I dumped all my screenshots from PS5 to PC specifically so I could send all the stuff I thought was cringe to my friend and make him mad as hell. He lives +4 hours from me so he’s gonna wake up in like 6 hours and blow a gasket when he logs into discord and sees what I sent him… >:)
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one of my favorite parts of contemporary life working 6 hours behind and being friends with polyphasic sleepers
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Regretfully I forgot to screenshot the single most cringe thing in the game, which is where they explain why all the script in the game is a made up script meant to look somewhat like chinese or korean, but not quite! (the answer is: the language was made up by the robots after the fall of humanity. they chose to not use human languages for some reason and invented their own?) it doesn’t make sense!! I’m guessing the real reason is they probably didn’t want to have a cultural consultant review a bunch of art assets written in an actual language
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would love to see a maritimer blow a gasket
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sao paulo time
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FALL GUYS
Like mario party minigames crossed with doritos crash course. i can see why it’s popular but it’s too random for me, plus only a few of the maps i encountered made good use of the mechanics
FORTNITE
i won my second game which means it must have been filled with shitty bots to try and hook me in since i had no idea what i was doing. does this have a tutorial? these F2P games have too many fucking menus, i dont know what all this shit is
PURE MINI GOLF
pretty rough around the edges but i enjoyed playing this before sleeping until i got to a course that frustrated me too much
CONGO MASTER
very silly and simple game where you go to clubs and make everyone congo with you. almost bounced off because it starts very slow and it’s very shallow and… it stays that way the whole game, but it was simple enough for me to turn my brain off to play plus all the environments and characters have a lot of personality. also its very short.
pac-man 99
not big on these 99 games, i’m too focused on my own game to see what everyone else is doing and trying to “strategise”. tetris 99 is the worst, i like that multiplayer because i can see what the other player is doing and time all my attacks and stuff, so the 99 version sucks all the strategy i like out of it
BOMBERMAN R ONLINE
not sure if i like this one or not yet. i think i like it! i thought it was going to be like saturn bomberman with everyone on one giant board, though
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have mixed feelings on Stray. it’s very cute but like the cat seems to follow Garfield logic in that i guess they appear to be a normal cat to most people and acts like one but they can also comprehend full sentences and can be communicated to by cute non-human entities? some of the puzzles have been kind of fun, but also i didn’t really gather it was gonna be this puzzley, previously. not sure if this will hook me to the end, but if it’s short enough, probably.
it’s really hot in the city (i was upstate for a week, where it was also hot but not as hot) and i’m trying to avoid using my large, heat-generating 4K TV, and so i switched to the NES on my CRT for the rest of the night.
started up FF2 in earnest and my suspicion that the only version i’d like of this being the Famicom one is turning out to be true. every sprite running at 60fps looks lovely and much smoother than FF1, and i love the way the screen tears in half for screen transitions. it’s also fun to instantly die when i venture just a little too far outside the right zone, but at least i can save anywhere on the world map (something the original DQs were driving me crazy with the past couple months).
Akira - trying out the English translation and it’s mostly just a retelling of the movie, so far. a curiosity.
Ninja Kun(Kid) - i picked this (and Akira, actually) up at a retro game shop upstate. i thought it was Ninja Jajamaru, but only because i didn’t know Ninja Kun was a game that predated it. super simple but has a great early NES feel to it. the petal animations on Game Over are surprisingly realistic in the way they float down. a more enjoyable game than i figured it might be when i picked it up
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I played Paradise Killer for 4 hours straight two nights in a row so I guess I like it, a lot.
Got three leads to follow up on before I do the trial.
Semi-worried the open ended nature of the game is a get out of telling a story. But! I like the characters and yelling at them. Running around is fun. The setting is neater than expected. All the plot threads pulling at each other is also good.
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yeah, it’s a loose mess, but it’s a pretty successful loose mess
I’ll tell you right off that they resisted rewarding completionism which while a fine choice makes the big climax a little anticlimactic, the high point comes right as you’re unpeeling the biggest mysteries rather than getting “justice” at the end
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Yeah but I’m a fiend for investigation.
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yeah, it’s a very pure exploration game in that sense, the most gratifying thing you ever do is totally self-paced exploration, and the world and the dialogue are tied perfectly together for that, it’s a shame that the various big and small puzzles barely work in comparison
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I think there’s a reward you might possibly only get if you punish everyone strictly according to the full facts of the case, although I didn’t try all that many outcome variations after the first two or three so I might be wrong, might be you only need to solve the factual truth of the Daybreaks’ involvement.
That bit you mention was probably the apex of the whole game for me. There was a later good bit but more in a “so bad it’s good” way, because it reminded me of a bad bit of Deadly Premonitions.
Anyway, I tried The Painscreek Killings originally because it had been recommended as an investigation game with Obra Dinn and Her Story namedrops in another forum, and misled by that it was sort of the initial impression I got looking at the Steam page because there was a lot of discussion about family trees and piecing character relationships. The game itself recommends a notebook.
