i did two side missions trying to increase the “earn” of one of my crew members so i could unlock more health bars and did like zero progress.
theres a cool car available but only if i get first in every race. there are like a dozen races. theyre all kind of meh. clearing them would take at least 2 play sessions
ugh
Oh huh, I’ll hafta give it a shot then! : )
One of the things that contributed to it being completely forgotten imo is how finnicky the dodge input is. I could never use it consistently and it doesn’t help with many enemies anyway. I really love the game, particularly its kitchen sink sound design but the game does not want you to love it a lot of the time.
It’s still stuck in PS3 limbo iirc
played that new moomin game. maxed out my harmonica level by sprinting through bushes for three hours. gaming
Sega Rally Championship (PS2 in PCSX2)
Port of the arcade original Sega Rally as a bonus game that came in a slip case with the “first shipment” of PS2 Sega Rally 2006 in Japan.
FAQs say the default Toyota Celica handles better, while the Lancia accelerates faster (same top speed though).
The camera can clip through walls a bit when using PCSX2’s 3D hardware rendering (not sure which one; I leave it set on “Default”); the clipping goes away when using the Software renderer, but it’s a lot chunkier.
Being a bonus game, this is a bare-bones port. Nice texture work. I like the handling: precise yet forgiving. Ooh ooh, I didn’t notice the course progress bar at the top while I was playing, but looking back I got to like 93% of the way through the 3rd track, gosh.
The simple auto-Accelerate Toggle button I set up in Steam Input after adding PCSX2 to my Steam Library as a non-Steam game seemed to work pretty well here; this isn’t the IDEAL game for it–because this game’s Brake doesn’t cut Accelerate entirely while activated–but I couldn’t do better without it, and it saved me having to hold down Accelerate constantly.
Afterward I figured out a more complicated setup that’s a bit better:
In Steam input, set three “Commands” for the desired auto-Accelerate button:
This lets you operate Brake and auto-Accelerate on the same button: once auto-Accelerate is engaged, pressing the button a second time cuts auto-Accelerate and applies the brake–so you no longer have to cut auto-Accelerate manually before braking; if no more than a single brake press is needed, as in drift-heavy OutRun 2006, it allows you to handle all your braking and accelerating with a single button.
I THOUGHT it would also re-engage auto-Accelerate after braking, but it doesn’t; not sure why. Also, you may have to press it twice to get auto-Accelerate to start up the first time–not sure why there, either.
If the game’s Accelerate button also functions as the game’s menu selecting action AND its Brake button functions as menu cancel, a separate button with a clean Accelerate press for navigating the game’s menus will be needed; it can be handy anyway since it saves having to double-press the auto-Accelerate button in menus.
This setup makes sharp corners much easier in Sega Rally Championship; for mild corners, a separate, regular Brake button works fine while auto-Accelerate is left on.
On the other hand, the complicated setup doesn’t work well in Sega Racing Classic 2 (in Like a Dragon Gaiden), where the tap of the brake while cutting auto-Accelerate slows the car too much for mild turns, but not enough for hard turns; for that, a plain auto-Accelerate toggle and a completely separate Brake button work much better.
Mega Man Legends 2 has calmed down into a more normal game that feels like it’d be rather difficult if one wasn’t told beforehand to invest heavily in homing missiles. I just got past a part where you have to rescue a couple kids’ sister from a bird gang, and while you are on the way to their hideout they more or less spend the whole time shrieking “Over here! Over here! Over here!” repeatedly which really made exploring that field a drag. Then I died at the first part of the sneaking in mission and had to escort them back there all over again.
…I hate them.
went into seclusion for a while for reasons that don’t even make sense in my own mind. while i was gone, i started up a new game of dragon’s dogma for the first time in a decade.
this is my little gay wizard oc
and my pawn, a bad attempt at link from the zelda series
anyways, i’m currently in the post-game, having taken out the big dragon. my opinion on the game is the same as it was back then: it’s a fun game, with excellent combat and rewarding exploration, but it is dry as shit and doesn’t really have a whole lot of personality. like, characters are just kind of there and say stuff blandly. there was also never any sort of resolution to a certain event that took place that led to me being arrested, as i was seemingly forgiven instantly, despite being accused of a serious crime that led to me being tortured and jailed, and also breaking out of prison. so either dragon’s dogma has a bad story, or i missed a ton of stuff despite spending a solid week only doing sidequests. but whatever, i can live with that since the rest of the game owns.
my soulmate at the end turned out to be the traveling merchant with fat titties. that’s cool.
the other dragon game i replayed was dragon: marked for death. it took fucking forever, but i finally unlocked the oracle and bandit classes. they’re pretty fun. more people should be playing this game, especially in multiplayer; it’s currently 50% off until the 26th.
