So I’m in charge of beefing up a new Snorlax each week. Most of the games waking play time is taken up by the same tedious economies stuff that exists in every Pokémon themed app. You’ll collect hundreds of berries and make numbers go up. There’s a season pass which makes your sleep generate more resources.
I do like that the Pokémon sprites seem to be 3D animations with a very low frame rate that are perspective-locked or have a 2D filter applied. So, they appear very solid and simple without the strange translations that some Pokémon 3D models suffer from. The simpler art style still doesn’t change the fact that the app runs like absolute shit with huge loads everywhere, even with the graphics settings turned down.
When you actually go to bed it seems extremely invasive since it records audio and movement during your sleep. Since I sleep with my partner, we’re getting a bit of an aggregate measure. Also, the Pokémon company hears what we talk about briefly before we go to bed so enjoy that shit. The target market of this and the teeth brushing one are clearly kids but I could see a Pokémon fertility app. Breeders Unite could be the subtitle.
First night, my sleep sucks although the game doesn’t really make these kind of judgements. Instead, it categorises sleep into three types: dozing, snoozing, and slumbering. I am apparently dozing type even though I mostly snooze. Dozing strikes me as bad sleep, but they won’t say it.
I assume they plot this on a combination of noise level and movement during sleep. You’re meant to put your phone on the mattress as you sleep to sense this stuff. It has me a little nervous as the phone constantly runs hot throughout the night as the app runs in background recording everything. I await the first article about someone starting a fire playing Pokémon sleep with the phone shoved under their pillow.
What sleeping type you are determines what Pokémon show up, and you can increase the range of Pokémon that show up based on how much you gorge your Snorlax. So there’s kind of a weird incentive to try and sleep differently every night? Especially since the dex is so large, I thought there was gonna only be like 20 different Pokémon in this game but I count at least 100. I got Croagunk (ew) but also Metapod (hey alright).
It asks you what your bedtime is and I feel very accountable. I am generally in bed by midnight but not asleep until 1 AM. I’m aiming for sleep by 11:55pm now just to see how this app goes in improving my crappy sleep cycle.
Armo(u)red core 2’s easily the worst of any of these, the generation move is less graceful than Miyazaki’s beginning and the worst ticks of Master Of Arena were taken forward into uninspired environments and Bad Jank compared to some of 3’s Good Jank (some of these arena missions especially from a duellist point are a complete joke). In some ways, I respect Another Age more for having EIGHTY NINE MISSIONS and no arena filler but it was around the time the achievement percentage runs like a louse that the diminishing returns kicked in. Stick with Formula Front.
when they showed the aura reading psychometry concept for life is strange true colors it sounded awful like they’d run aground and were stretching to make omniscient detective vision fit
it is that but the narrative frame (an involuntarily empathic x-men mutant aging out of foster care) works and it’s arrestingly fucked up!
I continue slowly playing through Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends Complete while reading through Three Kingdoms, and it’s a pretty good time. Today I just got through the part where Guan Yu gets taken in by Cao Cao instead of letting Cao murder him, but the whole time pines for his One True Bro Liu Bei (but not his other True Bro Zhang Fei, because both of them are all about Liu Bae), and then they get reunited on the field of battle when Cao Cao starts shit with Yuan Shao, who is sheltering Bei. It’s a real romantic moment, in its way, and it totally is in the game too, so that was nice. Poor Zhang Fei feels big third wheel for a minute or two.
i played some DW9 since it’s on PS+ extra currently
that game is a whole entire mess and i love it
i think the open nature of it works really well in terms of serving the RoTK story, i’ve already really enjoyed the liu bei/guan yu/zhang fei interplay which sometimes gets glossed over a bit quickly in some of the DW games as they have so much other stuff they want to show you. nice vibes
I hope it plays better on the PS5 than on the stock PS4, because it runs like garbage there. The PC version works well though, so I have hopes. I played a bit of 9 Empires on PC as well, and will probably play 9 through some on PC when I burn out on 8.
