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

[Rudie]

Playstation Plus gave me a substantial demo of Cyberpunk 2077 which the most I can say is I didn’t hate it and it cut me off right before I met Keanu. Oh and Hテル was clever.

It also gave me a trial of the first two chapters of Alan Wake and I don’t think it saved my progress if I go back. I had some complaints about it last night but Tulpa assured me of one of my grievances. It’s pretty compelling otherwise. And it’s scary. Effectively horror. There was one point where it gave me a jumpscare to prime me for showing me the scary stuff immediately afterwards and I thought that was so well done.

I still don’t think it escapes its own writing level. The mind palace thing was mostly a hassle to someone on a time-limit.

But I am thinking about it a lot the next day and will look forward to returning to it 4 Sales from now when it is a cheaper.

Also my wrist fucking hurts I hate the damn DualSense.

[aislesgrises]

i got an ending in picayune dreams, which is like, an aesthetically pleasant vampire survivors thing. i never played vampire survivors, but i guess the loop has a fairly strong hook. i’m glad this had an ending. i do think playing stuff like this on keyboard and mouse is suffering tho. like, i just can’t manage a sense of direction intuitively with keys, so i have to use my brain just a little bit harder to move in the correct direction than i’d do with like, a stick or d-pad. and you can also aim your shots manually by hovering the mouse in the right spots? but you never have to hit a shot button? i know this has been lifted as an aspirational idea for shooting games by a lot of people, that pressing and/or holding down a button is an ergonomic nightmare, and i have no doubt that’s true, this is why a shmup run should never be longer than 20 minutes, but i miss the “feedback”, because if i’m not even holding a button am i even doing anything? for the first few sessions i was occasionally clicking the mouse button hoping for some effect, or maybe pretending i had any kind of input on the shots outside of aiming. this is a psychological need i won’t drop easily. and this game still requires holding a key to do slow focused movements like a touhou, so… uh…

my complaints aside the autoshooting does feel diegetic. you are a corpse revived and animated by a power suit that will never, ever, let you rest in peace until the mission is over. the game over screen always asks if you accept resuscitation before overriding the choice by government order. similarly, i’m sure our corpse girl has as little control over wether she’s shooting or not as the player. the murders must never stop. kill, kill and kill some more until it’s done and you can come back to a home you don’t even recognize.

apparently there is some kind of true ending but you only get it by never getting hit by any of the bosses ever, and lol i am not doing that. just like hades, i finally got a clear run, i am now done and don’t ever want to get out there into the randomizer again.

[OneSecondBefore]

I’ve been in a weird mode lately where I just want to play 2 hours of a million different games.

BUT… I decided to give La Mulana another chance (having failed out of it very early back when it was MSX-graphics freeware), and man oh man! It’s classic for a reason! I’m totally sucked in.

I thought I’d get stuck really early on again, but this time around I’ve been making pretty steady progress. This really is the king of search action games, my goodness. I love the way it encourages you to explore like 9 different areas at once. Items are placed so well. You can spend an hour deep diving into what feels like an endgame area, and come upon a tool that you actually needed to finish off a major puzzle you’ve been wondering about in the first area. Even if you get stumped on something, you can go a totally different way and find a shop with something in it that’ll get you excited all over again. It’s great!

[siobhan]

Playin pokemon volt white 2 for the 55th time… Genuinely don’t think I can play these games without a nuzlocke anymore, and it’s not because of difficulty! The serendipitous storytelling is just too good. I love my kids so much. It’s amazing how incidentally brilliant that challenge is.

(Post gym 2)

[cask]

After finishing FF7 Rebirth after 100 hours I wanted a bite sized palate cleanser so I got Alan Wake 1 which I heard was a very breezy 10 hours or so.
I wasn’t grooving with it for the first few hours but I knew it was considered fondly around here so I kept playing and around Chapter 3 when things really started going haywire and the FBI shows up and Barry gets involved I got on its wavelength and really ended up enjoying myself. I bought the original (non-remastered) on PC and it really looked amazing piped to my HDR TV, the lighting and shadow effects in particular were some of the best I’ve seen and they really shine through on a nice display.

Playing through the DLC chapters now and wondering if I should move onto American Nightmare, Control, or straight into Alan Wake 2.

[Mr_Mechanical]

@cask

wondering if I should move onto American Nightmare, Control, or straight into Alan Wake 2.

I would say all of the above, in that order. Finish out the month strong.

[hellojed]

Need for Speed Unbound

Criteron, since 2012, had been relegated to making vehicles for the Battlefield series after it’s 2012 version of Most Wanted, which was good technically but kind of an empty feeling game. Ghost games had been making the lion’s share of NFS games, including Rivals and the soft reboot of the series, and culminating in NFS Heat. Unbound is Criteron’s first racing game in like a decade.

