playing a little of the link’s awakening remake has made it clear that the sound effect when you damage/defeat bosses in the original is probably my single favorite videogame sound effect (neutered here, of course, as is the wont of remakes)
17 Likes
A lot of the Steam reviews complain of the same thing – the jumping is a little off and there’s no strafe-jumping which I thought I was just fucking up the execution. I played a few more levels but honestly I’m not feeling this one, so that’ll do for me.
1 Like
Dipped my toes in Marisa. Very cool character and all but Im having so much more fun with my boy Zangief… VI is a helluva game
3 Likes
With days left in my game pass I tried Planet of Lana which as every review will tell you is an Inside-Like. It is bright and sunny and green and you know that extremely peaceful fishing village at the beginning was only going to get tragedied.
If I was somehow more cynical than I already am I could write a dozen complaints. Wait here’s one you can pet the monster. That was also a complaint at Ravenlok. Which I am going to complain about that first. That game was beautiful but also it was designed by fucking twitter. Whatever the public considered a good story got thrown in including it being Twisted Fairy Tales and a vague nod to unions and socialism. It actually broke my heart to play something that pretty and played well enough and yet was not even cynically made but clinically.
Which Planet of Lana is not. It’s just what if Inside but nice. Which that’s fine. The music is beautiful and oh the composer did The Last Guardian. Okay. I could see playing it with my kid.
It wasn’t like important but what game is important. None of them!
This is all to say I depression played Return to Monkey Island until 1:30AM and that sucked.
5 Likes
I’ve been messing around with Ghostrunner because it seemed like it might be enough like Mirror’s Edge to be worth giving a shot. It is a first person platformer/parkour game where there is a significant amount of content but that all appears to be melee. It isn’t quite like Mirror’s Edge (aesthetically it is the exact opposite) and for the first half hour I was just not getting on with it at all. Eventually I went and customized all the controls and then I was thankfully able to internalize it and while it can still be hit or miss, when it hits it hits fairly well.
2 Likes
Space Station in Pinball FX on PS4
Fantastic light (two sets of general illumination lamps means the whole table can go green when multiball is activated!) and sound sequences, lovely long shots, and delightfully straightforward play, at least in Pro Mode, where you don’t have to bother with going for Extra Ball awards from the complicated multi-bank target system: instead, just shoot the upper right trap, light 1-2-3 on the top rollovers to activate a lock lane for multiball, get multiball going, and repeat!
I like the two sets of rollovers, too. ^ _^ Just a lovely table to play.
I cannot finish Psychonauts despite I had great time with it initially. It oozes personality, but at some point it becomes a bit boring from game mechanics point of view. At the same time, it manages to surprise and be original in terms of what happens, with crazy situations taking place (bordering those of an adventure game) and be not-so-great in terms of sheer gameplay. Am I the only one feeling like that? Right now, I have reached the Waterloo section and I am not sure if I should stick with it or no.
8 Likes
I think, if you did Milkman and are at Waterloo and the whimsy isn’t enough to get you fired up to see the ending, then you’ve probably gotten everything you’re going to get out of the game. watch the cutscenes on youtube to get the plot out of your system
7 Likes
I got to some fish monster boss and died like, 3 times and somehow that minor roadblock was enough to convince me I’d seen enough. By that point I think I’d seen a lot of the best jokes anyway
2 Likes
Paradise Killer (PS5) - i started playing this yesterday without knowing anything about it. i ended up playing for like 14 hours and staying up way too late. a detective story about a strange island populated with eccentric deities. the characters and dialogue are excellent. world is dense and well-designed. detective stuff is very well-done.
i’d say the biggest issue with the game is it feels a bit thin at times - the investigating is rewarding, but the island exploration runs aground at times due to the constrained verbset and rote traversal.
overall, though, quite a gem. the music, in particular, is extremely good. haven’t made it to the concluding trial sequence yet, hopefully it nails the landing
17 Likes
god, I love that fucking game so much. maybe my favorite of the last five years, alongside Pentiment and Immortality.
7 Likes
Dang I can’t seem to get bandcamp embed code working here. … Ah well YT then:
2 Likes
You can pry fahrenheit from my cold dead hands but I gotta admit mega drive is a better name than genesis.
9 Likes
The last level of We Love Katamari is the perfect capstone to a game that didn’t really need to exist. It’s a really, really good game despite everything, but I think it’s clear that this was supposed to be the last one.
When I was a teen, I never got all the cousins, so I never unlocked the second-to-last level, which also means I never unlocked the last level. The last level has the goal of collecting one million roses.
I already knew this because once I got in an argument with my friend who said that this was the best thing ever because it meant he could keep playing Katamari forever, basically. But what I did not know is the shape of the thing itself.
I had assumed it would be a new level, or at least an existing level remodeled to be a very different experience. Instead, it is a small portion of the race level with roses strewn about. The Katamari never gets bigger, and the roses respawn over time, so it’s truly an endless experience that you can just loop around and around and around mindlessly until you decide to quit.
The game will save that number so you can quit at any time and come back to just…make the number go up. It’s a linear growth scale too, counter to everything that Katamari excels at (exponential growth).
