Games You Played Today Part 007 Goldeneye

King of Posters
1515

agree completely. i’ve really warmed up to pikmin 4 in the late game, where there are lots of standalone challenges you do on the side, outside of normal day timers, and a separate little campaign that’s timed days with no caves. i like the game a lot in both of those styles, but yeah, mixing them just makes both worse

i mean it doesn’t even really make sense, when you enter a cave it sucks all your pikmin out of the level and when you finish it you get a screen to pick whatever pikmin you want for the moment you set foot back in the level at the cave exit? it feels band-aided out of the box

honestly if the main campaign was instead like once you touch a cave it just unlocks and then you actually enter it later from a list in the between-day phase… it seems like that would work so much better!

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1516

oh yeah wow that would work way better. just make it one more set of challenges.

i think the change that set this all off though was removing the overall time limit completely. once that’s gone, the length of day thing is practically meaningless, to the point of questioning why you would include it at all other than tradition.

(the level in pikmin 4 where the tides change, and give you access to different parts of the level is probably the best reason i’ve seen for the day/night system since they removed the global timer though)

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1517

It would be great if they had secrets for making it to late areas in a short amount of time. The first Pikmin had a secret boss like that and I loved it.

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1518

you can, and i didn’t, but you can technically get the blue onion before you get the blue pikmin in pikmin 4. i almost did it but then i fucked up and couldn’t retrieve the onion.

absolutely useless but i thought it was cute

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1519

Adastra

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Adastra is the…follow up? Parallel project to? Echo. It was created because the original sole author of Echo got too depressed to not need a writing partner on it, and decided to de-stress with a fluffy side project.

And decided that a high concept political intrigue furry romance SciFi story was the perfect break?

Despite having a reputation for being the better game than Echo in a lot of places on the internet I’m just not seeing it? This very much is what it says on the tin, and it hasn’t really shocked me with any unforeseen twists. Not being as good as Echo, though, doesn’t mean it isn’t very good at what it is. A gay romance with cut with actual world-building, characterization, and conflict.

This is a romantic comedy where the stakes of the relationship are intimately tied to the stakes of imperial succession. The impressive bit is…it’s working?? Like this should be impossible to take completely seriously, but it does. It has that same lovely grounded character writing Echo has but about Space Wolves in Space Rome, and yet…the game’s so confidant about itself that in a way that a lot of dramatic AAA games just…aren’t. It’s this perfect blend of pure amateur dream project and actual writing chops that I love to see in the world.

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The worldbuilding is interesting. None of it is like…actually completely original to the game. There’s so many elements of it that are lifted directly from other scifi. What is weird is…it lifts it from scifi. The closest thing to TV and movie scifi is it vaguely feeling like an extened Star Trek episode premise. It does, like a lot of games, steal shamelessly from other media but when that media is Iain M Banks The Culture and David Brin’s Uplift it stands out from the crowd a bit.

(Like it’s this guy and Bungie. That’s really fucking weird)

That said, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t share my misgivings about some of the writing: The gist is there’s a cyclical series of civilizations that essentially integrate other civs into the galactic community as they’re discovered. There’s several established civs that are all of course Anthro animals, that mysteriously are based on human cultures. Rome, Egypt, etc. And a lot of them seem to have attempted to ‘uplift’ human civilizations but mysteriously none of them ever took. This is…hmm…naturally pretty colonialist but it’s trying to walk a fine line about what this looks like, specifically emphasizing that slavery and resource extraction is bad, and the fact that the Wolves do it is one of the core sins of their empire. At the same time…I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt so far because something seems off about this, and I think very intentionally so. It’s possible it’ll fumble this football, but I wanna see where it goes before I assume the worst?

Oh also this one has porn in it. Like Echo has graphic sex scenes but they’re pretty much all just text based (save for a optional side chapter not included in the base game). This one features dog guys fucking ion screen!

All in all…it’s good! I’d like more ‘wholesome’ games like this instead of small business managers. It’s definitely making me want to explore the unabashedly queer VN scene that seems to be proliferating these days.

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1520

That’s not a secret!

