yeah, again, the complaint isn’t about difficulty, but clarity. i used the SOL system instead of just hitting reset because the game implies i should do this, while in reality, the opposite is mainly true unless i use SOL strategically
3 Likes
Wolfenstein: The New Order (PS4) - is there anything more noble than massacring nazis? no.
Immortals Fenyx Rising (PS5) - a Greek mythology-inspired BotW-like. it’s just alright.
5 Likes
Okay so the thing that bugs me about this game is that everything is slightly off.
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There’s a roll ability one character has, and the icon for it is…a roll of tape? I guess it’s fine? But you can get the ability via an item as well, and then the icon is…a ball of yarn?? Neither really make sense but why are there two different icons?
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When you start the game, the character is sitting on a bar stool. If you hit left or right, they start walking immediately, but there’s also a half second animation of them getting up off the bar stool too. But instead of seeing that animation in place, you slide several feet to one direction in the air while the animation plays, then the walking animation starts.
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There are tons of jumps in the game that are just barely impossible. I have only found one item that increases jumping ability, so it seems like overkill to have 4 or 5 treasure chests behind impossible jumps on the very first level, where you will get at most two items (it seems). I’m just not going to be able to get those 99% of the time
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Same goes for doors you have to open with bombs - I usually find one bomb in the first level, if that, but there are often 5-10 things locked behind blow-up-able things.
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Item descriptions can be wrong - one item said “melee kills will give shields” but what it really meant was “melee kills have a tiny, tiny chance of giving shields”. This is very different.
It’s just like, constant weird shit like that. I don’t mind janky games at all, but this feels like it was a product of people who don’t care that much about the end result.
And the fact that the game’s theme is, uh, “cyber” “punk” really hamstrings the game from making anything coherent. Isaac and Gungeon have really strong themes and it informs everything about those games. It makes the small idiosyncrasies feel like they were intentional - it papers over a lot of the weirdness. I don’t even like those games that much, but i can see what they’re doing!!
But this game is basically just a collection of things. Here’s a barbecue grill, it makes all the grenades into firebombs. Here’s a vaguely egyptian themed hat, it makes it so killing enemies will give you extra hearts. Here’s a clown, he throws bombs.
The problem is that they imitate Isaac so much, like so much, that it draws comparisons. And those comparisons are unfavorable! Which is obviously going to happen when you try to come at a game that has an extremely dedicated community and like 10+ years of development!!
Anyway, researching the developer it seems like they are a chinese studio that mostly focused on mobile games before this. I was curious about the size of the studio - this feels like astroturf in the “indie” space if that makes sense. Like, it has the heartlessness of a large corporate product, but the team seems way too small for that to be the case. Instead I’m wondering if this was an attempt to break into a specific kind of market that they simply weren’t equipped to do. It would make the most sense to me that way, since this game very much feels like it was marketing-first, game-second.
Anyway I’m done with it now. Not gonna come back to this one, it annoys me basically every second I’m playing it. I just needed to figure out why.
9 Likes
I got all the way up to the DLC in Dark Souls for the first time over the course of a week in March and then all I’ve done since is Counter Strike with some friends every couple weeks. Up until now that is! I played a bunch of strategy games on my back log, and tried the new starship troopers game.
Warhammer 40k Gladius is a 4x game but with only a single x. It’s got similar management elements to a game like Civ without the complexity of systems or breadth of playstyle that makes the management choices interesting to engage with. The combat is better than average but that’s all it really offers. All my games devolved into my army of 30 units moving across the map painfully slowly. If I hadn’t had my brain infrastructure fundamentally changed by Dawn of war I would never recommend this, but at the current price of free on steam, it might be worth a single 2 hour match.
Bad North is very charming but suffers from being a bit too slow to be rewarding as a rogue lite. All the interesting decisions come 40 minutes in which leave me playing the game as tepidly as possible to avoid the early monotony. I would really like it as a game with a campaign.
Starship Troopers Extermination needs a way to mute people so I don’t have to listen to alternating screaming and slurring for 45 minutes. It’s very much movie Starship troopers rather than the book, so no cool exo suits but plenty of “I’m doing my part”. Me and my friends enjoyed it enough, but it feels like it’s 6 months away from being really fun, it just needs some basic features like muting and kicking from lobby, and more tools for communicating with your team outside of proximity mic.
OpenTTD is a UI nightmare and I gave up after 15 minutes.
