Did an hour long mission in pacific drive, you can’t save mid run (or at least not in the middle of a map, you have to exit it to save, I think?) so the stress they have as it goes on is pretty big.
To exit a map and go back to the garage you have to trigger a Fortnite Style storm which slowly closes in on your location. Then you have to drive to a point, and you don’t exactly feel like you have enough time to get there, so all the cautious driving you do around the map kind of goes out the window and it really makes you push your luck driving through anomalies on the road, or taking shortcuts to save time. I went down a very steep cliff.
I finally discovered the screen where you can Upgrade Stuff. And also the screen to customize the car. Each screen has it’s own UI theme and visual language around a different, specific computer. It’s easy enough to grok but, wow, ton of work went into this. But there’s like…12 different skill trees for various parts of the car and other junk, it’s a bit overwhelming. Stuff you unlock requires crafting it, which requires Resources, which require going out to get Stuff.
I am enjoying it more and more though. I like how they broke up the world into separate zones instead of a big contiguous area.
The controls are still a bit to get used to but I’m slowly getting muscle memory for them. Driving with the radio on helps make the game a lot less foreboding and scary. The music selection is really good, I think they went for a Phantom Crash style soundtrack where they got a bunch of local and small artists to license their music.
Penny’s Big Breakaway - Christian Whitehead, no longer satisfied with making Sonic good, decides the sons of bitches at Treasure need to be taken down a peg
why does red dead redemption 2 (which takes place in 1899) dump you on a fictional island administered by cuba where there is a slave plantation worked by indentured servants and political prisoners, who mostly seem to be cuban and haitian so far, when spain made slavery illegal in cuba in 1886, the country became independent in 1898 and the sugar plantations replaced a lot of their workforce with african and chinese indentured servants. so if anything there should be something fucked up going on around that, i mean like slavery has almost as much of a fucked up and complicated history there as it does here, but hey whatever i gues it’s just a detour for the white american protagonists and their story. It’s Called Satire!
Does rockstar games perhaps have an ideological reason for portraying a cuban army colonel as a slaving fascist and not even in a historical way?? Do they even know where Haiti is??? All these mysteries and more next time on red dead 2!!!
i’m going to the library to read about the socioeconomic conditions of 1890s cuba and the history of sugar plantations in colonial times there because i was effortlessly convinced i should just read a book instead because we all know this story is going to be resolved in game by arthur killing like 200 soldiers and going DAMN THAT DUTCH VAN DER LINDE
Running Neo Geo Pocket Color Pac-Man in the NeoPop emulator when it’s emulating the black and white Neo Geo Pocket system–and something a little funky happens, sort of a different way to play the game. ; )
Okay so in the inverted, four-gray screen, the ghosts all look alike. = o And the sound gets a bit weird, more like qwakka qwakka than wakka wakka sometimes (this happens with the system set to Color, too).
The cropped screen of the “Scroll” setting is growing on me–not only does it feel way faster, since it’s effectively a zoomed-in part of the Pac maze, but also I dunno it’s kind of suspenseful or something since you can’t always see where all the ghosts or dots are; or maybe I feel less intimidated when I can’t see all the ghosts or can’t see the borders of the maze hemming me in. ^ _^ It’s definitely harder 'cause like a ghost can just come bombing in right out of almost nowhere, and I keep forgetting where I left a little cluster of dots like way offscreen in the opposite corner, and you can’t see if a ghost is maybe heading into the opposite side of the tunnel on the other side of the screen, but, I dunno, maybe the blinkered view still helps me chill out with Pac-Man a bit more; regular Pac-Man definitely freaks me out. = o
(Also this way when you lose you have an excuse. ; D)
(Besides which, the super-low-res necessary to fit the full Pac maze in in the full screen mode leaves it looking kinda weedy. : PP Although I do like the extra big ghost eyes. 8)
Mednafen uses NeoPop’s code for NGP/NGPC emulation but doesn’t have a command line switch to do the forced-b&w thing as far as I know. NeoPop’s graphics code is so old its full screen crashes on my Win 11 gaming laptop, so I have to run it in a 4x window–which is still only like 640px square-ish ; D.
me and a friend lost a halo firefight earlier because this guy on our team kept focusing on our friendly hunters to the detriment of everything else, he wasted like a dozen rockets futilely trying to kill allies and wouldnt listen when we kept telling him not to in any language it semeed like he could understand…they say that tgirlswiftie’s cries of LOS HUNTERS SON AMIGABLES!!! IDIOTA!!! are still echoing off the walls of that map
I was trying to plow my way through the last of the hanging gardens in Tactics Ogre Reborn today. The final battle was kind of a mess, everyone just getting stuck down with fear and stun and doing minimal damage while the bad guy is just taking everyone out.
