Games You Played Today Classic Mini

Wolf2: New Colossus is on there now too so check that out if you haven’t already.

Sadly I don’t think that’s included in the “play anywhere” selection (i.e, not available on PC, only on an Xbone which I don’t X-own)

Ah that’s bogus.

Played some Recca. I don’t think I ever noticed before that level 3 B shot is at some points more useful then level 4 B shot. Level 3 B shot has one perfectly centered shot while Level 4 is missing a centered shot.

<3 Yagawa

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conducting verbal diplomacy with Phoenix Wright punchiness could easily be more satisfying than fighting is in most RPGs

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Judge Eyes having a side story where I have to catch the panty professor (one of three Hentai Masters) and then a guy well.

Makes me want to throw the disc out a window.

that’s too bad, the yakuza games (localized anyhow) have always been remarkably good at not falling into that

that guys a cop though, not a beautiful ethical outlaw, so it figures

Disgraced lawyer turned PI that regularly hangs out with a Toujokai Boss that raised him and the cops do not like him at all. Other lawyers are mixed.

Also if you buy enough from each convience store the clerks like you and then will help you in battle.

And 6 hours into the game it unlocks the ability to play the pinball machine in your office. Oh really because game I thought you cockblocked me by having a pinball machine I couldn’t interact with.

Similarly there is a drone race minigame that is one of those interupt the main story to unlock ones. Afterwards you get told about upgrades that require parts. You have zero parts. Now across Kamurocho are a bunch of parts for you to pickup all over. Thankfully you just have to run over them.

I have not unlocked the girlfriend side-stories (replacing the kabakura entirely) but certainly feel like quiting the game. don’t think they are gonna handle actual interpersonal relationships with any grace.

Also ended up in a brothel where the clerk fully explained the services and wow I can’t believe this game is being localized.

Can’t wait for Sega of America to try to clean some of this up only to have nerds yell about how IMPURE and CENSORED it is.

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I have a cold and trying to fall asleep to nyquil so tried to return to Axiom Verge and everyone losing their mind at release to A New Metroid where you have a self-insert that just goes WHATS GOING ON over and over and then you get a powerup that is just use on everything and then the next three powerups are also use on everything and be dissappointed and everywhere feels the same and I couldn’t describe the differences between the three areas I went through in 20 minutes and the music fluctuates in my mind between nice and trying to hard to carry everything.

Should just be trying to play Metroid Rogue Dawn. That seemed alright from what I saw

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Axiom Verge really drew me in with the promotional artwork (mainly the giant face things who take up half the screen like STG bosses). couldn’t make my attention last 15 minutes actually playing it.

i don’t get how people learned all the wrong lessons from metroid. discovering powerups isn’t fun when you already know where to use them. finding out that there’s actually a huge cavern underneath one of the starting rooms, because you didn’t imagine you could blow up terrain, is incredible. finding out that the Green Gun opens the Green Door is soporific

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been replaying Final Fantasy Adventure on my phone (hurray physical keyboard!) while traveling to Pennsylvania for my sister’s wedding. Its still a nice tight little experience. Probably my second fave thing on gb after Link’s Awakening.

for those who dont know its the first game in the mana series (as in secreet of). its a little rough and rowdy with unavoidable damage, weird enemy spawns, things getting in your way and occasional bugs. Im nostalgic for this particular style of jank.

The melancholy music is fantastic on headphones with good use of stereo. I first played the game in maybe 8th grade and still hummed the tunes to myself as an adult which is partly why I went looking for it when finding a new thing to play on my phone.

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Kenji Ito is a genius and the primary reason for my interest in SaGa games.

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Been like 4 years since it came out so I don’t remember the introductory staging but that’s enough time to make such a claim? I mean that’s literally scratching the surface of what might be offered.

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I still remember playing this on a trip as a kid at the part where your partner is bitten by a medusa (which of course turns them into a medusa) and begs you to kill them. You’re unable to leave the room until you swing the killing blow yourself. In the backseat of the car on the way to I dunno Chili’s or something, utterly devastated.

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i will be honest i was also playing on an aging laptop which screeched down to a crawl once the glitchy distortion effects started to show up. resuming it properly then didn’t seem worth the effort when i still had plenty of emulatable games on my backlog.

nothing about the presentation had really captured me at that point, though; it seemed to take far too many conventions for granted (and ironically acknowledging them didn’t win it any goodwill), without being very clear what ideas it was actually bringing to the table. i’d be willing to believe there’s some clever design down the line, but as an adventure game, it didn’t make me hungry to explore after introducing its setting.

sorry if my post seemed baldly dismissive! i was sorta just trying to illustrate the rift between where my imagination went from the stuff i had to go on, versus the blunt reality of Game Design Tropes hitting me when i actually sat down to it.

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At the risk of being terribly dull or against the grain on SB I guess I’ve been a little prone to blankly questioning someone’s dash of critique, when I read things like

followed by “one example there good, one example here bad” charged to effect, with my best intentions it rings like a kind of tunnel vision where I pause and think woah, would’ve been interested in someone’s disagreement with Axiom Verge, but they just hit it with a big foul and like…very little grounds imo? So I’m just given to challenging that a bit?

For me yeah I was of that chorus: Axiom Verge made the right impression of actually carrying or resonating an early “Metroid 1 type feel”, and beyond that, just one guy responsible for most/all of it! Enough creative will to produce one of the keystone works in floods of 2-D mapquest derivatives. Kind of a beautifully discordant mess where the foundation juts out: techno-organic. Maneuvering zones and weapon use felt fresh enough, didn’t find it below, if anything above average in level design and exploration.

Which is more of what you were zooming in/out for, so maybe a lot more of Axiom Verge wouldn’t have changed your mind. I don’t doubt you’ve had other first 15 minutes with Metroid-likes that made a better impression, but I’m curious what they are.

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I think it’s been rightly criticized for its design and that most of its solutions to Metroidlike enervation are ‘bullet pattern variant on player guns’. The art can be fairly evocative at times.

Maybe we could hone our language around genre homages. I think they’re fairly disreputable and for good reason, but we all have a guilty fondness towards some and we can define the difference between, say, Environment Station Alpha and Axiom Verge and what aspects they think are worth reviving and what they failed to integrate from modern techniques or even the originals they look to.

Rainworld is my favorite of the Metroid revivals because it understood the emotional core of my favorite of these games, was pulling in the most underappreciated of them, and pushed the aesthetic much deeper and rawer by rethinking the scenario.

Uh, Hollow Knight is my favorite of the ones I don’t really like – the expensive, highly-produced one like Ori and Shadow Complex and Strider, which all feel like rather pedantic grid-fillers overly stuck in a structure designed for compulsion. I find the Metroid structure among the most visible and predictable, so it tends to sag down a game that I’m not invested in to the extent of dungeon-crawler flavors like the Souls games (and that menace implicit in ‘dungeon’ makes such a big difference – La Mulana benefits from the same, is it safe? am I ready? query the player is constantly running in a way that closer Metroid templates avoid, with their very powerful player characters).

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I’ve played all the games you mentioned through, except for Environment Station Alpha, and tops ordered out, much as I love the great balance of scope skills art mood that HK brings, then Rainworld’s minimalist (and overly random/brutal aspects to fault) genius…Axiom Verge deserves high distinguishing praise for those tighter shooter, terrain traversal highlights and garbled freakish aesthetics. Weird Science.

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