Phantom Doctrine is far more competent than I was expecting. The systems are genuinely interesting and the combat is some of the most fun I’ve had in a game cast in the Xcom reboot mold. I’m only a few hours in so the scaling might be broken in favour of or against the player, but the initial few levels are great. I’m not sure I have enough time for a 40 hour campaign but it’s the only game of the above lot that I’d want a second session with.
Dark souls is obviously very good and I can’t wait to beat it one of these days. I can’t tell if it’s because of all the Sekiro but I breezed through the game with a spear build, where as last time I got stuck in the bottom of blight town with a dex build. So far I’ve liked Sekiro more but there just isn’t that much Sekiro unfortunately, I’m on the fence on playing 2 and 3 after beating this one. The only thing stopping me from having beaten it is that I want to have a massive 10 hour session to properly send it off, which I think I’ll finally have time for in the next few weeks. Soon, hopefully.
10 Likes
Totally agree. Another game swept up by the “indie roguelite” craze and done dirty by it
3 Likes
Another poke at some of the later TM games…
Trackmania Turbo (PC/Steam)
Floatier physics and I can’t seem to get a grip (oh uh no pun) on the heavy emphasis on exaggerated drifting, which has never been my thing. Decent graphics though.
Trackmania (2020) (PC/Steam)
Oh my laptop does get 60 fps in this, yay. It was pointed out with free access you can go into one featured server in what it calls the “Arcade” mode; ended up on some dark sci-fi Death-Star-looking map with people biting it right at left, actually finished the track eventually so that was nice and kind of fun really, just this sensation of blindly rushing through a dark place with everyone desperately trying to survive.
The official month’s tracks still blow, man. And I can’t quite get Gold in the first Training map, haha. The last Training map is awful though, what the heck.
Doesn’t have the intense, sharp rubber-on-the-road handling of Nations Forever. Not even close–it’s all fudgy. Ridiculous how immediately sharper and more gripping NF is when you play the two games back-to-back; kind of makes me angry that the handling in later games is so inferior… Maybe it isn’t their fault they just aren’t as good at it as the earlier team, I dunno. Then again, they have that one to go by, so how could they not be noticing that their fundamental driving experience is so poor by comparison?
Grr! Well, I guess that’s enough of that. Except that randomish dark online race, that was a different experience. Hm. I did try Mania Royal or whatever it’s called which was another mass online race but it was all poppy and the track was a horror show. So–wait, what was that Death Starry-server? Would it be worth subbing for? I don’t want to do that. Oh blast. Now I have to reinstall to see the server name at least. Oh gosh dang it and reinstall Ubisoft Connect…
Hah “Arcade” has already moved on to the next server. But that server was “Neo-Cupra Tracks”… Oh, I see. It was a series of 12 official sci-fi-themed tracks co-sponsored with a Spanish car manufacturer (Cupra).
I think the one I was in was this one
Now imagine that raced blind and surrounded by other blind racers. Hm.
2 Likes
Ah the next server switched to a similar-ish map, with the same mayhem rush of free access player scum like me ^_ ^
The room was “Proff10 - Lol & Short Maps” and the map was “LOLROS - Space Launch” by Proff10:
And what happened:
So that’s fun. ^ _^ The game is a relatively tiny 3.5 GB footprint; doesn’t drive anywhere near as sharp as (offline, anyway) Nations Forever but maybeeeee worth keeping around for the unique lemming rush frantic online experience?
Now I’m thinking possibly the driving sharpness was intentionally blunted for better online performance.
2 Likes
Everyone is playing the new zelda and Im still playing with my dinky little cars in Choro Q Wonderful.
I cant really recommend this game; it feels bad most of the time. Its easy to get lost, finding things (the game is openish world) would be more fun if the driving felt really good but it punishes drifting. This game has so many cute ideas but none of them are actually fun. Gosh its cute though.
I dont know why I keep at it exactly but I must see Racoontosh the Countach to the end of their super deformed journey.
This is going to be one of those things like Valis 3 thats just for me.
12 Likes
Now you have to get all the other Choro Q games. ^ _^
I did this once–PS/2 ones, anyway–I don’t really know why. ^ D^
3 Likes
Continuing my DSi adventure I tried X-Scape and could not get the touch controls to work properly and gave up. Also it had too much story. It starts with
in 8191 Man Had Colonized Space. Twenty years previous…
And at the end of the diatribe about what wars you’ve fought in it says “20 years later”. Alright cool.
