I played a few minutes of The Mummy: Demastered, the weird “16 bit” throwback tie-in game that Wayforward did with that Tom Cruise movie years ago.
It’s alright, I guess? Like, mostly competent. The dodge role is maybe a little too “sticky” on the startup if that makes sense. But like, mostly all of it is just “good” in a bland way. Nice sprites, nice soundtrack, okay action. Sort of very basic. I won’t spend more time with this, I don’t think.
Multiversus made me realize that maybe I don’t hate platform fighters as much as I thought I did, and it made me give Rivals of Aether another shot. I just really like how that game feels and how its characters are designed, so I’ve been getting used to playing Orcane against the CPU this week before I jump into unranked.
notably, Rivals has a DI tutorial that actually fucking works and it’s probably the sanest why to grok your brain around the concept as a whole
MV and RoA serve as a good two-step starting point because between the two, the tutorials they have more or less apply across anything vaguely Smash related (not PS All-Stars, that game is an abomination)
cookie & cream ds is a betrayal. i hate this
it’s much smaller on switch… i think all switch games top out at 16gb max bc of cartidge size. i support it… smaller textures and better audio compression pls
speaking of i tried dark souls remastered in ryujinx out of curiousity. seems broken bc like, yeah why would the devs bother optimizing with a game that is already totally playable on like 40 other platforms… very weird port tho. the b button is the confirm button in menus??? surprised smth like that passes nintendo qc… also it has like noticeably low quality / compressed audio while also managing to be larger than the original game?
also im sorry but why does this have such mobile game vibes
mercurysteam literally used the .webm video format for all the prerendered cutscenes
(maybe not actually the answer to your question but i can’t get that fact out of my head)
trying prey 2017 per @tulpa’s suggestion bc i really did not realize the whole thing was basically a triple a dungeon crawl. less “immersive sims” more dungeon crawls thx. it’s free (on gog) just saying…
it is a little shooty for my tastes not really playing this kind of thing to blast aliens with white goo glob guns. like at least dont make me aim at fast-moving targets or that sort of thing i do not need a dex req. i need a lock-on button. i felt that many of the rooms i encountered would feasibly meet some fire safety standards tho. multiple routes of egress and that sort of thing
this made me feel like an ultra megagenius (pictured on the whiteboard: the size of my brain) so maybe im not totally immune to this kind of game after all. dishonored is a great example of a game i would consider playing if it weren’t a ropey first person melee combat game centered around the bodily dimensions of ur character lmao
textures are too clean for the resolution, need higher-res uncompressed textures
sorry
Since I’m destined/ doomed to play basically every non-cringehorny metroidvania on Switch I got Vigil: the longest night, which is at the intersection of Souls, metrovania, and (dark) mobile game aesthetics. First impressions were abysmal and it took me like 6 months to pick it back up again, but now I’m thinking « this feels like actually like playing one of these mobile game ads » and I’m actually enjoying the look. The collage background foliage is actually non-ironically gorgeous too
After the tutorial zone the game starts having intensely euro vibes, you arrive at a surprisingly big Misery Medieval Village where women mysteriously disappear and villagers are spreading gossip about the supposed lack of faith of one of the kidnapped girls and the rigidity of her mother. You also learn that YOU the main character come from this village and your sister is also missing and one woman is in front of your house menacingly waiting to offer her cake (???) and the translation is pretty hacky and why the hell is all this in a Souls game? It’s great.
I liked the first quest which auto-completes itself « - please kill the terrifying beast that has murdered 12 guards already, we are suffering - I think that was the tutorial zone boss, it is dead now - thank you »
Combat wise the game has like four weapon types (sword, dual knives, axe, bow) and they each have their own skill tree with no sign of respec on the horizon which totally blows; you have to make a completely uninformed choice on which weapon to choose. I went all in on bows and my girl is now constantly firing arrows while flipping around, it looks as stupid as it is powerful
It’s a little combat heavy early on but you can build your character to be faster and more agile and stuff. By the end I was just running away from everything I didn’t want to engage.
