Games You Played Today Classic Mini

no not really. I mean you can do that if you want to totally customize your clubset from the ground up but it’s totally optional. I just played all the tournaments and challenge matches and eventually wound up with the Infinity clubs and use them exclusively for post-game/online stuff, not at all interested in custom clubs.

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I’ve been playing DQ builders for the past week. This is what I did:

Still haven’t played Devotion, but if you want to go even further in this direction the early movies of Tsai Ming-Liang are … even more melancholy Taiwanese family drama, I guess, including some “weird” / supernatural overtones

Rebels of the Neon God
The River
The Hole (not a family I guess, just neighbors)

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Thanks for the reccs, gonna look these up!

I just finished Devotion in one sitting. It’s really good. If you can get a hold of it, I strongly recommend it.

It’s surprisingly kind of not really a horror game? Like, it has some pretty lame jump scares now and then, and definitely an extremely eerie vibe, but as the game goes on it develops into something with a much more diverse emotional palette. I’d say its dominant emotion is sadness more than fear. I sort of get the feeling that half the reason it’s a horror game is because that’s what sells. Certainly the jump scares have got to be in there just to get streamers yelling.

But yeah, it really digs into some thematics related to parenting that games never really do. It feels like an Edward Yang movie for a reason. It’s very well executed. I agree with others that the ending bits aren’t as strong, but there’s still stuff to like there. I enjoyed the bit where you wake up in the spiritualist’s house and hear the tape of her clients being let down and angered.

So how do you even get Devotion now? Piracy?

Yeah, I think Piracy is currently the only way.

i guess Devotion won’t be coming to consoles then…

Detention did, so if they get this back up and available maybe eventually?

I started it up but need to sleep, will be devoting a couple hours in dim light and headphones tomorrow.

It really sucks that at the time Red Candle needs (and deserves) the most support, they can’t get it. They took the game off the Store themselves, to do a complete content re-check, out of fear. There’s no definite date on its return, but they do mention its return.

I recommend pirating it, playing it, and then buy it as soon as it comes back and replay it.

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Oh it’s a real grind, I just unlocked the second real course (Alps) after like 5 hours?

You unlock a new course by beating 3 »bosses » and you unlock a new boss to beat by just playing a course about 3 times. You get more points for playing on a harder difficulty, but it will always take a super long time

All things said, I probably would not have bought the game if I had known this but now I’m fine with it

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I played a few more hours of Caves of Qud.

I’m realizing my biggest problem with this game that has made me only spend about 20 hours in it in fits and starts despite in theory liking it a lot is that the early game starts you with too many random skills and attributes. When the game starts I have to spend 10 minutes inspecting everything I can do and have, check what the merchant has and what I can sell to them, and usually steal some stuff or pawn some of my starting items to buy a carbide weapon. Because I know at this point that if I just run at the early-game areas with a bronze dagger I will instantly get butchered (and sometimes that still happens even with the above preparation).

The problem this causes is right after I die midgame with my previous character. Suddenly I need to forget the build I was just playing with and spend 10+ minutes studying a new random character. The vibe is the polar opposite of “just one more game”, it’s like a brick wall of abstract thinking and I find it more natural to exit the game after death.

Hmm, I guess I could just use a fixed character and starting town for a while instead…

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big 2nd recommend for rebels of the neon god, it’s great. i think i have a copy of the hole somewhere but haven’t seen it yet. i also really liked Hanagatami recently - obayashi is a favourite and he made a family/wartime drama thats like 3 hours long. if that + surreal elements sounds good go watch that!

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Watch Rebels, Vive L’amour and The River in sequence so you can appreciate the casting in The River. Man, what Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang, and Hou Hsiao-hsien do feels so far beyond anything else, especially Tsai.

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I actually kind of liked Stray Dogs even though I, 100%, did not “get” it

I haven’t seen it yet but Shoplifters kind of seems like it might be sort of like. Someone trying to turn Stray Dogs into a coherent narrative. I bet it would be a good double feature.

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Do you mean the Mamoru Oshii movie that was filmed in Taiwan, or is there another one? The Oshii one is definitely an odd one, switching between slow melancholy, slapstick comedy and violent action movie. I’d probably only recommend it to diehard Oshii fans myself

No I was thinking of the Tsai Ming-Liang one, which is apparently on youtube?

That sounds cool though

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hi

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after playing the first set of stages of campaign+ mode in Cactus+, I’m overjoyed to inform everyone that Cactus is once again game of the year after taking 2018 off to recover from winning it 3 times in a row

maybe, just maybe, video games are good.

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I really didn’t care for Cactus much at all, especially after playing Nex Machina which is one of the best arcade games I’ve played in years.

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It really is an arcade game too; arcade game length and arcade game difficulty, and the sense of everything getting lit up and exploding continuously. It’s the best twinstick shooter I’ve ever played and Cactus feels sterile and limp by comparison. In Nex Machina the world is all voxels that react to your gunfire and the ground can ripple along the gridlines with shockwaves; there’s a real physical cohesion between everything on the screen that Cactus has nothing of. The human chaining system is as interesting as any shmup’s scoring system has ever been, and it’s immediately accessible. The game doesn’t waste a second of your time, whereas I uninstalled Cactus when even the game’s survival mode showed an uneagerness to let me die even when I tried to.

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