I ended up glad for the bug or whatever that prevented me from saving Eder’s dumbass not-kid from running off with a suicidal cult, cause then in the endings Eder is now my lifelong bodyguard/hired killer/best bud just cause that seems his best shot for getting a crack at the gods. I was also glad the anarchist pirates got a good ending out of siding with the huana since that’s what I did. normally I would of sided with them but we were dealing with overthrowing colonizing forces here.
looking up stuff in the game I stumbled on some forum thread where people were raging over the anarchists being the most ethically upstanding faction in the game. welcome to the real world, dorks
I restarted Soul Hackers up again after not playing for like 3 years
I love massively overdeveloped + obscure mechanics in vidcons and Mystic Change is very pleasing in that regard.
Please note that this mechanic is available from the start and I had never even found out about it in 30+ hours!
Ok so you can turn a demon into a piece of equipment through Mystic Change IF that demon has:
max loyalty
a « sly » personality
The option will ONLY appear if both conditions are met.
Personality is determined by demon type: every jack frost is sly, every leanan sidhe is kind, etc.
Every sly demon type has an unique piece of equipment with big unique art and unique cool properties. I have turned a demon into shoes that make kids like me? I don’t know how this works?
Soul Hackers has like 300 demon types and 7 personality types so there must be like 40-50 cool obscure unique Mystic Change items?
Your chances of having a sly demon in your team are already low from the start.
You’ll have way less demons available in Soul Hackers compared to a more modern SMT, because recruiting is a nightmare in oldschool SMT: demons absolutely lead the conversation and take you for an idiot. Plus a lot of enemies can’t be recruited anyway (thosd have to be fused), and getting one from the compendium is expensive.
Now even if you do get a sly demon in your team, having it reach max loyalty will not just happen naturally. Raising loyalty is easy for most demon types, and almost impossible for sly demons: you have to gift them expensive shit? The game tells that using magic attacks helps but experience shows that this is a blatant lie. I have found two alternate strategies:
fuse two max loyalty demons into a sly one, who will have max loyalty too.
buy some booze and happily drink with your sly demon to temporarily change its personality to something more manageable like « wild ». Rack up social points while its guard is lowered and transmutate it into a cool hat once it starts treating you with respect
ridge racer 3d is such a good game, and it sometimes feels like i’m the only person in the world who bought it (which, i guess, is why there aren’t any arcade racing games any more). anyway, time for some trademark loki bullshit: i was playing it earlier in the dark (the sun went down as i played), and the game coincidentally put me through a couple of nighttime city tracks one after the other. the game’s luxurious tropical near-future aesthetic mingles with the dark room and the humid june heat to create some nice immersion. highly recommended.
I had the game when I had a 3DS. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I remember not really liking the music. And the hardest difficulty felt a bit like playing that jet bike bit in Chrono Trigger where you can never get ahead; you just keep trading positions with the opponent, and who ever happens to be in front of the other at the finish line wins.
i picked it up for real cheap after hearing people talk about it and yeah, i loved it too, but the later levels really do feel cheap and unfun. it’s super fun time before that though.
RR3D is great, and at this point it’s probably the last decent Ridge we have. The Vita entry was plagued with problems, and the series has been a no-show ever since Bugbear’s exercise in missing the point.
It’s really good and builds up a strangely melancholy mood. Would recommend all the Monster World games, frankly. I love their child-like sense of the imaginary.
I’m gonna stick with it despite how gender-furious it makes me, bc it has likeable mood. By the end of mute tower I was pretty sold on it. Might just play the untranslated jp version tho
I highly recommend playing through all 4, it’s only a 30 minute commitment (and also portal 2 is $2 on steam right now).
A little bit Antechamber, a little bit Mondo Medicals, they’re really clever about their use of “impossible spaces.” The 4th one in particular is quite lovely near the end. I really can’t recommend these highly enough, they made me smile and laugh quite a bit, a great example of how architecture in games can be humorous and clever in ways that reality can’t, and a perfect extension of the idea of portals.
shadowrun returns was free on humble recently so i decided, hey, i guess i’ll finally get around to playing it.
surprisingly short, so i got it over with pretty quickly. played an elf shaman that basically just became Assault Rifle Mage with Haste and Bear Heal by endgame. difficulty was normal as a baseline and i felt like i wouldn’t want a harder version of this game since it’d just be even more pointlessly rng dependent. endgame was a slog, especially the gimmick on the bugs at the end that just slowed everything down to a snail’s pace.
writing was pretty okay. i am not sure it’s more than ‘okay.’ it gets a little too You’re Our Only Hope after awhile when a lower power scenario would have fitted its themes better.
I feel like the most common opinion I hear on the new Shadowruns is that the sequel Shadowrun: Dragonball is much better overall and people should just jump straight to that. You can’t beat free of course but you might want to give Dragonfall a peek if the opportunity ever presents itself.
The worst part of Shadowrun Returns IMO is the part where you find this locked door and you need the a certain level of decking/hacking skill to open it but then it says I can’t do it because my skill in that area is too low and it doesn’t matter that I hired perfectly capable decker who’s standing right beside me.
If it’s any consolation they sort of reverted to that for Hong Kong
Dragonfall is definitely the good one (and the only one that rises above the 2014 dividing line between “oh they made an old CRPG that’s cute” and “wow this game is pretty playable and the script really shines”), give it a go once you’re not tired of the game anymore
