hard to be a god, and I keep seeing that screen as saying loading cruelties
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I played Mother all the way through. That’s right Mother in Japanese. Much like anyone who has played through Mother I wouldn’t neccessarily recommend it.
It is neat everything it does as a late era Famicom release. The story is just barely there though. You’re given barely any direction for the whole thing. Like one NPC will say “There’s a factory” and that is your only clue you need to find this factory and go to it and do something there. It is neat how their often isn’t a boss at the end of a dungeon. It is trying to be a deconstruction but how successful that is as entertainment for the player is debatable.
Why you even start going on your adventure or continue to do so is a mystery. The game doesn’t really have story reveals as story occasionally happens with no connection. I feel like Earthbound did hit everything better but this has been in my mind for years and it was only concidence that it came up in this thread this week, while I was already deep into playing it.
I do finally get that Pollyana song.
Oh and since none of the patches work for the Japanese version the random battle rate is really really out of control. I had to switch to Retroarch for the back half and suddenly having fast forward only made it bareable. I’m talking 3 random battles in a row and you haven’t even taken a step. Doing Holy Moly Mountain the only play is to run from every single random battle and I did the Five Times I had to climb it.
i don’t have anything to say about the dialog actually!
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It’s funny how 4th-Dimensional Slip (not sure what it’s called in JP) is included as a spell almost entirely in anticipation of that mountain.
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Itoi on Mt. Holy Moly/Mt. HisName
That place is just crazy. When we got to fine-tuning there, I was like, “Whatever!”
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So I rented Spartan Total Warrior from Blockbuster today. The first mission was pretty alright, but then the game just hangs loading the second mission so maybe I won’t play more of it. The voice acting is hilariously bad, and combat feels pretty complicated without really giving me much feedback as to what worked better. I think I like Dynasty Warriors games more, though since the second mission won’t load, I may never know…
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wait did i just go through a time warp or something
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Booji lives in Bend, Oregon home of the last remaining Blockbuster Video as of 2019 or perhaps “renting ____ from Blockbuster” is a euphemism…
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Spartan is pretty good but it demands a bit more from you than a Dynasty Warriors.
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My brother does.
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Balatro was boring and grindy and every run feels the same regardless of starting deck
RNG isn’t a problem for the first 3 stakes but it becomes unbearable to me from black stake onwards. Resetting a run in the first two antes, over and over, until I get something remotely viable isn’t interesting. The poker part of the game is fine, the idea of manipulating the rules of poker to triumph is good, but the dependence on getting good items in the shop in order to succeed is so annoying.
Bad game, cute idea
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Select Button
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I disagree with this point because I’ve beaten the game 5 times and every time my joker setup has been different, requiring different priorities in each run. There’s definitely a sense that some seeds just aren’t viable for victory, but the game is snappy enough (and I’ve just come away from a Zachtronics Solitaire spree) where I don’t mind.
I agree that most starting decks feel like the produce similar runs, but the decks you unlock later are wildly different. After beating the game with five decks, the game gives you challenge conditions which can be even more bizarre.
I’m going to end this post addressing anyone who hasn’t played it yet. Don’t. You don’t want any of this shit. Stay clean, kids.
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in higher stakes games, a lot of the variance in strategy that I found with my early victories disappeared. It became all about constructing high-card/pair decks with lots of mult and xMult jokers (nothing else came even close to survivable, and if I didn’t find an xMult by the end of Ante 2, it was an instant reset because I knew I was wasting my time)
The only real variance at that point was if I happened upon The Trio in the first few antes, because then I would focus on three of a kind instead of pairs.
edit: and just to be clear, I am much further than just five victories. It was a compulsion for a while but I broke out of it when I realized how shallow the experience ultimately became. Maybe they’ll rebalance the higher difficulties one day so that it doesn’t turn into a slog
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This sounds fair. I’ve only played on white stake and I always felt like the value of the blinds after beating the game were funneling me into a very narrow success state.
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The game did a great job of making me feel like I did something very clever during my first few victories but that feeling subsided the further I got
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Any excuse to stop playing, to say no to completing each of the 120 deck/stake runs sounds like a pro to me.
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whoever designed the extra stages in the sonic 2 long verson romhack really loves stupid timewasting mazes that send you back to an earlier part of the stage for missing a jump. i, however, do not.
also started playing original resident evil for the first time in at least a decade. it’s a shame that this registers as nostalgia more than it does horror nowadays. but i guess that’s why it has The One Good Remake.
i really want to replay galerians, too. resident evil for chuunis
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i think a huge miss in the balatro design space is that there are so many jokers that do the exact same things but for different suits / hands / whatever. +4 mult with hearts. +4 mult with spaces. +mult with pairs, straights, etc. i really wish the suits and hands had identities – like how mtg colors are better at some things and worse at others. what if diamonds were better for chips and clubs for mult or whatever. like, there needs to be more axes to deck building where a skilled player can make more refined choices than a beginner.
and the dev was saying in interviews he didn’t play many other card games so that balatro would have a unique spin but i think that’s a super backwards way to approach game design. if your goal is to be different, surely playing other games and then intentionally picking mechanics that you haven’t seen would be the easier way to do that? like if you have to make rules for yourself so you don’t just blatantly copy things then maybe you’re not being intentional enough in your mechanics design to begin with. and if you play other games, you can actually benefit from years and years of developed genre conventions that exist for a reason. yes, a game needs unique elements to be compelling, but why throw away years of free design work (especially when your strategy still has a chance at convergent design, because, uh, you don’t know what to avoid!!)
anyway i think the video poker theming is great and it seems to be successful in attracting an audience who is usually averse to deckbuilders but i wish it was a bit deeper. it fell flat for me pretty quickly, while i’ve put 100s of hours into other deckbuilders and still occasionally play them when i get the itch.
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Played (some of) that demo for the Rugrats game on Steam, partially out of nostalgia but mostly wondering “how does this work, letting you switch between a 4:3 NES game and a 16:9 HD game?”
The answer is: rough!
Playing it, it was very clearly made with the NES version in mind first (which, hey, makes sense!), with the HD version being a sort of skin applied over it. Played entirely in that NES mode, it’s a pretty simple, charming little platform game. In HD mode, the game zooms in and crops the top and bottom, making parts of the level obscured. You can hit the left trigger button and force it into an HD 4:3, but in some ways the extra animations on enemies in HD make them kinda hard to read.
The NES graphics are also way cuter. Can’t render that awful lumpy Tommy Pickles cranium when you’ve got a limited economy of pixels.
I’ll give it another whirl and just stick to the NES version instead of constantly switching, see if it’s worth the time.
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