Games You Played Today The Nonbiri Express '09 (Galaxie ((500×2)−1)) 9小時9人9ゲーム LOOK I MADE IT LONGER: The Power of One

[thecatamites]

played some more sephonie… at this point it feels like every videogame has done the thing of like “level where you wander around some prefab assets placed in an abstract void to represent the protagonists fragmented memories”, even megaman has one now probably, i did like it here tho bc
(a) the whole section is a very earnest paean to the city of bloomington, indiana, which i think is a very funny thing to make a videogame level about
(b) it’s also just one huge contained platforming showcase that works specifically bc the manmade level shapes sit so oddly with both the rest of the game’s style and the basic controls, and bc the real life imagery gets to feel really strange and vertiginous at places in this new context… like theres a part where you have to wallrun and jump around on a suburban neighbourhood lot tilted 90’ and the backing and forthing of orientation was made that bit more disorienting by this readymade iconography of “floor” and “wall”

i also played a couple of domino club games… trying to catch up… i liked dream tube, joey wamone’s normal bedtime routine and ziptie choker, there were some other ones i bounced off a bit more… i think i’ve sort of got to accept i’m not a visual novel guy, like words in vgames work for me bc the habit of prose is undercut by game parts that tend to be strongly disinterested in what makes up “good writing” on its own, like lyrics in pop music, VNs feel more like spoken word or instrumental music… dream tube is a great showcase for some of the interesting effects you can get from VNs specifically but whenever i play one i find myself waiting for, idk, some kind of lyrical break which will complement and change the text parts, leap outwards into the vast spaces of a videogame skybox, and thats not really what they’re trying to do.

[Stree_Overlord]

Wandered up to Garinham after spending waaaaaaaaaaaay too long trying to do Edrick’s Cave blind (literally amirite these Torches suck ass) and then finally throwing up my hands and looking up this dinky-ass 15x15 or whatever it is map that had been torturing me for so long christ there were two floors how much blood do you want Enix. Shit is like literally 10x more expensive and the monsters give like 3-5x more rewards so uh set course for grinding ladies and germs.

It’s kind of fun to write and gripe about it because I’m sure everybody’s like c’mon duh you’re playing DW on the NES what do you expect but the experience has been smoothed out so much in the intervening decades and even the remakes of this title on other platforms, they’ve cut us a break even, so the question is how much did they playtest this, if they even playtested it given the development environments of the time, and with just the overall charm of DW compared to the sandblasted-ass “ideal funnel” experience of modern games whether we’d better served by having games that just…didn’t work on some level, that having a Dragon Scale that gives a permanent armor bonus just because you equipped it once and then just sold it again is better than yet another roguelite where all the powers are “get .005% more poison damage on critical hits”, better hope you’re making a Poison Build to pick that one baby.

[username]

I started up Ys IX: Monstrum Nox and either the first hours of the game are too intro/tutorial heavy or the game pacing might end up being a big problem. I enjoyed Ys VIII a good deal so something in that mold should be right down my alley but so far through the first 2 1/2 or so hours this hasn’t been all that good. There’s been rather little combat all things considered and most of it has either been “tower defense” sections or “random”-esque battles where you gotta touch an orb to activate a few enemies to fight. I finally got to a dungeon bit and it was over in under 10 minutes so that I could walk around a city some more. Fingers crossed I guess.

I will say the set-up to start things off was good, with you ending up arrested and thrown in jail due to your history with so many significant/odd events (i.e. all the prior games) is rather suspicious and you are accused of being responsible for all of them. The interrogator accusing you of wrecking all your ships after so many of the Ys games more or less start with you waking up on a beach after a wreck made me chuckle.

