Saturn games are just fun to say:
Tryrush Deppy
Sentimental Nuts
6 Inch My Darling
Bug! 2
16 Likes
finished replaying i’m scared of girls
blaaaargh (=word vomit)
world gains a lot of presence just from being broken in a bunch of really detailed ways (climbing/descending works differently for seemingly every other staircase nd theres a bunch of props that just don’t have collision boxes)
which i gather is what ppl like about sonic adventure? but this has the advantage of being very easy to pick up and play over and over again and only taking ~2.5 hours to finish
the locations and dungeon crawl routes are connected in really convoluted/confusing and illogical ways that often seem disinterested in any coherent sense of progression, which reminds me of yume nikki a lot more than basically any of the games that tend to draw that comparison (there’s a moment in this game that’s EXTREMELY like getting teleported in front of a seemingly purposeless structure in the block world that rly stunned me when i first encountered it, like yes, this person gets it!!) but there’s the added weirdness that it’s taking place in the form of a bump-combat dungeon crawler instead of an artsy walking sim which adds this layer of cruft to everything.
i think this kind of mess has to be more common in games than i think it is, and that maybe that impression is just a matter of how i approach them. still think that a gamelike hobbyist engine like rpgmaker lends itself uniquely to this kind of thing (even beyond the fact that so many of this game’s idiosnycrasies seemingly result from its creator trying to brute force an action game out of rpgm)
the story of this game is, you’re a crossdresser who’s been sent to purgatory and is searching for+destroying memory fragments from his life which take the form of hit-or-miss prose poetry segments. i’ve seen it criticized for not adding up to anything thematically but i think the effect of rifling thru dying memories and impressions is still well done, especially since those prose segments are placed so aggressively out of order.
on that note there’s this weird friction between how sketchy and scattered everything is + how placeless the locations feel, and the game’s attempts to imply a broader narrative?? like you hear about an “Angelica” in the protagonist’s memories and then you meet her ghost in an afterlife bar and its not commented on at all. idk i have a bad time articulating it (goes for this whole post tbh, altho in this case i think the term i’m looking for is just “incoherent storytelling” and im overthinking it) but i like it a lot
also it just has a wonderful mood and sense of place. maybe even helped by how scattered the world and narrative feel but mostly because the art is great. satie gymnopedie/gnossienne in rpgm is a cliche but this is forever the classic instance to me.
this post is horrendously incoherent but so is the game, thankfully!! i think i’m half hoping that by getting this out somewhere i’ll be able to better work out what i think of it… … … im also just lazy… … the other carrionblue/moga/bilexth games ive played are more fully-formed but i dont love any of them quite as much, altho i do like the music and nightmare tone of GHost Suburb II
other sheeet
- sometimes you spawn on a gap and can’t move until an enemy attacks you and you recoil onto an open space
- dying in this game is very strange… seems to be random chance whether you’re sent straight to the menu screen or to an afterlife zone, and whether or not an unspecified “mysterious voice” tells you “this is no good-- you must go to the unhappy place.”
- checking your inventory doesn’t use rpgm’s built in inventory system but instead calls up a series of text boxes saying “you have 6 or so rubies” “you have 10 or so obsidian” etc.
- what is the sapphire door??
- there are little pickup-filled siderooms you can teleport into from floating red orbs scattered thruout the dungeon. but with a single exception they all seem to be the same instance because leaving them returns you to the SAME dungeon room regardless of where you entered from.
- the circus tent is good
- mostly useless point system
- prose poetry-only easy mode takes place in a bizarrely fleshed-out bespoke location??
- game can seemingly not decide whether it’s called “i’m scared of girls” or “scarygirls”
- skull shop
7 Likes
I Blast Wind every day.
