i hoped that playing on a handheld would somehow sidestep the “old rhythm games on modern screens” problem, but i was wrong. couldn’t successfully do a single move in bust-a-groove ;_;
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I realized very quickly the reason we never got any more games that play like mgs5 is because all gamers paid attention to was the dive button after listening people talk about helldivers 2
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played a couple of hours of cyberpunk and it’s abject dogshit
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I can’t bring myself to play any more of that game lmfao
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Petit Hedgehog (PC)
A 2018 Sonic fan game demo available as a free download from
The physics and level layouts are a bit loose and I keep messing myself up with the auto-targeting jump dash ; P but the bright pastel look is super-cool!
I played it using my DS4 with the controls mapped through DS4Windows.
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Sonic the Hedgehog - Blasting Adventure (PC)
The 2022 update of the fan game by Gustavo Firmino Cazonato available as a free download from
! Also
A startup screen says it’s a remake of Sonic 3D Blast 5, Sonic Adventure 7, and Sonic Adventure 8; S3DB5 was a really bad GB Sonic bootleg, from the looks of it; SA7 was a GBC bootleg of THAT, and SA8 was a emulator-playable remake of THAT; I got that info and the SA8 ROM from https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_3D_Blast_5 and yeah SA8 is real bad. Fortunately, Blasting Adventure is only a remake of that ol’ bootleg series in the loosest possible way, and it’s actually really good!
The credits say Blasting’s graphics come from the Master System and Game Gear Sonic games–so that’s how they got that 8-bit look! Not sure where the music is from but it’s really good too! And the action is simple platform fun, with this version of Sonic being really nimble–I was just mashing the jump button whenever there was a spare moment, 'cause his jumping is so quick and fun! = D
It’s just what I want in a platform game and nothing of what I don’t–I even kinda liked the force-scrolling jet shoes level!–so yeah this might be my favorite Sonic game! : D What a delightful little game.
The game doesn’t have built-in controller support, so the author included a now-old build of Joy2Key in the download, complete with pre-made config file for its controls–although those don’t seem to have been updated to the latest keys so you’d have to correct those probably (F4 full screen toggle, Arrow keys to move, Z to jump, X for additional power in mid-jump I guess oh I forgot about this), but I just set them up in DS4Windows and played through using my DS4.
(“TSR” in the credits is The Spriters Resource spriters-resource.com.)
I still don’t know how Sonic knew my name. = ooo
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I think the other reasons for the mgs5 comparisons are:
Very slight tac shooter influences, like steeply reduced accuracy while moving and ammo coming in whole magazines rather than individual bullets
Calling down resources from your base to help you mid battle, which becomes more and more prominent the farther you get in the game
But in practice at any of the tougher difficulty levels it’s a constant clusterfuck that feels more like left 4 dead than anything. And the general frame structure of course is deeprock galactic.
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not necessarily mgs5 stuff so far here, like every game is super into this bullshit now, you can’t even walk around in halo without reticle bloom fucking your ass anymore. the mags system is very unlike mgs5 iirc
ah ok so it is completely superficial gotcha. Gamer media literacy strikes again, it’s just a game from 10 yrs ago they remember
lost my grip and fell, dying in a pool of my own blood in that made in abyss game.
i don’t know if i’d call it good, but it has my attention as like, a game that looks cute but is weirdly brutal, kinda like what i’ve seen of the source material i guess
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I think the MGS5 comparison is salient, probably more than any other game (besides HD1 of course). Certainly more than Nightfalls, which are basically MMO dungeons with extremely rigid encounter design, as opposed to the much more fluid open-world multi-state encounters you get in Helldivers 2. It’s like taking a random circular-sized cross-section of the Afghanistan map, assigning each base a random objective, and telling a group to clear them all.
Also, much like MGS5, Helldivers 2 is full of lots of fun little nuances that reward careful, intelligent analysis. Like how bots are better to use DMRs and the Anti-Materiel Rifle to kill, because they have exposed heads and (generally) move slowly. Which is completely ignored in favor of brute-force kill-'em-all horde mode style play from lots of players, of course; just look at all the people who think you can only play with the Railgun, Shield Pack, and 500kg bomb lol. But it’s there, and relevant for people who care.
I play it on difficulties 7 through 9 on the regular with my friend group and we all take diverse loadouts and squad roles. I typically play a sniper-scout, moving around alone and using distance / squirrelly tactics to clear bases and find objectives. I’ll wait for my teammates to trigger a patrol, which makes other units unable to call in their own reinforcements, and use that opportunity to move in for the kill. Meanwhile, my friend Joe likes to go all-in on support stratagems like EMS to create rolling-retreats that wear down pursuers.
Game’s good. I think about how detailed it is a lot.
