Games You Played Today ##RELOAD

I think this is a huge influence on Devine Linvega’s fictional language toys, too.

River City: Tokyo Rumble is fun. Not as trashy as I was assuming, controls real snappy. Initially had ignored it after seeing some drab screenshots years ago and reading it was a remake of Renegade; ostensibly it is but it plays more like a re-org of RCR. Looks more appealing running on the hardware. Worth the time.

I’ve also been playing through the most recent Ace Attorney, Spirit of Justice. Had also convinced myself I wasn’t so interested in this game, assuming it was some kind of time travel to the past plot for some reason. I guess I must have mixed it up with that other spinoff one that actually does take place in the past or whatever. I had played some of Dual Destinies via the iPad port, and ultimately gave up on it. This one seems to be clicking better. Character models look real nice in this game. Good comfort food; I wish everything was faster in these games and that I could play them without holding something up in my arms.

I’m really enjoying Recore in spite of its layers of cruft. It feels good to move around, and the platforming is flexible when it comes to scaling steep surfaces. I like the zandatsuesque mechanic with the tug of war for cores!

I was really bummed out when a) the line of dialogue (paraphrasing) “I’m not giving this core to robots like these!” and b) the inventory limit cropped up within 30 seconds of each other. You can definitely see where some guy came in and said “no she has to talk to the robots” and another guy came in and said it had to have loot and crafting etc. The music is also completely forgettable - it’s like the Modern Warfare level up guitar riff over drum loops over and over again.

Wow, the Amiga version looks awesome. That pseudo-3D scrolling looks better than the ST version.

Metroid Prime more like Metroid waste of Time. I have completely fallen out of love with this game. I’m right near the end it seems, but I’m missing like half of the artefacts and I really can’t be screwed going back through the game and finding them all. The game has tested my patience enough. I love a lot of things about it and the first half was a lot of fun, but it just becomes a bigger tedious pile of crap the more you play it.

And FORGET playing any of the sequels.

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Yep. This is how I felt. I looked up a guide to deal with the constant beam swapping I mentioned before, then saw that I had to collect more shit and called it a day.

It goes against the tradition of what defines a Metroid game. It’s as if Retro ran out of ideas and decided to shoe-horn a fetch-quest from what was most likely their abandoned RPG project.

It’s Goblet Grotto’s primary influence, apart from capitalism

also Gary Panter I think

Getting the artifacts doesn’t take as long as it initially seems, but one of my biggest qualms with Metroid prime is that the main path every first time player is likely to walk through the game runs into some severe pacing and layout problems the further along it gets. As an example, the part where you see that you need I believe a grappling hook so you walk all the way across the world to where it is, then have to walk all the way back to exactly where you last left off. Earlier in that game and in the better Metroid games they’d mix it up and present a less obviously padded way to do all this.

Also, it is almost worth playing Metroid Prime 2 (almost worth playing is another way of saying “not worth playing”) just to see how many different locks and keys one game can throw at the player.

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Oh, I found out that Freedom Planet 2 teaser came out

It’s like they smoothed over all the bullshit and made everything prettier and, my god, the custom difficulty options

Already among the top games of the year (I swear, you can power past the furry nonsense, it’s a good game!)

Hitting up Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries after eons.

I wonder if they intended to allow the player to fight dirty against the Clans by targeting deactivated units beyond visual range and hosing them with fire beyond what your reticle tells you is possible, because damned if they don’t take a good while to respond once they start getting shot up, longer than it seems to take when you do similar in original MW2.

And whether they did or not I’m doing it, fighting dirty against the Clans is how you do it at the time, and the game puts you on Wolcott and Luthien which are battles that highlight that fact. And I’m getting my money’s worth out of those double heat sinks and an extra PPC I put on my Awesomes.

Also after mentioning it in @meauxdal’s early first person polygonal thread I’m playing Earthsiege, since it’s one of those games that slipped through the cracks of my limited finances back in the day. It definitely feels a bit more sim-like the the Mechwarrior games, between the level of squad command options you can give, the main display you “look down” to get your detailed map and status and such, and with the importance it places on active and passive radar and missiles types and other things. One particular problem it suffers in this regard is having only one MFD though, which severely limits your access to information, especially since you can’t have your radar display active at the same time as anything else, nor afford to look at your main display in the middle of a firefight.

