Games You Played Today The Nonbiri Express '09 (Galaxie ((500×2)−1)) 9小時9人9ゲーム LOOK I MADE IT LONGER: The Power of One

[Polygonzo]

interesting! will def add Vitality to my list (Rogue Dawn is another Metroid thing I want to try out this year) tho I’m bad at playing multiple games at once so it’s gonna be King’s Field for a bit. I’m on a serious exploration game kick right now (usually with action/spatial playfulness)* and starting the year with NES Metroid and Room Map was really great for that in very different ways to think about (because of level design stuff I’m doing for my game (which I’d like to post about on SB in the future, a little too overloaded at the moment but anyway!)) and Dread just Wasn’t It

idk as much as you do about the details but I blame Sakamoto for the increase in story/scenario stuff I dislike (making Samus/the World less mysterious and in conflict with various daddy figures) and Mercury Steam for leaning into combat action spectacle (but this started in Other: M too so it feels like something Sakamoto is into as well) and from what I’ve watched of the I & II remakes (especially II) missing the mark vibe-wise so with the exception of Prime (only played the first one) there’s just this straight line of diminishing returns for me personally, and as we brought up before they’re probably aware of and honestly can appreciate Current Mainstream Gaming Attitudes evidenced by a lot of public opinion of those first two games vs. the remakes and Dread so it is what it is

*to ramble a bit more about this because it’s been on my mind:

games I really dig re: this

The Legend of Zelda
Metroid
The Manhole
DOOM
King’s Field/ShadowTower
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Jumping Flash
Super Mario 64 (and hacks like B3313)
Tomb Raider
Quake (and things like Arcane Dimension)
LSD: Dream Emulator
Star Wars: Dark Forces II - Jedi Knight
Thief
Demon’s/Dark Souls
Crackdown
Grow Home
Room Map
Pseudoregalia

games I want to dig into re: this

BABBDI
Crypt Underworld
Multiytheus
Mizeria
My House (the DOOM wad)
Galleon

(open to suggestions that might fit in with those, a few already on my radar via people here)

[Father.Torque]

Obligatory Galleon recommendation

(I’ve never played Galleon)

[Mr_Mechanical]

Play Galleon.

[eska]

Galleon: the winker option

[RT-55J]

@Polygonzo

Prime (only played the first one)

i have bad news about this game’s sequels

[Polygonzo]

Galleon! yes, on the list it goes

[Tuxedo]

Crystal Project

The weird JRPG job system + Minecraft world combination game.

It’s really huge for its 13€ price tag. About 60-70 hours.

It took me 50 hours to find a real great team synergy. Hunter / Weaver, Cleric / Valkyrie, Valkyrie / Chemist, Summoner / Shaman. I am now hunting down each skull mark indicating an impossible boss fight I annotated to the map

I -should- change my party member genders in town for the stat bonuses. But I named my characters after my kid’s caretakers so changing their genders would just be too weird.
The gender stat bonuses are really unusual. Guys get more HP/healing/luck, girls get more agility/speed/MP. Something like that. I’m glad for this

Mounts are this game’s equivalent of Metroidvania traversal abilities and you get the first one (a fast dinosaur) pretty far into the game.
Way further in you get a high jumping ibek (a goat) that can go to the high places in between areas. « What if I could go over the mountains in Zelda 1/2 ». Huge swaths of explorable land in between areas with almost nothing to see, but sometimes a hidden little thing tucked in there.

Everything from that point on is optional. You can find a floating owl and the floodgates open. You aim for high places then fly over everything in search of a prey like you’re the owl yourself.

Then a salmon! I got the salmon after already reaching the level cap but there was still a large ocean to map to explore

AND THEN you can breed and race quintars like chocobos to get a golden quintar that has the qualities of every other animal, to climb the legendary Sequoia

Such a dream 10yo game

[Tuxedo]

Have you ever tried a Pyranhabytes game (austere German exploration ARPG) I only played Risen but loved it

[loki]

@Tuxedo

Such a dream 10yo game

this really does sound like a game someone’s been playing in their head for decades before they actually made it!

