Games You Played Today Part 007 Goldeneye

[iguferon]

so basically my understanding of this games incoherent plot/conspiracy is that a billionaire republican senator used his money and ownership of a massive defense contractor to funnel unlimited resources to the PMC that the libertarians hired to protect them from disgruntled employees who accidentally did a terrorism because they misunderstood the power of the magic science battery they used as the explosive and it leveled a building, which honestly is a hell of a thing to rely on for your super elaborate deep state plan. and then that led them to co-opt the drone technologies developed by the libertarians to make a submarine launched drone swarm that can target assassinate important people determined by a computer algorithm to…start wars or something? which will guarantee world peace, uh, eventually. but also it’s suggested that the republican congressman is just doing this to secure access to oil in the middle east because this game CANNOT muster the energy to make anything but the most superficial criticism of the united states humanly possible. the most the writers can do is mention that his other drone development programs are funded by congress so he’s technically not doing anything illegal and only The Right People in washington are equipped to deal with this sinister threat to america

but also it makes me ask a lot of other questions like idk there is 24/7 video surveilliance of the island through cameras and drones and you can regularly hear the enemy NPCs say shit like “I can’t stomach the latest rounds of experiments they are doing on prisoners. I’ve seen Guantanamo, but this is worse…” or shit about how they saw civilians get gibbed in Guatemala or Syria et al. and signed up with the PMC so they wouldn’t have to deal with human rights atrocities anymore so why are they doing all this torturing and mass killing of libertarians??? and you’d think like any of that would make it out to the wider world eventually, or you know the US navy ship waiting like 10 miles offshore that they talk about constantly at the beginning of the game. but really it feels like im taking this a lot more seriously than the game is, i mean there’s like 12 quests where you walk into a house and see tons of civilians gunned down horrifically and the main character doesnt even comment. its like this games favorite thing to show you so its hard to not think about a lot!

me continuing to play every tom clancy game ever made for no good reason:

[smbhax]

Wizardry noob plays the English scenario of the free Java-based wizlike, Javardry.

Title of the single available–as far as I know–English-language scenario is a nod to the first Wizardry game: “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord” (1981).

The classical midi music is NOT stream safe, oh well–gotta rev share Benedictus and Kyrie eleison. : P

Wiki entry (Google Translate): https://freegame-gamewiki-jp.translate.goog/javardryintroduction1/?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp#原作Wizardry

Online manual (Google Translate): Javardry Manual Ver.1.039

Software page (JP): 酔生夢死 [Javardry]

English Windows version direct download link: https://thu.sakura.ne.jp/games/down/Javardry01_eng.zip

Windows version requires Java: https://www.java.com/en/

English web version: Javardry HTML5版

Japanese wiki w/ 30 scenarios: Javardry Wiki*

Art site: とり夫 - pixiv

Wizardry is an intentionally archaic series; Javardry’s menu & structure is pretty much identical 1981 Wizardry, or maybe 1982 Wizardry II.

But it has an auto-map which at least the NES versions of those games don’t.

There’s weirdness to the minimalism, like issuing commands to stay at an inn 1 person at a time, or not being able to save a poisoned char because you can’t use your anti-poison outside of combat.

Need a thief to make money; later Mage spells can examine treasure chests but thieves, even lv1, can for free.

Have to remember to buy–and equip!–items for new char. If truly desp can make money by making new char, pooling their money elsewhere, then removing that char. Wondering if I should make town char to hold money so full party wipe doesn’t leave me broke.

After playing I read up on party order and attack ranges; explains why my Mage in the back didn’t have an attack option w/ his knife.

An “@” sign on the frame border to the right of a char means they have enough XP to level if you have them sleep at the inn. Have to sleep to recover spells!

1st floor 2 fight gave enough XP to level lv1 char to lv4!

Characters age–not sure how quickly, but the WizII NES FAQ https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/c64/955810-wizardry-knight-of-diamonds/faqs/42243 mentions “best to use your cleric to heal party members then have said cleric stay in the stables to recover their spell points. Although some aging will occur, it won’t be nearly as devastating as staying weeks on end recovering large amounts of hit points.”

To swap unequipped items: Inn, Inspect, Enter, Item, Trade, Shift+L/R

Looked more at Steam & there are a bunch of wizlikes, like the upcoming Demon Lord Reincarnation (stylized Javardry clone-ish, uses same char art), Buriedbornes (mobile game, also uses the art), Wizardry: The Five Ordeals (English ver of 2006 Japanese official Wizardry game), the Elminages, Mary Skelter: Nightmares, Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls, & other late Wizardrys. & loads of games maybe classified as the more cutesy DRPG genre Reddit - Dive into anything --Etrian Odyssey etc.

