Finished RE4 2005 again. Still bad at it.
Trying out Mafia 3 on xbox to get a change of pace.
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spent a few nights recently alternating hard mode nocturne with shiren 1. masochism season #bufucore
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my copy of xiaomei for mega drive arrived! i think this might the closest to release date i’ve ever bought a mega drive game. it’s still a great game, of course, and the mega drive version adds a second playable character! unfortunately, no 2-player mode though, which is a big disappointment.
i also want to mention the box. nostalgia is obviously a big part of selling a new game on an old console, and they’ve done a great job here: the box looks and feels exactly like an actual mega drive game box! it’s like i’ve gone back in time to an alternate childhood where i had the money and connections to buy brand new import games. it’s an absurd luxury to spend £40+ on a mega drive game, but i’m definitely not disappointed with this purchase, and i’ll be looking out for columbus circle releasing interesting-looking mega drive games in the future (they have stone protectors coming out soon, but i don’t much like the look of it)
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we just finished up Tender Loving Care, an FMV game released in 1998. the crux lies in the drama between a couple (michael/allison) trying to overcome a very traumatic situation and the sexy new therapist/nurse (kathryn) michael hires to help allison. there’s a soft-core porn vibe that extends from the acting to the over the top sexual situations and the kama sutra book you can read in a bedroom. kathryn feels especially bad. she just feels like a 13 year olds cliched sex fantasy (hellooooooo nurse!).
overall, it’s Not Good but we got some good laughs and it’s fun to answer the dumb horoscope-y insight questions at the end of each chapter and play couch therapist. the questions oscillate between funny and stupid misogyny, which also describes the general tone of the game.
there are supposed to be different endings, but it got pretty tedious towards the end and i don’t think it’s worth repeating. i think we got the worst ending Kathryn ends up in a sort of catatonic state and Allison/Michael keep her around as a replacement for their dead daughter fmv games are great because even if they’re dumb as hell, it’s so low stakes. silly interactive trash!
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i always think about the fella in that game storming out of a cutscene and steaming about how NOW I GOTTA GET A FUCKIN PIZZA
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Finished Dragon Quest XI’s first act after 36 hours! Quite an ending cutscene… very interested to see what implications this will have for the overworld. I hope they are grave and significant!
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john hurt turns toward the camera now do YOU think consent is overrated?
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Got my clear of Mobile Light Force 2 (Castle Shikigami) on today’s attempt. I think looking at the final “dodge bullets for a long time” finale on youtube helped me as most videos had the clearly very good at the game player just bomb through a section rather than deal with it and that’s the exact type of pro-play I can actually emulate.
I also found out that on easy the game doesn’t have any less bullets or enemies, they just move slower and extends come a bit quicker. I was wondering why the latter half of the game still felt rather tricky.
(It turns out this info was not quite true as I noticed the final stage of the final boss was missing one element from the vids I watched, which likely saved my bacon.)
I also played through Ruiner over the past week or so. It was fine I guess but I don’t know that I have any real thoughts about it one way or the other. I kinda wish the player character, who has a cool video screen mask in all the comics and cinematics and such, let you see said mask while playing the game. It is legit stylish but while actually doing the game bit you look like just a guy.
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have been super bummed about this and preparing to replay from the beginning cuz I like the game enough to do so but hallelujah I was able to take POPstarter’s .vmc save files, convert them into .mcd with MemcardRex and simply drop that file into Duckstation’s memcards folder (renaming the file to the default name Duckstation spits out when you start a game)
idk if any of this might be of help to you? MemcardRex can convert the .gme files that seem to be common on gamefaqs to Duckstation’s preferred .mcd
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Played another code recollection mostly from a hospital bed and they are as good as i remember being roughly a teenager when they were new, but i get the overall impression as YA novel lite takes on adv games that most folks will find them very slight and there really is not much there besides nice art and vibes. That was enough for me though
I didn’t like that the touch, mic and wiimote stuff was totally reworked/flattened out (not for accessibility either as gyro tilting is mandatory) Also kind of wanted the original ost untouched. But i think it’s all accounted for though sounding way more produced.
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Well, Tekken 8, I love how it looks
Story shit is back. Both CG endings for arcade mode and a cinematic story rather than the weird journalism framing device of 7.
Fighting game stories usually don’t know what to do with half their cast and Tekken 8 kinda has this problem too but at least amartial arts tournament is actually a major story element. Fight-to-cinematic transitions are slick, and I think this outdoes Mortal Kombat which has fallen into a bit of a weird formula of rotating through the cast and struggling to make every person have meaningful moments. You mostly play as Jin who fights people who tell him he’s insufficient in various ways which gives him the inspiration to punch hard later on.
