Final Fantasy 4 is a good game. It’s a fun linear romp. There’s a heroic sacrifice every five minutes. It does so many fun narrative tricks with its systems. It looks like an NES game with slightly more colours and a sound chip that can suddenly do orchestral strings now. It’s so cool.
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This was really funny. And yeah I loved the stuff like Cecil becoming a Paladin, and how that mattered in a mechanical sense.
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Pixel remaster is balanced pretty well IMO. Its harder than I remembered the snes version being but not by much. Plus it just moves faster so it’s less frustrating
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The manual does explain basically everything and has tables for all the items and magic
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For both FFIV and Castlevania III I’d ideally have wanted a difficulty level in between the Japanese and US versions. Enough to create some tension and interesting decisions without being ridiculously grindy/punishing.
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FFV’s difficulty is just right and it has a heroic sacrifice every two minutes so it’s the better game IMO
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As a virtua fighter spinoff, virtua quest has some really over the top mocap during cutscenes lol
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while fighting, i just heard this rando mook mutter, “man you’re tall…”
i didn’t know they responded to things like that
… though it is accurate to my irl street mook experience
in other news, this month you can learn to plummet like geese did
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not really a fan of the Resident Evil 2 remake from 2019
it’s absolutely competent enough, and in a landscape of non-stop dogshit AAA games, it’s not bad at all, but… was “not bad at all” ever going to be enough here? have y’all played RE2 (1998) lately? shit is incredible! the tension, the music, the backgrounds, the voice acting. it’s all bonkers good
the new thing does nearly nothing to justify its existence other than “have shiny visuals” and “not be old”. i think it is most instructive to compare this to resident evil 1’s remake from 2002. REmake has a soul of its own despite being extremely reverent to the original title. it has ideas, vision, the markings of some kind of novelty. it emphasizes and doubles down on the original design ideas without strictly repeating itself.
RE2 remake is inarguably fine, but the reason it is fine is pretty much exclusively stuff that was already there in 1998. there’s nothing here that hasn’t been said, and honestly most of the changes are for the worse.
the combat in the original isn’t some amazingly exciting action or anything, but it knew its place within the design of the original game. it lent weight and tension to the proceedings, and most importantly, there’s a learned precision to things. resident evil 2 (1998) is nothing if not considered and precise.
meanwhile, 2019 is disgustingly loose and incoherent. over-the-shoulder free-aim is such a poor fit. i can’t understand any reason it was chosen other than “this is what modern games look like”, because it leads to very boring and frustrating encounter design. the already possibly too-sponge-y enemies feel vastly worse when every bullet must be delivered from the dead space camera (need i even mention the preferred dead space camera was already an inferior imitation of the RE4 camera). a vacuous assemblage of modernity without the apparent consideration for why any of it is happening, why it fits? design?!? it’s all smoothed-over, rounded-off, generic, ill-considered now.
instead of the niche but extremely functional action in the original game, you get a mediocre wannabe action game that’s only saving grace is its banal utility. hey, no tank controls! that’s modern baby
the original game is still a masterpiece, but as far as i’m concerned this remake is largely a boringly competent cash grab that fails to justify its existence in any meaningful way
it’s quite playable, at least. i’m plugging away. i’m just a little disappointed. if RE3 is worse than this i will probably skip it. kind of a shame since i think RE3 could have used a remake a lot more
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So I was gonna briefly write up all the smaller spooky games I played last week, but it seems a little late now and in truth most of them were rather unremarkable. I do want to mention Mothered - A Role-Playing Horror Game as it is… something.
It is a follow-up to the dev’s prior game The Enigma Machine (good spooky-ish game) and is considered the second part of the enigma trilogy (third game [ECHOSTASIS]̵ has a prologue chapter out) but is fairly distinct from it. A sort of walking sim horror game mixed with point & click, you are a young girl returned home after a long illness by your dad who then has to spend the next week in the house with her mother.
It is quickly clear that things are weird, and not just in a behavior way. The model for the mother is odd with the polygons of her hand and dress always getting tangled together, the jumps between times of day are abrupt, everything just feels very wrong. As usual the dev is adept at this particular aesthetic and filter, the tension builds as you slowly piece together what went on before an is going on now…
…mechanical spoiler territory for the next paragraph…
…and then you find out that you are in a time loop game, you have to keep playing that same seven day loop but if you pay close attention to certain conversations you know to look in certain rooms or locations at certain times you normally wouldn’t be there, the connections to the prior game become a bit clearer while the game itself begins to feel like it is falling apart, eventually you hit a credit roll and you are done.
