So I decided to play a Halo for the first time, loaded up the original game in Master Chief Collection (original graphics and sound) and… I’m gonna be honest, I had assumed this whole time that Master Chief was a silent protagonist so him talking and almost having a sense of humor really caught me off guard.
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the chief’s sense of humor rules, he only gets funnier too throughout the games which i always liked
Can’t remember which game it’s in but MC gets one of my favorite lines in an FPS:
“Thought I’d mix things up; try shooting my way out.”
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Played the end of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, starting from Death Egg Zone Act 2–but NOT getting The Doomsday Zone, because I hadn’t collected all 7 Chaos Emeralds–and then trying all 12 of the emulated Sonic Game Gear games.
The upside-down platforming parts of Death Egg Zone Act 2 made me kinda nauseous–and I just don’t like trying to do jumping upside-down anyhow. : PP
There are some really amazing and fun stages in S3&K, but also a fair number of not so great gameplay things, like the bonus stages, the upside-down stage, the squished in sand stage, and the triple final boss sequence with no checkpoint and no ring. I could pick out individual stages in S3&K to replay, but overall I think if I want a good Sonic time, so far my go-to is still gonna be Sonic 1! : D
If you have box art set to Japanese in Sonic Origins’ settings, it shows thumbnails of the Japanese title screens (when they exist) for the Game Gear games: Sonic Chaos is “Sonic & Tails,” Sonic the Hedgehog Triple Trouble is “Sonic & Tails 2,” and Sonic Blast is “G Sonic” (last GG game in Japan!). (Tales Adventure is “Tails Adventures” in both settings, so I guess somebody typoed something.) And it runs the Japanese versions! (There’s no “Puyo Puyo” in Japanese for Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.) This confused me for a bit.
The Sonic platformers on Game Gear are pretty janky; evidently the hardware–assuming this isn’t some monumental failure of the GG emulator used in Origins–just couldn’t really scroll the full screen smoothly, at least not at the requisite speed. But they kept trying! : P Eh well say what you want about the pre-rendered 3D Sonic Blast, it’s actually more playable than the rest–not that that’s saying much.
The Drift games…well, I couldn’t even really drift much; doesn’t help that the buttons are nutso: Accelerate and Brake together to drift–but the track is kinda too narrow to drift much anyway, and the framerate and control are sluggish enough that you can’t really tell if you’re drifting or just…not. The button assignments they made for the emulator don’t help: they put Accelerate on CIRCLE, and Brake on X! It should be Accelerate on X and Brake on Square, you nutsos! Thumbs don’t go the way you think! (I reassigned them in Steam Input but I got it a bit backwards I think; think I just swapped Brake to and left it at that, oh well.)
Bean Machine was probably the most playable, but the first match dragged on seemingly interminably against the CPU–not aided by my near inability to make combos and so forth, but, bleh.
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me and my buddy are looking to play this as part of an ongoing mission, but i heard there’s been some weird suspect stuff going on with the anti-cheat? it seems a little hyperbolic to me, but i also don’t understand the need for an anti-cheat in a co-op game anyway.
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gameguard is a super intrusive anti cheat that like a lot of korean mmos use and so does helldivers 2
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it’s the same shit that used to partially-stymie my teenager packet-sniffing hacker ways in Gunbound in 2005 or whatever which i find extremely funny.
basically every major anti-cheat now is some ring-0 nonsense and even then hackers are innovating against them (with shit like: you plug a thing directly into your motherboard and it’s not a program that runs so they can’t find it!). whatever moral line in the sand i could draw against kernal-level anti-cheats was violated a long, long time ago.
i think the most surprising thing is that they went with such an old-school anti-cheat? like, why not EAC? or fuck, VAC?
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i’ll never forgive anti cheats after playing the shitty avengers game where they took out EAC + the games as service store shit and it made the game load faster and run better lmao
i understand the desire to put that stuff in pvp games but i mean look at tarkov, 60% of that game is cheating and they have anti cheat i think lol, destiny 2 switched to battleye and that barely did anything (at least in the past). coop games just seems pointless
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i very recently found out that koei put out a dynasty warriors game that is a big cross-over title with a number of their characters besides the ones in dynasty and samurai warriors. i got it specifically because it has opoona (from tragically underrated wii rpg “opoona”) as a playable character, along with millenia from kagero: tecmo’s deception 2, which is some real sickie shit (in a positive way). i have not been able to unlock opoona himself yet, but i have been running around with millenia, murdering thousands of terrified grunts with familiar deception traps. game is super fucking easy and mindless, which is to be expected. leagues better than the terrible berserk musou i played years back. also the victory screen music is the atelier theme from atelier marie, years before the remake, meaning that there’s even more sickie shit in this game.