It feels really good. Races feel hard but fair, but there’s a lot of chaos to them. The game’s drift physics is hard to control and I can’t tell if that’s because I’m trying to counter steer when the game’s doing it automatically or not. But regardless, you can drive and customize a Crown Victoria as a starter car. The characters all look like they’re from Jet Set Radio with the toon shading and fashion. This game has one foot in the EA “How do you do fellow kids” marketeering that these games all seem to have, and being a seriously good driving game.

There’s actual stakes to the races, you have a limited number of retries, and you have a limited amount of in-game days to upgrade your car for a big race. At the beginning it’s actually impossible to win races, so you have to balance finishing mid-pack with earning money through other activities - like car deliveries or taxi side missions.

I need to play more, its frustrating to drive a slow car with no way to really upgrade it for the competition, but it’s $10 for the next few days and a fair bit less obnoxious than Forza Horizion’s writing is.

[doolittle]

i liked open roads a lot but it switches to two-camera VN presentation for dialogue between the mom and player character. i know a 3d mom wouldn’t be in scope but i think i’d rather she were a disembodied voice

when you’re in the car it’s a kind of neat 2d mom in 3d car until you talk and it’s out of first person again

still, gone home 2: multiple homes to go to was rock solid rummaging for lovingly-rendered period-accurate trash

[geist]

i’ve been playing a lot of shit I don’t like

unicorn overlord was alright, I did kinda like that one, but I got tired of fucking with my units and seeing every fucking ridiculous story for why this guy, who killed his family and forcefed their guts to some street urchins or what the fuck ever was actually just misunderstood and he should join our merry band of rebels led by a king you must swear undying fealty to. I got to a battle where 5 of my people made their own unit and left, and rather than rejiggering my entire unit setup yet again to go chase them I just turned the game off and never turned it back on

not a popular opinion here, but I couldn’t stomach more than a few hours of armored core 6. i never figured out what the fuck was going on with the UI and I hate the stagger mechanic just like I hate it in every other game with a stagger mechanic, which is so many fucking games lately. I don’t care about the differences between the aeon pulse laser rifle mark vi and the laser assault vulcan rifle. I don’t. I don’t.

a friend told me to play blasphemous so I amused her for a few hours. a very tryhard game. tasted like cardboard. you die in two hits. be sure to read all the item descriptions for L O R E. sorry, lia.

final fantasy xii really sucks, man. nice art style when you aren’t in a sewer or a desert, which is never. fran has a great voice. all the voice acting is compressed to like 3kb and sounds awful. there are 15 “jobs,” which, near as I can gather, don’t differ from each other at all until you play the game for 30 hours. all you do is auto attack and nothing matters. you still buy the ability to tell your party members how to not play the game from a shop, just like I remember. and you gotta buy at least 400 of those things. you still play as an annoying dipshit kid in shinpads. the game still tells you the entire history of the universe in the first 30 minutes and nothing about anything ever again. here’s my favorite matsuno-ism in it so far: apparently what character you make what job doesn’t matter at all, in traditional final fantasy fashion, except FRAN, the lithe ARCHER girl who comes with a BOW to ARCH people with is really bad at being an ARCHER and you should NEVER EVER choose that job for her, and BALTHIER the SKY PIRATE WITH A GUN is really bad at using GUNS and so should NEVER EVER be the SKY PIRATE WITH A GUN job. sure ok, you got me matsuno. sorry dad, I’ll go back to doing 1 damage to every enemy in vagrant story, fuck you.

sometimes I like fucking around in final fantasy xiv, I got a weakness for dress up and raiding and it’s got a lot of both of those, but the problem is you gotta play the final fantasy game and if I have to listen to alphinaud one more fucking time I’m uninstalling again.

circuit superstars is rc pro am only if you ever use your brakes you cook your tires and if you don’t lift and coast every turn you run out of fuel. I thought that sounded fun, because I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot.

