Games You Played Today IV: Quest of the Avatar

[Tuxedo]

@Tuxedo

The new HD-2D Live a Live looks like an 1:1 remake of the original. Like Funny Games US. And adding HD-2D is a lot worse than adding Naomi Watts. OG Live a live wasn’t exactly a looker, so this is still overall an improvement, but it’s impossible for me to secrete any froth when I’ve already played the original like 3 times. I’ll wait for the OST to drop on youtube

It’s here

The new OST is pretty OK, not spectacular. Too much cover band energy, some themes like Megalovania are not bombastic enough. I linked to the generic medieval RPG chapter battle theme, which is my favorite

Progression in Vigil: longest night has plateaud super early as I got all the skills I wanted very early on + got a sick, maxed out sea monster tentacle bow that I infused with fire. I feel like enemies aren’t equipped to deal with range very well, and I’ve just melted everything for a while (on hard mode!) Dungeons got too big and boring to continue playing considering, which is a shame as I really got into the horror story / looks / vibes

I also tried to play SMT5 with a luck/ailment build for a while but it hasn’t been much fun, ailments on bosses are just too inaccurate, enemies can only have one ailment at a time and it will be cured randomly, sometimes at the beginning of the turn. I just want to stack a bunch of permanent status ailments on one boss is that too much to ask?
In general I feel SMT5 is very impressive for a first playthrough but lacks replayability with its nothing random battles, lack of (good) dungeons and very similar boss battles

[VastleCania]

I am installing the sequel right now though

[Rudie]

Resonance of Fate OWNS. It’s like a PS1 game with 30 splash screens explaining the battle system that you are supposed to remember. I can buy beautiful dresses for the girl and disgusting jackets for the guys. These clothes will appear in all cutscenes. They have no stats. I have no upgraded my guns at all. The guns addons have weight and I have no idea what this affects.

I met a pretty hard barrier on the no-upgrading at the first boss but then just Became Great and destroyed it near instantly.

The game has vampires and infinite bullets and weird nasty dumb rich people and a ton of nonsense lore with minimal proper nouns.

On the PS4 version 5% of players have beaten the game.

It looks beautiful.

“Take care of that hand, you’re no good to God if you lose it.”

[loki]

i’ve wanted to play that since seeing the characters in the first project x zone many years ago, and referring to them as “the stylish russian team”

[notbov]

well, I was going to make a shitpost about Tower of Fantasy similar to the PSO2NG one I did last year since you can play around with its character generator right now and I was going to combo it into dunking on Genshin by going “oh damn, the game already has half as many brown characters as Genshin and it’s not even out yet!” but

uh

no that’s not how lighting works on brown people

also why are the white’s of her eyes not white

all of the darker skin tones have gray to dark gray eye whites, it’s… concerning? stupid? a poorly made shader? a bad assumption?

it’s not fair, I wanted an easy dunk and instead the ball has bounced off the rim into the other basket

what? what about the game?

do we actually care?

[aggie]

[username]

I had decided some time back that I was going to beat a Genesis game this year and that had proven somewhat more difficult than anticipated. I went with Shinobi III initially and while the first two-thirds of the game were pretty fine the ending couple levels (last in particular) were just cheap and punishing to an absurd degree, I ended up using save states to see it through to the end but never considered that clean.

A couple weeks back I decided to try Wonder Boy in Monster World as I have the Japanese PS2 Wonder Boy Collection. Unfortunately it is on a cd and apparently my Japanese PS2 no longer reads those (bad couple months for my Playstations). Turns out I picked up that massive Genesis game PC collection on Steam some time back and that was one of the games. Unfortunately after all that the game seemed kinda poor? I have a soft spot for the Wonder Boy series due to how odd its development must have been but everything felt floaty, combat seemed meh, the penalty for dying was a bit too much, I just wasn’t having a good time at all.

Stopped to consider what other Genesis game I own/would want to beat and I recalled that I also had the Japanese Treasure Box PS2 collection so I could try Alien Soldier… except that is also on a CD. The game is also on that PC collection… but uses the PAL version which runs at th wrong speed and screws all the music up. The sane thing at that point would be to just pirate a rom and run it via an emulator (I had purchased it twice already) but instead I downloaded a mod from the Steam workshop put up to fix the various issues. I spent $8 or so bucks to download those 50+ Genesis games, I deserve me 15-or-so cents worth!

