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

[hellojed]

Pacific Drive really nails the “I shouldn’t be here” vibes of Stalker, alongside anomalies, which pop up and do random harm to your vehicle. The game world is hard to navigate at times because of how overgrown the world is. Sometimes buildings will or won’t be explorable. There are a ton of screens for inventory and crafting management so it’s still overwhelming

UI beefs: the game overloads some inputs with a press and a press+hold, the indicator on the UI is a small triangle over the input, and you don’t realize this right away, so you often hit the input and it does something else instead of what you want. One other beef: it uses Icons for Everything. Some of them you can kind of read what the action is, and some of them are more vague. The symbol for the “Tab” button doesn’t use the word “Tab” and instead is a right pointing arrow. You press and hold tab to listen to certain story beats, so I missed a few because the iconography to do so was plastered on the screen but I didn’t know what it meant.

using scrap metal to craft panels and finish out the look of the car was good. driving around forbidding areas feels good. Each “trip” takes about 40 minutes which is about all I can do in a session.

game map is a series of levels that you get to by connecting branching paths.

And you end a session by finding a glowing orb in the world, and then selecting a target to make a warp gate appear, then you have to drive to the warp gate quickly before instability of the local area swallows you up. it’s pretty thrilling

[wourme]

So it turns out Windowkill has an option in the settings to make the smiley boss’s window always on top. I turned that on, and then I just focused on getting a lot of health so I could take hits while I messed with the mouse.

You beat that boss just by closing its window a few times, not by shooting it. But of course it might be far from your “ship” and you just have to hope that you don’t take lethal damage while you’re focused away from it.

After that part things just kind of start repeating, with the same bosses coming at you several at a time. Which would make me think I’ve seen everything this game has to offer except for the fact that there is a long list of unlockable things and I don’t think I’ve unlocked any of them.

[iguferon]

youve heard of describing easy difficulty like its for pussy babies how about describing easy difficulty like its for deranged murderers

[Godamn_Milkman]

I beat Midnight Suns.
I did not like it. Don’t waste your time.
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/e6Ir01ITtHb

[captainlove]

Enjoying the Unicorn Overlord demo. Feels like it’s been a while since my last SRPG fix and Vanillaware make such comfy, luscious presentation. Plot = no thoughts head empty. It reminds me a lot of the Soul Calibur 3 strategy campaign with more advanced unit counters and automated combat. Surprised at how battles automating doesn’t reduce the strategy aspect. It still feels fairly involved and active. I like the strategy inherent in the little squad grid. Feels a little fussy that I can’t just swap a person over to another unit on the map, like if they’re right next to each other but fine, I’ll work with it. Not quite the same but I think it makes for a pleasant alternative to Fire Emblem, especially after Engage.

This year will be me trying to clean out the Switch backlog while gasping for air amongst huge prestige RPG releases, I can feel it coming.

[smbhax]

Whoa dang! I can’t get your podcast to come up in a search in Podcast Addict (Android), but I was able to add it by punching the RSS URL in. ^ _^

[Godamn_Milkman]

Nobody should ever go through that much effort to listen to me ramble.

Thank you for that. I wonder wtf happened.

Just tried podcast addict on desktop typed in 'Godamn" and it popped right up, so IDKWTFBBQ"

[smbhax]

HM yeah “godamn” by itself works by “goddamn milkman” and "godamn milkman fails. ; D

The app’s search has always been pretty bad. I’m going to report this to the dev as a bug. They’ll probably tell me that I’m doing it wrong. ; )

[smbhax]

Quick plays of a bunch of Neo Geo Pocket and Neo Geo Pocket Color games in Mednafen!

Kikou Seiki Unitron
JP-only RPG sequel by SNK 2nd party Yumekobo. My old notes say this came bundled with a Japanese “slim” NGPC I wanted, that I had only played the first game, Biomotor Unitron, very briefly, and that I wasn’t impressed with the “Pokemonesque” gameplay here, greatly preferring the likes of Card Fighter’s Clash. That will probably still be the case. Nice presentation though. Translation patch from romhacking.net only does 1st few minutes of intro, and menus. Could be a decent RPG.