[isfet]

it took about 30 years, but i finally beat Castlevania

the Death fight is really the hardest part of the entire game, and even with a triple cross subweapon, it really takes 100% of my focus. i’m sure as i play this game more often, it’ll get easier, but still.

i think i’ve posted this elsewhere, but my first real love affair with Castlevania began with Castlevania VS. - it was one of the arcade cabinets available at the pool where my family would vacation in St. Augustine, Florida, and i remember watching the attract mode repeatedly, learning what the game was about. i had read through the NES Players Guide from Nintendo Power, and was always intrigued by CV, but CV2 had scared me as a younger child, and i guess it made me unconsciously reluctant to pick the series up.

anyway, i finally spent some quarters on the game and immediately got into. the cabinet had no sound, even, so i had to make up the sounds in my head, at first. when i got home, i think i eventually went to a Funcoland and picked up the game for rather cheap, and the rest, etc. is history

so anyway, i’d always made it to Death, and never gotten past him, but after watching enough speedrunners, i learned the trick (get the cross).

so tonight, i beat Castlevania. i think what the game has going for it is that it’s beatable in a pretty short amount of time. i loaded up Akumajou Densetsu right after, and quit when i died on the level where you have to wait for blocks to pile up. what a terrible idea for a stage - what were they thinking? it totally kills the game’s momentum, which is a shame, because everything else about it is so good.

except for Alucard - he sucks! i forgot that and took him to replace Grant. what a mistake!

after that, i moved on to Gimmick! - i made it to the boss of Stage 3, and after 30 minutes of retries, i gave up. i love that game, but it really is unwavering in its dedication to making you feel ridiculous

[hellojed]

I wanna like Night Runners because it absolutely gets the details right, the problems are several things:

very obnoxious screenshake and the dynamic FOV make controlling the car very difficult, just seeing ahead is difficult.

Every race I’ve entered has ended because I take a wrong fork in the road. In Tokyo Extreme Racer routes aren’t fixed, the game tells you when a fork is coming up, and you either follow your opponent or you choose which route to take. In Night Runners it’s impossible to tell which fork to take until after you’ve missed it, and you’re going too far and the camera is zoomed out too much to be able to react in time. There aren’t any invisible walls or giant glowing arrows telling you where to go, and their absence makes the game just really hard to read.

[Rudie]

@winkerwatson

they haven’t even given this away for free.

Playstation Plus has a 90 Minute demo, which is how I played it.

[Rudie]

Friend as someone who just two months ago tried this same thing with Dragon Quest 1 I gotta urge you switch to one of the down the road ports. The numbers get too rough. The numbers will crush you.

[scratchmonkey]

Hey we managed it at Branson with only a dedicated crew playing it around the clock for like three days straight.

[hellojed]

Pacific Drive allows you, mercifully, to turn off many of the game’s systems, including the vehicle taking damage. I did this to finally advance to the game’s next area. There are a lot of interesting sights on the way there, and I would not have been able to get there if I hadn’t enabled invunerability, because one area had so many hazards I had to drive through.

There’s still so many annoyances: There’s one resource you can only get from science structures, and sometimes these are gated by use of a tool. One of those tools I haven’t unlocked (Electronics Kit) and another required a crowbar. The game’s tools have durability, and I hadn’t collected enough scrap metal to craft a single crowbar (It needs 4 scrap, I have 3) but also: why does a crowbar disintegrate??

Now that the next area of the game unlocked more stuff is also unlocking, but I still have to do…so many runs to get the kind of currency which will unlock Stuff. Maybe I’ll leave invincibility on because the game is a lot more placid this way.

[isfet]

it’s been said elsewhere (by me and Sleazy and others) but i think Superstars would be vastly improved if they cut boss health by like 50%. the last boss is pure memorization, and not the compelling kind, and it just keeps going and going.

i enjoyed the game enough where i felt like i was playing the Genesis games again, but those boss battles really take me out of the moment. it feels like what should be a nice, 30 minute game, stretched out to something much longer.

[Tony]

I am still playing Shadow Tower! I managed to finish the Fire world (I spammed frost magic to the boss – but fire world is a madhouse) and the Water world (I kept shooting fire magic to the boss from afar).
Learning to use magic is fundamental, otherwise there are several enemies that will just kill the player, given their abilities and movement pattern.

