Small Adastra addendum
So uh, this is all true but…
Add Book of the New Sun to the list of stuff it’s taking ideas from.
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There are so many hidden interactions in this game that are only apparent if you are familiar with miyazawa’s work, though perhaps the most visible is the pair of traffic lights in town that fall in love with each other (I doubt most people would think to even talk to the traffic lights)
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Nox Archaist (Apple II)
The grind is real
and shops/inventory are a pain. Think I’ll stick to Angband.
I do like the aesthetic, but it might’ve ended up being slightly eye-strainey.
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played Venba, it was a nice enough story and the recipes are fairly realistic, however it’s quite short and as a Tamil cuisine aficionado i felt it could have included some more recipes. the characters are quite cardboard cutout and it doesn’t really give the casual player a full sense of breadth of culture, I thought; altho if you are from the culture you can detect touches of verisimilitude like the travel agency calendar with quotes from the Thirukkural on it (every Tamil household seems to have one), the style of film songs that come on the radio in different eras (one of them is a spoof on a children’s rhyme my grandmother taught me), etc.
I thought it was a shame they engaged with the kid mostly as this whitewashed caricature whose arc is about dealing with the whitewashedness; very typical diaspora art thing that i think is overdone and trite. Personally I was never whitewashed nor do I understand the appeal of ‘wanting to be white’ [9/11 happened when i was 10 so there was no shot of that] so I guess i am an unsympathetic audience this way. my dad was very militant about preserving the language and the culture, requiring us to speak tamil in the house, and so on; both me and my brother chafed at this but I think we were glad at the time and now to have that part of us never in question. my dad hates all non-tamil food, so we literally always ate tamil food in the house 100% of the time, and if i wanted something different it was rarely “trying to escape my culture” but rather trying to experience a different culture than the one i was constantly receiving. so yeah, the ‘whitewashed diaspora kid’ narrative simply didn’t land for me, i think it’s an overdone totalizing narrative.
they touch upon money struggles several times but i wish they had shown more characters outside of the nuclear family; Tamil culture and immigrant culture in general is so networked and intergenerational and community based, but you don’t see other family or community members outside of phone calls and dialogue references. there are some definite missed opportunities there. like for example, my dad tells a story about working his first American job in Amarillo TX, not having anyone to socialize or support him outside of Indian coworkers at the company, so he looked up a phone book and simply started calling random people who he recognized as having Tamil or Indian names asking if he could come over for dinner. One of them said yes, he became friends with that family, they taught him to drive a car, and they still keep in touch now and then. We don’t see that side of ‘surviving in a new land’, rather all the story takes place pretty much in the one home.
but yeah I don’t mind it, good to support someone making these games so there are more like it. the cooking sequences themselves were nice, not too obvious for a casual player I think, and uses cooking logic in what will be an unfamiliar cuisine for many players. (i can read tamil and know the dishes so things were of course easier) definitely the most satisfying part of the game.
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Damn Xenotilt is a lot and an easy way to just make half an hour disappear
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i am enjoying bomb rush cyberfunk a lot more than i thought! currently just past what i think is the first chapter and it feels like the right amount of retro that i want right know with just a few qol improvements that help the whole thing feel a little better
it currently doesn’t feel like anything more than just a jet set radio clone, i wish it had a little bit more personality of its own, i’d love more zineth in it or at least some kind of differentiation between the different movement methods - right now they all feel exactly the same but having some kind of like thps combo system but revolving around switching to the correct style of travel (blades, skateboard, bmx) at the correct time to get places would be fantastic
i’m a little worried that it’ll just be too simple and easy but it’s fine right now. i think the music is definitely holding the game up a lot more than anything else, i’m actually really enjoying all of it
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The lore with this game is, once at a birthday party someone just left a cartridge of it behind and thats how it came into our family’s possession, but we were never able to get very far due to not having an n64 save pak for the longest time. Certain indie game developers have rumbled about how good it is, and I’ve been curious to revisit it now that I have some idea of what games are doing.
The game’s biggest weakness is how generic it is. You’re a child who has to save the world, again! I do think the 3d environments help sell the game a lot better. There’s also a subtle day/night cycle. I don’t know if it has gameplay implications yet but it sort of brings the world to life a little more. It’s no Ocarina of Time
After starting the game you have to leave the giant castle, then climb down a hill to the village, and then stop at the inn to save your game for the first time. Every village is walled off, leading to a sense of danger of the outside world. The npc designs are…unique
So let’s talk about the battle system. You have 4 elemental attacks from the get go plus one melee attack for hitting enemies. You don’t select an enemy to hit but rather aim your guy in the general direction of who you want to hit and then use an attack (bound to the C buttons). Attacks have different ranges and those scale to different attack levels. So the wind cutter attack is long distance but doesn’t do a lot of damage, but the water pillar attack is really close up but powerful. I think elemental attacks mean that certain enemies will be weaker to certain attacks but nothing is really indicated yet.
The positioning system means that you can move out of range of enemy attacks and try to hit them from further away so there’s some skill involved. I think there’s auto targeting? It’s hard to tell. You can also keep moving out of range from some enemy attacks and avoid getting hit for an entire battle. To exit a battle you just have to run outside the battle’s radius, which takes a few turns depending on deep into the battle zone you are. It’s more engaging than a lot of battle systems are, but the elemental system feels like I’m only going to have like 5 attacks the entire game? Maybe as the game progresses you can position yourself and hit multiple enemies with a single attack.
I’m trying to decide if the game is “good” or not, I want to keep playing and possibly finish it, and it’s only 12 hours long according to da internet.
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Master Detective Archives: Rain Code continued
2023 is the year of the sidequest. I’ve abandoned doing sidequests in this and there’s literally no downside, don’t do them.
