Sonic 2 in Sonic Origins (PC/Steam)
Through the first seven zones, I’m not finding 2 as charming as 1. A few zones I downright disliked.
Overall, so far it’s okay, I guess.
I heard someone in an old podcast I think saying if you play with Tails along as the CPU he can pick up rings and then drop them if he’s hit which can be real bad; I noticed him picking up a ring here and there, but I haven’t noticed him dropping any; possibly I’ve missed it, I dunno.
Tails can drop rings in the special stages but not the normal zones.
Ohhh that must’ve been what they were talking about then. : D
Once every few years I will boot up 50 Cent Blood on the Sand and remember what a good, absolutely stupid game that thing is. Tonight was one of those nights.
Seeing this horrible fixed nightmare Disco Elysium grin I just assumed he’s suffering from severe comical burnout and that’s why he’s leaving everything including his golden bat +3 behind to eventually travel to Hawaii
I did skip every cutscene just to walk around a bit
something happened to me that made me want to play jrpgs again. perhaps its the nearing of middle age that is igniting a desire for the comforts of childhood. perhaps its also influenced by the slowly unfolding nightmare that we all are witness to everyday. either way, i wanted to finally try the first phantasy star which then led me to playing through dragon quest and wild arms, two of the many jrpgs i never actually finished during adolescence.
phantasy star is so impressive that i can forgive the absurd encounter rate (even compared to dragon quest 1), evil dungeon design, arbitrary event flags and overly simplistic combat system (also even compared to dragon quest 1!). within the contours of this game you see the basic template that 90% of the 90s jrpgs would copy. this is especially apparent in the way the world map is traversed and how it carefully considers future vehicle use. it’s just very satisfying to navigate and for the navigation to become easier as you acquire more vehicles. another obvious thing to state is how gorgeous and visually impressive this is for the master system: giant enemy sprites that all have multiple frames of attack animation. mind-blowing turning effect in the first person dungeons. main character’s have a pleasing variation in color palette. a really enjoyable game overall, but i also played it with maps and emulation speed boosting. however, it does let you save anywhere and features five save slots, which is the kind of quality of life feature that is astonishing to see in 1987.
wild arms is a game that i owned and would power on to just watch the anime intro and maybe play through one of the character prologues. i would only ever do that really, as the furthest i ever progressed was to the second full-party dungeon. all that i can say about it is that i find the theming very pleasing. it’s the exact kind of mishmash of fantasy and sci-fi with a touch of american west aesthetics that appealed to me at twelve and largely still holds that appeal twenty plus years later. there are no actual narrative surprises here, but i find myself surprisingly more affected by the trite tropes of love, bravery and self-sacrifice overcoming evil that these things traffic in as i grow older. much like how george costanza is reduced to tears by old man marley in home alone, i get a bit misty eyed when learning about rudy’s tragic childhood. a perfectly nice jaunt with a terrible localization that doesn’t do a good enough job of disguising one of the supporting characters “comedic” ephebophilia.
dragon quest. wow! there is some alchemical magic here. even in 2024, this feels good to play. a game that requires this much grinding shouldn’t be so fun. allowing you to grind until you die and keep your gained xp at the cost of losing half your gold is such a brilliant design choice. it also helps that even though roughly a 1/3 or more of this short game consists of the quest for more xp, it still feels tight and focused. it’s very forthcoming about what you should be doing and where. the gameplay loop of killing until you run out of mp and then walking to town to sleep at the inn is very satisfying. it becoming a cultural juggernaut was likely in no small part aided by toriyama’s great designs and the fantastic pixel art integration of said designs.
i remember that wild arms has a secret shop where you can rename all your characters and also draw new tiles for the menu backgrounds. so everyone i know had nobs and swearwords all over all their menus.
also there’s an island somewhere with flatwoods monsters that yield lots of exp i think?
