a villain plan that would make me, the hero, think “ehh lets just see how this pans out”
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hey, uh
I can get you some DLSite links
if’n that’s what you’re lookin’ for…
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Sonic Classic 2 v1.6.16 (PC)
I found Sonic Classic 2 thanks to YT’s algorithm showing me a recent playthrough of an older version ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pTaCY_zzNo ). Sonic Classic 2 is a fan game started by author Hez way back in 2011 https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?threads/sonic-classic-2.25938/ and is still in progress; four months ago they showed off the re-creation of another classic Sonic stage on their channel. This recently unearthed version 1.6.16 build–the most recent available, dating to 2022 it seems–is way bigger (~900 MB) than the other, older builds that have been archived so far by a user at Game Jolt - Share your creations . It seems to have at a whole 'nother long game’s worth of unlockable stages in it? = o And three soundtracks! (Aha, 700 MB of ogg files. ^ _^) There’s a Sonic-y one, a techno funk one, and a chiptune one–I went with the techno funk OST, and it RULES. Like, really hard. Hard rules.
I’m pretty sure the pixel art is the most beautiful I’ve seen in a Sonic game. It is incredibly layered and put together; just thinking about all the sprites and parallax layers and stuff involved is kind of mind-boggling. And somehow it’s actually cohesive and gorgeously composed, with lovely and varied palettes. Stunning work.
The layout of the initial stage–a Green Hill Zone type affair, of course ‘p’–or so felt slightly mundane in spots, but I stopped get that feeling about 1.5 stages in–and I think the stages have actually been getting better and better as I’ve got further. Aside from a water-freezing insta-kill thing that isn’t really explained to the player well at all, they manage mostly to avoid cheap hits and kills, even in boss fights; one of the boss fights, vs a giant spider-legged drill robot, was amazing looking, very well directed, and actually quite fun! Is that even allowed in a Sonic game??? = D Like, the author has actually tuned these stages and made them actually fun to play through, something very few amateur or professional Sonic designers seem able to do consistently.
The bonus stages are the rotate-around-ball-Sonic vertical maze type; one of the better classic Sonic bonus stage styles–which isn’t saying much and they still make me a bit nauseous, but they’re more forgiving here than in other Sonics.
There’s time attack, a challenge mode I haven’t tried yet, apparently loads of stages and other stuff to unlock (like, so much I still can’t quite trust it = ooo), even what looks like a maybe still-in-progress multiplayer mode.
It falls down A LITTLE on the technical side of things; having gone through 13 years of development so far now, maybe the code is getting a bit creaky. I had it crash when going from one menu to another and one stage to another early on; fortunately that seemed to stop. Menus are somewhat awkward to navigate and I’m not even sure how the keyboard control mapping WORKS. (On the plus side, the game supports my DualSense just dandy.) Most awkwardly, once you’ve started playing, there doesn’t seem to be a way to quit back to the menus aside from pressing F2, which simply restarts the whole game. Fortunately, it saves progress per zone (but not per act), but still.
Oh and it runs kinda chuggy in a lot of stages. Not horribly, but not quite Sonic-smooth. And a couple gameplay things feel broken, for instance you can’t crouch on certain terrain, or while you have certain shields on (and you can have multiple shields stocked up, which is rather unique but also a pain to manage); and sometimes Sonic can barely move up a very mild slope, or will suddenly flip straight up a sheer wall.
The person archiving the builds on GameJolt said ominously of this circa 2022 build “don’t know if the final boss softlock is still in there” so I guess we’ll see how that goes. = oo
But technical quirks aside, it’s an incredible game so far, and I’m kind of scared thinking about how many more stages there are apparently waiting to be unlocked! = o Is this the true behemoth of Sonic fan games??
Update / spoiler:
Spoiler: Eh the second half gets cheap and the final boss fight feels really unpolished and I gave up on it. = p
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that’s ok i think i’d rather look for things on my own
my experience with Princess Peach Showtime so far:
Woot had it for 10 bucks off for some reason so I impulse bought it’
they delivered it in a day
somehow my building lost it but also have a record of receiving it
the shipping label actually reads “Princess Peach” on it
so in addition to not having a game I paid for, I got emasculated at my building lobby’s front desk
a pretty good Mario game
17 Likes
I finished Contact. I’m actually kind of embarrassed by how much I’ve played these past five days. It’s probably wrong to think of this as a Suda game. The game is a post-Earthbound object. Weak enemies run away from you and you can combine food to create more effective healing items. There’s also a sincere attempt at bridging the world of the video game with you the player, to make contact.
As much as it recalls Earthbound, I found it to be even more similar to Moon: Remix RPG Adventure. The biggest reason is that these two games have a certain respect for boredom and ritual. Contact has cooking and fishing. I had to find a costume for both of these. I must be wearing the costume in order to do the activity, and I can only change within my bedroom aboard the spaceship-disguised-as-pirate-ship I call home base. I can buy potions, or I can cook them for half the price. Cooking means watching my guy toss ingredients around in a frying pan for 5 seconds. Cooking 10 potions adds up to about 1 minute of realtime cooking. Fishing is similarly time-consuming and mundane. I plop the line into a pond or bay. I watch the float bob up and down. When it plunges below, I press A and maybe that means catching a fish or gem or Famicom game.
There’s an odd attention to detail in the cooking and fishing for such menial side activities. I think there are about 10 kinds of fish and they become ingredients for cooking. The menu page for ingredients and meals stretches to about 50 items. I can cook coffee buy mixing beans with water or I can make a latte by swapping the water or milk. Eating food items gives my guy temporary stat boosts. At the same time, they fill my guy’s stomach up to a point where he can’t eat anymore. If he can’t eat anymore, he can’t heal anymore. I suspect the developers wanted to add hunger and thirst as stats as well but got bogged down by their already too-intricate system.
