People are gonna hate to hear this, but I’m afraid that was my exact problem with Nocturne too, and it caused me to fall off of it entirely. I respect that game a great deal, and I did have some fun with it, but I just couldn’t take that encounter rate any more.
7 Likes
my ideal version of undertale shows you each unique battle exactly once
9 Likes
Perversely I love Nocturne’s approach where you can get caught in a lethal battle one step from a save room. Game wants you to know it will never not be fucking around.
7 Likes
I appreciate that on paper but in practice I know if/when that happens to me I’m going to put the game down for a long time, if not permanently.
7 Likes
I played Trails of Cold Steel 3.
My 8th Legend of Heroes game.
Some day I’ll play something else!
4 Likes
Freedom Planet 2 is an ornate cathedral of furry pixel art and time-wasting RPG towns but also a Treasure Sonic game for the Saturn
It is not any more audacious of a time-waster than most RPGs, let alone a Persona or Yakuza, but you need to like the whole deal with the furry pixel art
I like it a lot
8 Likes
I tried the first one but I wasn’t a cool enough dude to beat many levels.
2 Likes
second one has several assist settings! also a beginner mode with a 
next to it to which i say omg me
2 Likes
Reinstalled fortnite and played 3 hours of fortnite. I spent $20 on vbux to try and eventually unlock this here emo cat.
4 Likes
been playing through Ace Attorney trilogy on PS5 with my fiancée and having a real fun time together. i’d only ever played the first game, with its DS re-release, and my main complaints about the series still stand. mostly, the game really prioritizes its narrative above everything else i.e. logic or investigative work. like you do those things all the time, but when it comes to actually advancing the story or figuring out the right answer to something, you will sometimes have to go in this huge circle to get to the answer you already knew because the game’s characters have to say a bunch of crap first so they can realize what you already know.
anyway, i’m having more fun playing this with another person. by myself i’d probably just brood on what annoys me about it, but instead i get to enjoy seeing someone really get into this series for the first time.
6 Likes
Did math, adding “would be fun to play with Neo Rude in 10 years” list.
4 Likes
Fortnite’s battle pass system is really interesting in that there’s a “buy in” for quests that’s time limited, so to get the maximum amount of value you have to keep playing the game in a generally focused way. What’s also interesting is that these quests can be done in multiplayer games, so it’s kind of a single player game in a multiplayer setting? There’s enough slack in the first 1/4th of a game to generally do those tasks even in a battle royal setting. Heck, some players will just recognize someone’s doing a quest and will not engage out of politeness, which is some really neat emergent behavior.
I have to wonder how much market research Riot does to figure out which outfit to put in what battle pass level to maximize playtime from battle pass buyers. There is a LOT of cruft in these battle passes. Having had the displeasure of implementing a lot of that cruft (cosmetics, animations, etc) into a game before I also have to wonder how much labor is going into putting all that shit in there.
I think the tension in each game is pretty interesting, since it’s a natural progression of generally easy enemies to harder enemies later in a match, with sometimes the bad luck of running into a really effective enemy squad immediately. I thought the big map would be easy to get lost in, but because every section has a unique look to it, I can generally remember places I’ve been and strategic choke points. Weapons wise there’s a good mix of Short, Medium, and Long Distance ranged guns and it only takes a few games to kind of settle in on what works.
That said I don’t ever feel comfortable until I have a DMR or Sniper rifle, lmao. I’ve never been an effective sniper in any of the FPSes I’ve ever played, yet here I’m able to get shots on target, I have to wonder if there’s some slight aim assist going on even with a Mouse + Keyboard. Some of that has to be the very effective projectile visuals, you can actually see the bullet traverse space through your reticle as opposed to it being hitscan, and there’s visible bullet drop too. I think this more than anything has trained me to use the ranged weapons a lot better.
4 Likes
HYPER DEMON HYPER DEMON HYPER DEMON
HYPER DEMON
HYPER DEMON
calling it devil daggers 2 is both accurate and impossibly short. it innovates on just about every aspect of Devil Daggers. it feels like a Devil Daggers sequel by way of a tesseract. next level brain genius shit.
enemies behind you as holographic projections! enemy spawn as decimated crystals! completely new and strange scoring system! tons of nuanced interactions!
16 Likes
I don’t think my brain will like this but I do like how it is trying to solve the problem of the first one where you have to make a lot of off screen calculations for what you can’t see behind you.
2 Likes
okay i’m firmly sold on this game now in spite of my Devils Daggers misgivings. i’ll def check it out at some point
2 Likes
I still wish Devil Daggers had a non score mode where you had a halo shield but make it charge super slow so you can at least make a few mistakes in a run.
3 Likes
I am halfway Return to Monkey Island and it flows. It has gorgeous graphic style and as an adventure, it has the same spirit as the first two, not as difficult as MI2, and there is a gorgeous hint system.
As far as puzzles go, I admire MI 2 much more, but I have no patience and with MI2 I ended up looking at the solution pretty often.
3 Likes
thats what the hrft audio is for!!! it probably has like… the best implementation of it ive heard
2 Likes
I finished FF3 Pixel Remaster and can definitely recommend it. The last streak of dungeons asks so much more of you than anything before, but really it’s not all that much in the grand scheme of things, just run with a lot of potions and make sure you can do damage. For the final, notorious dungeon, they added points that heal you whenever you kill one of the four bosses. This apparently was not the case in the original, which is psychotic. But I really liked how this thing was paced. You were constantly going onto the next thing. It’s a little nice to play a FF game that doesn’t have 10 hours of cutscenes, tbh. I had never played a 2D FF game, or very many NES games (though this is not exactly a NES game), so I am struck by the novelty of everything for sure. Though I can say I recommend it, and it was one of my favorite experiences playing a Final Fantasy.
11 Likes
What elevates it, I think, is that there’s like 3-4 ways each core enemy interacts with you/gems/the environment, so there’s a “path” you can carve through enemies by using your mobility and firepower options optimally.
For example, after you kill the first spawner enemy and start the game proper, two enemy types spawn:
- A writhing mass of skull tentacles, which will aggro to you if you shoot them, can only take damage on their heads, and which leave a tentacle hazard when the connected skull dies.
- Three “chaser” type enemies whose death state is actually a stun; shoot or run into them to kill them for good.
The tentacle enemy is vulnerable to stomping, you just need enough height to do it. Not coincidentally, the chaser enemies give you tons of height when stomped. So you can stun the chasers, dash into them to get height, stomp the skulls for a quick stun (or kill, if you’re lucky), and move on. Around this time a slo-time powerup also spawns which the tentacles quickly gather around, so you can get some height, dash into the beam above the powerup, and stomp down.
This isn’t even covering the firepower options. The nailgun/shotgun shot from DD return, but now you can also use an alt-fire to turn gems into a railgun blast, which causes funny things when you shoot it into a gem container (a mass of homing railgun shots sweeps the area) or a green bomb left by an Embalmer (creates a MegaSplosion).
It’s so much more mechanically dense than Devil Daggers! There’s so much to dig into. There’s also in in-game clip browser so you can see how other people are doing funny strats to climb the leaderboards and learn.
Devil Daggers may be perfect, but so far Hyper Demon completely blows it out of the water. I’m completely in love with this game.
15 Likes