Now I have reached the Illusion world: there are creatures playing strange music and I keep getting killed without understanding why…

[Mothra]

I’m continuing my way through Chrono Cross, which really feels like Squaresoft at their peak, both in hubris and talent.

This time, I’m taking the baffling “don’t save Kid” route that hides the other 50% of game content I never saw the first time I played. It bugs me how you are required to use a guide for this game, your next task is never well-communicated in-game.

That quibble aside, I am thoroughly enjoying it. This is such a sad, beautiful, strange game. The people that inhabit both worlds are interesting and of that place, you are frequently rewarded for chatting up everyone you see.

Example of a standard Chrono Cross sidequest

In the latest chapter, I found a village where humans had displaced all the demi-humans. There were just the ghosts of the displaced floated about. I slept there, and overnight, woke up to the solumn singing of a mermaid. I chatted with her, and she said that we might be able to fix this place with the help of a famous pirate king. She followed me out.

I found his pirate boat, got on there, and the pirate guy turned out to be an asshole. The boat houses a Prince-like hearthrob musician in leather straps, who the demi-humans believe could bring humans and demis together with his singing. However, the pirate lord wouldn’t let me go see The Talent.

So I wandered aimlessly, attended a stage magic show (always an insane thing to exist in a world of regular magic use), and the magician got heckled, being called a fraud. The guy was invited on-stage, where the magician turned him into a cat, then back again. I later talked to the magician and agreed to join his show. He then turned my party into cats, and then I fled the show. He gave chase but ran into a wall and threw out his back, so I left him for dead and snuck around the ship.

I talked to cats on the ship and found a way to go across a rope to the changing rooms, where I opened the door and the mermaid got the Prince guy super excited about the song idea. There was a brief aside where I battled the former chief of the demi-human island, now reduced to a literal janitor, and he agreed to hum an ancient song to Prince and let him learn it.

I then talked to a cat who told me about a sketchy machine in the basement, so I snuck in, and it was this giant magnet that a hench would rotate with the handle to make it so the roulette table in the room above always won for the pirate king. I grabbed the handle in my mouth and fled, then turned back to normal, and walked into the pirate’s quarters, where he was arguing with Prince, and accidently disclosed to Prince that he is his long-lost father. After this emotional moment, I immediately challenged him to roulette and fucking destroyed him, so he was forced to give me backstage access. I then rallied the band and played a song that mended the hearts of demi-humans and humans alike, curing racism.

[drastic_bb]

The Incredibly Bizarre Plot of Alien Soldier, Finally Explained - Mega Drive...

i have no idea if any of this is accurate or true but there’s a paragraph at the bottom that says something ive long wondered about…

specifically the connection between “alien soldier” and “glass soldier” which is mentioned in the s&p credits as the original title for the game

[Grandpa]

Alright I was kinda glib about Spiritfarer earlier, but I actually kinda had to rush one character off the boat once she was able because her whole predicament hits way too close to home

[YOE]

@thecatamites

dream tube is a great showcase for some of the interesting effects you can get from VNs specifically but whenever i play one i find myself waiting for, idk, some kind of lyrical break which will complement and change the text parts, leap outwards into the vast spaces of a videogame skybox, and thats not really what they’re trying to do.

yeah this is something that i’ve also found prevents me from really ever getting into any vns ive tried beyond extremely short ones. they have this breathlessly paced quality to them that i find rlly exhausting to experience like listening to a recording of a long conversation with all the gaps and odd pauses edited out, or reading fanfiction stuff that’s 10000 back and forth sentences, reading too many tweets fatigue. something abt the uniformity imposed on text by game engines doesn’t work when it’s the only thing happening i think

[Rudie]

Come to The Deathsmiles Machine in Hey Arcade in Akiba to try and beat my good but not impressive score in Deathsmiles MegaBlackLabel today.

