went back to this and it was terrible. as was the taekwondo minigame
5 Likes
play taekwondo on snes and champion kendou on msx
and the arcade game shanghai kid
2 Likes
yeah, customs charges have just been completely random (but thankfully rare) for me. plus i think you can currently only get one kind of shipping from japan to the uk (the expensive kind 
)
2 Likes
Beat Armo(u)red Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon and like it enough to go straight into NG+ which I was too lazy/inexperienced to do with For Answer. Iām curious as to how much of this was āMiyazakiāsā vision against Yamamuraās because this feels way more in line with the forementioned FA than anything in 5/VD, like Miyazaki made a 4:3 then Yamamura grafted a bunch of modern features on like posturing which (mostly) works and the Sekiro esque bosses which I should be more annoyed about than I actually am, maybe after 15 games having something a bit fresher was a good direction for the series especially keeping the arena mechs as a comparison.
Iāve heard complaints that this doesnāt have an easy mode but if anything I wish this had a hard mode like some of the others as after the first chapter once you settle into a rhythm only the bosses pose something like a challenge and even without anything like tuning the rest feels wilfully handicapping. Either way, the rest of it feels so good I donāt mind that much, wish it was longer.
16 Likes
Finished up Kena: Bridge of Spirits today (with a whole three extra days of PS+ coverage to spare) and it strikes me as both rather standard and quite odd? Before I described it as the game those who grew up on various PS2 action/platformer type games would go on to make, which I still feel is accurate as presentation and design wise it seems to hit many of those same notes. The thing is they went with basically āSouls liteā combat andā¦ like I said it makes things odd. The game is ranked teen for some reason (I guess because it deals with death and has lesbians in it?) but visually it feels very older kid aimed, and I keep going āman I donāt know how many kids would be willing to deal with this combatā. This may be completely wrong on my part, perhaps kids are actually playing various From and From-inspired games and have āgitten gudā but while not as deep or regularly as challenging it definitely has some bite to it.
Anyways I feel good about myself as the final boss in the game is a technically three but actually five phase slog that would take a good ten minutes to get through and which death sends you all the way back to the start, so I merely knocked the difficulty down a notch rather than bash my head against that. Iāll do that for a hard boss that respects my time (I did beat Malenia after all) but if you want me to master all five parts and will make me repeat all of them until I do soā¦ I got better shit to do with my time.
6 Likes
I started playing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun on steam.
Itās interesting! Iām on level 3 now.
itās as much of a RTS puzzle game as a RTS stealth game where the execution is the actual difficult part. It strongly encourages save-scumming so it can be played leisurely but then it also provides extra challenges for each mission and one of them is always a saveless run.
3 Likes
Master Detective Archives: Rain Code continues.
Holy god the 4th case is extremely dull.
The murder involves the killerās escape from a rooftop which the game goes to great lengths to make arbitrarily impossible except by one route which involves diving into a storm drain. One of the suspects is an expert swimmer and so the culprit is extremely obvious too early into the mystery. Theyāre also given a robbery motive out of nowhere (because you by chance pass a safe at one point late in the investigation) which does nothing to link it to the broader struggles of the walled-off city the game takes place in (the victim is the leader of a resistance group in the city). Nah, they were just greedy lol, gotta get the cash. Genuinely disappointingly dull murder mystery.
Danganronpa would regularly escalate stuff (sometimes to a ridiculous degree) but Iāll take that over sitting through 3 hours of dialogue to find out the swimmer did it. MDA just revels in a world with stupid rules and no stakes. The constant brushes with the law never lead to any consequences and our own murderous nature gets more absurd. We didnāt even need to solve the swimmer murder since our friends turn up seconds after we solve it to reveal theyāve solved it. Unfortunately for us, our solving it supernaturally kills the culprit, so we end up killing a man for no reason not even on the shaky premise that we needed to do it urgently to save ourselves. The protagonist is simply too eager to jump into the mystery labyrinth to kill somebody. So, we feel bad but then his love interest (who doesnāt know about his lethal murder-solving ability) tells him he did the right thing, so we just stop feeling bad. Iām not joking that the game most often resolves all of its ethical questions by having a cute girl try and distract the player.
The 5th case is a lot closer to DGR nonsense (an improvement) and involves solving a locked room murder involving a multi-layered security panic room and some new plot elements that link back to specific characters who arenāt just one-off NPCs. We also finally get an NPC companion who actually challenges your choices to kill people and even threatens to kill you based on a premonition about how the power could be more disastrous e.g. if enough people were directly, knowingly responsible for a large scale crime you could just take them all out in one go if youāre good enough at logical deduction.
DGR had a theme of hope/despair and MDA tries to do the same for truth (truth at what cost?) but it kinda falls flat since real consequences almost never seem to happen and itās treated as though solving the murders with capital punishment will eventually pay off one day. The NPC partner stepping into challenge things with this ātruth doomā premonition is keeping me going but Iām finding Iām increasingly annoyed at the game.
