Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic Origins - PC/Steam)
Oh, so Amy just feels faster because she’s tiny. ^ _^
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I am amazed Death Stranding is something that existed as a AAA blockbuster that the industry poured affection all over. I’m having trouble thinking of other times where something so weird was treated like one of the Call of Duty-tier releases of the year.
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well, our “main character” decapitates our optimistic high school boy right as he starts to believe in heroes again, ending that arc and chapter. good. 
bluntly written content warning
if you play this you are going to read a scene where a girl gets amputated, raped and pissed on
third visual novel which i’m unsure if i should make the post about, anxious someone’ll play it and then like, be upset at me not mentioning the “bad thing”, so i’m mentioning the “bad thing”, so you can just nope out of ever thinking you’d like to try full metal demon muramasa. or do it anyway, i’m not your mom
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yeah i played through it this weekend too! was a chill time and it really does feel great.
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i like that Pseudoregalia even captures the less beloved (to people that arejt freaks like me who need company) parts of the N64 aesthetic like smeary textures and huge open spaces
the walk cycle is so good too… all the animations have a pleasant uhh, frameyness. there’s a smarter term for that im not calling to mind like the animations snap between keyframes instead of being smooth, its really satisfying
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I almost laughed myself into a tizy today thinking about anyone playing Death Stranding past the point where they yell “I hate this.”
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I finished the first case in Great Ace Attorney and the PS5 says it took 1 hour and it absolutely took closer to 4. Each playable chunk being 90 minutes rather than 45 kills my motivation.
It is way better than anything in 5 and 6. I wouldn’t call it not snappy, but it could stand to be snappier. Like they invented the crime and then piled on backwards every logic injunction. They could have taken one or two of those out. 25 minutes about how a Steak was chewed gets to your patience.
And again you have to sit with the story and the logic so long you have obvious thoughts of motivation which is never brought up. “Why wasn’t it brought up” so that they can have this drip feed deeper mystery to wave around for the next 4 cases.
Placing bets which friends of Ryonosuke are gonna get got.
Everyone else on the forum describes taking it very leisurely between cases and playing it over a month but reading this fluffy text with my limited time each night over a long term will drive me to anger and dissapointment so probably won’t play it any more. Unless lady rude starts enjoying it and I play it in Japanese. Then it’s like practice or whatever.
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Easy videogame. Just roll the second-most OP joker in the game (after Perkeo). It’s that easy.
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Today I saw a Letterboxd review using a phrase “exemplifies anime’s strange capacity for evil” as a praise and I feel it applies to Muramasa on some deep level
At the same time, the game ends with the most straightforward humanist sentiment imaginable. Which makes me think of how the writer has once published a magazine column that was just 95% analyzing the mechanics of Fate/stay night’s Saber’s ultimate attack, whether Excalibur’s destructive power would be feasible given our current knowledge about physics and so on, and then, out of the blue, ended it all with “By the way, it is concerning that the youth of Japan is getting so right-wing these days”
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i feel i’ve got a lot to look forward to
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Godot calls it “discrete” instead of “continuous” animation; other sources might call it “un-interpolated” or “keyframed” or something similar. Basically the automatic interpolation most games do is turned off.
Turning off interpolated animations is also the best way to play Quake.
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oh shit yeah i was trying to think of what game it reminds me of, it’s software rendered Quake and its jerky fiends
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Sonic Mania (PC/Steam)
Thought I was gonna bounce again here, just before the half-way mark through the game, I think, after repeat sloggy squishing death (following a triple-phase Metal Sonic boss zone that took me a few replays to pass gargh) but I was forgetting that the Sonic community would have dealt with any such problem long ago and yep they sure did: the Mania Mod Manager
– Mania Mod Loader [Sonic Mania] [Modding Tools]
There’s a ton of stuff in there but all I needed for now was the “Infinite Lives” checkbox. Now it’s just like Sonic Origins! ^ D^
The level design is way overbaked and takes broken stuff from the post-Sonic-1 games without fixing it,
but Infy Lives should see me through just about anything short of an exact copy of the Sonic 2 final boss fights. = o
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finished ending 3 of cruelty squad… love that game so much. idk what there’s left for me to do there are a few items i never got, a few of the extravagant suit achievements, a few cursed mode default weapon times to set… im not a completionist tho so i think im content for now.
i consulted some online guides re: Amassing 1 Million Dollars and to find a couple obscure weapons and items
wow i miss guidebooks especially in the era of Extremely Large Games like elden ring and final fantasy vii remakes i think having a book to consult would be really nice!
nothing wrong with various forms of cheating here and there imho i think it’s fun. maybe games could have cheat menus instead of opaque difficulty settings and sliders i think that would be nice. let me turn on noclip or unlimited ammo who’s it going to hurt. or 0.8x speed or whatever. i guess a lot of pc games let you save / load literally whenever baldur’s gate 3 literally let you do it in the middle of conversations i appreciated that. it’s not exactly cheating related subject tho i think.
