“8 maps with 80 gaps.”
Sold!
2 Likes
You know a skateboarding game is good when you spend an hour trying to nail a line that would take 3 minutes in Tony Hawks.
5 Likes
y’all normies, i’m all about this shit
6 Likes
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a Zelda-like where you mostly do little sidequests and fight mostly harmless enemies and solve little puzzles. The titular turnip is an asshole while still being a completely silent protagonist. I thought this was funny.
Speaking of funny, the jokes are… sort of the terminally online kind. Also some Covid jokes! Great. A few lines are funny. It has one ongoing joke where you rip any document that’s handed to you (cheques, drawings, love letters) and you get an achievement for every one of them. I found this sort of amusing the whole time, I couldn’t really tell you why. The first time I realized my choices were READ and RIP and I couldn’t get back to the game without choosing RIP I chuckled. The hardest I laughed was when you tear up a contractor’s 1099 after he hands it to you to prove that he’s really a worker.
What I assume to be the last boss is such a jump in difficulty (with combat mechanics that really don’t suit an encounter like this) that I called it quits.
There’s a “central mystery” which gets telegraphed pretty hard but is also kind of like, a “heh” level of funny despite that. There’s also a weird undercurrent of darkness as you follow this subplot through some of the documents you read (and inevitably, rip).
I don’t recommend this but I also don’t not? It’s very breezy, I feel like I got most of the way through the mainline plot in only two and half hours? There might be secrets and shit, I might not be as far along as I thought. I feel like you could play for about this long and walk away with your opinion fully formed. You probably have better shit to play, though.
7 Likes
gonna be honest, all of my best skateboarding stories are about bailing or wiping out or finally nailing one trick. I think this is also true for parkour type stuff, which may be why it’s not as cool in videogames either
1 Like
watching the Thrasher video series “My War” when I was a year into unemployement motivated me to keep trying. genuine and raw examples of people overcoming adversity
3 Likes
dark souls is the skateboarding of video games 
6 Likes
Haven’t documented much i’ve played lately so here’s some:
Nuclear Throne
God what a game. Few enough variables that I can easily hold it all in my head, enough that each run has a unique flavor. Short as hell…if I ever finish it. Loud, slightly obnoxious, but still rewards caution.
I got to the throne once and died, haven’t seen it again but i can at least regularly beat the third boss now.
Would be easier with kbm but i got it on switch soo
Lovely game i may never beat.
A Robot Named Fight
Roguelite is…not a good match for Super Metroid. Competent and the fact that it generates coherent metroid maps is remarkable. But losing a run after an hour feels baaaaad
Also, metroid games often tell their stories through level design so losing that is a bummer.
Can’t say i enjoyed my 3ish hours with it but i sorta respect it.
Space Moth Lunar Edition
Look at this
This game is gorgeous. But holy ffffuck is it hard. Absolutely no safety net for learning, immediately jumps into difficult bullet patterns, no credit system, just blam blam start over.
About 20 minutes was all i had in me.
More later
13 Likes
The only skateboarding game I ever really played was Skate or Die. It was all right. I don’t remember Rodney Dangerfield per se, but I do remember the mohawks being nice.
4 Likes
The guy who drew Blueberry was Gir, pretty cool guy, mebbe he’ll draw some more comix.
3 Likes
I replayed Detroit: Become Human on a whim. Even though I backed up my ps4 save and put it on my ps5, my ps5 just said ‘nope’ for this one. Guess I’m starting from scratch.
Thought it would be interesting since I killed off one of the characters (Kara) at the soonest opportunity the first go around just to see if they would allow it. Turns out I did the right thing.
Kara’s best scenario is getting trapped by an absolutely perverted android gutter who just likes to make horrific shit. Other than being the usual ‘trap the female character in a crazy person’s basement’ that Cage seems to feast on, it was a rare moment showing what twisted people would actually do in a world like this.