[Mikey]

I’ve died more times in a couple hours of TotK than in every other Zelda I’ve played, combined. A+

[Grandpa]

Hot new horror game “hacking my Wii U” was not as scary as I thought it’d be. Easier than a 3DS or Vita or whatever.

Only like halfway done, but the rest is loading homebrew apps figuring out stuff like “should I make a dummy account so I don’t get banned for sneaking shit off Nintendo’s servers.” I don’t even need to steal any games, just these Xenoblade Chronicles X data packs! I’ll rip my own discs! There’s only a few I wanna play! Please, Miyamoto!

Edit: Nevermind, found a way to make this work out for me, don’t even need to rip my discs.

[Grandpa]

Double-posting here but I also found out that, uh, easier than downloading games and transferring them to the SD card one at a time and installing them to an external drive via Homebrew, I can also just, uh, run Cemu on my PC.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Aw yeah still love this one. Some weird shader shit when emulated though.

The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess HD: No emulation issues here (I guess my DS4 won’t do gyro stuff unless I jump through some driver hoops).

Three things!

1. Damn folks weren’t kidding about the opening being slow. It’s kinda charming, I guess, and not as long as I thought from all the years of groaning about it. I guess an hour is an hour.
2. What the hell, this is what people wanted graphically instead of Wind Waker? It’s ugly as shit. Combat feels clumsier than Wind Waker, too.
3. Those kids rule. That weird little baby I’ve seen posted everywhere isn’t actually a baby, but kinda of a mumbly asshole. Love that kid.

I’ve also been up to no good with my 3DS again, just…dabbling.

Luigi’s Mansion: Never really played the original so I can’t say much to the port, but it does kinda stick a knife in some of my rose-colored memories of the 3DS over the Switch. I will still maintain the 3DS is the ideal form factor! But these controls are just kinda miserable in this game. Also the existence of Gooigi in this version reminded me of just how long they actually, really did keep putting 3DS games out. Not too long, but long enough for Luigi’s Mansion 3 to exist alongside it, I guess!

Picross 3D 2: Is that the name? I think so. Nothing needs to be said other than “yes it’s still good” and “yes I still miss the weird duck mutant from the first one.”

Cave Story 3D: I trust folks here know (I’m sure I learned about Cave Story back on Insert Credit), but there’s two Cave Story games on the 3DS. The second one is a download-only version of the original, with the graphics kinda expanded outward to fill the screen, and a neat shadowbox effect with the 3D. It’s good! The first one, uh, is not. Nicalis opted to make a low-poly, fully 3D remake of Cave Story with remixed music, and manages to mangle every aspect of it. It looks ugly, the new music sounds bad, and the weird swimmy way that camera moves and shifts around makes platforming a goddamn nightmare. Carts of this thing go for a fortune, and I’ll tell ya, it ain’t even good for free (which, no matter how hard Nicalis tries to suppress it, is the price for the PC original, so! Y’know!!)

[smbhax]

Turbo OutRun Reimagined (PC or play-in-browser Turbo Outrun Reimagined v0.3.5 alpha by Sk1ds )

My laptop fan was going hard and something in there was making a tiny shrill squealing sound too even when the game was on the title screen; the dev mentioned the game doesn’t have a frame limiter, so I gave it one using RivaTuner Statistics Server and that seems to have done the trick. (That squeal was a bit scary, in retrospect! = o)

Can’t use RTSS when running the game as a non-Steam game through Steam for the perhaps improved Xbox analog stick input, but digital steering via Joy2Key is all right. And now I can run it from a taskbar icon and use the little icon image I’d made for it ^ _^

The developer mentioned that the manual transmission isn’t actually faster, it’s just more fuss. ^ _^ Which is good 'cause I really like the automatic!