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I feel like I’m going insane reading Helldivers 2 descriptions
what you’re detailing is Helldivers, and 2 replaces being an overhead trigger control simulator comedy with being a third person materiel support call-in simulator comedy
it’s extremely weird seeing HD2 blow up and people going crazy over the stuff it does when the first game does 99% of that
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i think the transition from twin stick shooter to 3rd person shooter is pretty significant.
i would argue 3rd person shooters are the more explored genre, and so you get a lot of mechanical detail for “free” by following genre conventions. the ways to expand on a 3rd person shooter are a lot more obvious than on a twin stick shooter – it solves a lot of design problems for you right out of the gate. feels pretty hard to make a twin stick shooter that has the same mechanical depth as a 3rd person shooter!
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I think the overall game state balancing (like they had in Armored Core V) is novel to this one at least
but otherwise I agree… as someone who really liked and paid attention to everything going on in the indie and AAA and PC and console and VR and mobile space during the PS4 era, much more than I had done for the previous generation, it feels like the entire PS5 era has mostly been companies trying to figure out how to remix and get credit for a lot of the innovations of that time period
which is just as well for me as I’ve been busier these days anyhow and it was all really fun while it lasted, but it is striking how underexplored (or if you must, undercapitalized) a lot of 2014-2020 is being made to seem in hindsight
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I’m not “going crazy” and I am a Helldivers 1 veteran. The shift to 3rd person, as pointed out by Gate88, changes a lot about the game out of the gate. More detailed combat and movement model, players no longer confined to one screen together, etc. They also significantly overhauled the way map generation and objectives work, which makes missions far more engaged.
Like, yes, it’s Helldivers in 3p, in the same way Risk of Rain 2 is Risk of Rain in 3p. But that resulted in a lot of subtle changes to the way the game plays!
And not that many people played Helldivers 1, unfortunately (I was only ever able to play it on local co-op), so it’s easier to compare to a game that people did play, especially when that game seems to have been a direct design inspiration.
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helldivers 1 had a ton of people online when it came out on steam i wasnt really aware people didnt play it
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I think more people played 1 on Playstation possibly? But in general the concurrency numbers for 2 are orders of magnitude higher than 1.
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I wouldn’t be shocked if they said 2 outsold 1’s LTD numbers in its first week
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It for sure did, I think it crested 1m copies across both platforms ~day one~. Word of mouth helped it a lot those first two weeks, and then annoying YouTube influencers pushed it above and beyond anyone’s wildest expectations (and into the realm of “oops our database is exceeding its I/O limits and failing, time to engineer a whole new backend!” rofl)
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I mean no shit helldivers 2 is dramatically more popular I just never had a problem finding a game of the 1st one was my point
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dragdog2’s character factory is a free download
it’s really fucking good for the most part, wish i could do weirder things with the hair though
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Sonic Smackdown (PC)
Unreal Engine Sonic fighting game fan game, free download from
While the base character movement feels a bit clunky maybe, and beating the single Arcade difficulty mode seemed to come down to finding characters whose heavy attacks you were comfortable spamming in long insta-chain-combo form, the result you get from doing that is remarkably spectacular for a friggin’ free fan game, and the character and attack variety beats out a lot of commercial Japanese fighting games. The UI is very well put together, the 2D art is quite nice, most of the 3D animations are spot-on and the cel-shaded 3D characters very well rendered, the voice samples surprisingly good–the presentation is at an absolutely ridiculous level.
Didn’t think I was going to enjoy the gameplay as I generally don’t seem to gel with non-Japanese fighting games, but I ended up spending way more time than I thought I would and even if I wasn’t necessarily finding finesse gameplay I would really want to dig into, I actually did have fun fireball/super/tatsu-spamming my way through with ultra-shoto Blaze, sumo slapping and driving silly with psycho goofball Big the Cat, inflicting Chao madness martial combos with Cream & Cheese, sassy pummeling as Mighty the Armadillo, and robo comboing with Gemerl. Heck, even Maestro Balan ( ; D)
and his mystical bouncing fireball spam was something to see. Hm come to think of it I’m not sure how much Yuji Naka’s uh company or whatever may be into fan games but uh oh well I’m sure he’s cool with it too, right? = P
Rings that pop out of struck characters restore the red, recent damage portion of the health bar for either player; the pattern of the ring scatter depends on the character making the hit, with some characters having fewer rings coming their way than others.
It may not be easy to get into as the AI comes at you hard, rather relentlessly crowding in and knocking you into agonizing combos. There’s a BURST button (:p) to get out of at least one combo once in a while, but the main answer to getting washed by the CPU seems to be: spam harder.
Did not make me feel physically nauseous like Sonic the Fighters so I’m pretty sure this is my favorite Sonic fighting game!
Through the devs’ itch page you’ll also find an alpha online-only “Ultimate” version, which I did not play past the point of seeing no single-player option on its main menu, whose HTML meta tags proclaim GGPO networking.
Did not support my PS4 Hori Real Arcade Pro V 2017 in any way, so I mapped the controls through Joy2Key.
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