Games You Played Today Part 007 Goldeneye

[shnozlak]

Started playing an extremly strange PS1 game called

Its about a mission to mars to hunt down a missing lieutenant. At first you might notice the faces of the chracters… Are they furriers?

Well, not by accident and not by choice.

It gets weirder from here.

Mars is haunted, very haunted and it makes everyone insane.

The game look like a point and click but is mercifully much simpler.

You save via little robot dogs taken from dr who

Cool designs and strange ideas abound. I dont want to give much else away as falling into this game was and is a great time. Its on cdromance if you want to try something different.

[smbhax]

When I happened to find a consolized NEOGEO MVS on eBay four or so years ago just when I was wondering if there would be something like that there, the seller threw in KOF '97 with it.

It worked at first but was too flashy for my eyeballs to play. When I tried it a year or so later, the graphics were corrupted. I disassembled it, didn’t see anything wrong. But it wouldn’t boot without graphic issues.

Finally cleaned the contacts with the isopropyl alcohol I got for NES carts recently.

Now it loads up fine again! Huzzah. And my eyeballs already hurt again so back in the cupboard it goes. ^ _^

(Fortunately there’s the “Global Match” version on PS4 and its inter-frame blending “Flicker Filter” option, which looks all ghosty but reduces flash by 50% or whatnot and my eyes don’t protest too much. : )

[meauxdal]

finally re-organized my PC games library using Playnite as well as as plugin called DuplicateHider. now i can look at my Steam/GOG/itch.io/Epic/Amazon/Humble/EA/Ubi/Xbox games all from the same application, and not have to go digging thru 7 different launchers trying to figure out if i actually own a game already or not lol

[smbhax]

Thanks to a save from GameFAQs, played through Guilty Gear X (Dreamcast / Flycast) as Ky in “Guilty Gear Mode,” which changes him to acting like a whacked-out robot, prefiguring the “Robo-Ky” character of later games in the series.

The only ending is the character graphic during the credit roll.

Also eventually figured out that I wasn’t getting the 34 separate music tracks playing during fights in Flycast because of not having dumped the DC BIOS; I could play the tracks fine in the Sound Test screen, for instance, but they didn’t play in battles until I dumped the console’s BIOS with DreamShell, and put it in Flycast’s “data” folder.

Another emulator, Redream, didn’t seem to need all that, but I don’t like that one as much.

[Sykel]

CLOUDPUNK

my god this game does not know when to shut the fuck up!!! and the writing and voice acting is SO GRATING. it would be okay if it was more concisely written, but every conversation goes on FOREVER, and you can’t skip through some of them so you have to wait if there is someone else in front of you that you want to talk to

the game itself isn’t very interesting either. you fly around a cool looking voxel cyberpunk city, doing deliveries. so basically fetch quests. you can land at certain places and talk to people which i liked and it feels more adventure gamey, but it just leads to more fetch quests. it already gave me a “find 20 of these things around the world” quest. into the bin with this one!!! i should start pirating games again, I paid $9 for this shit.

BLACK MESA

first, great job to the folks who remade this, it really is a top job

unfortunately half-life SUCKS. imo, i guess. they try to distract you and make it feel like you’re in a big action movie with all these scripted sequences and stuff, but the core of it is that you’re running around maintenance corridors doing busy work to get to the next bit of busy work. it’s the same with all these cinematic FPS games like call of duty (well, some are more interesting) except the corridors are cunningly disguised as outdoor areas there. also the architecture of black mesa makes zero sense.

half-life is basically another world but in first person (literally becoming that once you get to xen), except worse because a) another world is like two hours long and b) the verbs are much more limited in another world so it’s not nearly as tedious trying to figure out what the hell the designer wants you to do.

speaking of xen, that has been overhauled in black mesa. i really loved it at first (great change from the earth realm) but it dragged on for way too long and some concepts were used too much and made it feel repetitive. half-life more like over-rated!!!

GLYPHA VINTAGE

a remake of a classic mac game, it’s a solid little joust clone that I really enjoyed, if ultimately unremarkable and of little interest to anyone who didn’t play it back in the day

ROGUE INVADER

an enjoyable run and gun that takes lots of elements from rogue legacy and xcom, played it for quite sometime though there isn’t enough content to make the runs feel especially different from each other. fortunately, i found the core gameplay fun enough to look past that.

[Father.Torque]

@Sykel

the core of it is that you’re running around maintenance corridors doing busy work to get to the next bit of busy work.

