what kind of game is this? the few screenshots i’ve seen look really cute, but i don’t even know what genre it is lol
this looks like low poly finn5ter
it’s a not really great resource gathering/crafting type thing. you descend into the abyss, try to fulfill some subquest and gather valuables, trek back to the surface (which tends to be slower and slightly more dangerous), sell things, resupply then go back down.
it’s not conceptually bad but suffers from the kind of easy solutions to make it longer that a game with too short of a dev time for its scope might have, like filling the list of subquests with gather 50 times for every single area in the game. it’s also really, really janky.
but it does feel sometimes like there’s some thought to how they interpret areas known from the source material, and there’s been some thought put into how perilous climbing is.
i like how in layer 2 theres that zone with giant leaves that seems like no big deal. kind of a repetitive room with no climbing. but its all a bunch of tiny slopes, and every little ascension within a short amount of time adds to the “diving sickness” of the abyss curse, so you can get hit with it just carelessly walking forward.
that sounds like a game i’ll love to pick up on sale in a year or two!
i do want to emphasize i’m looking for nice things in a very repetitive and not completely put together game. like, it’s just barely good, and that might be me being generous. i finally encounter the supposedly scary corpse weepers that almost eat rico at the beginning of the show and all they do is mechanically fly in a circle until you enter their zone of engagement where they swoop down at you like a dark souls dragon. like… development of this can’t have been easy, there are so many shortcuts to getting things done everywhere like this.
well in what felt like 20 hours but was actually more like 100 apparently i have cleared every dungeon in shiren 6. except then it one more thinged me with something gnarlier. and then i was like well ok i’m taking a break before i try to do that wtf. and then here i am this morning, 23 floors into hell…
finished the one mafia 3 dlc yesterday. theres one where you and donovan are in vietnam i might check out. Faster Baby should have ended with the climactic car chase but instead you go back for like 4 pretty mid missions.
i might try grinding to get some stat increases since i find firefights to be really difficult. i just now realized the game has a bullet time mode that the game never mentioned.
They added a Battle Royale to World of Warcraft and while it’s a clever recontextualization of WoW’s core mechanics, I can’t help but think: GODDAMN I FUCKING HATE THIS GENRE.
been trying out xenotilt a little i dont think its working for me. i think it’s very funny that this soundtrack has both like fm synth tones AND C64 -style arpeggios going at the same time maybe thats just a little too much retro nostalgia for my taste lol… i often think that like self-styled kickass retro gameing soundtracks sound like an impression of an impression, maybe that is overly haterful to say. but i think it’s worth pointing out how lauded game composers like koshiro yūzō are known for drawing inspiration from music exterior to gameing industries and not just other sega genesis games or w/e ykwim
anyways i dont like how the ball seems to just warp between different playfield tiers and idk if there are bonus games like in alien crush / devil’s crush / jaki crush, but i find those fascinating as recursive spaces in spaces, something i think videogames as a medium are often good at exploring as a concept (katamari damacy feels like the inverse—spaces on top of spaces, where entire buildings have the same polycount and textural resolution as small objects like matchboxes)
it’s bullet hell it’s pinball it’s 16-bit 8-bit 32-bit and hd video all at the same time. i dont think its For Me
ive also been playing mickey mania on the sega genesis. oftentimes i think the like game design and whatnot is pretty lacking in licensed games. but some of these 16-bit disney games actually feel pretty effortful tho they do often suffer from not very interesting gameplay and weird hitboxes and whatever else. but they also have some of the most detailed spritework and animation of this console gen. like if anyone remembers the sega genesis aladdin game and how they produced pixel art graphics based on hand-drawn animation, well they also did that here (im a lot more fascinated with old hollywood theatrical shorts than a disney property from the 1990s like aladdin)
i think this is also similar to the graphics production of capcom games such as the street fighter alpha and street fighter iii subseries, also capcom’s marvel / x-men fighters and vampire / darkstalkers series (its certainly an odd choice for playing street fighter alpha 2 in 2024 but the snes port is one of the most visually accomplished snes games or 16-bit console games overall imho)
there’s also a pseudo-3D segment as impressive to me as any of the tech demo-esque sections of, for example, dynamite headdy or gunstar heroes
[this video is good this channel is by one of the traveler’s tale’s developers who actually worked on this game]
I’m playing Mouser, too
This game is really cute and it has some nice touches.
I got to stage 4. The flowerpot mouse will align vertically near you and pause to aim before throwing; stray from your intended path to trick him into throwing far enough from your desired destination that you have time to reach the ladder and climb to the next floor where you will misdirect his next volley. He can only throw one at a time, so as long as a flowerpot is falling where you aren’t and won’t be, it’s harmless - in other words, make your real approach as soon as the arc is decided. Adding to the challenge is that some of the possible arcs are hand-tuned so they swerve unnaturally in midair, and you have to get a sense to tell whether or not your path is actually free. It’s a really fun and imposing enemy.
