I still get occasional e-mail notifications that I’ve been dethroned for one song or another in Audiosurf. I never had a chance of getting first place for a song with any real popularity, but it’s fun to fight over the obscure ones.
Of those who still play the game, I wonder whether more favor the first or the second. I tried the demo of the sequel a while back, and I remember having the impression that I was better off just sticking with the first game.
I dethroned a few people today.
I tried to mess with “hacking” the PS Classic, failing to note you gotta have a compatible, low-draw USB drive for it to work.
So that didn’t work.
Anyway, uh. Puzzle Fighter is still good.
I think it’s the only game that really expands on what Metroid 2 was into
seconded
I’ve played entirely too much Mario Kart and not enough Sonic Kart 2 in my life
Everyone should play more Sonic Kart 2
yeah it is a really weird game especially starting out with no prior knowledge! there’s lots of stuff like quests that will just lead you nowhere and the game starts out with this massively boring escort quest to the main city and it’s like, what the hell is any of this stuff
I absolutely love the combat system though and it has a very complex and interesting AI system for the pawn helpers
I touched a NeoGeo Mini JUST NOW finally. Lady Rude said it was real cute. It is real cute.
The joystick fucking blows! It isn’t just a not clicky stick there are no gates at all! You just wickle it around willy nilly. It is pretty hard to consistently do a fireball on it.
The tiny little screen is good. The hdmi out put is good and I played stage 1 of Blazing Star.
It’s real cute!!
Welcomed the new year by finally getting my B ending in Nier Automata. I am endlessly thankful that hacking exists because everything else in this game feels super clunky and unresponsive. Maybe sometime this month I will be able to clear out the August 2017 episode of Hinge Problems I have kept half-played at the bottom of my podcast player for the last year and a half.
Coming high off my replay of Neufenstein Ein, which I loved all over again, I got The Old Blood and man! It is just not nearly as good! At least not through the first chapter. Much more boring linear level design, too much & too boring stealth, and no pathos whatsoever. Gone is the urgency and slight frisson of poetry, instead it’s bog standard semi-gonzo action movie stuff. One of the giant robohounds walks by and BJ says “that is one big fuckin dog.” What the fuck is this, a Gears game or something
The Old Blood gets better once you’re a couple levels in but not by a lot. Mainly the stealth goes back to being optional. I had a good time with it though because I just couldn’t get enough Wolfenstein.
I still can’t. When I read you were replaying it I fired it back up myself and played a new game up the concentration camp level. I’m going to go through both games again just because they’re that good. The way the guns sound and animate and the way the enemies gib and ragdoll is just so, so satisfying. Also, holy heck I started New Order and New Colossus concurrently just to check out the graphical differences and was kind of surprised by how pronounced they were. New Order is like four years old at this point so it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s starting to look long in the tooth but damn the second game just looks so much better.
Interestingly, the DLC for the second game isn’t really that good for the same reasons The Old Blood doesn’t quite stack up compared to the first game. It’s just more ultra violence but without those strong narrative frames and characters. Does Machinegames only have one writer or something? Or are they giving the task of making the expansions to some internal B team? I mean, I am down for just popping heads and doing high score challenges but that wasn’t what sold everyone on the game.
idk if you’re experiencing any of this but I loved doing as much of wolf1 stealth as possible, and found the same approach super frustrating in 2. I’m not a huge fan of 1st person stealth stuff in general but it seemed like early parts of most wolf1 levels were sufficiently constrained to make it viable. like, I could typically tell what the available options for action and associated consequences were. and then when I fucked up and ““went loud”” it was still good - like a ramped up version of the feeling of getting away with something that makes stealth so satisfying. the prison break level does this well iirc. but the the best time I had in wolf2 was setting the difficulty as low as it’d go and just storming through levels with double shotguns.
my dad is a true blue gamer and loves puzzles & mystery, so I spent the last couple of days playing return of the obra dinn with him and whichever other family members happened to be around. I think this is a game that a lot of dads could enjoy. but even if you don’t have a dad around, it’s probably best played with a friend or something. it’s also probably 3-5 hours too long. I wish it were not the case that the last couple of deaths (so, probably the hardest to solve depending on your playthrough) are the easiest to brute force, and also the most tempting to try that way bc you were expecting a 5hr thing and you’re on hour 10 and fuck it
I liked Phantasy Star ages version enough to try speedrunning it today. My first completed run was 2 hours 20 minutes, not too shabby. I like that this category specifically encourages holding emulator fast forward the entire game, and also that this doesn’t speed up the music! I’m not so fond of final boss randomness being so decisive though…
Yeah, totally! That was how I played the game initially, sneaking around until I couldn’t anymore. Now I spend most of my time creeping into things a bit then intentionally alerting the enemies so I can peek out from behind cover and pick them off with the headshots. That’s my current play style for New Order until I’m forced to move around the level more by either boredom or getting flanked by enemies.