It’s really funny because I’m the book, Liu Bei is about as close to a protag as you get, but he often just disappears for like 10 chapters at a time. So weirdly the DW games are kinda not off in this regard. DW8’s Shu story is big on the bromantic thruple though, which is good, even if it doesn’t go into enough detail about how Guan Yu would do anything for Bei (like stick behind in a clearly doomed city just to make sure his family are good), but he won’t do that (try to hook up with Bei’s wives, which he gets super pissed when Cao Cao even lightly implies that might be a Thing).
Really, this book is funnier than I thought it would be.
“Action Mode” is locked 60 but extremely ugly. whatever upscaling they are doing is gnarly. visuals are also just weirdly washed out in general in-game (cutscenes look great). v-sync is off so there’s screen tearing, but the game is very responsive and feels good
“Movie Mode” is supposedly 30 but feels truly awful. idk what the issue is. wrong amount of motion blur? bad frame-pacing? no idea, but it sucks
the vibe of this game benefits from having the spaces feel sorta-unreal. the office labyrinth. none of the structure makes sense! imagine working in an office made entirely of Hallway Corners. truly demented. no wonder the evil psychic murderer family was born here.
Does this game not use analog controls? I had to use the d pad to steer and the xbox one controller dpad sucks. It’s pretty nice, very Y2K Aesthetics. IDK If I’ll keep playing it.
Someone at Polyphony was like “I fucking love motorcycles” and this game is basically “Motorcycles: da game”. There is no career mode, everything is unlocked from the start, so it’s just time trials and races.
The 2 stroke bikes sound like 2 strokes. I don’t know if it feels like riding does, your rider really really leans over to the point where the pipes scrape on the ground and it leaves sparks.
Polyphony’s second obsession is photography, and not only is there a photo mode but there’s also an auto-photo mode, which basically snaps the rider at certain points on the track and makes photos, and you can pick which one you like. It’s really neat.
the labyrinths of dry wall also allow for the most wonderful peckinpah-esque particle effects. Every time the screen fills with debris from a shotgun blast, I am filled with joy
yeah having ridden bikes for like 7 years now I think the riders swing too suddenly left and right and inputs are more than I would expect. I haven’t figured out how to wheelie yet which is, like, kind of the point of a bike game. you can get a big stupid Hyabusa and swing it around a track.
re: fear, I tried to play this years ago and couldn’t get it to do anything but produce a green screen. is there anything special you did to get this running? or should i just try again now that i have a computer that isn’t entirely stupid?
Just getting it up and running. Purchased from GOG where it and the Lord of Storms add-on are on sale. Installs with its own version of the microm8 emulator, but I seemed to find that the latest version of microm8 has more options and a less blurry display. In both you can do things like increase the emulated CPU speed–200% seems pretty good, although it also speeds up and pitch-shifts the sound. ; )
The base game and the add-on install a bunch of well fluff and the important part, the 1.4 MB .HDV Apple II hard drive files; this gets confusing because for instance the included microm8 emu prints constant errors if they’re both installed in the same directory…which is the default way they’re installed! Finally figured out the Lord of Storms one supersedes the original; but the game also saves to the .HDV file, so I guess they didn’t want to stomp that.
The .GIF shows the “Voxel” output from microm8; it’s a little too bright probably, but the default “Raster” output is slightly blurry, which bothered me. Don’t usually go for scanlines but kinda wish the scanline feature worked in Voxel mode, just to tone down the brightness a bit–but it doesn’t. : P Oh well I suppose I could always just adjust my monitor or maybe Windows’ Night Light strength.
Anyway, really love the presentation. Such lovely little colors and animations everywhere–sound and music too, of course. Pure keyboard control. I’ve only got through the extremely brief tutorial combat, but from what that shows, the game avoids annoying UI pitfalls of Ultima V like Ultima V’s huge blinking box around the active character in combat. So far, the game just looks gorgeous.
Never played the Ultima games back in the day, no idea if I’ll like the actual adventure (and add-on; apparently accessing the add-on content is a matter of finding a certain NPC in a certain castle and typing STORMS at them, or something like that ; ).
6502 Workshop appear to be on the path to getting a sequel going.
if you ever want to do something like this, there’s a cool program called ShaderGlass that basically lets you overlay Retroarch shaders on anything you like:
so you can drop some scanlines on whatever you like
