My replay of Death Stranding has reached the absolute meaty core. I am passed the Chiral Artist and Mama stuff. (Though Diehardman told me there is a special mission for the Chiral Artist that rest assured will be worth my while.)
But now I just did the 2nd War Zone and Deadman and Heartman are just talking up a storm and I love it.
One of the emails talks about how the inverted Ghost Rainbows don’t have the color Blue, this is theorized because there are these worms that when they die eject Biolumenences that is Blue colored. Man what 4 issues of Mu did they collect that from? Seriously need a complete archive of Mu and I can break Japanese Video Games wide open.
If I had taken more thorough notes I could be writing an essay about Dad Feelings that surround the game. I mean Dad feelings about having an invincible tube baby hanging out on your chest that doesn’t require feeding/diaper changes/naps/clothing changes and really only gets freaked out when ghosts are around (me too kid! They got like tentacles and stuff!)
Dang wanna play more right now. Throw my piss and shit at ghosts!!!
But I can more or less track every single strange science, theory, cryptid, “did you know”, bullshit in video games to Mu. Whenever a video game stops to just talk about some bullshit you can more or less guarantee they took it from Mu. And you know Kojima games are full of that stuff. It’s pretty beautiful it is still being published in 2024 talking about space aliens and mayan prophecies and dna research and buddhist occult and exorcisms and JO crystals.
If I see a big article on a game news site in the next six months I know you stole it from me whoever you are. Not OSB they’re cool.
There are official servers you can roll characters on in World of Warcraft Classic where if you die your character is either deleted or you have to move it to a different server. To those who know about WoW or at one point cared to put time into leveling a character even a little, you’re probably having a similarly shocked negative reaction to the idea that I did when I first heard about Classic Hardcore. But a couple weeks ago I felt the urge to go wandering through the magnificent 3D spaces, with their wonderful sense of scale and atmosphere, but was really distressed and confused to learn in just a week they’d be unleashing Cataclysm Classic… which fully replaces the old world with the garish Disneyland world and quest design that makes modern WoW truly so so dire.
I know lots of people here hate this game for whatever reason, but what Classic Hardcore has managed to do for WoW is actually very interesting. Despite what you might imagine, the threat of permanent death in WoW seems to have inspired Classic HC players to take on an attitude that is serious about enjoying the immediate moment. Players are always dying. The next monster you pull could accidentally aggro another and you don’t do enough DPS. The dungeon could take an hour and the final encounter is still ahead, and so is maybe a party wipe. Every moment is tense but every moment is also very very present and defined, unlike the monotonous blur that is leveling in basically every MMO. Certainly for me, but I think this is also the case for others, reaching max level is something to aim for but it’s also an out of reach absurdity compared to just getting safely to level 14, which was where I got before my first death. They send you an obituary email when you’re killed, btw.
So this is all a lot of fun just for the single player. But another side effect of a permanent death limitation is that the early zones in Classic HC are always populated with leveling players. All quests are dangerous, group quests especially, but running into others and agreeing to momentarily party to edge creepily through a starter zone mini dungeon to get the head of some named NPC goblin is… well despite Classic HC appealing to the veteran WoW player more than probably any other experience demographic, these moments are basically indistinguishable from the beginning of the game when everyone didn’t have everything already figured out and no one was rushing. You’re on a journey, and so is everyone else it seems, and someone you met today may be dead tomorrow, but you’re doing a group quest together now and when you’re parting ways at the safety of a major stopping point along a road you two will /wave as to say goodbye, and it feels like something just happened to you that’s worth kind of remembering.
there’s a book you can get that’s just a couple of hundred weekly world news articles scanned and reprinted.
if someone published a book like that for mu, that was also in english, i’d definitely buy a copy
i guess the closest thing we’re likely to get are tara a devlin’s books of japanese urban myths
most of my video game playing is in phases. i’ll play nothing for a long time, then I’ll have a phase of X, then Y, etc. usually when I do this the last few years shmups and fighting games end up being like every other phase, like I’m slowing weening myself off of everything else, then those other games assault me in their death throes and I enter some desperate manic fugue. yes, I usually refer to my brain as an unknowable thing.