I’m not sure how any of the spawning rules work and I don’t get how to catch the red mice. If you corner them they vanish. I’m not sure how to trick them because they wisely hang back from you in all circumstances. The developers seemed to carve out clear intended paths - e.g. on stage 2, if you just go as fast as possible, you’ll end up doing these clutch movements past obstacles that seem to be deliberately timed to encourage it. But if you always rush to the top you might flub your mouse quota and have to trudge back down to scoop them up. Luckily the blue ones don’t often take the most efficient escape route.
The ladders are not lenient. You can’t just visually contact them, you have to be properly aligned to within a few pixels. Your dumb cat is unable to grab ladders in midair and you can’t grab the middle of a multistorey ladder. You also fall through the corners of platforms if you don’t come down on them at the right angle. It feels like a mix of Donkey Kong and Lode Runner (although it seems Lode Runner came out the same year).
This cat is a real screwup. It can’t survive a fall deeper than its jump, and in fact, it gets a little clonked tweety-bird sprite even when you land normally.
The first level is harder than the second. The bouncy ball enemies chase you more aggressively than the bombs, and they are gruesome to dodge without a ladder, but unlike Lode Runner enemies they will (A) never climb upward and (B) foolishly track your vertical before horizontal, making it easy to hang out on a ladder, convince them to drop down to you, and then climb up and become safe. There are safe spots where enemies cannot reach you at all, but like smbhax said, the game will take you out if you abandon your controls. There’s a DIP switch to change the difficulty to “hard” but I didn’t see any obvious differences.
Every level has a new twist on the cutscene. The first time, the bat-winged mouse flies away with the damsel. But the second time he fumbles and drops her! He has to swoop around and grab her up midair. The third time he drops her and doesn’t even see so a couple regular blue mice have to run in and grab her.
I read somewhere that it isn’t possible to catch the red mice. A high score video or something I watched seemed to bear that out.
Good point about going when the pot has been flung, I’ll have to remember that. : )
Been helping my dad out at his place while he recovers from surgery for the last two weeks, so it’s been a lot of “games I can play in spurts” on my Switch, which means…
Balatro: Black Deck sucks, I think I’m done.
UnderMine: Played the hell out of this last year and am playing the hell out of it yet again. Finally saw the second boss for the first time the other day. Great game.
That Picross with all the Sega stuff: Hit a rare flow state where I chewed through like two pages of puzzles and got stuck again. Refuse to use hints!
Red Dead Redemption: Still a great game, all these years later. I should be doing missions but I spend a lot of my time cheating at poker and busting the whole table out. Thunderstorms at night are still amazing in this thing. I get this is far from the latest or greatest as games go, but it feels perverse being able to play it on a handheld (some day I will save up for a Steam Deck and say this about a lot of games).
while im on the subject of pixel graphics production:
Wait there’s a fucken’ Hotel Dusk sequel that never came out in the US?
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (PC/Steam)
Fighting Vipers 2: Charlie, and hidden lucha Del Sol; plus a play-through as returning but newly blonde pixie power-puncher Jane.
Charlie’s bicycle theme is probably a bit silly, but luchador Del Sol is rad, even if I’m not good enough to land his fancy throws; I wonder why he’s hidden off-screen in character select, alongside the Dural-like blank gray guy whatsisname. Jane’s armored fist is HUGE now, it’s like she’s in a powered exoskeleton. ^ _^
The game’s newly added combos and additional power moves, and new short chain, ground and wall combo system (oh huh VF got ground and wall combos after this, in VF4, didn’t it? I wonder if this was a test bed for that, or at least became one) feel like just what the series needed, really improving the flow of combat and adding fun unpredictability from funky clashes and interactions. And the combos aren’t long and repetitive, just light, flexible, and fun. (Although I am not great at combos so I won’t be shocked if they can be abused into ridiculous boring chains by combo masters.) This could be just about my favorite combo system in a fighting game; in any case, it sure worked well here.
There’s a new “SUPER K.O” instant-win attack (f plus PKG) you can try once per match, when your armor’s gone; didn’t try it since I never had all my armor broken off, but looking at FAQs now I see you can voluntarily take your armor off (f,b,f,b PKG)–that remove armor move was in the first game too but I can’t tell from FV1 FAQs if there was any reason to do it there aside from seeing the characters wearing less clothing. Or as an intentional handicap, I suppose. Hm pressing the three buttons together is also used for various power moves in both games, it looks like.