I got him down to almost nothing somehow, and then it was up to Hobyrim to make the final blow, as he was able to do just a bit more damage than the remaining HP. Of course he stumbled though because of the stun. I was ready to throw the controller as the boss did his big spell and wiped out the last of my party, but because one of them was my dragon who had Dragonscale active, the damage got reflected back and killed the boss. So basically a full party wipe but I still won.
I must have made some bad story choices in my playthrough because pretty much every major character came to a pretty depressing end. No tears for Vyce though, he got what he deserved.
Has no one talked about Fading Afternoon by Yeo (of Ringo Ishikawa) ?
Well now I will. So this time his open world depression game is flagged and timed. Each “day” is actually a week. And you need to pay attention to the dialog to actually see the story beats. But also you are supposed to fuck up your first playthrough and be inspired to play more.
This one has added a bunch of stuff like having controlled territory that you want to defend. And you’re dying the whole game so your Yakuza’s health bar is constantly getting lower. And the gang territory stuff is just the same fights you are trying to do to continue the game which is beat up LITERALLY 25-35 guys.
It is very pretty and well written of course, but also underwritten compared to Ringo.
After 3 hours and fighting a losing fight the whole game I tried to imagine doing this dumb (but good for 20 minutes) battle system for 20 hours as others have and went nah I am gonna end it here. And I did. The game gives you that freedom.
If I was younger I could see dealing with it, as is, nah.
Died in the 31st floor of the New Shiren, after placing a Sanctuary Scroll (previously a Blank Scroll) on the floor, only for it to…not activate? Deaths in this game rarely feel unfair, but I really wish I could go back and see exactly what happened.
they do only stop attacks from adjacent enemies, ranged special abilities etc can still hit. i’m not aware of any reason a sanctuary scroll wouldn’t activate, but i do still find out things i didn’t know every few hours so…
game is god tier though, maybe someone oughta wrangle a time for some parallel play pvp once everyone’s got their sea legs…
nocturne and the blair witch games popped up on cdromance so I thought I’d give them my annual attempt at running them but these games are just busted for me now. have to flip switches multiple times before the door their tied to opens, npcs don’t show up sometimes, events don’t trigger, characters get stuck walking places in cutscenes, like the gamecode itself is broken and then sometimes it’s fine for a while. I never see anybody anywhere else bring up these problems, people on youtube seem to have the game running okay, so I don’t know what it is.
i got the impression from somewhere this robocop rogue city is almost a yaklike now? is this accurate? because i will absolutely play a yaklike as robert cop
It’s kind of hard to describe actually. It’s like… 1/100 of a yakuza game. Some people have taken to calling it an “imsim lite” and I get what they mean but that doesn’t capture the vibe at all. It’s just… a ps2 game. Bespoke collection of mechanics the devs thought were cool and thematic to the character, pretending that they aren’t “solved problems” in the professional gamedev context.
Update/warning: It turns out Sanctuary Scrolls simply don’t work in boss rooms (although at least they’re not wasted). It’d feel like a baffling decision in previous games, but given how easily you can find them during a regular run, I can sort of see why they decided they needed to do that. Whether an item that useful should have been that plentiful in the first place is a different question altogether. In any case, figuring this out when you’re one action away from dying is…well, it’s actually incredibly Shiren.
Rogue City is a linear shootman with occasional sections that play like if you gave Deus Ex a frontal lobotomy and sometimes the game goes “hey did you make your Robertcop good at opening safes?”
also what you say to important NPCs during the story means you unlock different ending snippets but the game isn’t calling you a paragon of Delta City or anything silly
I finally got to fire up that recentish Capcom fighting collection, and Red Earth totally isn’t what I expected (which is a straight fighting game). It’s hard as hell too! I have no idea how many credits it took me to play through.
It sort of feels like a piece with the Jojo game in that it really plays with the classic street fighter formula to be something a bit more.
I can’t believe how good Pseudoregalia is. I feel like it captures a potential that was never fully realized in old 3D platformers. Like it takes that next step that could’ve happened if the Gamecube and PS2 had never existed.
It does several things from other platformers I really like. A lot like Mario Sunshine you can fling yourself wherever you want, confident you can probably save yourself. Sunshine had the Fludd jetpack, this game has several midair jumps to change momentum. This game does it better though because I think Fludd trivialized challenge a little too much.
The game also has something that reminds me of the triple jump in Mario 64. I always enjoyed practicing the triple jump just to fill time as I was traversing from place to place. This game has consecutive long jumps that require you to maintain momentum, and you can practice that when traveling from area to area.
I love the low poly 64 look. I like the PS1 style that’s popular right now. But contrasted to the PS1 look, which I think is more noisy, the stark N64 style means you can place a single prominent visual element in a level and really have it jump out and hit the player.
It’s enjoyable just looking around at the environments. I think when you have such a robust platformer it imbues all of the architecture with potentiality that makes everything even more visually appealing. The N64 style does the game a lot of favors too because the geometry is so crisp, so sharp, and you can look at anything and instantly imagine how you can interact with it in a number of different ways.
