i wish
it pulls an axiom verge and makes its morph ball replacement an autonomous drone (in practice it’s unchanged) — the classic coward’s move imo
4 Likes
played a game called beyond fallendom which is like a remake of dicing knight on the wonderswan, only did one dungeon but it is very good.
'played a ton of other stuff for a little bit each too but nothing worth mentioning really
3 Likes
Been playing a survival crafting game called Planetcrafter (or The Planet Crafter? the name is different depending on where you look) which is a mix of a survival crafting game and, I guess, an idle game.
You build structures all over this barren planet that slowly generate heat, pressure, oxygen, and eventually “biomass” (flowers, trees, insects, etc). Like in an idle game you are waiting for number to go up, unlocking new structures which make exponentially more number go up per second, deconstructing old structures to pay for new ones and manage your power expenditure, and so on.
As you achieve various milestones, the environment changes dramatically. Water begins to fill lowlands, the desert begins to turn green… there’s a sense of being in a very controlled experience, as if you were seeing a stripped down level design in the early game, and the developer is slowly unveiling their “actual” level design for you over time. Awkward ditches in the ground fill with water, plants appear in caves, the lighting changes, and weather events begin to happen. You being reading the environment with an eye toward this. To me this feels less like being a real terraformer who is trying to predict how water might change an environment, and more like being a player who is seeing a level load in bit by bit. It’s interesting, haha.
The experience feels the most controlled and scripted when it reacts to my resource deficiencies–as you progress in the game, new types of meteorites will hit the planet and deposit new metals on the surface for you to collect. At the start of the game it was all low value metals but now, inexplicably, rare ores fall on me. In particular they seem to fall on me when I run low on them. 
Oddly enough this game seems to be using some of the same assets as Subnautica. I recognize, I think, several of the elements you collect from the environment as being used in that game as wll. It borrows quite a bit from Subnautica all over the game–the environment is covered in lumps of metal you just grab, the planet is covered in busted wrecks of very smooth, nearly cartoony space stations, there’s a backstory about failed missions and previous people who tried to terraform the planet, there are secret almost dungeon-esque bases or wrecks to find, etc.
I am genuinely enjoying this. It is very satisfying to slowly accomplish all these terraforming milestones and to understand what kind of infrastructure I am meant to be building at any given time. Like any idle game, number goes up exponentially, and sometimes you are suprised with a new tech tree, sort of, for solving a problem you used to solve in small and boring ways in the past. At one point the game introduces space rockets, and it took me several hours to realize I should be prioritizing those rockets because they apply a 1000x bonus to my core planet stats every time I launch them. I then launched a zillion rockets and was delighted to see number go up faster than ever before. The planet turned green in front of my eyes! It was fun.
I am always impressed when a developer mashes together two ideas as seamlessly as this. The game is jank and often looks less than good and is pretty poorly localized in places but I am having a good time.
11 Likes
Over the weekend our game night resumed for the first time since the Brucetravaganza and my friend chose “Messhof” as the theme so I finally got to catch up on some significant omissions to my Have Played List, the big one being Nidhogg which fuckin’ whips when you’re all together on the same sofa. Fun to play, fun to watch. What more can you ask for?
We booted up Nidhogg 2 and holy art style change ups! (I actually like it in isolation…feels wrong in practice compared to the minimalism of the original, I’ll never warm to the paper doll style of animation though especially considering how expressive the first Nidhogg’s were). It ran very slow…something to do with hardware settings…we messed with it a bit but never got it running properly which was something of a theme for the night: my friend purchased an old laptop with Windows 7 just to play a few of these games, many of which Messhof seems to have, if not disowned, abandoned and left to fade into obscurity. All sorts of weird quirks like a game would slow down if a USB mouse dongle was inserted.
Flywrench is pretty great but too grueling for me to want to beat. I managed to break out of the level bounds and break back in so we did that a few times…
Poopcuzzi (I’m working my way backwards from the order we played) was a goofy four player lol time about diving for shit in a hot tub and accusing someone of shitting that shit with their shit in hand while you yourself try to shit in the hot tub without being correctly associated with the shit you secretly shat in the hot tub. We didn’t have the butt pad controllers even though there’s instruction on how to make them, maybe next time.
You Found the Grappling Hook seemed fine, I just watched, we didn’t get the axe or the hover boots…seemed like a visible tangent for your hook would have been helpful but my friend got the hang of it and then had enough after about 12 minutes.