I don’t think Wizardry: TFO uses char art made for Javardry; TFO originally came out on PC in Japan in 2006–so Javardry art was prob inspired by TFO. TFO too was made as an editor for user scenarios. Its editor isn’t available in English yet. Sounds like ~10 TFO user scenarios have English vers; they’re dld’d through the game. Can control TFO w/ lots of keyboard keys instead of mouse. TFO doesn’t have automap; map display is by spells. Its screen shake in combat isn’t nearly as bad as Demon Lord Reincarnated.

I don’t super-love the presentation of the other wizlikes I looked at; Javardry gets it spot-on!

!

Poked at the editor & popular, huge Japanese “The King” scenario but couldn’t spot a way to open up the text to see how easy it might be to run through Google Translate or something.

Probably shouldn’t worry about the other stuff, & just play the one Javardry English scenario & call it good–if I ever get that far!

[Tuxedo]

Really like how Wizardry characters live in parallel timelines, any time they go to the inn they age on their own while others don’t age at all. The inn only has one room, and the rest of the team goes to wait in the Uncomfortable Time Capsule. Maybe the age shown is not meant to be a literal age and more about how much what anyone’s body can withstand, like Brain Age but about your Body instead and very grim. Your guy is still 25 but he has suffered so many injuries it’s like he’s 65 now

I’m playing Judgement. Yagami is such a tryhard cool guy but Japan has such a different idea at times of a cool guy from the rest of the western world in some places that it creates a very fun disconnect, yeah this guy is a whiskey drinking chain smoker who knows martial arts and parkour and wears a leather jacket and he’s lean and small and wears skinny jeans and spends 1 hour every day on maintaining his perfect hair. I like this guy more than Ichiban

It’s really cool to play a detective game in Kamurocho, a place I already know quite well from playing 4 Yakuza games. I can turn off the minimap and try to rely on my knowledge of the town to get around. Really liking the number of quests that go like « where do young people often go » and « where can I buy a cheap jacket » with no objective markers, I hope they aren’t all relegated to the beginning of the game.

Extremely silly how the game’s general story is about a murder case when 100 people try to kill me in the streets every day?? + Yakuza combat is at its worst here, I’m just pushing buttons randomly and Yagami does whatever he wants, terminally Xbox 360 combat. Another game i wish didn’t have this much violence but I know it’d be hard to fill the gap left by excising it from the Yakuza template

An underrated aspect of the Yakuza Coziness is the recycled animations, I just love seeing these animations again in every game, favorite is the Fist Pumping while Crouching Down Slightly

[dylan]

this game is so beautiful wow

[smbhax]

Yeah! Really elegant minimal interface and the character artist made like 99.9% of the art they’ve been making for it public domain:

Art resources

Uh well I just wanted somewhere to stick this. The artist who made the art for the free Java-based Wizardry-like, Javardry, has been posting the art online for years (last update as recent as three months ago) https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/5887541 saying (under the “View profile” link; translation here by Google Translate) I was making monster image free material for Javardry. ↓You can download all of them here. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzzUx0NE2xYAekdJTkhVTDNmZWc?resource…

S’like I made this goofy quick title mashup out of the high-def art I downloaded from their Google drive archive (notice they’ve updated the skeleton a bit, bigger skull and stuff; sword updated too):

The artist IS a porn artist, of course, which maybe explains how they can afford to spend so much time creating free super-high-quality non-porn art.

[wourme]

Games You Played Today VI (III in the west)

I love Square-enix’s non AAA output right now, I’ve played Paranormasight which is this microbudget, no-cruft, occult horror, dutch angle fest, flowchartcore VN with a flawless style. [image] [image] [image] Very Nonary game adjacent, with the fanservice cringe + puzzles rooms absent, and math game theory being replaced by ancient japanese curse game theory Fourth wall breaking narrator asked me « so how many people did you kill at this point from 0 to 5 » and I counted them all and it w…

I started playing Paranormasight and I like it. I was a little wary of immediately being required to kill people in the prologue and one of the early puzzle solutions is kind of silly, but after the game opens up Shadow of Destiny/13 Sentinels style, it’s fun to see the various stories overlap.

The music is good and so are the facial expressions/mannerisms of the characters.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Played so much Breakpoint yesterday. Got Panther and Pathfinder to rank 10.