also an unpopular opinion around here, but nier replicant is indescribably boring. a fetch quest simulator staring a paper bag, filled with giant swarms of one enemy that each take 2 full combos to kill. I get it hah hah it’s funny how bad it is, you really got me yoko taro, what a genius, sure i’ll deliver that mail now. yeah yeah, side quests end with everyone being sad. very profound. i’m sure if I play it for another twenty hours it will turn out we’re all dying in my dead sister’s dream and it’s actually clever how boring it is because

dragon’s crown is the one with the titties, it’s got this great baroque style to it that the game is really proud of, outside of the hilarious titties. you get pieces of art after every quest and they want you to look at that shit, it’s like the main reward. there’s this gregarious old dude who narrates the entire game. so far so good. then you try to play the game and it’s a beat 'em up where they decide what if we make a beat 'em up with no weight to anything, then we fill the screen with numbers and health bars and then we give you 6 companions so you can’t see anything? then what if you also have to scroll a cursor around every second to pick up hundreds of doodads that fill the screen with more numbers that also do nothing? then what if you have to command one of your 36 companions to unlock a door to move forward once every 20 seconds, also with the loot cursor. what if you go fuck yourself instead

it’s rough out there. I think I’ll go back to shmups. been playing a lot of those. this is a hater post though, so we’ll leave it at that.

[notbov]

absentmindedly guessing you picked Amazon, who is supposed to be a weightless berserker who mows through everything and also can get free i-frames from parries, which I can respect because she has a nice butt

(yes I just have this at the ready, what of it)

what you need to do is pick Dwarf and PUMP UP

also at no point do you need to have companions other than Rannie, you can go ahead and turn those off and play by yourself

to fix having to run a cursor across the screen is easy: play on the Vita. easy!

see, you haven’t encountered the actual sticking point for a lot of people, which is DC is actually a loot game

you get a lot more out of the game the more of a belt scroller pervert you are (one section is straight up an Arabian Fight reference. who is an Arabian Fight reference for)

anyway, if you want Dragon’s Crown but with things like hitstop or being on PC, you can always go grab Granblue Relink from your favorite horse racing company Cygames

[geist]

every time I don’t bring companions they just show up anyway, I actually screamed out loud the first time this happened. like I go to a level and then 3 people fall from the sky and I’m like what the fuck.

I did pick amazon, though

[notbov]

[geist]

why the FUCK is that a setting when they already have a separate ‘have NPCs join you’ menu in the tavern, which you are even required to go to after every mission.

[notbov]

the menu in the tavern is for manually adding party members if you wanted a specific party composition, whereas the auto-join simulates drop-in join as if you were playing online

the game flow of hitting up the tavern makes more sense when you unlock the ability to marathon stages endlessly and you choose to go back to the tavern to do loot management

[hellojed]

NFS Unbound has Drift Events, I have a FWD car, this is impossible to do with the physics engine.

I am finding the controls to be unusually hard, it’s impossible to predict if a drift will send me into a wall or not. You should really play the game with a front engine rear drive car, since the physics seem to favor drifting everywhere.

[isfet]

@geist

fucking ridiculous story

i have some critical thoughts on Unicorn Overlord as i near what feels like the end game, but definitely this one has persisted throughout. i feel like Vanillaware games have usually been pretty strong in the story department - melodrama, sure, but usually there is something there that touches on tragedy or genuine human emotion (idk about Dragon’s Crown because i didn’t play much of it, but it also seems less important there). UI feels like like a game that needed more time in development, or less, i’m not sure. it tries to do too many things and doesn’t do a great job at most of them, but i find the overall game loop satisfying enough to keep going. the story, though, just never really goes anywhere that feels worth the time i’ve spent watching it.

[captainlove]

The most interesting Unicorn Overlord’s story ever gets is when it ties stakes of a mission to narrative stakes and sets you a task to navigate around a rogue unit that you don’t control. And even that is kind of a gimmick. Otherwise it’s all just pageantry for another round of Little Wars. I think the story’s simplicity would benefit from some ham if the plot never progresses from straight ‘good liberation front and evil empire’. Valkyria Chronicles had some real tone shifts with the less important units and you got a better sense of everyone being their own person rather than just their class designation.

Like Scarlett is set up as a main character initially but is kidnapped and then becomes kind of irrelevant to anything. Almost all characters follow this structure of having a spotlight of relevancy before fading to the back and then occasionally reciting their stock motivation line.

‘I too hate Zenoira’

The game is total comfort food to me though, I stand by it being the inverse of 13 Sentinels.

[isfet]

yeah like i said, i find the game satisfying, but as i’m crossing into the 60+ hours territory, i feel like i would have been more satisfied with half that length, which would also encourage repeated playthroughs on a harder difficulty.

i do enjoy the very big stages, though, that involve crossing wide terrains and capturing towns along the way. that Ogre Battle/Warcraft feeling comes out and shines during those moments.

[smbhax]

Voltron®: Defender of the Universe DEMO (PS3)

DISAPPOINTING

[alfred]

@notbov

which I can respect because she has a nice butt

The Amazon from dragons crown gave us the greatest figure of all time

https://myfigurecollection.net/item/363034