light novels are already offensive enough, I do what I can to reduce harm
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finished talking to Measurehead in Disco Elysium (i am both too weak & stupid to challenge him lol. im just very friendly & good at shooting bodies down from trees) and immediately got both the Communist and Superstar Cop thoughts at once hell yeah
i love how obviously this game was written by bitter communards. the self effacement in the writing about communism is very… specific. ive felt it before. ive felt a lot of things in this game before lol i probably relate to the protagonist a lil too much
its such a fucking wonderful game so far favorite bits:
-failing my Conceptualization check to come up with a name, then when i tried to protest that “Raphael Augustus Cousteau” sounds douchey my necktie piped up & forced me to accept it
-failing a Visual Calculus check (again, im dumb as bricks) that probably would have let me trivially determine i obviously destroyed the fence (something i Kenzie the player of this game figured out immediately) but then just for the helluvit i tried a VC check on the footprints near the hanged man, fuckin nailed it and got to do a whole CSI analysis scene. this was both funny and kinda accidentally badass
-ringing the doorbell near Whirling-in-Rags and getting the spooky otherworldly recording
-insisting to my Encyclopedia skill that i know what books & boardgames are, then when it replied “no you don’t” i told it not to sass me
-befriending Cuno and agreeing to go nab his dad’s speed stash
-dunking on racists with Kim
-internalizing a thought that encourages me to make finger guns at people
-realizing that a good way to make money in this game is to collect bottles & cans for the tare. i just appreciate the realness of that. i used to work at a recycling center and most of our regular customers were unhoused folks; ive also had my own hard times where i collected tare to scrounge a little pocket money.
-“Volumetric Shit Compressor”
im trying to play my detective as weird but not too much of a jackass. idk i like the idea that he quickly grasps what’s happened to him and elects to roll with it instead of getting hung up on asking people a million questions about the world. It is nice that the game has provided a granularity of responses that let me play a median character like this, without forcing me to go all in on wacky starman or Boring Cop
14 Likes
The bike in Death Stranding doesn’t feel like a bike and this annoys me greatly. Praying that Kojima and I cross paths on a moped monday at Add A Ball and I let him ride my psychotically fast Tomos Targa (in this fantasy my fast bikes are running) and he becomes obsessed with good feeling vehicles. OR. he could hire me to do it.
15 Likes
vehicle handling’s a real mechanical low point in DS
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Kojima you have my number
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ahh that makes a lot of sense, thank you!
1 Like
I’m playing some Chinese strategy game creatively named “NationWar2: Chronicle” about their Warring States period. It’s like a total war type game I guess. I say I guess because I don’t even know what to say, I started as Qi and on literally the second fucking turn my 67 year old general decided he no longer had to take orders from me and absconded with the entirety of my only army.
All I can do is verbally reprimand him over and over again to impotently try to re-establish my authority while he lays siege to this neutral settlement for god knows what reason. Maybe it’s because I got sick? Or I’m pretending to be sick?? I have no idea.
There’s like nobody playing this who speaks English and no manual besides vague tips that appear at the start of the game like “Don’t go into debt. Save your money!” I can’t wait to play more…maybe when this old man lets me…
18 Likes
It’s been a long time coming but I finally tricked @boojiboy7 into playing Lunar The Silver Star for Sega CD while I concurrently play Lunar Silver Star Story on Playstation in Japanese.
There is half a dozen not very good reasons to do this. One this is the game that made Vic Ireland/Working Designs’s Reputation. This is a game complete weirdos declare is better than Chrono Trigger. The creators of the game: Game Arts, declare they wanted to make a game with “Story-telling, not just a story.” Well Okay!
You play as Alex who is mute in the Sega CD and a character in Playstation. 15 years ago the legendary hero came to this village and died and it is absolute complete cocidence you were born 15 years ago. You are preparing for some village festival with your childhood friend Luna when your other friend Ramus comes and tells you the ancient dragon is awake and you should all explore the cave he is in. For whatever reason your parents are cool with this and give you a knife and clothes. The girl gets nothing. But she does know magic for some reason.
You navigate the first dungeon and meet the dragon. And I cannot make more clearly this is what happens. The Dragon tells Alex come back after he’s “obtained manhood”. He then looks at Luna and says, “We are entertwined in destiny.” Then Ramus says can we have one of your diamonds? Which Vic Ireland inserted that the diamonds are the dragon’s shit, but honestly why else would a dragon have diamonds he’s okay with giving away.
Ramus says let’s go back to town and sell the diamond. The small village you live in cannot support dragon shit disruption and they recommend going to the big city on the continent. Your parents are again totally cool with you going across the ocean to pawn dragon feces.
Booji then proceeded to get increasingly frustrated with the number of boring dull steps needed to get to an unknown port city, to hire a boat, to go across the continent, to get to the big city to again, pawn dragon poop (1).
2 hours into Chrono Trigger you’ve rescued a princess after being sucked into a time hole to rescue your friend who is the descendent of the princess you are rescuing.
In Final Fantasy 6 you’re on the run from the evil empire and have stopped in an incredible sand castle that can move and recruit the lecherous prince who can also use a chainsaw.
In Final Fantasy IV you’ve released a horrible beast burning the summoner village to the ground laying the work for an eventual redemption.
In Phantasy Star 2 you’re probably still in that nightmare first dungeon.
In Dragon Quest V you’ve just beaten the first dungeon and have been rescued by your Dad.
In Lunar The Silver Star you’re on an incredible quest to find a pawn shop to sell literal poop. We all made a lot of jokes about The Silver Star being the Dragon’s coleca.
23 Likes
I have to be honest I think it rules that this game starts with your friend coming up with a get rich quick scheme to sell dragon poop. And that dragons poop diamonds in this world.
