think about the tire wear, though
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Hey look, itās hyper depressed freshman year of college me. Better make sure I have a copy of Gran Turismo 2 around.
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how about the pollution and resource consumption
hell, even exploratory games are arguably tapping into some of the same impulsions that led to colonialism.
is there anything we yearn to do in videogames that isnāt profoundly immoral in reality?
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Puzzle games are the first thing that come to mind. Unless my love of Picross speaks to deeper, darker desires within me to lay bare the innumerable lines of darkness etched beneath the planes of our existence, guided only by the faintest of hints from the all-knowledgeable-yet-unseen who came before.
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Iād make a distinction between exploration and expansion. 4X games certainly express a manifest destiny impulse, but exploration games express the impulse to observe, appreciate, learn. (Iām thinking Marco Poloās style of exploration, as opposed to Christopher Columbus.)
Puzzle games express the impulse to solve. That is in itself ethically neutral ā in real life it can be strongly positive or negative depending on the context and the ends, which of course are often absent or token in such games.
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If you think the arcade version of Hologram Time Traveler is bad, you should try the home version. It runs on any DVD player. I had to buy a copy years ago after playing it at a friendās house, just to own the worst video game Iād ever encountered.
That reminds me of another thing I miss from when I was youngāthose stores in shopping malls that sold nothing but holograms. They were always way too expensive for me to hope to buy one, but I liked looking at them.
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i guess what i mean is, thereās porting work, they have full soundtrack access at the title screen, there was translation work (or, at the very least, reworking of another script), font work, filters for the GB, etc etc. like, itās not just āroms.ā
now, you wanna say ā$40 is a lot considering Konami Collections have been $19,ā then, sure.
I checked out Trials of Mana earlier. My only experience with Seiken Densetsu 3 was in like, 2000, and I only really played a chunk of the Hawkeye scenario. I know there had to have been a reason why I stopped playing back then and never had any compulsion to go back, and itās because the battling and character movement in that game feels like shit. Absolute shit. I reconnected my controller and checked my input configurations because I figured thereās no way itās supposed to feel and play like this. Loading either of the menus takes a few seconds, and likewise, switching between areas of the primary menu also takes a few seconds. Iām not sure why anybody involved thought a menu system that takes time to load was a good idea, but I donāt have the patience for that shit. The font is a bit too thin, but that was probably needed in order to fit the full character names? I recall Hawkeye having to be called āHawkā in the fan-translation.
But, regardless of how I feel about the game, I appreciate that they went through with localizing a 24 year-old SNES game. I hope this sells well enough that other companies will do something similar ā Iād love to see this for something like the first 3 SNES Shin Megami Tensei games (1, 2, ifā¦), especially since the latter two have never been localized, and the first one only saw an iOS localization, and you canāt even play it anymore if youāve updated past, I think, version 7?
I think Iāll go back to Terranigma, instead.
i think the combat feels like a midway point between SD2 and Legend (becauseā¦well, it is) and takes some getting used to, but can be gotten used to? and when you have more party members, itās more fun?
but yeah, the menu systems in this game are trash. they take a few seconds to load, they have input lag, and theyāre laid out in a way that makes you experience all of those things to do even the most basic shit like changing equipment or getting items out of storage. itās a drag.
maybe Squareās āgood at menusā person was busy with Chrono Trigger or something.
ok, so after spending more time with the game (iām about 4 hours in, now), part of the issue has to do with just the look of the game. maybe on a CRT, stuff stood out differently (i doubt it, tbh), but sometimes itās just really hard to see that, āoh, thereās a hole in this wall i can go through,ā or āoh, this configuration of rocks is actually supposed to be an entrance.ā if you donāt know what youāre looking for, you might end up wasting a lot of time just searching everywhere, while the answer hides in plain sight. thereās just something about the graphical style that made my brain not comprehend the geometry of areas properly.
that said, now that i have more of a feeling for the game, progress has been more steady and smooth. i know what to look for, and i know what the game expects of me with regard to figuring out what to do next (basically talk to every single person, pretty much after any event, or sometimes at a different time of day).
iām really having a good time with it. the combat is definitely strange. itās this weird mix of autobattle (which you can toggle on by holding down the A button) and sort of real-time, but itās also sort of ATB, meaning you canāt just keep attacking. the way you switch between other characters, though (hold L or R, respectively), feels good. during a boss fight, just chipping away with my melee characters while having my magician (Angela, who reminds me a lot of someone i used to be close to, weirdly) charge her attack and then execute itā¦idk. it all feels very fluid once it gets going.
edit: thinking on it more, it almost feels like the battle system is a rudimentary precursor to stuff we would end up seeing in Final Fantasy XII. you can set AI tactics for everyone in the party and you can just let them do their thing. itās sort of like MMO combat, in that regard. now, itās definitely not in your best interest to just let the characters do their thing all the time (in my experience so far), but it seems like this is what they were aiming at.
the introduction of most treasure chests being traps is an interesting nod to D&D, and it makes having someone with a high Luck stat actually useful to your party.
my team is a bunch of a weirdos - Amazon, Magician, Thief. i love them all and will help them save their world.
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I grew to tolerate then like SD3 combat after a while but yeah itās weird.
Itās at least inarguably better than Secret of Mana
Whether the game plays well mostly depends on the character you play as.
- As boring as Sword Dude Duran is, he is the most satisfying: He has the least weird hitboxes, a long reach, can quickly hit and run, does all right damage. He just feels good to play as.
- Lise is a worse, but at least cooler version of him.
- Angela is awful - do you want to have to pull the menu anytime you want to do anything of note in an ARPG?
- Charlotte is the same, and her healing is rendered obsolete by either Duran, Kevin or items.
- Hawkeyeās double hit attack just feels bad - too much commitment for this game, too little reach, and it moves him around. I canāt stand him
- Kevin would be the same as Hawkeye but he hits like a truck and is already MVP before turning into a werewolf so heās forgiven.
The most annoying thing the game pulls is letting you move around at 1 HP when you are in fact already dead, and any action you try to take wonāt count. Avoid dying
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I decided to bite on that $1 Gamepass thing, since theyāre converting whatever Xbox Gold months you have to Gamepass Ultimate (itās good for something like 36 months, but thereās no way I was gonna spend $180 topping off my account).
So! With a bunch of Xbox exclusives Iāve ignored for a while now at my fingertips, I played
Super Luckyās Tale.
Itās OK. Feels like itād be pretty good as like, your kid siblingās first 3D platformer. Itās fine! Though the controls in the 2D side scrolling bits donāt feel great.
Void Bastards was downloading while I was playing it, though. Iāll play that soon!
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is lise the official name? in the olden days, everyone called her reisz
Sheās Riesz in Trials of Mana. She was the character I was using yesterday.
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Big supporter of high fantasy anime stuff with characters named āKevinā
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polio is a really good fantasy hero name
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I defy you to identify what realworld immoral behaviors are endorsed by, say, Myst
Going through someone elseās diary.
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In later games Atrus literally hands you his books.
Heās clearly trying to get someone to read his unpublished manuscripts.
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