Normally I’d chalk that up as neat, the best of the spooky games I tried this season while not quite on the level of their prior game and call it a day. What caught me is that they released a demo for the now few years old game on Steam on Halloween (apparently existed on itch for a year or so) and while it is an actual demo for the game… if it detects a complete game save it instead transforms into a sort of epilogue where everything is now a further step wrong, it breaks away from what came before and if one digs down a bit the rabbit hole goes deeper than one would think.
It feels like things are falling apart to the degree that it can quite easily actually fall apart (I got a not particularly uncommon soft lock and had to watch the end on youtube). I may just be a sucker for novelty but this was a cool thing to have pop up a few days after I happened to play the game proper (checking the steam new release list daily for randomness pays off sometimes) and elevated the whole thing to a much more memorable experience and I am now actively looking forward to the eventual third game as the dev has convinced me they got enough ideas and a grasp on “game is actively degrading” aesthetics to be worth keeping tabs on.
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i will say the game still has one chance to win me over and that’s because i haven’t seen Mr. X yet
it better be good, though
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RE3make is universally considered worse. It’s like DLC of RE2make.
That said counterpoint that I don’t have time to elaborate is I think 2make is fantastic. I played through it all 4 ways there is in like a two week period while raising a baby. I love it. It only didn’t make the top 100 because I didn’t have it right in front of me and determine whether it or the original was better than REmake would take 20 hours.
I love Mr X in the remake.
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Is this a new thing for the series? I always assumed it was like mouse centric click to change targets real time crpg combat.
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I just went through it on Switch on Halloween. I don’t think the demo is available on Switch unfortunately.
I liked how the game used a now familiar cliché, but switched the point of view to create something new. You play as a robot existing to replace a couple’s dead daughter, and have to deal with the mother’s severe mood swings
Re: The time loop, I didn’t want to go through the dreaded apple orchard part more times than necessary so I just looked up how to progress on Youtube. That’s when I noticed I missed all the main character’s dialogue all along due to a bug on the switch version. Her lines were badly implemented and appeared as « dolores_line_01/02/ etc » and I just assumed this was just one of the (frankly too many) ways the game uses to remind you you are a robot
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Astro Playroom a decently fun and free platformer that sucked all the novelty out of the VR space and throws in Reference after Reference after Reference predating their more critically acclaimed IP graveyard blah blah blah what the HELL is this implying
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he’s like the worst part I think. there’s no cool cutscene of him getting air dropped in, actually getting to see these umbrella bioweapons in their intended usage, that this big bastard is just one of several being dropped somewhere etc, he’s just some guy whose just there inexplicably, if you never played the original he could be the building janitor for all you know. there’s no a and b scenario anymore so he’s twice as irritating and not some cool unique part of the 2nd half the other character has to deal with. and they did it completely ass backwards where he’s annoyingly stalking you the whole time and then in 3 nemesis is just a couple fixed encounters.
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parker is right, the way they turned mr. x into discount nemesis and the complete lack of zapping system is what downgrades the remake from being good to being just fine. if he just showed up in one scenario like the original it would have been novel, but the fact that he keeps reappearing to an absurd degree is fucking dumb especially because they were clearly planning on remaking re3 so why would you waste the gimmick on the wrong fucking game!! nemesis was an escalation of the mr. x drama from the B scenario in original re2. it’s why he was extra scary. and not only is nemesis reduced to fixed encounters in the remake of 3, you no longer get to make choices, you can’t run away to put him in stalking mode, and he doesn’t drop sick loot like the mares leg or svi infinity anymore. it’s like one of the worst game remake crimes ever how they turned him into a total pussy despite that weird ryona cutscene where he beats up Jill at the beginning. motherfucker gets owned by a single grenade now. God I could write forever about how much they shit the bed on re3 remake. We could have gotten the park section if they didn’t spend all the money animating that weird cutscene where she gets face fucked by a monster. And I’ll never forgive them for replacing all of Carlos’ dialogue with dumb shit like “it’s kind of fucked up shooting zombie cops” instead of talking about how his accent makes the ladies go crazy. Paul W.S. reimagined him much better, as a cool guy who smokes weed.
Anyway the original Resident Evil 3 is still the best because it’s bad ass and you can dress Jill as Regina from Dino Crisis.
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with all earnestness available to me: the gaming world would be a better place if we had more Balan Wonderworld and less Resident Evil 2 (2019)
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