Alice (Kara’s ad hoc human daughter) being an android is a really silly Cage twist I missed the first time round, and Kara’s story generally doesn’t deal with anything interesting beyond flat allegories for slave refugee routes and concentration camps. The game is more concerned with showing androids in these frames and leaving it at that than either: showing the implications of sentient android civil rights, or the struggles of, you know, a real group of horrifically marginalised people. Would that be the watershed moment that these AAA story games apparently need?
As for the rest, I’d seen it before but leaned into the peaceful civil rights stuff and Connor being swayed by it, rather than trying to fuck up the game as much as I possibly could. There is no interesting resolution to this series of events. Trust that trying to make the choices as chaotic and messy as possible is almost always more interesting – good/bad ending be damned. Marcus is a fairly dull character and glancing at his rise to android MLK is more interesting from a distance than up close for the most part.
This game really should have been framed as a short story sci-fi anthology with short episodes each focusing on a different android story. Connor is the strongest throughline by far and the other 2 characters feel limp by comparison. Have Connor investigate murders while dealing with his awkward cop programming. You could have him investigate each short story as a clean-up case and be the lynchpin reflecting on the big android questions that get swept under the rug.
It’s still the best Quantic Dream because the world they’ve built is fucked (but not in a way they properly explore) and android characters work for this awkward drama paradigm they’ve cultivated. Connor is the best written character in any Quantic Dream game because he is so awkwardly earnest and initially resists any attempt to give him a full personality of his own that he achieves maximum synchronisation rate with the general tone and quality of the writing. He actually surpasses it for how awkwardly polite he is whilst also being a complete weirdo. What engineer thought that having an android that analyses blood through their tongue wouldn’t be odd to people nearby – and then programs them so that they immediately do this action upon entering any crime scene. Or that he should breach data privacy to stalk his partner to keep the case going. This is some Zuckerberg satire waiting to blossom. Being programmed to be a cop and having to maintain the likeable personality of a butler would drive any android over the edge so the central character conflict is perfect. He also never gets too bogged down in Cage’s preoccupation with extremely basic emotion. Awkward androids are training wheels for writers who can’t quite write 3 dimensional humans.
The world has extremely fucked up issues surrounding android development it doesn’t want to explore. The people who make all this stuff are absolutely huge freaks but we never go all-in. There’s a sex club where every sex android is just an underwear model. If you have this tech, people would want to manifest far stranger shit surely? Also bees are fucking extinct as a background detail and it’s like, how dystopian do you wanna be? That shit would ruin everything.
I love how Quantic Dream games make tidying a house and doing chores a really easy and calming activity - the true power fantasy.
15 Likes
I have proven weak to the nostalgia-hose which is Shredder’s Revenge. I appreciate that they’ve added a bit of mechanical depth, though, and they’ve managed to make even the basic Foot Clan guys feel worthy of respect. Getting anti-aired when I try to spam the jump kick was a pleasant surprise. Also I am glad for story mode, I don’t often have the time to play through an entire arcade brawler in one shot, these days.
Lots of great nods to the old games, I’m enjoying the voice acting and the very luxurious animations for all the Foot Clan guys jumping in from the background of scenes. Great stuff.
I honestly don’t think I would have wanted anything more from this.
6 Likes
Some more games played today:
The Procession to Calvary is a point’n’click game that uses renaissance art for all its assets, as well a bunch of classical music. Including, hilariously, “Stars and Stripes Forever” at the very beginning.
You solve the usual puzzles, or, you indulge the protagonist’s murderous streak and just kill anyone who gets in your way. This, of course, leads to a bad ending, but somehow I felt satisfied with that? It was silly and short and I basically got the gist and I didn’t feel like going through the whole adventure game rigmarole anyway.
Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth seems good and yet I’m left a little flat by it. I think maybe this is a little more Castlevania than Metroid and I prefer the balance the other way around in these kinds of games. It also tends toward being a bit more linear in general, and I halfway think maybe it should have just been completely linear. The feeling of exploration here is very watered down. This feels like a good throwback, I guess?