Anonymous Code 3 Abyss of Darkness is like the other DSi games just a balm nothing game. It plays like a roguelite Secret of Mana. Go identical room to identical room and get equipment that barely changes your stats. Note this is unrelated to Anonymous;Code the sister game to Steins;Gate. I am sure you were all wondering. I don’t even know if I am getting that subtitle right. It was a way to pass 30 minutes.
After playing it for years I am still be months away from beating Pokemon Picross.
3 Likes
One of the poorly explained systems is that they add stuff to the cutscenes after certain SOL restarts to prevent you from doing just this, in theory because of this there is probably significant parts of the story I only have a surface-level understanding of.
Anyways I finished Stray and it was fine. It is basically just an art style/aesthetic delivery system as the game itself is so frictionless it’s probably easier to tie into the walking sim genre than the 3d platformers or whatever else would initially seem more appropriate. Fortunately said aesthetic was interesting enough, story was a lot of whatever but I have the head canon that the cat literally had zero idea what anyone was saying or what was going on which made it a good bit funnier than intended. It getting game of the year talk was silly but as a five hour jaunt it was pleasant.
9 Likes
JAG
TREVOR MCFUR IN THE CRESCENT GALAXY
This is FURRY BAITING, there is barely any furry art in this game! It mostly just looks like a bad 90s shareware DOS game with terrible pre-rendered graphics (though some of the character portraits DO look cool). The game itself is awful, it’s a hori-shooter by people who don’t know how to design one. No thought was put into the enemies, and they’re all slapped into the levels haphazardly. Zero craft on display here. So it plays like a bad 90s shareware DOS game, too.
ATARI KARTS
I like this game’s “cool” 90s aesthetic! It plays and runs super smooth, and there are even changes in elevation… mario kart didn’t have that! unfortunately this game is MEGA DRY. There are only 6 or so power-ups, and half of them just make your car control better. So it looks like a cartoony, wacky racer but feels like a more serious one when you play it, but then it’s lacking mechanics to make the core racing satisfying and interesting like drifting or such. so, not much to offer in the end. had potential though.
10 Likes
Finally managed to crawl my way out of a Persona 5 Royal shaped pit, and am about to tumble down a Zelda shaped one
P5R really is the ultimate “eating a whole birthday cake by yourself” game. Like it’s good stuff, but there’s just so much of it. Whenever you think the big boss is done, it just says “mwahaha, now see my true form”. 153 hours to beat just through regular play without going too far out of my way for extra stuff.
Edit: i realise that since i got the ‘true’ ending i can’t really say i didn’t go out of the way to do extra stuff, but that still feels like a pretty crazy play time for what’s mostly just story and linear dungeons
13 Likes
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is a bit of a banger and I am ashamed I haven’t touched it since its release in 2011
7 Likes
I loved the multiplayer in that game.
1 Like
The RTS-to-boot-stomping-action pipeline pioneered by Creative Assembly, an honorable tradition
1 Like
NES Tetris with a ROMhack
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Nes Tetris Nostalgic by CAndiman: Romhacking.net - Hacks - Nes Tetris Nostalgic
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whose graphical call-backs to Famicom Tetris’ onion dome and GB Tetris’ brick playfield border also happens to reduce drastically the amount of the gray color that the game strobes yellow when a Tetris is made ~~ so with this I can play Tetris again without risk of migraine, woo! ^ ^_
4 Likes
JAG
AIRCARS
Hovertank game where you glide around a simple landscape looking for targets to blow up, while enemies get on your ass. problem is that it runs and controls like crap, and the draw distance is really short but enemies can still pelt you with bullets even when you can’t see them at all (and i mean like, from a MASSIVE distance away) so you spend half your time trying to kill things via the radar. you will be dying quickly and constantly.
FLIP OUT
I was enjoying this at first, a fairly simple puzzle game where you have to get objects in the right place by juggling them around and making sure there is always at least one thing flipping in the air, but then they add annoyances such as enemies that keep blocking spots, and just when you clear them, one moves somewhere else. it gets tedious very fast, and it’s a shame they couldn’t find another way to increase the challenge because the base concept isnt terrible. would also work better with mouse control.
love the goofy alien aesthetic though
EVOLUTION DINO DUDES
aka the humans aka shitty lemmings
DOOM
It’s doom! pretty good port for the day… plays pretty well, though levels had to be cut down, the enemies seem to be on crack, and also i managed to crash it. like the game itself gave me an error message, not the emulator. if that isn’t something that happens more than once, i would have been happy with this as a kid if i didn’t have a computer.
11 Likes