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Easy Come Easy Golf has proven that it can hit really, really hard. Every boss I’d encountered up to level 4, I had handily beaten before the 6th hole - getting 3 ahead ends the game in your favor, rather than making you play all 9 holes. None of the bosses or other golfers I’d encountered ever had even 1 up on me. Never!
But then the boss of the 5th level of the tournament…she’s a real tough nut. She beat me by hole 5 the first time around.
The problem is that it’s raining, and she’s strong in the rain, which means she hits at 100% strength whereas most of my characters hit at 95% strength. You wouldn’t think that matters, but that extra 5% is just that much more tiny math to do when hitting the ball. Also, she never, ever fucks up - every other boss I’ve fought hits at least one bad shot, but she kept landing pars and birdies. And she wrecked me!!
I tried again and she almost beat me, but I got it to a draw right at the 8th hole, then kept it at the 9th. We then went for 5 more holes, matching pars and birdies each time until finally she landed like, 19 feet from the pin and I only landed 5 feet from it. I got a birdie to her par and finally beat her.
So yeah, it’s weird, this game has mostly been a walk in the park until suddenly BAM, difficulty spike. Now it’s back to walking in the park? Weird game but easily my favorite golf game ever.
10 Likes
As the network features were reactivated, i started Dark Souls II again. I’ve never finished it before, i guess i got about 80% of the way thru the first time i played. It’s much harder than i remember! I was doing ok to start with but i’ve just died 10 times in the castle near the start. I seem to remember that after a while it just removes enemies which makes me feel like a loser. I guess i just need to start using every item i get, as i don’t seem to have enough skill to get by without at the moment.
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afterburner climax runs very nicely in rpcs3 now
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also whenever i have a look at how rpcs3 is doing, i can’t help but play demon’s souls for a bit
greatest of games…
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How does someone “get the files”
i picked up and played a session of hyper demon after not practicing much and i guess something clicked in my brain because i am reaching the boss way more consistently. five times, including a back-to-back!
a few times i should’ve probably died to push my pb higher. oops. oh well. here was my closest attempt.
this game is such a boundless well of learning and applying and skill growth!!!
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Sometimes the generated names for “regen” players in Football Manager (I’m in 2033 currently) are very very good:
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You know…Fortnite is great.
Really have a great time with it in a daily level more than Destiny or CoD or so.
Because you die it’s just next game. Instead of trying to get revenge you can just suck your teeth and say, “I’ll do better next time.”
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recently one of my friends wanted to get back into left 4 dead 2 and they only played on the 360 so they were asking me about modded campaigns. ive found in general that a lot of the most popular well reviewed campaigns are pretty poor, like most 4 or 5 star reviews on gamemaps are “pros: all cons: none” which is hardly helpful. there is this general trend of making overlong campaigns with a heavy reliance on scripted events, puzzles and little quests that people praise that I have never understood because it seems so counter to the design of the game
anyway…i decided to go back to DEAD BEFORE DAWN the zack snyder dawn of the dead remake campaign that everyone was really excited for in 2008/2009, because it was one of the first high effort pieces of custom content for the game. it was going to have custom voice acting and music, all that stuff. this shit was in PC gamer. i dont really know too much about the development other than it started off as a map for no more room in hell in 2005, the romero zombie “realistic” mod for hl2 that wouldnt come out until 2011. this is really important context because it explains some of the more obnoxious design choices that i hated at release, some of which were totally stripped out or downplayed in the l4d2 “directors cut” version. its funny that it came out a few days after the l4d2 demo because that game does almost all of DBD’s thrilling gameplay innovations like “uh oh! you set off an alarm!” and “collect item for an asshole” much better
originally i remembered the campaign starting off in a city that didnt really have much to do with anything before you got to a gas station near the lady from the movies house, now you just start on the roof of the gas station. everyone in the steam workshop comments says the custom audio and music doesnt work, most of the custom audio worked, and i didnt have some music pack installed which is my bad. but again this is the problem with this custom shit…these nutjobs make these levels that take like anywhere from 2 to 5 hours of your time and you cant even get an accurate impression of them. thus the responsibility falls on brave souls like myself