Initially I spend lots of extra time getting all the perks and then kind of blast my way through the rest of the game while still focusing on finding all the secret stuff. I dig those extra modes you unlock. I’m not sure how many times I’ve actually played the game. I platinumed it on PS3 and PS4.
But New Colossus, yeah, it’s a bit different isn’t it? Stealth is still pretty doable but the diffulty level is still kind of punishing in general regardless of what you’ve got it set at, so there’s more incentive to just go all guns blazing all the time.
I’ve been obsessed with Kenshi for the past two weeks (I might write it up later but it’s the perfect aesthetic mix of Fallout 1 and Morrowind; it’s an extremely more-ish fusion of a space trading/Star Control-like systemic world and base building/survival loops falling out of the post-Minecraft survival genre, and it supports exploration beautifully through scale, perfect tone, and holding enough back).
So I found ‘Nice Ruin’ along the coast (you get a notification when you’re near enough to mark a point of interest on the map, with the name). It’s completely empty, but the houses and watchtowers are all intact. Normally these are destroyed, and you’re left to presume bandits or wandering spider monsters or religious crusades.
I go in the first house and suprise! I find a robot
He’s a police robot. I can tell because he screams “POLICE” constantly.
As do all his friends.
His many, many, many friends. Who are all cops.
Eventually, by accident, I realize if I get in the water I’m safe. Robots can’t swim – they just walk on the bottom – and since they don’t carry ranged weapons, so I can just swim to safety. The copbots follow on the seafloor as long as they can.
After I accidentally swam through a current of acid I made it to the Ashlands and found a new location, ‘Nice Village’. But when I went to talk to the villagers,
they were skin-wearing robots. Note the copbots still shouting in the far distance. Naturally they see no problem with white (and red-) Skinned robots
After the party was split into the slowpokes and the three fast enough to outrun any patrols (the slowpokes were told to practice their backstroke safe from the fuzz), the scouts entered the town. Luckily the speaker was my own robot character, the Skeleton Masaru, carrying the much-skin-possessing human Pars on his back. The Skin bandits were sat around a fire and were practicing their laughs. When I approached, one stood up from the circle. I took this one to be their leader, or the most go-getting of the robots. It didn’t attack, but complimented Masaru on its nice, fresh skin Masaru was carrying. Then it asked for the skin. “No.” Then it got jealous. And so did all the rest. And that’s how we got chased again, this time into the hazy Ashlands.
The map now marked that town as ‘Horrible Village’.
Eventually they chased me into ruins guarded by older, rustier, and grumpier robots (look at his little frown!), in a grueling bit of kiting I haven’t had to do since Star Wars Galaxies.
It was great.
Leaving them to fight each other, and the Skin Bandits starting to drop dead, I was able to scavenge their skins. Ok! Now I didn’t have to flee every one of the crazy-laughing Skin bandit patrols wandering in my path. So naturally the first thing I do is check out their secret crazy robot base:
Shhh! They haven’t figured it out yet! My own robot is taking a nap on their repair bed so I can sneak in some healing while the organics hide out by their trash cans (corpse incinerators).
After this we’re going back, to get lost in the ash-coated ruins. There’s a voice in there, deep down
damn, i remember when that game was on indieDB in alpha, 2008 or something.
this is incredible
kenshi is so fucking good. my roommate was trying to start an outpost, every day huge packs of starving bandits would show up to clobber the fuck out of his guys and steal his food. then one day this happens:
oh. okay. just 30 fucking ninjas hanging out in my living room, i guess. he ended up having to abandon the town so they’d just peace out somewhere else instead
It really is. And it’s better than anything I’ve ever seen at generating diary stories. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what amount of pre-built content and narrative I want in a game to feel meaningful on top of the game of it, because Kenshi is hitting exactly that line where it can imply rich stories without doing much of the prebuilt content work.
I think it helps a lot that the Conan-esque harshness of the world makes a lot of very brutal and simple stories that occur from systems feel correct, and properly told.
