Games You Played Today Classic Mini

King of Posters King of Posters 2000
1485

yeah, I powered through most of the first memory before deciding none of it was working for me

very similar experience to Tacoma for me, it was constantly apparent that they wanted to create a given effect and never really enjoyable or interesting even though so much of the craft is objectively good

and Larry Ellison’s daughter gotta get paid

but games like this always make me wonder whether the creators have considered whether people wouldn’t rather relax with a good book. it all feels so aspirational and that is very rarely a good thing for a videogame

5 Likes
1486

omg ya’ll CRTs ;_;

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1487

I started playing God of War (2018) since I wanted a game I wouldn’t have to think too much about, and I thought it’d be cool to be a really strong dad. I misread some text about kratos’ skill upgrades and spent the first 10 hours or so thinking they were unobtainably expensive. I thought that was great! I was dumping all my xp points into atreus and thinking it was a neat way to tie the mechanics into some narrative stuff. Turns out I’m just bad at reading. I wish I could go back to thinking this was a game about a stubborn old idiot who’s increasingly reliant on his son to get through a journey he’s not physically or emotionally equipped for.

14 Likes
1488

Turned the cam off, thanx buttz

I must now remark on how much of DQ11 can be made to just run automatically and watched wow

1 Like
1489

I mostly asked because I agree with you on FFT and it’s so revered and I really wanted to like it but it’s just so tedious and I prefer Western games like JA2 and X-Com. A cool Japanese turn based game is something I’m fundamentally interested in though

1490

This is the best bottom line review for this game

5 Likes
1491

This may have been mentioned in the news thread but What Remains of Edith Finch is available for free on the Epic Game Store for a couple weeks starting on Thursday (free to keep forever, not just for those two weeks), so if anyone wanted to see if they’d think higher of it this would be their chance.

I am through the first four levels of Flashback and the ending of that fourth level is just such a trainwreck of design. The game has a habit of occasionally asking just a bit more from the player than what the controls can let them comfortably do, and that is the section where they decide to combine that with a somewhat strict time limit. Add in the downright funky way the game handles checkpoints (failing at the end makes you redo twice as much of a fairly long stage than is typical because the theoretical final savepoint is a decoy that is actually impossible to reach) and… yeah, that was a mess.

2 Likes
1492

I haven’t touched RE7 since I beat it a few years ago (man, time flies) but I decided to give the DLC a whirl because lately I haven’t felt like committing to a new game for personal reasons. I respect the fact that most of the extra “content” is just scraps of unused gameplay and agree with Capcom on their decision to cut those bits out. Of the official DLC scenarios I’ve played, Not a Hero didn’t necessarily redeem what was a pretty bad last act of the main game. That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable but I secretly had hope Not a Hero would be some wild revision of the wackier elements of the main game. It’s not that, it’s a completely safe and predictable coda to what was already a lackluster ending. With that being said, Capcom does manage to shoehorn in some racism (shocker) as the new enemies are called “White Molded” which are an evolution - and improvement - over the black molded featured in the main campaign.

1493

So when I made my list of games to try and play in 2019 our good friend @BLUE_BLACK_PURPLE took the time to warn me that Flashback kinda sucks, to which I responded that it might but I’ve put off playing it for a decade now and I just have to know.

With that said… I finished it up earlier today and while suck is perhaps too strong a word it ain’t exactly all that good. I can see how certain things it did being more novel when it released 25 years ago. The story is a pastiche of Total Recall, They Live and a bit of Running Man, but there weren’t exactly a ton of games in that mold back then. An entire chapter had a bunch of rpg-like side quests you had to complete to earn money, which would have likely blown my mind/confused me deeply back then.

None of that is really that noteworthy now sadly, and I think the game’s biggest sin is sometimes trying to do more standard gameplay bits within the confines of a cinematic platformer and it just isn’t a great idea. Of that era in that micro-genre I think Out of This World and Prince of Persia stand above the others, mainly because both of them tweaked what they asked of the player to be more in line with the… I hate to say laggy controls, let’s say deliberate. If Prince of Persia asked you to make your way through a Mario level it’d probably be a disaster, so it didn’t.

Flashback sometimes remembers that, but on enough occasions it just asks too much. The main offender is probably combat, and I say this having played through the game on easy because I’m not a sadist. There really isn’t a way to smoothly attack especially up close, and in cramped quarters you really just lack any decent way to deal with this. There were battles where using the same exact approach from the exact same spot I would escape being hit only once, or being hit five times and dying.

It has a pretty alright art direction though. You get some nice alien locales eventually. The animations have that rotoscoped flavor and you get a ton of random 16 bit cutscene animation at the end of each level and oddly enough whenever you pick up or hand over an item. For me that is a positive, YMMV.

So yeah, it is an interesting enough game to revisit and when it stays out of its own way (again, play on easy as all it does is reduce the number of enemies and they are the weakest part) while never outright good it is okayish enough. It just fucks up just frequently enough to drag it down to being subpar. I can see a theoretical version of the game where a handful of setpieces were either altered or dropped and it making a legit difference.

Also since someone asked I always heard that the Genesis version was better than the SNES one (oh yeah, there is notable slowdown in the SNES version), although one of the original computer versions is supposed to be the best one.

8 Likes
1494

I got a bunch of games on fightcade today, and I went to load up Garou and I took one look at it and :sob::sob::sob:

Flatscreens were a mistake

1495

Been going through games I got via PS+ but never gave a chance, and found Portal Knights. It’s like if Minecraft was a good game?