Cowboyana was a lively little precursor to the twitchy mano a mano mania of Nidhogg but with shootouts and interstitial whiskey swilling (getting your opponent drunk fucks with their controls) and train robbery (360 swirling your joystick to reload your revolver was cute).
Things get less playable/enjoyable earlier and earlier in the evening. In The Thrill of Combat you fly a helicopter from which you have to laser remove baddies on the ground before dropping your little buddy down there where they’ll harvest organs from people. Then you’re using the keyboard to maneuver the craft in the air to avoid missiles while at the same time using the mouse to cut around and cut out various organs displayed in closeup on the right side of the screen. You pull your buddy back up on a rope by scrolling the mouse wheel. It’s not an easy game.
Although grueling/unwieldy/sensory overloading interactions were the through line throughout the night, Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist was the loudest and most in your face about it. After a trashy text scroll announcing how drugged up on drugs you are, you “drive” a bus and then “fly” a Big Ben into multiple space stations to destroy them and then hurl energy balls at floating baby heads and then take control of a tendril’d baby freak and then…I don’t remember how it ended but what I will remember about it is my friend accidentally introducing it beforehand as Randy Bachman: Municipal Abortionist and for a moment I stoked about a BTO reference.
It all started with Punishment and Punishment 2: The Punishing. The first one sucked to play. Slippery platforming up and up as a picture in the background (a girl in the stocks, Miyamoto with Mario and Yoshi plushies…) unpixellated the further you go. There’s a Democrat and Republican icon you can touch. Democrat reverses your controls.
I only watched Punishment 2 which was two-player and involved platforming and hitting switches to go up to the next screen but you had to go back to the previous levels and hit the previous switches again each time also…all over again…the sparse but chill background music inspired my well-received joke: “This is my favourite genre of music: drum”
Overall, nice to see this dude’s evolution over the years. I was aware of some of this stuff just never got around to playing it and don’t really know too much about him or context although a lot of these seemed to get framed in a This is Art way being toured around publicly before release in Nidhogg’s case and shown at art exhibits and commissioned events and whatnot in the case of Poocuzzi and maybe others. We watched an interview with Mark Essen and he appeared…way more normal, dare I say boring, than what I was expecting. An unfair juxtaposition maybe considering how intense and unhinged the games could be. Anyway, fun time
EDIT:
Forgot that Jetpack Basketball (two player, grabbing basketballs with a rocket and thrust maneuvering them into the hoop, chill) and Pipedreamz were in the mix as well. I liked Pipedreamz where you alternate between soul-sucking day job where you flip burgers/scarf down raw meet while trying not to get caught and hanging ten on the mother of all dream waves (once you’ve put in enough time at the job building your Pipedreamz Meter) scoring sick tricks like “Extra Sauce” and “Mega Burger”
22 Likes
I just happened to fire up Nidhogg 1 yesterday and didn’t realize a new graveyard themed level had been patched in somewhat recently.
I still can’t bring myself to try 2. The super fluid psychedelic Intellivision running man in the original is so perfect. Props to them for going a new direction having already achieved perfection though.
8 Likes
played a little nmh3 in ryujinx… not rlly attatched to these games at all and havent actually finished one. kind of feels like a transition from travis being an actual repugnant fucking loser to being this sort of scoundrel antihero in nmh3, a lot of “stylishness” to no particular effect imo. while idt killer7 is intentionally like player-hostile or stupid i kind of feel like nmh1 is (tho i also idk if i find that very interesting)? like oh a life sim where youre inserted into the life of a creepy asshole in some godforsaken american suburb. idk. what do ppl think of those games these days. i just cant vibe with this extremely mid combat idt
7 Likes
i only played the ps3 version of nmh1 and the best part of it to me was its passion for good graphic t-shirts. i associate grasshopper manufacture with a tim rogers anecdote from some video where i think he mentions getting a trash bag full of japanese streetwear placed on his desk as a gift while working there.
instead of no more heroes sequels they should have made all the t-shirts real
7 Likes
All the shirts in 1 were real and boutique to Koenji/Shimokita shops. Should have bought the one I spotted in the wild. I probably would have lost it between then and now anyways.
10 Likes
Immediately after finishing Jak II, I started Jak 3, and bulldozed right through it. So many great moments in this one! I had no idea! The dune buggies are so wild and the terrain of the desert is filled with huge, slippery, sand dunes. I was shocked when I got the buggy that could super jump and made my way across an archipelago, up a volcano. Some of the levels felt a bit mediocre in comparison to the last. There are triple the amount of guns, but I mostly used a gun that ricochets with incredible accuracy.