I am also currently playing this game and this same thing happened to me. it’s like an elaborate baldur’s gate 3 bug only it’s just the way the game is supposed to be. a real welcome-to-playstation-3-gaming quest
the game spends several pargraphs describing how the main guy thinks of women as prey during sex, and i’m guilty of feeling this would hit different if he was she
tops and bottoms is just a better framing than “ah, the inherent differences of the dominant male and submissive female”, tho i won’t deny some of his top behaviors are hot regardless
also i think he fucked his mom
anyway, muramasa is good
i can feel the end of mafia three coming. the final area is the French Ward, and they seemed to save the more thought out stuff for last. the level design is a lot better in these encounters and reminds me of the early game. i was able to sneak around and not get into combat for an entire objective. the area is small enough that i am walking from one objective to the next, taking in the meticulous environments on foot. more games should make you walk, you see more and the world feels sufficiently sized
Further adventures in Mega Man Legends 2:
Got to the next big dungeon, whose gimmick is that it is mostly underwater. The main thing being underwater does is make everything move at about 1/4 speed… so basically it sucks and I have no willingness to go back and explore the paths I didn’t take as everything here is such a drag.
There was also a bit where you have to jump on the back of a giant robo-fish sloooowly swimming around a big room so that you can then jump on pillars when it swims by them. I could never get this right and fell just short, wasting tons of time. Then randomly the big fish’s pathfinding changed and got much closer to the pillars which made jumping up there much more reasonable. Am unsure if I had to do something to trigger this, if it was just slightly bugged out or there is a “if the player is still here after 10 minutes make it easier” bit of programming in play".
played tenchu for the first time since I was like 16 and goddd I love this fucking game, the soundtrack is great, love looking at ps1 swimming textures in first person because the only camera controls in this game are literally moving Ayame’s head to look at things, love the rainbow loading screen text… every tenchu level has loading screen tips that are like 1. beware the lords men 2. stay alert 3. a ninja never kills the innocent like do you really need any more instructions than that??
I was playing garage: bad dream adventure which is the very last steam game installed on my computer (trying to uninstall steam & stop playing games at my desk) and I realized that it’s on the app store for 4.99, both are unity remakes anyway so I’m sure the phone version is fine. and it’s a very long/involved game so might be nice to play in little chunks over a very long period. I double dipped.
what an incredible looking game…
I am still hoping someone will fix the fonts…
I’m playing my first Trails game, Nayuta : Boundless Trails
Just like Disaster Report 4 I almost only bought this game for its logo
Please acknowledge that this isn’t weird and these logos are good
Really from what I gather, Nayuta shares nothing with Trails (aside from being made by Falcom) It’s more of an Ys Gaiden. Did they want to capitalize on the hot brand recognition from Trails? Don’t think this was a successful strategy
Salivating over these upscaled PSP graphix
The only meaningful departure from Ys is a stage based approach (All PSP Games Must Be Stage Based), with little stage based missions (« finish under 3 minutes »), it all goes down very smoothly. Though when you’re backtracking in a stage because you’ve been missing one big crystal and there’s no life left because you’ve destroyed everything, it becomes too plainly undeniable that destroying ecosystems is in the JRPG DNA
Since Ys IX’s I’ve been looking for traces of conservatism in all the Falcom games; here it’s not too awful or anything but I do find it funny that your sister exists to prepare you meals, and when she eventually gets sick, she gets replaced by another girl who exists to prepare you meals.
And then there’s Third Girl In The Story who’s the mysterious hot girl from a forgotten civilization who will presumably become Nayuta’s GF in the ending, but obviously, coming from an ancient forgotten civilization, she doesn’t know how to cook delicious modern meals to her future husband (you) so your sister eventually shows her how
Beat Astlibra Revision, finally for real this time. I think i got the true ending, which required a bit of grinding at the end for certain items.
Great game, would be good if they could turn down the horniness just a bit though.
