I just don’t understand someone using luck as a dump stat and being surprised they got one hit killed by the rat in the starting cave
1-luck runs are great but they’re not going to hold your hand!
5 Likes
i max out luck and dump charisma in every single fallout game yeehaw
The canon Courier build imo
i love that you benefit from 100% speech while having almost no charisma almost like you’re fuckin hard talking everyone from the friendly end of a gun in every one of these games
10 Likes
I have finished pacific drive
Spoilers for the ending of Pacific Drive
As you play Pacific Drive more and more of the inner zone reveals itself until you unlock “The Well” which is this huge glowing thing at the end of the road, turns out. You gotta drive there. I was expecting more resistance from The Zone after many hours of strife and headaches, but the drive there was trouble free. I even took a shortcut.
So you drive into the big glowing thing and…it’s a walking section. an extended walking section where the characters plot arcs all resolve themselves over voice lines. You run thru rows of TVs while voice lines play.
And then finally you come to the car, and you have to drive…fast for some reason? The Well is collapsing and a bunch of things are flying at you. I spun out twice because if you hit a booster it really makes the car unsettled. I then had to awkwardly turn the car around and then keep going. The last booster spun me out right at the end, so I entered the climactic jump backwards…
You go back to the garage and through voiceover dialog the main scientist decides to leave, the last one decides to stay and keep investigating The Zone and…you are also stuck in the Zone forever. They tell you that you can leave whenever, but there’s no road “Out” so, uh, you’re there forever… Then End!
I guess I can keep playing the game and unlocking nodes and stuff for the car, that might be fun. I had a good time with this game despite having many bad times with this game. I think it was the right length, I think it could have been longer.
Seven out of Ten
7 Likes
Cruelty Squad is great because the more you play and the systems unfold the easier it gets, and then the game goes “oh it’s too easy? fuck you” and then the game’s difficulty goes completely sideways as you torture and break the simulation just to beat a level. And then you realize that there’s EVEN MORE DEPTH
7 Likes
Jubilee
Cute indie precision platformer. Did they die off? Feels like Celeste was a swan song for the genre, in retrospect
I like how in a game with only one-hit kills, collectibles are saved when you touch a savepoint. This adds a little « do I push forward or go back » to a genre that usually doesn’t really have this.
The plot is about escaping jail, the tone is unfortunately indie game dev jokey, just lame jokes and references all around, but maybe it’s all redeemed if you find all 5 secret pages….
You decide :
Logiart Grimoire
This is Picross from Jupiter, but with an overarching theme. (I wouldn’t say « a plot »)
You combine items to make other items. Ocean + Forest = Island. It feels like recreating the world from scratch, sometimes in a wrong or weird order. Fossil + Horn = Triceratops?
Unfortunately there’s no mega picross. 0/10.
This was a kickstarter backed game, and Jupiter made special picrosses from rich backers who were asked to combine three items from a pre-selected list. (A popular choice was any kind of animal + cook, which would lead to a chef cat for example)
There was also a special « Leave it to the designer » option. And one backer just went with « Leave it to the designer » x3, offering total freedom to the designer to make whatever they wanted.
What do you think the designer chose to draw? Think hard about it. Answer below.
When I understood that the switch screen was too small for this :
I had already filled one third of the squares and sunk cost fallacy kicked in. The puzzle is complete and my eyes are gone
Stranger of Sword City
Experience Inc games…. On one hand they all rigidly follow the Wizardry formula… On the other hand the aesthetics are always changing. Stranger of sword city is isekai dark fantasy, Undernauts is modern horror, Saviors of sapphire wings is generic D- RPGs, Demon Gaze is for the anime perverts…
Usually it’s the other way around, mechanics evolving and aesthetics staying the same. Not sure what Experience Inc’s deal is. Are they trying again and again until they get a breakout hit and attain the unattainable ultimate goal (hot new young people loving Wizardry) ?
I like the huge friction you get when one character gets to 0HP. While there’s no permadeath (unless you’ve picked old characters who only have 1 life point, oops)
, you have to go back to the base to get dead characters revived (it will either take one in-game day, or be instant and cost $$$) and then after they’re revived you need to go back to the base again to tell them to rest, so they can recover their lost life point (it will either take four in-game days or cost $$$$$$) It’s such a chore, I love it.
