As someone who has been steeped in the PC Engine brine for months now, EGG looks incredibly interesting.
6 Likes
played the first stage of deedlit in wonder labyrinth. feels good, though itās very easy so far
6 Likes
So important tip:
Planet Laika on retro pi requires the PSX core be run in interpreter mode with instruction caching or door/scene triggers will not load all the time. Took me way too long to figure that out.
Im playing it every night before bed and its effecting my dreams. The game is relentlessly off/wrong. A game where every single character including your own is losing their minds is kinda rough. Something about how the insanity of others rubbing off on you and building up every time you talk to them is also messing with meā¦
I need a palette cleanser game
5 Likes
even tho i canāt stand it right now, it seems really good. itās just cause i played all those zeldas in spring, and egg seems to be alttp for the dreamcast with a comic books mech paint
4 Likes
what core was a good question. I think its beetle psx. Its the preinstalled core for a retropi.
2 Likes
Been playing a lot of Decarnation and really like it. Itās extremely narrative heavy bordering on a visual novel but there are some really neat minigame segments that do enough to engage with whatās happening with the characters in the moment.
Itās also just gorgeous:
I feel Iāve not seen a game use cross dissolves for scene transitions this much, or at all? The cost being that you have to constrain the playerās movement very frequently but it works here given the very deliberate staging of scenarios. It also does a lot with perspective which justifies the top-downness/room by room structure. Your apartment, corridors, lift shafts, and later your cell have very claustrophobic scene boundaries which only take up the central third of the aspect ratio. They open up in dramatic ways and itās really interesting how it contrasts huge environments with closed off rooms. They play a lot with edge and the black void beyond where the distinction between game and the non-game black border space gets very blurry.
Here's some examples that are also spoilers (if you feel like you want player I wouldn't look at these):
Thereās some incredible contextual animations for stumbling and other very specific actions that only play a few times, sometimes only in a single scene. Itās to the point where Iām certain this and the background art took a lot of the dev time but it makes the game feel a lot more fluid than its general character sprite design would otherwise suggest. Itās a lot less visually stiff than, say, LISA although I think both games visual style support their different flavours of brutality.
The framing device of basement kidnapping and the framing device of a bizarre dreamworld as a way through the mental anguish of it work really well together and itās never completely certain whether what is happening is genuinely supernatural or just allegory. The discomfort and the uncanniness come from the relatively mundane scenario of a woman being kidnapped and forced to live in a basement without any reason given for what is happening.
Will probably finish soon, doesnāt seem like a long one.
19 Likes
Ultimately, I found myself wishing this had remained a little more ambiguous rather than dissolving the otherworldly creepiness into a tidy resolution. But the style is great regardless.
3 Likes
I really wish the character writing in this was stronger, given how prominent it is. It has some tics that really irk me in auteur-ish indie projects recently: an urge to do Capital D Dialogue which limits space for unique character voices while creating a strange dissonance between lofty goals and pulpy means, themes trumping verisimilitude, constant reliance on overly specific but not completely justified references.
Interacting with a very familiar painting in a museum and seeing its author described as āDavid Keith Lynchā sums up the general vibe: technically justified, but cāmon, what youāre doing here is so obvious, and it shouldnāt be (especially with how the whole place is just a collection of reference points for the game). At least the same room had a small kid getting psychotically excited about Marina AbramoviÄās Light/Dark, which is such an absurd image it stayed with me despite dropping the game about halfway in.
12 Likes
I love EGG, I think its one of the best zelda clones out there, just for the music and art direction (and for the complexity of the dungeons, many of them have mutliple exits and even connect to each other to create a megadungeon)
9 Likes
i like the system shock remaster a lot!
i like the new intro as superfluous as it is. gives more of a peek of the world outside citadel
i like how everything looks. enemy redesigns are cool and threatening. love the lofi textures, good lighting and effects. great wide use of colours.