so the first thing you hear is some asshole yelling HELLO HELLO HEY HI HELLO IS ANYONE THERE? HELLO HELLO IM WAITING and then you answer and without fail every time i had to interact with a radio in this mod to start dialogue a horde attacked me. the zombies literally can bust through the wall you have to stand next to to listen to him talk so its a lost cause no matter what. i had issues hearing every single line of dialogue in this mod and the subtitles werent working so apparently nothing mission critical was communicated at any point. this is a far cry from the initial release where you would be locked into a room for minutes at a time listening to the security guard guy talk, he used to be CJ from the movie but now he’s a guy named hank unintelligible, horde combat noises and rambles incoherently about 80% less than before
here you can see willem dafoe heroically getting the shit kicked out of him while this asshole on the radio blabs at me about I BET IT WAS THEM TERRORISTS and THE MALL IS THE ONLY SAFE PLACE IN TOWN. ok man whatever you say i guess ill get moving
the developers demonstrate mastery of advanced techniques like environmental storytelling
anyway you go through this park
and past this fort
and you end up at THE MALL
the exterior of THE MALL is actually pretty well designed for a L4D map, theres multiple paths into the parking lot and even if you miss the short way (pictured, because i missed it) its pretty hard to miss the long way around. out here and the surrounding park are some of the few pieces of level geometry that remind me of the movie at all
a lot of custom campaigns are full of maps where you wander around aimlessly with no items in huge, dark spaces, typically ugly ass caves or forests with dense foliage, or intensely linear claustrophobic spaces where you also can’t see shit and there are also no items. Like for whatever reason a sign of quality for people on l4dmaps.com is when the mapper is like “fuck lighting, dude. i want you to feel like your down in the dirt digging for fuckin mushrooms” and i just dont get it
i took a picture of this hanging AC unit as a memento because in the original version of this mod the AC unit on the malls roof was part of an unskippable, involved puzzle with 4-5 randomized solutions where you had to find a part to fix the AC before the security guard would let you into the furniture store. this rooftop is also notable because it has a ~PERSONAL~ L4D map pet peeve of mine, which is when unopenable doors have 3d modeled knobs instead of sprites! youre fuckin with the language of the game here! I took a picture of the bastard to put on my wall of shame, especially because this is the only place in the entire campaign where this occurs. door_003.mdl won’t escape this stain on his record.
this is one of those side quests youre forced into doing thats extremely typical of no more room in hell. most maps in that mod are objective oriented where you do a bunch of fetch quests basically before youre allowed to escape. its supposed to be tense in a classic survival horror way because youre like collecting parts, that kind of thing and the zombies are all slow but you have one life and its easy to get infected. it doesnt work so good when you translate it into a much faster paced game where the objective is to go from point A to point B as fast as possible and the enemies are unavoidable. the major sequence of the third map (which i will talk about next) is a great example of this. anyway I guess the randomization now is “you have to do the puzzle, or not” so some dialogue I couldn’t hear as usual played and he just let me into the furniture store. well, OK, i guess my bitching seems a little rude now!
this is where i remember quitting for a LONG time when this came out. your informed by the annoying guard that if more than 50 people cross through the front doors a big celebration is gonna happen and everyone dies. in the original version of the mod failing this meant you lost the whole campaign. in the majority of the versions since, this mechanic was replaced by teleporting everyone to “the nightmare room” where you’re forced to begin again and repeat the section until you can keep the zombies out. up until this point you have to make it through multiple panic events and a good chunk of mall with a few throwables and no medkits. i guess somewhere along the line someone realized this rightfully sucks and now if you fail a tank spawns and then the bank doors that normally open when you complete the event just explode open. you can trigger this by running back and forth through the doors before any zombies spawn and its much faster lol. this idea clearly meant a lot to someone so it’s funny that you can just completely opt out now. i would have cut this setpiece entirely so i don’t know if any of these solutions to the problem are particularly good or elegant
so willem and i were chilling by the drink machines and the game was like, “Don’t shoot those ATMs. An alarm will go off” and none of the stores inside the mall have alarm systems, just these ATMs. its strange because they are kind of out of the way in the corner and youd have to make an effort to shoot them. i guess the storefronts would make more sense and they’re everywhere so it’d be more of a threat…? at least everything is signposted really conveniently (this is very rare in these mods!) even if it isnt particularly subtle
you never really get a good sense of the layout of the mall or where your ultimate destination is, which is something the valve campaigns do really well. the mall is a bizarre, sprawling labryinth, full of those shitty S shaped box warehouse rooms i hate in videogames and a whole filler level that feels like a procedurally generated SWAT 4 level made entirely of those grimy 70s carpeted offices you shoot russian mafia guys in
it originally got cut in an early patch for time because the campaign was too long, along with the entire huge food court area and its associated fetch quest, and keycard hunting bullshit, all this stuff. it’s weird that they added it back in because this campaign still takes 2x as long to play as a regular one.
