(also, Unfinite Comedy lets you watch what a second Group of your party members is up to. So while you set everyone in your party to
REFRAIN fom spam-casting 50MP spells every 5 seconds you #€@$¢¥£s
you can watch all the other members in the second party spamming epic attacks on the most meagre of wimps
and 
at the same time, good times that were.
there are two modes to the made in abyss game. the first is a retelling of the first few episodes of the anime and sucks really bad. the game presents it as tutorializing you on the mechanics, but for the most part you are encouraged to ignore them entirely in favor of moving to the next check point where a scene can play out. you can collect resources, but there’s very little you can do with most, and after the intro you lose access to the only shop were you might sell things.
the second mode, which you could be excused for not expecting this, is the real game where the mechanics and resource management you got a little hint at seems to be a real thing.
you spend a moment designing your own original made in abyss child laborer
then you quickly get started with whole new parts of town fulfilling a kind of dungeon crawler base camp, where you pick up quests and trade items.
they even put in one of those nasty skill trees so you’ll gradually expand on how well you can navigate and survive. also entirely new creatures in the starting areas i never saw during the “anime” mode. it’s a nice start. doesn’t rush me along and doesn’t invalidate my want to explore the areas more. definitely a skinner box tho
ive been loving metal slug so ive been diving into the irem softography… played a bunch of x multiply maybe the secret best r-type game?? so creepy and fleshy, it’s a little faster and sharper feeling to play, i completely love the central gimmick of piloting a ship and controlling your tentacles at the same time with a single joystick.
gunforce 2 is also great!!! it’s faster and more contra-like than metal slug, there are more vehicles and more chaos and explosions. beautiful game you can see the formation of the Nazca Look especially in gunforce 2 / in the hunt / undercover cops imho
also retroarch added a new “append / prepend shader” feature which is great for using multiple shaders at once. really been loving how it looks to use the vhspro shader and a crt shader at the same time. it adds some video noise and phosphor trails!! it looks great imho! i would love to post screenshots but retroarch refuses to take gpu screenshots at this present juncture so i will take a photograph of my roommate’s large oled tv soon
THE ONLY THING BETTER THAN THE RAINBOW BEARNICORN IS THOSE FUCKING WALKING NOISES THAT PUT GRANDIA 2 TO SHAME
Sonic SMS Remake 2 (PC)
In this widescreen 8-bit-style sorta Master System Sonic the Hedgehog 2 free fan game remake – downloadable from https://sonic-sms-remake.blogspot.com/ – you pick from two-character teams, each having a flying character needed to get past certain parts of the stages. Was gonna quit once I realized this 'cause you can just fly over the stages
and that’s not a game anymore, but found they have a cheat code that lets you play as just Sonic (no flight teammate Tails) with bounce pads installed to get you over the flight-required parts.
So I played on but found that although people say the 8-bit Sonic 2 diverged a lot from the 16-bit version, which I did not like, there’s still a lotta levels here similar to what I didn’t like in the 16-bit version in Sonic Origins.
I quit when I got to another version of the always abhorrent Oil Ocean zone, now set alight and force scrolled by Sonic’s boot jets in some way that also kills my eyeballs.
(They have a Sonic SMS Remake 3 that goes even harder on the team thing, now it’s 3-character teams or something.)
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Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit (PC)
Free loose fan game remake by @NoahNCopeland of an 8-bit Sonic game; incredible amount of gorgeous 16-bit-style graphics here and nice new music–it’s kind of like Sonic Mania, but with actually fun levels. ^ D^ Also you can switch it to play like Sonic Origins, with infinite lives. : DD Downloadable from
https://stt16bit.wixsite.com/sonictripletrouble16
Like Sonic Mania I ran into a thing here with jerky scrolling or framerate or whatever after playing for a while–this started coming and going after maybe halfway through or so. There’s an option called “Unload Textures” that the manual (five png files in the game dir that I found after playing :P) describes as “Should the game unload unused textures after a stage? This can increase performance but will add a brief loading spike.” So I’ll try that next time, maybe both these games tried to get away with not keeping their memory usage clean or something and it caused problems even though I’ve got like gigs of RAM they shouldn’t even need to be touching? : P
Anyway yeah it’s pretty good! Even old Sonic stuff like inverted gravity in the space station at the end isn’t too bad at all, you can turn off the weird and overly long toward-the-screen-scrolling snowboarding stage (I should’a known there was a reason they included an option to turn it off ; PPP ; D), and there were only a COUPLE boss fights where it wasn’t very clear what was up. And dang does it look good, I mean some really nice sprites and textures here. And maybe I’m imagining things but I could swear the physics are even slightly better than any of the commercial Sonic games I’ve played. And that jungle level is cuh-ray-zayyy!
Big let-down though: no score attack. Whyyyyyyy??? I actually like some of these stages! It’s got a mode that lets you play any stage you’ve cleared–but it doesn’t save your high clear time! That’s all it needed to doooooooo. … I mean I guess I can do the bother of tracking my best time manually but man c’mon. (Even the 8-bit game had ONE score attack stage, apparently. : PPP)
I mean realistically I guess I’d just go do Sonic 1 Score Attack in Sonic Origins instead 'cause it’ll save 'em and 's’got them online leaderboards and all even. But dang some of the STT16 stages are neat.