Movement and combat are kind of weird though, there’s really poor feedback of when and how you take damage, partly due to aforementioned MFD issue, and there’s a certain stiffness to movement of everything, which aids in combat really devolving into just hosing every gun you have at a Herc’s legs, both because it usually kills quick and also because it nets you the most salvage, which other than weapons is an abstract numerical value that is basically money to repair and build units. There’s an energy level that applies to your energy based weapons and shields, but so far I find rarely feels as important as the heat management of Mechwarrior. Also land skimmers are fast airborne units that are annoying as fuck and way too common, and even missiles aren’t good at hitting them like you’d think they would be.

It’s an interesting intermediate step between Mechwarrior 1 and 2, not nearly as stiff and clunky as the MW1, but also not nearly as smooth as MW2. It is also really nice to look at, though suffers big on draw distance, gunfights start before you can properly see things and it has some real nice low poly low res textured stuff, but you have to get very close before LOD brings it all out.

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Okay, I will. You can expect more on it on Monday because right now life is happening and I don’t have the time. I’ll post here again

Addicted to my Nuzlock run of Pokemon Y.

I am really bad at Pokemon it turns out. I have had around 20 of my little buddies perish on me including both starters, the Lucario and Lapras that are gifted to you and am left with a rag tag bunch with some questionable type coverage.

About to go into the psychic gym and I have only one pokemon that truly owns psychics. Should be interesting.

been blasting through Makai Toushi SaGa (WSC, 2002). it’s roughly 300% better than the GB original, and it also includes that version in its entirety (which is also translated(!)). that makes this the uncontested definitive version. and what a version it is!

there’s such a thin line between woefully underpowered and laughably strong. i love it

i don’t love it when my mutant overwrites his best spell randomly

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I had too much coffee and now im playing cs:go for some reason! Played for honor beta last night. I have mixed feelings about it. Have you guys checked it out yet?

I hated Woolly World when I first played it, but it turns out I was playing it wrong, trying to find all the doodads in each level and it drove me insane. I tried it again after enjoying the demo of the 3DS one, and having a much better time with it now that I’m chill about collectables. Plus I can bring Poochy along to help me find stuff. It’s a nice chill game if you let it. Plus it’s so pretty.

Wish they would add the 3DS stuff to the Wii-U version though.

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a couple days ago i finished metal gear solid v: the phantom pain. it took me seventy five hours, which is probably some thirty hours longer than with peacewalker.

i think it’s the only metal gear game i’m somewhat ambivalent about. definitely the most enjoyable on the basis of being able to be inventive/mischevious on a moment-to-moment scale, that being one of the reasons i still hold snake eater with the highest regard. it’s fun to think about the relation of the two in terms of skill, because in phantom pain it is way more acessible to do crazy stuff while in snake eater there was a level of coordination recquired to make the controls do what you wanted (lots of buttons to be pressed/hold, harder to obtain certain fun items, etc).

no but like, there are so many variables in any outspost and bigger base. it’s a marvel of design. i probably won’t play any other metal gears over the next years, to say the least (except for snake eater (which i already did (just the virtuous mission though))).

my negative criticisms lie in that by making a lot of the exposition moments being delivered “sideways” via casette tapes and unexpected cutscenes (that’s more prominent in chapter 2) although at first it feels more personal it starts to thin out with time, which is a common problem with “open” games to me – eventually taking the helicopter and walking around motherbase and trying to understand the geo-political intricacies of its world became less and less charming and more vapid.

i came to appreciate the Big Twist at the end. as @teblus once wrote somewhere else, i’m just glad they managed to make something new out of the concept of big boss (which in itself is redundant because big boss is by definition “just” a concept).

I like how these cutscenes happen devoid of any agency in chapter 2 (that feels more like an epilogue than a chapter in itself). The fact that they just happen and are somewhat related to your previous actions in chapter 1 is Very Good, even if people ended up hating them.

For a guy who doesn’t like Dark Souls, NIOH sure is a surprise hit.

Still playing Banished. It’s been quite a while since I have been so steadily addicted to a game like I am with this one.

“Ok just one more season. I gotta see if those bean fields pay off.” D: