Finished Return, can confirm it is not sabotaged by the ending. Excellent game throughout.
Even if the ending was done better in Umineko
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i know i was posting abt playing a lot of demons souls and dark souls ii a few months ago but i never finished either lmao. back at it in a new apartment bc honestly what cooler game is there to celebrate moving
the goofs start early… killing vanguard demon in the tutorial only to get insta cutscene killed by the dragon god lmao. and then you get a pov cutscene of the maiden in black’s feet. oh miyazaki…
have any of those youtube souls dissectors explained at all what this magic instakill hole is (pls hold the laughter)
if you kill all the slimes poor phalanx will run away from you into a corner… it’s almost enough to make you pity it
videogames have quite simply never looked better than this. it might not be the best-looking videogame ever bc idk how you would ever quantify that but it’s one of them. it’s literally so beautiful…
did 1-1, bought the club + went to the shrine of storms to grab the magic falchion bc the rolling skeletons dont resist blunt weapon damage, now i’m playing thru the mines to get a +5 dragon short sword. doing an sl1 playthru…
https://rpcs3.thearchstones.com/onlineusers.html
i didnt realize they listed how many players were presently online on both the ps3 and rpcs3 servers! the emulator is usually a little more populated it seems. it’s so slay that this game still has people on it… taking my time to luxuriate in the experience and click on every bloodstain and message on my way
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I didn’t realised that’s mean monkey island, it leads me to this new game
Wishlist +1
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yeah, that game’s a classic! i follow her twitter and she’s currently working on a noctis-iv-esque game which i’m excited about too. she’s very into procedural gen/cellular automata/noise functions/raycasting these days.
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oh shit oh shit oh shit what
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Tomb Raider… is rough. i had a bit of a crisis yesterday about if i wanted to keep playing this game to the end. looking up playthroughs gives you the impression that this game is way shorter than it actually is, because people who play those have mastered the controls and know where everything in the levels are. most levels take me an hour or two to get through, by contrast.
the specter of constant death haunts everything. obviously Lara is designed to control much like a lot of cinematic platformers in the vein of Prince of Persia, which are already very difficult and brutal games. but add the unpredictability of a third dimension in here and it’s just way harder to gauge the mechanics of where you are and how you’re supposed to move through the space. i think i understand better where the ouevre of Bennett Foddy comes from.
the camera is a real problem. any time you’re on a platform in a corner you’re basically making a leap of faith. and your jumps tend to go way off target if you’re not overcorrecting for that, which probably results in instant death. which is compounded by the fact that Lara doesn’t seem to want to jump half the time you’re running off a platform. there’s probably some precise timing you need for this, but i haven’t been able to suss it out at all. so the playthrough has been just filled with my brutal savescumming. it’s my only real coping mechanism to be able to get through it.
i finished the dreaded Cistern in a few days ago. this seems to be a consensus pick online for people’s least favorite TR1 level. i watched a friend (who had played the game several times before in the past) basically have a breakdown about this map when they were streaming Tomb Raider, to the point where i felt compelled to help them find the missing key. i can’t imagine streaming Tomb Raider at all, so i completely understand that response.
it’s kind of a shame, because i really like the vibe of a central hub area of the level a lot (pictured above). it’s a bit more memorable than other levels which are more scattershot and all over the place. it does involve changing water levels, which is obviously a thing that many people struggle with in 3D.
the real problem is getting one specific key, which you have to do a lot of backtracking and changing of the water level in the main hub area to actually get to. it’s frustrating because i think with a handful of changes it would be basically okay within the context of everything else in this game. but everyone who was working on this game was doing all this stuff for the first time, so i guess it’s understandable that they didn’t know what players could tolerate and what they couldn’t.
this is the last level of the Greece-themed set. one of these statues turns into a terrifying red demon creature. a few of the enemies in this game are nightmare-fuel especially with how uh… frantic the combat is. most of the time i’m just scrambling to hit the fire and jump button and Lara is only facing the enemy half the time. if you can cheese the enemies from far away it’s almost always the best strategy.
this is in the inside of the above entrance area. if you look closely you can see a bit of the crumpled up corpse of Pierre French Guy (or whatever his name is) who has been your nemesis throughout these Greece levels. i cheesed him from far away so he went down easy. dig the textures though
speaking of the textures, the egyptian themed levels generally look really nice in that lo-res uncanny sort of way. but i like egyptian/pyramid themed things in videogames in general. also you can see me dealing with one of these terrifying mummy creatures who you absolutely do not want to fight close up because they frantically jump around you and stun you, and also their limbs explode into pieces when you kill them. definitely nightmare fuel.
also this area you actually come back out that moss covered door at the top of the slope at the end of the next level in a neat callback.
the very close draw distance in big rooms gives things a very uncanny feeling. like everything just beyond your view is shrouded in darkness. it ends of being kind of a neat effect in larger rooms like this one. especially if you’re looking at places from above. this, more than anything else, is what has kept me playing this game. it makes things feel so crunchy and tactile. i just wish moving through the environments didn’t feel like such a horrible, hostile chore.
i’ve heard that these textures were mostly just scanned out of random books and stuff. because they’re lo-res, it really creates an interesting effect. you wouldn’t think that random scanned textures would work that well together, but somehow they do and really add a lot to the overall atmosphere and appeal of this game.
this next mission is really frustrating to me because it’s one of those things where you have to hit four hidden switches to reveal four artifacts. i entered this room with the furniture pretty early on in the level, but completely missed the hidden switch on the very corner which is required to progress. you would just assume that any switch you’re required to flip would be very easy to find! that’s not the case
this is me back in the same room near the beginning of the level, having exhausted every option with the level and consulted a walkthrough… only to find the switch is hidden in the corner on the left side of this picture. how would i know to look there? especially right at the beginning of the level, where i’m not even sure what these switches do yet.
these kinds of rooms where you have a climb a gazillion ledges to get up to the top aren’t so bad the first time. but when you have to do them over and over again to find what switch you missed it really feels horrible. esp if you already have wrist issues and you’re just tbh trying to get through this game so you can move onto something else.
in conclusion: i dunno, this game really fucking nickel and dimes you, man. looking at the screenshots makes me want to play more, but i had such a rough time pushing through last night. i have at least like 3 or 4 long levels ahead of me. we’ll see how much more i can tolerate before i have to bow out for a bit and try to play something else.
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this is mirroring my experience with TR1 completely. all true, which makes it crazy to think that there are like six of these games and some people have played all of them!
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yeah - i mean and that’s only talking about the original series of games. there’s also the PS2-era ones, and the 2010’s reboot games.
i might try and play through TR2 if i have the patience for it at some point in the future because most of the original dev team worked on it and it seems different enough from TR1. can’t imagine going beyond that though. maybe the PS2 ones control better though.
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Last night I knocked out Vagrant Story, another game that’s been on my backlog for 20+ years. The story and presentation absolutely hold up on 2022 and it’s worth playing through for that alone. It’s really too bad that the game is so utterly miserable to actually play… the final couple of bosses and entire final citadel section in particular seemed needlessly cruel.
For example, the final boss spends most of the fight in an unhittable state, and when they finally enter the playfield they tend to use a non-damaging debuff on you, bringing your damage down to zero. You can easily counter the debuff, but casting it takes the time you would normally use to hit the boss, and they’ve likely left the playfield again by the time you bring up the attack command. So you can prep by casting a magic block spell, but if the boss spends too much time outside of the playfield your buffs will cancel and you won’t be able to reapply them because you have a magic block on. It winds up dragging the fight out without adding any tension whatsoever.
I guess the entire idea is that you are supposed to be timing your buffs and magic block (all through menus) but it adds literally nothing to what is an already pretty crummy battle system.
There’s zero tension in any fight in the entire game and they all happen in the exact same way: Cast Analyze → Equip Weapons → Set Gems → Cast Buffs - > win. If you don’t have a weapon that works you may have to quit out and go make/find one, but that never happened to me.
Occasionally you will run into a block puzzle that is either ridiculously simple or extremely obtuse and neither felt particularly satisfying to deal with.
Anyways, I’m glad I wrapped it up but even at 12 hours for a playthrough it felt about 6 hours too long. Next up on 2022 The Year Of The Backlog: BOF 1 and 2 for the SNES (and maybe 3 and 4 if I’m feeling it)
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THIS IS WHY I TELL EVERYONE TO LEVEL THEIR CROSSBOW that fight sucks so much ass without it
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I literally had forgotten that crossbows even existed until you just mentioned it! I bet that would have made that fight a lot easier/less frustrating.
I had just gotten through the previous fight too (that phantom guy with weakness to light) where nothing but spirit surge did any damage, and that was only about 20 damage even with int buffs up. I checked online and apparently I should have used a staff and a stronger light spell but a) I went back to the nearest workshop and checked my inventory and the only staff I had was the silver wizards staff from way early in the game, I didn’t get a single other staff to drop the entire game and b) the grimoire that taught the stronger light spell didn’t drop from the boss it was supposed to. So I just sat there and used spirit surge and mana regen potions for what felt like 30 minutes. What a weird game!
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Yeah TR2 is good, 3 and after is where the series drops off a bit, yeah.
It has save anywhere on the PS1 version as well, so I wouldn’t worry about save scumming at all; they’re demanding games.
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sometimes you just call out of work and play all the way through rondo of blood. rondo of blood. rondo of blood. rondo of blood. rondo of blood.
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Times like these I like to try the completely forgotten game in a series Chronicles which is like from 2002. Maybe 6 games in they got better…at friendly level design.
Anyways you made me want to bang my head against it after I finish messing with game pass.
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pretty sloppy run but i’m starting to get better!! god this game is like pure adrenaline. i think going back to devil daggers would feel glacial in comparison.
send me a request on steam if you want to compete or see a version that youtube hasn’t murdered https://steamcommunity.com/id/gate88
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I’m up to 51s myself, with a high of 55s. Gradually getting the pattern down (laser bounce scuttlers into stun, aerial blast and stomp braids, bait embalmer lowering or throw bomb into it, repeat)
what’s getting me now is spawners
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god I want to play this game 
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laser or dash is the efficient way for spawners – barring that you can hold down shoot and finish with a tap shotgun for a slightly faster kill.
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judge jump distance is a basic part of classic Tomb Raider, the jump system is block-based
it’s easy to calculate the blocks once you learned it
check it out and pratice it in game
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