I am also behind PIRATES, it is super duper fun.
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Yeah, as much shit as I talked about it in the podcast I really love the hell out of that game. It manages a really fine balance of being details-oriented simmy while striving for fun first.
I actually love and miss the sid meier school of ‘a bunch of minigames tied together by a simulation-y theme’ game design represented by Pirates! and Sword of the Samurai.
I have probably put hundreds of hours into Pirates, that game owns. I never finished the story tho because… I forget honestly. I hated the treasure hunting, maybe?
I basically love the original take on Pirates! (especially Pirates! Gold) but thought that the newer version overcomplicated it something fierce.
It was generally simpler than the original Pirates! though.
Granted, Pirates! Gold was simpler than both but still. You don’t need or have a sextant in nu Pirates!
Yeah, it’s not complicated at all as far as I can remember
I finally got over my frustration with retroarch after realising that effectively none of the “cores” for platforms that aren’t already handled by mednafen actually work well at this point (though at least the PSX retroarch core has internal resolution scaling, unlike mednafen’s).
to that end it’s still, I guess, a good low-latency frontend for mednafen with the promise of getting better and a decent controller-driven UI. but the ppsspp fork is way out of date, the yabause fork doesn’t implement hardware rendering, the dreamcast core is just broken, the mame implementation can’t handle dynamic aspect ratios so CPS3 stuff isn’t a good idea, and the n64 core is really really early. and the automated directory scanning still doesn’t work well enough for the “playlist” concept to be the first-class browsing option.
oh, it also implements the desmume fork with internal resolution scaling. so that’s at least one little feather in its cap.
mednafen has low quality support for nes, gameboy, gba, snes, genesis
retroarch is definitely way better than using a 10 years out of date hack of bsnes
the n64 core, despite the new features being in a very early stage, is already better than any other standalone n64 emulator just because it doesn’t depend on trying to manage a bunch of janky hackjob plugins in the hopes that the game will be just barely playable with the right collection of hacks.
yeah I never used mednafen for snes either but I declined to point that out because I prefer snes9x (which retroarch includes an up-to-date-version of!) since I hate byuu’s approach to emulation but I know that’s indefensible.
its nes/md/gba implementation has always been basically beyond reproach in my experience though, and the psx support is fine save for the missing resolution scaling
Isn’t this Mupen?
Haven’t been having any trouble with Mupen64Plus on Linux, apart from it being light on options and the frontend I downloaded being not so hot.
Its mupen with a handful of in progress improvements
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Worth noting is that I never did any “land invasions” in the early Pirates! games, never quite figured them out. New Pirates! made them borderline mandatory in my experience with it. I recall failing to reach a single city in the time I spent with it because of this and never played again after that first annoying session.
So for me it added an extra step that kinda killed the whole thing for me. Perhaps the rest of the game beyond that was relatively simple, that part was too complex.
quantum break came out on steam recently and it was actually playable and legible for me compared to the windows store version and I ended up liking it quite a bit (though the windows store version was almost interesting for the experience of playing what felt like a busted ps3 game on a crt from the comfort of your desktop pc). the time travel all works out logically within the story and I thought the bad guy was interesting. moreso than the main character. and paul serene is a great name. the tv show stuff is kind of goofy. I didn’t really care about the characters it mostly focused on. but I guess it did help expand the world a bit and make it feel bigger than if it was just all about the characters in the game. it was funny seeing a live action guy with a handgun shoot and kill like 5 rifle and armor wearing guys like any videogame protagonist does all the time. anyway, thought it was a neat time travel story
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Why does everyone forget that Neo Contra exists
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hey does anybody know if tim ever got to play Steal Princess, on the Nintendo DS
Yes.
You could have asked what I thought of it ;_;
Stuck on Downwell boss. Doesn’t to have any deeper strategy than “shoot it a lot and look out for the fireballs” but is a very long gauntlet and leftover enemies become a problem. That being said, is surprising how easy are the aquifer and purgatory areas compared to the dungeon, purgatory mostly. By the time you reach it you have so many upgrades you can just shoot all the time while falling and making sure you land in a debris piece frequently enough. You can even take more risks there, if you take a hit most of the time you have a combo big enough to get that hit point back. Finding a spot to land and get the benefits of the combo is harder than doing the combo itself.
Yeah the catacombs is the hardest level because its dense w/ threats that you might not be equipped to respond to yet.
The key to the boss is to have all the gem-related upgrades (gem attract + gem powered + gem bullets is a hella good combo) and the drone and the one that creates a time-stop bubble when you get hit. Also, lots of health and ammo obviously.
Yeah, finished just right now. I managed somehow to reach the boss with ten life and tons of energy, and the weapons I found while fighting it were all heavy things like the shotgun and the puncher. There was a moment in the aquifer part of the fight I thought I was going to die but the extended invincibility of the candle made things easier. The purgatory part of the fight is quite easy in the end, enemies move only in vertical so you can remain in a narrow part of the level and shoot away.
Anyway, I think I am done with the game for the time being. Really good time, way better than other rogue-lites I played before. I am looking at you, Risk of Rain.
I played the REmake for the first time last night and @toups told me that it was a false god that deserved no praise ;-;
also I’m really bad at it