Ended up recreating my favorite loadout and look from Wildlands (minus my gal’s cigar, where the #$&% is my cigar, Ubi?!?). Good ol’ Mk. 14 (heavily nerfed from Wildlands I guess), M4 shotgun (the shorty version here, always feels weird having two full-size long arms; more of a me thing than anything else), and a 1911 pistol (okay, sure, with 8 shots it sucks compared to most pistols, but it’s here mostly 'cause it’s the only thing I use with a suppressor).

Suddenly the game went from pretty challenging to super easy. So I went back to fucking around with other weapons… except machine guns. Haven’t really machine gunned. Never been much of a machine gunner in any game. I’ll try 'em, though. Probably. When I have time. And level Medic.

Oh yeah, this has mostly been playing alongside my brother who played Sharpshooter, then Medic to my Panther, then Pathfinder.

Pro tip: The Pathfinder’s Drone is super good. If you use it against a Behemoth you’re basically self-destructing yourself to no useful end.

[VastleCania]

@iguferon

i mean there’s like 12 quests where you walk into a house and see tons of civilians gunned down horrifically and the main character doesnt even comment.

i would also say nothing when presented with this tbf

[iguferon]

Last night me and Cuba raided a huge underground cold war tunnel complex stretching underneath a mountain range so we could find a nuclear bomb in the gentleman’s club and I’m glad he was there because I don’t think anyone would believe us if we did it solo

[hellojed]

been driving the minivan around BeamNG, now I want one. They are the perfect vehicle. Car like. You can put a bed in the back and sleep. Haul like 5 or 6 people on a road trip.

[doolittle]

“alright guys, remember, left knee bent 120 degrees, head to the right”

[boojiboy7]

For a second, I saw this before I saw the context and was just like “what did they do to my boy Ryo Hazuki?”

[smbhax]

Muldulamulom

Free, psychedelic play-in-browser metroidvania platformer by Mason Lindroth (Hylics).

• Muldulamulom by Mason Lindroth

Only took me five times as long as the author to get through. ^ _^ = P ^ D^

And I only had to cheat and look at their walkthrough video once. ]_]

Darn spikes! : P

The physics are a little slippery which doesn’t help at certain points but sort of feels intentional; not saying it was a good idea.

Be sure to read the directions under the game window especially the part about controlling the carpet. ]_]

It’s a 'troidvania so you’re backtracking some but new threats appear in old areas and then you also open up new areas. And you don’t ever have far to go in the fairly compact weird little world–the dev’s walkthrough video, at the bottom of the game page, is under 12 minutes.

The colors and style are super-cool.

[yarusenai]

i changed my name in the nintendo ds interface earlier and man it’s still so nice and fresh and feels like the dream of a bright future. the switch interface makes me actually angry with how charmless it is in comparison. i miss the days of technology feeling like a companion or a pet with its own identity. console startup noises got shorter and shorter as the years passed

[hellojed]

ah yeah I really miss that. The 3DS too. I still remember booting a GBA for the first time and was like “woahh” . they don’t do that anymore!

[iguferon]

New fable just dropped

2 days ago

today: PRESS E TO ADMIRE

I better find out who created the extra fast tree growth formula so it doesn’t get militarized and turned into a serum that turns white people into tree bark!!!

[smbhax]

EchoBlade (PC / Steam)

An American dude made a first-person Unreal engine hack-n-slash, with the gimmick that your character is blind so they only see by echolocation, which in practice means things that make noise are visible in a dark-lit flat-shaded glowy way that is kind of neat, but also if you stop moving (no footsteps) it gets real dark which is sort of annoying.

There’s no automap through the very boring large square dungeon rooms that are almost always bigger than your echolocation range so it feels really easy to get lost like immediately which is not a feeling I love. You can sort of backtrack along glowing footprints you leave on the ground (?) but they didn’t seem to be there sometimes so I dunno, maybe I was just more lost than I thought.

Combat goes: you slash, they slash. Pretty slow and boring and easy, the challenge being you don’t bother dodging because it’s too slow and boring. Forgot to try the crossbow. : P

Haven’t tried mouse and keyboard gaming in forever and my dumb old mouse shoulder didn’t seem to appreciate it, dang. Tried to switch to controller but the game didn’t recognize my DS4 at all, even though Windows did and even though PS4 controller is one of the game’s two controller settings and I had it to set to that (also tried the Xbox setting just in case).

