Games You Played Today IV: Quest of the Avatar

King of Posters
1115

Had a very chill time with Hylics. “recreational program with light JRPG elements” indeed. Really good at channeling the enticing crypticisms and nonsensical NPC interactions and poking and plonking around of something like Zelda 2 or Myst in my mind…you might call it a pastiche of that particular vibe but with a contemporary sense of consideration for the player’s time (scale, scope and simplicity for one, generous saving/persistent puzzle states and enemy deaths, the neat idea of only levelling up your HP when you die which is also where you can warp to places you’ve been) and with an art style and soundtrack this killer it’s very much it’s own thing. Squishing that one button over and over to annoy and finally coerce a character into rewarding you is a kind of video game I think about a lot, when you suddenly find yourself eyeball to eyeball with the designer to see who’ll blink first. And nice to kinda bring that back for THE END where it felt less like a game of chicken and more of a handshake.

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I will be playing Hylics 2 for sure!

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1116

I find Legend of Mana a lot more endearing now than… 23 years ago. The vibes are so unique and everything is either top notch or interestingly awful

The remaster is excellent, with beautiful HD OG background art, non-ruined sprites, the ability to save anywhere, toggable enemy encounters, the PocketStation minigame, and a new translation.
Square-enix will just wonderfully remaster all their more niche titles and completely botch the remasters for their flagship series

God it would be so easy to make a 3 hours long video essay about this game. The most interesting part to me now is how it’s maybe the best representative from a long gone era when all the systems in your game could synergize extremely poorly and it was seen as not exactly good, but acceptable.
Like what exactly is the Most Elaborate Smithing System Of All Time doing in baby’s first ARPG, a belt scroller with regen health and all enemies 20x slower than you. Why have I randomly spent all my resources on breeding this rabite and he’s still 10 times worse than the kid with the frying pan living inside my house
Man even if you want to get real serious with the smithing or breeding systems you might have already perma-screwed your save file less than 1 minute into the game by placing your home at the center of the map instead of near the borders, lmao

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1117

this was one of my favorite parts of legend of mana back in the day, I loved the sheer mystery of the map-placement mechanic

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1118

my replaythroughs of the souls games with a str build got more tedious than enjoyable once I made it to the dlcs of 2 and 3 so I think I’m done with them now

2 Likes
1119

Conceded that lost judgement is going to be the most I enjoy any of the dragon engine games and while it’s an improvement over the original it doesn’t do much to trim the Yakuza Bloat the entire series has and I don’t know how you manage to finally add a half decent fast travel system and then hamstring it with the worst movement gimmick of anything ever.

Plot’s dumb as rocks, hope whichever writer first introduced deepfakes got a bonus.

4 Likes
1121

Left Worms Armageddon (Steam version) sitting at its main menu on my desktop while I went to go brush my teeth and after a minute I heard this sound from the living room and stuck my head around the door to see that the game had gone nuclear and started playing a remix of the old theme and then there was a spoken word story and it kind of blew my mind:

8 Likes
1122

I just reached the end of Teocida, an action puzzle platformer that isn’t technically a sequel to Tamashii but it basically is. There’s a harder version of each of the areas. I only did one of those, just to see what it was like. If I try the rest, it will be another time. Probably some other secrets I missed as well.

As in Tamashii, there’s Giger-ish horror imagery all over the place. There are kind of several different art styles mixed together but with all of the glitch and VCR effects it doesn’t really come across as all that incongruous.

This is what the game looks like:

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Edit: I should mention that you already have this game if you got this bundle a week or two ago (there were three very similar ones recently and it took me a minute to figure out which one this particular game was in):

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1123

Played Last Call BBS last night! It’s very good. The gunpla game is the best one. I also like Dungeons and Diagrams a lot too.

I have loved some Zachtronics games but this game really hits home for me that I am not in the target audience and am literally not familiar enough with engineering related sciences to play some of these minigames, haha, and I don’t care enough to research how. So I had an enjoyable time checking out all these games (completed the Kabufuda Solitaire sequence and was pleased to see that little story unfold. I love to see these very genuine notes about the kind of relationships people build on their computers! Fun stuff.

But I don’t care enough about some of these puzzle formats or themes to spend the time learning how to play them (the real challenge of the game) so I think I might be done for now. Liked the arcade game, the solitaire, dungeons and diagrams, and the gunpla stuff; less hyped for the rest of it. Glad I checked it out though!! Still a lot to enjoy.

5 Likes
1124

How Fish is Made is a pretty one-note narrative slice. Someone thought it’d be fun to make the process of a whitemeat processing machine a perspective switch where you flop through a Dante’s Infishno full of tryptophobia triggers. There’s a music video in it where a tongue-eating louse talks about how great it is to have parasites. This is the highlight of the game and it could’ve just been posted on youtube. Even at 20 minutes the game is too long and not worth slogging through a bunch of fish NPCs talk disjointedly about going up or down in a machine. It’s free though so.

