finished alien soldier for the first time and the last third of that game made me want to run someone over with my car
18 Likes
Did I make this post already? I don’f remember and search says I didn’t!
While being stuck in bed I replayed El Shaddai and Killer 7 which are both some of the best to ever do it. I even read the El Shaddai bonus book, which is more or less El Shaddai 2.
I played Killer 7 in Japanese. The dialog was always in English. The Japanese subtitles vibrate beneath. The furigana is frequently katakana English words that are somewhat related to the kanji. You combine that with the babelfish Japanese To English To Japanese To English to Microsoft Text to Speech with a filter on top you get a very unique experience in your brain. Remember the Japanese script has thick meaty kanji words which are to express english words in the script but babelfish doesn’t know that so that leads to some unique choices out of the Ghosts mouths.
Like every part of the game is that textually dense. Then it’s all about Japan’s role in the world after WW2 except sometimes it’s America (capital city Seattle) as Japan but other times Japan is Japan and America is America? Sometimes these themes are just for fun and sometimes serious and often contradictory. It’s all being relayed to me in sometimes English but contradictory Japanese? Then like 4 of the coolest things you’ve ever seen happen next to the most amazing video game bullshit that’s a joke at the player and video games?
I see why I gave Grasshopper near infinite goodwill to disappoint me for the next 19 years.
Meanwhile El Shaddai remains beautiful. The jeans are distressingly low-res. The one button combat is so fucking good. Then it is almost an entirely coherent work about apocryphal Abraham God writings. Boy did I spent 10 minutes just now whether I was gonna put writings/fiction/history/media/books there, for a religion I do not believe. I’m fine, no problems. Sure is a shame that studio got to make a no-budget dungeon crawler then fold.
Playing the best games ever made is good.
22 Likes
i’ve been trying to play that new(?) Need for Speed game, but i literally cannot figure out how to get into my “EA Account” - it said i have to reset my password, which i did, but then there are no further instructions as to what i have to do next.
also, the password i reset with…doesn’t seem to work!
so i uninstalled the game and i guess i can never play an EA game for the rest of my life.
6 Likes
yeah this in particular feels like a very “pen and paper” puzzle trope to me, where a lot of puzzle is in the contextual reasoning about the problem and the execution isn’t terribly exciting because everything mostly just falls into place with the right set of assumptions.
i did not give any of this variety much of a shot yet because i knew enough to see from the beginning it was heavily constrained that way and quickly bailed. were i to attempt to beat them, i think i’d first need to just mess with it so i can get used to the flavor of the mechanics, and then try again with that knowledge informing the overall strategy. basically need some throw away runs to get a sense of what i’m dealing with.
3 Likes
Wizardry without any friction besides exploring the map. no skills or stats to manage when leveling up, no loadouts to tweak, autobattle for encounters (unless you run away). the main loop is keeping an eye on party HP, gold, XP and retreating from the maze at a fortuitous time
kind of wish the map traversal was also as smoothly frictionless, as I get lost in a maze of 2-tile rooms with loading transitions at each door
6 Likes
Still Peaching
Peach should renounce her royalty and just become a witch. This game s t ruug gles on loading. Load times are framey and longer than most contemporary open world games and there’s no clear reason why other than the Switch getting to retirement age. I feel like this game would be a good candidate for Treasure as a developer or at least the bosses give that energy.
Enjoying Unicorn Overlord a lot. Came across a detail presumably missed by the editors. There’s an area in Southwest of the game called Drakenhold but one brief cutscene depicts it as Drakengard (presumably an earlier name they changed halfway through doing localisation).
10 Likes
nothing I hate more than having to re-cut videos to reflect a docs change so I get it
11 Likes
They also didn’t account for the order that you can visit different areas in the narrative parts between chapters. “We might consider exploring [area I’ve already thoroughly explored] next.”
3 Likes
Haven’t played this person’s games but they posted a “dungeon crawl with lighting and Dutch angle” gif that blew my mind. Such low hanging fruit but wow incredible perfect
4 Likes
Their “Demon Lord” dungeon crawler is pretty fun–free on itch, expanded “Demon Lord Reincarnation” version on Steam.
3 Likes
New graphic card means new games, and old games that didn’t run super well. Stuff I’ve been playing:
Dishonored 2: Jumped back in to an old, I think I was enjoying myself more now with the higher FPS and maybe lower expectations. I was less invested in perfection than the last time I played it, and just soaking in the weird world and occasionally just beating the shit out of guards instead of of being a perfect ghost is helping me enjoy it a lot more. Jumped into my old save and got up to speed real fast.
Obduction: Played it before but dang does that game look great in high FPS, gorgeous art direction marred by some weird normal mapping issues that look bizarre as hell in VR, but still, it’s a cool looking place that’s cool to explore even if I’ve explored it before.
Firmament: I bought this on launch, was extremely disappointed by the 45 minutes or so I played, it ran like shit on my old card, the obvious (atrocious) AI art and Writing inserts have somehow become more obviously shit in a year (hey we’ve got a team that’s known for writing and art, we’re going to randomly put really shitty writing and art in the middle of our great architecture to make you know how much worse the future might be), and thus I returned it.
But there was a bundle that cost less than it’s MSRP that had two other games I wanted to play in it (7th Guest VR and Another Fisherman’s tale) so I bit the bullet and got it again. It’s fucking me up hearing dev started on this five years ago as a VR first project because their LoD choices are abysmal, the trees in the distance look sub-N64. I’ve just encountered a puzzle where standing on a rotating platform is important, a well known nausea trigger that was getting my 2000 hours in VR-strong stomach a twist. At least the weird gimmicky control scheme that so far just seems to be “Hey, what if your switch was your hand” works more consistently than it did at launch. So much of this wouldn’t feel as bad if they hadn’t knocked this VR stuff out of the park with two other projects beforehand, and if I didn’t know you could make stuff of this scale and detail in VR Chat (A UNITY GAME) run better.
Still gonna trudge on through because it’s still a new Cyan game (albeit a very mid one) that I get to experience for the first time in VR.
6 Likes
yeah this is strange, because it’s still called “Drakengard” in Japanese, so it feels like a big oversight
2 Likes
The Amerzone is mentioned in one of the books you read in the library in Syberia 1
4 Likes
It comes up a few times in Syberia, actually. The university you visit has an entire amerzone themed area with a convoluted puzzle involving a mechanical egg, they namedrop amerzone a half dozen times at that point
4 Likes
are these games also related to cyberia for saturn?
1 Like
No the people who made that one went on to make redneck rampage
4 Likes
oh, they made kingpin, too. i remember that being well received in magazines
3 Likes
kingpin is a game i wanted to like because it’s a steampunk hip hop FPS, but man i got sick of turning a corner and getting instantly killed with a shotgun to the face
5 Likes
Carrying on with Spiritfarer, honestly kinda…nice? I guess? That a lot of these characters are deeply flawed, and some of them depart without having any sort of clean resolution. That’s life, baby! Kinda what a few of them say as they leave, too.
Glad I am playing this game, enjoying the wildly dissonant writing that accompanies the nice hand drawn indie vibe the whole thing has (there’s just so much cussing in this thing, catches ya off guard). But I gotta muscle through because I feel like if I stop now I’ll never come back. There’s just so much busywork in this thing.
3 Likes
You should try Shogo
5 Likes