Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

havent wanted to post in a long time for many reasons. also just haven’t been playing many games, i really think i’m losing my broader interests outside of specific things on my radar cause no one wants to do anything cool anymore lol. i beat mario 3d land a few weeks ago because i have a juiced 3ds and ppl like to fashion mario games as like harmless airy fun but genuinely i think it’s one of the most tedious and immiserating games i’ve ever played lol, i think 2d mario games are pointlessly exacting with too many fucking levels in the first place but putting 3d mario star gating mechanics in it too just makes it feel like getting my food service license but i have to do entire sections over if i get to the end without filling all the dots in. when i beat the game and 8 more worlds of bonus levels unlocked i got so mad i uninstalled and deleted my save just to make sure i would never try to play anymore. nintendo games like try to drown you in as much ephemeral pointless Content as possible and expect your brain to form something coherent out of it like, eventually, somewhere, even most of the 3d zeldas feel like this lol

i also spent the last month of summer playing through last of us 2 which i was fully expecting to be bored by and only really bought cause i wanted to see a girl who looks like a possum strangle people till their blood vessels pop in infinity resolution ultra graphics for extremely normal reasons and it turns out. i actually loved it and its probably the only really excellent first party sony game since ps2 lmao. i always thought the indie and aaa industries had neurotically paralyzed themselves out of ever making evil video games ever again but it’s finally here. i don’t really give a fuck what it has to Say about violence (searching for the didactic message will always disappoint you even if its there cuz) so much as i just got really vividly captivated by how much it’s fiction revolves around exchanges of deepseated cruelty, i didn’t get the impression there was supposed to be a message i was explicitly taking so much as a tone to digest and the tone was perfect, that’s as much as i really wanna wade into as far as it’s strengths lol (although it’s really funny ppl don’t have as much of this What Is It Supposed To Be Saying About X neurosis when it comes to like Breaking Bad or something, like trying to divine it’s Moral Perspective on being epic crime guy would start a 200 year 4chan level argument where nothing interesting would be said but it’s literal strength is in it’s disinterest with that didactic question and it’s commitment to accepting Epic Drug Guys as part of the fabric of it’s dna and allowing it to play out without scrupulous judgement yadda yadda yadda bing bang bong). someone told me there was a big Conversation about it a couple months ago and i really didn’t want to wade in cause the last time i spent several hours typing out the demonstrable power of a game people are really committed to hating’s structural strengths and deliberate arrangement people spent about ten minutes reading it and kinda tried to shut it down by looping the same points i felt like i had already defanged while not really digesting literally anything i said into their “”“counterpoint”“” and that gave me a really grim impression of the faith and (in)curiosity some people argue in lol, i hate it when people turn into a brick wall because you brought up an idea incompatible with a highly curated social consensus of aesthetic canon, it’s literally somewhere between twitter and letterboxd disease.

anyway The Adventures Of Meat Mountain And Caillou gets three thumbs up, i never thought i would like a naughty dog game cause literally everything else they’ve made is dogwater, i keep recommending it to every lesbian i know who wants to watch girls give each other huge dental bills

oh also i played this. a liiiiitle unintuitive and kinda techdemo-y in terms of spatial breadth (there’s like 10 screens total, all very pretty) but i like how focused in it is and its fun that kinda tries to gamecube up basic point and click mechanics even if it isn’t entirely succesful at utilizing that format to smooth out the experience (it is very easy to get stuck almost immediately until you figure out how combining items works and its a double button input so you might press all the buttons and assume you can’t lol, unfortunate consequence of Wordless Game)

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got up to bucket jump in getting over it

considered riding the snake, did not

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got my brain sucked off in the Upper Cathedral Ward. god damnit I already hated those tentacle head nerds but now it’s personal. one got me with a Hold Person spell at the top of a ladder (so, out of sight), dropped me, sucked brain, dead.

I just finished getting Arcane up to 25 so I can see what Tiny Tonitrus does. pretty good at electrocuting giant babies

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Up to 196s in Hyper Demon. Have cleaned up my early game a lot. Once I can consistently kill the worm (easiest method: stand directly under it on the first pass, fire upwards; only takes damage on segment underbellies) I’m sure I’ll start pushing higher scores regularly.

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I finished Soul Hackers on 3DS recently and decided to get a few other JRPGs from the store, including SMT4, Strange Journey and Defenders of Oasis. That last one is a game I remember being desperate to play when I was a kid after I’d just gotten into RPGs and read about it in Sega Power. Somehow I never got around to playing it even after I’d discovered emulation.

Anyway, it’s pretty much Arabian Dragon Quest. It’s got a few interesting wrinkles in the formula like the Genie character who needs items to boost stats instead of XP, but otherwise you basically know what you’re getting. It’s reasonably short too, maybe only around 10 hours or so. The problem is how it tries to extend that length by simply having you go back and forth through the same dungeons multiple times.

The RNG is also completely out of whack. The random encounter rate is off the rails, almost every time I started the game up, I’d be in a battle before I’d even moved one pixel. Once I escaped from a battle only for another battle to start before the screen transition had even finished. Half the monsters in the game cause poison, and it may as well be a 100% chance. The turn order is kinda weird too, it seems like it’s completely random and the speed stat just determines how frequently a character is likely to get a move. This means sometimes you get characters moving multiple times in a row, or it’ll take like 10 turns for them to get a shot in.

The game’s got some charm to it, but I think I was pretty exhausted by the end of it. I’m a bit burned out on grindy JRPGs for the time being so the other SMTs will probably have to be put on the backburner for now. Time for some mindless action stuff instead

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it was one of the first games i got from the 3ds store for the exact same reason lol

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the balenciaga skins that were in the store a few days ago make me think this could really happen

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there should be fortnite for adults, where its the same but you have collabs with fargo or something

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imo

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you say that, but i can totally imagine a breaking bad fortnite collab. kids love breaking bad

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They already had a Houseparty collab what more could you want??

wait no that’s a different house party

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actually looking at this list of collabs i think fortnite might already contain fortnite for adults

NFL Cosmetic Items
John Wick
Punk’d
Tenet
Ghostbusters
Kratos
TRON: Legacy
Ellen Ripley and Xenomorph
NBA
Harry Kane and Marco Reus
Ferrari
Rick Grimes
Frankenstein’s Bride
Segway Tour
Eminem Icon Radio Takeover

I just think maybe adults are not exactly who we’re thinking of when we say “adults”

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i need fortnite x pj harvey, fortnite x don delillo, etc

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kids these days are absolutely going apeshit for the segway, and simply can’t get enough of contemporary popular musicians like “Eminem”

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the airborne toxic event is coming to fortnite

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this has been my experience with zoomers

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eminem is still super popular, huh. segways though???

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well more scooters in general

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it makes my stomach curdle reading this list

based on evil levels alone I think I’m the one playing fortnite for adults

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i get to be a xenomorph with a pink shotgun and butterfly wings, so i think i’m complicit in the evil

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