aesthetic, mechanical, and narrative elements that keep me kind of enamored of the series that i didn’t really know what to make of it.
that’s why this
is sort of intriguing to me… i definitely did not feel that way but i also didn’t make it past the first main area. weirdly the main thing it reminded me of was the hub world set up of like sonic adventure, like a space that just feels fundamentally incompatible with the way your character is designed to move. plus you also have to drive a car that also feels like shit to do
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This is very astute and puts a perfect name on a previously nameless feeling. Except I love it of course, it’s all such completely odd bullshit. I love FF15 because it seems designed backwards.
Pretty soon the car drives itself 
A hilarious admission of defeat
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I think the game that most feels like FF15 to me is Anodyne 2.
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thank GOD
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oh the toaplan platformer
kinda wonderboy-ish
knew that art looked familiar
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when dark souls first came out, toups kept insisting i play it on account of how it was 3d castlevania done right, knowing how azurelore be toward such things
thus far i have managed to largely avoid the series and its brethren in much the way i have managed to avoid radiohead the last 25 years or so
because, azurelore.
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@isfet
it seems no-one has actually made any posts or videos on the internet about this yet: is this a new port?
a video of the old port to compare:
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i vaguely recall that wardner was hitting md/gen again in that low-prod indie way, but for the life of me i can’t remember the details
it sticks in my mind less out of affection for wardner specifically, which i have barely played and have no specific opinion about besides that i’ve always liked the way that it looks, than because i am such an old toaplan bitch in general
there was a fair bit of discussion about this in the kinds of places those discussions happen, maybe a year or two ago… 
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Final Fantasy 11 is one of my favorite MMOs ever, my second favorite Final Fantasy, and a genuinely moving experience. I like it more than 14 (which is great! but not as much my jam). It’s almost all soloable with trusts (summonable party members) so you’re not stuck in the pre-2015 days of hoping you can find basic leveling parties. I highly recommend it. It’s definitely a time investment though, like all MMOs, and you have to be the kind of person who loves stumbling into an esoteric system that takes you down a 100+ hour rabbit hole / loves dense interconnected plots about breaking free of historical cycles.
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Once again connectivity issues thwarted an attempt at PS4 gaming but I finally figured out a solution, which I should have done in the first place. I dug an old WiFi repeater out of storage and connected it to my network, and then connected it to the PS4 over Ethernet. Voila!
Now I’m spent and won’t play anything until maybe later tonight
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