Sewers are swamps
6 Likes
to be fair, the ecco games have a lot of tiresome parts where you have to do a lot of jumping out of the water
6 Likes
ecco the dolphin is so corrupted by the water level that it even made going into the air feel like a water level
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who are these people and why are they wrong
the city level in the back half of the game is a way more “I dunno, you figure it out” map
2 Likes
Danganronpa 2 ended up being very MGS2. I enjoyed it but don’t have much to say except for it makes good on the promise of more convoluted murders than the first game. Having unsolvable murders and cases where intent vs. enacting the will of another brought up were cool twists. I might watch the anime sequel. Having played the three main ones now, I think V3 is still my favourite due to the cast and the balls to pull the twist ending it does. I think I just like games that value pissing everybody off more over resolving a series-long mystery.
I played all of the 51 Worldwide Games Switch collection. Playing the games and finding what you enjoy (as a solo human) is basically figuring out what a rudimentary AI doesn’t just make completely trivial. The simplest games are usually the hardest because the AI has to be brute-forced rather than the game just played. As a result, most of the more complex strategy games are pretty chewy and I’m playing a few of them a lot more than I thought I would. Renegade (Othello/Reversi) is the shit.
Renegade is a really beautiful game but only when automated, this shit would be so tedious in real life (which is why I suspect I’ve never properly encountered it until now) but the same is true of a lot of the best games. Hanafuda and Mahjong remain some of the more engaging ones because these fall within a sweet spot where the aesthetic experience of play is balanced by the AI not completely stomping the player due to healthier blends of strategy and edge-case rules.
Renegade is super fucking hard once you get to the ‘amazing’ level AI and Wikipedia describes the experience well.
Reversi - Wikipedia Good Othello computer programs play very strongly against human opponents. This is mostly due to difficulties in human look-ahead peculiar to Othello: The interchangeability of the disks and therefore apparent strategic meaninglessness (as opposed to chess pieces for example) makes an evaluation of different moves much harder.
Really getting the Matrix code vision from trying control the corners, secure the middle 16 and cut diagonal lines of defense 5 turns ahead of a payoff. It’s really unlike anything else I’ve ever played and feel like it’d make a good JRPG sidegame. This is my GOTY so far - I am dead serious. Getting the CPU to do this is my biggest achievement in a game this year:
The biggest swindle of the whole collection is Gomoku, which I didn’t realise is just a version of Connect 5 using a Go board. The game has no playable version of Go which had me mad huffin’.
I hate the inconsistent flick strength in some of the games like Carrom and Billiards and the choice to force joycon use for Bowling and Darts feels like an own goal. Pretty much any highly chance-based game kinda sucks. Like why is War in this? Fuck that shit.
Easily worth the entire game’s price for Renegade.
13 Likes
there’s an arcade game you can play in mame called othello derby, where your performance in othello on the top half of the screen affects the results of a horse race that’s happening on the bottom
and on game boy color, there’s othello millenium, where you play against opponents in a story mode, and your performance affects the growth of a weird creature that accompanies you
14 Likes
Hell yes!
6 Likes
I once won an othello tournament at Hampden-Sydney college and was awarded $15 by the math club.
19 Likes
the wealth disparity at the roblox laundromat is staggering. i’m scraping by with 20k and my neighbor here has ~10 THOUSAND BILLION cash on hand, not to mention how much they’re holding in capital assets.
18 Likes
people owning extreme amounts of wealth and also having access to reincarnation is literally what’s going on in Cruelty Squad. These game look a lot alike too.
9 Likes
Luckily young Mikey had basically no morals and I just used a cheat to skip that level and went on to enjoy the rest of the game greatly
4 Likes
The key thing for me about Dangan ronpa as a whole project is
that the macro mystery isn’t a mystery at all but a philosophical question about dealing with the crushing despair of existence IMO
The biggest problem with 2 for me is that it actually confirms that everything Junko Said happened outside was true, when the original game’s point is it doesn’t matter because you don’t know what despairs will impact you ultimately.
That said they all end on a note of ambiguity about reality that casts doubt even on what you know.
For example: V3 show’s it’s hand in a very clever way because the initial revelation of the doomed earth is far more explicit than the fate of the outside world than any other game in the series, which means it couldn’t possibly be the ending.
V3 is a little long but god, it’s genius. That ending is perfect.
3 Likes
Yeah this is where the series gets a bit more interested in canon than theme. This is why I’m wary of the anime that comes after as I figure it’s just more world dressing than pushing the central idea forward.
1 Like
TIME TO TRY AND GET GARBAGES IN ALL MY FAVORITE ROOMS
7 Likes
It’s impressive that V3 manages to walk that back so much, and actually comment on fandom’s need for certainty.
2 Likes
Played a custom game of “just drive” on fortnite only to load into the map and hear a bunch of children screaming on the mic. The “return to lobby” button was covered by a “rate this map” dialog so I hit alt+f4. Worst experience ever
5 Likes
The anime sequel is complete garbage. It very explicitly shows what happens before and after 1 and 2. Every important event or character that was only hinted at is explicitly shown, and poorly shown. It manages to make everything it sets out to explain feel smaller than you imagined, or a retread. It’s not just that it’s not pushing the central idea forward, it’s actively destroying it because it’s absolutely not the same level of writing, plus not having the time to deal with dozens of main characters, plus the fact some things would have a completely different impact on age ratings in visuals rather than text so they’re replaced by something that could be aired.
Every returning character gets reduced to one note parodies of themselves, and new characters have ultimate skills that are necessarily directly mappable to “is an anime fighter” because there’s no room for nuance. Not to mention the “anyone can die” aspect doesn’t last long as you’ll quickly understand returning characters are not on equal footing with newcomers.
Like, a good chunk of the games revolves around a notion said to be so overpoweringly horrible it cannot be put into words, is it not writing 101 to understand then that actually showing it and explaining how it works is the stupidest move ever? Even without going into how the anime’s explanation of it is particularly lame?
TL;DR it’s trash that makes the games seem retrospectively lamer, don’t waste your time on it.
4 Likes
Beat the amazing level Renegade AI. On to Impossible.
4 Likes
What about bath house sequences in JRPGs and visual novels?
1 Like
as water levels?
what if an onsen was also a dungeon?
5 Likes