Games You Played Today IV: Quest of the Avatar

I’ve spent all day and all last night fighting fume knight in the ds2 dlc, which I never played before. I think I’ve ended up liking the great club slightly more than the greatsword, after using it for a backup when the greatsword was about to break

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I played an hour of my game before splunking into the debugger to find why it stops working after a certain point. I still don’t know but I have A Theory and I may be able to get it to work…this time…

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I haven’t gone back to Wildermyth because now that I’m out of the first chapter I’m afraid that the strategy/resource management layer is going to spoil my fun like sometimes happens in games of this style (e.g., in XCOM). But at some point I’ll muster the courage.


After a years-long hiatus I returned to HackyZack which is such a fun game concept, but I was rapidly hitting a plateau in what I could execute. I thought to myself “do I want to spend the time and energy to git gud” and the answer was “no”, so my play of this game is concluded.

Very enjoyable LoFi Beats to Walljump To, though:


After a similar years-long hiatus I have put Gonner to bed. I hit the same skill plateau in that game years ago and its structure also contributed to failure being really dispiriting. I could go find the wall I was banging my head against and resume, hoping to break through, but no. I’ll take my fondness for this game and leave.


Instead of playing I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, I read the short story. I think I have hazy memories of reading a Let’s Play from a long time ago too, so I’m vaguely aware of the plot differences. And I can probably live without suffering through some old obtuse Adventure Game Puzzle Design. I have enough adventure games in my backlog anyway.


And those are all the Games I Didn’t Play Today: XXexecutive Dysfunction

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I respect the radical shifts in setting but the writing (or maybe the English localization) in the FF13 sequels gives a poor impression. I’m up on the lore so I’m not balking at jargon — it’s just the repetition of parts of speech and incessant explanation VO in Lightning Returns especially. Hope on the radio congratulating you for talking to each NPC and then instructing you to talk to more, all fully-voiced, is immediately grating.

I appreciate the irony that I groan at the idea of a Final Fantasy town with side quests in 2022 when their absence was 13’s top complaint.

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The forum has been a bit slow so I feel comfortable to again announce Alundra continues to be sicko stuff. So glad the mister core has save states so I can just reset the room.

By sicko/pervert stuff I have meant the game will very easily make you “fail” a dungeon puzzle and the only recourse is navigating to the exit and trying again. With save states I was doing rooms in 10-15 tries. Trying to imagine that with dwindling health and healing supplies. The save points are always awkward.

You do get the best sword in the game if you die enough times.

Also each dungeon has a hidden sellable item and life gem. Good Luck finding those. A lot of the dungeons kick you out forever once you kill the boss. I was shocked tonight’s boss didn’t even give me a warning or a heal spot before it. Again crying thinking about this with also Vic Ireland’s health values.

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I don’t like Air Twister. The aesthetic’s there and the music’s doing overtime but it doesn’t change that even by mobile standards the touch controls dont go where you want, it’s annoying to switch between fire and lock on and I rolled my eyes after finishing my first go through when a giant map appeared with a bunch of daily/weekly challenges to juice out whatever fun’s left and a skill tree to repeat the game to the point of tedium.

Even more annoyingly there’s keyboard binds but NOT a twin stick option that actually shows where you’re shooting. Give it a console port but for the game that finally made me activate the free month of apple arcade I’ve put off for three years it’s a real letdown.

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This comment could rightly get me permabanned from Select Button

I’d prefer Pocky & Rocky as a twin-stick shooter

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I’d prefer Elden Ring as a twin-stick shooter

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they feed us touch screen shooters, so we buy their dual analog gamepads, while they supress our sega hss-0151 twin sticks

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the real crime is that controllers have stopped at 2 joysticks

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The new Bulk Slash patch adding twin support sparked a long dormant hunger in the modern game landscape.

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In a fit of craving a game to stream to friends and a desire to reconcile with the franchise I played Pokemon Arceus Legends.

Overall, it’s extremely fun for the first half once you get past the rote. Filling out a Pokédex as the main goal is so natural and actually made me want to exploring look forward to areas but the game really clamps on the brakes towards the end. To the point where the climactic final fight is interrupted to go and mine in a cave and then return back to the final fight. We used up our magical stone and had to get another one. I never played Diamond and Pearl so a lot of the lore is lost on me. I had all desire to play the post game content knocked out of me by such a damp waft of a back half - seems like they saved too much of the challenging and interesting stuff to be after the credits and I frankly don’t care to check it out given how much they pulled their punches.

