more ultraviolence of FEAR
the soundtrack to this game is insanely good? you don’t notice it at all unless you pay attention and then you sit down and listen and it’s like how, what the fuck, this composition is bizarre? every game like this goes hard on the heavy metal rock shit but FEAR is like fuck you. reverb steel drums and dissonant square synth. you’ll take your experimental ambience and LIKE IT. you could probably take any track from this game and find a place for it in Pathologic
I started YsIV for the PC Engine Thread. Have you checked the PCET lately? Lots of good posts by me and Minty, but we want you in there as well. Giving the posts.
I switched over to Castlevania Harmony of Darkness. The first 90 minutes of this game as so great. The castle is a creature of chaos. The music is so good. The battles are eh, challenging enough.
You get into the stonewall middle. This is the worst case of “where the fuck do I go?” The world covered in dead-ends and no fast travel and it isn’t even circular. You’re only option is to walk from one end to the other. I feel like I reached my breaking point of finally finding the “wall breaking key” and breaking a wall only for a different lock to be immediately on the other side. I did a run across the whole game trying to find what to do next and failing.
If I open a guide why not just watch a longplay of a game I’ve beaten twice in the past? I wish this was my favorite GBA CV but getting around the castle is obnoxious.
Guess that means I’m about to start casually playing Circle Of The Moon.
Apparently I had the key, thought I had equipped it but haven’t. To be fair I am playing in Japanese and am tired.
Pikmin 4 is a very pleasant game of unlocking all sorts of things using weak little guys and I’m enjoying it quite a bit even though your guys in this one aren’t quite as weak as I remember them being and also I can’t play it at 60fps yet.
I like the dog a lot.
FEAR IS THE BEST. Like I often call it the last great classic shooter, I put it on the same shelf as Doom and Quake. It’s insanely good but there’s almost nothing flashy about it save for the SpOoKy bits and the bullet time. Nothing about it looks special in screen shots. The narrative feels like an afterthought, but as a pure gun game it’s unparalleled in it’s era and has held up beautifully.
i would also like to join the FEAR is one of the best shooters of all time club
FEAR is probably the best game monolith made at like the end of their most interesting creative period. like coming off of no one lives forever and making what james and i have decided is the closest thing we ever got to shogo 2 is amazing. it still LOOKS good - the particle effects hold up, it still has some of the wettest grossest videogame blood ever, the art design aged gracefully. theres this really excellent balance of detail and sparse decoration, along with the endless offices and industrial hellmazes, that make the game still look good because everythings bathed in really thick dark shadows half the time anyway and its super atmospheric because the sound design is amazing and the soundtrack mixes into the ambient sound really well…and thats all before you even start shooting replica soldiers, who have an incredibly memorable way of speaking and are super fun to fight because the level design caters to the AI. every time i replay it im like damn this looks and plays exactly as good as i remember it and videogames barely work like that at all
the expansion packs are worth playing if you really want to ruminate on how FEAR is special, because the level design in perseus mandate is so fucked up, everything is really blocky and ugly like its from 1998 and they managed to make the amazing combat into a total chore. extraction point is fine i guess especially if you are a holiday fan and want to see his story end, for whatever reason that may be
Demon Lord Reincarnation (PC)
I took a more in-depth and hopefully slightly more accurate if still clunky stab at a Photoshop (ancient version 4 from 1996 ; ) tutorial for creating DLR-style screens from the original high-res, full color, public domain Javardry character art: 1503: Demon Lord Reincarnation \\ Playthrough 4/? - Photoshop tutorial advance! & Floor 1 secrets! - YouTube . ^_ ^ ( Javardry art archive: とり夫 - pixiv )
Simulated game screen:
Finished (first pass, anyway) the floor 1 map! Maybe the most likely spot for mistakes would be me having encountered a scripted thing I thought was just random, like an encounter or a treasure chest.
For chests, I’m not sure if the chests at 3,4 (backed off and it wasn’t there when I went back, so, random?) and 14,6 (just opened it straight off so dunno if it would’a been there when I went back which would mean scripted?) were random or scripted, which is why they have “?” on them. : P
Man that was a lotta secret doors–that I almost missed! If I hadn’t happened to stumble through that one secret door last episode, and then think of that this episode and think wait, maybe those other “empty” areas had doors…I would’a missed about a quarter of the first floor!
