I’ll admit it took me way too long to figure out how the powerups etc actually worked, the visual indicators are a little easy to miss/misinterpret.
At least it gave me a good “aha” moment.
3 Likes
It’s certainly neither indie nor minimalist but a feeling of “parsimonious and mean” is also why I stopped playing Returnal!
The parsimonious style of game balance is always less inspiring than the many-equally-good-ways-to-feel-overpowered style. But there are still many first-rate non-roguelikes with the former philosophy, for instance Hollow Knight (a game in which I always complain about this, but ultimately still enjoy overall). Whereas for roguelikes, every successful one does some version of the latter.
5 Likes
Too late! Played it without dash 'cause I’d turned on “Button Dash” and didn’t realize that moved it to R2. Fewer problems than in the SNES version though. ^ _^
Last night I finally melted down and gave up on The Manhattan Project and Hyperstone Heist, though. ; D But Fall of the Foot Clan was a nice palette cleanser.
After much waffling, replaced Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug with Arcade Archives: Dig Dug (PS4)–not blurry, that one! High scores are way lower, though; I got to a pathetic stage 3 or something in Hi Score mode and that got me to 67th or something ridiculously high on the leaderboard. Meanwhile the high score in the blurry one is max 9999990 or whatever.
And I found I can play Ms. Pac-Man (Arcade Game Series ver–Arcade Archives probably not gonna happen at this point with Namco in full erase the Ms. from history mode) without the power pellet blinking bothering my dumb eyeballs–unlike regular Pac-Man, I think 'cause the rest of the screen is darker in that one so the contrast is higher. Anyway yay Ms. Pac-Man. And yeah it’s waaaaay harder than that “reverse engineered” web version with the non-blinking power pellets I found the other day.
(Coupled with silly video research: the power pellets in PS4 Arcade Game Series: Ms. Pac-Man toggle between on or off every 10 frames; in the Namco Museum 3 version on PS1, it’s a faster blink toggle: every 8 frames. = P)
On PS3, found Golden Axe (arcade port–confusing 'cause they used Genesis box art for the PS Store art!), and dug up the de-listed X-Men. Both blurry early Backbone ports, seem to play well though.
2 Likes
finished earthbound
also finished Spy Fox in ‘Dry Cereal’… ipad port… game holds up really well… children’s games from the 90s truly ‘goated’
what evocative art for a kids game
11 Likes
I had these as a kid and thought they were improbably good by luck of the draw but it’s Ron Gilbert and co. post-Lucasarts
The ports are all running on ScummVM, it’s great
2 Likes
Demon Pit is Devil Daggers but with different weapon types, and an arena that morphs in between waves, introducing hazards and disrupting your sightlines. One interesting wrinkle are a number of glyphs around the arena which you can do a light-dash to in order to escape danger. This is okay I guess but I have little desire to spend much time with it.
2 Likes
Because I just now thought of the wording I was trying to convey earlier: Perfect Dark’s level design is a fever dream of reality. A long strand of office hallways leading to near identical rooms. None of it makes logical sense and in any other game if would either be an office building or a twisting tube. Here you have no idea what door is actually going to have the main way forward. It might require going through 3 door ways that also exist 2 other times to dead ends. Baffling.
That Guardians of the Galaxy game is pretty good. Not going to have time to finish before the end of My xbox game pass. Turns out if I play on the cloud on my laptop I can let it do hdmi out for 2 and a half hours. That’s my game playing time! Perfect.
It being the Shadows of Tom Braider people makes sense since it is way more emotionally sensitive than you expect it to be. That tradeshow gameplay demo came off as try hard to me, but the game itself is great. I am inpressed with how much incidental dialog they made. So much! And it looks big and strange constantly.
I also recognize half the animations from Tomb Raider. Of course.
And it has dialog choices (you can also choose to say nothing!) and they are compelling choices. There is an argument between a mother and a daughter and you can choose to take sides, or tell a joke, or stand there awkwardly (you are a prisoner). The writing is smarter than it needs to be. It’s good.