Ultimately, despite some sagging moments, I’m still impressed by the variety of ideas that they swung for. Are any of their contemporaries this ambitious? Any of the Ratchet and Clanks, the Sly Coopers, etc.? I saw that Up Your Arsenal won an award over this, but does that game have anything as neat as a tank splashing through flooded city ruins or a Shadow of the Colossus style boss stomping through the desert?
10 Likes
Nmh is pretty fun in a ‘cruising through the emptiness and revelling in obscure media tastes’ kinda way. You’re playing for the aesthetic flavour, not the combat depth.
Ratchet and Sly mainly escalate in scale and refinement. I get the impression Jak is one of those trilogies where the 3 games are really different from one another. Ratchet 3 has probably the best weapon roster of the series and simplifies the hookshot mechanics. It has big open battle missions but they’re not super fun.
3 Likes
Is Ratchet 3 with the planteoids pre-Mario Galaxy?
1 Like
Mind Zero is basically a poor man’s Persona 3 Portable. There’s no life-sim aspects, though. The battle system is at least sort of interesting:
You can summon MINDs (your Personas, basically, though there’s only one per character, so no demon fusion or anything like that either) at will in battle by tapping a button. Your MP will drain slowly while your MIND is active. Also, while your MIND is active, any hits you take will drain your MP instead of your LP (life points – why not hit points? 
). You can restore your MP with items, or by dismissing your MIND to let it recharge. At that time you’re vulnerable to actual damage and your attack power is diminished. If an enemy attack reduces your MP to zero, you suffer the “mind break” condition and are unable to act for a turn.
So there’s a neat little juggling act there in combat (presumably; enemies early in this game are real pushovers on Normal difficulty).
But just about everything else in this game is pretty dire so I’m not going to play any more of it!
5 Likes
today i played smash brothers ultimate and it sure is that game
3 Likes
2 Likes
I am playing Castlevania: Lacarde Chronicles 2 or as I call Italian Castlevania (because it is a fan game by Italians).
The video options screen is blank and I have the option of full screen 640x480 or center of screen always on top That ruins all my other windows and sometimes makes my mouse dissapear till I slam keyboard buttons til the window closes. Despite these headaches I’ve been spending 30 minutes of nap time streaming this for friends.
When I first started I used the wrong of two exes so I died in one hit. Still feel like I am playing on unintentional hardmode.
I was actually impressed that the first barrier made me go “oh I need a double jump” and it turned out I needed to use a skill I already had. Wow! Then today I beat a boss and got a double jump. Ladies, Gentlemen, We Got 'Em. Used it to get over a just a little too high ledge. Of course, video games.
It has this mix of being difficult, sometimes clever, and then Ladies and Gentlemen, Video Games. It is as professional as most video games. And what am I going to do? Complain about this free fan game? I can just stop playing it and shut up.
I am saying it is interesting. And only looking at it with friends going “hmmmm” is keeping me playing it. Italiano!
8 Likes
my cutie in academia started playing smt nocturne and she named the demifiend “sigismund schlomo”
12 Likes
That’s 2. They return in 3 on a larger scale though iirc
1 Like
Goddamn, finally finished Spelunky 2
7 Likes
Black and White sucks!! I was going to write a long post but I think @HOBO summarized it best with
“Every time I look at this game I feel like I’m watching a Classics of Game video, even though I know all the context”
Honestly if the entire game was something like the first or second map, which is to say “A village manager with some weird sidequests and puzzles throughout,” then it would be a better game. As it stands, the quality declines steeply on each island to the point where I’m convinced Island 4 is basically unplayable. It’s just a constant bombardment of fireballs until you solve a puzzle, and by puzzle I mean “the same fucking thing you did for the last 4 hours” and by that I mean “try to convince a village to believe in you by like, throwing rocks near them or something”. Absolutely miserable.
It’s just like, they added all these systems but forgot to make a game, but also forgot to make the systems interesting? I guess that’s the Peter Molyneux promise though.
Anyway I can now see the more clear lineage between this and Fable, and I think I’m also never going to play it again. Going to cross this one off the white whale list even though I didn’t finish it.
28 Likes
oh and you’ll all be happy to know that I only punished my animal twice, and that was (1) to get past a tutorial, and (2) on accident. What a horrible system.
9 Likes