licked by a toad and banshee in the same day? you’re living the dream
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Yeah I didn’t even manage to fit in the kissing part, was wild
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My favorite thing to do in Far Cry 6 is push into new territory to unfog the map. Everything else is just kind of whatever for me. There’s activities and missions and systems and stuff and it’s all there and I usually do each thing before moving on and it’s fine but when I open that map screen and see the brighter areas where I’ve been vs. ALL OF THE REST OF THE MAP I haven’t been yet I just want to push on forward and keep exploring.
I spent a huge amount of time on the tutorial island just unfogging that map and doing everything there before moving on with the story knowing full well that the rest of the game was going to be just like that only times 100 because the rest of the game is literally that much bigger than that first island. It was actually a free weekend thing I played it the first time and kind of got my fill of it there, despite not making it out of the tutorial island. But a year later the game was on sale and I felt that itch so I jumped back on it and there you go.
That was probably February? When was the last time the game was on sale? Anyway I picked at it some over the next month or so. First thing I did after getting off the starter island was see if the game has a hidden ending at the beginning like Far Cry 4 and 5 (it totally does!) and then I grabbed a jet ski and spent two evenings just unfogging the outer most edges of the map and some of the interior rivers. It was very satisfying but got me nowhere close to my goal of having a brightened, fully explored map. I haven’t played the game much since then, I was picking at it a bit before I finally got around to Tears of the Kingdom and that’s been occupying me since, but for the story I followed up on the leads on the western most side and have unfogged most of that area.
I will say of the actual game I like how much everything is tied to exploration, like how all the guns and gear can be found in chests. It can also all be purchased from various places but I don’t bother with that because I’m all about finding it in the wild. It’s weird how unfogging a map became my favorite game mechanic because I was all about that in Tears of the Kingdom and partly I’m still playing that because I know at any time I need to get that kind of fix I can go to the depths and start unfogging there.
Last night I bought that Arkanoid remake thing on sale for $2 and my xbox notified me that it had pushed my rewards points over the point where I get a $25 gift card so I cashed them in and bought Watch Dogs: Legion for $9 (I also bought Dragon’s Dogma for $5 don’t judge me (but I did buy Thi4f for $2 so maybe you should go ahead and judge me)) and while I am kind of interested in how their whole “play as any NPC” thing works out I’m really just firing it up right now to see if you unfog the map at all and this is going to determine if I continue spending any time on it at this moment.
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Man I’ve been posting things in the wrong pinned threads up top here the past few days, I think my brain is broken.
Anyways, copied from my deleted post in the news thread…
Been playing random PS+ catalog games for an hour or so to see if any of them are things I’d like to revisit some time down the road, my brief thoughts so far (you already got my Returnal ones):
DMC V: It feels wrong to call this dry as everything is so over the top, but mechanically I just don’t think I ever clicked with this. Early on I had awful depth perception issues where 50% of the time I attacked right in front of the enemy as opposed actually attacking them (bought an ability that has you charge at them which helped), and I don’t think I ever figured out how to rev the chainsaw sword while attacking no matter how hard I tried. There’s probably some interesting depth to the game but it doesn’t really do a good job of surfacing it, eventually hit a boss I died to a few times and couldn’t find the interest in continuing.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Surprisingly okayish. They pretty much nailed the personality and at least the initial area was very neat to look at, the third person shooting was more… pacing/functional than anything else, but also didn’t get in the way. Would probably be a fine junk food game to come back to, not sure anything more.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits: Do you remember how during the PS2 era we got a ton of “7 out of 10” action platformer brawlers? This seems to be the game people who grew up on said games would make. Combat feels a hair more Souls inspired than its predecessors were, but otherwise it is very much that. I have some fond memories of those games and haven’t played one in a while and this appears to be sensibly lengthed, might try to come back and finish it up before my PS+ expires after next month.
Ghostwire Tokyo: Man I knew nothing about this beforehand beyond that it modeled parts of Tokyo really well (I did not know it was a first person game). Gave it 75 or so minutes and I think I may have to give it at least another hour as… I’m not convinced it’ll be any good but it definitely is kinda odd. It feels like a game where once I know everything about it the fun is over (combat has not been inspiring at all), but I’m open to giving it a shot to prove me wrong.
Up next: Resident Evil 7, Doom Eternal, maybe Ghost of Tsushima or Fallout 4.
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That vampire killed me again.
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final fight 3 is not as good as final fight 2
every boss is a tall muscular man who jumps high up in the air and tries to sit on you. they added more moves, but most of them are useless. your dash attack is nowhere near as good as the free specials in streets of rage 2, for example. and the input specials are almost impossible to connect with. every enemy after the first stage has way too much hp.
it’s fine, but it’s inferior to final fight 2 (especially the rebalance patch version), and final fight 2 is inferior to the streets of rage/bare knuckle games.
and obviously, snes final fight isn’t worth playing at all.
