Sad to hear; that version of Daytona was the best.
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Aw man. Well, I did get in an MP session. … It was weird. ; )
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Its missing extra tracks and etc but I was always sad that the 360 port of outrun 2 got delisted due to rights, never had HD bloom looked better than in that game
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doing the best i can at quarantining myself in a 2BR railroad apartment, which means i’m playing stuff on my laptop in the bedroom:
Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit - this game is very cool, but i don’t remember enough about Triple Trouble anymore to compare the two (although some key moments, like the end of Stage 2, for example, triggered some memories), but it feels really fun to play. i think my only critique is that the levels honestly feel too long for Sonic levels. maybe if i had played more Sonic fangames, i’d be used to their vernacular, but overall, i find myself wondering when each stage is going to end.
Heainkyo Alien 3671 - it’s interesting that there have been two remakes/sequels/upgrades(?) of this game within a fairly short span of time, but what is more interesting is how they both reinterpret the original. i’d say that this one feels a lot closer to what Pac-Man: CE is going for, in terms of maximizing the stuff on the screen and the amount of points you’re accumulating. i’m not sure if i prefer this or the Famicom reimagining, yet, but this one feels more spiritually close to the game made by Tokyo University.
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No refund, Sony says the DS4 is not officially supported on the PS3 and the game is working fine. : P
Oh yeah also when the actual live agent first logged into the chat after I was on hold from the bot, the first thing they typed was “zlatanmessironaldo” (might have been some other football player name than ronaldo for the third one, can’t remember for sure) before pasting in the usual boilerplate “please provide the following details” thing. Big World Cup fans over there I suppose!
Cardfight!! Vanguard Dear Days has extreme old school dating sim vibes.
This is the latest video game adaptation of the trading card game Cardfight Vanguard, and thankfully for me (and unfortunately for the competitive scene) it’s a regular game with a single player focus as opposed to a F2P game. Fifty percent of the time the translation certainly feels like a throwaway F2P mobile game though.
The tutorial also can’t decide if it wants to show screenshots of the English version or the Japanese version.
I’ve only played a couple of matches but it seems to be exactly what you’d expect from a TCG adaptation like this. You hop around nodes on a map of your town and initiate visual novel-style story scenes and battles. You earn points that can be spent on buying cards and accessories (like card sleeves and playmats) and it seems pretty generous in regards to how easily you accrue points. It also provides a card crafting system to target specific cards you’re looking for. I like how there’s a “heart of the cards” mechanic in the story mode where you can equip a skill that, when activated, can influence your card draw during a match.
I wish pulling up card info didn’t block off so much of the screen because it’s difficult to read both card details while looking at the playfield at the same time, so I’m constantly cycling between the two as I learn the cards. It’s a minor thing that adds up to a big annoyance since I have to do it so much. I believe FuRyu has developed other TCG adaptations in the past so I imagine they’re just re-using what they already designed a long time ago, but it could use some improvement in the user experience.
Still though, it seems good enough and it’s way cheaper than playing the actual thing. It’s still $70 though! That’s a lot, and the season pass is also $70 (gets you booster sets into next year, so it’s nice there’s some longterm support). There’s also a ton of head start DLC that instantly gets you rare cards from each set (if you don’t want to get them through the game), and if you were to buy them all it would be like $50 or something.
One interesting thing about this game is that you play as a cool, smart, and popular high school girl with a cute little brother. This current generation of the card game had already seemed to be aiming at garnering a female (BL-fan) audience with what it’s done with its anime, but it’s cool to see the franchise double down with the game.
I think I’m going to be using the phrase “No lose intended!” a lot going forward.
Here’s to hoping that fan translation for the recent Battle Spirits TCG game re-emerges, as I can’t find the discord channel for it anymore.
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still enjoying this weird version of tactics ogre where arycelle is bad and xapan is one shotting bosses into chapter 4
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when will we get video game adaptations of the tcgs i like to play (digimon, pokemon)
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Digimon is just a tutorial but technically counts.
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Speaking of card games, I accidentally beat Slay the Spire on my second run. I may be ass at video games but for once, having a chronic case of card game brain is working in my favour
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also they’re from the early days of the tcg but the gbc pokémon card games are real good!
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I would absolutely spend real money on Digimon as a digital tcg
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From someone that played it for like 30 hours it is really really luck based. I had to stop playing because of getting 20 minutes into a run and realizing I was not going to win ruined my free time.
I think because the first 10 minutes of every game are pretty much the same.