The improvements are so numerous it feels like this should have been done decades ago. They cut out abilities and breeding and all sorts of other extraneous stuff. This is the first time to my knowledge that the actual Pokémon games try to simulate what it would be like to throw a pokeball at a pokemon. It works! But playing the game I had a sneaking suspicion that I was being impressed by stuff that should have been impressive in 2008? Why hasn’t Pokémon done this yet? I suppose the portable bondage has imprisoned its inner desires for too long.

Even though a lot of the changes are really good, Arceus kinda has to be contained in a weird box now since I can’t imagine mainline games will adopt the changes fully, even after Scarlet/Violet is released. Either way my love hate relationship with mon remains and I find that towards the end of a Pokémon game I just have an extremely detailed obsession with elements of the game which contribute to making the series generally miserable to play. There was only one challenging boss fight before the credits and pokedex-filling becomes a chore too quickly. It’s fantastic when nearly everything you find is a new discovery, it is not when rare Pokémon require extremely specific tasks to be done ad infinitum to contribute to their dex score.

I’m still gonna be suckered by Scarlet and Violet. I’ll do my best to resist peeking under the hood like the games seem to want me to, but I can’t take much more legacy nonsense that ultimately is applied to a very easy game about the fantasy of fighting bugs with other kids.

Very calming to play.

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King of Fighters R-1. The NeoGeo Pocket–the original black and white one–has a Contrast knob, and a lower-intensity screen than the later NeoGeo Pocket Color. That, plus R-1 has fewer flashing FX on super moves and such than, say SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium on NGPC: for instance, Ryo’s circle back, circle forward + P super has no screen flash FX in R-1, but has a whole series of screen flashes in MotM.

So my sometimes photosensitive eyeballs played R-1. Good game, maybe slightly slower than MotM. But I guess it’ll now by my go-to on-the-go fighter…if I ever need one. I don’t actually go anywhere so this is unlikely! ^ _^ But now I’m prepared.

And the NGP with its slimmer body is so nice–sleeker than the blocky NGPC

ngp_ngpc_face_comp

and even smaller than the later, “slimline” NGPC model

handheld_faces

And, I mean, silver buttons, come on. : D

(Ah the old shag in my old apt, classic. ; )

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Pretty much every year, I wonder, “Is this the year I buy a Neo Geo Pocket?” Prices have gone up so much since I first thought about it. I may never buy retro game carts ever again.

Still, the allure of clicky sticks and stone blue paint remains.

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GT7 World Championship

Race 4 of 5

Final lap at Bathurst

I broke my upshift paddle! Had to awkwardly reach way back there to shift and managed to place 2nd. 3D printed stuff always eventually breaks on me.

Edit: How do people race on this track? The straights are really fast and there’s almost zero passing room. It may be worse than the Nürburgring in that respect.

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I’ve always thought the layout of Brands Hatch appears deceptively simple. Almost resembles a Mario Kart track, but then it’s actually really tricky!

Edit: whoops never mind, you were talking about Bathurst!

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Yeah in Panorama against the AI it usually came down to barging by them in those last few steep downhill turns, they don’t take them very tightly.

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After a week of not really being able to play anything due to covering at work I got to put a bit more time into FF XIII and am now up to chapter 4. I think I may need the full 30 hours for the game to open up as according to the post-fight ranking system I am inconsistent as heck. Since the paradigm system is there I want to use it and am trying to think about my use in an intelligent manner, but I’ll then end up near the par time with 3 stars as opposed to just mashing autobattle and sometimes getting 5.

I’m currently with Sazh, Vanille and Hope trying to figure out Saboteur and Synergist classes while also working out triple battle strategies and have shifted things so I start with Saboteur and Synergist for the first couple turns to then shift to a more traditional attack, but it feels like whether the negative status effects I kinda need to inflict on the enemies are only in play every other turn. Perhaps I just need to keep my eyes open more rather than going “okay I buffed everyone once, now to shift to offense”.

I also feel like I have very little moneys but I’m also not sure I really have wanted to buy anything up to this point.

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you definitely want to use autobattle most the time, but still shift paradigms. the game is mostly about getting the timing of when to switch jobs, and less about what you do within those jobs.
as mentioned previously, there’s 12 second background timer, so you should be switching pretty regularly to get the most out of those free atb refills - even if it means setting up doubles of your most used paradigms to shift between.

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Spider Man 2018 is an expensive Lawn-mowing Sim grounded with enough Marvel storytelling for a filthy comics casual like myself to embrace without feeling overwhelmed. The flippin’-and-a-dippin’ athletics never get old while the autocombos enjoy plenty variety among gadgets, environmental furniture and stealth in every encounter and I rather love it

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