…So anyways after all that Alien Soldier ended up being pretty swell. I played on supereasy as I’m a mortal (you either play on supereasy or superhard, the former mainly just gives you infinite continues and passwords for each stage) and it gave me enough of a fighting chance to see all the stuff they threw in there. For those that don’t know it is basically a 25 stage boss rush game, there are stages before most of them but they are super short and mainly to replenish your health a bit before the next boss.

When I briefly tried this game fifteen or so years back I thought it was neat but I had trouble wrapping my brain around the somewhat tricky controls. Since then I’ve played several games (most notably the Souls games) with a focus on dodge rolls and Alien Soldier has something functionally similar with its dash that protects you from harm in a similar fashion. It took me a bit to make that connection but once I did everything sorta clicked into place. I still wasn’t great at the game but I felt it gave me an in towards dealing with most of the bosses. If I more frequently remembered that I could double tap the attack button to shield myself from bullets and often transform them into health pickups I’d have probably done much better.

There were still a few bits of the game I thought could have been better (I’d have liked either the stages to be something a bit more or just removed, switching weapons was awkward, and as always I hated the one actual boss rush boss even if it was a beloved callback for others) it’s still fun to watch Treasure at about the peak of their powers throw out just about every 2d shooter boss they could come up with while coming to grips with an admittedly tricky but also well considered control scheme.

[Cerium]

Played 5 minutes of Bulk Slash on my steam deck before it crashed then it refused to load Cyberbots, Elevator Action Returns, Keio Flying Squadron 2 or Hyper Duel so back to the drawing board.

[notbov]

@notbov

what? what about the game?

do we actually care?

in a shocking turn of events, it turns out I care

what I expected: Johnny-come-lately Genshin ripoff

what I got: Lost Ark with gacha

I can’t even be a piece of shit and play the game all day because they time gate account progress

well, back to the devil I know

hot damn, trash artifacts all day in Genshin? there’s the dopamine hit daddy was looking for

edit: also literally what the fuck is this achievement, who does this

[Cerium]

Twinkle Star Sprites 2 works but Twinkle Star Sprites 1 doesn’t

[Hojulas]

@username

If I more frequently remembered that I could double tap the attack button to shield myself from bullets and often transform them into health pickups I’d have probably done much better.

Definitely because one important thing that might not be immediately obvious is that the dash isn’t just evasive, at max health when your HP bar is flashing it actually becomes a powerful attack that inflicts large damage to whatever you pass through, but it also consumes just a tiny bit of health so you can’t spam even if you don’t take hits.

[moneygp]

Picked Pocky & Rocky Reshrined back up, trying to get 1CCs with the entire cast before moving onto hard mode. I found out all the hidden 1-ups (+ a shop manipulation trick that lets you get a 1-up guaranteed from every 100 coin shop) which has made this a lot easier for most of the cast, but I’m still stuck with Pocky. I thought Rocky was really weak because his special skills were kind of whatever, but his red shot does a ton of damage, whereas Pocky has some decent defensive abilities and really piddly damage that is making me die a lot more in the early stages.

e: as I though Pocky just needs a much slower/defensive approach in places where other characters, especially Ikazuchi/Gozen, can get away with being super aggressive. Looking forward to seeing what hard mode is like.

[falsedan]

@falsedan

Bloodborne, at the first street with more than one enemy

am out of Central Yharnam. was about to look up strats for Daddy, went to the graveyard to show where I’m stuck, “watch me die in 30 seconds”, and won. 2 parries, two music box stuns, two Molotovs, and dodging forward for the beast overhead slam

[Rudie]

6 hours into Resonance of Fate. Nathan Drake voices the horny on main character.

There have been little skits showing the main character’s daily life that play out with no fan-fair. Like if Kingdom Hearts had pacing. Don’t worry most of them are anime style harassing the girl.

I spend all of my money on beautiful dresses for her. Give me more dresses!!!

If this game had a clothes dirtying system I might forgo everything. Saying that right after the dresses thing makes me sound much more like pervert than a weirdo with stupid interests.

Child calling more thoughts later.

[GherkinForce]

Finished the Live A Live remake last night. Feels pretty wild that for what is essentially a collection of short JRPG experiments, the reward for completing the 7 scenarios is just a bog-standard ‘save the princess and defeat the dark lord’ fantasy JRPG complete with random encounters. Granted it had a pretty decent twist. The random encounters in particular chafed on me since the rest of the game didn’t have them. As a result I ended up at the final boss way underlevelled, and managed to beat him by pushing him into a corner and huddling my guys in the opposite corner, wittling his HP down gradually and healing up with the robot every time he used his big attack-all move.
I think it’s pretty good all round, although some of the scenarios are a bit hit and miss. The prehistory one reminded me of the claymation series Gogs so was probably my favourite. I think I was getting impatient with the game overall though despite it being so short, which I think was mostly just because I was forcing myself to finish it before I could move onto playing Sword and Fairy: Together Forever.

