I don’t see the problem
flexing muscles compress and the mass gotta go somewhere
I think you are really underestimating the value of boredom in videogames. Like would Nier be better if it was some kind of 1000rpm speed chess Sekiro DMC4 thing? Man I don’t got the energy for that shit in my life. I’ll deliver this lady’s mail with pretty music though, that’s my jam.
5 Likes
it’s like the same 3 songs the entire game though and for mmo tier fetch quests
6 Likes
would prefer maybe 1/10 the kingdom hearts combat for the same reason
Nedge loves mmos
3 Likes
been playing earth defense force world, brother. i initially passed on it because i wanted it to have a character creator like 3d dot game heroes and it didn’t, but it turns out this game is good despite that. one, it’s an edf game, and those tend to be hard to fuck up. two, the characters that are here are pretty fun; any game that lets me have an astronaut, a cowboy, and a catgirl maid team up is a game that’s up my alley.
10 Likes
Today is the first “Event Dive” for Endless Ocean Luminous. You join in with a few people and the game spawns a bunch of rarer fish, which is nice for filling out the logbook.
What’s not so nice is that if everyone finds the seven glitchy fish that summons the giant special fish, you get three minutes (!) to find it, and whenever someone scans it, it vanishes from the radar. So I couldn’t make it to the cool giant seahorses in time.
I streamed it again and while Shrug shared pictures of some cool frog fish that walk along the ocean floor, I found the seven fish and…it summoned one of the giant fish I had already seen. Whole hour down the toilet.
This game…it kinda sucks, y’all 
7 Likes
I love exactly one thing about MMOs*, and it ain’t fetch quests
*ok, I actually like the entire base experience of vanilla wow, but only once every decade
errant spouses, am i right?
5 Likes
I’ve been playing this stupid jam game by pancelor way too much today.
It is seemingly a “homage” to another game, this one has a scoring system that once you figure it out let’s you ramp your scores up significantly. I eventually got an “everything broke right” run where I got a score of 202 (60+ higher than my previous best), hopefully this lets me walk away before it sinks its claws into me even further.
7 Likes
Now you can go on to the Japanese browser game it links as its inspiration, Fruit Box! It has drive-you-crazy background muzak! ^ D^
3 Likes
Started up 1000XResist and up to the 2nd chapter. The game has hooked me so far though you don’t really do much other than explore and talk. The set up is that the Earth has been finished off by a disease brought by giant aliens and the only remaining colony is made up entirely of clones of a girl who was immune during the initial outbreak. The presentation and the way it relays history and time from the current-day clone’s perspective is well told audiovisually but it’s not doing anything super crazy.
You play as a clone who gets embroiled in how everything will eventually go wrong with this cult society and the very first scene basically confirms this but how it will play out is the hook. It is kinda like Nier Automata’s world but Signalis feels like a closer analogue (lesbian love through scifi horror) with a bigger emphasis on diaspora and the addition of COVID as an undercurrent. Exploring the limited spaces you have access to sometimes makes you wonder why they bothered with large 3D environments but it helps with the sense of pacing and isolation. Like it could’ve been more VN but then you’d lose the familiarity you build up with the space of the world and how closed it is.
The voice-acting is quite amateurish but also very good? The voices carry a rough charm which may not have been intentional but the strength of the sound design generally makes me wonder if they did intend it.
9 Likes
I have restarted my playthrough of NFS Unbound because trying to play the game with a FWD car is impossible. Except I may have to restart the game again, in the game’s prologue you have to enter races to continue the game story but it’s possible to spend money on parts for the car - which locks you out of said races because you don’t have enough money for the entry fee to continue, and you can’t really earn it easily in this stage of the game.
This is really frustrating because the cars are fun to drive, even the FWD cars are fun to drive, but the game is really set up for cars that can drift, the prologue is overly long
This game is so frustrating
4 Likes
Wow that song is… not great!
FWIW I like Make Ten better, the unexplained scoring twist that you get a point for every space highlighted when making ten, including blank ones dramatically shifts how you approach things and the chance to score serious points in the back half keeps one focused throughout the two minutes each run takes.