I originally bought in because I enjoyed DGR for the most part and love Masafumi Takadaās music but I canāt recommend this game at this point. It just doesnāt respect your time enough, even by the YA VN baseline.
5 Likes
My friend has been sending me indie games that catch their eye and Iāve been playing the demos (or in one case the game itself), so hereās Tegiminisā Word Of Mouth Report.
Dungeon crawler with an Islamic theme and a deliberately obtuse / old school presentation. You canāt use your mouse, to change settings you close the game and edit a text file, it was made in 3DGS (anyone remember that engine? lul), etc. Hits that sweet spot of really old RPGs, like Iām playing some five floppy creation in 1992. I liked it!
Pretty standard platformer. The gimmick is you are both a duck and a turtle, and you can do combo moves with them to traverse the levels. Itās nothing special but itās also a lot better than most games of this ilk; levels in the demo are very focused on particular themes and mechanical challenges, so youāre always learning or practicing your movement skills. Plus the sprite work is adorable. I liked it!
Fantasy wizard FPS akin to Wolfenstein, down to collecting treasure to make your score go up. The sprite work is okay but I found the fireball weapon to be finicky and the level design boring. I did not like it 
Completely linear sci-fi visual novel following a fictional whale species on another planet, presented like a nature documentary. You can probably watch a playthrough on YouTube and get the same experience as playing it yourself. VERY good, the art is fantastic and the writing nails that nature documentary feel while also hinting at much larger worldbuilding just behind the curtains. Great stuff.
15 Likes
Aliens: Dark Descent - Interesting mix of survival horror, rts (with the option to pause and issue commands), stealth and squad-based action. Combat is nothing like X-com. In fact, the game actively discourages you from getting into too many fights, as it only ramps up the frequency of attacks, which drain your resources, saps your squadās mental and physical resolve and could cost you a day when you have to pack it up and burn another deployment.
Itās a much better idea to go from room to room, gather resources, take out enemies undetected and anticipate where you might be vulnerable, plan contingencies, and make sure your rear is covered should a roamer appear out of nowhere.
6 Likes
Played the Sea of Stars demo finally. The Messenger liker has logged on. My kid wasnāt around and believe me and my friends, I said audibly āfuck youā half a dozen times in the 90 minutes I played it.
Which sucks because the beautiful pixel art put tears to my eyes. There is a lighting system in this that I cannot believe. Light went through a divided window and cast at different levels on a bench. It didnāt need to do that!
Strikes Against it:
- The dialog sucks universally
- the battles are a slog
- Remember Chrono Trigger
- The player characters have zero personality
- That is certainly Chiptunes
- āpuzzlesā (do the one thing you can do)
- we paid Yasunori Mitsuda a few hundo for his name on the box
- companion cubes
- crafting
- So many hats on hats
I didnāt see a dog to pet at least. The fishing minigame was involved.
I am probably going to play it. Then again I never played CrossCode.
I put off playing it because I am sure I was gonna hate it. Oh well.
17 Likes
Never trust a game that uses āmusic by old composer who worked on the game weāre apingā as one of its main selling points.
The writing in The Messenger never seemed as good as the game wanted you to think it was, what with how many story scenes it felt like it had that it did definitely did not need. So itās not really surprising to me that that making a story-heavy RPG did not work to the developersā strengths. But they somehow managed to get the game on both Xbox Game Pass and Playstation Plus at the same time on release, so I hope they got some good money from arranging those deals.
10 Likes
I tried to join in on the Disaster Report 4 fun but, despite it being funny and having a strong PS2 charm, it was just too slow going and I could tell it would eventually frustrate me in the same way that getting stuck in a point and click adventure game does.
And I also tried to play Final Fantasy XV again, because itās so intriguing, and because I once put 25 hours into it (pre all those patches) and feel like I should see it through for, well, no reason I guess. But the combat is fucking INCOMPREHENSIBLE! There is a lock on that doesnāt seem to aid in landing hits. The lunge doesnāt take you far enough to reach any enemy. Hitting the button to evade like youāre prompted to when a creature is attacking and the game says BLOCK!! seems to more often than not cause you to actually evade and miss the chance to parry. Itās maybe the least cohesive system I have ever had to grapple with in a game with this budget, which is fascinating, but I donāt buy into the bizarre unity asset store fantasy world aesthetic of this one to feel compelled to keep playing it. And yetā¦ there is something here that makes me think I havenāt totally written it off. The bros on a road trip vibe is attractive.