Jin was a genocidal dictator in Tekken 6, and 8 spends some time trying to redeem him. He was only doing it to summon a world-ending demon so he could kill the demon for the greater good but is still responsible for the deaths of millions. Anyway, this particular demon shows up again in 8 and Kazuya just resummons it and absorbs it to become even more powerful. So I guess Jin did some genocide for no reason. Tekken 8 often makes the effort to wrap up loose ends but also raises some absurd questions in the process.
In one chapter, there’s a mini Tekken Force beat-em-up mode callback just buried within the story mode. They didn’t have to do this and it’s so strange it happens for just one chapter. I love it!
Anyway, after pretty much every character gets their little story tidbit and after much punching, Jin gets an upgrade to Angel Jin. Jin and Devil Jin become good friends within Jin’s mind place, unlocking Jin’s hidden vanilla flavour. He turns into a Soul Calibur create-a-knight and has a Devilman fight in space.
Jin and Kazuya punch each other so hard you both end up both deprived of Devil powers for a pretty cool final fight. At various stages Jin seems to falter but the game does a cool thing of going through legacy movesets as Jin draws upon his martial arts knowledge rather than Devilman powers to get the upper hand. He progresses from his Tekken 4-7 Karate hybrid and reverts back to his Tekken 3 Mishima style complete with remix of Jin’s theme. It’s a rare type of callback. In order to make full use of it you have to actually remember legacy moves from Tekken 3/TTT. He then changes again to include Jun’s Kazama style utilising a moveset only seen in Tekken 2 and the Tag games that used to be only partially a part of Jin’s Tekken 3 moveset. I’ve never seen a fighting game do this and it felt pretty special for someone who played Tekken as a child to see the move list tell the story.
I’ve slowly been working through every move and mode just sampling the buffet.
Character customisation feels a lot more limited in this one as there are fewer items than 7 and there tend to be mostly full-body costumes and very few other clothes that look good on anyone.
Tekken’s Babel fish approach to language leads to a bit of a weird discrepancy in voice quality. Not sure how else to describe it since I’m not a native speaker of most of the languages but Feng and Shaheen’s voices, for example, just sound a little oddly balanced compared to others. There’s a big facial animation and detail discrepancy as well, mainly across men and women with the latter often having limited expression and smooth dollshape. Some characters wrinkle and crease in compelling ways but most women barely change expression.
Arcade Quest is a very simplistic story about getting better at Tekken 8 but it’s kinda neat in the same way the Gameboy Pokemon TCG games are. You’re just some kid getting better at an arcade game except the unlocks are cosmetics instead of new gameplay elements. I skipped most of the tutorials since Youtube + Practice are kinda enough for me.
I mostly play Asuka, Yoshimitsu, Jin and (soon) Eddy, but I enjoyed Reina the most of the new characters. Complicated stance transitions only really appeal to me in Tekken for some reason and she has a lot of nicely animated ones which compensates for me sucking with her. She has an appealing evil Sukeban vibe which was kind of a gap in the Tekken roster.
Anyway, I’m going to try and get good at Tekken after having played it for like 25 years. This game will probably serve me for a long while.
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Started playing Cosmo Dreamer on Switch. On Casual difficulty (which the game defaults to, to be fair!) it’s a very breezy shmup, only really encountered some friction at level 5 so far. Gameplay is pretty fun and simple (automatic rapid shot, a “slow” mode by holding R and shooting that slows you down but concentrates your fire and power, and a bomb), bullet patterns seem to vary between a few shots/Cave bullet mass/Touhou patterns in boss fights.
Gotta imagine the art style is pretty divisive. Especially with the sequel’s front and center character, that looks like an anime stick figure with two huge circles for boobs.
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hello
hi
a short essay about my Relink addiction
for some reason, I have chosen Ferry as the character I play (well, on PC at least)
hi Ferry
(side note: I am literally the only soul spamming quick quest online playing green colored Ferry)
so the game is fairly normal as you play along and it has normal action RPG things
look, it has a skill tree, except it’s fake because you unlock all the nodes anyway
okay and then there are weapon masteries, which just means you have unlockable bonuses for all the weapons you get. so you have “uncap and fully level up every weapon for your character” on your endgame laundry list.
so this is where is starts going full pervert
when you hit level 80, the character can do Over Masteries. the short version: you spend mastery points to gamble on extra stats
I love gambling
so then you need to put sigils on your character to pump them up (think jewels in Monhun). well, you can be an idiot and play the game and get sigil drops
OR
you can go to your cool, friendly local knickknack seller and trade your knickknack vouchers and gamble for sigils
also the more you gamble for sigils, the more you fill up the power for the Transmarvel sigil banner, which doles out The Good Shit, endgame double trait sigils. also it’s gambling.