After playing this I took a peek at the DC version, which I never got back in the day for some reason even though I was buying all DC fighting games back then, particularly imports–maybe I associated it with VF3tb whose low-poly grayness had really turned me off at the time. Anyway, in fabulous, input-lag-eradicating DC emulator flycast, FV2 just rips! It feels so much more lively and responsive that it just makes it clear that while you know I guess it’s great for Like a Dragon players that they get these bonus arcade games, Sega is doing the games and their fans a disservice by not bothering with proper standalone ports anymore; with probably additional input delay, no move lists, no high difficulty options, and now shrunken screen sizes and obscuring graphic overlays, LAD is NOT a great way to experience these fighting games (or any games really but they don’t have any standalone ports of the driving games here, dang). I am gonna play FV2 again but it’ll be the DC port.
(Man now I wish DC had ports of VF 2 and 4. ; ] Alas it only got 3 and its sweep-spammable CPU. ‘p’)
Got tripped up trying to use my Hori Real Arcade Pro V5 in the game; Steam’s Controller test reads its touchpad and Share buttons just fine, but they weren’t being read by the game; if I switched the stick from PS4 to PS3 mode, the touchpad and Share buttons worked–but the regular buttons kept switching back and forth between two separate layouts! So I was using it in PS4 mode but couldn’t pause FV2 when a large, spring-crazed spider was marauding at me during my Jane vs boss struggle. : P Afterward I found a working set-up: stick’s hardware switch on PS4 mode, touchpad mapped to right “joystick” in Steam Input (and then when I need to walk around the virtual arcade as Kiryu I can switch the stick’s d-pad to “LS”–left stick–mode), Share button mapped to “Select” in Steam Input; that seems to cover the needed bases.
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Fighting Vipers (PS3)
I like the clean Sega Model 2 look here, but while the gameplay, simplified from Virtua Fighter 2, has been spiced up a bit with breakable armor, power moves, and a couple female characters in unfortunately cheesy costumes, the smaller moves sets can end up feeling a BIT restrictive. In retrospect, the additional combos, power moves, and juggling system added in VF2 are exactly what the game needed to flesh the gameplay out and take it in its own direction; it’s a little tough to come back to not having them here in the prequel, but it does make for a simpler, more streamlined game–for those who might be looking for such a thing.
I played without Guard (called Block here) like I do VF–which doesn’t work great against the game’s boss, who likes to rush you down, although not quite as persistently here as he does in the sequel. Definitely missed Jane’s FV2 kick combo. Purely out of necessity I did learn to at least get a hit off the boss after he came down from her dfP backfist uppercut launcher.
OH I only just now while trying to type “FV2” above realized that (F)ighting (V)ipers is (V)irtua (F)ighter backwards. = ooo
After playing blonde Jane in FV2, I’d forgotten she was brunette here in FV1, where she seems based on Vasquez from the movie Aliens.
FV1’s setting has GOT to be based on Seattle: the tower with the round structure on top is the Space Needle, Picky’s stage is the view of Seattle from I90 coming back from Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades, Grace’s stage is the Port of Seattle just south of downtown, Tokio’s stage is Boeing Field SSE of downtown, etc. The resemblance doesn’t really come across in the sequel, so if you want a fighting game set in cyber-Seattle, this is the one to get.
iirc, if you do it while playing as the daytona car in fighters megamix, it makes you way faster and more agile
You can also use it while driving. Makes car combat easier by giving you more time to target the wheels or the driver, which I only realized 20+ hours into the game was a toggle on one the shoulder buttons. I kept trying to aim manually when I could have been locking on in slow motion the whole time.
Mafia 3 is my current podcast/youtube game.
They actually mentioned this in the mission where you go kill the haitians for sammy at the very beginning but in your defense it is the only time the game ever mentions this.
Seems like the perfect time to mention I played Black Knight Sword a completely straight forgotten Grasshopper game. The game’s world is a stage with papercraft and puppet aesthetic. And I guess a lot of blood. Very strange to play a Grasshopper game with absolutely no twist.
The strange thing is the game has tutorials for jump and use attack. It does not have a tutorial for the ghost blocks you run by in stage 1. Then in stage 2 you’re absolutely stuck until you pause and go into options and then how to play and find out you’re supposed to awkwardly shoot on a little ghost puppet with RB to turn the ghost blocks into real blocks. The next few rooms have you needing to jump and activate this ability midjump. It’s a pretty poor mechanic and for a platformer game the second stage took me 25 minutes which let’s be fair is too long.
that it had forced tutorials but no tutorial for the one abstract concept it contained was it’s one interesting point.