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1521

It sort of is!! you have to throw the pikmin in a special way to get over a wall, and you gotta freeze the water before they hit it or it’ll become inaccessible. it feels like a secret!!

anyway it’s not a good comparison to your secret i agree

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1522

turns out you can play video games. yall hear about this?

after my hardly touching it in my teen years because… frankly i don’t know why because while i was definitely a very stupid teen i still definitely played large amounts of many more difficult games and i’ve always looked fondly on the bit i did play then, but regardless i’ve picked up playing my copy of Final Fantasy X (2001) as an on-the-couch casual playing game on some evenings with the gf. It’s pretty great! It hooked me, real fast. I don’t even care that the sphere grid is a lot more limited in this version than the international version, that’s fine! this game’s mechanics have enough on the bone that i’m pretty content to experience it in the simplest way possible, at least the first time i run through it (i do intend to, later, play the international version though because i am a freak). the nuance of the characters’ lives and relationships is also really interesting but i’m also yknow. only barely out of the game’s first act so i’m not gonna talk about that much!

i have, on occasion, been playing Wild Guns (1994) with @contentdeleted and, lord, what a game. the mechanical nuances! those delicious context sensitive action buttons, the repeated tapping to swing your lasso, the differences between jumping and rolling… man. it’s so good. and thats to say nothing of the obviously amazing graphics. like, idunno, i knew this game owned but its wild how much it owns, actually playing it. definitely should shell out the cash for Reloaded just to get to be a cool big lady

I’ve taken various tastings of some other games recently as well, though those were just some snacks so I don’t have any thoughts too set in stone (aside from the fact that Gimmick! having a secret platforming challenge on its literal first screen which to reach you’d need to already have worked out the finer points of its wild ass mechanics completely owns)

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1523

I finally drank the Switch kool aid about a month ago. I got the OLED model and the Hori Split Pad Compact (in a nice shade of chartreuse) because I mostly play handheld. I’m not sure why I had a bad impression about the Switch user interface but I kinda like it. I like the wet fart sound when you flip through all your games on the main menu. Anyway here is what I’ve been playing:

Sega Ages Herzog Zwei I beat the computer at a game of herzog zwei! Motherfucker!! On type A difficulty but whatever! Gamer goal achieved! It only took going through the entire tutorial and maybe even having to go back to redo some sections a couple of times. Cool game! I will not be playing again!!

I want to say one little thing about the moe tutorial girl. In case you’re not familiar with M2’s “Emotional Motion Technology” used in this game’s tutorial…well, I’m not sure i am familar with what it is either. It seems to be a tool to animate character portraits in a way that is both sophisticated and kinda crude. There are lot of jokes in the tutorial but the funniest part was when moe commander gets really excited she does this very jerky “excited” reaction, but in one extreme case they play it over and over again rapidly, and because this is M2 Sega Ages release they use a very megadrivey sound effect, so she looks and sounds exactly like a Gunstar Heroes boss spazzing out.

Sega Ages Phantasy Star Hell of a game! Surely this beats Dragon Quest 2 for RPG of the year 1987. I know some people prefer the PSG music but I looove the FM music. I could not have finished it without the easy mode, the fast forward and the dungeon mapping. I didn’t even need a guide except towards the end when I needed to know town names. I guess this game came with a paper map that would have made it easier. Anyway thanks to all the enhancements it was so much easier to experiment with dead ends, wandering around and backtracking so I could figure stuff out myself. Best of all, unlike an emulator the music and sound effects don’t speed up when you fast forward. Using the Hori handles with the back buttons meant I could map one to fast forward and one to rapid A. It felt very luxurious.

Sega Ages Virtua Racing This should really be marketed as an HD version! It’s in a whole different league than the other Sega Ages games. It’s 1080p and 60fps! You’re not going to get that on any emulator. Unless it’s yuzu lol

Arcade Archives Tetris: The Absolute: The Grand Master 2 Plus I wanted a version of this to take on the go, and it’s more likely I might play doubles with somebody if it’s on a console connected to my TV rather than on my computer. But this is a disappointing port! the music kind of stutters! unacceptable! Also in handheld mode, my eye muscles started hurting and twitching! too small!

