enemies going “fuck!” or “shut the fuck up” in response to banter is funny though
6 Likes
I finished Xuan-Yuan Sword 3 last night. I think this is a prime example of 7/10 game that is a personal 10/10. It moves at a good pace and the story was always engaging and full of plot developments that made me go “what the heck”. It’s around 25 hours long which feels like the optimal length for an RPG for me. It actually started to get a little difficult toward the end, particularly the final boss which I ended up resorting to using what essentially amount to cheat items.
Some assorted thoughts:
- The translation is a bit clumsy but does the job. Main problem is the sometimes unreadable font colours and text disappearing too quickly.
- The encounter rate is a bit on the high side, but no dungeon is ever longer than say, Kuran from Phantasy Star 4.
- Speaking of random encounters, every one feels like a frickin’ jump scare with the sudden ‘BOOM’ and wildly shaking screen.
- I noticed that the dialogue boxes change depending on the language spoken by the character, eg papyrus scroll for Arabic, silk scroll for Chinese and framed canvas for European languages. I thought that was a nice touch.
- The battle and overworld music also changes for each region, which is always cool in RPGs.
- Rather than kill God with a chainsaw, I killed Satan with a ‘Bliss Doll’
15 Likes
Keep chipping away at Kirby Star Allies. It’s weird how difficult it’ll randomly get, at least if you’re aiming to get the big puzzle piece collectibles in some stages (I intentionally died maybe six times when I was too slow to grab one that falls during an escape sequence).
But that’s also kinda it - the only times I’ve died have been by my own hand, or mistiming cannon shots and getting crushed. Game just constantly hands 1ups out with abandon.
I dunno. It’s fine. It’s nice and colorful. It has that weirdly dark edge to it that a lot of Kirby games do for some reason. It’s also apparently not super long, so it should tide me over til Prince of Persia is out.
3 Likes
Played The Exit 8, a cool pseudohorror adventure where you have to escape a subway tunnel exit. The game is good and I highly recommend playing blind. It’s not very expensive and quite short.
You’re caught in a non-euclidean loop and have to navigate anomalies according to these rules
You become extremely familiar with a tiny bit of level design as a result and it makes for a great gameplay loop. You get progressively closer to the exit as long as you follow the rules but a slip-up sets you back to the start. Breaking the chain is devastating and it feels like careful steppin’ through a Demon’s Souls level except the challenge is spot the difference.
The corridor zigzags left and right which creates a naturally fun reveal of anomalies and whether you successfully found them by peeking around the corner.
The poster corridor seems to be the main area where anomalies occur and eventually you develop a sort of meta-awareness of when it must detect the player has gone too far and can’t turn back. The detection of this may not even work so well but it doesn’t matter since the uncertainty is the game’s spice. I inspect every inch of the poster corridor and usually find the path has reset to 0. You missed something but the game won’t tell you what. You develop normative eyes and unhealthy apophenia. It’s great.
22 Likes
If you haven’t already, I recommend going back and looking more closely at a few of the anomalies if you didn’t get a good look at them. I’m specifically thinking of
- The door that opens just a crack (not all the way).
- The figure embedded in the far wall.
3 Likes
I was preoccupied with progress and ran screaming from the figure I’ll have to take another look.
My favourite is the flooding, I was wondering what the hell was gonna happen and had a genuine feeling of ‘run for your life’
3 Likes
After I completed the game, I couldn’t resist seeing what would happen if I didn’t avoid each of the dangerous-looking ones. The flood can in fact get you but it’s nothing too crazy. The two agents posed like The Shining also do something but it’s not as fun as the figure in the far wall.
One thing I didn’t realize at first when revisiting is that each anomaly you successfully identify/back away from doesn’t show up again until you’ve been through all of them. I initially just ran forward each time to try to find a specific one, which didn’t really work.
4 Likes
I’ve been playing this on my steamdeck and it’s got nice atmosphere. I like just how stoned the whole experience of playing it is, but after a few hours I think I got it. I plan to just rush through the rest of the game in the near future. I think other posters might enjoy it more than I have though.
2 Likes
Lo and behold, was finally putting the finishing touches on Tales of Arise earlier today, and after mopping up some optional late game bosses, hopped over to really real, seriously final endboss, and … used three or four items (to replenish HP for the crew), that’s it.
Wiped the floor, next phase, cue random stack of “how comes!”-kind of animu banter, the n’th plottwisty plottwist (that we all saw coming, yawwwnnnnn), rinse & repeat — done.
So what remains at the end of the day?
It took me two years, and almost four months (for 97h of ingame time) to finish the game, and i have been wondering myself why i stuck with it over the years… it does have some nice quality of life improvements over the usual standard jRPG fare, but that alone was not enough to warrant picking it up after being out of it twice already.
The cast, plot, worldbuilding, even most of the Motoi score — didn’t click with me.
Sunk cost fallacy - doesn’t apply here, because i have put away games earlier than this.