12 Likes
wizardy
ive actually been playing more Ganbare Goemon but i wanted to make fun + funny posts about them, but i cant figure out where all my retroarch screenshots are saving to on my SteamDick so. blurry photos of wizardry maps are fun in their own way right??
i really like floor 1-2 of this game. undecided on floors 5-6 so far and floor 3 is a giant prank on me that can go to hell lol i thought it was a puzzle that wanted me to figure out the correct orientation to follow the signs on the floor on the various crossroads, lest i fall into a pit or step on a spinner trap. unless i missed something though, the steps are all bullshit and what the game actually wanted me to do is fuck off. you have to sneak around all the crossroads through hidden doors and the floor exit is behind one of them
this post is brought to you by the beautiful math notebooks currently being resold at my favorite store in the world, Northampton Deals and Steals. i will probably never use another type of book for sketching and doodling and mapping
20 Likes
WarGroove is uh
really boring?
I think the problem is that it doesnāt have the charm of Advance Wars, but it has all of the flaws (and doubles down on a couple).
For example, the battle animations are significantly slower than Advance Wars, so each one feels like a bit of a chore. This works in Fire Emblem because all of those units have incredible animations, plus you get to know many of them as people so it lends some narrative weight. But these are mostly disposable units and the animations are that āso gorgeous that iām boredā sort of pixel art thatās been in vogue the past, uh, 10 years. So I ended up skipping them extremely quickly.
Also, the thrust of the game seems to be a lot of the same āWar is fun!!ā vibes of Advance Wars, but thereās no writing to back it up. Itās easier to write maudlin war stories when you donāt have the chops - the emotions sell themselves. But a sort of goofy yeehaw-letās-have-fun-folks vibe requires very strong writing and characters to bounce off of. Itās gotta be Anime!!! This game is not anime!!! The writing is bad, and also not anime!!! !!!
The art overall is lackluster somehow. The character profiles for the important characters just likeā¦donāt work for me? Generic fantasy vibes. The units are cute and very differentiated between sides but they have like, too many frames of animation so they stop being little plastic toys and start being dudes who are getting killed by skeletons.
The music is extremely dull generic fantasy music.
And somehow, the battles are even more slow than Advance Wars. Like, that game gets to be a slog in the later campaign but this one feels like a slog in mission 2. Mission 2 took 12 turns!! And I was trying really hard to play aggressively. Iām not even really sure why theyāre slower. I think the AI might be smarter than Advance Wars, so itās harder to trick them into doing stupid things. I also think the level design is not as good. But honestly itās just really hard to say. It feels like a vague problem.
I went back and played Advance Wars for an hour just to make sure I wasnāt papering over problems with nostalgia and, nope, that game is brisk and breezy and very cute. Great game! Iāll just play that instead.
21 Likes
played a game called holehole which donāt look it up unless you are ready for risque-looking furry cleavage. itās not a risque game at all tho, and the game you see in screenshots is not even really the textual narrative to the game as its about the girl who was making it.
when we see ārealityā itās still furries but drawn a bit rougher and more modestly. like the mundane reality to the āholeā that the game in-game takes place in.
a hole in the ground that loops on itself, inhabited by people eating the trash that falls down there, and a supposed ādungeonā further below that the ādeveloperā never finished. sometimes it feels like you can see parts of the āauthorā reflected in the gameās script. the story itself is simple and the twist gets obvious early on, but itās interesting to see this fake artifact as memory capsule.
11 Likes
Rainy Day Racer makes me wonder if the arcade racer is purely an indie joint now. The unending Scottish drizzle was a cool aesthetic, but I think its understated how much the general quiet in the rest of the presentation is what really sells it as a product of urban Scotland. The cars arenāt flashy, the podium girl is nestled in a rain poncho, and the environments take great care to include industrial projects and grim slabrous Scottish council homes.
Drift mastery is very rewarding, especially since all the game really asks of you is to clear the par time for a lap across just 3 courses. Learning to accelerate around corners close to 100mph feels really good in this. The announcer gently encourages you with brief updates about lap records and checkpoint gains. He never gives it a full-throated Wave Race 64, staying instead at speaking volume. They donāt even show the time difference between laps and checkpoints which I think is actually crucial to the lighter encouragement, you donāt stress the milliseconds. That said, I got 2:50:02 on Seawall, .02 seconds below par
Iām interested in the extent to which the game is meant as a piece of comedy. Itās clearly trying to pinpoint a very specific national identity but does so in contrast to genre and street racing conventions (as they exist in Hollywood/other arcade racers) and feels self-effacing in the way that Scotland is sometimes preoccupied with its small crapnesses circumstantial to oneās situation ā in this case being endlessly rained on. Turning that into the quiet, persistent soundtrack to perfecting a single mechanic works really well.
17 Likes
i played the first thirty minutes of demons crest, absolutely wonderful first thirty minutes of a game. real all-timer
11 Likes
Iāve reached Chapter 5 of AC: VI.
Completed the first mission, and now the playthrough forks through two different missions. Since my brother went one way, Iām gonna go the otherā¦ and Iām pretty sure a certain voice in my head is about to be very, very cross with me.
3 Likes