I love gambling
okay but also two of the weapons you can get for your character are ascension weapons. this means that after they are fully uncapped and leveled up, you can power them up 10 more times. this gives you more stats and I think stats are good.
finally, while playing the game, a thing you do inbetween gambling, you might get Mirage Munitions as drops. what these do is you can freely graft them to a weapon and the further the stat boost from a weapon.
your weapon can go to +99 from these.
also the amount of munitions you can hold has three digits, which is concerning because there’s 16 characters now and 4 more coming as updates
what I bought: cool character action game with RPG elements
what I was sold: a gambling addiction
I love gambling. grinding too, i guess.
verdict: still good game
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Halo Infinite firefight is constantly being forced to hold these two feelings and wildly oscillating between them based on the conduct of your teammates
game goes hard when your listening to in the end by linkin park and smashing on some covenant fellas with John Xbox 2 and GerardMCR666 like it’s 2004
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i tried playing wonder project j2.
after getting josette to greet a fisherman i bought a stuffed cat cause walking around i saw one briefly and i’d like her to be nice to it so i practiced friendliness with that. then i get an event where the fisherman gets his fish stolen by the cat and asks for anyone to go beat it up.
uhh… what? so i go to where i saw the cat and it pretty much rips josette apart. i hate it but go along with teaching her to beat up the stuffed cat to “solve” this event and see how things develop.
she kicks the real cat, gets rewarded by the fisherman, only for someone else to chime in and state the obvious, that the cat is NOT gonna understand why it got attacked and this was cruel for no reason
this is so annoying i don’t even want to see how the rest develops
the way i remember the last game is you have to mold your robo-child into whatever shape is currently required to progress the story. all of the raising-sim is pretense as you are as subject to wrong and right choices like the child and will be sent back to fix your errors for the next attempt. then they can be fucking coy and ask “why would you do that?”
very cute game tho. i’m sure it’s got good qualities to it, i’m just really mad about this somehow
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My PS2 and its aging laser are in the cupboard now alongside a PSOne, PC Engine Duo, Dreamcast, and NEOGEO CMVS–because the emulator PCSX2 runs Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution with exactly the same input delay as the PS2 itself on my set-up–5 frames–and with far greater screen resolution and convenience. Huzzah! = D
PCSX2’s interface is very similar to that of the PS1 emulator duckstation because duckstation’s developer, stenzek, has been contributing to PCSX2 since early 2022 or so. Rather curiously though, Vulkan and OpenGL are in the opposite order in the Renderers list in PCSX2. ‘p’ Also, while D3D11 is the default renderer in duckstation (maybe for compatibility reasons? but it had twice the input lag in my test with Darkstalkers 3 in that emulator; in duckstation, all but the OpenGL renderer had an additional 1 or 2 frames of lag on my set-up), Vulkan is the default in PCSX2. I couldn’t see any real difference between the renderers in these tests, so I’m just going to leave PCSX2’s renderer set to Default.
I had the Emulation - Optimal Frame Pacing setting checked, and internal resolution set to 4K, while running the game full screen at 1080p, 4:3 aspect ratio.
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I am 75 minutes in and terrified of how expensive this game looks. But also terrified with how good it looks. It feels like a GTA game if they took the basic concept and greatly improved everything. The shooting. The Driving. The dialog. Even the camera shots are blocked correctly. Nobody does that. The game world looks incredibly amazing. The driving physics and camera work are something I’m going to study really closely. The facial expressions are really good, and that’s something that takes a lot of money to get right. I keep thinking to myself “they’ll never make something like this again” it’s too expensive and actually feels like it’s trying to say something.
God there’s so much detail everywhere! Damn,
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There’s a new mode in Apex Legends called Three Strikes where your team has three spawns, downed players are invincible and revives take milliseconds. if you’re frustrated by the battle royale rules, but like the game mechanics, this mode might be for you. it’s a lot of fun.
the new update coming this week will be the biggest update to the game since its inception, apparently. most exciting to me is the addition of 120fps mode to next-gen consoles. I gave it up for a year or so but they roped me back in
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So what your saying is, this is just like Spec Ops: The Line.
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I didn’t get very far into Mafia 3 (I think I did the big junkyard shootout early on, or maybe the meat plant after), and burned out after failing to heed the advice of every review of “really, don’t try to do every single side thing and collectible in an area, you’ll burn out.”
The main things I do remember - the shootout in the insanely creepy/super racist abandoned theme park, and hiding behind a pillar in a garage and repeatedly whistling/stabbing guys to death as a huge pile of bodies amassed around this mysterious whistling pillar that mob guys couldn’t help but walk over to.
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