Could go and get the PS4 version that just came out but on second thought the gameplay isn’t making me want to try more; from videos it looks like “more” amounts to more mazelike dark stages and samey combat and then deadly traps and jumping puzzles.

It runs super smooth and has a neat look and doesn’t make that weird loud blood-splooshy sound that most 3D swordy games and soulslikes seem compelled to make all the time and I’ve kind of been wanting a good 1st person swordy game since Dark and Darker was hyping up Twitch for a minute, but I guess this isn’t gonna be it for me.

[smbhax]

Demon Lord (PC)

Demon Lord by Surt R.

A free, super-streamlined Wizardry-like made for Dungeoncrawler GameJam 2023 ( Demon Lord - Playing Dungeoncrawler GameJam 2023 Submissions - YouTube ) with a sepia-toned, blurry pixel filter. Uses (blurry, pixel-filtered) b&w version of the public domain character art made for Javardry. Made I think by a single European (or Japanese?) developer–could be wrong about that.

There’s no Wizardry-style town; you start as a single character in the dungeon. No menu, no automap, just walk down hallways, random combats start, you can attack, defend, or run, then the usual turn-based Wizardry thing happens. Didn’t get far before being killed (repeatedly; don’t think I survived more than two combat rounds) so I’m not sure if there’s any inventory, etc.

Enemies shake when hit but it’s not bad. There’s a pink, slow-ish screen flash when your character is hit.

Being remade into a maybe slightly less blurry, four-character party version called Demon Lord Reincarnation. Someone asked on that game’s Steam forum if there would be an option to turn off the graphical filter, and the reply was no, “Demon Lord Reincarnation is designed to look like a cursed game that you’d play on an old system.”

Update: oh wait, there’s a campfire you sit down at and get more party members? Okay, I have to give this a real try now.

(Note to self: skipping the text that pops up at the start of the dungeon that tells you about the campfire was dumb. ; D Four party members can definitely survive battles. They’re at the fire fully made, introduce themselves, and you just accept them or skip to the next one. Doesn’t appear to be inventory or anything. Looks like maybe you can go back to the fire to replace party members if need be. Hm this has possibilities.)

[hellojed]

We are back with Mega Man Legends 2, and I have fully embraced the Cheater’s Casual Playthrough, especially given the bullshit train boss fight I had to get through.

the final dungeon is an ice themed one, you slide around unless you get cleated shoes. That’s 2 dungeons that require footware specific items to navigate correctly. Without them it would be very frustrating, but with them they’re trivial. Why are they in there?? hmm

Also: who likes 3d platforming?? I don’t! especially without midair control. There’s a lot of instances where you need to grab ledges and the camera and controls just make it super hard to do.

Well we get to the end and we gotta chase down three walking keys, of course, in this massive underground snow area. The glowing red eyes show up in the distance and are really creepy to look at given the game’s shorter draw distance in these caves

and then it’s the boss, who is this very creepy blob thing. Props to this game for being unsettling most of the time

Anyway that’s done. Yeah me too Roll.

Well, you bring the keys to the ship and once they’re in proximity, the weird ancient people we rescued or discovered at the start of the game take over the ship.

Then there’s some stuff about “The Master’s genetic code” and “Getting it from Megaman Trigger” and other stuff from this mom looking character. She looks like Roll’s mom, but When Roll’s mom landed on the forbidden island this robot healed her with nanomachines, but went too far, and then took over her body, but she’s “borrowing it” she explains later

Well with that out of the way it’s time to fight a bird robot.

After you defeat this guy, he blows up the entire ship. And then you black out. And when you come to there’s an extended dream sequence with…this guy???

Ok so it turns out the Master Is the last “real human” alive and that he has been living for like 3000 years, and decided to use technology to re-create humans, that’s what “carbons” are in the game’s fiction. Basically made mortal humans who would be born, suffer, learn happiness, and then die. As…a Hobby??? well he came to Terra at some point to make the carbons alongside Megaman and then decided to …die? and then megaman had his memories transferred to Data?? IDK

It’s all some very heady end of the world Sci-Fi stuff I kinda dig the idea.

Well The Master’s last wish was for Megaman to “destroy the system” whatever that means. Our helper robots that aren’t on Sera’s side (sera wants to destroy the carbons in a planet wide wipe) and we have to choose at some point.

We get one last moment with The Master before…uh?

Then everyone’s like “WTF” and then it’s off to space, or, Elyusium, for the final confrontation.

[hellojed]

Learned that Famitsu gave Left Alive a 31, but Mega Man Legends 2 got a 30. Travesty