It’s extremely funny! What a waste of time lol
19 Likes
i’m at an impasse with Immortals Fenyx Rising. watching something like Skill Up’s video review of the game and reading the comments, i feel quite disconnected and confused, lol. i only started playing this game in the first place because i kept seeing it pop up in comments sections on kotaku and whatnot, saying it is really underrated etc.
this game is extremely boring! the writing is kinda funny at times, but it’s not like… actually funny? it’s worth a chuckle at most
the puzzles are awful! the combat is no good! the controls are finicky! the traversal is stale! the physics and systems are lackluster! the protag is blah! the metastructure is full-on “ping the map for icons” lawnmowering! the art direction is snooze-worthy!
outside of the greek mythology + humorous levity angle, this game does absolutely nothing new, either
noted that the accessibility options are excellent - better than BotW. too bad they aren’t paired with a better game
the combat is way too easy on normal, but insultingly hit-spongey on hard (what i’ve been playing on)
this emperor is extremely naked in my view
8 Likes
@AutomaticTiger and I talk often about how we would in any other game have a lot of complaints about Paradise Killer but some magical combination of the elements have led us still thinking about it months/years after playing it.
I just recommended it to a friend with a new switch along with Ringo Ishikawa, No More Heroes 3, Immortality, Sakuna of Rice and Ruin, The Forgotten City which weirdly has become the games I would recommend people that are not Breath Of The Wild.
6 Likes
This demo version (“Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (Trial)”) has I THINK been delisted from the PS3 PSN store: it doesn’t come up separately for me in a search there, & the store page for the full 2013 game (delisted for 6 months 2016-2017, says Wikipedia) isn’t showing me the typical “download free demo” link.
Developed by Sega Studios Australia, loosely remade from the 1990 Genesis game by Sega. The demo runs at 720p, 30fps w/ sluggish controls, mysterious collision boxes, & animation too intricate to see clearly at 30fps.
The game begins w/ a narrated soft-focus sequence of reasonably Disney-ish illustrations (everything in the game is soft-focus–maybe being internally upscaled from sub-720p?) showing the of-course abduction of Minerva “Minnie” Mouse
by an unusually wrinkle-free attempt at a stereotyped magical “wicked” witch,
and Mickey’s immediately thereafter run-in w/ an awfully convenient & generic unnamed “old mouse” who popped up out of nowhere to explain to Mickey intimate details
of the witch’s plans, motivations, location, & security arrangements, and added the final admonition that the helplessly confused-looking Mickey should be “cautious.”
Prodded into adventure, Mickey does his best Charles Martinet impression* in constant vacillation between uncaring glee–forgetting, perhaps, over and over, that he’s there to rescue his girlfriend–and abject terror;
he’s clearly deeply insane.
And I, it seems, am just terrible at platforming.
The music and sound are nice, as are the visuals, in their soft way–when you aren’t trying to play them as an unresponsive action game filled with unsteady jumps over instant back-to-the-beginning drop pits.
Mickey’s scale can vary from scene to scene. SOMETIMES when I respawned back at a certain loop-fork, the narrator matter-of-factly mentioned that Mickey was “back at his regular size”–but they’d never mentioned he’d been shrunk, or how!
As Mickey falls out of the tree canopy & spawns into the loop-fork, there’s a frame w/ nothing but Mickey, the fork sign-post, & the skybox: Mickey, spread-eagling in his fall, appears to be, in that flash, crucified on the post.
I had been stuck–I thought–trying to get through a tricky tree-canopy-jumping loop; but now I notice that a play-through of the full version just dropped out of that section entirely Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse 2013 PC no death 60fps - YouTube ; & I suppose the playing card at the end of it is an optional item mentioned in a random load screen as used “to unlock new outfits.”
So I could’a fallen outta the tree & looped back to the beginning, engaging the climactic sequence, at any time. So narratively, the stage’s purpose is nearly zilch. When you fall back to the fork w/ the card, a modified narration mentions Mickey has it–trying to give a generic collectible meaning.
Falling into the hole at the end of the hitchy forced scrolling climax may restart you at the beginning of that sequence…or it may spawn you past the hole.
When you get to that apparent end of level, you loop back to the beginning. This is made even more confusing by the game a) having already presented 3 looping sub-sections within the stage–
and b) giving you 2 button press options at “Stage Clear,” “(X) Continue” & “(O) Return to Castle,” both of which, it turns out, restart the stage.
“Mizrabel’s twisted playground of trickery,” the narrator reminds you afresh.
What fiend would delist an endless demo? The best castle of illusion is the forbidding fortress of bad game design! Don’t worry, you can still pay for the full version–& it’s also still on Steam, also w/o a demo.
(Haven’t played it, but from what I see on the internet, the Steam version appears capable of higher resolutions & frame-rates–maybe after it’s been hacked Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse 2013 PC no death 60fps - YouTube a little.)
*(The game only credits “Voice talents” collectively, & after everyone else at Disney Interactive US, including all the testers, suits, middle managers, & support staff; Bret Iwan - Wikipedia credits Bret Iwan as Mickey & says he’s been Mickey’s voice since the 2009 death of the previous voice, Wayne Allwine. I hope they’re at least giving him plenty of the giant diamonds Mickey is made to crave above all else.)
15 Likes
Replayed Love and am now playing Love 2 (both of which are generously bundled into Love 3).
Brisk, challenging but not overly-technical platforming combined with a soundtrack that has some real bangers. Attractive in a primitive pixels way.
5 Likes
I don’t know who this Skill Up man is but you should know better by now than to trust the opinion of anyone outside these hallowed walls when it comes to vidcon worthiness
5 Likes
I got into the strike fighters 2 site that’s struggling with spam and ISP kill lists or whatever after following the process to the letter, it only took 2 or 3 days. and all these files are literally like 3-5mb. It really is some shit where now that I have access to this it’s some gerald from the witcher shit where im touching the ground and going what happened here
4 Likes