fyi the best Phantom Crash tracks are the ones by itoken, because they’re the only ones that perfectly capture the tone of the game:
yes, itoken is Kenji Ito, of SaGa and Mana fame
6 Likes
I always mix this up with Phantom Dust
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Crash has an incredible soundtrack but this is the one I keep coming back to, very early dreamcast tone to it.
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Iirc the artists on the phantom crash soundtrack are mostly all semi-amateur musicians/composers who are united by the fact that they uploaded their music to the internet. Most of them have in-game bios you can read and links to their homepages. It paints a really optimistic picture of the internet where everything online is cool & interconnected & worth hearing, simply by virtue of being online, even the Kuricorder Quartet
14 Likes
god, fine
I’ll buy a third copy to go with my two bad copies
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Phantom crash is my Jet set radio future (game i whine about on the internet over no BC on XBX)
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its fully emulatable now, runs full speed with no obvious errors
edit: yep, it’s even one of the few games to have ‘perfect’ compat status on the xemu webpage.
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not to mention a handful of fictional musicians that are characters in the game.
Phantom Crash is such a cool game
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ok i gotta plop this game on the xbox immediately.
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PS3 Joust. Got this almost exactly 15 years ago, according to my PS3/PSN download list. 14th thing I’d downloaded onto the PS3 I had back then. Whoa man, 1080p. Love those minimalist sidebars.
Still a really solid port by Backbone. Somehow I have the 53rd highest score on the leaderboard. I suppose people were holding out for fancier games on their fancy new console. ^_ ^ Joust was always an arcade favorite of mine though so I was pretty happy to have this. : )
Currently only scoring up to 299th. : P Forgot you can only hurt the pterodactyl while its mouth is open. = O
Never realized the birds were cyborgs! = oo vv
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SLAI is cool
and then you find out flanking attacks have a massive damage multiplier
the area ranker appearing in a match turns SLAI into a horror game
if the fuckers catch you from behind, you just melt in a second
anyway, have fun
5 Likes
Started playing Gargoyle’s Quest 2 as the first was neat enough when I played it a few years back and man, this game has some of the most absurdly demanding platforming I can recall. I don’t mean in general, I mean that there is for example a specific point where you basically have to leap from the very last pixel possible (legit your sprite is 90+%) over the edge and hover perfectly to not fall into an insta-kill fire pit.
It’s not even in a “real” stage, but a short interstitial one before you get to one. Means more often than not I lost all my lives before even getting to the actual supposed challenging part and had to walk a minute or so through the overworld map just to get back to that specific jump again.
Anyways the rest of the game is interesting if not particularly great, some real top notch sprite and background work for the NES though.
9 Likes
I want to believe, but I feel like the way Bunkasha went out of business means that all these rights are owned by an insurance company somewhere that also went out of business a decade ago.
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Citizen Sleeper seems like a cool game for me to play during the summer, when the life-management sim with constant deadlines and impending nightmares doesn’t so closely mirror my actual life.
the central gameplay conceit seems mostly like “what if Cities: Skylines had RPG trappings instead of city management”
there’s something cool in there, but i think i already screwed myself in the game by not prioritizing the right things. getting myself out of that hole seemed like a lot of work, so i quit the game. gonna see if i’ll actually die or if the game enables you to escape your fate through some last-minute mechanic (feels like this kind of game could go either way).
it’s neat, but it’s a game to play only if you’re in the mood to read a lot
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So I decided to check out Elegy for a Dead World. The whole idea is that you wander around painterly 2D sci-fi landscapes, where you are given one of a set of preselected writing prompts (which you fill in Mad-Libs style). A little exercise to get the creative juices flowing by playing around within these constraints and using the visuals as inspiration, I suppose.
But like. I just actually feel stifled? Maybe I’m giving myself way too much credit but I feel like this is definitely more for people who are less creative in general. The text of the prompts already felt sort of trite. I think I could come up with better just looking at shit in my apartment or even out in my boring suburban town. I could just be in a sour mood. I did just finish writing something for a client so maybe I was in the wrong groove for this.
I’d rather just pull up a blank Word doc or something.
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third level of sniper elite 5 kind of incredible as far as these things go. made me need to take a nap
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my ps vita has stick drift 
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Played a few hours of Borderlands 3 with a friend, given it was free on Epic the other week and we were both morbidly curious, it’s not bad but boy does it have some rough edges versus 2, you can really feel the turnover in the team and the technology between it and its predecessors.
Little papercuts like the game dropping items (class mods) nobody in the party can actually use for hours on end, despite the unlock seemingly not being possible at those items’ level requirement.
At vendors, you can’t push the “sell junk” button from the buy screen like in BL2, you have to enter the sell screen to do so, despite it not doing anything at all on the buy screen.
The inventory UI is more complicated, harder to read, and just overall harder to use, but the loot drops seem even more numerous than prior games.
Audio log placement is the sloppiest it’s ever been, placing audio logs right in the middle of “follow the npc” sequences, resulting in the choice between picking them up (and having them immediately and repeatedly interrupted by dialogue from the NPC you’re following) or ignoring them and backtracking. Not that you care about them, but they’re there and the X button needs pushing. Grr!
For some reason a significant portion of audio logs have absolutely no subtitles, and the subtitles also sometimes just display the some stale or incorrect line repeatedly. In the second level of the game all the dialogue was captioned as some line from Torgue, a character who hadn’t even appeared yet.
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I have a wireless space mouse for 3D modelling that happens to just map itself as a regular mouse in macOS:
and it’s like 80% of the way to actually being convenient to play starcraft 2 with on the couch, just a little off
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Wuppo is a pretty cute little adventure game/platformer hybrid. It’s kinda neat solving little puzzles with inventory items and doing some light platforming/shooting. I met a tribe of Lion/Flower people and I assumed they were hostile and killed a few, and their king was like “what the hell man” and attacked me, but when I beat him up too he was like “okay, wait, you’re too strong just pay me for the guys you killed and we’ll call a truce”.
It’s got some funny moments (but like, ya know, video game funny) and I fought a couple of annoying, fiddly, boss fights. Ultimately I am not into this enough to play more than I did, but hey, neat little game.
Technobabylon is an adventure game that takes place in a pretty stock cyberpunk setting, but a few things seem a bit more noteworthy – allusions to Texan Warlords and hotzones, people who are bio-engineered into suicide bombers by having basically making their bones explosive, etc. It is also doing a good job of interweaving the personal histories of many of the major character (whose perspectives you switch between frequently). Some of the puzzles and shit are wayyy too obtuse and I’m freely relying on a walkthrough at times. I’m not sure how you’d be meant to figure some of this out without a ton of trial an error. Also I nearly quit because of an especially annoying minigame that was gating progress.
One real shitty thing in this game: one of the characters is trans, and another says something to her that is like, pretty typical ignorantly hurtful shit. of the “oh you used to be male? I wouldn’t have guessed” variety. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be characterization or if it was just a real big fumble by the game’s writers. Well, I guess if it was characterization it was still clumsily done. Like, they dropped a landmine right into the middle of a scene in a way that was not necessary at all.
The writing isn’t amazing, and some of the voice-acting is also a little wooden but I’m pretty invested in seeing where the story goes. I have a pretty good idea what one of the big twists is going to be, I’m looking forward to seeing how it gets pulled off. There have been a few really good flourishes of world-building even if a lot of it is pretty by-the-book superficial cyberpunk so I have to give them credit for me not just wanting to snooze right through the lore bits.
7 Likes