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I beat Light Crusader (Genesis) the forgotten Treasure Dungeon Action Game. It’s good. Has a great giant spider. Is very considerate of the player. None of it quite builds like you may expect a modern game too (you start in town and that’s about the only time you ever need to go there despite the tendrils of empty houses and missing people.) there were some real sicko puzzles scattered around. I should really get started on Estopolis 2. I bet I would just be rubbing my hands together and cackling at that one the whole way through. Then that has a 99 floor bonus dungeon, just for creeps!
I keep dipping my toe into the Sega Master System Library and I really shouldn’t as it isn’t very good. Tonight was some third rate Donald Duck game that was like if Duck Tales was bad. I then ended up also beating Mickey’s Ultimate Challenge which took maybe 25 minutes but I was fine with it.
Now with Light Crusader and FF7Rebirth out of the way surely I can focus on Chrono Cross (I won’t.) I don’t hate CC and in fact find it neat but I don’t think I’ve ever been more positive on a game and more disinterested in playing more of it.
13 Likes
Have you tried the few compile shooters it has? Been meaning to try Golvelius
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I’ve been feeling like a sicko, so I’m still working on Hydlide 3 The Space Memories, but I also downloaded Tritorn and Xanadu because apparently these are games I want to play on my Switch, my portable PC-88.
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I made the huge mistake of starting Alan Wake 2 and then going on 2 weeks of vacation in between Cataclysm Classic and Dawntrail dropping
My only saving grace is that when we get back the kids go to my parents’ for 2 weeks. Gonna have to cram in some truly disgusting gaming
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im so excited to poopsock again in like a week ive been barely playing videogames all month in preperation
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master system outrun is a cute little game. an ok attempt at the music, chuby little choro q-looking sprites and a cure squeaking noise when you’re turning.
it’s unfair to compare master system hang-on, since outrun came out 2 years later and was on a cartridge while hang-on was on a card, but i will anyway. it’s not as good! feels like you’re racing through a featureless void, a feeling that’s definitely not helped by the lack of music
edit: what a useful cheat for outrun
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outrun isnt as good or hang on isnt as good?
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hang on isn’t as good
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I loved Master System Outrun as a kid because the perspective felt very mysterious to me. What exciting things existed over that horizon? But because me and my friend who owned it didn’t know about changing gears we never made it past the first checkpoint. I was always thinking about that horizon.
I think I liked Battle Outrun better though back then
10 Likes
that reminds me of how the first time i saw evo: the search for eden was at the house of a friend who had never gotten past the first couple of stages, because he’d never thought of pressing select and finding the evolution menu.
he passed the controller to me, went to the toilet, and returned a few minutes later to be shocked and astounded
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this also happened with my Megadrive copy of Outrun, figuring out you could change gears to get to more stages was…a revelation lmao
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Yeah the thing with the Master System version as well is that to change gears you have to press up and down on the D pad, which was not something I would have considered for a non-movement action.
I think I remember my friend’s dad telling him ‘you gotta put it in high gear’ and then my friend yelling at me to change gears and I am just panicking and going ‘How?? how??’
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I wish I liked metal black, because it’s extremely cool. I just don’t like playing it much. man it’s fucking cool though, I give it a credit feed now and again on principle
the director of the game had a weird career. he stumbled into the anime industry as a teen, somehow ended up as the animation director on char’s counterattack of all things, then left to go design shmups for taito for some reason. the first game he made for taito was gun frontier, which is basically battle garegga light, to the point where shinobu yagawa has been pretty open about just ripping off gun frontier. also the more you read about how fucked up taito’s management and production schedule were in those days the more inexplicable it is that they ended up shipping any games at all, nevermind a fleet of fucking bangers
edit: oh alfred linked an interview that almost certainly covers all of this. I’m very good at posting
9 Likes
I finished the last 2 podracing circuits in Episode 1 racer. One of them you race through a volcano and there’s tons of lava. If you win you get a pod racer with 2 engines. Kind of wish there was a way to really upgrade every part in the game but there’s a set amount of currency you can earn in the game so you can’t grind for it. I did download a trainer for it to experiment so maybe I’ll try that. Learned that the design lead for this game went onto lead the Forza games.