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i might be (am definitely) biased but i have a major soft spot for very early titles on a given platform
Super Famicom release date: November 21, 1990
Final Fight SFC release date: December 21, 1990
there is a cool hack that restores some graphics and sprites from the arcade version:
but in 2023 you should really just play FF30AE: Final Fight 30th Anniversary Edition | Arcade-Projects Forums
which imo is the best way to play the game now
i kinda like the SNES port of the soundtrack too, though it doesn’t hold a candle to the aggressive FM synth of the 1989 arcade version
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shout out to Final Fight One (GBA) which is a surprisingly robust port and utterly wipes the floor with the SNES version
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GCI MENTIONED
GCI was the closest I’ve ever come to enjoying the CoD(Modern Multiplayer FPS) style game with a heavy bend to load outs. Every equip/gadget/body style decision had just enough weight to consider your playstyle and every combination felt viable to some degree. That’s a game I’d love to see get the Titanfall 2 treatment of fan run servers but I guess the attachment to batman would make that prickly at best in regards to any legal allowances.
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i played a little bit of gotham city imposters when it was free on games with gold.
it’s a shame it didn’t have a single player mode, because it looked amazing, and the premise would have made for some cool design possibilities.
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I am a GCI stan, it’s one of my favorite multiplayer shooters. Frustrating how they just abandoned it, crippling networking bugs and all.
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I do regret not playing more GCI. I remember liking it, and just assumed that “Oh, this must be how fun Tribes is if you get good at playing Tribes. Well maybe I should just get good at Tribes”. and I never did that.
Also I associated it with a bad comic book storyline, which felt like it was a meaningful qualifier at the time.
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It is, funnily, still active. You can usually find a lobby. You just need to set your networking type to 1mbps, because (insanely) all matchmaking is segregated by what connection type you made in settings lol
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I put a credit into Ninja Saviors on Steam Deck. Game is not verified but the first 5 stages run great at least.
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Have tried bits and pieces of various mobile games, and have had basically no patience for anything. Tbh, I think this is probably for the best, I think a lot of these games aren’t actually worthy of my time.
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IMMORTAL REDNECK
this game shamelessly rips off the structure of rogue legacy, like it’s identical. each time you die you spend the gold you collected to grow a skill tree and have to ditch any you dont spend. as you may suspect, the game itself is a roguelite where you run through proc gen floors of a pyramid, climbing higher to get to different bosses. it’s a first person shooter that apes serious sam… egyptian setting, “quirky” humour, goofy character designs, and fast paced.
it’s a pretty fun little shooter (and looks great) but while i loved rogue legacy when it came out, it’s kinda poison now. for one, these kinds of games never have enough variety so runs end up feeling repetitive pretty quickly, but the biggest problem is that it doesnt feel like im getting better at the game. instead it just feels like im constantly grinding to unlock more levels on the skill tree so i can get further with each run. in the end, all these games end up feeling really hollow.
i enjoy the core gameplay of this one and it’s a fun time killer, but like every other game of this type, i can feel myself bouncing off after a few hours
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This hasn’t been my experience, but I didn’t grow up with any form of the SoR games, and playing them much later–maybe on the PS3? somewhere around there–I just couldn’t seem to get myself to enjoy them all that much. But I suppose it probably just comes down to Final Fight, even SNES FF2, feeling more “arcadey” to me than the SoRs, which somehow felt more like console games–and I guess what I was looking for was “arcadiness.” Probably none of that makes sense, I’m not even sure what it means. Bigger sprites? Simpler gameplay? Dumber sounds? Eh anyway I haven’t even managed to get myself to go back to FF2 again so obviously I have no clue.
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Played a bunch more of this, some more yesterday and over two hours today. I went from “you know this might be pretty neat, I can probably pick away at this for the next month or so” near the start to “I think I’m just gonna finish up this particular main mission and call it a day” to “how cow how long is this stupid mission, I’ve been at it for over an hour”. To be fair part of this is due to me not paying enough attention to the minimap and climbing up to the top of the wrong building that one time, but the main mission bits seem to long given how repetitive the gameplay parts are (mainly the combat, which is just sorta bland). The shame is that the side missions are pretty quick and have a nice “pop” to them, you get in, see something potentially neat and get out, if the main missions were like a few of those stapled together it might actually work. As is I was basically in a “how many stupid floors in this building do I have to climb up” rut for too long, just for the payoff of you looking out off the observation deck and seeing the guy you tried to trail earlier walking into the subway.
Anyways I still mostly enjoyed the 4ish hours I spent with it (last half hour was rough), but another 15-20 hours would probably poison that so that’s a good stepping off point.
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Played the first two levels of Trepang2 on Very Hard. SNORE.
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More Ridge Racer V because it’s the end of the work day and I have no more brain power left. For funsies I turned on Vulkan rendering and then cranked up the internal resolution to 1080p and oh baby
this is closer to ridge racer PSP than Ridge Racer 4. After being frustrated by every other car I elected to use the slowest but best handling one, which has zero drift. I basically point it in a direction and go, getting 1st place by not hitting any walls or slowing down. Instead of drifting you let off the accelerator and it just pivots around. This is not True Ridge Racer but the slowdown from hitting walls is so unforgiving that if you just don’t hit anything you’ll usually win, regardless of how sloppy the driving is.
Every ridge racer has an enthusiastic guy yelling things like “get first place!” or “that was a nice drift” but the dude doing Ridge Racer V has the most unenthusiastic reads I’ve ever heard. Dude sounds so bored and detached it’s almost funny. It all sounds like they’re first takes too.
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