3 years late I finally bought and played Back in 1995.
It was a pretty cool three hours and y’all should play it if you like 3D video games from 1995.
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So I did indeed pick up Way of the Samurai 3 on the Steam sale, and have been running around. Biggest issue is clearly that for all the stuff you can do, you can’t actually interact with the dogs and cats hanging around. Especially when I was walking by the shrine on the road one night and heard a cat and looked around a bit and then saw a bunch of cats sitting in a circle, and fuck all this power struggle in Amana, I wanna know what these cats were meeting about.
That aside I dig the way they basically make new game+ integral to the experience since you can save after you die, which really builds into the whole angle of trying all sorts of shit, especially how some things do seem to happen without your involvement. For instance one run I ran into some Ouka dudes harassing a merchant on the road and trying to take his load of rice because they claimed he was supplying the Fujimori clan their bunch is supposedly is trying to oust, he claims it’s just for a vendor in town. I get involved and with a few words and the with added involvement of one of their bosses defuse the situation peaceably and the merchant goes on his way. Another run and I missed that scene, and later in town see a vendor fretting that his rice shipment never arrived because of the Ouka dudes robbing the merchant.
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more quake champions, watched a bot repeatedly get stuck humping walls
bots come in if matchmaking can’t get a decent game in a reasonable amount of time or there are drops, their pathfinding is fucking terrible but they don’t miss with hitscan weapons
early access owns
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I’m playing ECHO and it’s very cool but I need to bitch about something I left burning
I went through nearly all of INFERNIUM last week until my patience ran dry, from its not quite “perma-death” system. Right as I began the (very well laid out) final challenge. As you’d expect it combines most of the enemy types and and door/switch setups into a much larger zone than usual, and like most before, demands plenty of trial and error. Sharpening your navigate-really-fucking-quickly skills to a fine point, as you have next to no time for hesitation curbing every pursuer, no pause, relentless. Yeah it’s easy to cite Pac-Portal-Souls, thing is the game has a killer tone in its own minimalist way.
I’m fine with it, I love it actually. What I don’t care for is how tiresome a 5-10 minute slog the player is put through once you run out of normal chances (lives, lights). And to gain back just one more. I avoided this until the very end, and geeeeez, if you’re playing and run low, just keep stashes of light and candles in mind to restore a bunch at once…hitting the bottom is real punishment. A fine idea just painfully boring to execute repeatedly.
Good area in the Falls or whatever it was called ^ Also could totally play more content in this vein, hope to see some.
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Gnomoria is Dwarf Fortress but with less depth, better graphics, and worse music.
Yeah I was pretty interested in it because of the DF similarities. But that was a while ago. How is the game right now? Would you recommend it?
I’ve only got about an hour in it so far, but at least the very beginning plays exactly like DF. You get a bunch of doods with preset jobs, some supplies, and a couple animals, and you’re plopped in the middle of the wilderness, and you have to clear the ground, designate stockpiles, pastures and farms, and then START DIGGIN’.
It even retain’s DF’s dual-layer z-level system.
The controls are a little wonky, but that’s balanced out by the addition of context-sensitive mouse menus on left-click and a drill-down action menu on right click, which are a godsend.
I can’t imagine Gnomoria has the depth that DF does, but if you’re in the mood for a graphical, mouse-enabled DF-lite (or a “First Two Hours of Dwarf Fortress Simulator”), it seems like a pretty good substitution.
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the first two hours of a dwarf fortress game are always the best ones anyway
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I think that’s true unless you are ridiculously good at the game because then you can see some truly weird and amazing things. I know this only through anecdotes and let’s plays, obviously
Even without waypoints I never once saw a frikbot get stuck.
Holy shit
I successfully got unlocked the Unlimited Talisman in Gravity Rush 2, before the servers disappear. Now I’m going to return to Yakuza 6.
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It looks like Yet Another Reverse Imperialism Game: Rumble In The Kongo Edition. The achievement this time was to take over the entirety of Africa. The only tricky bits was to oust Ottomans from their Egyptian lands and to push out the last couple of Christian colonizers that had a handful of scattered provinces.
The former was handled by allying with a massive Austria and the usual big Russia to split the Ottomans in three directions (AI doesn’t handle multi-front wars well, thankfully!). It needed a second war to complete and also smash up Tlemcen that was still around in North Africa, but Ottomans upgraded their web of alliances with Great Britain and a broad but no authority Ming. Tit for tat, I brought in Bahmanis that had united the Indian subcontinent. Then Russia decided they were too good for me DURING that second war and rivalled me, staying in the conflict on my side but no longer friends once it was over.
The latter was taking advantage of Christian wars, dealing with them quickly on the side when the heavy Catholic hitters were busy in other wars with me and Austria. It wasn’t too bad, the Spaniards this time around weren’t rich as balls because they couldn’t get past the cape into the Pacific until much later and there was a lot of in-fighting.
And to keep myself from getting bored in the mid-game, I meddled with the Colonial Nations in South America, picking off Castile’s subjects by telling my own to start fights when I noticed his did not have much of an army from being too poor. I also built the Suez and Panama canal because I got rich as balls from being the trade gatekeeper out of South America and Africa.
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Jesus, owning all of Africa like that must have made you sick ducat
i’ve been playing aria of sorrow. they really captured the atmosphere of sotn again before going anime
free ideas for essays about metroidvanias:
link michael fried’s ideas about absorption and theatricality to dracula’s castle, moments of reflection in the castle. critique castlevanias like you would a painting
old testament: pre-sotn games, lack of figurative language in old testament parallels limited mobility in old castlevanias, strict adherence to following the belmont/hebrew bloodline
new testament: metroidvanias, super detailed castle, lots of mobility. parallels the use of figurative language in N.T. and retelling of the same stories (backtracking)
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jesus christ the character designs in resident evil revelations…