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Finally finished (for probably the fourth or fifth time) Shadow Complex. What a dumbass game. It’s fine, as a thing to play, but this story, good god. I also forgot if you grab the golden armor and guns you can’t unequip them, so the end of the game just looked like this
Anyway it’s done, onto something else.
16 Likes
I keep thinking about replaying this, I have no idea why. I barely remember anything other than the goo gun
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The goo gun was sadly not as fun as I remembered it being.
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This has been on my list forever. Maybe this will be my christmas break game I just need to get my Sega CD working again. I think the black fuse blew.
3 Likes
demos i tried for Steam Next Fest (or thereabouts) on my stream:
HYPERBEAT: y2k styled rhythm game. was too hard for my sore aching wrist but i did get into it a bit more after some practice. not bad - could be one to look for for fans of rhythm stuff who want something stylish and not garish that reminds them of like a combo of Beat Saber, Rez, and Vib Ribbon. or something like that.
Mohrta: another first person gzdoom game from the creator Vomitoreum, but this one is a lot more extensive. it’s got low-poly 3D models ala Dread Delusion, and RPG-like hub towns! the actual stage design of the first stage was alright and there were some neat enemy designs. but the hub area was really neat and unexpected as someone who played Vomitoreum but felt it was kind of light on substance. i played a little bit of another stage and the sensibility - def can imagine combat getting more difficult. def struck me as more memorable than the guy’s previous games anyway
Miss Paint: one-clever mechanic 2d platformer with a sort of alternate Windows OS. it’s made by members of the Mario Maker 2 Troll level community apparently. it’s not anything you haven’t seen before, but i thought it was cute and fairly well designed! the big thing is that you can make the levels in ms paint basically - they’re designed around that, which i think is interesting. generally seems like it’s on track to be a likable 7/10 sort of game.
SWEYET: DREAMING EMULATOR: THE FAMILIAR DISCOMFORT OF THE UNPREDICTABLE - weird 3D game that relies around a webcam tracking your eye blinks (certainly not the first game to do this) which i didn’t realize until too late. the alternative is to manually blink on the keyboard, lest the entire game goes horribly out of focus which is def very cumbersome. you were making a pizza with clumsy controls in the first part - i imagine you do similar sorts of clumsy tasks in later parts. cool vibes but i wasn’t blown away by what was there - it’s a little cumbersome. there’s some interesting menus and stuff in the game. it’s funny how time has made me a lot less excited about these kinds of weird walking sim-adjacent games than i used to be - maybe it’s that meme culture kind of infiltrated into them a bit. or maybe it’s just because the visual design seems to be the main emphasis almost at the expense of anything else. anyway, someone else here might be into it but i found it a little cumbersome but also i didn’t play super far in.
Tenebris Somnia: really boring and mid point and click horror adventure game published by New Blood. the one mechanic is the game is 2D and pixelated but it has live action cutscenes. the reason that’s the sellling point is because nothing else about this game is interesting. the writing is so boring - why make a point and click adventure if you can’t at least pretend to be a decent writer? what a waste tbh.
My Work Is Not Yet Done: cool black and white aesthetic but it’s ultra slow and i couldn’t make heads or tails of how to get anywhere in this one. might have to come back to this one later.
edit: oh, i also played Glitch Dungeon Crystal for IGF judging and that one was good. def a game in the mold of the better free indie games you could find around tigsource from the years like 2009-2014 or so. wish the glitching was explored more but it’s fun to figure out how to move around the environment with the different powers. it’s just nice to know platformers can still feel relatively unique and don’t have to be either Metroidvanias or straight discrete puzzle platformers, in spite of what some people think.
12 Likes
The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe got released on mobile and has a free trial which contains a new ending. Rather than go through all the trouble of downloading a free trial and playing through all that why not just watch the youtube video like 90% of the people who have any interest in the game?
5 Likes
Steam Next Fest is over, time to play demo for games that already had them
Poke All Toads is an action puzzler (yay) where you (blue fairy + friends) have to poke toads (all)
gleeful animation, this is mostly all in-game idle loops
puzzle-wise, it starts obvious then gets heavy on sequencing + misplays. the fairies don’t seem to mind being eaten so neither do I
load screens + tips images are very silly
14 Likes
This looks really neat, like what if Lost Vikings was good. Does it get weird enough for real puzzleheads?
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Finished Alan Wake and I’m left with the impression that it was probably more impressive back in 2010. There probably weren’t… horror adjacent games of this scope back then, the lighting tech is strong, the narrative while a trope (oh no, what the writer writes is coming true~) probably felt more ambitious then, it feels ahead of a curve that is no longer in play in the year 2024. As is there are still some inspired choices (the live action Twilight Zone knock offs are bold regardless of era) and some which are… well different (finding pages saying what’s gonna happen next undercuts as much as it enhances) but it just doesn’t feel like it comes together. Too much of the game is in dark forests that really start to blend together, parts of the story feel borderline incomplete (I have no clue what was up with the FBI guy), it’s not bad but at the end I don’t really see much to recommend it.
That said I was told the bonus episodes were better so I’ll try them later in the week.
(All the people complaining about the game losing Space Oddity and it legit is only played during the ending credits. Gamers.)
EDIT: I just noticed that I got the Steam achievement for beating the game on hard, apparently console normal became PC easy and hard became normal (yet the achievements don’t catch this), game must have been a pushover on console as that wasn’t hard in the least aside for the most part.
9 Likes
Still a great metroid like, but yeah. The fear mongering about liberals is off the charts, the democrats are going to establish the new Roman empire! Only the military can save us! Only in the delusional world of Orson Scott Card, insane homophobe and the male JK Rowling
9 Likes