the implications they reveal about that deku makes it even more horrifying/tragic
3 Likes
Finished Homeworld 3, it ended up being a lot shorter than expected.
I enjoyed the tactical side of this, the game looks gorgeous, and the environments were cool. But honestly, pretty underwhelming in terms of variety.
The story is just plain not good, which is real disappointment. It makes it hard to get into any of these battles, so it just becomes checking off boxes at a certain point. The game has a real problem with constantly interrupting you, pulling away control, and playing some dumb cutscene or telling you what the next thing you’re supposed to do is. It then has Command repeat what you’re supposed to do over and over until you do it. Pretty annoying.
I kind of can’t believe the story is as basic as it is: An evil version of Karan Sajet - a warlord-type - appears and tries to take over the galaxy, then you go and stop her. A lot goes unexplained about how she got her abilities or what this psychic realm you go to is, or what ascending into hyperspace is supposed to mean, and I dunno, it seems rushed? With as long as the game was in development, it seems like it can’t have been rushed, but here we are.
Hopefully I scan squeeze some more out of the skirmish mode or the multiplayer.
Also: It rubbed me the wrong way that the Higaarans were revealed to just be regular humans in H2, but like, here they literally have English written on their shirts and it just feels like maybe the devs think that this all takes place in our galaxy?
Not the vibe I got from Homeworld 1…
So yeah I dunno, worth a playthrough but probably not at full price.
5 Likes
Finished Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
The puzzles are good, basically a deep dive into the subtype of keycode puzzles. How far can you push the 4 digit code puzzle and mazes. However, no indie game is allowed to make their whole thing about mazes anymore. No more for a while. Not after The Witness, Tunic and now this. We can find new puzzles.
No ‘back’ button has got to be the game’s biggest offence. I suspect the design philosophy of having only directional input and a single button is a sort of minimalism aiming towards getting the player to think about every input as a literal maze but… you gotta have a back button.
“The entire interface is a maze, if one must press a button ten times to navigate to the back button so be it. It’s like they’re really navigating the maze”
My inputs were probably doubled to an unhealthy extent thanks to this stubbornness.
The flashing and buzzing in some visual effects was also getting a bit much in places. You’ll need LASER EYE surgery after this (seriously just have an alternative for eyestrain/epilepsy).
The ‘Maze gunmen’ as a hard gate seemed to exist to encourage the player to save and I thought would pay off in some way. It’s not really a true difficulty challenge and if you fail one you just redo puzzles you’ve already solved which is tedious. I think if the save data itself had become necessary in some way, incentivising the player to create a save for the information could’ve been kinda cool.
The plot concerns competing principles of the technical and creative but is kinda thwarted by Renzo’s characterisation as unhinged. It almost suggests that rational technical people are just bothered by certain art, or that the art itself is superficial aesthetica with no connection to real life.
There are some nice flourishes when the paradigm shifts and you get a new tier of puzzles but there’s a lot of ‘clean up’ in the end game where you’re just hunting for a literal key to get you to the next set of things to write down. The final supercomputer section was cleverly presented even if the ending is pretty underwhelming. I imagine it’d be fun to play with a puzzle-minded friend.
4 Likes
Devil Blade Reboot is unsurprisingly a banger. Looks great, sounds great, cool patterns, good balance of survival / scoring, just generally a really fun time.
9 Likes
Game time continues to be dominated by New Vegas. To this day I’m trying to understand why I’ll put 60+ hours into a game like this, but struggle with a 5-8 hour game, and I think it comes down to it letting me go on “little adventures?”
Let me do this little quest, let me see what’s in here, etc.
I like that New Vegas (compared to what I played of 3 and 4) puts less emphasis on the Vaults as a thing? Maybe it just comes down to The Courier not being a Vault Dweller. Certainly are some vaults, with their share of weird shit, but, y’know.
Went from having 50K caps to a lowly 5K. Banned from every casino, loaded up with implants, toting a Mexican rifle that, if I’m lucky, explodes most things in one hit.
New Vegas…a neat game.
I went back to Blasphemous and it’s incredible how irritating some of the enemies you come across are. These wax ghosts (?) that hit you with some sort of laser whip with absurd hitboxes are a drag.
7 Likes
Isles of Sea & Sky continues to be great. I was concerned this would be another Stephen’s Sausage Roll situation – a brilliant puzzle game that’s too brilliant for me. But this game’s Zelda-like structure is very well implemented such that there’s always something else you can go and do. I’m pretty far into the game now, and so far there have been enough reasonably doable puzzles to sustain me on the critical path without getting frustrated. There are definitely some really mind bending puzzles mixed in too, and I do engage with them now and then. You can decide what to do based on how much brain power you have at any given moment.
There is one issue to that Zelda structure though. Every major area has an item you can get that gives you a new special power that helps you solve certain puzzles. Oftentimes you’ll run across a bunch of puzzles that require one of those special items, and it’s not always clear that the puzzle can’t be done with your current slate of abilities. So you can hit your head against a puzzle for ages and only realize later that you never could have done it in the first place. But once you’re aware that this can happen, it’s usually pretty clear what you can and can’t do.
