played legendary wings in street fighter vi and them choosing the rom where you play as the dude instead of the girl sucks
2 Likes
i attempted to start playing Ghostwire Tokyo last night after getting it in Humble Choice but it made me dizzy whenever i moved around and i couldn’t seem to improve that regardless of what settings i chose. and it also crashed like 3 or 4 separate times just getting into the basic part of the game and messing with settings to try and improve. i also learned that they recently updated it with some DRM that everyone hates and says is responsible for tanking performance. great. trying to play the game was a profoundly negative experience that made me uninstall it. maybe i’ll come back to it later, and maybe it’s better on console or something.
i ended up installing Ittle Dew 2+, a random game i bought years ago. it’s a Zelda clone, basically, with a slightly bigger emphasis on puzzles. it was also designed (afaik) by Daniel Remar, who did iji and Hero Core back in the day, among other things. i didn’t play the first one but the second one looked more interesting to me so i just jumped in directly to it.
this game is interesting because it’s sort of the opposite of the experience i was having with Alundra earlier. that game had a compelling overarching theme and story and a really broad scope but took way too long to get to the dungeons, and the dungeons felt a bit meandering and frustrating. by comparison, Ittle Dew 2’s plot is basically like an goofy webcomic/edgy flash game of the 2000’s sort of sensibility - really just enough to justify everything else in the game. probably felt a little out of step with everything when the game came out originally in late 2016 (it’s apparently also on the Switch with the “+” update which it came out later for). the overworld is definitely smaller and way less meandering than in a game like Alundra (or what i imagine Tunic to be like) but also a bit generic. the dungeons themselves are not particularly big either - everything moves along really quickly.
but there is a sense of character and personality to each of the areas in the game that i really like. it’s not original or groundbreaking but it feels much tighter and confident in its design ideas and less interested in like a sort of bombastic presentation. i guess that’s consistent with the rest of Daniel Remar’s work. his experience as a designer almost certainly helped the game feel tighter and more confident.
the first official dungeon was themed like an art gallery, which i had never seen before in a game like this:
(when you take a screenshot via Steam in this game, the little Steam screenshot icon glitches out so every one of these screenshots has a weird looking bar on the lower right corner)
i also like that the tutorial level was a pillow fort:
one interesting thing about this game is that you can do the dungeons in any order you like. i am pretty much sticking to the original order. but it means all the puzzles in the dungeons can be completed by just a default items and they’re only made easier by items you receive later on. this is an odd choice - though not one that ruins the experience by any means. and the “+” update includes this optional dream world zone where the puzzles are more challenging that i haven’t messed with yet:
this third dungeon was sewer/garbage themed and i appreciated the frowning garbage bags. i really appreciate the commitment to detail in trying to make the themes of these dungeons distinct from each other
this dungeon featured a boss fight with the dreaded “Cyber Jenny” which was oddly really difficult and felt like a Dark Souls boss until i just decided to stop being strategic and hack at her like mad with one of the weapons, which of course led me to win right away. definitely a little bit broken
anyway the game may be too generic or too webcomicky for some but it has a lot of character to me. which i think is a good antidote to a lot of like higher production value indies with much more substantial presentation that end up lacking in that kind of character. and i also appreciate how much more it values my time than a lot of other games like this. so overall - it’s not revolutionizing anything but it is really well done for what it is.
16 Likes
As seemingly the only other person here who’s played it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it in more detail!
4 Likes
I have left cheats on for the entire playthrough mainly because the boss battles are incredibly difficult, with Megaman getting knocked down pretty constantly and then taking multiple hits while being staggered, it feels awful! In this boss battle you have to hit shots from incredibly far away, the floor is quicksand and you move slowly, while also getting attacked by mobs. It’s fairly miserable without invunerability.
And then there’s the next dungeon which is Lava Themed. Everything can set you on fire, and if you do catch on fire 90% of your health is slowly chipped away. You can get heat resistant armor and shoes but those require like several sub items that I didn’t feel like hunting down. So I just left the cheats on and had an ok but not great time.
