I’ve been playing SNK 40th Anniversary Collection. Some of the games are not so great, but others are fun titles that I’d never heard of. And I like noticing echoes of a later game in an earlier one, such as this boss with claws reminiscent of the Victory Road bosses.
These games are reminding me just how unfair arcade games could be. The Psycho Soldier final boss is ridiculous, for example. Speaking of that game, I never knew before that you could change form.
They did a good job with this collection, and one of the nicest features is the ability to rewind up to a minute or so at any time in any game. That can convert a frustrating experience into a sort of puzzle, where you rewind until you can find a path through enemies and projectiles.
Another feature that I appreciate (and that was one of the main reasons I was looking forward to this release) is that they turned every game for which it makes sense into a twin-stick shooter. Even Vanguard.
Another interesting feature is a video mode that plays through a game with fast-forward controls, etc. You can stop the playback at any time and jump in yourself.
I haven’t decided yet whether to revisit Crystalis. I’ve only played that game once, way back when I was 14 or so. Ever since, I’ve thought of it as just about my favorite game of its generation. Or at least on the short list.
i saw a bunch of thai short films critical of the country’s buddhist monarchy dictatorship last night and its generally enhancing my experience with digital devil saga a lot
i’ve been thinking about how every white buddhist i’ve ever met has been a complete asshole who fears accountability also? this game is crazy.
eat others for power, kill for nirvana, its okay that you’re a monster. this can be applied to anything. its so bleak, capitalist manifesto burning man burning man burning man @jack on twitter
i love all of the buildings and stuff. there’s a lot of really rad buildings with like, old Indian architecture and it’s really cool, especially contrasted against all of the rubble.
Earlier today I finished Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders, a game I picked up last week on a whim. It’s a very safe murder mystery adventure game starring Hercule Poirot, which actually scores you “ego points” if you act like the famous fictional detective. Having zero knowledge of Poirot, I scored less than half of the 600 available points.
I’ve played a fair number of adventure games, but none of them were truly murder mysteries, and I need to correct that because I love the format for it. I call this game “safe” because it 1) adheres very close to a Telltale-style presentation and mechanics, and 2) is impossible to mess up. The game is unfortunately completely linear, guiding you to the correct conclusion even if you pick the wrong dialog option and halting your progress until you piece together the correct clues.
There’s a “deduction mode” where Poirot combines clues to draw conclusions, and before each segment starts he says “now let us get our brain cells to work” in his cute Belgian accent that grows less cute after the 10th or 20th time. I was also disappointed that the game kept showing the murderer in cutaway scenes, spoiling the mystery, except this person also turns out to be a red herring, so the game is deliberately trying to fool you? The ending twist lands kind of flat so it doesn’t really redeem the game giving the audience more info than the protagonist.
Not sure I’d recommend, but I did find myself compelled to see it through, and it was cheap on PSN. If you folks know any other good murder mysteries on PSN, I’m all ears.
Prey (2017) is on Xbox Game Pass now. Tried it out.
Hoo boy is it not good for my anxiety.
It’s neat though. Very System Shock in ways most Shock-descended games just don’t manage to capture. For example: it’s good! Rooting around in trash cans for banana peels and used cigars to break down into raw materials just reminds me so much of that old Shock feel. I don’t know if I can keep playing on normal difficulty just because of how jumpy I get around the enemies though.
I grabbed a Euro rom from the same site where I got the U.S. rom. and it runs like poop. I mean, I’m sure the PAL aspect is probably why the max framerate is lower. But, the animations also run slower. Not just with less frames and the sound is downtuned, as well. So imma use the U.S. version I guess. Its very smooth.
sherlock holmes crimes and punishments and the devils daughter are okay. I think they came out on console. it has a deduction mode type deal too, I wish they’d go back to actual cork board and yarn and index cards for those parts of the game instead of a giant black screen where you click on little brain synapses though.
Don’t emulators have ways to speed up the PAL roms to NTSC levels these days? I haven’t noticed slowdown on my version, but then I might just be used to the poop version.
I dunno. I’m just using Fusion364. Its lite on features. but is supposed to be very accurate and it works on my laptop. None of the cores in RetroArch could do accurate sound for this game. They were all staticky. Albeit, I didn’t try any tweaks.
Spent the past few days being incredibly ill, so I didn’t really do much other than hunker over my laptop for a few days and read. But I was well enough today to play some stuff, so!
Dreams Early Access: Still haven’t dipped into the tutorials or building things myself yet, but there are a ton of really neat little experiences on there so far.
Considering folks are making this stuff with the in-game tools, with a plain old controller or waggling around two move controllers, it’s unreal some of the stuff people have conjured up. There’s a really amazing painting floating around online that someone made as part of a visual novel they’re doing with their wife on there.
Far Cry New Dawn: May as well, seeing as I’m pretty close to done with the story. Finally got myself some higher tier weapons, which has made the game more tolerable. Can’t wait to do another story mission and need to buy a whole 'nother tier to stand a chance, oh boy.
Hitman 2: Assuming it’s not over yet, there’s a priest in the Italy level from 2016 that should be up through the weekend. I think I got him the first time around in the last game, but it was messy. Maybe I can do it a bit more neatly this time around (assuming I don’t forget and miss it, like I did a target or two ago).
Other than that I keep dipping back into MKX in anticipation of 11 next week. Probably not the best idea, given how much combos have changed in the new one, but it oughta tide me over.
I played Gunstar Heroes today for the second time, and the first time in a decade or so, and yeah I’m just too tired from work this week to deal with this (also spending the last month playing nothing but numerical puzzle games and VNs hasn’t exactly helped my reflexes). Perhaps next week or maybe this weekend will be my time to truly get my feet wet with it.
Fun fact about me BTW: I generally hate boss rushes and I played until the second level. Let’s just say that my initial impressions aren’t good.
20XX is a very solid Mega Man clone with some lite RPG/Rogue-like elements such as randdomnly generated stages and 1 life per run. Really clean graphics. Good controls. 2 player co-op local or net play.
I’ve been on a let’s-fill-my-hacked-nintendo-machines-with-a-bunch-of-stuff for the past month or so. Lots of good games I missed out on on the 3DS especially. So of course I’m playing the Mario and Luigi RPG remake of a game that I played at least twice when it originally came out.
It’s not as good as Super Mario RPG, specifically in that the world and characters are just a little…flat, I guess. And traversing the world is fairly annoying with all of the ability switching you have to do just to get around. It’s also just not as bizarre as Mario RPG was.
It’s also not as good as Paper Mario, again the characters are flatter (oops i made a pun) and navigating the world is more annoying. Plus the badge system in Paper Mario is amazing, and in Mario and Luigi it’s just…nothing.
But the battle system is best-in-class, that class being Action-y Turn-based RPGs Based on Mario Characters.
I really love how dangerous the enemies are, especially if you’re like me and substantially underleveled by the halfway point. The bosses in particular can take upwards of 6 or 7 minutes to beat, but could kill you in two or three hits. BUT, since this is the only RPG system I know of where you either avoid damage entirely, or take ALL of the damage, you can fly through the game completely unharmed if you’re good enough at it.
The enemies have some really aggressive attacks as well, and the animations are wonderfully done to telegraph the attack, but with just enough time to dodge it. It’s very good.
I also think this is the game that looks most like a Saturday Morning Cartoon, especially with the goofy-ass animations for Mario and (especially) Luigi.
Anyway, this game is worth the annoyances. It rules.