Moon I am amazed how similar this is to Chulip but also less cruel, prettier and more cohesive. Monsters in this game = underground citizens in Chulip, getting info about items by holding them up to people, the sound design…I feel ready to go back to try Chulip again, this feels like training for that game. Anyway I really loved this game and went ahead and double dipped on a used copy of the japanese deluxe release, but I didn’t actually finish the game. I managed to reach level 27 without a guide. when I finally caved and googled to learn about the requirements to get to the final fishing spot (which is also needed to finish the game), i felt utterly defeated bc I never would have figured that out on my own, and even with the answer in front of me I still felt like it was a lot of work. so the plan is to wait many years before going back and finishing the game so it’ll be like I just barely remember what to do & maybe I’ll be able to figure it out on my own then.

Death Come True I am always in the mood to play more live-action games after 428 but there’s a big difference between a game that uses nothing but photos (428 can pull this off well) and an actual FMV game that has like acting and cinematography and stuff (Death Come True cannot pull this off well)! but I got kind of used to the badness and the cringiness and it gets slowly better as it turns into kind of a metal gear solid 2 vibe. in the end I finished the game (I think it is less than 2 hours long) and I want companies to make more games like this, but I don’t recommend this one.

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1524

I think my ideal secret would be something like this: on day 15 there’s a thunderstorm and it causes a rockslide to cover up a cave entrance. If you go there after the rockslide, you just can’t enter the cave. Also, day 15 could be absolutely crazy mechanically since theres no hard day limit. It could force you to use water pikmin, all fires are doused for the day and bingo battle style lighting strikes randomly.

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1525

Please dig up and respond to my FFX thread where I really really did not like it.

I keep thinking about maybe going back to it.

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1526

First time playing Dragon’s Dogma and it’s just not really clicking with me. I get that it’s like a beat em up grafted into a limited, heavily designed “open world” and while in theory that sounds good… I’d just rather be playing Morrowind on the one hand or Spartan on the other. Or just… Dark Souls. I’d rather be playing Dark Souls. I think I need to get Elden Ring finally.

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1527

it didn’t age very well imo, but in a way that makes it likely the sequel will be much much better

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1528

I love Dragon’s Dogma but it is definitely poorly-aged jank. Still I have high hopes for the sequel.

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1529

I didn’t make it past the tutorial in Dragon’s Dogma when I tried it earlier this year either. I was hoping to be charmed by jank but I felt overwhelmed by a flood of it instead. For example, the characters kept spamming voicelines nonstop to the point of speaking over one another.

Come to think of it, I didn’t make it past the tutorial in Horizon Forbidden West either partly because of too high volume of voicelines there too, and that game is supposedly “polished”. So jankiness is maybe not the right way to frame the problem. It’s maybe something about the game’s philosophy towards orienting the player’s attention.

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1530

but rudie… you said you’d never go back…

I did the digging khan so you can do the posting if you want

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1531

I played a bit of Dragon’s Dogma a few years ago and I could see the brilliant core of it shining through but ultimately I couldn’t get over the jank either. TBH though the real problem for me was the endless inventory spam. Just so many different items that mattered so little, demanding incredible amounts of time and patience to deal with properly. That might be a me problem though… I also balked at this aspect of Divinity OS 2, but that game was good enough to keep me going through it.

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1532

this convo affirms my suspicion that games do not age, because it’s like every post up above is actually just seeing the game for how it always was, or at least what it looked like to me from my time playing at release and after the PC version. admirable but a bit too gluey for me to love playing.

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1533

Dragon’s Dogma won me over completely when I neared the end and the game chose as the hero’s love interest some random shopkeeper guy just because I had bought a lot of things from him while trying to exploit the buying and selling system.

And because I played the game though all the way twice and did the DLC pretty early on, several of my PlayStation friends who played months or maybe even years later told me that my pawn made the whole game a breeze for them, being so overpowered.

Pretty sure Dragon’s Dogma 2 is going to compel me to get a PS5 even though I don’t want one.

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1534

I hope the sequel teaches us about the hunting methods of wolves. I’ve always been curious about that and I have no idea how they go about it.

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