Speaking of which, I started that game briefly last night as well. I’m playing it on a base PS4 and while it is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous game performance wise, you can still tell the devs have no real idea how to correctly optimise their code because golly does the prologue area look ugly in some parts. It’s like when an area loads and the high res textures take a few seconds extra to load in, only that’s just how it looks by default. Basically it looks like it’s the Switch port of a PS4 game.
Once you get out of that section and into a green forest area (which you’d think would be much more processor intensive) it looks much better, although the framerate takes a hit. I think I may restart the game over tonight, since I started on hard and it’s a bit ridiculous on that setting since every enemy is a damage sponge that can kill you in 3 hits

[shelter]

gigi and i played like half an hour of xenosaga ep 1 before its sterile soporific haze overwhelmed us and we almost fell asleep on the couch. that game is like an airport filled with anesthetic gas, i love it so much.

[Rudie]

@GherkinForce

the reward for completing the 7 scenarios

Love it! The best thing it does is it is these experiments in how to tell a story in a JRPG. Would be interested to see how fresh that feels 15 years or whatever after I played it.

[parker]

I fell asleep during the opening cutscene the first time I tried playing it

[daphaknee]

THE WHOLE GAME IS AN OPENING CUTSCENE!!! YOU NEVER DO ANYTHING FOR LONGER THAN 45 MINUTES ITS AMAZING

the first time i played it i thought i was still in the opening build up to a game and i had been playing for eighteen hours

the combat has no time to get old and boring! its perfect!

[Shahczyk]

I’ve been playing Super Robot Wars 30, Disco Elysium and Katamari Damacy for the personal computer.

Generally speaking I get a lot more enjoyment from being someone who doesn’t watch anime, than from watching anime, but wow Super Robot Wars 30 has brought the 7 year old right out of me. I “Yoooo” at the screen multiple times per session.

Regarding said 7 year old, I played through OG 1 and 2 at around that age, and ho boy I think those games ruined me. Up until that point I’d just seen an episode of Gundam Wing on the Australian toonami equivalent 2 years earlier, and it dominated my thoughts. When I finally got to play those games on the gba I would let the animations play through every time, repeating for hours and hours and hours.

Super Robot Wars is a tactics game that uses percentage hit chances, and so 7 year old me had the perfect strategy: an inordinate amount of attempts. I beat OG2 by grinding it down on car trips, flights, under the covers after my parents went to bed. I wonder where the patience I had went. I got all the way to the elite 4 in Fire red without being able to read a word of English, just by using the show as a Rosetta stone for what Pokemon did what and what the items looked like. From Super Robot Wars I saw Disgaea 2 as an 8 year old, and then Final Fantasy tactics A2 later on, and so on. Super Robot Wars has been disastrous for my upbringing.

As far as strategy goes these games don’t really have much. I got more strategic enjoyment from figuring out how to roll around most effectively in Katamari Damacy than I have in SRW30 so far. Speaking of which, I got to the 2nd last level in Katamari and then Xbox removed it from game pass the very next day. My worse fears have come to pass. I might just watch them on Youtube but man, I should have just stayed awake for another hour or two.

Katamari Damacy goes really hard, I liked (what I played of) it a lot.

I’m also liking SRW 30 a lot. The game feels way too easy so I’m limiting myself to the best of my ability since turning the difficulty up wasn’t enough. I thought I was a mecha fan but in actuality I’ve just watched a decent bit of Gundam. I recognise maybe half the IPs on display and maybe a fifth of the characters. I liked the game enough to watch the first 2 episodes of Getter robot Armageddon and of Armored trooper Votoms, and hey, I enjoyed myself more than I didn’t. Maybe it’s time to examine old prejudices.

I also played Disco Elysium for the 2nd time as an interfacing reaction time cop but I never got my gun back so I just ended up catching a bunch of things and asking quick questions without doing the main thing I was hoping to. The game is so good but I can see some seams on the replay, especially after reading a bunch of detective novels between my two play throughs. I don’t know how much longevity this game has tbh, might have to replay it 4 or 5 more times to figure it out.