I feel like i overdid it a bit, blazed through the game in a few weeks and now my wrists hate me
touhou embodiment of scarlet devil is still cool. gonna beat the game again and then see about doing the extra stage. maybe. it’s not like i have much dedication for huge tasks like that these days. i actually really like the pre-boss banter in these games. sometimes they seem very inexplicable in a charming way, which may be the “fault” of the translation, like, rumia asking if she doesn’t look like a crucified saint and marisa responding it looks like humanity started using the decimal system. also everyone is talking about eating reimu and marisa like a running gag
started playing batsugun special edition the first loop of which i would describe as very easy, contrary to conceptualizations of the entire shmup or even more general 2D arcade genre being impossibly obtuse for like non-lifers
there’s not much of a scoring system. you hold down the shot button, destroy enemies, get bigger lasers, dodge bullets, and sometimes press the bomb button (like cave games knowing when to bomb is an Important Skill bc it makes you invincible and also kills everything on screen. like imagine if the souls games let you do a dodgeroll that also instakilled everything on screen lmao sounds like a good move right)
the fm synth bangs, it’s all beautiful vintage pixel art (notice how cave’s first few games are not as heavy on the pre-rendered 3D sprites…), even your bullets are pretty… i think i would recommend this as a great shmup for people who arent super into the genre or find it intimidating, it’s easy without being turn your brain off mode
im back in the retroach zone i spent like literal hours tweaking shader presets til i was extremely happy with 2 layered on top of each other and also tried out some features like black frame insertion (it’s crazy you can literally see the individual bullets in garegga with no problem)
finished mgs1, i liked it, it did feel weirdly heartfelt in a way by the end - like i feel in a lot of cases asking “whats the in universe explanation for the player character beating all these guys” about a videogame is going to involve some unsatisfying handwaves but here it feels very much part of the game’s own thematics that solid snake wins BECAUSE he’s a player character, which in this case means a sort of will-less and untiring engine of destruction, and the rest of the plot is sort of bouncing around various elaborations and mirror images of that idea. liquid snake as the willed and deliberate but equally empty version, the wonderfully gratuitous dinosaur mech as nightmare elaboration of it, the sled dog footage and lowpoly caribou at the end as sort of a glimpsed and more peaceful image of willlessness. it does get vgame last act syndrome a bit and comparing the little jeep chase to the jetski part in re4 made me sort of depressed wondering if games are really only good at retelling variants of the one story structure… i guess we’ll see… it’ll be very funny if after leaving it “poetically” uncertain they just casually mention curing FOXDIE in the sequel. dont worry we invented a vaccine for metaphors. also meryl feels kind of wasted ultimately but don’t worry i’m assured the rest of the series will get better at that kind of thing
metal gear solid 2: sometimes people are like “when’s the ps2 nostalgia wave” but idk i sort of feel like, how would we be able to tell…? it feels like we’re still in that console generation sometimes, maybe excepting a certain lingering sense of limitation… like dragons dogma is basically still a ps2 game to me it’d just be one with faked physics, less online stuff, and a bunch of large but still sort of boxy individual maps having to stand in for the “open world”… the era of left stick moves your guy right stick moves the camera and everything else happens in that frame
mgs2 is interesting in that it does feel like a mix that way, you can sort of feel the more deliberately constrained layouts and overhead views chafing against the fluidity of the camera and movement system and the extra simulationist touches. there are also so many water effects which i guess is also a ps2 aesthetic thing… the part in siren blood curse with the sunken village definitely felt like a sort of nostalgic ps3 callback to all the simulated water fantasies of this era
the writing feels better too, i feel like it benefits from not having to pile on the gravitas to compensate for everyone being a little lowpoly guy and the historical ideas it throws around feel a bit more specific and interesting. i know the bait and switch with raiden is old news but its so funny that they force you to go through the infantilising codec explanations every three steps AFTER you’ve done the tanker level and already played around with half this stuff. also the stuff with Rose is like the bleakest vision of heteronormativity as prison this side of, idk, Facade. does Facade take place in the mgs universe? i’m pretty sure you get to recruit DARPA Clown to Outer Heaven in one of the later games
the game parts of the big shell section feel kind of aimless and perfunctory so far which might be “justified” by later twists, but… anyway we live in a dark timeline where metafiction is kind of tiresome to everyone while the psychic hangups of baby army guys running around antiseptic and drone haunted complexes are still unfortunately relevant so we will see
Wait what did yoh catch FOXDIE as a metaphor for?
