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

[captainlove]

Played Princess Peach Showtime! and I feel like I bet on the wrong horse.

The game is very simple to play (move, jump, action) and is a pure context-action game. The premise and most of what you’re asked to do are almost too mindless though. Each level revolves around a gimmick that changes Peach’s contextual moveset but it’s mostly just one or two new actions you mash in most situations. The levels have little sparkles you can get for doing little secrets and bosses but getting them all on the first run usually doesn’t happen because you get put in lots of points of no return so the game seems to expect you to replay a handful of short levels over and over to get used to each Peach. It feels like a weird Megaman game with no challenge other than remembering the one or two things you didn’t do.

The presentation and politics of Peach herself are odd as well. I’m not sure what this game can really say other than ‘we don’t think Peach is an object, at least’. She is barely a person. She says her lines and looks gung-ho and does things in the framing device of a play. She has no other real characters to bounce off of and the confirmation of her as a protagonist that rises above her historical stereotyping is all external to the game and too complex for a game that is clearly aimed at very young players. I’m not sure what the vision is and you get the horrible feeling it was an original IP made into a Peach game.

Ninja Peach is really fun though. They should just make a Ninja game.

[isfet]

@Rudie

Hey Arcade

i think about Hey every day of my life

[Rudie]

So it’s Balan Wonderworld: The Video Game By Nintendo?

[Grandpa]

Streamed a few games, for a little bit. Some “bite sized” chunks.

Mameda no Bakeru: Hey, speaking of that Princess Peach game, I guess this is Good Feel’s previous game from last year, that knowing my luck will get translated this year and I’ll be out $25, dang! It definitely sorta has a Goemon game look to it, but it’s a pretty simple little platform game where you run around whacking enemies with taiko drum sticks, and hit a few lanterns to break a seal on a drum at the end of the level, and collect, uh, little factoids from book-reading poops. Maybe it won’t get brought over here, then Way more dialogue than I expected, so I’m having to hold my phone up with Google Translate to figure it out. I gave up and just use it when the poops dish new info…

Masala Drive: It’s funny, but dang it’s too hard. Love to mash the horn button, too bad it slows you down though…

The Brazil: The other, newer game by Happymeal. Oh my god this game rules. You try to dig through the earth to arrive in Brazil from Japan. The only control you have over your character is that holding any given button makes you dig in a circle to the right. You gotta maintain your oxygen and hunger meters by collecting O2 and food pickups, and can dig faster with shovels (or get poisoned and slow down). If you starve, run out of oxygen, or hit a patch of water or magma, you die, so sometimes it’s better to pop out on the side of the earth and end up in Brussels, or Antigua. The death screens are so damn funny, though.

Excessive Trim: I could not figure out how to play this. You play as an alien flying around in some sort of buzzsaw UFO and dash into farmers and protestors? I think? It looks cool, at least.

Sokofrog: Very cute little sokoban game with a frog. The music loop is…way too short.

Eroblast: Loathsome. I bought this for $5 when I was going to do a birthday stream earlier this year (and ran into a bunch of technical issues and had to bail on it), since the bundle I got was “Eroblast: 37 Waifus Edition” (I turned 37, this was the joke). God it’s so bad. “What if Tinder with anime drawings, and every response is the most boneheaded shit you can imagine, and also you constantly run outta money to chat so you gotta play a terrible block busting game to try and get more Boost Mobile bucks to keep saying the absolute worst shit.” I knew it was going to be bad, but, geez!

The joke…is on me…I could have gotten a crunchwrap…but at least we got some cringe laughs out of it, I guess…

[Sykel]

@Rudie

So it’s Balan Wonderworld: The Video Game By Nintendo?

I only played the demo, but it’s not nearly as bad as Balan. I agree with pretty much everything Captain Love said though… I thought it was a chill enough time, but it definitely didn’t have enough meat on it to make me pay full price. Very, very simple game.

I didn’t have any problems with Peach barely being a person because that’s pretty much every nintendo character

[username]

@Grandpa

Sokofrog: Very cute little sokoban game with a frog. The music loop is…way too short.

I was gonna go “wow, way to jump on a game that just came out with no fanfare or talk around it whatsoever”, but it turns out that was SokoPenguin. FWIW based on a quick peek Frog looks like the more sensible soko-animal experience.

I was told recently that a game named Monstruous was made free to play, so I got around to playing it yesterday. The game is basically having to figure out the correct order to press the 8 buttons (that is literally it) which is a bit on the limited side. On the other hand it is basically an animated battle against a creature where the reaction to each button press/attack informs you as to what it could do and where to place it within that 8 button sequence. Utterly inessential but I thought it was a cute little experiment.