You mean you didn’t enjoy being stuck on shitty touch screen mini game duty while I do the platforming??
Tulpa asked me if I had played Moon Crystal and I had but I had to Play More.
Woah this Prince of Persia-Like Anime Famicom Platformer. It even has the turn around animation much to it’s detriment. I used save states to give myself unlimited tries. It was a pretty good time until the Stage 4 Boss. Good luck doing that. I gave up.
Then I went well, maybe, and actually checked the cheats tab. There was a cheat to instant kill any boss. Did that, turned the cheat off live (which didn’t expect to happen.) continued a bit more into Stage 5.
Then loaded up Lost World for Genesis and looked at cheats so I could play some of those absolute bonkers levels I’d never seen despite owning the damn thing.
Guess gonna play those B-Grade Action Platformers for NES for a bit (kickmaster, shatterhand, power glove).
I played a little more of The Void Rains Upon Her Heart. The weird nudity is still weird. The shmup mechanics are refreshingly kind to someone as unskilled as I. I have no idea if I have enough patience to unlock the 4 million McGuffins in this game. Also apparently this is still in Early Access and chances are I’ll be tired of playing it before it’s complete.
Knock-knock kind of manages to be unsettling and monotonous at the same time. I feel like there’s not enough here narratively or mechanically for me to submit to being spooked.
soooooo many great little guys in this… this game like looks and sounds so deluxe outside of idk… the interface design that looks like a bunch of big touch screen buttons (at least it’s not persona 5 which is like “stylish” to no particular end which is obvs an issue i have with plenty of games besides). it is so weird how it came out <a year ago and no one even talks about it anymore. it’s interesting how much like japanese game dev in ue4 now ig bc it looks + runs great on switch and has good jp documentation + porting to ps4 / pc isnt terrible? this / nmh3 / armored core persona (daemon x machina) / persona with cops (astral chain). wow a lot of switch games are just persona lol. you cant convince me fire emblem isnt also persona.
anyways~ ryujinx handles this game marvelously. downloaded some shader cache w/ some shady electron app bc the vulkan renderer seems glitchier than the opengl one. it really is more fun to emulate. i dont mind weird glitches or hitching i’m just pleased the games run at all
one of the best things abt nocturne is how perfectly it translates kaneko designs to 3d and this does a great job of combining the aesthetics of kaneko designs and the new demons kind of seamlessly which is smth smt iv (a game which i am increasingly convinced esp. after playing this is actually very bad a few rlly good tracks aside) absolutely does not. guys new and old, united at last on the unreal engine… cool game i approve
We Need To Bring Back Dungeons tho… need deep down so bad
i tried playing the original metroid but my god it’s aged like a wet fart, no wonder why they needed to remake it with zero mission
there are probably people who say that about metroid 2 but those people are wrong
What didn’t you like about it? I reall respect how it is unkownable. That eventually to advance you need to fall into a secret fake lava pit and then Go Deeper.
Sykel play Junkoid.
Like my biggest problem with those games (especially Metroid 2 sorry M2 fans) is it encourages this OCD bomb/verb every surface. Junkoid has none of that. It is incredible.
I made Bachelor play a different Metroid 1 romhack, Over The Moon, and he said he turned it off after it made him pixel hunt for 2 Missile Capsules. I saw where one was, it was not clever. It was Gordon Freeman entering a room, reving up the crowbar, and finding out the Y-axis was locked and all the boxes were shoe-boxes.
a BIG problem i have is always starting with like barely any health so you have to farm after you die just so you can survive more than five minutes. that and the controls are just really clunky, and i miss being about to shoot down or crouch. it’s interesting how some of the powerups are just to make the game more playable… you cant crouch, but you can get a ball powerup. you cant crouch and shoot, but you can get a bomb to lay on the ground
also so many of the rooms are copy pasted which makes exploration a bit boring and also makes it easy to get lost and forget when you’ve been already
it does feel more like a world than super metroid though, since in that one there are so many of these blocks that can only be destroyed with certain powerups, but that’s obviously not a thing here since there is only one kind of bomb and missile
i admit bombing every surface is a problem with metroids design, yah. like wall humping in wolfenstein (doom fixed it by giving clues to where secrets are, wolfenstein usually didnt/couldnt due to the tech limitations). super metroid at least gives you the xray vision so you dont have to do that, but instead i just took five steps then scanned every surface instead lol
Years ago I only got part of the way through Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet on Xbox 360. Out of curiosity since I have it on Steam I thought I’d fire it up again and see if it’d tickle my fancy now. No, not really.
