I liked how it feels like those RPGMaker games where they try to bend the framework of the engine into something completely different, and so we get a stealth mission, a fighting game, a sci-fi horror, giant robot anime etc. It does feel odd to cap all of that off with Dragon Quest Lite though.
I forgot to mention before that I went for the bad ending, because I looked it up and saw I’d have to do a boss rush to get the good one. there’s also a completely different ending scenario depending on whether you chose a specific character, so I guess I may be coming back to this once I finish the ol’ Sword and/or Fairy
I’ve been playing Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers today and I think the real sin of the fathers is how bonkers the puzzles are. I know that’s a common refrain about Gabriel Knight games but I didn’t expect it to be this ridiculous. It really encourages the improbable leaps of logic and longshot attempts to solutions that make you look like a complete dingus in real life situations. I think I’m pretty close to the end and I finally had to use a walkthrough for the first time tonight because I kept dying on one screen.
Even with the walkthrough and watching a video of someone successfully getting out of the room, I still died three more times before giving up for the night. I’m a little ticked off, I gotta say!!
Otherwise, I’m having a good time listening to Tim Curry trying to pull off a New Orleans accent and exploring is fun. I haven’t gotten tired of retracing my steps yet.
Once I finish it, I’ll probably have deeper thoughts to give but all I can say at the moment is that I don’t think I’ll ever replay this one.
I reviewed Hohokum for some paper a while back and found it weird the game didn’t get more attention at the time. It’s very good at its own shtick but maybe lacks the structure and unambiguous plotting that most darling indies need to be discussed ad nauseam by gaming press. I felt like it was The Yellow Submarine: The Movie: The Game.
It’s a marvelous game—for a long time the soundtrack was part of my main driving playlist so I listened to music from it nearly every day. Immensely satisfying chill out game. I believe I also nearly 100%ed the trophies. I have very strong memories of my first time playing it, and of being blown away by how much better it nailed the “toylike” vibe than any other game which gets advertised as “toylike”
for some odd reason I downloaded an iso of haunting ground and I’m about 2/3 of the way through it now. I played a little of it when it came out and wasn’t impressed – it didn’t seem particularly scary or frightening and the first stalker guy just kind of felt lame.
but man, this game actually owns! it’s so wild and creative with its mechanics and setpieces. sure, some of them are clunky and require bizarre survival horror logic, but many puzzles are genuinely clever. and I love the second stalker character. it’s really rare for a survival horror game to actually improve and bring out more interesting ideas in the second half, but this game just keeps getting crazier and creepier and I’m loving it. did not expect it to be such a slow burn given how campy and trashy it appears from the outside.
I have really really wanted to play through that for the longest time. I did put in an hour or two earlier this year and loved what I was seeing. Such beautiful PS2 graphix and wonderful spooky environmental art from Capcom. I also like that it’s just as gross and male-gazey as a giallo movie.
i played fortnite clasico (build mode) for the first time today. there are competitive shooters with kind of advanced but mostly simple tech like bunnyhopping or ctrl jumping but this building stuff is like the korean backdash of shooters. i don’t think adult fingers or schedules are capable of doing whatever must be done to excel in fortnite clasico. what the hell is going on
A friend reached out to me cuz he was concerned about my well being and he said “how about we play Fortnite together” so I finally said yes, I will play Fortnite with you, so now I have a Fortnite date for tomorrow, I hope he doesn’t have the Chun-Li skin, that would be bad for me, I hope he’s just a banana or Spidey or something
The technique I noticed pro fortniters like dellor using is “aligning” to the corners and edges of the build grid and moving their mouse in a circle while spamming build. That probably takes a lot of the thought process out of building such that they can just instinctively go “i need to go up now” and they just do the rote motion to get a protected staircase up.
That said it’s still too much for me so I’m with you on the adult thing. Also death to the battle royale genre.
Played a few hours of Steamworld Quest: The Hand of Gilgamech
Puns abound, what with the steampunk robot fantasy setting. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
So it’s a turn-based RPG with deckbuilding elements. Each member of your party gets their own personal deck of 8 cards a piece. There are three kinds of cards:
Strikes, These are basic attacks, and can be played freely.
Upgrades, which are typically some kind of buff or debuff, and can also be played freely.
Skills, basically your special moves and spells. These cost SP – SP is generated on the fly by using Strikes and Upgrades. It carries over between turns but not between battles.
Each character has their own personal deck, but on each turn you draw a combination of cards (up to your full hand size) from each character. So you need the decks to synergize not only internally but with each other. You can play any three cards in your hand with the caveat that you have enough SP to play skill cards, but you can usually combo your hands such that the third card will have enough SP to go off.
You can perform combos by either playing three cards that belong to the same character, or for some abilities to trigger, combinations of cards from different characters.
Okay, this is all great. Nothing mind-blowing. But you know what sucks pretty bad? If one of your characters goes down in a fight? You keep drawing their (now useless) cards. You can redraw up to two cards per turn, but lemme tell ya: when one third of your deck is suddenly rendered unusable, the odds are bad even with redraws. It’s surprisingly brutal. And HP recovery isn’t easy if you’re relying on drawing cards with healing abilities. HP-recovery items are rare-ish and their effects sort of meager.
All this to say it’s a pretty interesting system but I can see the potential for frustration here so I’m probably putting this game down.
To expand, right after this I loaded up and actually beat Chapter 3 which puts me farther than 60% of people that played the PS4 remaster.
But you can enter this state with wrong move or a stray big hit from the enemies where your meter is broken and you are supposed to run around picking up the literal broken pieces of your meter but if you get hit in this state YOU LOSE THE COLLECTED PIECES AGAIN. Then the enemies can collect them to Heal! It’s this hideous lose But Not Quite Yet state. Then if you actually lose you can pay to retry the battle.
This causes a lot of unhealthy built up stress. Anyways I looked at the One Good Guide on GameFAQs which had good tips for the battle system. But also told me the next chapter is an escort mission. Through the dungeon I just finished.
And lord going through the dungeons is kind of miserable. They are broken up (so far) into 8-13 square rooms (that are represented as hexagons on the minimap) that you must fight a random battle in. If you have to pass back through a room you’ve already finished too bad another random battle. Sure you could run for the exit, but take damage and meter that will persist to the next room.
I got about 8 hours in before it felt like it was wasting my time and life though. Maybe time to give FF8 another try.
Playing Crypt of the Necrodancer again, great game. Shocked that only 8% of people have beaten the first four floors with Cadence. I guess to be fair, it took me like 12 hours or more when i did it on the Switch, it was a lot easier this time though.
Working on the second character now. I got to the final boss but couldn’t figure out whatever the trick was so…gotta do it again. I think that’s the most annoying thing about this game: trick bosses. It takes a lot of effort to get there in the first place, and to lose because the boss was invincible and l couldn’t figure out the trick in time is annoying.
Oh my lorddddd the Steam (DOSbox) port of Tomb Raider controls so miserably and the camera is awful. Was it this bad on the original Playstation version? Maybe it just doesn’t work well with an analog stick? I can hardly believe this series wasn’t killed off after one installment, is this the power of polygonal tiddy? Makes the excellence of the 3D movement in Mario 64 seem all the more miraculous given it came out the same year.
The transition from side-scrolling was a bit rocky is all I’m saying. I’ll try Tomb Raider Legend maybe that will be modernized enough for me in my soft, impatient middle age
I was surprised to learn that tomb raider debuted on the sega saturn. I guess people consider the playstation version “definitive” though? I’m curious about this too bc I’ve never played it and now I’m wondering if emulating the psx version is the way to go. for some reason I always thought it was more of a PC game.