[thecatamites]

yeah, i get why people would like that sense of radio-play intimacy and it does mean they get to be more specific and precise than videogames ever seem to get to - like it’s funny playing one of these things where “a sound effect” is a specific event to pay attention to rather than just another element in a vague sensory wash, where you’re hoping just to pick up the broadest outlines of whatever’s being signalled…

to be honest i do get a bit tired of that specificity in itself too. like a few of the games reminded me of a tendency afflicting a lot of english prose to think of little sensory details as marks of “truthfulness” in writing, and so to pile them on, maximal minimalism, the impulse not to trust any piece of prose unless it’s been worked into something immediate and overripe… that can be fun but it also just makes me fantasize abt going back for more games with a perfectly undetailed green field under a nonspecific blue sky and some subvocal little homunculus squatting there doing nothing in particular. freedom from effect, terrestrial paradise

[Rudie]

Other things I encountered when I went to Akihabara today:

Senseki Striker by Kaneko: It’s not very good!

Viper Phase One: Fantastic as always. Is it properly emulated yet?

Rage Racer owns so hard. To beat the normal track you would have to play perfectly for 6 laps. Who could do that! Midway through my run an old man sat down in the 2nd cabinet and burned through the hard mountain course slamming the steering wheel in a way that was clearly working through something. I got up and watched the rest of his run and as I did a little tourist kid sat down in my seat and played a round and just like yeah that’s a weird special experience to have nowadays huh?

Go damn there are so many tourists now.

Battle Garrega was open so I sat down for it and I immediately felt every eye passing by on me. That’s the power of Battle Garrega. I definitely dissappointed that game is hard as shit and I lost my first life to amateur hour and my second life to the first boss then burned my bombs so I could make a respectable attempt at stage 2 which I did.

@HOBO is right! Street Fighter 6 Arcade is out and it was active! That felt good. Just next door was a woman in full “just went to a wedding” formal destroying Cleopatra’s Fortune.

I did two matches against a real human Cyber Troopers Virtual On Oratorio Tangram. Then I was out of money!

Police 911 2 is the best light gun game ever made until Superhot VR did the same thing like 12 years later. Give me Police 911 2 in VR!!! It should have been in the wii dammit!!!

Some Italians tried to scam the staff by saying they put 1000 into NYGunblade? I assume they just put 100.

Like 6 of the big machines in that arcade we went to @contentdeleted are dead. Yeah expected that!

I thought about how I did get to see Akiba die at 8pm but it was still so clogged with tourists now with nothing to do. Guess all the UFO catchers were open and there was just a volumnous number of meiddo touts. And I really worried when there are actual sexual services available what’s the appeal. Decided I still don’t understand. Weirder sadder stupider thread going in the axe.

When I Go To Akiba I Become A Different Person. I kept yelling stuff assuming a friend was listening. I was alone. At one point I was in an elevator with 3 other white guys (all strangers) and we all had Jean Jackets on. When the elevator opened I said “Nice Jackets Everyone”, I got nothing!

[loki]

if fictional tv shows about the clientele of maid cafes has told me anything, it’s that they’re pathetic losers who are terrified of sex, and that’s why they go to maid cafes

[aislesgrises]

i’d probably go to a maid cafe at least once tbh

i defeat the actual for real true last boss in rabi-ribi and even tho the writing is kinda no good i think it’s incredibly funny that prefacing this is her getting in bed with our protagonist and “doing something”, freaking out that she’s terrible for this “something”, running away, and we have to catch up to her and let her know it’s totally ok. but we gotta survive a really long danmaku battle before we can reach out to her.

afterwards they recover in bed together. very sweet.

this was fun. the loop of finding and beating up girls so they’ll become your friends and move to your town is like, pure dopamine for me. it’s sort of horny, but i’m not sure i would’ve cleanly registered that without seeing someone else pointing that out cause it avoids any like, actual explicitness. mostly a lot of characters wear stuff like garters and leotards and swimsuits and whatever, which is like, ok sure? it’s all kinda whatever?

this island is all lesbians so how come i’ve never seen any girls making out? like, who’s gonna shame them, the other lesbians?