11 Likes
I’m still playing Unicorn Overlord. Wondering about the HLTB since I’m 40 hours in and what feels like halfway. I think I’m watching battles play out too much instead of mashing the start button.
5 Likes
yeah by it’s at about 50% that i started skipping battles unless i really liked the unit or needed to see how some change to their formation/moveset/character make up affected their performance in real time.
at that point, it feels even more like an RTS
2 Likes
I’ve got a no-miss clear on Easy and a single-death clear on Normal under my belt so far. Working my way through stage select and pushing scores with bomb-boosting.
So far, my favorite part is that the scoring system basically means you want to be nose-to-nose with every boss as much as possible, rather than just sitting at the back dodging patterns. To the game’s credit, it doesn’t just spam you with central-gun, targeted attacks like most Cave games, so grinding up on the boss is totally doable.
Instead, you periodically get pushed back / to the side with such an attack (usually at the beginning of a cycle), and you have to get back into position by weaving the subsequent web of attacks. The game understands that you want to be that close at all times and designs around it without either being unduly punishing or hand-holding.
Easily climbing my list of favorite shmups as I get deeper in. I’d say it’s on par with Daifukkatsu / ESPrade in my personal canon at this point. Maybe that’s just recency bias, but damn it’s fun as fuck in a way I haven’t felt since I first started getting into the genre with DoDonPachi and Ikaruga, while being bone-simple.
Also I’m playing Mad Max again. Almost ten years later… It’s okay.
6 Likes
I’ve been playing this some too, mostly for survival on hard. below hard I think it’s only a scoring game, it’s too easy otherwise. you get a million bombs because they’re necessary for scoring, from a survival perspective there’s no way a game of this difficulty level should have so many bombs. I’ve done a little scoring on normal, will probably do more of that even though I’m more of a survival player in general. it seems like a fun scoring game.
I think this is a good game for people who don’t really play a lot of shmups too, it’s great as a pure spectacle, really reminds me of a lot of 90s shmups in that respect: rayforce, einhander, radiant silvergun, metal black, et al. doesn’t exactly play like any of them, but it’s got that vibe. I haven’t played or even unlocked the original version yet, but as a remaster it certainly does a good job of still evoking that time period. a pretty easy recommend. really wish it had save states or at least the ability to select starting points within stages in training, ala the live wire cave ports.
2 Likes
Yeah, this is the one big issue I’ve run into with the game as well. Especially on the second island before the trend is fully revealed and is complicated by there being three potential factors (the water spirits, the tides, and the swim fins) eventually in play it can get a bit troublesome. There was one room in particular with a lot of things in play (as there’s basically three different puzzles laying atop one another) and I got got by this two separate times to the tune of a good hour or so of stubbornly banging my head against impossible things.
Other than that though this is definitely a keeper, the puzzles and Zelda overworld-esque bits continue to play off each other quite well. I’ve actually stopped my forward progress for a bit to go cleaning up on the first two main islands and various smaller ones I have access to, got about 41 stars out of them so far but will probably be time to move onto the third main island soon.
Oh yeah, finished up Assassin’s Creed Mirage as well. I eventually got used to its quirks but aside from it being on a saner scale I don’t know that there is a reason to play this over AC II and its various spin-offs. I will admit to guffawing when (major end game spoiler) it turns out I was Fight Club/Tyler Durdening the whole time, I thought they were being lazy at the end when they had you put on a face scarf for riding through a sand storm while your female companion didn’t bother but it was because she was imaginary/your repressed memories you inherited from one of the ancient aliens for reasons I still don’t grasp.
3 Likes
“I will not start another game until I beat Blasphemous, Shin Megami Tensei 3 and Fallout New Vegas.”
Anyway I booted up Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin and goddamn does this run like shit on my PC. I can’t figure it out, because the stuff that’s driving me nuts (mostly horrendous screen tearing, and some drops and judder in gameplay) is really only happening during cinematics, I think? Which are locked to 30 FPS, though it seems like both the prerendered and in-game varieties suffer equally.
Looking online, the solutions seem to be accepting that it’s a poorly optimized port, brute forcing it with better hardware, going into the bios and disabling “e-cores,” and setting up some shady-sounding program called Special K to launch it.
I guess I’ll go with the first one.
Also played some Multiversus, since…ya can’t put Jason Voorhees into something for free and not have me give it a try. I guess it’s OK. Game feels ten times slower than I remember the beta being.
9 Likes
So I don’t know if you knew games called Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy Six, and Mother 2 came out in 1994 (do not correct me.) this made the 3rd place Megadrive feel real bad so they launched the Mega Drive Role Playing Project. This resulted in six games:
Crusader of Centy (
)
Shining Force CD ( )
Beyond Harmageddon Gaiden (unknown)
Beyond Oasis ( )
Dragon Slayer ()
Dragon Slayer 2 ()
And Surging Aura from 1995. You maybe forgiven for not knowing about Surging Aura, it’s been untranslated and indeed would be exceptionally difficult to translate. The menu system is a baffling pile of subset menus in tiny boxes of dangerous kanji.
