i died again in shiren because i kept getting 10000 wands and no jars and i was so impatient i just stated throwing my wands in random directions but when i threw my THIRD swap wand, seemingly away, i swapped with someone in a monster closet and just put myself in the middle of their business. no rescue needed this time. too shameful
shiren 5 clogs the fuck out of my inventory
looks like they finished that shiren 2 english patch huh
DeadCore is a PC indie game from 2014, which is both a statement of fact and a pretty good descriptor of its vibe. Years after both games, many of the Steam reviewers lean on calling it a mashup between Portal and Mirrorās Edge, neither of which itās actually like very much.
You jump around on platforms and bounce pads, and you have a gun that activates/deactivates various mechanisms. It may get more complicated than that as it goes along but I donāt care. It wasnāt very compelling.
The art direction is there. Thereās a sky box and a lot of bloom and fog and a bunch of shiny metallic āarchitectureā accentuated with glowing blue to make it look technological.
The game seems to have (or had) a pretty vibrant speedrunning community which is cool, and it looks like the devs really took care of those folks if the message I was greeted with upon launching the game is any indication:
Anyway, scratch this one off the backlog.
Forza Horizon 4 (PC/Steam)
Oh that sharp tux I wore in that one event, now I can-- Oh. Locked. Wait everything is locked.
What do these things even mean. Why did you bring me here, game.
So the only clothes I can get areā¦
Watching a virtual influencer ironic dance in a Santa suit is real depressing.
An influence gave my influencer a free house because ugh
With enough āinfluence points,ā Autumn crept in creepily, like a villain taking over a kingdom in a derivative fantasy.
But a good time for mudding, woo! : D
Player ghosts suddenly appeared all around, smashing things.
The game told me to break signs for bonuses.
iām not done shitting on jag AvP!!!
So as the Predator, you have unlimited invisibility BUT, you only get honour when you kill enemies uncloaked (and aliens can detect you anyway), and you unlock stronger weapons with higher honour. This SEEMS like a clever way to tie the predatorās honour system into the gameplay and not nerf him too much, but in practice it means you just run around mazes finding enemies to grind on until you unlock the most powerful weapon so you can go kill the queen (after running around mazes trying to figure out where the hell she is). also you can just snipe her from a doorway.
as mentioned, the alien mode also has an interesting mechanic where you can cocoon enemies and use them as extra lives, but in practice itās tedious because you canāt use elevators and have to use mazey air ducts to get around and access different levels (which makes no sense because the air ducts have no elevation changes), so when you respawn from an enemy you killed ages ago, you spend ages trying to remember how to get back to where you were. I watched a longplay and the player deliberately let themselves be killed fairly often just so they could update their spawn spot, itās stupid. their objective is to free the captive queen, so itās just running through mazes trying to find wherever the hell she is, like the predator mode.
the marine mode is the deepest game mode, and also the worst designed. you have to run back and forth through levels, finding keycards to unlock new areas. the problem is that you very rarely know where the keycards are, and they are typically on dead bodies but you dont know if they have one until you walk over them. itās so easy to miss them. and THEN you have to remember where you saw a door locked with the security level you now have.
itās also very non-linear, in that you can go through air ducts and get behind locked doors, and use the elevator to get to all the different floors but this is a problem because itās very easy to end up in an area you have no use for yet, but you dont know that, so you end up wasting a shit load of ammo, which can put you in situations where you just canāt fight back and you basically softlock yourself.