Neo Turf Masters
Saurus’ (SNK 2nd party?) version of Nazca’s Neo Geo golf game. Doesn’t have RPG stuff like Mario Golf but I was getting into the actual golf part. Some wild course stuff like being atop a huge waterfall. Can’t save mid-course in-game? Emulator solves that I suppose. Want to play this more. Waitasec, I have MVS/AES version from the Humble Bundle NEOGEO collection. Well now I gotta try that (I think I thought at some point MVS/AES ver had flashing FX? Not seeing them at the moment).

The King of Fighters: Battle de Paradise

KOF: BdP
Your avatar hops around a board triggering King of Fighters-themed button mash minigames, most of which aren’t very fun. (There’s a pretty fun hidden game if you put the cart in a b&w NGP, haven’t done that yet, need to use an older emulator.)

Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams

Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams
Amusingly drawn cutscenes with a silly young witch; boring horizontal shooting.

Faselei!

Faselei!
Rather lovely solo mech tactical strategy by Sacnoth. “Program” your mech’s next series of moves by socketing action-specific, upgradeable “chips,” then watch them play out alongside the enemy’s moves. Lush presentation.

Neo 21

Neo 21
The card game in slightly jank graphics.

NeoGeo Cup '98 Plus

NeoGeo Cup '98 Plus
Initial, b&w version of…

NeoGeo Cup '98 Plus Color

NeoGeo Cup '98 Plus Color
Kinda cute national team tournament soccer w/ absurd clothing stat-boost items to collect (don’t get too attached–thieves will steal them). Gameplay’s a bit maddening as it seems nearly impossible to pass to your CPU teammates, who a) are usually offscreen and b) always seem to run the other way than you’d expected; meanwhile, the CPU always has 2-3 players right on you. Back in the day I found a spot to shoot from pretty far out and to the side that goalies couldn’t block; darned if I remember where it was. ; )

Dynamite Slugger

Dynamite Slugger
Seems like a pretty good baseball game by ADK and I am terrible at them, specifically here the very streamlined pitching, and the fielding where I always press the wrong base button to throw to. Not as flash-screen heavy as the “Baseball Stars” games (Saurus did the NGPC version of those), but there is a strobing effect for a home run. : P Nice graphics. Maybe some day I’ll have an inning where I hold the CPU scoreless…

Pocket Tennis

Pocket Tennis
Earlier, more challenging version with fewer characters and less animation–more challenging because serving is touchier and your character has a shorter reach. : P

Pocket Tennis Color

Pocket Tennis Color
By Yumekobo. Movement feels good until you try to coordinate it with hitting the ball, at which point I encounter mysterious whiffs, dives that take me away from the ball, and hits that often don’t go in the direction I wanted. Feels more like ping pong than tennis a lot of the time. Some weird courts with hard-to-read nets. : P My old notes point out that the CPU doesn’t move on defense, so you just hit it past them.

Of these, the games I have marked to come back to are Neo Turf Masters (the MVS one, at least, and possibly this one to compare), KOF:BdP for the b&w hidden game, and Dynamite Slugger.

[hellojed]

@smbhax

Biomotor Unitron

pros, you can be a lizardman in the game, cons: only hetero couples

[hellojed]

Played some more pacific drive, flipped the car, and was pleased to discover the magic “get car unstuck” function.

they bought a real station wagon during the game’s development, a Buick Estate

[Tuxedo]

RGG Infinite Wealth

I’ve played a bunch of side stories and minigames that were cool but killed the very little momentum the plot has going for it so I feel like I’m eating my vegetables going through the main story now. I don’t feel like watching a soap with trivial RPG battles for 20 hours right now. RGG is really at its best at the beginning of a new game, and becomes worse as the novelty wears off. Not sure I’ll pick it up again.

