An hour of Anki every night is how I learned Japanese, so I’m a big believer in SRS. I found an SRS site for Smash Ultimate tech the other night and I wish every fighting game had this:
6 Likes
I was just thinking maybe an SRS could’ve similarly helped me break out of the Strive plateau I started to creep up against!
I wonder if speedrunning practice mods could benefit from it too. One of the most frustrating dynamics in speedrunning is how “real runs” practice the beginning of the game much more than the end.
1 Like
Endoparasitic has me really impressed during the short amount of time I’ve had with it. It’s a survival horror game where you play as an arm attached to a torso, which you control using just the mouse by clicking to drag yourself around. You are some arrogant chief scientist in a mars lab that has just had a huge contamination event lead to the zombification of every living creature (scientists and lab animals) and to your infection by the very parasite your oh-so-important research is about. You crawl around the corridors of this Martian lab, bleeding from the mouth as the parasite inches closer to your brain, and only these weak vaccine syringes can keep you alive so you have to keep moving and searching. There are enemies around every corner however and you need to kill them before they kill you.
You have a gun you can reach for on your hip, forcing you to be come stationary since you only have one arm to move around with. The entirely mouse-based control scheme for this game is interesting in this respect too, because by scrolling up on the mouse wheel the parasite and inventory menu appears (without pausing the game) and it’s here that you drag spent shells out of the cylinder of your revolver and also drag new ones in to replace them. You also have to grab the gun off your hip to even fire the thing.
It’s very tactile and sweaty and serves the survival horror tension quite well. I think I recommend it. One of the dev’s previous games called Wrought Flesh also looks really cool. And I haven’t watched it yet, but it’s interesting to me that one of the options on the main menu is called “Making Of” which links to a youtube playlist about the brief development of this game.
15 Likes
Finished the vacation with Harry! Stopped by mcdonalds and tried to get a bud.
Definitely realized I got the bad ending when everyone around me started dying and/or tried to kill me. Good thing I hoard items because cybil fucked me up. Got disoriented in nowhere esp with my stockpile (read: 6 health drinks instead of 9) of items getting depleted. I was getting spooked and wasted a lot of bullets. Like, there was this ghost of a kid running down a hallway and I blasted him with my shotgun immediately. Some of the puzzles got me real frustrated esp when it’s just like, “o i didn’t see those jelly beans, woops”. but overall good fun, great time! 0/10 vacation (esp after having to shoot my kid and uh ended up i was dead the whole time?) poor harry
video games sure are feeling fun again. thinking about pickin up scorn next
22 Likes
What game is this?
1 Like
Silent Hill!
6 Likes
Been picking away at the demo for Youropa on Switch. How to explain it: you solve “puzzles” by slowly waddling around Mario Galaxy-style curved edges on Umihara Kawase-looking urban waste levels suspended above an SMT Nocturne conceptionesque Paris (there’s some sort of graffiti side activity too, which I’ve chosen to ignore). There’s not much here to hook me, but it’s pretty chill. The demo is large enough for me to not bother buying the full game.
I’ve also been playing Voxelgram, a Picross 3D-like. Gamepad controls took some getting used to, and the melancholic music is a bit much, but this game’s pretty alright. Solved puzzles get added to themed, little voxel dioramas. Very cute. I like this more than the 3DS Picross 3D.
And for this, the spookiest of months, I’ve been playing through chapter 2 of Black Book. I put this game down in January and forgot how much I like it. Very cool, somewhat academic/literary, demonic/folkloric rural 19th century Russian adventure that mixes visual novel, point and click adventure, and card-based RPG battles. Great atmosphere and mood. Some rough edges. The battle system’s really hooked me. Reminds a bit of Shiren the Wanderer, where you can exploit your set of tools to become greater than the sum of its parts and survive seemingly impossible situations.
9 Likes
that makes a lotta sense. this dudes basically one of the few folks ive found who make videos about game dev who i don’t think is a complete hack fraud. wrought flesh is defs worth a check out the pitch of “an extremely fast paced shooter where your inventory is your guts” has any appeal
(theyve done a bunch of little game jam type videos with other devs around the notion of 4 devs 1 asset pack a la 4 producers 1 sample a la 5 photographers 1 model, which are pretty cute.)
2 Likes
Parasite Eve (PSX) - i wanted to write a lot about this one over two weeks, but i didn’t like how the post was coming out and then i just never did. anyway, i’m playing this game for what is actually “the first time.” i rented it when it came out originally, but at the time, my memory card was full, so i never got too far into it. it seemed cool, but back in those days, i wasn’t buying my own games and i guess it didn’t appeal enough to me to warrant asking for it as a gift as my one game of the season or whatever. but yeah, playing on the MiSTer, i really enjoy it - it feels like it belongs in my new favorite genre: “jrpgs you can beat in under 30 hours,” even though it’s more like an action game with ATB on top of it. i finally just reached a point in the game where i feel like the “survival” part of “survival horror” is starting to come into play, whereas in the first 3 chapters/days, i never felt a crunch when it came to ammo. overall just a fun PSX game - i have a lot of thoughts about it being set in NYC, especially because i know some Squaresoft folks were hanging around here back then (i went to go see them talk at an Amano exhibit!), and i like thinking about how these visits impacted the game’s design.