[hellojed]

More Pacific Drive. Turning on invincibility was the right call, theres way too many opportunities for the vehicle to get damaged and very few ways to repair it. Unlocking armored parts takes so many resources! There’s one enemy type that just straight up yanks parts off the car, and so I had to craft new parts in the field to replace it. It would take me 3x longer to crawl to the point in the game that I’m currently at if I had to stop and fix everything…and also get resources to fix things…I have so many resources, I have nearly 2 lockers full of resources gathered. But I feel like spending any of them would lock me out of other stuff I might need, so I don’t upgrade anything hardly. I finally upgraded the wheels of the car to off road tires and traversal is actually so much easier.

The game’s plot is told via narration of the 3 characters stuck in the Zone, which is fine, but there’s so many of them they kind of start to overlap, and when there is a lot of shit happening in the game it’s hard to pay attention to them.

The game is also not very clear on gathering “LIM Energy” which are beachballs that glow and you grab them to unlock stuff. I thought you could only get them at dead-end nodes or if I grabbed one I would have to open a portal back immediately. instead you can just grab them as you drive along.

Haha nevermind, i can’t add a new engine because I need a whole new resource I have only found ONE of

yeah look at what I need to build “repair gel” which is the only thing that fixes the many parts of the vehicle, after playing for an hour I can craft like 3 of them because they require 2 “chemical” which are only found in certain structures (and I look every time!) and I haven’t been using them because I have invincibility on. but the other resources I have a ton of, probably an indicator of how uneven the game’s resource economy is.

[hellojed]

you need functional upgrades to the car, like more gas capacity or storage, or lights - these make going out and doing basic shit in the game easier and faster. But you also need to constantly rebuild the car’s panels and doors, the game levels are full of hazards that randomly pop up and damage it. Doors have glass, so they can be damaged and also have a status effect of the glass being shattered, or electricity, and to upgrade these it takes one zillion units of bullshit. There’s also gear you can apply to your character to make them resistant to, like, radiation and stuff. Except after fully 15 hours in the game I have unlocked ONE SINGLE character upgrade. I am regularly dipping into radioactive areas so it would be nice. but since turning on invincibility it doesn’t matter.

and yeah, gathering resources is kind of tedious. Sometimes you use one of your 4-5 tools to get things and then they scatter over the ground, and other times it’s a menu interface where you transfer things over. i uhhhh god.

[notbov]

all I’ve gotten about Pacific Drive is that it’s a game that artificially gates progress through stingy drop rates and getting all hot and bothered thinking about it

[MintyJuffowup]

I have been playing A Solitaire Mystery. Out of the 23 modes of solitaire I see on the main screen, I’ve been able to win at seven of them. It’s great to come to this after Zachtronics Solitaire collection. Some of the decks are explicitly inspired by those earlier inventions. That’s not to say they are solved in the same way, but the ideas are flowing from the same fountain.

Of course, not all solitaires in the collection are created equal, but the sum effect of seeing them all presented together is inspiring. It just makes me think how much we are able to do with such simple tools. It also makes me realize the relationship between solitaire and sokoban. In both, you are a virtual storekeeper, a valet whose job it is to put everything where it belongs, no matter what is in the way.

Some of the modes are very small variations on traditional forms of solitaire. They have very clever theming and I expect to play these again many times. Other modes feel more like puzzle boxes. Solve it once and you’re likely to solve it again every time. The puzzle boxes sometimes frustrate me because of how narrow the win condition can be. I’m going to speak abstractly to avoid specificity. In some modes, winning involves using an exact number of “resources.” Through your actions, you can eliminate necessary resources and not realize until you think you are about to win. It can be hard to swallow defeat when you’ve spent so much time digging yourself out of various holes. I don’t see myself playing any of this style a second time, but the first time solving them is satisfying.

Anyways, GOTY so far. I really liked Eldritch Invasion, Time Travel, and Transmutation.

[smbhax]

This might be a free old version of one of the mystery solitaires: https://hempuli.itch.io/babataire

[MintyJuffowup]

Yep! It may be slightly altered now but that’s one of the solitaires I’ve been able to beat.

[Tuxedo]

After my disappointment with Unicorn Overlord, I went back to the FFT-style TRPG Fell Seal, which I previously abandoned for being way too uncool

Verdict : Fell Seal is pretty OK, but I’d probably play through FFT at least 3 times before touching this game. Classic « worse, indie version of a game you’ve played 20 years ago »

The game has a nice balance of classes and interesting systems etc, but 20 hours in I just decided to forego the usual « melee attacker / ranged attacker / magical attacker / healer / support / status inflicter » team composition to turn everybody into dual wielding gunners. They all had good damage, at 7-8 range, in a FFT- like too budget to have line of sight (so guns always hit even if there’s a house between the gunner and their victim)

This turned a smart diverse TRPG into a really stupid game of « can the Cowboys just stay where they are and shoot all enemies one by one before they reach and kill them ». The answer was always yes. Do bring two guns to a swordfight

I’m not unaware that I ignored a game for being too shallow (Unicorn Overlord) to play a deeper game in the most braindead way possible. Maybe I just needed the possibility of depth, even if I just ended up ignoring it

[smbhax]

I felt like I could hang with it up until being able to turn any card sideways onto any other card and suddenly that was waaaaay too complicated for my brain to handle. = ooo

I did manage the first puzzle in this free play-in-browser block pusher they just put out yesterday so I felt good about that ^ _^

Tilemount by Hempuli

[Father.Torque]

@Father.Torque

Literally all I’ve played for a month is FF14 and Helldivers 2 (and bg3 with the boys), what the hell is happening to me. I need like a singleplayer game with a story to feel human again

Took the opportunity afforded by today’s gorgeous weather to stay inside and remedy this by playing a 90’s adventure game about ecology, Amerzone.