i think it’s interesting that you can like skip to any part of a movie on dvd and not any level of a videogame at least by default (also there’s usually no way to rewind lol what if i sneeze) and maybe how it speaks to certain Gamer Attitudes towards like feeling like a game Should be played in a specific way. i guess there’s a parallel to the ongoing internet spoiler wars re: new movies and tv shows, and how all three mediums have a hype cycle around popular new releases (i remember hearing about like halo midnight releases thruout the 2000s idk, people sometimes treat certain moviegoing ocassions like dune 2 as a sort of party or celebration, etc.)
another use case for cheat menus i think is that there are many games out there that i often wish i could revisit / replay certain specific moments in, maybe even to look more closely at in some kind of amateur research way as i often do with movies
(having a fast forward button on any final fantasy game is great also)
ive also been thinking about how resident evil 4 on the gamecube gates progress behind mashing the A button, as in there are a few parts of that game where you literally cant progress any further if you cant press A fast enough.
one of the reasons i bring these things up is because ive been playing metal slug 3, which is a game that frequently sticks you with the default pea shooter pistol which fires one shot per A button press by default, in a game where the average shmup popcorn enemy takes like literally somewhere between 5 - 10 pistol shots to die, and there can be like 10 such enemies on the screen at any time, which basically means you might have to tap the shoot button literally like 1000 times—on the first level
(i remember this being a point of discussion in the epic bracket list, re: the inclusion of a metal slug 3 romhack where everything including bosses died in one hit)
that’s too much fast aggressive tapping for me so obviously i would turn autofire on, which is sometimes considered a form of cheating. i do find it interesting how autofire can break some games but is also practically required for some… a good example would be dodonpachi which without autofire could probably take like, literally 100000 button actuations to play thru the first loop of. maybe that’s not true, it would be interesting to test! i think that would certainly be more effort that i would really be willing to put into a videogame though, i dont really play stuff that seems a little too effortful like mmorpgs or clicky online first person shooters about clicking on guys faces. i think those are valid but not for me u know.
darius gaiden is said to be a game that is on the easier side with autofire per this list i saw online:
i think i might be entering another personal era of like 2D mostly 80s / 90s arcade game enthusiasm it’s a great and maybe underappreciated part of Ludology imho. there’s obviously some pretty popular stuff like the metal slug games but there are a lot of really great titles out there besides those.
i like how the controls are just a little weird lol i always love a touch like that. little things like you cant drop down through platforms only up them… true of many games but not of the maybe most direct point of comparison the contra series right. nor can you aim diagonally lol…
in elevator action returns you can shoot upwards at an awkward 45° angle but not directly upwards or diagonally also. one of my fav 90s arcade games it’s such a deluxe audiovisual experience in a very 90s Videogame type of way that im obviously obsessed with.
that was another game i played a little of today, ive been interested in doing some old-school co-op gaming and a lot of games of that era like elevator action returns or metal slug or various beat 'em ups are great for that. it’s a big part of Gamerdom for me personally that i wish were more of a thing people did still. even as recently as the xbox 360 gen they were making all these fairly enjoyable split-screen co-op games like gears of war and the legendary Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days…
metal slug 3 tho very enjoyable time i mean the animation and design there is so incredible by a lot of standards i think, ive been playing it with someone who is an animator / illustrator who also really appreciates that aspect of it. so many great details like footprints in the sand…
i think there’s a link between videogames and movies (for example, theyre both a form of “moving pictures” i would say) and i also think there’s a link between videogames and animation (which is similar in many ways but different in others from live-action as well) and i think many arcade arcade games of the 90s in particular but not exclusively have reallyyy excellent animation and have cross-cultural and transtemporal appeal (it seems like shounen jump cartoons from as far back as the 1980s as well as first half of the 20th century franchises like looney tunes and tom & jerry to have appeal in many regions of the world to this day, far beyond the borders of the countries of japan and the usa where they were created, etc. etc.)
snk in particular i think excelled at this it’s probably true they were and remain popular in so many parts of the world because neogeo was bootlegable but i also think a lot of the flagship neogeo titles remain appreciated for the excellent cartooning they contain!!
i also want to point out they have a more of what i would consider to be great woman characters than almost any other company, such as fio from metal slug. how many games let you play as a woman in glasses who trips on her own 2 feet? very few. she has probably never had a voice-acted line of dialogue but people think of her fondly to this day…
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I finally played the tutorial for Herzog Zwei and then two full games (I lost both) and feel I have finally done my service. That was some of the most stressful gaming I’ve done in a long time. What nutjob at Technosoft made this then never made anything like it again?
NO ONE UNDERSTANDS HERZOG ZWEI.
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I do.
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Briefly, play more games by Compile, he’s a hardcore fan of MSX, you will meet him again.
https://tcrf.net/Herzog_(MSX2)#Message_3_-_Development_Diary
https://tcrf.net/Shin_Kyuugyokuden_(MSX2)
And if you wanna meet him right now
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understanding Herzog Zwei is pretty simple, it’s just like everyone’s favorite Arcsys fighter, Guilty Gear 2 Overture, but with less drifting
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Elden Ring actually got a guidebook, but it was so big it was split into two separate volumes.
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