Even fighting in the game is rote. The game doesn’t make me press attack each turn. It knows I want to attack each turn. Instead, I occasionally get skill points that I can spend on special moves and deciding when to use them is the main point of strategy.
I never figured out what girlfriends do. I gave one girl so many flowers and she said she really liked whenever my guy stopped by to see her. One of the island’s girlfriends likes bad boys and video games, so I could’ve run around killing people and sending her a dozen copies of Jump Man if I was interested.
All in all, a 6.5 game made for me.
I’ll leave you all with this:
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The only part of this entire game that I remember at all was the main character getting pissed off at the player after fighting the final boss and getting nothing for any of it, and trying to attack the inside of the DS screen. I immediately hit him back, because I didn’t want him breaking my DS.
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the recent hot wheels games are on gamepass so I gave em a shot
first one is overly undercooked, the presentation and the UI are too close to a mobile game, skip
the second one is significantly better – it gives you a bit more to do, adds motorcycles and monster trucks and f-zero body checks, but it’s still a little on the charmless side compared to eg sonic racing transformed or the lego expansion to forza horizon 4, and that leaves it feeling like a trackmania cover act.
anyone know if the hot wheels expansion to forza horizon 5 is any good? I didn’t like 5 as much as 4 in general and it doesn’t look as impressive as legos
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for trying to be hot wheels that game (the 5 minutes I played) sure felt heavy and sticky. not really the hot wheels game I wanted
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Sonic Classic 2 v1.6.16 (PC)
Downloaded from Game Jolt - Share your creations
It becomes clear in the second half that this is still very much a work-in-progress as the stages do start to get rougher and rougher, with more and more cheap deaths (hopefully these are things the author is still working on and not how they think they have to ramp up difficulty!); Flying Fortress Zone doesn’t have the game’s usual meticulously parallaxed layer upon layer of gorgeous pixel art background detail, and dumps you right into a big pit that does not feel like the start of a level; and the final or some final boss fight anyway lurches very slowly through a cycle of clunky attack patterns, that aren’t actually very dangerous because a glitch lets you keep re-activating your shield–but once in a while it does a sorta insta-kill attack and bah, I couldn’t deal.
So hopefully this stuff IS still being worked on, along with the meandering performance level and so forth. I’m following the author on YT so I’ll just have to check in every once in a…while. ^ _^
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you and me both brother amirite
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I felt this way but it turns out the starting cars they give you are truly dog shit. Still merely a “pretty good” racer though.
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The was an indie game that came out a decade back called The Fall that was a minor hit. It was about an AI within a spacesuit that determines that after a fall of some sort the person within the suit may be hurt and to get them to some aid. Doing so required having to work with the rules that govern its behavior. Solid little adventure game, rough controls and some occasional “how do I proceed” bits but still benefited from the neat narrative framing and asking some decent sci-fi questions. That said I forgot almost all details of the story beyond the basics.
Some point after this a sequel came out, The Fall 2: Unbound, that failed to make much of an impact and performed poorly enough that they apparently recently admitted that the third part of the planned trilogy won’t be made despite the initial kickstarter having tiers that mentioned providing all three games. Naturally this was the perfect time for me to decide to jump in and I gotta say… it has almost the exact same flaws but I think they have a gift for pulpy sci-fi stories as I dug this perhaps too much?
After the end of the first game where it turned out there was no one within the suit and you end up taken away and disassembled you come to, detect someone trying to intrude on your programming and decide that since the new rule you made for yourself is more or less “must live” to go do something about this. Since your body is currently unavailable you do some light platforming through the internet equivalent, jump into some other AI-run bots going through their programming and without getting too much into things it does a good job of asking about the worth of rules even if self-chosen, the morality of trampling over those of others to uphold your own, and other sci-fi things of that ilk. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is high art or anything but there is a level of pleasant sci-fi that I find charming and this operates within that spectrum rather well.
It also fortunately ends at a decent enough stopping point so that while it definitely left open a place for a third game to go it successfully addressed and tied up most of the major narrative threads and ideas it was concerned with.
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that first hot wheels unleashed game is indeed charmless and tasteless and obnoxiously mobile-adjacent, but it’s still the one of the best-driving non-sims out there. and i personally abhor forza horizon so i have negative interest in those
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each of the hotwheels only pulled me away from trackmania for about one play session each. i found the AI way too easy on one difficulty and way too hard the next difficulty up and it was just much more pleasant to grind trackmania maps where restarting takes a fraction of the time.
they’re clearly trying to do some rocket league-esque mid-air driving/boosting but yeah the physics feel weirdly heavy and the collisions very plastic/rigid and unpredictable so it doesn’t quite work. if it leaned harder into trackmania or leaned harder into being a sort of futuristic racer (fzero, wipeout) i think i’d like it more but it seems to sit in a weird midpoint that satisfied neither itch for me.
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Stellar Blade demo: turned it off and walked away after the ass lady you play as, EVE, reveals the name of the male lead
it’s Adam.
video games are bad?
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Iirc from the trailer, your equipment person is named lilly, so yeah that’s games!
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stellar blade is making the dumbest gamers alive horny for its insanely misogynistic “korean game industry” house style so i am completely unsurprised that it sucks. “finally, a sexy woman in my game, unlike all those ugly western games with hag women” they say. my brother in christ you have a porn addiction!!!
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Precedent set by people pretending Nier Automata is more than just a butt for most people tbh.
Coincidentally also has characters named Adam and Eve in a vague gesture at themes
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tbf i think adam & eve being incestuous brothers has more going for it than any of the usual adam & eve stuff
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