the redesigned maps are very goodā¦ they make the main halls much more spacious, so theyāre much better for combat and such, and everything has a greater sense of place, but then in all the maintanince shafts and stuff, everything is mazey like the original and makes the station feels like its held together with duct tape which feels appropriate. and despite all the changes, itās still all recognisable and feels like youāre in the original station. also like there is a message explaining why the design of the station is fucked up, was that in the original? its pretty amusing
new puzzles are fun. took me a while to figure out how they worked, but now i really enjoy them. complex enough to keep me interested, simple enough to not frustrate me
all the combat and UI stuff feels much more modern and nice
i like the new survival horror mood, and that the music still has nods to the original soundtrack. which i think you can turn on? it feels much less like a jaunty 90s cyberpunk action adventure now, but i think it works really well as survival horror
i like the new mechanics, such as recycling (though it really needs a āvapourize all junkā function) and the more limited inventory (which only becomes a problem until like halfway through)
i like they didnt add the weapon breaking mechanics or class stuff from system shock 2 because that shit sucked (i dont like system shock 2 for those reasons)
i also really like how it feels like a modern indie immersive sim since the design is much more quaint compared to newer stuff like prey and whatnot, especially due to the lack of wide open spaces
THINGS I DONT like
it is WAY TOO DAMN EASY to miss stuff, things dont highlight like in the original game. i keep going back to old areas and find massive things i somehow missed. iām sure ive missed a bunch of thumbdrives with important info, which brings me toā¦
I WANT MY HAND HELD. or rather, at least pointed in the right direction more clearly. i had to look up a guide to find the code for the shields (turns out i already found it, but just forgot about it because i didnt know what the code was for) and fix the laser problem, and i dont think i needed a guide to do that in the original game years ago. i dont have time to wander around for hours trying to figure out what i need to do anymore, i want more direction. im just gonna look up guides when i dont know what to do next, life is too short
also there arent enough toilets, there are some floors with NO TOILETS AT ALL, i know itās supposed to be a weird design on purpose, but come on, give the people more toilets
7 Likes
I played the demo of that System Shock remaster the other day, having never played the original. Iām not really a big immersive sim guy, but I have to say ā the hacking in that game is INVIGORATING! I think that was the most exciting hacking Iāve ever done in a game.
10 Likes
I gave the first few hours of FF VII Remake Inter-something a shot thanks to the PS+ catalog to see if it is something worth digging into down the road andā¦ my verdict is maybe? It is definitely a pretty thing to look at but I had a lot of trouble with the combat system until I looked stuff up online and the voice actor for Cloud certainly has some very āfirst take reading this off the pageā line reads. Worth noting I only played parts of FF VII with my sis back when the game came out so I donāt have a ton of nostalgia for it, I also apparently remember very little of it as all the invisible flying dementors really caught me off guard.
2 Likes
wellā¦about that,
11 Likes
oh, you mean cyberspace? yeah its cool, itās basically a little solid descent clone you get to play. and it looks GREAT. it does lose some charm not being wire frame and having these flat shaded arrows and file fragments floating around anymore (the arrows are integrated into the architecture instead which i thought was a cool touch), but overall i love the new cyberspace
3 Likes
Today in ghost recon breakpoint, my item pickup notifications werenāt showing for an hour and then at the end of a cutscene it was a nonstop stream of random shit Iād picked up like METAL JUNK and SEA CUCUMBERS for 30 whole seconds
8 Likes
god damnit i canāt believe iām launching the ubisoft connect program right now because of you people
7 Likes
I finished Decarnation
Yes, this! Kinda frustrating they leave it so neatly wrapped up, itās weird. It felt like they have very little to say about the whole plot somehow. The game has an epilogue that goes on way too long and feels like itās just teasing you with more intrigue through lingering trauma but itās all resolved so quickly.
Iād love for them to have done some further timeskips, make the escape from the basement more of a glass ceiling. Still enjoyed it aesthetically.
1 Like
ARE YOU GONNA PLAY WITH US??
1 Like
maybe!!! lemme know when youāre playing and iāll hop in if iām around
i started a new character so i could experience the epic story again (i never finished it before)
2 Likes
like 6 of us have this game now and daphny can only play if im in the lobby with me because theyre on my friends pass but im in the process of ORGANIZING right now
please enjoy every single jon bernthal cutscecne they are so fucking funny. going to make people watch every cutscene with him in it with my birthday for next year
2 Likes