5 Likes
I 100%'d what the golf! today
it’s the classic “game that’s just humorous enough to keep me going until the end” (see also : chroma squad) meets my natural completionism
the extra challenges in the main game can get tiresome and outlast their gags but the second half of the game is paced better than the first I think. they get a lot of mileage out of the “you think you’re hitting one thing but actually you’re launching something else” gag, I’m impressed it stayed consistently surprising throughout
5 Likes
I can buy this for 1, 4, and 5, and can easily imagine why someone might think this for 2.
But there is no world in which the Game Boy MM3 is better than the NES MM3.
If you wish to refute me, you must clear Dust Man’s stage in a single credit.
You have 24 hours.
2 Likes
NES 3 has Gameplay but GB 3 has Vibe and I think we all know what’s most important here.
2 Likes
Starglider 2
It is absolutely absurd that a game like this existed in 1988
A space sim with a whole solar system to explore, complete with planets that you can enter the atmosphere of, animated 3d models all over the place, running on an amiga of all things. Amigas couldn’t even run Doom until 1998 (and even then, badly)
Anyway, this is a space dolphin. The plot of the game has something to do with collecting a bunch of parts to build a neutron bomb so that you can destroy a moon that is secretly a killer space station.
It’s designed around mouse control (another thing that I found shocking for a game of this era!) and it actually feels better than I expected to control. The planetary surface segments feel a lot like 1995’s Terminal Velocity while space travel feels like a stripped down Elite. It’s fascinating.
Also, I spent like 3 hours tweaking the shaders I used to approximate the commodore 1084s, but I wanted it subtle enough that you only really notice if you zoom in (because that monitor produced an extremely sharp image as is, and I don’t like emulated scanlines so I made them as small as possible)
21 Likes
Starting to get to respectable high scores on Demon’s Tilt. My first ball lasted for 10 minutes somehow, I just had that flipper feel. And that’s with spending long enough in the bottom part to lap the minibosses and complete HERMIT for the first time
5 minutes into this killer run, the game suddenly froze for 10 seconds in this spot, with 1 second of audio looping and everything. I thought it was a permanent hang and took a disappointed screenshot. Then it unexpectedly started again and I had the presence of mind not to die
17 Likes
Demon’s Tilt is so good!
6 Likes
been playing Kirby and the Amazing Mirror and it’s just not bringing me joy. It feels big enough with rooms kind of loosely connected enough that I need a map to get a grip on the levels as they exist in space, but the in game map feels nearly useless. Mostly it feels like it just keeps going on an on and on. Maybe I’m missing sommething.
5 Likes
radirgy really has that 00s akihabara, insercredit feel to it. makes me wanna watch di gi charat or to heart or something
7 Likes
I played this back when it came out. It’s strangely cold and inaccessible for a Kirby game. It’s an interesting dynamic – Just one enormous, contiguous Kirby level, pleasant and easy as you like, but nearly impossible to navigate intentionally and full of increasingly obscure secret paths you need to divine in order to progress. This game’s main path is more confusing to navigate than any Metroid game! It’s bizarre, really not what you expect from that series. That endless labyrinth with its deep indifference toward the player gives the game an almost “icebergvania” feel that blew me away in 2004. A true anomaly, a “lonely game” Kirby.
14 Likes
Amazing Mirror’s the only Kirby game I’ve ever gotten on with as its breath of space does a good job of matching kirby’s movement. I haven’t played it in like a decade but could pick it up again and float around and use cool powers in an unhostile environment for a while.
3 Likes
i am definitely a longtime defender of amazing mirror, think its great
i’ve actually been replaying superstar recently and am really loving playing great cave offensive again particularly, which i’m realizing in many ways amazing mirror is sort of a spiritual expansion on? like, okay we made a kirby game within a kirby game about exploring these long continuous levels with different sets of challenges and puzzles, now what if there was just a full kirby game exploring that idea that was built out more fully
also amazing mirror letting you unlock different kirby colors is very important, obviously
6 Likes
I think actually playing the Guardians of the Galaxy game may be against my religion but I do respect its attention to detail, and by that I mean it’s really funny how there’s a box of tissues within arm’s reach of Teen Star Lord’s bed.
12 Likes
I thought a really good detail is you also just have some of your mom’s books in there.
4 Likes