I love it. I didn’t know what to expect, I always just drooled over the box art devoid of context, but it’s punchy, with practical puzzles in diegetic bite size chapters. It’s a game made by ~the French~ about seeking a lost legendary animal so I guess I’d call it a Syberia-like.* It’s trying really hard to make cg cutscenes work and the characters are hideous in the most charming way. I really love adventure games that have other people in them that act realistically but also have neat explanations for why there aren’t more than a handful of people and why your interactions with them are limited, and Amerzone does this admirably. It’s also… woke? Like the plot is about this trio of men who in the 30’s ruined a South American country via colonialism each in their own way, and you’re here to offer just a tiny bit of justice for the indigenous… you can’t solve all the problems or save the world, but you can do one good thing to work a modicum toward setting it right.

Feels good to play. Excellent spring afternoon game.

*Ok so I looked it up on mobygames and Amerzone’s director literally also directed Syberia in 2002, so I guess Syberia is actually an Amerzone spiritual sequel.

[hellojed]

Advancing in the game somewhat, i mean plot wise. We have an Inner Zone destination. I have spent, like, 2 days trying to unlock a new engine. Unlocking the crafting receipt took forever, and crafting it takes so many resources and I didn’t think to get fifty gajillion scrap metal. Grabbing resources takes so much time in terms of repairing the car for a run, doing a run, and then coming back.

I also decided to turn back on player and car damage. Some of the settings under “realism” change whether turning the car on and shifting it into drive are button presses vs holding it for 1 second, and I’m like “why isn’t this on automatically? why is this a toggle? why did they think this annoying extra bit of friction had to be here?”.

I rage quit like once when a bunch of anomalies just spawned on top of the car and destroyed it. There’s so many of them and they don’t follow a certain logic. They literally just show up and fuck with you.

[Sykel]

This sounds like a game I would adore in concept but hate actually playing, that’s disappointing.

[hellojed]

I want to like it but it seems like car upgrade aquisition is just so difficult and tedious.

In The Long Drive for instance you can just swap parts on from other cars whether they fit the slot or not. To get a car running you need a few things (Engine, gas, water, oil, radiator, four wheels and tires) and those can be found in the game world. They generally don’t take damage, but you can repaint them or freshen them up using stuff. You do stop at every structure to see if there’s anything useful, but also because they’re so few and far between, and there isn’t a map.

Jalopy has a more gamified approach but also has an in game money economy to purchase and trade stuff to make the car go further. You also need money to sleep at a hotel for the night and advance to the next area. Functional parts like engines and wheels can fail and you have to swap them out or repair them. So you’re balancing the cargo capacity of the car and shuffling things around trying to carry the optimal amount of stuff, while selling off what you don’t need.

The “Quirks” system in Pacific Drive was cute at first: the dome light randomly going on and off when you turn the wheel. But now they’re really really annoying. I fixed the dome light problem only to have nearly the same problem crop up again, so I’m leaving it unfixed so it doesn’t break again. You have to remember to fix it, and by the time you got the car all “ready” you forget to do it. So you just live with it for an entire run, rinse and repeat. I have a very annoying one where the lights flicker when the windsheild wipers are on.

I want to like this game, I think i’m gonna try to finish it because the game world is interesting and seeing where the game’s systems break down is useful.

But man, the grind, I do enough of that during the work week

[hellojed]

Completed a run where I went and grabbed a bunch of crystals, except I’m like 7 crystals short. It would be nice if these fucking crafted items let you pin the stupid shopping list for whatever bullshit you needed.

I did manage to finally upgrade the engine so now traversal is less agonizing. Mid run I ended up disabling damage again because the later levels are full of bouncing acid balloons that cover the car in acid, they do a lot of damage really fast, they’re impossible to avoid. Maybe if I weren’t trying to unlock a bunch of bullshit I could have eventually gotten to building more armor for the car - except you can’t build this stuff without going into the high damage areas.

I only made significant progress in the game when I disabled damage so maybe I just do that the rest of the game.

[drastic_bb]

thinking about how i started replaying killer7 last year when i started smoking weed and the andrei ulmeyda boss fight was so fucking scary to me i had to turn the game off (alt+f4 dolphin)