Huge endorsement imo. More maintenance corridor focused videogames please

[loki]

[MintyJuffowup]

This game seems so insane. Like some kind of B-Film Resident Evil/Rainbow Six merger, by HuneX of all people!

[username]

Been playing Paradise Killer the past few days, enjoying it but I kinda don’t know how to actually do anything with all the evidence and stuff I’m collecting. I assume it plays a bigger role in the trial I can seemingly start whenever, but I have no real feel as to if I have enough for that or not.

Thankfully I’m mainly interested in jumping on top of stuff so I’ve mainly been doing that, it’s not like all those people are gonna get any deader >_>

[Broco]

My POV is the trial is another of the cosmic jokes in PK’s twisted universe (indeed if you expect it to be anything else, you’re in for an anticlimax) and the game is meant to be played until you’re personally satisfied you have solved the mystery

[Rudie]

Doing all the detective work is real fun though!

This Sonic Frontiers is alright. Glad someone made Sonic Utopia The Whole Game.

Running around a world while Mystic Ruins plays is kind of all I’ve wanted in a Sonic Game for 24 years.

[notbov]

oh, there’s another massive Steam demo thing, I guess I should click on some random entries and torture myself

Captain Wayne - Vacation Desperation: it’s like if someone went out of their way to make a Build engine game in the Doom engine. don’t know if I’m in tune with the quipping hero but I dig the art, the game plays fine because well, it’s Doom (it’s probably closer to a total conversion - do the kids still say “total conversion”? - than a whole-ass new game) and the level design seems on point. also it has the cannon from Serious Sam and that’s always good

Beyond Sunset - somehow I downloaded two different demos that are zDoom things. this is more like a whole ass new game and it’s like, uh

someone made 80s cyberpunk-core Doom Eternal except you also have a sword you can reflect with. you know what’s cool that’s like this game? Severed Steel. good ass game. play that.

Sunset seems fine.

Spell Disk - okay this is the umpteenth roguelike (“roguelike”)/survivor/run-based game but the gimmick here is you can get the titular spell disks, which you can junctionlink to spells, and the disks have requirements and when you meet that requirement, they auto-cast whatever spell is linked to them

so of course you’re heavily at the mercy of RNG, but holy shit when you get a build working and you press a button and every other spell in your inventory cascades like mad, it’s super satisfying

Girl Genius - Adventures in Castle Heterodyne: Girl Genius?!

like, the comic Girl Genius?

what year is it

okay I saw screenshots of this and it looked like a janky PS2 licensed platformer so my brain shut off and then I played it and found out it’s actually some kind of puzzle/adventure game except it controls like Dark Souls and also there’s combat shoved in there for some reason. it’s perfectly there.

also,

I’m trying to figure out if this looks bad or accurate

Go Fight Fantastic - I cannot accurately judge this game, some kind of coop party based MOBA/twin-stick shooter thing, because the single player mode they shoved into the game so they can actually sell it seems inadequate. I feel like if there were three people playing, yes, this game would be good. single player seems… not great. also I have issues with the KBM controls but I was too lazy to plug in a pad (I plugged in a pad later because I thought Girl Genius was a platformer).

uh, I like how it looks.

Decline’s Drops - for the second demosplosion in a row, I have played a game that takes Smash mechanics and shoves them into a platformer/action game. good ass game, good level design, good combat design. the dev putting in a bonus level which is just a big flex of “I’m confident in both the levels and the verbs I gave the character” shows how good this is

En Garde! - okay it’s like Asscreed/Batman combat except you’re encouraged to run around the arenas and do shit like kick boxes to stun and get into 1v1s when swarmed or throw a bucket on a guy’s head or throw a lantern at a cannon. they want you to engage with the environments and arenas and they actually design for it. probably good.

Toxic Crusaders - this game is broken

not the good kind of broken

I’m trying to figure out if the game is designed like this on purpose

I can’t tell how designed the game is

I can’t tell if it’s designed at all

somehow the slower and the fastest characters in the demo do roughly the same damage?

the superjoy for the slow grappler guy has so much goddamn recovery that by the time he gets out of it, enemies are already swinging at him

you can just turn around during your combo and you just fucking warp whoever you’re hitting to the other side

instead of walking up to enemies to grab them, you have a dedicated grab button for all your grabbing needs, but since it’s also used for items and throwables, it has NO startup, so, like above, you can just cancel the recovery of the last attack in a combo with your grab and you grab the enemy instantly and

all of this barely there insanity is bad and also it’s on the same brainwave as the bad brain I have so of course I’m going “…yeah?”

