UT2004 rules. Before the guy who always hosted our LAN parties found Jesus and infamously implemented his only co-op games with invincibility turned on and preferably everyone uses the same skin policy we used to play the shit out of that and 99.
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I am a big fan of DRAINUS! it ticks all my boxes as a tepid middlebrow shmup fan of Blazing Star and Gradius V! I really like the powerup system and the presentation and the level design! finally a modern throwback shooter just for me!
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I was trying to figure out why none of this rung any bells despite how many hours I played of UT2004 until I remembered for all the hours I spent on that game, it was all the demo that only had that one stage with the little hover cars. But that stage is my Blood Gulch.
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im reading a john wilmot biography named āblazing starā at the moment and i got really confused reading this post for a sec
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I briefly gave Shinobi III a shot earlier today as someone has been poking me to give it a shot andā¦ well it is a game where you definitely should read the manual before playing. I eventually figured out enough to make it up to the third stage boss who killed me repeatedly due to having the oddest ācanāt damageā phase after each hit I can recall in quite a while. Now that I have read said manual and know what I can actually do (and looked up exactly whatās up with said boss) hopefully I can make some smoother progress next shot.
7 Likes
the hardest part of that entire game, for me, was the automatic vertically scrolling segment that required several wall jumps in succession
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75% complete on the Japanese version of 13 Sentinels. Iāve decided to just let the text flow at the normal rate and concentrate on what theyāre saying, but tolerate ambiguity and donāt pause the game unless thereās a word that really piques my interest in looking up in the dictionary. 30 hours into that, my Japanese is nicely derusted. Not quite as good as it was at the end of my study abroad in Japan yet, but feels within reach
The best joke in this game is how the time travelers from 1945 to 1985 are 5x more culture shocked than the time travelers from 1985 to post-apocalyptic 2065.
The latter are like, ah, droids and War of the Worlds style tripods, gotcha. Whereas Miura first thinks he must be in New York given the tall concrete buildings, heās blown away by household appliances, and when he sees a calendar that says ā1985ā, he needs to do some mental math to convert to āShowa 60ā to even grasp what year heās in
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Another observation about 13 Sentinels: it seems to me that just beneath the surface, what holds the unwieldy megastory together is this unspoken loneliness that every character shares.
Theyāre each going through these insane and confusing experiences, but they keep it a secret from even their closest friends, for fear that it may seem crazy or even that they may be secret enemies. They maintain an increasingly inauthentic facade of being a normal teenager during the day, then sneak around alone at night trying to piece together the whole mystery on their own. When they bump into another character doing the same thing, instead of collaborating they more often wind up pointing a gun at each other. Several charactersā closest relationship is not even with a human, but with a droid or cat or ghost.
What makes the battle mode a relieving intermission is not just that you blow shit up with mechs, but also that in this part of the story the 13 are acting as a trusting, cohesive group of friends
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Something really funny in particular about the '45 guys eventually getting obsessed with hamburgers and yakisoba pan.
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Started Strange Horticulture and Iām really digging itāovert Cultist Simulator influence in its text descriptions and tactile UX but instead of eerie cult stuff itās like running a spooky goth plant store. Identifying the plants and figuring out the little systems has been pretty good so far
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A few minutes of Avernum VI reinforced my opinion that ultimately I donāt need all these old CRPGs when Iām actively in a D&D campaign.
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I have graduated to CODE 5 Sinner in Freedom Wars and I am having a good time, I feel like the extremely frequent tutorial pop-ups early on made it feel more mechanically confusing than it really is underneath.
I appreciate that, in spite of how I feel like games can often go the cutesy route in these sorts of narratives, the game makes quite clear fairly early on that fucking everyone is oppressed by the panopticon system, including those ostensibly propped up by it.
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Bladed Fury is a Chinese devās (a subsidiary of Tencent, as it turns out) take on Vanillaware, specifically Muramasa, or at least thatās the parallel I keep seeing other people make and now Iām brainwashed into accepting it. I suppose the way you navigate in between screens is pretty reminiscent but this seems more strictly level-based rather than letting you wander around the gameās whole world at any time.
Itās a fairly standard side-scrolling brawler with some combos/cancels/specials etc but despite all that seems relatively simplistic. And thus far, not terribly challenging but this is okay, Iām mostly in it for the visuals, which are very good. Great character designs, the designs for women are only like 65% horny.
In it, you are a princess who gets tricked into killing her demonically-possessed father and is outlawed, and you go on a quest to track down some witnesses who can clear your name, etc. It seems as though you may also inadvertently right some wrongs along the way as well? Cool. Steam reviews say this one is pretty short so I imagine I have a good shot of actually seeing it through.
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i have a new xbox, which iām using to play old games on. so i thought i would give breakdown another shot. i remember absolutely hating this back in like 2005-2006. playing it in 2022, i still think itās bad. someone at namco played half-life and said, āwhat if we did this, except horribly unplayable?ā
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i spent a few days looking in all kinds of stashs and hidey-holes for my copy of mega drive darius ii, and i finally found it, covered in dust and accompanied by space harrier ii.
i played a few games of it, and itās still really great! itās a game i never played until my late teens, but somehow it feels like it was a part of my childhood. just something about the music and the graphics, i guess, even while played through a slightly imperfect clone console.
while i was looking for it, in another place, i found a copy of alien 3, belonging to a friend. i played one game of this, too. for the first time ever, i managed to get past the first stage! this is a game plagues by what i call ārick dangerous bullshitā, that is traps and enemies that you canāt see quickly enough to react to without prior knowledge of their locations.
i didnāt play any space harrier ii tongiht.
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So armed with knowledge I put Shinobi III on easy (so that I have ten starting lives) and put aside a couple hours for it. While it had some issues it was alright enoughā¦ until I hit the last stage. The last stage feels like the basically decided to try and come up with the most hateful platforming imaginable (the controls arenāt great for platforming to begin with) and as much as I dislike using save states since they came built in with this version (the Steam Genesis bundle thing) I abused the hell out of them to just reach the end credits so that Iād never be tempted to subject myself to it again.
Real ātake any and all goodwill and set it afireā experience at the end there, at least now I know to never play another of these again.
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Iām very amused by how shockingly bad I am at apex. compared to titanfall 2 when I was like always always a top 3 finisher in any match, I have never gotten one single kill in apex in like ten games. I donāt get it at all. the game feels bad and makes no sense to me
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i loathe how much time there is between encounters in battle royales and how high the stakes are, if you die you have to queue up and start a new match. it takes so long to build up proficiency in the mechanics and figure out which guns do what. this is why i have bounced off the battle royales pretty hard
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them: we created all these systems of nonverbal communication between players to avoid abuse
me: I have trouble getting headshots if Iām not, like, talking to my cat about my indigestion out loud on the mic, secure in the knowledge that Iām bothering people
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Well, I hit an annoying boss and said āokay, thatās enoughā
Overall Bladed Fury was an āokā little game. Inessential, go find the art on the internet or something.
1 Like