There are multiple boss battles, one with this huge dinosaur, and one with Tron again. Before Fighting both you and Tron work together to move a huge rock to stop the lava flow. This is a fun sort of character moment
Anyway, we grab the key after sending Baby Bonne into the fucking lava. “I hope he’s ok…” megaman says. Then it’s back to the snow island where some plot exposition happens, then a train level.
All the pirates have joined forces, execpt two of them quit immediatly during the cutscene, and then we blast the 3rd (Glide, with his compliment of robot birds) away pretty easily.
Yeah thinking on it I’m guessing they wanted to make 3 train cars, but then ran out of time to program in a sequence for the 3rd one, so they just had them quit. That or it didn’t make sense.
The final part is where I gave up last night. The train is too far away for direct attacks so you have to catch missiles that Tron lobs at your train, but you have a very narrow window to catch them and only some of them you can catch because the others come at a steep angle. And the missles don’t lock on so it’s easy to throw one back and have it miss. If I were not on cheats I would be redoing this over and over and feeling very frustrated! For some reason this section reminded me of the train level from Gears of War? IDK.
I am not having a bad enough time to quit because the game is about to get to the interesting part. Running around with invincibility on makes it a kind of shallow experience, so I might do the money cheat instead to bring up my power and health level and try to finish the game that way.
8 Likes
It’s just that the story seems slow and the payout doesn’t seem worth it. I counted like 15 different proper nouns in the first five minutes, and I just couldn’t follow. It’s a weird feeling having to both wait forever for the story to come at you, but also fill in all the blanks because they’re just not giving you enough.
The production values are through the roof and it is exactly the kind of gorgeous I want in my games. I really appreciate that, and the combat is alright (and could be good!). But the combat is alright (and could be bad).
I guess the last thing is that the tone just doesn’t fit for me. It’s “adult” with swearing and blood and screams of agony, but, like… when I had to google search to figure out what happened at the end of the demo? And the big plot twist was that important? I just don’t get the feeling that I’ll enjoy the game. I hope I’m wrong and I get to find out somehow, but yeah… especially with quality of games coming out now I can hold off for a while.
3 Likes
Something something Fal’Cie joke
7 Likes
so which final fantasy was this now
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I like the final fantasies that don’t obfuscate their simplistic plots with a bunch of inscrutable proper nouns which is why I don’t like XIII but I do like XIII-2
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Yeah, it is definitely proper noun soup. When the game stated in medias res I felt completely unmoored, and not in a good way. Things felt a lot more grounded when it settled into its groove with the flashback, and that “active time lore” feature helped make sense of the setting. It seems to me like this game is doing its proper noun overload in a different way than previous FF games. Instead of being like, “yeah let’s go to the tower of zot… why’s it called that? i dunno!”, I think XVI is trying to do more of a Song of Ice and Fire thing where there’s a coherent but extremely large and complex world of different polities with histories and politics and such. There’s potential for it to be way too much, but I’m keeping an open mind.
The tone is weird for sure, so edgy. The moment to moment writing I felt was better than most JRPGs but I hope it can sustain that. The slice of the later game that you can unlock felt a lot less engaging to me story-wise than the main demo did, so that’s a bit worrying. But it was also out of context so I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt.
5 Likes
WOLFENSTEIN 3D
first episode holds up, has a surprisingly good sense of place despite the tiny amount to work with
second episode feels like running around a sewer/catacombs. not as interesting to run around as the first one, but i like the survival horror feeling the zombies add and it’s designed in a way so you don’t get lost easily
third episode, still has a bit of sense of place, though starting to get more abstract and mazey. still solid also you get to kill hitler
fourth episode okay this is just mazes now, i dont have time for this, quits
8 Likes
strike fighters 2 has one o the most interesting extra modes ive seen in a flight sim, where you can fly a mercenary squadron with whatever plane you want in any of the campaigns, but weapons and replacement planes cost money instead of relying on supplies arriving regularly
the game keeps track of everyones stats, down to every cannon shot and missile fired, and AI pilots on both sides grow in skill as they survive missions. if an AI pilot gets more than 5 air kills they get tracked as an ace and the game will start telling you about their activities. some of that is pretty normal but the pilot rpg skill shit and the detailed combat log are unique to this game!
