That sounds extremely My Shit but unfortunately I am possessed of the inferior mobile gaming operating system.
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I played it on my sisterās iPod lol
The microphone is different on the New 3DS so itās positioned under my wrist and makes blowing into it incredibly awkward. Iāve failed this final flute song like six times already because sometimes Iām missing the mic entirely and sometimes Iām hitting the wrong notes as I pass them because itās still registering my breath. Iām suffering.
I figured it out. Turns out it doesnāt give a shit if you hit the right notes, it just wants you to basically sort of trace the path and hit the tempo. Fuck allllll this.
Spirit Tracks is sort of a āHey, we have a bunch of ideas! Hey, almost all of them are bad!ā kind of game. I probably like Phantom Hourglass more than most so I donāt mind the base Spirit Tracks is built upon (probably why I didnāt outright hate the game), but it is possible that every single change they made was for the worse.
I also completely forgot about that stupid flute until you mentioned it.
spirit tracks had some drm feature so u couldnāt control the train properly and i never got to play it 
phantom hourglass is top 3 zelda for me
I finally finished planescape torment this week after several aborted playthroughs over the last several years and hereās what I think:
the new torment is much better (and, though I already said this with less to go on, succeeds at being a very faithful successor without feeling derivative). this one should be regarded much nearer to ultima 4 ā a game that was very forward thinking in terms of its structure and subject matter, but whose actual writing and setting is much more a product of its era than anything else, and whose mechanics and aesthetics are generally not good unless you have particular affection for that era (though I still love ultima 4ās C64 UI more than any infinity engine game) ā than its current reputation which holds that itās a timeless classic and one of the best CRPGs ever made. it absolutely isnāt!
one of the few things it does really well mechanically is the way the first and second acts are structured as sleuthing mysteries without being too obscure or overdesigned; youāre in a hub and youāre trying to gather information to find a mystical being, and some of the quests are blockers for others, but it rarely feels that way and isnāt explicitly tracked. the first act is also immediately too bleak and overwhelming, owing to 1999 āwe can make a living-feeling city!ā design and 16-bit colour āhow many shades of brown do we have?ā software rendering overindulgence, plus the fact that it comes after a tutorial thatās also fairly bleak and directionless and offers no respite. but by the second one it really settles in! infinity engine combat is never good and FFXII/DA:O are the only RTwP implementations that are remotely satisfying ā there was exactly one interesting and challenging encounter in the game, at the end of a really obscure side quest near the middle ā but once youāre in a groove with the hotkeys it mostly stays out of your way.
the writing is definitely good for the most part but itās also very D&D and the characters arenāt particularly well-drawn; it doesnāt feel like a philosophy seminar or anything but itās also just not that nuanced. avellone and the others have actually gotten a lot better over the past 20 years; there are way more passages in numenera that really sing off the screen and itās much more worthy of your time right now.
I also got into the nex machina beta which Iām excited about
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After doing a ton of money grinding in P5 on Wednesday night, I left myself with 5 levels to go in Mementos before Iād head back to the surface and start playing the fun part of the game. My wife wanted to play last night, which is cool, but she really, really wanted to grind up to level 29 so we could fuse something for the twin wardens. It took like 3 hours and was completely miserable.
Itās sweet that she wanted to help but fighting hundreds of trash mobs is just so boring
Tech problem update: I fixed it! I made a clean install of Windows and that didnāt do anything and I was irritated and I wanted to be able to play Doom 2016 and finish The Witcher and Dark Souls 3 at a respectable framerate and resolution so I gave up and bought a new graphics card (it was long overdue, baby was 6 years old) and now itās fixed. Easy! I should work in IT!
Iām hesitant about installing Stories Untold though, too scary.
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Never got Tormentās hype. Could never make it past the first 20 minutes.
Fallout 1 and 2 were far more interesting from that era of RPGs.
to be fair, the first 20 minutes of Fallout 1 are
Rat Dungeon!
leaving aside that I donāt think I quite agree with the rest of your postā¦
Transistor is better than both of these
yeah fallout 1 starts badly but picks up much faster and is a much better game overall
thatās a good point, I didnāt think of transistor as RTwP but it totally is
itās like rat one-single-room-where-you-can-just-run-straight-past-the-rats
the only winning move
(I love Fallout 1 dearly and have spent some time wondering if itās possible to make more of it without draining the world of mystery, charm, and threat and Iām pretty sure this is a case where less is more, strange for a big fat RPG)
Fallout figured out this open world stuff way better than most anyone else and part of that is just how barren the main quest actually is. Itās only a small fraction of the actual game and the real joy of the experience is in building your own narrative by engaging with the world, something most other open world games just donāt understand. (I havenāt played witcher 3 but I assume itās more along the biothesda school of quest design, where the main quest is an explicit series of events to interact with rather than fallout style of a remote goal and a whole world of possibilities in the way of accomplishing that goal)
To be fair itās more like 5 minutes but yea, punching the face of rats after living in a vault most of your life to go on a quest to get a chip so your community can produce more water is somehow more interesting than what Torment had to offer.
The atmospheric music might have had a hand in that enveloping interest, too
planescape torment had atmospheric music too! By the exact same composer! Mark Morgan
Thereās good stuff in the PS: Torment tutorial zone but itās too long and kind of a text wall if you donāt peace out of there immediately. The rest of the hub is way more interesting
Iāll have to try Torment: Tides but Iām gonna be a bit more skeptical of it despite @Felixās praise because Iām already disinclined towards the setting, being that I have fairly low opinions of Monte Cookās setting-crafting ability and at least by the book Planescape feels like a far more unique place than Numenera (which is just D&D but sometimes they use technobabble words to describe magic items)
Yeah Witcher 3 is a bit like that in that the main quest is very much The Plot with big moments and characters and pretty constant sense of urgency, but you can totally spend hours between missions doing sidequests of the lil fetch quest or the cool vignette/short story variety, some of which are very fleshed out. So while the plot is a bit at odds with hanging out with the world, the latter is definitely doable and rewarding and encouraged.
new Torment gets kind of Dune-y the fourth or fifth time it has to describe entering into a trance with some technomagic device but the prose is astonishingly high quality throughout, the contrast with the first game (which is fine, but falls back on its setting too often) is really striking
and Witcher 3 isnāt structurally innovative or interesting at all, itās barely even worth turning off the objective markers on the fetch quests, itās just unbelievably well (and smartly) produced ā if I were ranking CRPGs Iād have to put it below SC2/Fallout/Morrowind for that reason, but practically every single quest is entertaining from start to finish and thereās a huge beautiful world with lots of sidequests that interrupt one another organically and wonderful characterization and so on
I canāt say planescapeās music did anything for me
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