I don’t know any more.

[Rudie]

Oh so if I turn “Definition” off in GTAIVPC it looks like GTAIV? .huh…

[Mikey]

Playing a whole boatload of games on my phone, most nothing to write home about but I’m having fun with Flipping Legend. Pretty simple arcade-ish game where your character advances by flipping diagonally from square to square, with special maneuvers (or use of screen wrapping) to swap between the “black” and “white” squares so you can smite baddies and grab loot.

Sort of ugly but I’m enjoying the music. I usually have a really hard time with touchscreen controls in action games (especially if anything is supposed to approximate joystick controls) but this is all taps so I’m actually able to hang.

[ellaguro]

i also played a bunch of Steam demos this week, and it seems like there was no overlap between us so:

Wizordum

fantasy retro FPS seemingly developed by the same company that made those Secret Agent/Crystal Caves HD remakes for Apogee, which i actually like quite a bit. Wizordum felt decent to play and there were a lot of details in the world that surprised me for being such a simple retro pixel art FPS. however, the enemies were pretty boring and the combat was a bit bland/boilerplate for this kind of game. maybe it gets better over the course of the game, but i wouldn’t recommend it over Project Warlock (which has much better enemy design) or the Hocus Pocus Doom mod (which has a much more extensive world and is free).

Viewfinder

i have to rep out more “one clever mechanic” puzzle games when i can, because it definitely a genre that has died out from its former prominence. basically you take photos or paintings or whatever else in first person and hold them up to the world to progress. the setting was decent enough, the voice acting and story were pretty bad as to be expected. it started to get more interesting/janky with the photo mechanics towards the end of the demo, so that might be a good sign. otherwise this feels firmly in the middle for these kinds of games - it feels like they’re genuinely interested in trying to explore this mechanic in ways that go beyond usual cliche, but the game also seems to take itself really seriously.

Antonblast

if Pizza Tower wasn’t enough, here’s another Wario Land style 2d platformer. this one borrows the background/foreground mechanic from the Virtual Boy Wario Land game, among other more usual features you’d expect from a Wario game. other than one or two of the controls being a little strange to me (you have to bounce to jump higher which i struggled with a little bit) this seems like a pretty worthy game in this genre. it was hard to concentrate while streaming, so i might have more fun playing the game outside of that. but there sure were definitely a lot of things happening on the screen.

Nour

this game has been floating around for what feels like a century now, so it was nice to finally play a demo. it feels like mostly the thing you do is cause chaos to lovingly rendered food in as many ways as possible. there are a bunch of different “spells” you can cast among other things. i’m not sure there was much of a specific objective beyond that, but i might have been missing something. someone on my stream suggested the idea is you were supposed to ruin food photoshoots, which i could see. there were only three different scenarios i could try for the demo but it seems like there are a lot more. i enjoyed causing chaos but got a little bored after a little bit. i’ll have to see where this goes when it finally comes out.

Sludge Life 2

the demo was real short, but it’s pretty similar to the first game. you run around in first person and experience the life of sludge. the cats smoke cigarettes in this game. if that gives you an idea what to expect.

Escape From Lavender Island

i wanted to try this out more, but it was causing my computer to absolutely crawl in one of the tutorial sections. so i had to abandon streaming it when i was playing it earlier. it seems like a GTA-like except very weird and mostly about exploration and not combat. i like Jeremy Couillard’s other games a lot so i’m down to play more of this in the future.

Heartworm

this game starts out as a fairly boilerplate/uninspired looking retro PS1 horror title in the mold of RE/Silent Hill before becoming a bit more surreal and Yume Nikki esque. the suburb setting after the initial house reminded me a lot of the Halloween movies. i feel like this game has a lot of potential, tho there were a few facets of that frustrated me. i couldn’t figure out how to use the camera as a weapon at all initially, and i’m not sure how much it really helps anyway. i really struggled with endlessly wandered around to find all the pieces i needed to collect for the puzzles to beat the demo also. and looking up walkthroughs did not help remotely, so hopefully they make that easier to follow in the future.

but yeah, a lot of potential to take a genre that can be boilerplate/uninspired and do something a little more unique with it. though the story was pretty uninteresting from what i saw.