All things considered Stranger of sword city seems like one of the best of these, because the wandering bosses do inject something interesting to this ancient genre and the art’s good.
Something about these backgrounds…
17 Likes
I finished Chrono Trigger, which you may of heard, is one of the best games there is. It features Yuji Horii and Sakaguchi Firstnamehere and Nobuo Uematsu. They got some new guy called Mitsuda to do the other half of the soundtrack, I guess he sounds good to. A full half of the back of the Japanese boxart is declaring that we got frickin’ Akira Toriyama over here.
Let me tell you, that game has got Toriyama all over it. Just covering the thing.
After the first two hours the writing more or less fades to the background. I mean the words. The story is there for you to make a buffet of. I am not sure I got too much out of it in Nihongo. But that’s what Yuji Horii is known for right? Clean writing.
Suprised how much the Demon King (Magus) isn’t in the story if you let him live. He has maybe 8 lines total. Also where did they get the English names for almost everyone?
The game is beyond fantastic, of course. Through my own brute force I was constantly teetering on the edge of defeat in battles. That felt stressful and great. I even failed a few times, which felt even better.
Good Great Game.
23 Likes
Ring Racers is the “Legit” standalone sequel to SRB2 Kart, a kart racing game built off the fork of Sonic Roboblast 2, itself a fan game built off the doom engine. The game starts by saying that, Robotnik and Tails are friends now, and they’re working together, to do ring-powered kart racing. It’s very cute.
Anyway it guides you through setting up a player profile and going through the options menu before playing, which is neat.
But I hope you’re ready for a literal hour long tutorial going over the game’s many many many many many many many movement systems and tech. There’s drifting, there’s midair tricks that can give you air-control, there’s spindashes, there’s springs, there’s fast-falls, there’s overcharging via ring collection, there’s quick attacks, you can charge your car by collecting rings or spend them to get a temporary power boost. During the drift tutorial a bomb chases you and you have to outrun it by doing drift boosts and I failed so many times. There’s a half pipe section. Driving is different if it’s underwater. You can get throwable items that activate switches. There’s barriers to shortcuts you can only pass if you’re going fast enough. The game tutorializes a lot of these. I played for I think an hour and then quit because it was so damn long.
The game looks pretty amazing, I can tell a bunch of effort was poured into making the game look this. The resolution blown up to full screen with everything happening is a bit harsh. I feel like I’d be better playing this on a smaller CRT.
It’s probably some of the best Doom Engine out there. They even have loops in the courses! I’m eager to get online and play but I think lobbies are going to be full of people who have mastered the movement tech.
It’s great that fangames for the Sonic franchise can exist like this. I am willing to bet this is a better kart racing game than anything Nintendo could produce. The Sonic Fangame Community has been iterating on 3D movement mechanics and level design more than AAA ever did and I think they’re going beyond what a commercial release is capable of. Sega Does What Nintendont.
19 Likes
did you ever play SRB2K online or check out the old leaderboards when they were still active? lol
and by lol i mean yes you are correct you will potentially never find someone who isn’t a goddamn grandmaster at this shit
2 Likes
we should actually do a virtual meetup and play this game online with SB folks…
4 Likes
I did a few times! I was pretty inept and couldn’t keep up lol, but I had a good time.
2 Likes
game rules, i had been grinding time trials for several days so i thought i’d be able to keep up.
i could not keep up.