the cuts are noticeable but mostly good, its a shooting gallery, it doesnt need to be fucking rocket science. stuff from removed puzzles is still there, there are a lot of inconsequential events inside the mall that dont really go anywhere, like this guy at the pawn shop who yells some shit at you i couldnt hear because we were getting attacked by a horde. i just walked around him and it was fine, so…
and there’s this sorta useful weird children’s ride that has an m2 browning stuffed into it and looks like this which wasnt in any of the old versions i played as a kid
or this mysterious hell room where i found a charger trapped, running around and endlessly beating on the glass, unable to reach us
fun fact: the guy who made two evil eyes and presumably contributed mapping work to this project, Matthew Lourdelet, also made Cold Stream, a campaign valve made official in an update. very few people like it (it really is the worst campaign in the default game) and valve had to remove stolen assets from it in another update. it was such a clusterfuck it put them off adding community campaigns to the game entirely until they did some update in 2020. now he is a level designer at UBISOFT MONTREAL lol
ok so this post is insanely long and im wrapping it up here, because it takes fucking 90 minutes to trudge your way around zacks mall and it took 90 minutes to write this and its gonna take 90 minutes to read this. finally the dickhead guard tells you theres going to be a helicopter on the roof and you need to get there. its whats called a gauntlet event where you basically just have to keep battling while nonstop hordes attack you. this is where the lack of items really fucks you over, and i dont understand why the designers had no problem giving you tier 2 weapons on map 1 eliminating any sense of progression with weaponry but couldnt give me some fucking medkits when i have to fight through a chunk of mall and all the way up a parking structure to get to the “helicopter.” you get up to this rooftop which has a fortified central structure in the middle, then pretty shortly the security guard busts through a door in the fortified bus from the movie and it actually caught me off guard because he immediately plowed into one of the AI bots and killed him outright. you basically have to know he’s going to drive 360 and then park directly in the middle of the previously inaccessible fort otherwise you just straight up die after all that struggle. apparently this is the new finale, there is some old version of it that got replaced before they ported it to l4d2 that theoretically explains why there is a helicopter mentioned. im sure this all is only mildly interesting at best. i dont really hate this mod anymore, its just kinda extremely mid with all the changes. it never made it into no more room in hell (which has been on steam for 11 years now!) in any form. no wonder its fallen into semi-obscurity as a small piece of source modding history
here i would like to acknowledge the tragic loss of my prized AI comrades rune armor guy, the RX-78 gundam, and willem dafoe. without them this would not have been possible 
23 Likes
i’ve been trying to work in more time to myself into my life schedule to relax and like, iunno play video games and read books. its mostly been the former so far. due to my comically miniscule, uncomfortable “office” space and the weakness of my laptop, i’ve not been including any emulated games or games on the computer atall as options for this relaxation, cuz trust me, there is nothing relaxing about the box within which i am typing right now. i’ve also not been including all games i own either, because neither of our ps4s are working and we don’t have space to get the CRT out of storage and i’m not going through the trouble of setting up any consoles. so its handhelds and the switch and thats it
due to a recent conversation with a friend i’d looked thru my small assortment of DS games, and rather than play one i liked (digimon world championship, which imo might be the best of the Expensive Tamogachi games) nor one that i think is genuinely good (lost magic is the only game i’ve ever felt kinda made the stylus thing seem interesting) i played Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker.
now, the dragon quest monsters series is pretty cute, imo. who doesnt love those toriyama freaks and friends? and for the first few hours or so, hell for the first maybe 10 hours i was enjoying myself mostly. your ‘rival’ is named Solitaire and part of the joke is that you never actually fight her despite how much it gets built up and i think thats funny (also it turns out her name is fucking Ginny Rummy so, uh, she wins the title of “Character Whose Name(s) Contains The Most Jokes About Cards”).