I feel like I’ve mentioned this before but this is one of those games where I feel like it looks great in a trailer and then you actually play it and without all the musical bombast and snappy video-editing it winds up being much more dull. I have vivid memories of this game’s trailers, I can even remember the music! Maybe I’ll just go watch that again to get my neurons to light up and then I’ll uninstall this.
Played Obduction and it makes me wonder if the frequent and long load times in this kinda game are a deliberate way to encourage the player to thoughtfully proceed. I know they’re mainly due to technical limitations but it practically leads to this happening, at least in my experience.
It has an excellent initial setting and mystery of a big spherical lump of Earth (and everyone contained within) being mysteriously ‘abducted’, along with various other spheres from different periods strewn about. You quickly discover the settlement that’s been there for decades and it instantly gets the question mill churning. How do these people eat? What’s the government like? Did people get sick of each other? The questions generally get answered in relatively natural ways although there is some scifi hand-waving. It’s excellent that you don’t discover stuff in the order of a neat chronological clue trail and as a result, things discovered early on make no sense until really late-game payoffs which makes the world feel more rooted.
When the game starts introducing other alien races who are also trapped here, the glass ceilings work well to keep you intrigued up until a point. The first contact stuff is generally cool but a central conflict emerges relatively early and documentation on it is conspicuously absent given that the settlement has a clear protocol for introducing new arrivals during a lockdown emergency. The Mofang are relatively ambiguous as an enemy. We never learn their initial reason for conflict and the game does at least show they’re not inherently evil or anything through defectors (this is Cyan after all), but the exact reason for the conflict is never broached. Perhaps it’s not important.
After I finished the fan wikis suggest the WMDs used to attack the Mofang are from Mofang but the Russian sub worked to imply the weapons were constructed by the humans which I kinda prefer as a difficult situation with no easy answer.
Ultimately Obduction is a good adventure but has a big front half/back half problem. Front half human interest story in the spirit of Myst/Riven world building, back half empty alien world with a bridge/swapping puzzle loosely justified as a tedious method to block intruders/increase transport security. The (I assume infamous) swapping puzzle is highly tedious because the player can figure out the solutions faster than the game presents stupid swap-sphere roadblocks. This is where I thought the load times have an intentional edge to them. The puzzle can be more quickly cleared by careful consideration and note-taking than brute forcing through multiple swaps (each one incurring a load time). Thus, if the game was remade for say PS5 or the loads were otherwise lessened, I think the fundamental approach to puzzle-solving in the game would radically be changed even if it seems like it’s the more convenient option.
Just an interesting wrinkle that I think applies retroactively to Riven as well. The transitional scenes are kinda needed to make sure the player isn’t just running around blindly but properly considers if they’ve really tried everything in their immediate environment before a lengthy journey.
Genocide/colonialism is a common, prominent theme of Cyan’s output that I’ve played so far and I’m wondering if this is for any reason in particular. I’m sure there’s a lot of good documentaries I could delve into and might have a search around. I recall hearing the Millers are Christian. Anyway, a big recommendation but brace for the swollen suppository of a puzzle in the late game.
on 2nd thought idk if i recommend this course of action they’re just very slightly glitchy in diff ways… opengl has random flickering black textures whereas vulkan has this weird like… flickering geometry. both go away after a few seconds but the vulkan renderer computes shaders almost instantaneously so there’s no need for messing around w/ shader caches you dl’d from some mega link you found on reddit encoded to base64 bc technically it is piracy i guess… even tho reddit is otherwise filled to the brim with copyright infringement
heartily recommend emulating switch games tho!