the new one looks dank as fuck tbh
1 Like
aww i really gotta play this. i love eggman and tails being friends that’s… not dissimilar from vague fan comic ideas i have had lol
i did recently play some other racing games featuring a different well known mascot
I fuckin suck at SNES Mario Kart so i only played it till i got fed up. Never really liked that one but i wanted to give it the old college try. Then i completely housed MK64, a game i know like the back of my hand. Both have such kickass music, i love 64’s menu theme
Now im digging into Double Dash!! which i haven’t played much of before, despite it having two bangs in the title and trans icon Birdo in the roster. It really took some doing to get used to the controls, going from a sprite racer to properly modeled wheels and suspension immediately feels a lot different. I am really really digging it though, the trigger drifting and switching up drivers to cycle multiple items add so much it feels really chaotic and fun. also hi i’m daisy
Oh and im most of the way thru Kid Icarus now and it does get very easy, but also im glad im riding the save states cuz seriously fuck the eggplant wizards and double fuck the little guys who steal your magic items. Its a pretty neat game but i wouldn’t say i like it as much as im fascinated by it
Annnnnd im almost done with the star course in Marios Picross and that’s all the games ive played today. sleepy out
9 Likes
ring racers is certainly a different beast. all the new movement tech and even the random items being something where you can get what you want by stopping it at the right time makes it feel pretty different from srb2kart.
unfortunately, the tutorial isnt very good at explaining everything, and some of the new movement techniques are… an odd addition, to say the least. ring boosting is great, but giving you a melee attack that drains your rings when you hold it down so far seems useless. maybe its meant to parry items or people that could run into you, since getting hit without rings sends you flying, but uh, ive never successfully used it so far. there was also points that doesnt exactly explain whats going on very well, like how underwater affects your movement (and, annoyingly, is introduced in the one part where you can’t really slow down and experiment with it). and certain things that aren’t explained at all, like how rivals work in grand prix mode. also idr if it really explains drifts that well
i mean, its more explaining then srb2kart, but i felt like i got more in srb2k by watching short youtube tutorials and then copying what gold medal ghosts did in the time trials. and, uh, alot of these techniques are track specific.
i was also gonna rant about the unlock system, because it locked a ton of stuff that should be available in the first place behind grand prix requirements. online required beating the first cup, addons required beating the first 4 cups, and time trials required beating 14 cups. luckily, they just released a patch that makes the requirements much more lenient. i guess their reasoning is that they didnt want to overwhelm or turn off new players, but, uh… ironically ring racers feels way less beginner friendly then srb2kart thanks to all the new mechanics they introduce all at once (even though several of them are track specific; ive played a few cups and have ran into only a couple tracks that actually have trick springs for examples) and the strong rubber-banding on the cpu in grand prix (or, at least, it feels like really strong rubber-banding).
im honestly still on the fence on whether i like it more than srb2kart or not. its definitely fun, and is trying hard to make it different from the previous game. but, tbh, i cant tell if these new mechanics make everything better or worse until i try the time trial mode, because getting gold medals in srb2kart’s time attack mode is what made me really learn how it controls. i was even able to translate that experience to online mode, both from knowing the tracks better and knowing how to drift better. well, mostly, there were a lot of custom addons that changed or added mechanics, but still!
anyways i am glad i no longer have to grind for time trials thank god. also, the new patch lets you skip the tutorial much more easily if you want to.
7 Likes
I finally did play a race series and there is a lot to keep track of, i’m constantly using ring boost to keep ahead. I set it to easy mode and had to restart several times because random items would just flatten me. I had no idea there was a 2.1 patch or that the unlocks were so grueling to get through. I’ll have to upgrade it.
I did finally complete the tutorial too.
3 Likes
What games that I’ve been playing:
Ys IX Monstrum Nox: I finally got the full party assembled out here in chapter 6 and the game is more comfortable now as I figured out that if you do the side quests then there is no need to engage in any of the “random” battles you can trigger. Really while this is a well designed city to jump around putting much of the game in here was probably a mistake. If I am honest with myself this is a rather mediocre game, hope X is more like VIII than this.
Viewfinder: To the last area and I have the feeling that these people weren’t the best puzzle designers. There are some optional puzzles but those are most of the ones that actually force you to puzzle things out, the rest is basically coming to terms with various aspects of the mechanics they out in place. Said mechanics are impressive as hell and IMO are worth the trip, I still enjoy the game well enough, but as a puzzle experience much of it lacks much bite.
That said one of the last optional puzzles I am unsure what the intended solution was supposed to be, but I came up with an ugly as hell solution that I forced until it finally worked so full credit for that.