it had better have some astonishing features, damn thing cost 70-90 USD retail in 1988
Goldeneye 007 (N64) is still a great game. frustrating, yes. poor framerate, yes. but the level design, movement, objectives, music + sfx - it all comes together in an impossibly great way. i’ve been slowly working my way through 00 Agent and the back third of the game is unbelievably difficult. Depot on 00 Agent is ridiculous lol, and stages like Jungle and Caverns are even worse. still, i can’t stop playing. no other shooter does it for me like this one. wish there were any games whatsoever that captured more than a sprinkling of what i like about it (i’ve played all the Perfect Darks and TimeSplitters and EA / Activision knockoffs)
Teardown (PS5) - pretty unimpeachable as far as i’m concerned. just a wonderful voxel destruction sandbox crossed with compelling routing puzzles as the meat of the experience. i love that it kind of miniaturizes the macro speedrun loop of routing + running, preparation and execution. my brother said he’d prefer more friction in the planning phase, but i think the hard contrast between pre- and post-alarm in this game is important and compelling, personally
Kaze Kiri 風霧
this has already been written about at some length in the PCE thread, but i picked up a repro of this game and have been playing it. i feel like, in some regards, Naxat Soft is one of the unsung-hero companies of the 80s and 90s. a lot of people know their greatest hits (Recca, Alien/Devil Crush, Spriggan), and those often go for quite a bit of money in the resale market, but generally speaking, whenever i see their name at the start of loading up a new title, i know i’m in for an at-least-pretty-good time.
Kaze Kiri is not necessarily as great as it could be, but what is there is really cool, and it shows more cinematic flare and restraint than most modern games. the entire intro animation is beautiful, and mostly-silent - no dialogue. this wasn’t a technological restraint, either. in a time where dialogue was getting pumped into anything on a CD-ROM format, they chose to specifically have the opening cinematic create the game’s context purely through sprite-based animation and facial expressions.
the game itself starts off really easy, to a point where i was a little concerned about what i had just bought; however, within a few stages, the difficulty ramps up, and you are given a reason to use the large array of moves at Kaze’s disposal (unusual to have so many, at the time, really). the game feels somewhere between a beat’em up, a fighting game, and a Shinobi game.
the graphics are beautiful and the majority of music follows the Samurai Shodown style of using mostly-authentic-sounding traditional Japanese music, with some modern pieces here and there.
around stage six or seven, robots appear! i…didn’t expect that!
i am quitting the game and playing something else whenever i die, so it will take me a while to play all the way through.
Scrounging the internet for an answer, but supposedly those new ports of Stubbs the Zombie changed the API used for the music (?), which means not only do most of the levels have no music at all, but it does not have, y’know, the soundtrack to Stubbs the Zombie. Never saw this brought up in reviews, but I also gotta imagine the overlap of folks who played the original and then reviewed the port ~16 years later is nonexistent.
Anyway, if I can’t run around chomping brains out to this, why bother.
OK i will add that the voxel system makes driving vehicles in the grass very obnoxious as they are extremely prone to get stuck. tough issue, seems somewhat unavoidable when you are still using pretty chunky-ass voxels such that even a single unit of elevation rise can stop a vehicle in its tracks
I adored teardown during EA and I’m glad it’s getting a wider audience, there were very few games that came out in 2021 that I cared much about and I think it wound up like #1 for me by default
Cruelty Squad is easily my GOTY 2021 but Teardown is extremely good yeah
Sure Ichiban is a saint but have you seen his place
This guy is 46…… He really needs a woman in his life ASAP
Side note, the streets are just absolutely filled with forgotten unlocked briefcases containing paper plates / iron plates / onigiris / smoke bombs for me to loot. I’ve played 6 LAD games now and it’s never been as ridiculous as this
that looks cosy and comfy imo
they kind of half assed the first chapter before you get to hawaii in terms of how the world is populated, it feels unintentionally like a 2 hour tutorial
i haven’t played this, yet
but you better believe it’s happening soon
edit: i wonder if this is one of the earliest games to bill itself, on the box, as a “remaster”
on the 32x note, though, i did load up the new romhack of Golden Axe because the latest version does, indeed, run on real hardware
it does what it advertises - it’s as if Golden Axe had been made for the 32x. sharper colors and graphics, smoother gameplay. it’s Golden Axe!