Lack of better alternatives — nope, there are dozens of other games i absolutely want to start playing (SO6, VP3, Eldenring, Ys 8 etc.pp) or continue playing (AC6, Sonic Frontiers, FF16),
So, … why the hell did i stick with it!!!
Only thing I can come up with is the hang-outtitude that the world has, and the tiny, almost irrelevant touches that never got old over all the time:
e.g. when using fast travel, you are always greeted with a short, tongue-in-cheek one-liner a lá
If only we could fly to this place … like that would even be possible
That was a nice little adventure we had there
or when facing enemies on the map, you get cues whether you are over- or underleveled, e.g.
that enemy looks strong, we should stay away from there
or the stack of messages in the battles/after battles, depending how it went (e.g. if you are doing well, relaxed banter about how one party member would have liked to get that one enemy before the others did, some ‘i didn’t even try seriously’-comments — or on the other hand, if one or more members have low HP, or someone died, you get some ‘that was tough’ or ‘we should rest up/come better prepared next time’ comments)
Nothing life changing, but it all adds up to smoothen the rough edges these type of games usually have, and if I’d have to sum it all up, I’d say that it wears its heart on its sleeve and is proud of what it is, instead of falling into the all-too-easy “jRPGs, right? LOL”-trap it could pander to as well.
And that, much to my own surprise, is the greatest praise i can give this game — it gently moves the goalposts when there was no need to, and the dev team gave it an honest shot.
Well done, and I will fondly remember my time with it
That was a nice little adventure we had there
8 Likes
I’m getting serious Starbreeze vibes from RoboCop Rogue City so far.
7 Likes
Granblue Fantasy Relink demo: GAME GOOD
GOOD GAME
THE VITA MAY BE DEAD, BUT ITS SPIRIT LIVES ON
4 Likes
lost like 5 minutes to really bad missile management in area 2, and also a bunch of time to really bad health management in the tower area. i could easily see myself getting 1:15 with just a bit more practice
not bad for a first Proper, Recorded, Timed, and Split attempt tho
7 Likes
I’ve made it through the abandoned buildings, with an excellent displacement shader to make the brickwork pop. this musta been mindblowing back in the day
quality shootum halls
anyway, you’re tailing The Guy Who Sucks through the concrete and glass maze that is the underground base
but unfortunatly The Guy Who Sucks gets shot at! and he’s invincible and has to give a crucial quest if we want to get to The Vault! or whatever!
i’m very close to the end it feels like. probably a half hour to go.
6 Likes
one thing that bothers me aside from the nonsense building layouts: no bathrooms! at all! probably didnt wanna deal with mirrors
5 Likes
I’m looking at gameplay footage of Trepang2 and it looks alright but not the Fear successor I was thinking of. Like it’s a prescriptive successor but doesn’t have the same tone or feeling. You can go into slo mo but I’m not stopping every once in a while to take screenshots of an empty hallway.
Having played it, and it being the reason I decided to fool around and work on the FEAR-like, Trepang2 is nothing like FEAR. It’s much more akin to Crysis.
Finished Tiberian Sun last night! The last mission for each side is very funny because it’s a huge slog where, if you aren’t careful and finish the objective before you prepare, this fucking huge-ass raygun future robot activates and vapes all your dudes effortlessly with his rapid-fire lasers. He fires in bursts of 2 and can kill the heaviest unit in the game in 3 shots. Shit’s ridiculous.
However, he has literally 0 air defense, so you can kill him by spamming aircraft. Banshees away!
The level design gimmick of the last level - where the Nod version is the left half and the GDI version is the right half - is a cute touch, since Firestorm is the first campaign in C&C where both sides are canon and the narrative is interwoven instead of independent per side. After you finish Nod’s version, Kane is shown in a tube merging with the Skynet-analogue CABAL, setting up the expansion for C&C3.
Time for the last genuinely great C&C in my quest to beat them all again: RA2. Generals is after and is alright, but I think most people rightly consider RA2 to be the last high point.
10 Likes
This was one of the main games I played with my at the time 3-4 year old niece back in the early 2000’s. One of my reasonings being that you move mainly with the analog sticks which I thought was really cool, and that pretty much every button on the controller does something.
Plus how can you not smile/laugh during the intro when the monkeys are dancing!
We didn’t do much gaming because my sister didn’t want her to become a video game addict but later on we would play GTA Vice City during Summer visits and now she works doing CGI for movies and TV shows.
14 Likes
it also doesn’t really play like fear I’ve posted about it before, that game sucks so bad before you even end up in the meme levels
3 Likes
LOVE 3
Through the LOVE 2 remastered stages in about an hour and a quarter. Still loads of fun, loads of chill tunes.
Jump button from arcade stick kept dying, wouldn’t respond until hitting a direction on the stick. Weird. Seems likely to be something w/ using Steam Input, although it didn’t happen last time. Maybe I should disable it and try Joy2Key, I dunno.
Kind of this funky art deco look to some of the pixel art. ^ _^
8 Likes
[deep sigh]
2 Likes