2 Likes
This game is one long hallway. I finally got to Elizabeth and the game does this “NPC looks directly at player” stuff which sets off my fight or flight response. Randomly giving me items is…nice…sometimes. Tearing open reality to give me ammo boxes is weird. The game starts to give you other weapons like grenade launchers. The game is also constantly telling you what to do, things like “Find more ammo! you’re low on ammo!” or “Shoot the robot in the back where his weak point is” and it’s displayed as white text in the center of the screen. I feel like this game doesn’t trust you enough to follow the single direction it’s pointing you into. The problem is that the game opens up the next area by opening a door that’s usually tangent to the space you’re in, so once combat stops you wander around looking for a door that had previously not been opened.
This game leads us through several Racism Hallways. There’s a new character. Something about Wounded Knee and The Boxer Rebellion. Booker Bioshock and Lizzy have to find a Plasmid (sorry, Vigor?) that enables us to shoot electricity, and to do that we have to go to a whole nother area of the game world and do a bunch of encounters. I have not made it back yet. I seem to play this until I get bored.
7 Likes
It is striking to me how much the game telegraphs Lizzy as your romantic interest despite, you know, the rest of the plot. I think it’s more than slightly manipulative to have her Give You Stuff and also she’s invulnerable to gunfire, but also she’s too weak to pull levers or open doors. Also the revelation that she can pick locks but couldn’t pick the lock to the door she was trapped behind forever is…suspect. It’s just such a weirdly written character. I wonder if gamers glommed onto this game because they felt a spark of affection for the first time in a long time.
I can’t get over how Booker Bioshock is so unprepared for this job. He didn’t even know what Columbia even was prior to the job. You’d think he’d have a man or two on the inside to help smuggle in stuff he’d need, or do any kind of research at all. It feels so unrealistic. I suppose this is to mirror the player also coming into contact with Columbia for the first time…
But yeah big floating stone buildings, I am not sure how it works. Columbia even has a fake beach and ocean and they’re just hovering at high altitude like that? How do the residents not pass out from how thin the air is up there? I’d assume real-estate is very precious given how expensive it is to keep stuff hovering like that so why do they dedicate so much space for bigass stone statues? If Columbia were a bunch of floating islands on the water I feel like they could keep 99% of the visual design, and keep the airships and stuff, but it would just work better.
FPS design wise it’s pretty mid. Maybe has to do with running at 30fps on the xbox. The guns all have a basic design to them, you can find weapon upgrades, but you can also find gear like a hat that increases critical damage chance by 5% or something. It all feels like discarded parts of a larger whole. I have a feeling the desire to have these story beats took precedent over having a more complicated systems driven game.
6 Likes
I bought a lime green ps vita from japan and spent a weekend going through the tedious and fiddly jailbreaking steps to get it unlocked with unlimited warez. I am now basking in Sony software from 2000-2011, I never had Sony consoles as a kid and am unfamiliar with almost all of it.
I started with the ‘ThorHighHeels’ set of PS1 games and got Racing Lagoon running natively on the internal PS1 interpreter that works via the PSP chip on the board. You have to spoof it with the game ID of Resident Evil for it to work, but this game is great. It is so melodramatic and soaking in the post-crash malaise of 90’s Japan. The english patch is really thoughtful.
The first actual Vita game I am playing is Final Fantasy X. What a bizarre game. A guy wears oakleys. Everyone is dressed in scuba nu metal based fashion in a Caribbean nightmare. The translation is so bad it kind of makes it good. Compared to the Final Fantasy games I have actually finished this plays like an on rails tour of final fantasy mechanics with almost no player intervention.
The most significant thing about this thing is how many Peak Indie Gaming games came out for it in the late-Vita period after Sony first party abandoned it. I have a folder with everything from Fez to Cave Story to Spelunky to Nidhogg to Iconoclasts. People keep hacking more indie games from this period onto this machine… like for fun. There’s a hacked port of Gone Home, Night in the Woods, FNAF, and a ton more. It’s like being in a graveyard of another era, the Indie Game The Movie era of games all the way to the end with stuff like Binding of Isaac Rebirth. We are so thoroughly outside of that period its weird to have this tiny plastic time capsule.
18 Likes
Racing Lagoon has some of the most difficult driving controls I’ve ever played with, also the story goes buckwild in the final act - it was written by Final Fantasy 7 writer IIRC.
6 Likes
ya tbh the overworld driving mechanics are kind of killing me already. I find the races a tiny bit easier in first person, but the way that every loss fundamentally changes the dynamics of your car because you lose parts means you can never get used to anything.
1 Like