My first five-star run. I guess the campaign levels I completed taught me to play the basic game better.
3 Likes
I played Breakpoint until I was falling out of my chair.
No idea what the campagin is like, just kinda potatoād around the world. Hiked across like half of it.
3 Likes
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is a game I got as a throw-in in a Fanatical bundle. Iāve played a lot of āletās remix chessā games, many of which Iāve liked a lot, but I have to say I think this is one of my favorites. Itās been a really unexpected pleasant surprise.
Youāre the black king, and every level sees you arrayed on a board against a selection of white pieces. You only need to kill the white king to pass a level. Evening the odds is the titular shotgun, and other powerups you acquire between levels. That said you canāt capture pieces with your king the old-fashioned way, and the game prevents you from firing your gun if you are in check.
In the fashion youād expect, you select upgrades between levels, but your selection also comes with a separate upgrade for the opposing side. Though it looks like these can also play out to your advantage (ex: I had a powerup that gave me an extra turn after killing a knight, and later wound up picking an opposing side powerup that replaced a pawn with an extra knight, which suited me just fine). Also, when you kill a non-pawn piece, you gain its soul, which you can expend to move in the fashion of that piece for one turn, handy to maneuver out of danger.
Fun stuff! Iād just recently played a different Chess puzzle game, Unlock the King, which reminded me a bit of puzzle games like Rush Hour but with chess pieces.
I could probably start a whole thread on videogames that use chess as the starting point.
4 Likes
MOTHERFUCKER. I finally see it. Thank you.
Seriously, though: unless Iām thinking about it the wrong way still, thatāsā¦not the sort of contradiction-finding the game had been expecting from me before.
ETA: Nope. Never mind. The logic is right, the resultā¦this needs additional thinking.
ETA2: Okay, now itās properly solved, and yeah, that one part really opened the rest of the grid up.
4 Likes
playing hyrule warriors on cemu and man this is just a greasy double bacon cheeseburger of a game.
one thing I appreciate is that, while this game still has pieces of hearts, sometimes you bomb a boulder and are rewarded with an whole-ass heart container. this has not happened since NES zelda and tbh I missed that feeling.
also itās very funny to play a zelda game with a thin layer of koei tecmo sleaze applied. I feel like there had to be a lengthy negotiation process with nintendo to work out exactly how slutty they could make the characters. oh to be a fly on the wall of those proceedings
20 Likes
thatās the way to do it. i went on a plundering spree slash road trip along the western coast yesterday and it was a great time.
4 Likes
I maintain you can have few better experiences in that game than sneaking up the length of coal valley at night on foot
4 Likes
I only interact with new things in that game by crashing into them with whatever car I stole
4 Likes
Itās a bit too button-mashy to make me want to spend time trying to get better at it I think, but SoulCaliburās a really nice-looking game and decent fun to run through with the various characters once, at least.
2 Likes
Picked up That Which Gave Chase because Iāve had good luck with intentionally lo-fi PS1 style in the Pay-More-For-Shorter-Games-With-Worse-Graphics genre, and it paid off again. It didnāt feel held back by its aesthetic choices at all, and its frequent use of hard cuts made for great pacing you typically lose in 1st person games.
The game is currently $5 and is an hour long, so Iād strongly recommend playing it before reading this spoiler as most of the gameās mystery is built on it.
Right when I completed it I felt that the game was being uncharacteristically restrained in not exposing the full eldritch nature of the mystery, but after letting it stew for a bit I figured out thatās because there wasnāt anything eldritch about it at all, and thinking that there was was me getting caught up in the same desire for mythology that the characters were. The mushrooms are only exactly what they appear to be: they show you how to find what youāre looking for.
The first expedition all got trapped because none of them knew what they wanted, just that they were looking for something to find, so the mushrooms could only show them how to find more mushrooms. The client was only able to escape when he finally in his desperation looked for some way out, which led him to the musher. Because the musher had no desire to find any great secret of the natural world the mushrooms wouldnāt trap him in a cyclical search, so he could leave with his dogs of his own will.
2 Likes
Life is Strange 2:
7 Likes
really conflicted about this after before the storm!
3 Likes
SYSTEM SHOCK ENHANCED
went back to re-confirm some things, AND ITāS MORE CLEAR ABOUT THINGS THAN THE REMAKE. Like I didnāt remember having trouble with the laser code in the original oneā¦ in the remake, the code shows up on a screen behind you after hacking cyberspace, with no label, and it isnt saved anywhere on yourself so if you dont write it down like me, you have to go all the way back there
in the original, it shows up NEXT to you, has a LABEL saying exactly what it is, and is automatically correctly filed in your data! so yes, they really need to fix stuff like that. in general i felt the original game was way better at communicating things to the player, including the story. but as i said, i still loved the remake, but communicating stuff to the player is a bit of a mess. it feels like it was made by people who were really familiar with the original and just expected everyone else to be to, and just know everything already
oh the remake also doesnt have the minigames, but they were a novelty that were cool for five seconds anyway
8 Likes
Alundra (PS1) - holy shit this music is fucking great. wait, this is the same composer as Gravity Rush? shit fucking rules. iām playing the Unworked Designs patch. game feels extremely Landstalker-y - honestly feels more like Landstalker than Link to the Past(!)
Sonic Wings 2 (Neo Geo CD) - this version has a badass arranged soundtrack. devs recently got NGCD stuff working on MiSTer so iāve been playing thru and listening to some of the ASTs - really cool stuff. (was enjoying Last Resort and Over Topās ASTs quite a bit, though Over Top is nearly unplayable with obnoxious load times between every section. even 4x CDZ speed canāt save that turd)
Mega Man X3 (PS1) - i love bopping between the SNES and PS1/Saturn versions of this game, the soundtracks are so different! i probably slightly prefer the SNES soundtrack, but the 32-bit versions are pretty interesting, too
Azure Dreams (GBC) - havenāt played the PS1 version of this. pretty sweet. thereās a nice custom SGB border which looks fab. music is extremely good! the title theme is just fantastic.
11 Likes
Got back into GT7. Itās pretty enjoyable when you just focus on driving. I wish my god damned fanatec shifter worked on the ps5 as a standalone device since Iām driving with a Logitech wheel.
8 Likes
A Hat in Time (PS4) - decent game, terrible port. does not hold 30 FPS, which for a game which honestly demands to be played at 60, is unacceptable. oh, and by the way - it looks like absolute dogshit lol. donāt bother with this on PS4
Mega Man X Legacy Collection (PS4) - great games, cool extras, but the input latency is fucking unbelievably bad. MMX1 has like 7+ frames of latency. no wonder i couldnāt hit the jump in flame mammothās stage!!! i played X3 on MiSTer last night and was like what the fuck why is this so much better and, yeah. well. people played this and probably thought āthese games all suckā but itās just the ports. fuck.
7 Likes
decided it was time to finish zeldo. very curious where they go from here
where iām going from here:
14 Likes
Going from a decent game to a great game
7 Likes
oh fuck yeah, Pentiment is the best game about history ever. I think about the final act (which most critics derided) alllll the tiiiiiime. wow.
8 Likes
critics derided the best act?
video game criticism is the lowest form of writing
4 Likes