Joker seemingly got rid of monster personalities, as far as i can tell, which is a shame. also its … yknow when the monsters know a number of skills their AI really starts to shit the bed which is unfortunate! part of the charm to DQM imo is the fact that these monsters are battling on their own, and when they only know a few tricks they do it pretty well! but as the game goes on … ehhhhh i found myself having to manually enter in more and more commands for things to not go horribly, which i’m not crazy about for games where part of the interest is that doesn’t happen
also the games pacing just really shits the bed at the end, which i found woefully tedious. and then, i dont know if i just had some error somehow or missed something, but i ended up stuck on an island i couldnt leave after one of the final story events and had to just get party wiped to leave it? frustrating. i didn’t finish it, i got really close but it was just not worth it at the end. it was fun for a bit, though, and i’ll take that.
also playing it and thinking about my love for monster taming games did make me have some bonkers wild thoughts for a game i’ll never allow myself to even think about actually making so that was fun
anyway i also own the sequel, i’m definitely not gonna play it unless i hate myself enough in the future. but if i hated myself and wanted to scratch the 'mon itch i’d probably just play pokemon sword or somethin since i also havent gotten around to that yet, like a chump
3 Jokers out of 5
tonight i tried to play, after owning it for a while, the switch remake of Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. and … lord. man oh man. uh.
i really like the story of seasons games. the first one i picked up was a cheap copy of back to nature on the psx and i fell in love, real fast. inscrutable minigames at festivals? cute girls? charming non-reality? stressful farming? i loved it, and i still love it! and i’ve really enjoyed the rest of the series that i’ve poked around with (which mostly is looking backwards and also playing a decent bit of wonderful life in high school when i spent most of my time rotating between two different PS2s that both half-functioned wasting my days away with mostly NIS nonsense). ive never played rune factory and god help me i never will
anyway this one fucking sucks
now, my pettiest nitpick about this remake before i get cruel, just to get it out of the way. i don’t know if its true to the original friends of mineral town, i’ve never played specifically that one, but its bullshit that they let you walk on the tilled soil and crops. what gives, man! the pseudo-tactics of not being able to walk on the plants is where we get the classic weird U-shaped plots of crops! why would you get rid of that, that’s part of the game design! theres some other design things that are different from other mineral-town-set games (like back to nature) that again, maybe could be true to the GBA game this is a remake of, but which i think are expressly bad either way. but me talking about the game design of a farming dating rpg is absolutely more boring than-
OH MY GOD. THE PRESENTATION. CHRIST ALMIGHTY.
as soon as i heard that fucking clowns at the circus ass music i knew i was in trouble. and then i saw the disgusting, overclean UI. the bad font. lord. when i saw screenshots of this remake before, i thought “oh those toy-esque hyper-clean graphics might be kinda cute for story of seasons!”. i know that was overly optimistic, i know. but they really could, in theory! i mean theyre less cute than the graphics on again, say, back to nature or 64, but theyre still not bad. but … in motion? fuck me.
in motion every animation is too fast, too stiff, too lazily handled. or someones words start fast forwarding after you click the action button to proceed the dialogue, because they didnt think to apply a buffer on the holding to speed up thing, so that briefly lingering thumb means that the first about 3 or 4 words anyone says go super speed. everything about this games ‘polish’ just screams shitty mobile shovelware. it sucks! it sucks real hard! it makes me sad! it makes me want to just play back to nature again but you already heard what i said about both emulation AND getting out my consoles or the CRT, so i’m not gonna! unfortunately!
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is ConcernedApe’s Harvest Moon, brought to you by Zynga.
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is why i hate video games
i cannot abide by it, regardless of there being lesbian marriage. i’ll just go back to telling myself the dude with the backwards hat and overalls and big anime bangs coming out of the cap is a butch - and that’s honestly REALLY easy to tell myself. you’d be amazed at how effortless pointing at an affable dude character and calling him a he/him dyke is
anyway now i’m gonna try some fuckin uhhhh Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon, we’ll see how long i stick to that. i kinda hate holding these handhelds so i might give it up for playing something on the switch where at least i can use a controller. also i historically don’t really like mystery dungeon games regardless of the branding, they’re just not my specific flavor of dungeon crawl! they’re a lot like games i like a lot, but somethings just never clicked. giving it a shot, though (also cuz its not like i own that many games, so i may as well)
25 Likes
had to drop my car off at a bodyshop on Long Island yesterday (aka the only bodyshop i trust to not rip me off) so took the Playdate along for the LIRR trip back home.
i think Foddy’s Zipper is my favorite out of season 1. a lot of the playdate games seem somewhere between “a Gameboy game,” “a quick, simple, addictive game” and “…something else!(?)”