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legally obliged to note that nobody could reject a plea for help from Oda Nobunyaga
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i said this yesterday and now cdromance has been attacked i am sorry
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apparently they got spooked by some stuff from the first game’s PC release and they’ve said the game is still P2P so they’re really trusting the client
also microtransactions
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Silent Hill: The Short Message changed my mind about the continued bastardization of Silent Hill. Like, while these new releases are consistently worse than the originals, and to a greatly dire extent, at least it’s entertaining how bad they are. This one is… immensely terrible. All of it sucks, the generic condemned building environmental art plastered in banksy-stupid graffiti, the arbitrary presentation and design of the horror aspects where they just like turn off your light for parts of the game because they just can and they don’t need to explain it. But the best of the worst here is by far the writing. It’s truly embarrassing. Like Lifetime Original fidelity depictions of depressive moodstates and teenage envy and self-hatered. there’s very little care extended to making the characters believable, everything is pure trope. so you get a lot of unearned dramatic moments of people “going crazy” or dropping their phones upon learning something “huge”. it really feels like a parody of Silent Hill, like that people can fly parody of Call of Duty games from 12 years ago except earnest, untalented, and cheap as hell.
My favorite moment was when the protagonist experiences a revelation and they get a seemingly nonsequitur text from their friend that just says “find it” and she is just on such a high level genius thing, so many fricken questions ahead of the player, that she doesn’t respond to this text by saying “find what?” she just says “who?”
they really signal just how bad this thing is going to be during the introduction where the voice over is edited in such away that it completely bombs the punctuating moment of this somber intro
I want to be strong on my own, without a group. If only there was someone who could understand that To adult me."
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The graffiti repeats, too, which is inexcusable. Just include less of it rather than break the illusion that badly.
I think the worst thing in the game, though, is the memory of the mother’s obnoxious voice, which also repeats.
I think the best thing in the game is the bugs in the bathrooms, on the walls and flying around. They should have just done variations on that endlessly with no one saying a word.
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holy hell a dragon
shortly after this I cross an invisible bridge in the dark besieged by fireballs on either side to enter a room stocked with high level murder demons but also high level valuables which were collected ASAP before splitting and then…what’s that barely glimpsed through the black fog to the right of this invisible bridge I’ve backtracked across, another little bridge below, can I make it? I leap off and make it. was this a secret or just what I had to do? felt like a secret. there’s a warp at the end of that bridge and I find myself face to face with giant Wall Faces and one in particular that talks about its father and a sword before snuffing me out in an instant.
I gather this is the final boss. I know the Moonlight Sword debuted in this game and I don’t have it…the game has conveniently (for this game, relatively speaking) opened up some shortcuts back to earlier levels so time to get that Moonlight Sword probably. I check my notes: oh yeah, I’ll finally buy the cross and give it to the priest who gives me a key that…mostly opens doors that yield loot I’m overlevelled for now, oops. another note: the barred gate on I think (?) Level 2…idk how to open it or even where it is exactly, must find out tonight! (also those dragon doors, how to open them…) the end to all this feels within reach now, some good adventuring!
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beware that the end boss has to be fought with magic (since it’s across a chasm from you) and while i think you’re meant to have access to the moonlight sword’s beam attack, the stat requirements to unlock it are absurd given how short the game is. i ended up having to kill it by spamming light arrows for like 10 minutes lol
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I’ve avoided and will mostly continue to avoid a guide but I had to glance at some weapon descriptions just now and lol the Shadow Blade “causes reduced visibility when equipped” which explains why the second bridge to the boss warp felt wildly obscure (think I only equipped it on the 5th level and shrugged the extra black fog off as particular to that area). says the Moonlight sword requires Swordmaster class which I’ve achieved but idk if that’s enough by itself, will see!
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i thought that was the case too but apparently you gotta have a certain level of strength and magic in balance even if you’re technically swordmaster rank. the moonlight sword requires 80 points in both, its possible to have your strength almost that high naturally but i think youre meant to go hunt down a bunch of verdite using your final key in order to even approach 80 magic
all the KF games have sword magic as a semi-hidden mechanic but i could count on one hand the number of times ive actually been able to use it across all 4 games lol, it always has prohibitive requirements
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Making quite literally 2 minutes of progress through linda^3 at a time cuz im so tired, but its happening. Its happening.
Also been replaying dark souls 3. Let that one sink to the bottom of my interest for a while because its arguably the least interesting of fromsoft’s modern catalogue but its been helping me further iron out my thoughts on why elden ring is just absolutely fucked
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Wind temple and boss in TotK felt suitably epic. Honestly I was so ready to be a hater and I love this game
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