The new 0.3.5 alpha makes the previously unlockable Lambo available from the start.

[smbhax]

Manic Miner (ZX Spectrum)

Freely available from Manic Miner

Playing it through the Speccy emulator ( Speccy: Portable Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Sam Coupe Emulator ); only keys needed seem to be Enter (to start), Space (Jump), P (Right), O (Left), A (Pause). In Speccy I’m also using F6 (Quicksave) and F7 (Quickload). Mapped all these to controller with Joy2Key.

Seems like a pretty sweet hardcore platformer. Horrible music that worms into my brain. ^ D^ 20 stages of this is gonna take a heck of a lot of save scumming–and carefully too 'cause collapsing floors can cut off necessary back-tracks and leave you stranded if you do them wrong, and the depleting air meter means you can’t even afford much time wasting! = oo Brutal! ; D

Hah and I just overwrote my quicksave wrong trying to take a screenshot. : P Gotta get used to backing the quicksave file up I guess; or I could use the ZEsarUX emulator, which saves them as successive files, but that gets a bit messy–and its quickload is still mostly manual, and its pixel art menu is kind of a pain (and seems to insist on leaving title/info lines at the bottom of the screen).

[wourme]

I had Manic Miner on my C64 as a kid. It was so frustrating but I’d still find myself returning to it periodically.

@smbhax

Horrible music

The Spectrum version has more intense title screen music than the version I’m familiar with.

Manic Miner Title Music (ZX Spectrum 48K)

[smbhax]

Yeah, the Spectrum is insanely intense in general, and that original MM on it is just nuts.

Actually the dev’s follow-up, Jet Set Willy,

is way too nuts for me to handle

…also I guess kicked off the whole walk-around-and-collect-stuff craze on Spectrum (oh I think I got that idea from @MintyJuffowup platformers that arent metroidvanias or meat boy clones - #19 by MintyJuffowup but you can definitely see it

when looking at other Spectrum games ( amiga mini - #18 by meauxdal by @meauxal ) which I’m not really into. And they had to remove the music in the original versions, which was a rip-off of “If I Were a Rich Man.” ; D

And check out that copy protection:

– Jet Set Willy

[wourme]

Some of my favorite games of this type never had Spectrum releases, such as Mr. Robot and Miner 2049er.

I wonder if Manic Miner was the first video game with room names displayed on the screen.

[Wizball]

@Grandpa

What the hell, this is what people wanted graphically instead of Wind Waker? It’s ugly as shit. Combat feels clumsier than Wind Waker, too.

In Silent Hill Downpour there’s a few rooms that use a static camera angle, and there’s nothing going on in them. It’s just like storage rooms of generic stacked crates. Made as like an obligatory throwback to the old games or something. Clearly there’s no love for why static camera angles are cool

That’s kind of what some of the visuals in TP reminded me of. Resentment that they would ever have to design the game this way and confusion that anyone would ever want this

[sleepysmiles]

and then for skyward sword they blatantly went “ok what if we put a cel shade filter over twilight princess do you like THAT you fucking jackals???”

[username]

I wanted to see if my PCSX 2 set-up would work on my new PC (it is obviously strong enough but I haven’t tried to rip a PS2 disc with the cheap portable DVD drive I picked up) and it did, so I decided the best course of action was to see how many days it would take me to complete Castle of Shikagami on easy with the I think 9 starting credits. It meant I got to pull this wonderful box out:

This is the one without the butchered voiceover work; they simply cut all that out. Anyways I made it up to the final boss on today’s attempt so the game on easy isn’t quite as hard as I had feared. It ran well, there was occasionally some mild graphical issue that I’ll call screen tearing but honestly who knows. I feel like I have hit the point in my life where I am just too old to really play trickier shoot 'em ups “as intended”, and it is clear that at best this game is rather middling, but I still find some enjoyment doing my best, bombing frequently and continuing without shame.