I actually finished up Tappingo yesterday and while it is fine, it may have the flattest difficulty curve I’ve ever seen in a puzzle game. At some point halfway through the puzzles get twice as large, which thanks to the lack of zoom means they become twice as tiny to see and touch. Aside from that and the first few puzzles being rather small and basic they were all basically the same in terms of complexity or difficulty, one could probably play five selected puzzles and see everything the game has to offer.
Still decent enough to pick away at a few puzzles at a time.
Dying a lot in Caves of Quid. This game leads to some wonderful stories if you can hang in there long enough.
Also slowly working my way through Prey. I’ve been wandering aimlessly for half the game so far, but the environment’s interesting enough that I don’t mind. I think this IS the game.
Wish the enemies were more interesting but whatever. Flying freely around the outside of the space station makes up for a lot.
I am messing around with the Capcom Belt-Action Collection (a thing I can very easily recommend if you’re getting it on Switch but less so on other systems because the netcode is seemingly frame-delay based, which means after two players games become stuttery messes) and even though I will strongly and easily claim Knights of the Round as the best game included (it’s insane how it feels like a modern character action game for something from 92), my favorite discovery is Warriors of Fate because you can use your Sure-Killing Technique on mooks and their bodies fucking explode and shit
getting a one-credit clear is fulfilling but seeing a boss’s internal organs because you punched him hard enough to explode off half his body is satisfying
I finished off Hammerfight today. I first thought it was simply a physics based combat game, so I had no idea there was this dense and confusing world behind it. I imagine the translation makes it more opaque than it’s intended to be; however, I find the foreign setting lends the inscrutable plot a sort of authenticating power. I can’t understand what’s happening because I am on Earth; of course I wouldn’t know why things operate the way the do in that universe. It exists as a place to exist in, not necessarily comprehend.
I really enjoy the small ways you can role play. It’s possible to disarm your opponent, but attacking an unarmed opponent is dishonorable. Similarly, you can wound an opponent down to their last breath and spare them. Depending on how you act, you are granted titles such as “the Peacemaker” or “the Barbarian.” I dig it.
Some of the systems are a little opaque and the game progression sort of sneaks up on you so suddenly you’re in big difficulty spikes and you’re supposed to be upgrading weapons and confusing but it all works great
I just wish you could wrapper the mouse input handling because every time I’ve played it, it’s impossible to get the sensitivity right and it always messes with a Windows setting that’s hard to revert afterwards
The poor dev managed to both hook into the win32 APIs for his sensitivity slider and didn’t provide a good baseline for what it’s supposed to feel like. Biggest problem with the game.
i wanted to play robo army, so i went into mame and typed in “robo”
i played robo army! it’s fun and silly.
i also played robocop 2, which is really good, and a lot better than the more well known first game. and ufo robo dangar, which has great music
also i’ve been playing a lot of fire pro wrestling world and it’s really good. just making wrestling ocs and having tournaments and leagues and setting up feuds and so on. the storylines only happen in my head, of course, based on what happens in the matches.
it’s actually what i used to do on the ps1 version of street fighter alpha 3, since you could have cpu players on both sides in team battle mode. so i’d have silly little fanfics that only existed in my head about street fighter characters teaming up in trios to fight (this was actually before i played any king of fighters game!)
I played through Hammerfight earlier this year and… I mean, I don’t know that you were supposed to have the mouse sensitivity set up to the max and be forced to very carefully select whatever menu option you wanted to start, but the game plays so much better that way that I think it has to be intentional? With sane menu controlling sensitivity I could barely make it past the first few stages, at max insanity the controls become very snappy and the game just feels right.
Anyways, there was a choice right near the end of the game and I accidentally picked the wrong option which locked me into a somewhat unsatisfying ending (I may have skipped the last boss due to it?) and there is no stage select I could find to let me go back and try it the right way.
last night i played rekordbox and vcv rack, which scratched my itches for beatmania and space chem.
hypothesis: the decline of beatmania and dj max was that computer dj programs got smart enough that you can play them like a game and they’ll quantize and assist you until you sound competent.
i’m curious – how many of you have played with vcv rack? it’s a free/opensource emulator for eurorack modular synths that’s really good and even has the blessings of companies like mutable instruments and some oldschool modular artists. if you’re not familiar with modular synthesis and why i compared it to spacechem … the idea is that you have modules that generate control signals and/or tone signals, and you route those signals around through other modules that change them in various ways, and eventually to an audio output. you start getting into really fun and devilish puzzles when you try to eg, set up a network of modules that will play themselves and modulate their parameters through various bits of logic. that’s fun because you can make a patch in the morning and leave it going as background music and tweak it a little bit during the day. highly recommended!
A bit, though tbh the Neutron is about as deep into modular as I’m comfortable with
Still, as a puzzle-solving challenge I can certainly see how it qualifies
The Super NES Classic Edition is reminding me of just how bad I am at Street Fighter II.
I can beat it on three stars fairly easily, but as soon as I put it on normal I get pummeled when I fight Ryu.
It’s nice to have a game I can plug away at.