Fortune’s Run

someone was really committed to bringing back the glory of early 90’s cyberpunk tropes here. this is an immersive sim with surprisingly detailed pixely sludge graphics that sort of remind me of that PC game Quarantine. you have a katana and do fast combat in a way that seems slightly unwieldy/complicated but there’s also stealth and puzzle exploration. did i mention the weirdly involved/detailed lore dumps going on here too?

this game seems very committed to a particular kind of 90’s simulationist clunk that makes you do things the hard wary. but also it has this self-serious comic booky sensibility that clearly the creators think is really cool. but it’s not all a 90’s sensibility - the danceclub i was in was basically playing hyperpop, and someone talks about crypto (not approvingly, mind you) in the game. this game operates by its own rules. so yeah this is a pretty weird and unique game overall even tho i’m not sure what to make of some of it or how much i like of some of it. but as Ross Scott of Ross’s Game Dungeon says… somebody had a vision. and i must respect the vision, and see where it goes.

[Chevluh]

@Broco

until you’re personally satisfied you have solved the mystery

I’d really have liked to think like this, and the game itself has a discourse that seems like that, about subjectively determining truth yourself, but it falls apart because there’s absolutely an objective truth the game wants you to find in the end and everything feels half baked unless you do (well, after that it feels half baked in a diffent way).

[Broco]

I think the first reason for that is Paradise Killer ran up against the limits of the detective story format. It wanted to complicate and deconstruct it but if it took that too far, it ran the risk of leaving behind what makes the genre satisfying, and winding up with a purely experimental game beloved by critics but not a mass audience. In the end it opted for a relatively conventional genre core surrounded by elements that question and undermine it. That sort of approach is common for art that also needs to allow the creators to make a living, and although that might hold it back from being a masterpiece, I’m OK with it.

A second reason is that the subjective truth/objective truth theme is philosophically difficult in the first place. Indeed, a game that can’t seem to make up its mind on the question, and then unexpectedly lands heavily on one side, meets me where I am: in my occasional ruminations I always waffle and don’t end up synthesizing them into a coherent view of truth. But I also find as a temporary expedient in specific life situations or discourses, it’s sometimes useful to act as if I believe objective truth is discoverable, and sometimes as though it’s unattainable.

Paradise Killer seems to draw mixed reactions but for me personally, I was delighted from end to end: I found it satisfying to solve the mystery and at the same time I loved all the cosmic ironies and bizarre cults.

[Broco]

Come to think of it, this reminds me of this Covid origins article I read earlier this week:

In this way, the origins question has broken down into a pair of rival theories that don’t—and can’t—ever fully interact. They’re based on different sorts of evidence, with different standards for evaluation and debate. Each story may be accruing new details—fresh intelligence about the goings-on at WIV, for example, or fresh genomic data from the market—but these are only filling out a picture that will never be complete. The two narratives have been moving forward on different tracks. Neither one is getting to its destination.

That is very related to the themes and structure of Paradise Killer, but it’s not where the game lands in the end. And I notice that in the game, there exists only one standard of evidence: the forensic evidence and witness statements of the classic detective story.

I wonder how a mystery game with multiple competing standards of evidence might play out? For example, a “divine” standard, like a Catholic inquisitor’s.

[iguferon]

in pentiment theres multiple lines of evidence pointing to different people with no clear conclusion for the few mysteries the game asks you to participate in

I also liked frogwares sherlock crimes & punishments, where you get the option to condemn or absolve people of their crimes at the end of the investigation, oftentimes cutting the cops out of the equation entirely, which i thought lets you choose what you want to believe pretty ok

[Chevluh]

I guess It’s in the implementation, notably because the actual innocents in the trial veehently point out you’e making a mistake if you incriminate them, and also the way the game backloads the evidence distribution by dumping a whole bunch of evidence related to the actual truth in one single go. It kinda goes closer to the kind of stuff I’m looking for with the Daybreakers, which you can save since they’re your friends by dumping everything on Yuri, but there’s an extra CG if you stick to the truth.

I’d like a game where you can botch, mislead or even falsify the investigation as long as the facts add up and it can serve a different kind of truth (think Orient Express), but even better one that leaves ambiguous which was the real answer, or at least doesn’t make it obvious. Not the same as making all answers be true though. That’s often the case for more interactive story kind of things but I feel a more mechanistic approach should make the player work to get a solution that fits the facts they found, but allow that solution to be contradictable by another player or playthrough finding a different set of facts. Some examples that get into that mood:

Iguferon has also already mentioned Pentiment. I think games are uniquely equipped to to this specific sense of mystery to work, although the only other concrete case that comes to mind is Obra Dinn, where you can pin it all on the captain to expedite your investigation, and it’s a fine answer as far as the insurance company’s concerned. Pathologic and Umineko have simpler but interesting takes on this, too.