Unicorn Overlord

I’m liking this, can’t help but be disappointed that we couldn’t get anything interesting going on plotwise. I’m not expecting Matsuno but Vanillaware did just release 13 sentinels.

9 years of shadows

I’m really baffled by the mechanics in this otherwise bog standard Metroidvania

• Enemies carry money, but they all drop like 1-2 coins for the whole game

• Most upgrades can be bought easily but require other hidden trinkets.
  It’s like if you had to pay an extra 50 rupee tax in Zelda everytime you got four heart pieces, and rupees had no other purpose

• Damage numbers. You do 2 damage and never level up or change equipment. Instead you get one upgrade that raises damage to 3. If you get all the secrets, damage is upgraded to 4. The use of small numbers isn’t even interesting like Fire Emblem / Paper Mario, it’s just jarring

• The shield is weird. You have what I could describe as an impractical but infinite use Estus Flask for 95% of the game, and since most bosses give ample time between attacks you’re in no danger most of the time. I tried to dodge attacks just as an habit but it was way easier to just never dodge and smash that attack button

• There’s a weird Gears of War reload mechanic on top of that and it just completely gets in the way

Game dropped to 5FPS on the switch in the second to last boss battle + removed the estus flask so I dropped it

Enjoy the Diner

Short indie adventure/VNs are the best

The basic premise is you’re stuck in a diner with 4 other people for all eternity.

I love the ambiance in this one, it really feels like the other people in the diner have been there for a long time and went through all stages of grief multiple times and are now in this calm detached acceptance state. Most of the game is about chatting and killing time, but there are a lot of striking memorable moments like trying to brute force a 16 digit password for hundreds of years

The music, use of three colors (yellow, light blue, dark blue), shadows and the always present moon are so good…

You can go for the default ending or look up a guide and go for the ending that explains everything. I like a game that sits down and clears everything up from time to time. Especially with these cool little vignettes

Here’s the sound room menu option. Each object is a track.

You can choose from the setting menu between a 8-16 bit soundtrack or a piano rearrange, I strongly suggest the latter

[Brooks]

had my annual thrashing at 3S at mikado
100 yen well spent

[captainlove]

I’m starting to see 13 Sentinels and Unicorn Overlord as weird story-mechanic inverses of each other. Not sure if they have a two team structure or what

[toups]

I’ve been playing barony. it’s like realtime first person shiren. it supports online and splitscreen co-op! it manages to have minecraft graphics without being minecraft-ugly. it’s honestly perfectly aesthetically harmonius using mostly low-budget/low-effort assets. it’s great!

[Felix]

@Tuxedo

I’m liking this, can’t help but be disappointed that we couldn’t get anything interesting going on plotwise. I’m not expecting Matsuno but Vanillaware did just release 13 sentinels.

yeah, the biggest problem with this game is that the battles themselves are not that much more interesting than 13 sentinels – they are paced differently and evocative of other games but strategically they are pretty comparable – but instead of filling in the remainder with storytelling, it mostly fills in the remainder with unit minmaxing, which is all pretty well done, but to avoid the game being glacially slow as a result, they’ve made it almost nauseatingly quick

[captainlove]

idk, I can see the late game of Unicorn requiring more deliberation than 13 Sentinels’. I think it’ll come down to how balanced units ultimately get so it isn’t just smashing toy knights together until dinnertime.