anyway get a load of the gay bashers. The jury is still out if the head of this probably reactionary fake monarchy the UN is intervening to protect called it that homophobicly or because he believes happy pilots are good pilots
I even made a fake acz galm team roundel to replace the default mercenary unit insignia!
anyway a few months into the conflict they gave us a really ill advised bombing mission and i had to bail out
i should really maek a thread about weird flight sim campaign modes some day, from il-2 dcg being a weird roguelike thing where once you die you can continue as a fresh pilot in the same squadron to mig alley giving you four campaigns to get accustomed to the various jets before the fifth campaign forces you to plan the entire air war strategy over korea yourself mission by mission
8 Likes
Not a shocker that Resident Evil Mercenaries in which you play a white person with top of the line small arms shooting black people armed with bottles and sticks in an arcade shooting gallery did not age well.
After the first actual stage I feel sick. I mean I am sick right this second, but a second sickness.
3 Likes
I played the Viewfinder Demo. Cool mechanic but also kinda lukewarm feeling. Taking a photo and then spawning its location into the environment tends to just be used for cloning an object or building a bridge to somewhere else. The demo takes off when visual styles change with each image but I kinda wanna know how much it’ll develop. There’s not much of a plot present in the demo took things on thematically. My guess is the player out of different photography or style possibilities so how the fidelity of an image might change the levels it spawns? The rewind feature is really useful and is mainly there is a quality of life feature (for when you spawn something in the wrong place, or despawn an objective) but I suspect they might play around with it in some interesting way later on in the game. At least the levels are fairly bitesize so you’re not having to set up some insane Rube-Goldberg just to progress.
2 Likes
wow such wrong opinions!!! the fourth episode is my favorite one. i’m surprised you like the first episode so much also. it’s so bland and indistinguishable to me outside of a few levels
also episode five is great too
here’s how i would rank the Wolf3D episodes from best to worst if anyone is curious:
4 - perplexing, genuinely brilliant levels. every level feels different
5 - consistent, some really memorable moments
2 - great atmosphere. first 5 levels are some of the best of the game. dips a bit towards the end.
3 - starts a little basic/slow but great buildup to an epic conclusion.
1 - a handful of good moments (levels 4 and 7) but levels a bit indistinguishable from each other
6 - too many mazes and stupid bullshit esp near the beginning. from level 4 on it’s at least better. though level 7 is also maze hell.
5 Likes
(btw i was being a little sarcastic above and don’t begrudge other people for having much less patience with Wolf3D. it just captures my imagination in a way few games do)
also i forgot i streamed all six wolf3d episodes years ago if anyone wants to hear my rambling commentary on why i like the game. unfortunately i wasn’t using my good mic and the framerate is a little choppy for some reason. maybe i’ll do it again some time.
6 Likes
I wonder if those guys on combatace are so bitter about popular franchise ace combat because it can communicate the weight of history far better with one level where you chase a hyper lethal drone doing inhuman manuevers down and destroy it 1v1 with the lost art of gunfighting so your forced to contemplate how mans dream of flight has been perverted by technological progress into an efficient process of killing than any of the strike fighters guys mobile ace combat clones that cost 30 dollars + dlc plane packs and play about as archaically as air combat ps1 from 1995
8 Likes
I played the Viewfinder demo whenever the last Steam Puzzle fest thing was (couple months ago probably) and I was left with the similar feeling that they crafted a very well-paced demo (particularly by putting the bit with all the different visual styles near the end) that left me unsure exactly how well it will scale up to fill a full-sized game. It was definitely enough to get me interested in said eventual full-sized game, but I’d guess it is probably a coin flip as to how it’ll end up being.
3 Likes