And I love myself a good investigation, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a Gone Home spread over a whole village. What you’re actually doing, all the time, is searching for the next key or code to open the next door, in a pretty linear sequence. As long as you read all documents on the way there’s really nothing to piece together, it’ll all be very unsubtly spelt out for you.
Well, I guess I’m being a bit unfair, the plot’s all spelt out eventually but figuring some of the codes does necessitate some thought. It’s just never about the investigation itself.
Plus the town’s actually kinda bad. It’s supposed to be an US town that’s been abandoned over the last 5 years, but it looks more british IMHO and a lot of places look like they were abandoned yesterday, down to still warm ashes and at one point a weapon used years ago with the blood still fresh. There’s another guy who came to investigate the case years earlier and disappeared and his car’s still there in the middle of the road, with all its contents just as he left them. The houses are numbered by someone who didn’t have the faintest idea of how street numbers work, too. It’s baffling. Everyone keep dozens of diaries, which is of course a given for Gone Home clones but it feels really excessive.
The title’s a silly and apparently unintentional sorta-spoiler too, by the way, in that the game’s prologue sends you to investigate a single death and no public document in-game ever says otherwise but the title makes it pretty obvious you’re gonna discover there’s several murders.
And sure, there’s the ghost girl, something which is really awesome the first time, only glimpsed, but so overused in less and less subtle ways that by the end it becomes goofy.
Also the endgame suddenly switches gears to become a dumb Deadly Premonition style raincoat killer chase.
Anyway, the stupid failing it has in common with Paradise Killer (so it’s an end-endgame spoiler for Paradise Killer too) is that, although presenting itself as an investigation game where you eventually have to present the conclusions you reached about the case (here the killer’s name and weapon),
The crime revealed
There’s that dumb room that contains a full detailed murder confession, the bloody murder weapon and the murderer! What’s the point of letting me investigate if you’re just gonna fill in all the details in one go with no wiggle room?
This especially made my blood boil in Paradise Killer because the game maintains throughout that truth is subjective but it’s not! There’s that idiot killer who spells it out for you, during the trial the game auto-corrects if you stray too far for some crimes and even if you go out of your way to accuse everyone you’ll easily see from the blatant tone of the reactions who the people actually uninvolved were (coincidentally the same you can sleep with but I guess that’s another story). The only sort of wiggle room I see for subjective truth is choosing to involve the Daybreaks but there’s an extra endgame CG if you do, making it the “more complete” choice.
That being said, a real good idea Painscreek Killings had is the camera that allows you to reduce backtracking and note taking by diegetically taking screenshots of clues. Too bad I played it soon after Rhem 3, which also has it (although limited to photographing documents) and uses it for one of my all time favorite (and cruelest) puzzle design jokes (which is that the photographs of a bunch of hard-to-access documents involved in a “boss” puzzle are meaningless without the context, requiring you to go back and take notes about the documents’ surroundings). Plus of course as far as investigation games with cameras go there’s Outer Wilds which uses its own for some rather spectacular and unique puzzle.
Anyway, it’s a bad detective game and a sort of middling walking sim that drags on for far too long.
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IIRC the first like five games are going to be almost all bots with like a handful of other new players, this is the tutorial before you do well enough against the bots, then they drop you in with the sharks.
Dragon Warrior 7 (PSX)
I know the opening of this game is infamous for being long but honestly I got to the first fight in around 2 and a half hours. By coincidence I also played the opening of Horizon Forbidden West and it was about 4 hours before I finally got off rails, funny how things change.
PSX era RPGs with earnest but minimalistic translations (and copious fast forward abuse) are my favorite genre of game, but im surprised how much better this game flows than I remember. I just finished the Falrod section and so far I haven’t had to grind and finding the shards has been pretty straightforward/well signposted. I definitely don’t remember that being the case when I played it back in 2002…
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impressions of the game are pretty warped these days i think. there are one or two knotty moments but you can mostly find your way through if you’re just like playing mindfully. the game is very long but is mostly paced very beautifully imo and yes it is much more like 2/3 hours to the first fight than 6/7 (i find it baffling that that is such a flashpoint for this game to begin with but that’s another thing entirely)
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They didn’t seem too interested in hiring one writer, why would they hire a 2nd writer for a different language?
This is really bugging me. We’ve had years of interacting with AI captcha teaching computers to recognize streetsigns, and and they had to do was put in a line about how “This is what human language, in aggregate, looks like to a computer”
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Played a bunch of Spirits Abyss last night after Cania recommended it, and I co-sign everything they said, it’s a delightful little game. The dev clearly fully understood Spelunky AND understood how to get me everything I got out of Spelunky but with a little less pain and a lot more skulls. And baby talk. Amazed at how much I like the baby talk. The colors are also great. Luminous and chunky! Fantastic. Expect I’ll play a lot more of this.
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Bloodborne, at the first street with more than one enemy, learning about crowd control & situational awareness. so far I have worked out not to molotov when being rushed until after they take their swing at you
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One of the great opening levels in action games. The pattern of throwing the player into the deep end in a systemically-open environment designed to cause failure and rapid learning is unmatched.
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