[Felix]

that’s true! the only thing about the game I’m technically on the fence about is that chapter 1’s pacing and storytelling and use of its characters is… quite stupid. ironically it’s right at the level where it would be an exceptionally great mobile game (right up to the point of having a better touch interface than a controller one; I keep forgetting what the buttons do) but they don’t make those anymore, so instead it’s a console release that doesn’t know whether or not to gorge itself

but they’ve got some really solid bones here so I’m very curious what the full thing looks like

[Tegiminis]

rare paul eres mark of quality… that’s how you know that shit’s good

[smbhax]

More NGPC games in Mednafen:

Puyo Pop

Puyo Pop
“Puyo Puyo 2” on other platforms; Wikipedia: “it became the most widely known multiplatform game in Japan” and “Only one version of Puyo Puyo 2 was internationally released, and that was Puyo Pop for the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which was the first Puyo Puyo game to use the international title of Puyo Pop, but the third Western release after Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine and Kirby’s Ghost Trap/Avalanche.” Bizarre menus and why is the playfield white. I’ve never clicked with Puyo Puyo and this was boring/frustrating.

Puzzle Link 2

Puzzle Link 2
Yumekobo had a stylish look here but connect-the-thingies-to-clear-them gets monotonous, and the alarm sound is irritating.

Puzzle Bobble Mini

Puzzle Bobble Mini
Kinda weedy graphics. Save shows I played through all 99 stages of Puzzle mode back in the day, jeez. VS-CPU is way too easy (maybe there’s a way to make it harder I dunno) and Survivor really does seem to go on forever, throwing more bubbles (or whatever) in your way when you’re close to clearing the existing ones.

Rockman Battle & Fighters
Combination of arcade games “Rockman: The Power Battle” and “Rockman 2: The Power Fighters” (“Mega Man” in the west); those can be played in Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium but are filled with screen flash and sprite flash FX, while this NGPC version doesn’t have nearly as much of that stuff; it has a short white strobe when a CPU opponent is KOed–and loads of sprite flicker–but that’s about it. And its 8-bit art style is way more charming than the soft rounded look of the arcade games. Six campaigns to play through, and four playable characters. It’s boss-rush style, but survivor-ish, in that you don’t regain all your health between battles; would usually end up scaring me off, but you seem to have infinite continues, so it really isn’t that bad; in fact, the game feels like a big party of rad stuff, a celebration of goofy robo fantasies and wild sprites that Capcom just wanted you to enjoy. Really cool. A fan translation covers pretty much everything except the main menu.

One tiny complaint is that it was easy for klutzy me to quit back to the title accidentally when switching weapons on the pause screen; the EXIT option is one tap away with no confirm, losing your progress through whichever campaign you were doing; they’re not that long but still.

Shanghai Mini
The credits for this are interesting: Success did other NGPC games–Pocket Reversi, Cotton, and Picture Puzzle, but their name isn’t on game; all it has are Activision–who owns the rights to the game name of “Shanghai”–and SNK; credits apparently say “Source code […] designed by SNK,” but the names in the credits are apparently all Success staff; so it appears it was more or less a Success production, but without their company credit for some reason. The presentation is definitely not SNK-style. Discussion: Developer - Success Corp? (Shanghai Mini) - MobyGames

It’s a great version of Shanghai. The main game appears to be just playing whatever layout (of six or so) of tile-matching you want on whatever difficulty level you want. The symbols on the tiles are only two colors, and things like flowers, which can match other varieties of flowers, don’t really look like flowers at all, so it was tough to tell at first which weird pixelated pattern could match which.

But the music and sound is spot-on, and, most importantly, the tiles are razor-sharp; I think maybe it was this game I was actually remembering when a year or so ago I went looking for a Shanghai game on modern systems and SNES, and failed to find a decent one that didn’t have blurry symbols, either due to various visual filtering methods or just base blurry bitmaps. Definitely not a problem here, eyeballs rejoice!

There’s even a story mode! (Confusingly named “Tournament.”)

And there’s a VS CPU mode where getting lots of matches dumps extra animal tiles onto your opponent’s side of the screen; I guess I like to take my time in Shanghai and the CPU did NOT wait around so I got trounced. Not quite my thing, so I can skip this mode. ^ _"^ (Oh, might’ve picked the hardest of 3 CPU opponents.)