Persona 5 Royal (XSX) - on the complete opposite end of the “jrpgs that can be beaten in under 30 hours,” there is this game. i completed and really enjoyed the original Persona 5 when it came out - i know in these parts it is mostly-universally reviled, but idk what to say - i like these characters and i like the game’s style and flow; however, my fiancée is the one playing it, this time. i’m kind of excited because this is the first game like this that she’s played, and the game is kind enough to offer a “Safe” mode. realistically, i think maybe Easy would have been better, because you do so much damage in Safe mode that it makes obtaining Personas that much harder, but now we’re sort of deep into Chapter 1, and she’s having fun, so i’m just gonna roll with it. right now i’m in charge of navigating dungeons, at least until she improves her own skills at both walking in 3D space while simultaneously rotating a camera with a separate analog stick. so far i’m mostly surprised at how much stuff they’ve added to the game from the original. why do they do this? it’s kind of annoying, really.
20 Likes
I heard that Persona 5 had a super homophobic scene everyone hated, and for Royal they went back and changed it… but supposedly it’s only like 3% less homophobic now. Bummer!
I only ever played up through the first dungeon of 5 and I kind of liked the game’s style, but I didn’t want to commit. Royal is on game pass, so maybe I’ll mess around with it a little more. But FFXIV takes precedence! And not just because I’m making a tv show episode about it.
10 Likes
yeah obv i would not begrudge people for avoiding persona team games due to their inability to grasp queer identities past the year 1982
14 Likes
swapping implied sexual assault for panicking over drag really tells you where the writing’s at
15 Likes
Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is exactly what is says it is and that is what i wanted it to be. My first monster was a Miclas, who is a capsule monster that Ultraseven summons to fight for him, which is more than I could have asked for. He got his ass handed to him by Ultraman Zero when he flipped out on the ranch once, so that was good, but also implies we are not operating on the Ultraseven timeline*, but I can’t imagine this game is actually trying to fit into the main timeline anyhow.
So I named my Miclas Nicky-slug and he is doing alright. I mean, he is getting his ass kicked by trying to break out of c-rank right now, but ya know how it is. Can’t wait to try to cross breed him with some other kaiju and get a horrible monstrosity. There is one monster that can just cover characters in like 20 eyeballs, so maybe that is next.
*: Ultraseven is weird because it is the second season of Ultraman, but was intended to be its own separate show. Seasons 3 and onward retcon it into the main timeline, but then they also made a few series that are direct sequels to Ultraseven, and imply that none of the other Ultramen exist. Seven as a character is interesting because all of the other Ultras on Earth are humans that bonded with a Light Warrior, while Seven is just a giant alien who can disguise himself as a human named Dan Moroboshi, who is not great at acting like a human. It rules.
13 Likes
FYI, shin ultraman is circulating online now
6 Likes
Finished up Dead Space: Extraction and it is odd, there were a few chapters where I felt it settled into a groove and mostly worked as intended, but I don’t think it worked enough or at least long enough to really be successful?
It really goes all in on being a cinematic wiimote light gun game, but at 4+ hours in length it couldn’t just be a lightgun game so they added some features to make it deeper but they didn’t really vary the encounter design enough to go along with it. At times I again got into a groove where I disable rushing enemies with a slicing weapon that takes out their legs at a relatively safe distance so that I then switched to the default rivet gun (infinite ammo) to finish them off and it worked as a dance of varying attacks to maximize ammo and such; these moments were fine. I also like the active reload system where if you hit reload a second time as the reload gauge fills (think kinda like most golf games) the weapon is reloaded immediately, makes that process a bit more active. There’s also stuff like turning and holding the wiimote 90 degrees to use alternate fire (kinda a pain), waving the nunchuck to melee enemies that get too close (is fine), pressing a button to freeze things (literally only did so when explicitly told to) and pressing another button to pull things towards you to either throw at other things or pick up ammo/different weapons (spammed during every talking scene, might have been counterproductive). There is also the sections where you have to shake the wiimote frequently to light something up so that you could see anything for long stretches of time, my sore arm says fuck you for that.
Anyways all that shows that they did try to figure out how to make a meatier light gun game, but it is just so undercut by so many encounters running for so long and so many of them feeling exactly the same. Maybe it has as much encounter variety as most other light gun games, but those generally last maybe 20% as long and the stretching things out is very noticeable. Add in that everything looks so muddy and similar and it just sorta becomes a slog too frequently. That is when you can actually see things, so often I was shooting at what I guessed was a moving shadow in the midst of a larger one, sure part of horror is “there are enemies out there and you can’t quite make them out” but some of them were the type that stay at a distance and occasionally threw a projectile at me, I basically was stuck firing randomly and hoping I hit something eventually.
Oh yeah, there’s a lot of story. I have not played Dead Space so I have no idea how much this is tied into it (I would guess based on the ending it is likely a prequel to either the first or second game). It is so very generic and not even particularly well told. As an example the game starts with you playing as the seeming protagonist when everything goes to hell and having to fight off your former coworkers who have transformed into monsters. The chapter ends with you being gunned down by security forces as you seemingly went insane and started killing innocents. You then play as the person who shot said guy, end up escorting said guy’s girlfriend most of the game, mention to others how you haven’t even broke the news to her yet… and the game ends without it ever coming up. Just a very loosely told tale.
I want to give it some credit as they clearly tried, and there are some neat mechanical ideas in there. Maybe if I played co-op it would have went better (BTW no way a non-gamer could handle this), and as always I have a soft spot for games that try something a bit different, but it just didn’t feel like this particular mix worked out as intended.
9 Likes
sounds like I’ve totally forgot how that game actually plays
2 Likes
oh dammit now i am gonna have to figure out how to get that.
1 Like
Oh my god i never thought of it like this but you’re right
7 Likes
Golf of War puts so many obstacles on the green smh
6 Likes