the whole game is filled with padding with little actual depth, especially the alien and predator modes which is just running around mazes. itās padding: the game. the longplay is only like 3-4 hours long, so itās really short when you know where to goā¦ but if you donāt, youāll probably be restarting a lot (especially as the marine, because youāre fucked if you waste too much ammo in places with no use)
also there are like four enemy types in the whole game in conclusion fuck this game
(i went back to play it some more, realised iām wasiting my time, and watched a longplay on 2s speed while playing better games instead)
i tried this russian f2p game steam has been recommending me a lot
and in my first match i was completely overwhelmed because for whatever rason i could only hear the in game voice chat and none of the audio, and i was the only person not using voice chatā¦ there were two guys on my team who were like doing epic badass operator guy voices and addressing me and the other new player by our class role instead of our names. they were like micromanaging where we were standing and shit. then at the end of the mission their delta force bantering broke down into an incredibly homo exchange where one of them got downed and then the other guy got really agitated and started telling us to cover him while telling the downed guy that he had his back and always would because thats what brothers are for
Sounds great, where do I sign up
I played like 4 more hours after that and nobody used the voice chat and fuckin 50% of my matches ended with my team getting themselves killed trying to do basic boss fight mechanics so I uninstalled it. At one point i was actually able to kill the boss by playing marksman and headshotting him while my team ran from cover to cover confusedly and then they wasted all my fucking effort anyway by refusing to go to the exit when the 30 second death timer started
Itās all they had after their parents spent 600 dollarsā¦
kind of hit a wall with Dragon Quarter, same as last time. the game doesnāt really explain anything to you in terms of what SOL restarts do, and itās incredible that all these years later, someone hasnāt just made a flowchart of what gets carried over under what circumstances. i SOL Restored about 6 hours into the game and suddenly now find myself in a position where i have no items, not enough money to buy what i need to survive, and half of the party XP iād accrued. apparently if you SOL (whatever) after death, you lose things, but NOT if you do it mid game?
because i guess the game wants you to predict the future and know when youāre about to die? orā¦it wants you to keep restarting, compulsively? is the idea to grind a shit-ton of party XP and then over-level myself? should i not be trying to get as far as i can on every run of the game?
not entirely clear, yet.
will see if i have the energy to do another SOL restart when i get home today.
I mean, if I was a kid with loads of free time and patience (and I was that kid), I would have gotten into it, but as DISCERNING ADULT, I see it for the waste of time it is
The Jaguar was actually like $200 but sucked so bad it felt like youād gotten burned for way more, please understand Iām not quibbling with the number but underlining just how much that console sucked
Club Drive for Jaguar is still the killer app
I only know one person who had a Jaguar and he also had a TurboGrafx 16, so he was definitely That Guy
Basically yes, youāve nailed it.
The way Dragon Quarter presents information about the SOL system is definitely confusing, but basically the game is more of a classic roguelike in which the knowledge you gain from playing is more important than anything you keep from SOL, rather than a roguelite where there is some expectation of a consistent linear powering up necessary to beat the game.
From a practical standpoint, SOL Restore is almost always your better option unless youāve softlocked your game by running out of dragon counter. At that point youād want to grind as much party xp and zenny as you can before selecting restart. There are also one or two areas in the game where you can grind a ton of party xp very quickly so if you wanted to minmax a bit you could, but Iām not sure if itās really necessary.
There is a risk/reward to using SOL and you always want to try and use after pushing yourself as far as you can but before getting killed, because if you use it after dying the game halves your Zenny/Party XP.
Iām sorry yāall keep saying SOL I can only interpret it as āShit Outta Luckā
This is like, one of those things that feels like it should be there, on the screen for you to understand when youāre selecting it lol.
i know thatās very post-PS2-era thinking of me, but the fact that i had to discover this stuff via trial and error is frustrating, especially when i was making some pretty good progress!
iāll probably have to restart, because my last save is right before a boss fight (sort of) that took me a bunch of heal paks to get through successfully, and the BioCorp lab that immediately follows is definitely above my level - i only managed to kill enemies in battle with a healthy dose of bombs and dynamite to assist me. but i had so much party exp! ugh!
Even though I love dragon quarter I think that the SOL system on top of being explained horribly is also just kind of a mess. In 2023 hindsight I think the game would have just been straight up better without it, even if they needed to tweak the balance or make a ācompleteā run shorter or something, I dunno.
Still, I think the game is worth experiencing through to the end. Itās basically miraculous how well it wraps up the themes of the series as a whole.
i kind of want to play the gollum game, it looks interesting
Itās not as bad as reviewers are making it out to be from what Iāve seen. But it is messy.
