I mentioned it in another thread, but I’ve played more of Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity since then and I can’t overstate how much I like this game. It’s as if it’s been designed with my tastes in mind.
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Shmups basically require an arcade stick to be played properly, imo
Esp rade is the perfect videogame for everyone
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Enjoyed Shovel Knight. Had good throwbacks to Mega Man while still maintaining its own identity. I never felt like I should just be playing MM instead
Learning Age of Empires 4 with some friends and it has one of the strangest end of game stat screens I’ve ever seen. Military score doesn’t care about your fighting, instead it adds up the total value of your remaining military at the end of the game. Economic points are based on what resources you save rather than what you earn/spend (as far as we can tell)
The game piles abstract mechanics on top of AoE2 with varying degrees of success. I enjoy the civilization that gets bonuses based on hunting wild animals since that’s a thing that already exists in the game. Another civilization gets cows instead of farms and I have no way to intuit if that’s good or not. It feels like just remixing an existing mechanic for the sake of distinction rather than offering a unique benefit
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i find the hitbox in esp ra de pretty hard to keep track of, one bc it’s not visible, but two bc there are so many like fluid turning sprites when moving. the hitbox is on the “body”, but the body is not always centered on the sprite depending on what animation you’re in.
cool game though. the flow with the special weapons is really interesting.
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Yeah the hitbox is a bit fucked and the slowdown can be stuttery in a really frustrating way but… its the best
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New PoP came out today (I guess it came out a few days ago for folks who wanted to pay the expensive Ubisoft tax, and, nah!), and…it’s pretty good. Sincerely impressed with how many combat options are available early on with just two or three buttons.
Whole game just has a real good feel to the movement.
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Sonic Generations (PC/Steam)
The end boss fights are worse than the earlier boss fights, which were already remarkably bad. The third to last tells you what to do–as usual right as the action starts, so I missed it initially–but doesn’t make any sense: why would the boss keep setting himself up? Finally he changes tactics, does something even more boring for 82 seconds, and falls over.
The last two boss fights are something else: you can’t tell what you’re supposed to do, what the buttons are doing, or, in the big finale, what the boss is doing. Most of the time, the inputs BARELY influence Sonic’s course; you hold buttons until Sonic sort of gets closer to the boss and may blunder into them and…defeat them? Yes. Hold various buttons for a while. Eventually, it may trigger a win condition. Or not, and the sequence will restart. Agonizing.
It’s over. This has been my first Sonic game. The others I picked up are 2D; hopefully some of them are actually good instead of just the best of the worst or something.
This was the most “we were told to make a game” game I’ve ever played.
5 Likes
Crystal Project
An unholy amalgamation of Final Fantasy battles & job system, and non-linear 3D platforming in third person Minecraft
It’s all about jumping awkwardly at the edge of a map to find a treasure chest with a powerful axe, then killing demon squirrels with said axe to level your job level
Clearly a XX years long passion project from a guy who couldn’t possibly care about writing a story. Your 4 character team comes down from the heavens with no introduction like in Final Fantasy 1, and your sole goal is to explore and get more job crystals. I suspect that it takes place inside a MMORPG considering how little care there is in making a believable world
What if every time you touched a goomba in Mario 64 you’d get thrown into an extremely complex random battle where you’d have to manage HP, MP, AP, DoTs, aggro, AoEs, status effects with a team of 4 shaman / exorcist / ranger / godslayer toads??? Realistically, either platforming and/or RPG mechanics need to be toned way down to make for a digestible game, which is why every Mario RPG is a simple RPG with simple platforming.
This game however is a weird One Guy project so it has both very complex RPG mechanics and very complex exploration. And tons of secrets. I love it
There are a few concessions, like the low density of enemies, being able to put markers on the map, and the deeply simplified platforming ; no puzzles, no fail states, no map gimmicks, only a simple jump.
The jump has a somewhat crude arc, there are no frills (no air dash, double jump etc) and perspective is often hard to gauge. This doesn’t sound great but it has a certain allure; reminds me of games where jumping feels like a gift/curse to the player that could have been removed from the game. Games like Link’s Awakening, Elden Ring, Paradise Killer, Xenogears, Dragon’s Dogma, SMT5. Roblox. I’m not sure there should be a jump, but I’m glad there is a jump.
Also the lowest level spellcasting book you can buy is Moby Dick
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Does this mean… Prince of Persia?
youtubes
A 2d search action? Hm…
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I think there’s a demo out now…
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shit this looks great wow
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I saw the new PoP get some strikingly strong reviews and while the demo was pretty alright… I remain skeptical for reasons I find difficult to articulate beyond “…it’s Ubi”?
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It’s a pretty solid game, at least in the early goings so far (I think I’ve fought three or four bosses so far, just got a new power). Some of the puzzle/trap rooms are excellent - lot of carefully timed jumps and maneuvers that feels at least as good as similar stuff in Mario Wonder.
Can’t fault the Ubisoft skepticism, though. God knows I don’t wanna engage with the Assassin’s Creed/Far Cry/Ghost Recon formula for a good while now.
Wanna say this game is from the Rayman Legends team? I guess that makes sense.
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I mean I wouldn’t be shocked if it is good, Ubi has that 7/10 that occasionally hits 8/10 routine down fairly well. It’s the few reviews giving it 10/10 or saying “move over Hollow Knight” which I am rather skeptical of.
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Gonna highly recommend folks give the demo a whirl. It spoils an extremely early story event (that was probably in the trailers anyway) and gives you a lot more powers and abilities than you start with in the actual game, but I think just getting hands on and feeling how the whole thing just moves is a big part of it.
I gotta get better at this combat, though. There’s a real rhythm to it that I’m neglecting, and it’s getting my ass kicked more often than not.
I appreciate that the section of the game that pulls from Metroid Dread is thankfully not as insanely stressful as all those segments were in that game.
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I got immortals of aveum for $10 on the holiday sales on Xbox and I already feel like I wasted that money. I have played one mission and it’s a mix of Joss Whedon dialogue and PS3 era FPS jank. Everything is just a lore dump to explain this magical world and the conflic. It’s so annoying and feels really bad to play. I feel bad for Gina Torres. I hope she got a dumptruck of money to speak all this terrible dialogue to my annoying and uninteresting protagonist.
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…yeah?
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some of the office children play darktide, i am tempted to interfere
has it improved since launch much?
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Significantly. They added the missing crafting system, did a very well done talents overhaul, and released an excellent series of story-relevant missions. This is to say: this is how it should’ve been at launch. Worth getting into now for sure.
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