Even me a fluent Japanese speaker (失語あり) and player of video games with 30 years experience took about 10 minutes to equip weapons.
The battle system involves making a decision through a scrolling menu then letting it continually happen till you change your mind. I managed to get to two party members and that is double the decision making.
The music is good.
I have exhausted it’s remarkable points. It is an unremarkable game in every way that matters. Is it to be remarked that it is boring and dull to look at? The Super Famicom has Breath of Fire and Tales of Phantasia and Estopolis if I want to begin to have a B-tier experience.
I watched @boojiboy7 play King Monarch which is at least like, something. It’s a tax rate simulator!
16 Likes
There is a French translation that I think I could fumble my way through.
1 Like
I’ve been thinking about Lord Monarch this morning and man, it sure is “what if your RTS army was a virus whose infectious rate was controlled via taxes” and I kinda liked that? Also apparently the other versions are at least graphically much more serious, which I don’t think would make that game better.
7 Likes
Stranger of Paradise runs like shit and is exceedingly linear but damn if it isn’t really stupid and fun. So easy to craft game-obliterating combos. Was a breezy 20h clear for me (no endgame). Story was stupid in just the right way.
4 Likes
I really enjoyed what little I did play of it. Combat felt pretty good, and it seems to lean in on the stupid hard.
I just…need to finish some other games first, before I never do, before I commit to this adventure of these moody men and their ominous JO crystals.
2 Likes
My best advice is, if you want to really bust the game wide open, go all in on leveling Black Mage / White Mage / Sage when you get them, because they are ridiculously powerful as a multiclass.
3 Likes
when it comes to Shinobi
i love Shinobi
now, the thing is, even though i think the USA titles of the Genesis games are more interesting, the Japanese titles do a better job of conveying a distinction between the games’ intent. i.e. if it’s just Shinobi or like Shadow Dancer, you know you are going to be collecting some children or some bombs.
if it’s The Super Shinobi, you know you are about to play an intense, pure action game with the worst double jump in videogame history.
a while back, someone posted about how much they hated Shinobi III, and i didn’t respond out of respect to people’s subjective experiences with games. that said, i think Shinobi III is one of the best action games ever made, for a variety of reasons i’ll get into one day, but not today.
today, i’m here to talk about The Revenge of Shinobi, aka The Super Shinobi, which, by all accounts, seems to be universally beloved, although sometimes i wonder if it’s just because of the Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.
for whatever reason, i never really played this game as a kid. it’s one of those early, early Sega Genesis releases that no one i personally knew owned, so i didn’t have exposure to it. by the time i got a Genesis, something about it just never seemed appealing to me (i’m not sure why). i eventually rented Shinobi III and loved it, but also never bought; i also can’t tell you why.
eventually, in college, through emulation, and then later in the Sega Ages 3D rerelease on the 3DS, i got into doing non-pro glitchless speedrun attempts at the game, mostly just aiming to beat it without dying or using continues, as fast as i could. i got pretty good at it!
a few times, i went back and tried The Revenge of Shinobi, and always bounced off of it. this past weekend, i found a boxed copy of it for a reasonable price at an upstate NY game shop, with the intention of finally getting past the second level of this game and beating it, entirely.
but holy hell, this game is so difficult. the first stage has a really strange mechanic that, so far, has not appeared anywhere else. you unlock doors and then backtrack through the stage in order to complete it. everything else from there is pretty linear, with not too many gimmicks. but then stage 2-1 is genuinely pretty evil. a lot of pits and annoyingly-placed enemies to knock you into them, that you’d have no way of avoiding during your first playthrough. it also requires you to continually utilize the double jump mechanic which, even though it’s the same as in Shinobi III, i can still never pull off 100% of the time.
for those unaware, in the Super Shinobi series, you can only do a double jump if you tap jump at the exact moment your character has hit the highest point of their jump. tap jump right before or after this moment, and you won’t do a double jump, and you will fall to your death.
from there, i have managed to get Stage 5 (which according to the Sega Wiki is called “Area Code 818”), and then died. you only get 3 continues, so the game is really a war of attrition, requiring you to memorize stage layouts and enemy placements and then do everything perfectly.
that said, everything before and after Stage 2-1 is really fun and interesting, and i’m starting to see why people like this game. 2-1 is so bad, though. like, really, really bad. it also makes no sense as a predecessor to stage 2-2, which is a rooftop city level - why is 2-1 a waterfall stage? again, the Sega Wiki says Stage 2 is “Tokyo,” but that’s bullshit!
anyway, i will beat this game one day, but i feel like Shinobi 3 is an improvement in every way - less need for double jumps, and they give you attacks that give you iframes, and you can run. also you get a motorized surfboard, because it’s the 90s.
20 Likes
this person is wrong and I have no respect for their wrong opinion
I’m willing to say this because, well, just look at the shit I like
6 Likes