Typo: One of those random games I try, it is a puzzle platformer where you go to a computer console and type in a word and that object appears in the puzzle allowing you to reach the exit. This sounds incredibly hard to pull off but don’t worry, only a handful of letters can be used at each station. What this means is that in the first couple areas you can only really type out “box” “ball” or “water” so… really it is just a longer way of making me press a button. Basically it is an example of how just because you have a good/ambitious idea if you can’t pull it off it doesn’t really matter, although there is enough game left that I leave open the possibility of it having a solid ace up its sleeve still.
5 Likes
So people are talking about Manor Lords. Did anyone play that?
2 Likes
I played Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and it’s just OK. The music and aesthetic are pretty spot-on Y2K but the game feels a bit halfway. Chaining tricks for extended periods is hard unless you really practice the environment, and you miss rails often enough that you can never be sure if your intention will line up with the geometry. ‘Ah, I’m afraid you were 5cm off of that one, player. Go back to the starting rail and try again 
’
Also you never really feel that accomplished when you do pull things off. I think it’s just there’s not enough to make one player’s performance radically different from another’s. So the game has both a tight requirement for execution and a narrow expressive range. This is kinda the opposite of trick-focused, momentum-y navigation like Mirror’s Edge or THUG where you can feel like you’re using your tools to be yourself through the environment’s limits. Also the combat is underdeveloped and probably should’ve been cut which is surprising because hitting stuff in Lethal League felt incredible. I don’t think anyone would miss the combat if it were cut and the tricks/navigation need a bit more of a cushioned layer of head-empty actions.
The music is untouchable. I feel like I get easily attracted to what end up being ‘album games’, basically albums that come with great aesthetics and a decent game as a secondary bonus.
11 Likes
Decided to wrap up Spiritfarer tonight. Some upgrades left, sidequests left undone, but all the core stuff finished.
Still have some gripes about the pacing (it’s a deliberately slow game, but almost to a fault, when you’re waiting for timers to finish or grinding minigames for supplies), but even when I was finally burned out on it, the ending still got me a bit.
4 Likes
Dark Void
I wanted to try this again after getting the world’s best HDMI upscaler (it’s fine, it was 18 dollars, I wasn’t expecting FrameMeister quality) because maybe the bump in resolution would help things. Also considering I had unlocked the jetpack level I figured going at it after not being fatigued at 3 hours of plodding 3rd person shooting would make the game’s systems shine better.
In the flying level you shoot some towers, then shoot at a turret gun, then you have to destroy two floating sheild generator structures. You fly into these, land, then do a little bit of 3rd person shooting. Then you destroy a thing, that takes down a sheild, and then you fly into another “vertical shooter” section with scores of platforms, but now you have the jetpack so it’s tempting to just fly in there and get the target - which I tried several times - but death meant starting all over again. So many times I’d get to the 2nd control panel only to die on my way out because I hit something midair - then have to restart.
After doing the first shield tower they spawn some midair enemies to shoot at, and I was like “finally, some Crimson Skies type shit” but it was really kind of meh - maybe there’s later levels where the air combat is more intense, because the air dodging moves hint at a much better game.
So the second shield tower is a little more involved but it’s mostly the same. After failing the 2nd part several times, the game crashed, and made me restart the whole level there seem to be no mid-level checkpoints if the game crashes. I took the disc out. maybe another time.
John Woo’s Stranglehold
Holy shit. This game has it all. Bullettime, skill shots, bullet dodge minigames, sliding down rails, shooting things in the environment to fall on enemies. Every single encounter is a meticulous rude-goldberg diorama of violence. There’s no cover and no Aim Down Sights, just straight up shooting dudes, exploding barrels type videogame. Nearly every scene is full of physics objects and becomes a chaotic mess the instant action starts to happen. There’s destructable walls. Time to Kill is pretty low, so despite the overwhelming amount of enemies, it never feels like a slog. Tequila moves around with ease. All the movement and combat systems work really well. It’s a joy to play, I kept muttering “holy shit” after every other combat encounter and cutscene.
They should let John Woo make another videogame, the dialog and cutscenes are all really good. After the first level, Tequila exits and the police chief is like “I told you not to go alone” and Tequila is like “I didn’t, I brought my friends with me” as he holds up both his pistols. They don’t make games like this. They should make more games like this.
16 Likes