anyway. I keep coming back to ddp daioujou, and it’s so exhausting. not because the game is relentless or difficult, though it is certainly both, but because it is so monolithic in the way it makes me feel like all the other video games are superfluous, like it is conceptually purifying them through sheer force of will. it’s like listening to bach and being like ‘welp, I guess that’s how music works’
did my yearly “let’s give guardian heroes another shot” and jesus christ this is the worst fucking game ever made, and i’m really getting tired of everyone trying to tell me this bullshit is actually good when it isn’t
also appreciate trying to go online and figure out what i’m doing wrong in this game (aside from playing it), only to be given the advice of “just cheat” or “do a tool-assisted run.” cool great thanks why not just call me a fucking idiot while you’re at it.
guardian heroes is weird because when I was a teen I played that game and I really liked it, certainly before I would’ve thought there was any Real Gamer Cred attached to that opinion, but when I try to play it these days…yeah, I’m like what the holy fuck is this abomination. I have no idea what was grabbing me about it in the 90s.
I played a lot of it with one friend. We each had our characters (Randy and Gen) and we ignored the undead soldier guy. It worked pretty good.
Edit: I think what I loved most about it in high school was just using fighting game commands to do magic, which meant ignoring 3 of the 5 main characters because their magic wasn’t fun. Also the weird things like the elemental damage spreading like a virus. Those were things I remember thinking ruled a lot.
launching enemies into the air, and not being able to do any follow up attacks because the enemy sprite touched you and sent you flying backwards
moves that are unsafe on hit, meaning you land a special attack and then get hit with a full combo by an enemy
not being able to see anything in several levels because there’s a bunch of shit in the foreground
not being able to see your character because they get buried by the 80 enemy sprites on screen
raising your stats does seemingly nothing, because you still die immediately and it takes fucking forever to take out enemies
“friendly” cpu wiping out your health with constant aoe magic spells
bosses spamming aoe spells of their own for seemingly minutes at a time
getting hurt by your own magic
all this just makes the game way too fucking hard and unfair, causing me to either say swear words or say things like “astro boy must have been a fluke”
guardian heroes is just such an awesome mess because like… both the stage progression and the character movesets are constantly hinting at weird depths that you wouldn’t even have realized were there. and there were not enough super scaler style games on console.
it’s kind of prohibitively frustrating to replay in my experience because the levelling doesn’t work great and some of the bosses can ruin a whole run but it’s just so neat
I’ve only played the GBA version. I wonder how much Treasure was just the vibe when we were younger but it very much is not now. I’m tempted to try out Gradius V again to see but I know I bounced off Alien Soldier when I finally did get to play it, so who knows
Sin and Punishment probably still owns though. Ought to check out the sequel now that emulating wii is possible.
GBA Guardian Heroes is a very different game. I wonder if the emulation slowdown ever got fixed for it (when it came out, emulation just introduced way more slowdown than was in the cartridge version). Had a lot of fun playing that 2player using a GBA hooked up to a Gameboy player.
These days I enjoy games I can play and finish with limited time. And this week’s nominee was PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. It was on sale, I finished it in 15h and I enjoyed at least 14,5 of those hours!
BOMBERMAN HERO was a rental as a teen and i remember enjoying it despite knowing it was average.
there is a charm to its simple 3d platformer design (it feels crash bandicoot inspired), low production values, and often unintentionally funny cutscenes, plus there is a dom cat furry at one point. oh and it’s impressive how varied they make the levels feel
but it kinda feels like crap to play! bomberman is so floaty and slidey, depth perception is so hard to gauge, and throwing bombs around is a tedious way to fight enemies. it turned into a slog because of how increasingly bad it felt to play as the levels got tougher so i just watched a long play to see the rest of the cutscenes
I would seriously, honesty, sincerely suggest you try out the HD mode in the 360 GH port. it’s completely rebalanced to be way stupider (in a good way) and as someone who bounced off the Saturn gameplay for feeling stiff, the HD mode felt real smooth
or you could play Panzer Bandit
I would tell you to play Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds but then I remembered the new IP owners delisted the original versions of the game and now you can’t buy it any more anywhere. god, I guess you could buy Ogre Tale, Mages should still own that, but I dunno if I’d co-sign buying that.
