I thought Racer’s Revenge was pretty cool though I’ve never played the first one
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I’m curious whether this game has high-level play, the way expert Geoguessr players learn by rote to recognise stobie poles or phonetically read Cyrillic. What would that even look like? Is there a method to narrowing the conceptual space beyond sheer intuition, or perhaps quirks in the data set?
It took me forever to make the link from strong to sharp, and getting a hit on dramatic only baffled me. I had to resort to churning through thesaurus entries before accidentally stumbling on the solution.
Such a brilliantly stupid idea for a game. “Think of a concept… No, not that one.”
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racer revenge is great!
those pre-race videos in the first game show up in the dreamcast version, which is the best console version (the newer ports notwithstanding)
it also got a port to Mac OS so i’ll be trying that version out soon
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Made it to ranked in Star Wars Hunters. There’s generally a mad scramble for Vex, the starter bounty hunter character, because she’s easy to use and by the time you make it to ranked you’ve most likely unlocked her specific XP track that rewards you for getting kills with her.
So I’ve been playing a lot of Sentinel, the Stormtrooper heavy gunner, which is fine. I do alright with him, except against another Sentinel. Or that goddamn Wookie…he’s too fast for a Tank class…
Anyway mostly posting to say 1) this game is good, and I’m pretty sure it’s thanks to it being mobile-first and keeping things nice and simple and, more importantly, 2) one of the characters is two Jawas in a trench coat.
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My game playing has slowed down since my ass got kicked in Bitterblack Isle during April. And the only game which for some reason is intriguing me at the moment is Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. And I just keep resisting this, thinking there’s gotta be a better game I could play… but I’m starting to think you just gotta play sometimes, doesn’t matter what.
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Grimrock 1
Very jarring to have these very realistic and very wet graphics coupled with ridiculous real time tile-based combat that lets us fully take advantage of enemies not being able to attack diagonally. Funnily enough, the final boss adresses this by being a ridiculous giant 3D Mario rotating cube.
I played the hell out of this game and cleared it in 2 days, I can’t resist being thrown into a giant tower and tasked to get to the top / bottom
Before the green Moon
Indie Harvest-Moon like with that Analgesicy faux-Gamecube look
This is definitely a Harvest Moon-like and not a Stardew Valley-like because days pass by so fast. It will take about one full in-game week to explore the whole minuscule game area just because days pass too fast. Good
I got kind of spoiled about what this game’s deal is (it is what made me interested in it after all) and now this is coloring everything, unfortunately. I’ll see something happening and think « this furthers the message of the game because ______ » and I wish I could feel it viscerally instead of having this detached analytical experience. I don’t really blame the game for it but it’s inescapable. There are still a lot of little things left to enjoy nonetheless… but maybe not enough for me. I haven’t really vibed with the game’s characters yet, including the one who started to work in my garden and who’s probably a/the love interest
OK the one thing that really surprised me is this extra bit of friction :
The game is divided into one rainy season and a dry season. It starts at the beginning of the rainy season to ease you in so you don’t need to water crops at all for 15 days. Then during the dry season, just like in Harvest Moon, you have to water crops with a water can everyday, and refill the water can in your water tank when it’s empty. It’s already the most taxing part of your day. But very soon you learn that you also need to periodically refill the water tank with water pumped from the lake and transported with these big impractical cubes! And maybe you should buy another cube, so it’s less of a chore. It’s great
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dipping into Enter the Gungeon for the first time in awhile, i dunno if ive played a game with a bigger gulf in my enjoyment & skill between regular level progression vs boss fights
I think it is a really great feeling fun game, the aesthetic choices work so well for me (cute Cave Story x Adventure Time ish sprites, detailed background and closeup art, bangin music) and the roguelike meta-progress feels fair and appropriately rubber banded – i make more consistent progress as i unlock a bigger/better pool of loot, but also as i learn good habits and how to use more hidden, risky mechanics (curse, throwing guns, when/how to spend keys etc). The room layouts become complex in interesting ways as they add different traps and combos of enemies, along with opportunities for taking cover and emergent strategy from destructible elements. its great!! it even does being super refencey in a way that doesn’t bug me, cuz it obeys the Smash Bros. Principle where its more fun to pick up an injoke weapon and wield it mechanically than just read dialogue or see a visual reference
And then seemingly like 90% of the bosses ditch that, and turn the game from a Smash TV/roguelike/bullet hell hybrid into straight bullet hell, which i am simply worse at and less into than its other components. Tellingly the only bosses i like either can incorporate those elements (so, the big muscle bird guy, sometimes if his arena doesn’t just spawn as an open empty room) or just have easy enough patterns that i dont feel overwhelmed. it feels like there’s a 2/3 chance of getting screwed by something too hard for me at the end of an otherwise successful floor, and it makes for mixed vibes. Not helping that stress is knowing one of my sources of heart containers (besides passive item unlocks) is doing a no-hit kill of a boss and its hard to ignore the perfectionist impulse that creates 
its cuz of that i tend to pick up every couple months, have fun with for a while, and then kinda plateau and put it down out of frustration
4 Likes
On more than a few occasions I’ve tried, and bounced off of, Dungeons of Dreadrock. It’s a little isometric dungeon crawler that looks like it should be turn-based but isn’t. Each floor is more or less a little puzzle, but the fact that enemies and traps move in real time, and the touch controls, conspire to make me die a lot more often than I think I should be. I made it farther than on previous attempts (death just respawns you on the current floor, you don’t lose progress). But I think I’ve seen enough. It’s fine, I have tons of other stuff to play.