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My recent game playing:
The Longest Journey: Still picking away at this, just reached chapter 12 (space). I limit myself to only a chapter a day to prevent certain parts of it from irking me too much. Odd story, whoever summed it up as jrpg-esque wasn’t wrong. I think it is possible that every major puzzle in the game is a mess (the underwater altar one is stunningly so) but that’s what walkthroughs are for. It has on occasion told me things out of order, the diary screen wrote about a character death that wasn’t to occur for another minute or so, April occasionally has the option to ask people about stuff no one has yet told her about, that kinda thing. I think in 2024 it is more interesting than good per se.
Elephantasy: This was just pleasant as heck. It borrows a bit from the metrovania template, except there are only four main items that bestow abilities and at the start you can only borrow one at a time from the store; as you collect more jewels you can hold more items at the same time. As it is mostly combat free (there are a few mostly optional bosses) it is more of a puzzling experience figuring out what combo of items you need to proceed in a given direction or reach a certain place, and on top of this there are various secrets you gotta puzzle out in a more meta sense. If you keep your eyes open you can generally figure them out, I looked online for a couple nudges but otherwise could manage. Add in that it is charming as hell and I’d easily recommend it.
Waxwing Radio: I dug this way more than I expected. You basically have to guide your circle through single screen mazes/obstacle courses while crossing over your own path a set number of times (sometimes zero) with the only way to steer being pressing up and down on the keyboard to rotate clock- or counter-clockwise a bit. Thanks to the drone soundtrack and the bits of texts between areas it ends up much moodier than one would think and the limited controls makes things just tricky enough to handle to be interesting without becoming too annoying of a hassle (a couple late game stages excluded). My only real complaint was putting start on Z and restart on R, given that each attempt is brief you need to keep your fingers on both and it got uncomfortable after a bit. The only other thing I know Waxwings from is Pale Fire so maybe I should just track down everything they appear in >_>
FrogFall: I’ve mentioned Kultisti’s games before once or twice, this one is a single screen platformer where you have to jump on and kill each enemy without touching the ground in between. Simple concept that has been done before, but this adds a bunch of neat little twists in each of the five or six areas in addition to harder B-sides a la Celeste. Walks a nice line of being challenging without being crazy about it, solid way to spend 90 minutes to get through its 80 levels.
Pushmo World: Is basically a level pack/expansion for the original game as only one side section has anything that wasn’t done in the original. I think every Pushmo family game is too long (this game has 250 puzzles!) but if you use them as a pick-away-at experience they are still rather good. Shame it is now officially “lost” as it was a WiiU exclusive.
EYES: Tiny in-browser metrovania, only worth mentioning as I think it had a clever little twist on the classic Metroid escape sequence in there are tiny mushrooms that pop up & decorate the game world, at the very end you find out they highlight the escape path out when it starts to self-destruct.
Oh yeah, also finished up Ninja Five-O which finished on a timed escape sequence depending heavily on the hook swing (boo) and started up Ape Out, while I’ve never played a Hotline Miami-like before I want to assume this one is the best solely due to the presentation.
12 Likes
we’ve been away from home visiting my family so ive been playing mr driller 2 and drill spirits on my ds. driller 2 is by far better. feels a bit nicer to move, nicer visual style, susumu’s “lucky” when grabbing oxygen is both cuter and less grating when rapidly picking up a bunch in a row, and the gba cutscenes are cute & funny (try not to laugh at susumu going “im very angry >:(” at the end of 500m) both games are good tho and im running drill spirits for difficulties that exist between the few ones in 2. im still “bad” at these and have never cleared the longest stages in any mr driller
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Wow this really captures my feelings about Chrono Cross. I love everything about it except for playing it (though I have trouble with RPGs in general so in my case this isn’t an actual criticism of the game mechanics which I probably dont understand)
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