I really do like making bank shots with that bow.
Signs of the Sojourner is an odd duck. It’s a card game, but the main objective is matching symbols between cards you and your conversation partners play. This in turn plays out the conversation you’re having (the game itself being pure abstraction and not acknowledged by the characters). The story is, you’re trying to step into your deceased mother’s shoes and take her place in a trade caravan, to avoid your dusty little town being dropped from the trade route.
I like the idea in theory but luck of the draw can be a bit of a bastard here. I feel like this’ll drive me nuts because it seems like you can redo encounters and my perfectionist urge will get to me.
7 Likes
weird nostalgia for “hank/conner” fanfic that shipped the gruff detective hank with the twink conner.
also the Super Best Friends LP of Detroit was my introduction to SBF and Detroit, and I was like “damn Im looking forward to watching their videos” and then they immediatly broke up after the Detroit LP wrapped
5 Likes
This is surely more evidence that this is the strongest character dynamic in Quantum’s oeuvre.
Just checked on ao3 and I rest my case.
5 Likes
new blizzard character design tool just dropped: ao3 tag word clouds
8 Likes
I really think they might be the opposite of this! A videogame thing I think about a lot is that they are uniquely bad at imparting the kinesthetic experience of having a human body.
10 Likes
have you down as the #1 jumping flash fan I know
2 Likes
more games i’ve played lately
Sophstar
Good shmup!! it’s sort of an 8/10 on everything except variety, which is 11/10. So many ships, all of them playing very differently. I’ve only played 3 out of the 9 and each was a fully different experience.
It’s fairly old-school - doesn’t feel like the mathematical beauty of a bullet hell, but way way more approachable. It’s much easier to visually understand and plan a move.
I think that the teleport mechanic is kind of useless but I’d be interested in seeing high level play. Also, this game is pretty hard!! But I was able to get to the end of stage 2 on one credit on my first try, so it’s clearly not as hard as Space Moth.
Scoring mechanics are fairly simple - get up to a 9x multiplier for killing enemies quickly, but it fades fast. Enemies drop score trinkets that decline in value very quickly, so point blank murder is going to be your best bet. There’s an “advanced” scoring system I haven’t even tried.
By my count there are 108 leaderboards just for Arcade mode (9 ships * 6 difficulties * 2 scoring modes), so it’s easy to be in the top 10 for at least one of them. I only got to stage 5 out of 8 here:
Also has a basic tutorial and a bunch of bespoke missions to complete and a special timed mode and a score attack mode. This is a huge game for 10 bucks. This game is a potato in the best way - good at any time of day, lots of ways to enjoy it, and huge bang for your buck. It may not stand out with any one feature, but it’s a really solid game and I am glad I have it in my library.
Bullet Garden
A game where the ship fires unless you press a button, all sound effects are quantized to the rhythm of the music, weapon variety is huge, there are tons of random elements, the graphics are black-and-white-and-red, and there’s a gacha mechanic that’s only good (it lets you build a custom ship but otherwise doesn’t hold back any part of the game). This seems like it should be catnip for me, if I was a cat.
But somehow it doesn’t hold my attention? It does everything right but something about it bores me to tears. I wish I liked this more because I think it’s really very good, and honestly for $2 it was worth it but like…
Yeah, just not for me I guess?
CRIMESIGHT
I played this with @Godamn_Milkman and it was fine for 2 players. I like that’s it’s an entire Werewolf game that is playable with just 2 people.
But also it was really, really hard for me to see any strategies other than really general ones. I want to be able to fool and re-fool people and double/triple bluff people, but mostly it seems like if I just sort of act like a doofus (as the villain) it sort of eliminates most strategies the good guy has?
And the good guy feels like it’s just shooting in the dark?
Very curious what a 4P game looks like, but yeah, a bit disappointing this one.
16 Likes