The abstract representations of the mystery through a physical space rather than a simulated debate is probably the games biggest strongpoint at the moment. Sometimes they are re-enactments and sometimes the spatial relationships are metaphorical. Asking you to re-enact the steps of a locked room mystery is more engaging than simply pointing out logical contradictions alone.
The corrupt police force that is constantly trying to block you is a limp bit of writing. There are established as immoral fascists who are willing to kill to cover stuff up, but despite you being cornered by them multiple times and people mysteriously dying in your vicinity, they never take the step to just arrest, neutralise, or kill you and so aren’t very credible antagonists. There is so much handwaving it’s ridiculous. This gets especially dumb because:
Our character is just a murderer. The fact that the person who committed the crime dies immediately upon solving the mystery is just the weirdest ethical pill the game asks you to swallow. At the point I am in the story, team murderers has killed nine people, and I am responsible for the deaths of six people since accomplices are included in the solving. For every 3 people killed so far, I have pretty much knowingly killed 2. I assume the game is eventually going to revive people upon the solving of a big mystery? Otherwise not really sure what is justifying this other than ‘murderers are bad people NO MATTER WHAT’ or some convoluted greater good argument. I am literally a serial killer vigilante who covers up their crimes. Your character ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ about the ethics but goes along anyway because otherwise the game wouldn’t progress.
The Looker
Excellent parody. The bathos to Blow. My favourite joke is the one about the slow laser mechanisms. The mechanic is genuinely interesting as well although line drawing is frequently stymied by corners cutting the line. This roughness kinda mirrors the extremely clinical lines of The Witness well though. Drawing lines or being confined to the limits of a maze is shown as having two modes: rigid adherence to design purity, or the messy playfulness of freedom. They even push the mechanic to its extremes with little rules wrinkles. It arguably does this slightly more organically than The Witness because of its length, since mechanics are not limited to themed areas, they just come thick and fast in the hour or so the game takes to complete. Highly recommend and I wish there were more direct game parodies like this.
It Takes Two
Great level design. I’ve watched the game through 2 times already but first time playing with someone. The narrative and tone do not hold up. The best stuff is when you mercilessly murder sentient objects. Otherwise, it’s insane how cartoony the parents’ dialogue delivery get (the dad in particular) after becoming dolls. Like parents going through divorce isn’t quite the right framing device for most of the game. Looking forward to more though since the game is just fun to blast through with a friend.
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I got the game at release and it was a disappointment. The thing that really kills is is the « unenthusiastic depressing fanfare » soundtrack
I think people find the weird mechanics cool but that’s nothing that wasn’t in SaGa or Parasite Eve before really. I don’t think there’s much to save about it
You sort of have to go invest all your points into one element and this is like a hidden difficulty choice. Do you pick an element with healing spells?
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yes, you do because theres literally no economy and you cant buy healing items lol
i have an (admittedly sorta tongue in cheek half-ironic) affection for this game but tbf you pretty much described all the interesting things about it hellojed. i like the music tho!
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In Ms. Pac-Man, if you insert a credit on the marquee attract screen before any ghosts appear, your first maze/life will be purple-walled instead of orange.
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learned that you earn agility points by running around in the world so the strat is to just leave the game on with a rubber band holding the analog stick for a few days to level it up.
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okay, so I’m hyped for Cyber Bomb Rush but also I am one of those freaks who vastly prefers the original Jet Set Radio over Future. should I hold off for a sale, since everyone keeps comparing it to the latter? (especially since it seemingly replicates the worst parts of Future, including the combat?)
also man, I played 20 minutes of Everspace 2 today and I don’t think I like looter shooters. as a thing. all of that resource collecting, ew.
I don’t really play Dead By Daylight but the Texas Chainsaw game is fun, as a giant fan of the original. grandpa is the best there ever was!
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i may have talked about this before but Quest 64 is the most unfinished version of the game
Imagineer went on to further refine things in the PAL localization (Holy Magic Century) and further still in the (definitive) Japanese release, Eltale Monsters. most of the differences are catalogued on the tcrf page:
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yeah bad game hall of fame had an article about it where they talked about how the different versions have fixes and improvements, I wonder if there’s an english translation patch of one? but what’s the point all the dialog is so bad lmao
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i started playing the ps3 copy of dragon’s dogma i got a couple of years ago for £1, and it’s pretty good. like a less miserable witcher, i guess? nice that it came with an actual manual with multiple pages held together with staples. even in 2012 that was uncommon
but then i found out that dragon’s dogma: dark arisen on ps4 is an enhanced version and not a sequel like i assumed and that also goes on sale for dirt cheap pretty often. so i’ll probably get and play that instead when i’ve wore down some other games in my backlog, just because it’s so much easier to take screenshots on ps4.
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you got the superior main menu experience at least
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still early in opoona, but i looked it up to check and you only get your first party member a third of the way through the game and then you don’t get the second until the final third. it’s 90% wandering around lost in airports and 10% grinding. you can get part time jobs and make friends and watch tv and you have an art stat that increases when you find outdoor conceptual sculptures. it’s a sprawling wii game with the design philosophy of an extremely obtuse nes rpg and the dazzlingly sterile y2k surfaces and modern lifestyle aesthetic of a jp-only dreamcast title. @aislesgrises drew my vtuber as opoona, this is how it feels
my friend and i have been playing ff7 with the retranslation patch and (quite brutal) hardtype mod and it’s impressive how fun this game is and how intentional its design feels with the tightened balance forcing you to engage with the mechanics and patterns. the translation also helps clarify the characterful weirdness that made teens fall in love with it. i’m still not totally sold, but it’s been nice to look at through fan goggles.
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encountered at least one gory creature carcass while trying super junkoid and feel more compelled to play these than i did before
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