More accurately, it’s Minecraft meets action-adventure RPG and I think I’m enjoying it more.

The real test will be if the wife enjoys it enough to play with me. We haven’t minecrafted together for a while.

Sucks that you have to pick a binary gender for your character, but I’m not sure what it does besides set some defaults - so far it seems like none of the customization options are gender-linked, and all the NPCs use they/them pronouns even for each other.

1496

Nice! I was looking forward to your opinion and didn’t expect it so soon. I agree with your qualms about the game. They’re what I think are wrong with the game too. I also got stuck at some points and didn’t think it was too obvious what you have to do next sometimes.

It bugs me because PoP and Another World are two of my favorite games of all time and Flashback always looked like it belonged up there too but it just ain’t happening for me. Heart of Darkness rocked my world when I was a kid. Heck, I even dream about making my own cinematic platformer one day (I want to turn one of the novels I’m writing into one, eventually) and modern games like Limbo prove that the genre still has a lot of juice left in it.

So I’ve got a lot invested in these games and Flashback just kind of falls short

Good on you for beating it! Here’s hoping you like the next game on your list more

1497

Now try to finish the clunky as hell 3D sequel, Fade to Black aka Jank: The Videogame

I loved Flashback, but I played through it like 15 years ago so my opinion may be different now.

1 Like
1498
1499

I played a shitton of Flashback and Prince of Persia as a kid and there is this point where mastery of the locked-in animations becomes satisfying in its own way. It’s like the committal-based heavy weapons in Dark Souls, except for every kind of action.

In Flashback in particular there are also a lot of invincibility frames in the animations that make the combat a lot more tractable once known (although I still never figured out how to handle multiple aliens at the same time, particularly on hard difficulty). For example, there are iframes while drawing your gun, so you can just walk up to a mutant’s face and casually draw your gun at the right moment and counter-shoot him, it’s great

There are so many iframes that I made a personal game out of running into every landmine in the third level without taking damage

10 Likes
1500

Super Nintendo Prince of Persia was one of my favorite games on the system (I only played a but of Out of This World at the time and thought it was swell, tracked it down years later and it was really swell) which is the main reason I always wanted to give Flashback a shot. I’m not here to talk more about Flashback though, I want to talk about a different SNES cinematic platformer.

As an avid EGM/Gamepro reader at the time I remember at one point there being a tiny preview of maybe a paragraph and a single image for a game called Nosferatu. It was described and basically looked like a vampire/horror-infused version of Prince of Persia, and to teenage me that sounded like the greatest idea for a game ever. Sadly the magazines themselves never mentioned the game again, although if you recall the single or double page ads near the backs of these magazines that had a huge list of games you could I believe mail order from somewhere it always ended up listed under “coming soon”. I never heard of it and assumed it was quietly canceled.

Some years later I found out that it in fact was not canceled and was a very late SNES release with a rather limited print run. I was overjoyed and eventually found a chap on I believe the shmups forum who was selling his copy of it at a reasonable cost. After all these years I ended up quite literally holding the game of my dreams in my hands…

…and it was absolutely dreadful. The graphics were dull and blurry, the animations weren’t great, the controls were sluggish by even the standards of the genre, and the combat… my god the combat. Most cinematic platformers go for relatively simple combat due to the limitations of the genre; Nosferatu put in a bunch of enemies, regular boss battles and what might be one of the most complicated hand to hand fighting systems of the era. In better hands that could have been interesting, in their hands I don’t think I ever landed a single blow on the first boss.

I tell you this not just to tell you that I understand, but to let you know that it could have been much much worse.

4 Likes
1501

switch outrun is beautiful

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1502

There are five different finish lines depending on which route you take, and each one gives you a different comedy ending (as in the arcade game), but each also now unlocks a special upgrade for your car.

These can be toggled on and off before a race begins and affect things like your top speed, handling and how much of an impact hitting other cars makes. As a nice touch, each of these upgrades also changes your car’s colour, meaning you’re no longer forced to go with a red Ferrari every time.

Most interesting, through, are the rearranged versions of Step On Beat (from the Mega Drive port of Out Run), Midnight Highway (from the Master System one) and Radiation (from Out Run 2006 ), all of which have been recreated in the Sega System-16 style to sound like they would have if they had been in the original coin-op.

oh that’s neat

4 Likes
1503

I played through all of What Remains of Edith Finch over the past two days since it is free and unlike others here recently I actually dug it a decent amount. I also liked The Unfinished Swan, so take that as you will. Also as someone who has played both, yikes @ that easter egg.

See, I feel this way about a lot of the more recent arty so called walking sim games (while a very slightly different genre To The Moon is the most “this gains nothing by being a game” game I can recall playing) I don’t think it is quite fair to paint Edith with that brush. By the time it wraps up it has at least a few memories that I cannot see being replicated in another medium at all. Regardless of its quality, it was made in the appropriate medium.

Also FWIW I can live with the existence of indie games that would really be better off as novellas as there are some people out there who aren’t particularly good writers and yet have a solid story idea trapped in their heads (again, To The Moon). I think it is better to have these stories or ideas being imperfectly crafted in an unideal medium than have them either being executed wretchedly in the appropriate one, or never existing at all.

6 Likes
1504

Games that gain little from interactivity seem to have supplanted webcomics for a certain crosssection of the marginally talented

4 Likes