Anodyne 2 is ok so far. I’m early on in the game and while the tone and aesthetics are pleasant enough, I’m not sure I see the ‘hook’ yet. Really solid double jump hover. The game is very upfront about being a game, particularly in the 2D sections and the world is so abstract at the moment I’m not sure where the accolades come from yet. I’m not disliking it but think I need to bathe in it longer.

4 Likes
1125

I have been replaying Shakedown Hawaii and I had two major thoughts:

1: This game has way more ideas than GTA ever has. Even repetitive tasks, like shaking down the 80+ shops for protection money, have a fair amount of variety. One shop might have you staring down customers, another running around with fliers outside to scare people away, another smashing a mannequin, another fighting a gang or the cops, another stealing a delivery truck, another getting dunked into the sewers and doing a platforming challenge.

It’s just so full of creative ideas and bespoke content and it’s happy for you to experience it in 30 seconds or less sometimes. Just really brimming with ideas, even if the interactions are very very simple.

2: It’s a way better parody than GTA could possibly be. It’s very specific in what it’s trying to say: that old capitalism and new capitalism are just different ways of exploiting people, inseparable from criminal activity.

The idea that you’re an 80’s capitalist who built his business on violence and scams is great. He basically sat on a beach for 30 years and now his business is failing because all his old scams have been rendered obsolete.

So you get to have this grumpy old guy going “All I see online is ads for fiber supplements - business must be great for fiber, let’s get into that!!” only to be informed about targeted marketing. And instead of going “Wow, the future sucks” he immediately sees an opportunity to do a new scam.

So yeah, it’s not super insightful parody but it’s very smart. It has one idea and it iterates on it over and over again. A capitalist is a capitalist no matter what.

Anyway this game rules and it has the ever-coveted HBFG I’m always looking for. 3 years between playthroughs was just long enough for me to forget all the good jokes.

EDIT: Also, it’s a major major major major improvement over Retro City Rampage, to the point that I can’t believe the same guy was involved. Really shows that you can like, grow and learn and make really cool shit.

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1126

oh and also it turns out you can make a parody without being a shitty bigot asshole

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1127

Anodyne 2 picks up after you leave the city, and it has some of the best slow buildup of themes I’ve seen in anything

It’s just weird that a game does actual pacing and escalation, since most games put their best work up front and Anodyne 2 purposefully does not

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1128

FWIW, and if I’m remembering correctly, my feelings upon first playing this were similar and then it really went places for me. I had a similar arc with the first game, but I think that one hooked me just a tad more quickly.

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1129

I have faith in the praise I’ve heard and am enjoying a relatively blind entry into it. It’s actually nice to not know a whole bunch going into a well-regarded indie. Looking forward to seeing how it gathers pace.

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1130

Hm, maybe I should try Anodyne 2 again. Aside from some art/character design nothing really hooked me, wanted more from the character control, some friction or sense of weight, some kinda feel but I did drop off right after I left the city so I guess I missed where things start picking up.

Back on the CRT for now, Everdrive 64 this time

dadidontwanttobehere

Mischief Makers, is a weird little game. Garish. Gaudy. Contrived controls. I’m into it! Levels so short they inspire an immediate redo for an ‘A’ if I got anything less the first time. Only at World 2.

This was nice to flip through: Trouble Shooting! : Tetsuhiko Kikuchi (Han) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Who doesn’t love Marina?

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1131

I’d phrase it more specifically. Shakedown is critical of rentier capitalism. The protagonist is a get-rich-quick scammer who takes over legitimate businesses and turns them into negative-social-value rent-maximizing machines. When the game begins, Hawaii is if anything in a state of idyllic “honest capitalism” where every business profits off selling useful goods for a fair price. By the endgame the player has gleefully ruined everything.

The wider social critique is that nothing stops this from happening in America except personal shame, and if you’re immune to shame, you can get rich easily and with total impunity. One way to get back to “honest capitalism” would be to increase regulation of shady business practices and enforcement against white-collar crime. It seems more like Elizabeth Warren leftism rather than Jacobin leftism, in other words.

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1132

I played this for like 30 min last night and thought it owned? It just might address the concerns I had with Hollow Knight and Chasm in one nice package.

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1133

that’s a really good breakdown of it, yeah. it’s definitely not radical, it’s just coherent which is such a low bar, and yet…

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1134

I love all of your CRT GIFs. I’ve wanted to do the same thing with some of my posts but that would require some kind of rig over my GBA and I’m not ready for that kind of work.

6 Likes
1135

i really like so many things about Mischief Makers. love short stages with a huge amount of variety and a lot of gimmick stages in there (def remember the track meet one vividly). the art style is truly bizarre. just like stages constructed entirely out of weird glowing face blocks. weird uncanny backgrounds. the fact that stages do the character portrait flipping scene transition. the sort of obnoxious blarey synth music that still works perfectly (i guess that’s kind of Norio Hanzawa’s thing).

my friend had more money cuz of his doctor dad so he had like a shitload of N64 games and Mischief Makers and Pilot Wings 64 were kind of the most ideal “staying up late at night over at my friend’s house on the weekend” games of the bunch.

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