So as I mentioned before I started up Deus Ex: Mankind Divided recently as a sort of random half-goof, half “eh, is probably a decent junk food experience” and… I think I unironically think it is rather good? I recall it having an iffy reputation for reasons that mostly elude me (I think there was some preorder BS?) but I’ve basically loaded up my guy with all the hacking stuff and am basically playing as a thief/creep who just breaks and creeps into everywhere while trying not to kill too many and the game is very for that.
I also think the world of the game with its big prejudiced against augs deal kinda works better now due to the horrible situation going on in the real world. You get dropped into basically a walled off city/open air prison for augs where they are living in awful conditions and one of the first people you bump into is an outside aid worker who legit says “a humanitarian disaster like this would normally draw all sorts of media attention, but because it is happening to them they remain silent” and… fair play they nailed that one.
thank you that’s the word for them!!
I think it was the green of the grass but multiple times I said “I wish I was playing Grandia 2!”
Maybe because I was playing it at low volume on a laptop but I did not notice the walking noise in IU.
I did end up in a dungeon with my whole party dead and it asked me to load my most recent save and well…
I found out this was not in fact an early release but from 2008 and soured on the whole thing immediately. I said I’d rather play Fallout 3 than this, and I meant it. That’s fucked up.
i am clearly having a fantastic time with 80% there Xbox 360 emulation.
I rest my case.
Tenderfoot Tactics
Great Gouraud Shading in this game.
I think.
I just looked up Gouraud shading on wikipedia and I’m still not sure this is that
This is about a small group of goblins led by a powerless god that starts exploring hostile Gouraud lakes and mountains, getting into FFT battles along the way, with very few explanations / context given
The goblins get a map but it’s like a whole huge world map and has no player marker. It’s near useless. I’m just going in random directions instead, getting lost going from ominous place to ominous place. The fog is thick and faraway places are heavily distorted, jerking around randomly until the goblins get closer. God knows what’s happening.
I usually hate level scaling but this confusing structure is making me warm up to it, I can’t see the game work without scaling
Battles have three interesting unique underlying systems
the unnerve / promote system. Hit enemies from their sides or backs and their turns get delayed. the opposite can also happens : you can have your turn come faster if hit from the front (If certain conditions are met)
Ecology management. If an enemy hides in a bush you can hit them with a fire arrow, the bush will catch fire and the enemy will take extra damage, and the fire will spread in the following turns. If you hit a knight with a grenade the floor will lower and they might be unable to reach you on their turn. Fill a pit with a water and the enemies will just have to swim like idiots (I don’t think they can drown but that would rule)
souls. enemies leaving behind their xp juice. You either wait until the battle is over so it’s shared between members, or you can have one guy you want eat it all up and heal a bit of HP in the process
There’s a really robust FFT job system in here with everybody starting as a goblin then branching. Knight requires Goblin lvl 4, Spellsword requires Knight lvl 4 + mage lvl 3. Etc etc.
Each little goblin seems to start with one random weapon that can’t be changed, and one skill learned by default + one extra skill from another job.
One of my knights could only insult with no regular physical attacks. (Surprisingly super powerful)
There’s a lot going on, even at the start with only the base goblin class available, so I’m really looking forward to the rest
My only real complaint is the UI, it’s (understandably for a game this size) really rough, I feel like it’s getting in the way of making interesting decisions in battle since it’s often easier to just use brute force
oh hey balatro is pretty good
let me open those PACKS, baybeee
this has no directional-sensitive lighting, so is unlit (or just diffuse) and with gradient texture shading on some things.
Feeling wildly bored by the plot of Yakuza 0. They all have issues with pacing and lots of exposition about conspiracy, but this one has the worst set of supporting characters out of them all and is so seriously dry. I’m crying for Yakuza 6 at this point. I need a summer story where someone accepts they’re a dad right now.
Umihara Kawase… Yeah!!! Wahoo!!!
While i’m here, any folks have recommendations for wide, open, systemic games with open ended but clear goals? Basically, like, linda^3 but examples outside of JRPG would be great. If there are any side scrollers like that it would be amazing. Need to do some research.
Played B3313 final 1.0. I challenge everyone to find and visit these four areas for themselves. You will not succeed.
Ringo Ishikawa and Fading Afternoon?
neo scavenger? tombi?
Star Control 2! Its great remake “Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters” is on Steam for free. The genre is difficult to pin down, but it’s sort of like a big space exploration / resource gathering / RPG except the battles are real-time arcady spaceship combat encounters. You get set loose with a specific set of goals but the way you achieve them only becomes clear in time as you explore. Like Linda Cube, you’re on a relatively long time limit and the game world evolves and changes over time, with or without you.
Also the best comedy sci-fi writing in video games.
Gals Fighters (NGPC, in Mednafen)
The permissive chain comboing developers Yumekobo came up with here is pretty fun in its button-mashing way, but breaks the game as far as fighting the CPU is concerned, because you can just spam light punches–jabs–to beat them even on the highest difficulty setting.
