Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

I deleted the iso to free up space so can’t check, sorry.

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just finished BOSSGAME, and it’s easily the best designed action game i’ve seen on mobile. i think it would actually be worse on other platforms.

i guess i’d describe it as mechanically richer undertale style battles, but only the bosses. almost a rhythm game? failure feels like practice rather than bad luck. absolutely astounding amount of bespoke attacks and animations in this game too, constant novelty. it’s really really good!!

the story and writing are also extremely cute and cool and gay, i was worried it would be too “wholesome game” but it features actual writing, conflict, and character moments. it’s pretty god damned good.

comes with my highest recommendation. it took me about three hours to finish, so its a shorty. killed a whole plane ride for me. play this dang game!!

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oh this is great ive been looking for a new mobile game to play that isnt ADS ADS ADS DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE ANIME ASSES SNIPING ADS ADS

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Stuntman is such a good game! I’m not surprised it has issues being emulated. I beat it back in the day when it came out on PS2. Apparently that’s one of my big gaming accomplishments I never knew was an accomplishment.

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Continuing Dragonflight. On the subject of Blizzard’s court-ordered step away from heteronormativity, I posted this—

—and some of the very next questlines were in-your-face gay romance stories. One guy wants you to craft a gift for his husband using high-quality materials; another guy wants you to help prepare a proposal for his partner.

It wouldn’t be a problem if they were written better. There’s a particular voice they they use, like this, it’s fond of commas but it uses them poorly. It’s not as egregious as the Baradin Wardens quests in Cataclysm, but it feels like that same quest writer gained ten years of experience but still prefers impressionist punctuation. That said, some of the most affecting quests have used this haphazard punctuation, so I can’t complain too much.

I was more impressed with their depiction of a centaur leader with a hearing disability—she’s got an interpreter and what is effectively a service animal. You talk directly with her even though the interpreter is the one providing speech, and the two of them sign throughout the conversation, although I doubt the animation has any more meaning than does their mouth-flapping facial animation used during talking head narration.

I took a break from progressing through quests to fully upgrade my dragon-riding talents and get gold ranks in half the available races. I like the landscape: it’s just four zones again, as it was in Shadowlands, but they’re part of the same landmass, so they have to fit together better aesthetically. The focus on dragon-riding necessitates a lot more verticality, including plenty of towers and other landmarks to put collectibles over, so at the risk of making the most predictable possible comparison… It reminds me of Breath of the Wild. Apparently I’m about to unlock rock climbing as an activity, so we’ll see just how blatant that inspiration really is soon.

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: sewer system (return to daikatana)

Playing Popful Mail (sega cd version), I was full of expectation but actually playing it is a bit underwhelming. Kind of a Wonder Boy clone, which isn’t making me feel anything

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Exactly when you feel like quitting that game is the right decision.

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Hahaha! I think I will follow your advice

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Finally tried Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate, and my first run, which seemed to be going far too well, took a turn after I accidentally lost my sword and shield in a Synthesis Pot mishap shortly before the day-to-night element first came into play. Well played, game, by which I mean, “I am an idiot”.

Probably the most notable thing about the game, though, is the translation. My only past experience with Shiren is with the DS port of the first game, and I expected this game to be written in the same style, or a the very least keep the earlier game’s translations. Not so: not only is the tone more humorous (although that may also be the case in the original Japanese), most of the items are enemy names are translated differently–riceballs are now onigiri, Melding Jars are now Synthesis Pots, etc. It’s already odd enough for a modern game series to not have a consistent style guide, but given the importance of being able to identify things in the game, it feels especially jarring.

ETA: Another odd thing is that the item distribution seems rather different from the DS game. If I remember correctly, people had noted that that port had rebalanced the game to make it harder to get the best stuff from the start, and that seems to have been undone here, at least in the regular game. Like, having that first play through gave me two Revival Herbs, which would have never happened in the DS game.

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Symptomatic of our times that when Proteus returns it’s wearing collection and cataloguing as a driving force.

What I want to use this for is memory triggering; to look at vague semblances of shapes I know and feel the soft fizz of recall as I match it to shapes and colors and moments in my life. And that’s what’s good about this. But a layer of game above it forces my mind into organizing, optimizing, quantifying, and patterning that drives my life.


I need to structure my thoughts on the victories of the early '10s indie minimalism. We’ve seen it fall down so much in the last five years as they’ve tried to adapt techniques to roguelikes and RPGs and game-heavy forms that we’re in danger of losing what they unlocked, deeply. The only thing that seems to be surviving is twee aesthetics and an appreciation (appreciated!) of low-fidelity for its suggestive qualities.

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Might have hit a wall with NFSU2. I got a ton of money from sponsorships and races, and so I wanted to trick out a new car, and I chose the “best” car based on stats, which is the Audi TT. Anyway, after dumping all my money into the car, it sucks ass and I hate it. And so now I have all this money I wasted on a car I hate. This sucks.

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why do I keep getting called out for my taste in phone games

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i just played through the Ib Remake that came out this year. this is my first time playing through the game in any form.

i really liked it. it was honestly like a 10/10 experience for me. i guess when i hear about RPG maker horror i tend to assume a) a Yume Nikki rip-off and b) some kind of jump scare/contrived plot element that feels very adolescent. so that’s why i never bothered trying to play through the original version of this game before.

…but that wasn’t my experience at all. was really pleased with all the different creative and imaginative stuff done over the course of the game. it really makes such good use of using a bunch of different ideas within limited tools and doesn’t feel monotonous or like it’s dragging at all at any point. i only got to see a few of the endings, but i felt like the game’s length was generally really perfect for what it was too.

so like - on the one hand, i was very happy to finally experience this game and have a good time. but it also left me feeling sad that this is a freeware game that came out 10 years ago (in its original form) and the whole indie space has become so much bigger and more demanding from people on a technological/work end… and yet there’s so little i’ve played in that space that even mildly approaches the creativity of this free RPG maker game by a solo dev. just shows how little things have changed in some ways.

anyway, it seems like the original developer was the one who initiated this remake (unlike Cave Story where Pixel wasn’t involved at all or Yume Nikki where the original dev just seemed to be advising/not directly making it) so i hope it made them some money.

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… I spent far too long writing up a custom config file for xidi, a directinput wrapper, so that I could play Crimson Skies pc on a modern controller with controls resembling the xbox crimson skies, all without losing access to analog inputs.

So anyway, Crimson Skies pc is still a good time and now I have a new bit of emulation software to become obsessed with the possibilities of. I can surely write a competent config for Freespace 2, right?

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I’m looking for the most unethical CD key reseller website around. I need one that GUARANTEES that every key I buy has been stolen and ripped off. this is the only way I can pay money for Midnight Suns while Denuvo keeps blocking warez groups from cracking new games

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Oh yeah, Crimson Skies also has antifa dna in its bones. Like the third mission involves me destroying a british base and a work camp to help out the (independent, uncolonized) kingdom of Hawaii (almost every mission involves fighting imperialists)

ah the days when you could have explicitly left politics in a game without controversy.

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I gotta get Crimson Skies working again, the game stopped after like 3 missions

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I figured this out after the meetup btw

In the xbox crimson skies, you can’t continue that mission until the briefing voice clip finishes. The buttom prompt just doesn’t appear before then. An absurd oversight in the interface

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ohhh dang!

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