Zipper falls into the second category, which i think makes it perfect for a commute. each stage being a little movement puzzle, trying to figure out how to slash all the dudes before they slash you.
over time the Playdate has become a thing i felt slightly lukewarm on, but am happy to have now. it’s a slow burn.
Persona 5 Royal - into the second chapter now. am continuously surprised at how many new characters and how much new stuff is in this game. not convinced that it helps the pacing or the overall vision, though.
16 Likes
really don’t feel like doing any work today, it’s cold and miserable so i’m hanging out in diablo 2 with BigBeat the barbarian again. controller seems to work really well here?
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Controller support is worth the cost of admission imo, its great
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yeah, especially considering my keyboard has no f-keys
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resident evil shadow of rose says “you are lost” on the game over screen 
the third-person camera feels more claustrophobic than the first-person one in the vanilla game
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My first level (after 1-1) is completed in Demon’s Souls Remake and I’ve fulfilled a longtime ambition of doing 5-1 first. I really wanted to try 5-1 first because I usually tackle it late-game when most of the level is quite trivial and the boss especially so.
I forgot this level is really punishing throughout. You have to deal with a lot of tricky geometry and vertical vantage points. Then you progress through posion bugs, plague-giving rats in a tight space (in a room where like 9 are encountered for the first time!), then a precarious bridge with a giant plagueman at the end of it. It’s pretty relentless as well as having low-light levels and the stingiest vendor in the game (sells things for far higher prices than you could get just by defeating enemies). I like the old woman vendor though, a good example of Demon’s Souls taking a well-known system (shop) and turning it into a prank (you likely have no money here because everyone has so little, the message is ‘bring money to help us’).
Demon’s Souls has always been interesting to me as a game where the level design works with the enemies in an inseparable manner, they are almost always encountered in their proper context and it usually complicates things compared to if you had to fight them in a big flat arena. Specifically, the environments are very closed and narrow. Leechmonger is actually a really good example of the game’s environment being the real danger to keep eyes on, pressuring the player into uncertain and unsafe situations. The spiral crater down to the boss is generally unsafe and because the boss regenerates health when left alone too long, the player has to confront the horrible inevitability of needing to plan a safe route down and engage with an unclear battleground. The level tends to give the player pine resin and because of the general weakness to fire in the level, the implication is to use fire on the boss. However, trying to get pine resin applied at the right time ended up stressing me out more than anything. As always, the challenge is really to achieve maximum calm within the constraints of the level.
I learnt that (like many Souls bosses) the trick is to try and stay in the boss’ blindspot. However, the low light and ambiguous silhouette of Leechmonger makes it a challenge to even tell which is its front and back. After many failed pine resin attempts, careful shadowing of the back worked a treat and a horrible uphill battle culminates. I recall 5-2 pushing ambiguity of sight even further. In the original, 5-1 had a good enemy reveal when you first encounter the big plagueman since, seen from a distance across a narrow bridge, you just assume it’s an encounter like any of the dozens before it. But then you see it up close and it’s too late. In Remake, the two enemies are very clearly different which kinda ruins the level design conceit. At least it has a nice intimidating stomp sound.
Had to dip into each of the other worlds to get myself properly prepped and I think the fun of this random world order challenge so far has been trying to remember what tools I have available to me with the various limits in place. I’ve realized that I’m basically doing what speedrunning communities do with randomisers or novelty categories but it’s giving me a new perspective on a game I thought I’d mostly worn out despite also loving it.
Still finding the remake decisions a mixed bag. Environment and object sound effects are excellent, voice and music not so.
Remaining level order: 5-2, 1-2, 5-3, 2-1, 3-1, 1-3, 1-4, 4-1, 2-2, 4-2, 4-3, 2-3, 3-2, 3-3
14 Likes
playing the awful re3 remake and the original back to back was fun because i couldn’t imagine playing the original in the tight ass fov third person of the remake, you would get fucked easily. iirc re6 let you tweak the camera settings and it was so nice
3 Likes