Jab spam definitely does NOT work vs the CPU in Yumekobo’s earlier Garou Densetsu (Fatal Fury) NGPC game, and doesn’t in SNK’s NGP/NGPC fighters King of Fighters R-1, King of Fighters R-2, and SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium.
It’s too bad because Yumekobo put together some fun and surprisingly large and wildly animated move sets for characters here, even characters I typically don’t have much of a feel for in, for instance, the NEOGEO/Dreamcast version of The King of Fighters 2000–but aside from the jab spam problem, I’d have fun here with the likes of Mai, Athena, and Leona; basically I enjoyed playing the five characters I have unlocked on the top row of the character select screen–Mai, Yuri, Athena, Leona, and the unlockable character Yuki, Kyo’s girlfriend–whereas the four I have on the lower row–Nakoruru, Shermie, Shiki, and Akari–I feel more at-sea with due to their teleports, flying around, knives, and just weird normals.
(I still have two characters to unlock, one on the upper row and one on the lower; not sure which is which, but one would be the boss, Miss X, and the other would be Whip. (Fight 100 matches or collect all [16] items for X, and beat Arcade (“Q.O.F”) mode with all 8 non-unlockable characters for Whip, GameFAQs says. I don’t really want Whip with her sorta teleporting and annoying whip/gun moves, but the thinly and hilariously disguised Miss X would probably be fun. ^ _^))
The excessively dull southeast Asia stage annoys me more than it should, and some of the other stages are only so-so, but the outdoor hot bath stage with mostly naked cameos of male SNK fighting game characters is a bit of a hoot, and the almost abstract stage with a rainbow of tree and traffic lights leading up to a distant Arc de Triumph through a hazy evening light is a real high mark. Oh! And a night version!
I was wondering which version I had; according to my 2004 notes, originally I had the US version–still have photos I took of the box. It must have been one of the carts I had that got stolen from my airline luggage one time, though, because I raided my cupboard and found the Gals cart I have now is the EU (PAL) version.
There’s a little mystery here as the ID printed on the EU version hard case, apparently, is NEOP0093, but the ID on the EU cart is NEOP0095, which is the same ID as EU NGPC Last Blade. : P US Gals Fighters is NEOP00931. So, likely a typo on the EU cart–should have had 93 rather than 95. Reference: GALS FIGHTERS NEOP0095??????? | Neo-Geo Forums
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Mickey’s Dangerous Chase (GB, in Mesen)
The title screen just says “Mickey’s Chase”–the game’s title in Japan; some well-meaning dreamer maybe at publisher Capcom USA managed to jam “Dangerous” in there as an attempted warning to would-be buyers.
This game is sick.
There’s a tra-la-la first level or so without real platforming where you just throw huge square blocks at critters in your way SUPER HARD and blast them into orbit. All just good clean Disney fun–no real indication, aside perhaps from the superfluous velocity of the animation, that this is anything other than a standard happy-go-lucky Disney adventure.
At the first full platform, I jumped, hit my head on the low ceiling, and fell into spikes.
The game uses powerups to bait you into dangerous areas. A vertical forced scrolling section forces you to guess which way to go; guess wrong and you’re stranded with no escape, dead. Huge sprites are thrown at you faster than you’ll be able to dodge. You have infinite continues, but this might have been done by sadistic developers knowing that in some cases it would tempt players into prolonged torture.
This might be the hardest game I’ve ever played.
Then again, I have emulator quicksave/quickload, the platforming physics–aside from the kinda chunky scrolling–are pretty darn solid, and the game isn’t TOO long. … I could kinda see myself save scumming through this again some day when I’m feeling masochistic.
There’s a jump where you have to press the jump button long enough to reach a fairly distant platform, but lightly enough to fit UNDER a spinning oil barrel somehow flipping up between the platforms from a bed of spikes below; not real easy to find the right button press duration, and the timing window offers maybe just just four frames of clearance. You have to make this jump three times in a row; it’s the only point in the game where you have to make a timed mid-height jump against a looped obstacle.
Jumps out into space over a spike bed, then cutting back to a platform just above the one you left, with minimal head clearance for either platform, are frequent to the point of being just about the norm.
This is a straight b&w Game Boy game. Wikipedia says it has Super Game Boy support, but their reference is a site I’d never heard of, which does not specify of what the SGB support consists. I tried both US releases of the game, they both had exactly the same ROM, and neither seemed to have any special properties when used with my Super Game Boy 1 or 2 ROMs in Mesen, which has excellent Super Game Boy emulation. Googling turned up nothing. The game isn’t in Wikipedia’s own Super Game Boy game list. Pretty sure the SGB support mention in the Dangerous Chase article is in error.
I colored Mickey’s shorts–Sprites #1, Color 2–red in the emulator. You can also play as Minnie. Goofy is here too, suspiciously meeting you at the end of each torture chamber to tell you exactly where the villain you’re chasing, whom he apparently made no attempt to stop, went.
When Mickey holds a block above his head, the space between his arms is opaque white rather than transparent, looking odd against darker backgrounds.
