Participated in two Rivals of Aether tournaments yesterday (one workshop one not) and shockingly did not end up 0-2 in both. Managed to finish in top 4 in the non-workshop bracket which is really good for me, especially considering two of Puerto Rico’s best PM players wound up in there
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I had the same shock about unreal for some reason. I would loooove to see the level geometry of these maps. Some of them are so huge and interwoven. There is one later on where you climb very very high up (without loading) and then just slide all the way down. The whole time I was sliding (it’s a long segment of you just sliding) I just kept wondering how much stuff I’m passing that I had to climb to reach that point. Very fricken cool if you ask me.
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Played about two hours of The Big Con and having a good ass time with it. Good soundtrack, fun writing, and a good little gameplay loop.
Can be had for a significant discount in a Fanatical bundle ATM but really it deserves your twenty bucks.
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Final Fight: Double Impact (PS3)
Accidentally found myself in a pick-up online game of Final Fight last night! Jeepers I think maybe the last beat-em-up I played online prior to this was a random six-player X-Men rampage shortly after that game released (also on PS3, HM) in 2010. = P
Well see FF:DI drops you right into this rotating 3D scene where the game’s menu is like printed on the wall of the ruins of a building around an arcade cabinet, and I don’t know if it was the default to auto-jump into an online game but in any case they made it so you probably aren’t more than like two or three flaily button presses way from it–and the menu was printed so small and non-obviously on the heavily textured wall that I didn’t see it, so I flailed at the buttons, thinking the game was stuck or something; next thing I know, I’m loading into a game. ; )
Actually ran pretty well; some kind of delay-based networking but only chugged a bit once or twice near the start. I stuck around for a stage or so so as not to walk out on the other player immediately. Seems like maybe you can get some more hits in on the first boss if there are multiple of you to be able to jump on him when he tries to move to other areas of the screen–I’d forgotten about that sort of thing.
So accidental Final Fight was kind of fun. ^ _^ And someone had just happened to have been playing an open session on PS3 in 2022 just as I’d dredged FF:DI out of the depths of my PS3’s download list after all these years and accidentally bashed on the menu buttons! = oo
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Ridge Racer 7 Demo (PS3)
Re-downloaded the ol’ demo yesterday (the full game on PS3 outside of Europe was disc-only, I think, and I’d only ever played someone else’s copy) and man, they SO wanted to be OutRun 2–but instead of feeling like you’re ripping through a hugely powerful drift, it feels more like you’re wibbly-wobbly noodling your way along a slippy road, just turning your car’s nose wherever you like. It’s weird. I wrote in 2006 that I liked the control? Heck.
StarDrone (PS3)
In a top-down space sorta maze, you launch your little drone and have to hold a button to energy-tether yourself to poles to swing your way along a rather loosely constructed and hard to read course. Similar to Star Trigon for the base mechanics but the hard mechanical setting lacks charm, actions lack feedback, and it isn’t easy to tell where you’re going; I couldn’t stick around after having flung myself out of the first few short little A-to-B training tracks few times.
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The closed beta for darktide ends tonight. I was really impressed by the presentation and stuff, though not totally sold on the gunplay and I dislike the idea of bonus objectives being randomized and built into missions instead of the way Vermintide 2 handled tomes and grimoires. But the basic formula is still fun and I have faith in Fatshark to support the game and just make it better like they did with Vermintide 2. I’ll pick up Darktide when it comes out!
@Tegiminis did you develop much of an opinion in your time with the beta?
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yeah: it’s vermintide 2 alright
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Ridge racer 7 is amazing once you get a feel for it. Probably my favourite car game. Sure it feels weird as hell when you fuck up the drift but i like how you can feel the mechanisms at play, like the programming is revealed by being stretched out of place.
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Interesting. The only RR I’ve played at all is 4, which I did rather like the feel of–a lot more than Outrun 2, for that matter.
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Still wounded that the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Collection doesn’t include the arrange OST
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Nah they were never gonna stick ASTs in BeuB. Played through FF in Double Impact last night, and the AST was pretty much the one part of it I liked. Other than that I think I hate Final Fight now, yeesh. Let’s just throw more enemies and barrels at you until they kill performance, your inputs get swallowed, and you go down–until you burn your own health spamming your special move, so you won’t blame us for swallowing all your quarters. Or, lets have a boss or tough who just hits you with ~single-frame attacks. 'Cause that’s fun! Anyway now I know some other ‘beat em ups’ that don’t rely on that stuff quite so much.
Heck I think FF:DI may be the only collection I’ve bought since the PS2 that actually did have an AST in it. Or, well, they just call it a “remix.” I don’t know terms. It was weird but it grew on me.
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I played the Darktide beta and, idk, it seems worse than Vermintide. I’m not sure what it is about the gameplay loop that’s so different. I think the levels are a bit narrower and the enemies move a bit faster? I’ll play it anyways so whatever I guess
I do like that the soundtrack is so fucking weird. Very refreshing after a million 40k games doing the orchestra + choir thing to have a 40k game that’s like… idk, avant-garde industrial? I played 80+ hours of Vermintide 2 and I could not tell you a single thing about the soundtrack.
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god’s most perfect game, you can tell because only He could bless us with The Hit Squad
possibly only bested by Knights of the Round, which is probably the ur modern action game in 1991 form
just wait until you see or read about the FF score strat, where you perform item alchemy to always get point drops
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My favorite Capcom beat em up is Captain Commando, particularly the Japanese PS1 version with the funk soundtrack:
Huh, again with the ASTs.
Say I’d forgotten I actually do like KotT. Gonna have to get in another round of that, it’s been a while.
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i think the composer for like Hitman Blood Money did the score for this game, and yeah, it is surprising! But I also feel like there are just some weird things about how the game flows. It seems minor, but I think the fact that these missions don’t end with desperate extractions like every single Vermintide 2 map does really changes things. It’s strange that you can just like kill a boss and the game just triggers an ending cutscene. It isn’t very exciting imo.
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elaborate on this please
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beat them ups are already very “hey memorize the game and strats”
the two things KotR adds to the Capcom formula - strong attacks and blocks/parries - feed into this
when you do a successful block, bam, you just have oodles of i-frames to do whatever you want
when you correctly read or react to an enemy pattern, a strong attack does tons of damage and possibly a knockdown
look at modern character action games: a heavy focus getting maximum value on confirms and punishes while rewarding proper use of defensive options
it still plays like a Capcom game but running up to a boss to bait an attack and throwing out a block is just as important today as it was 30 years ago, being nigh identical to Raiden parrying or Bayo getting witch time or the sad robots in Punishing Grey Raven doing full parry runs on bosses
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I played first new Xcom a few years ago.
Which one should I play now: Xcom 2 (maybe War of the Chosen) or Phoenix Point?
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XCOM 2 War of the Chosen is fantastic fun. XCOM 2 without WotC is not as much fun. Can’t comment on Phoenix Point, personally.
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