Finally felt really on top of the power curve in this episode. What’ll the encounters on floor two and its new walls and orangey color scheme be like? = o
oxenfree ii was excellent. i like how much time i’ve had (and everyone has had) away from the first to give it some gravity. twin peaks the return is just one influence but it is the most similar reference i can think of for the relationship between the two. exploring regret and futility but through very different kind(s) of characters than the return
it is not very amenable to repeat plays because the dialogue goes at a set pace and my enjoyment greatly improved when i started using a point and click interface instead of directly controlling the character’s movement. everything else about it is very polished
i don’t want to jinx it but i hope netflix doesn’t shutter them unceremoniously and they get to make something different next
More Echo!
Okay finished hunky Wolfboy Leo route:
The nuance of the genuine sweetness, but also incredibly fucked up controlling attitude of a codependent relationship hit pretty hard. As someone who’s been tentatively talking to an ex of mine I had a pretty bad breakup with, a lot of the plot threads in this one hit hard.
I really like the ways it contrasts the vague supernatural evil with the very grounded shittiness of a small rural town. I also like the game giving little moments, even to absolutely horrible people, that give them a short conversation worth of humanity.
Some other stuff that’s emerging is the characters casual discussions of sex? Like it’s definitely filled with codeswitching between cast members. Your gay ex boyfriend will talk to you casually about sex, the way the game acknowledges the sexual aspects of the characters and their histories…it’s really different? It’s kinda funny how much color they get from starting at the premise of ‘ok this is going to be a subversion of porn games’ to reduce but not eliminate those elements entirely. It feels very mature about this stuff in a way I’m not used to!
Also it’s slowly introducing metanarrative stuff that acknowledges the fact that you’re in a VN, albeit not explicitly. This should be grating but it’s mostly working because instead of purely looking towards the camera and going ‘look how clever I am’, it’s starting to build this up as an genuine aspect of the weirdness of this town and all the awful stuff transpiring there. This sort of thing would normally undercut this kinda game for me but it works here because it’s still focused on the actual emotional and dramatic core, focused occasionally through the lens of that conceit.
I am conscientious that like…it does fall back on a few rural stereotypes. Some of which are…actually just very true to my experiences. That said one of them I’m not totally sure about is the weird kinky gay serial killer. But since the authors of this game are definitely queer, I trust them a little more to use that than I would other folks?
Also it does toss around a lot of slurs, albeit mostly in ways that feel…correct for the characters and story? I’m always of two minds about the deployment of stuff like this. The whole “This is realistic but is this depiction of it mindful enough”? Y’know, that kinda thing. Definitely something to consider if you’re sensitive to anything of that nature.
Those misgivings aside, I’m really liking this game! And have had to actively pry myself off my computer late at night to keep from continuing it!
Nice to hear that the sequel is worth playing. I’ve had the Oxenfree dynamic theme enabled on my PS4 since the first game’s launch. For a while it didn’t look quite right because they added a “Communities” button that of course wasn’t part of the older themes. But a few years later they killed that Communities feature so the theme’s consistency was restored.
Here are some videos I made about games I played recently:
if I loathed oxenfree, would oxenfree 2 change my mind?
(I was not a fan of the marvel movie well that just happened ness of the writing)
we replayed oxenfree yesterday too and in the time since 2016 i’ve watched six seasons of buffy and could now name that evil
oxenfree ii’s writing still suffers for being voice acted and filling dead air while you navigate. i don’t think it’d pass muster for you and i don’t recommend it for you, but it’s unmistakably better to my ear if someone else reading this might be satisfied with a incremental improvement
for one thing, the main characters are adults and the antagonists are teens
I thought my first playthrough of Oxenfree was fine but people told me it was necessary to play it a second time to truly appreciate what it was doing and now I no longer like the game. In case I end up with the sequel as a free Epic Store giveaway some time in the future are people gonna try pulling the same cruel trick on me with it?
absolutely not necessary with II or the first. the first’s is a secret ending that you might put together yourself and though II has multiple endings each is definitive afaik
i would also argue that II pointedly disagrees with those people
stand proud and reject yoko taro bullshit
i am nearly done with pikmin 4 i think (60% completion of the fourth area). this is nintendo saying “hey you. specifically, you, lonelyfrontier at select button dot net. we made this game to appeal to that very specific part of your brain that loves and is obsessed with the gamecube/wii era of nintendo and the art style and creativity that so many games used during that period. but now with slightly more graphical fidelity. have fun!” it rules and nintendo has been a roll this year. corporations are good now, sorry.
Are humans no longer extinct in this game? That doesn’t look like ruins to me.
no idea. guess i’ll find out soon.
Pokemon Sleep provides little sound clips of your sleep that are generally useless but I look forward to hearing what i did while unconscious at 3am.
The amount you get is random (usually 2) and today I got 4! Three of them were just Pokemon Sleep’s alarm going off. I’m outraged, you can’t DO that. It’s breaking the rules!!! 