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so i thought i’d experiment on cross-posting an edited comment for festival judging i left on this game - because i spent long enough playing and it’s worth at least saying something about a game like this here. because it’s also already out… and i’m not saying anything confidential or i wouldn’t say in a review etc. i also wouldn’t give a game like this my time otherwise probably, so it’s worth saying something about.
my friend’s first comment upon seeing the Steam page was “this looks like NFT art” and boy, it does
but anyway, this game Recursive Ruin is a puzzle/narrative game with a visual style and puzzle design that recalls Manifold Garden, among other things. enough to probably be fairly deemed a “Manifold Garden” clone i’d say. but it is also definitely its own kind of experience…
the narrative is like a mix of the sort of depressive navel-gazey thing about a floundering depressed artist in his 20’s with an abusive father that a lot of indie walking sims mine as subject material with some kind of highly bizarre sci-fi plot. the tone is i think trying for something darkly comedic, but it’s hard to tell at times… giving it kind of an unintentionally amusing quality to it. then, in the video game world you have these bizarre syfy channel B-movie characters with ridiculous names that are all like robed shadows or sentient floating orbs or whatever that prattle on in this kind of indulgent grandiose abstract sci-fi prose. it kind of went beyond the point of being merely bad and self-serious to being kind of amusing to me, but it’s not exactly what you’d hope for in a game. it actually reminded me of another weird indie vanity project i think about a lot that has some interesting/weird ideas in it along with incredibly overwrought and overly long character dialogue called This Strange Realm of Mine
i actually enjoyed the puzzles to Recursive Ruin a good amount of what i played. they made me think a little bit of Mirror Drop, as well as a lot of a lot of games in the Portal/QUBE/etc mold. i guess i like those kinds of puzzlers. do i think the mechanics are maybe pushing that genre forward? maybe not. but it’s a lot better than i expected, and was enough to keep me going for longer than i expected. especially but for something with a narrative so silly and overwrought i kind of expected puzzles that weren’t as well developed as they were. the last section i played before stopping was heavily plot and just seemed very spooky repeat PT-hallway wandering thing wasn’t altogether very interesting at all though. i really don’t know what they were thinking with that section - i’ve seen total bottom of the barrel indie horror games do a better job of cribbing off of PT.
the visual style is truly beautiful though, at least in the puzzle worlds. even though it’s heavily borrowing the recursive world concept from Manifold Garden it feels like it has its own visual identity. that alone made a lot of stuff worth playing. it’s cool that people can make videogames that look like this now.
it is hard to summarize exactly what the appeal of these kinds of games are to people expecting things to be, uh, like 100% good and worth endorsing. because that’s not what is interesting about these kinds of games. it is kind of what i’d think of a “B-movie”/exploitation version of a game like Superliminal that nonetheless overachieves and feels kind of unique to itself. there are moments in this that were really great. especially in the puzzle worlds, when the music hits a kind of wistfully abstract early 0pn style (as much as 0pn is my personal nemesis) and you’re trying to suss out the environments in these giant abstract shifting sci-fi worlds it felt really great.
but the voice acting is too cheesy to not be off-putting. the design is pretty good in the puzzle parts, but i’m not sure if it’s anything anyone who hasn’t played Manifold Garden or Superliminal or whatever hasn’t seen before. the story is pretty bad and overwrought but in kind of a (perhaps unintentionally) campy amusing way.
anyway this is probably another one for my personal canon of my “overachieving B-game/vanity project that are kind of bad but also kind of great” that Soul Axiom (the greatest of all of these kinds of games), Where The Bees Make Honey, and also This Strange Realm of Mine belong in
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I played the demo for this back during the Steam puzzle fest thing and I def walked away with a lot of conflicting “that was neat”/“that was dumb” feelings. It could be very striking to look at even on my aging PC, I legit had to look up a solution to one of the very first puzzles as I had a hard time grasping what the game was even asking of me but it did have a good amount of “I kinda want to see where this goes next” energy to it. I ultimately passed on adding it to my Steam wishlist as I think a taste of it was enough, but I’m glad for that single taste.
I enjoyed This Strange Realm of Mine a good bit more but that’s sort of an apples to oranges deal.
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The game gives you a shocking amount of ways to counterbalance the variance inherent in the cards you are given access to and maintain the consistency of your deck. Maybe it just stands out to me because I play a lot of card games that do not give me this level of control, but so far I have been more fucked over by accidentally pressing the end turn button instead of the potion button on my controller than I have by RNG 
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FWIW I don’t think anybody’s found an unwinnable Slay the Spire seed yet, and at Ascension 0 (the difficulty where you haven’t completed the game yet), the consensus is that a veteran player wins somewhere around 99% of the time. It’s also worth noting that the most well-known StS player is a former online poker professional.
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can I sell you on a phone app about horses
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