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The Talos Principle leaves PS+ Buffet in the 18th. I am about 4 hours into it, finding out I am less than a 1/5th of the way through by Time To Beat. That’s too much game I say. I don’t think I’ll beat it by the deadline, so it kind of saps my wish to play.
It is one of the few games without proper Spotify integration so the music plays on top of my music. I would be cool without sound but my own except for the voice overs that keep surprising you.
I also can’t tell how much I should be “cheating” or if it is expected. I’ve cheated twice on a puzzle. I also feel like I am approaching the bullshit puzzles.
As a paper carrying Philosopher the Philosophy stuff is all good.
Too much game in this Portal like. Will it do anything with it’s Portal like structure? (if it does please spoil it for me in a PM.)
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been playing Street Fighter Zero 3 on Saturn which, in my opinion, is the definitive version of this game. it’s unfortunate that this time period was a kind of nadir for Capcom and arcades in general, because i think the late 90s is really my favorite era of Capcom arcade stuff. i find the game still really enjoyable to pick up and play and just to behold. the home ports added so much stuff and characters, too, so it still feels like a treasure trove of gameplay.
i should start going to the local diy arcade Red Parry more often to play this game against people. main issue is that i don’t really like hanging out in Bushwick, anymore, but this summer i’ll try to make it a once-a-week habit
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that playlist is a performance art piece about what it feels like to walk in NYC
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Turns out that Super Hydlide rules. I mean, it also sucks, but…
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The game definitely wants you to cheat on puzzles. The whole narrative thrust of the game ends up being built on it.
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I don’t think it’s even much of a spoiler anymore to mention that yes, The Talos Principle does have puzzles layered on top of the numbered ones that use the external environment. The story includes multiple endings based on solving these additional puzzles.
The sequel is very good, by the way.
1 Like
I played some of that Layers of Fear remake last night. Some of the things they changed are technically impressive and add to the atmosphere but the writing hasn’t improved any. In fact, I can’t tell whether my memory is mostly of what the original game got right or whether the talking parts actually got worse.
Still, I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to resist playing that SH2 remake even if doing so risks corrupting my memory of the original.
The other day, I was thinking I’d like to replay SH3 from that “HD Collection” release. (After a bunch of patches, the SH3 part ended up being pretty good. SH2 still had issues, though, as I remember it.) But I think the only way to do so would be to hook up my PS3 again. (I have an XBOX One connected but as I understand it they never applied the patches to that version so it’s still quite broken.)
2 Likes
re: gungeon
you may not be using the dodge well!
funny enough that is one of my main gripes with the game – the dodge trivializes a lot of it or at least makes the bullet patterns really boring. this ain’t no touhou – you can largely ignore your positioning and just time rolls to get through basically every pattern.
maybe a hot take but i think many games use invincible dodges as a design crutch to smooth over their messy encounters. dodges are game warping but can be great if the entire game is designed around them (c.f. dark souls, monster hunter). i just don’t think these indie devs have the finesse to wield them and are instead sort of cludging them in so they don’t have to make sure any given pattern is readable bc worst case scenario you can just dodge through it.
make positioning matter again!!
my other problem with this game is that the devs thought they should try to balance the weapons and powers really tightly relative to each other which means everything kind of feels bland and the same. why would you develop a roguelike without spikiness??? what a slog.
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Is fumblying trying to jump over walls cheatting in this game? I did it once and it felt like a glitch.
I spoiled myself on the plot and went “yeah of course.”
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I’ve got…a lot of Football Manager played that I haven’t talked about. I should probably do a mega-post at some point and just get over my nagging fears that nobody could possibly care about this crap.
However.
This is worth sharing:
Yes, FC Gifu has somehow stumbled into the Asian Federation Champions League. And we have been drawn against a team from the DPRK.
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Hm thats not really my experience with the dodge roll at all actually, if anything i think it’s overemphasized in the tutorial (and uhh dev name). like the #1 gungeon tip online is “dont rollspam, 9 out of 10 times you can just walk out of the way” and i did start to take less hits when i stopped flopping all over the place
I do kinda lol when a game clearly included a dodge roll cuz People Like Dark Souls but ngl i can’t pull any games where ive felt like it was an active detriment. But that’s just me!!
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Dodge rolls are swagless in the third dimension (the most superfluous Rondo move now ubiquitous and boring? How?) and meanwhile Every Platformer’s down+jump = slide move has been abandoned aside from Vanquish
Best dodge idea is Godhand’s separation of “I gotta escape” backwards and L/R dodges and the aggro forward dodge, the parry of dodges
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