5 posts were merged into an existing topic: sewer system (return to daikatana)
Playing Popful Mail (sega cd version), I was full of expectation but actually playing it is a bit underwhelming. Kind of a Wonder Boy clone, which isn’t making me feel anything
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Exactly when you feel like quitting that game is the right decision.
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Hahaha! I think I will follow your advice
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Finally tried Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate, and my first run, which seemed to be going far too well, took a turn after I accidentally lost my sword and shield in a Synthesis Pot mishap shortly before the day-to-night element first came into play. Well played, game, by which I mean, “I am an idiot”.
Probably the most notable thing about the game, though, is the translation. My only past experience with Shiren is with the DS port of the first game, and I expected this game to be written in the same style, or a the very least keep the earlier game’s translations. Not so: not only is the tone more humorous (although that may also be the case in the original Japanese), most of the items are enemy names are translated differently–riceballs are now onigiri, Melding Jars are now Synthesis Pots, etc. It’s already odd enough for a modern game series to not have a consistent style guide, but given the importance of being able to identify things in the game, it feels especially jarring.
ETA: Another odd thing is that the item distribution seems rather different from the DS game. If I remember correctly, people had noted that that port had rebalanced the game to make it harder to get the best stuff from the start, and that seems to have been undone here, at least in the regular game. Like, having that first play through gave me two Revival Herbs, which would have never happened in the DS game.
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Symptomatic of our times that when Proteus returns it’s wearing collection and cataloguing as a driving force.
What I want to use this for is memory triggering; to look at vague semblances of shapes I know and feel the soft fizz of recall as I match it to shapes and colors and moments in my life. And that’s what’s good about this. But a layer of game above it forces my mind into organizing, optimizing, quantifying, and patterning that drives my life.
I need to structure my thoughts on the victories of the early '10s indie minimalism. We’ve seen it fall down so much in the last five years as they’ve tried to adapt techniques to roguelikes and RPGs and game-heavy forms that we’re in danger of losing what they unlocked, deeply. The only thing that seems to be surviving is twee aesthetics and an appreciation (appreciated!) of low-fidelity for its suggestive qualities.
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Might have hit a wall with NFSU2. I got a ton of money from sponsorships and races, and so I wanted to trick out a new car, and I chose the “best” car based on stats, which is the Audi TT. Anyway, after dumping all my money into the car, it sucks ass and I hate it. And so now I have all this money I wasted on a car I hate. This sucks.
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why do I keep getting called out for my taste in phone games
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i just played through the Ib Remake that came out this year. this is my first time playing through the game in any form.
i really liked it. it was honestly like a 10/10 experience for me. i guess when i hear about RPG maker horror i tend to assume a) a Yume Nikki rip-off and b) some kind of jump scare/contrived plot element that feels very adolescent. so that’s why i never bothered trying to play through the original version of this game before.
…but that wasn’t my experience at all. was really pleased with all the different creative and imaginative stuff done over the course of the game. it really makes such good use of using a bunch of different ideas within limited tools and doesn’t feel monotonous or like it’s dragging at all at any point. i only got to see a few of the endings, but i felt like the game’s length was generally really perfect for what it was too.
so like - on the one hand, i was very happy to finally experience this game and have a good time. but it also left me feeling sad that this is a freeware game that came out 10 years ago (in its original form) and the whole indie space has become so much bigger and more demanding from people on a technological/work end… and yet there’s so little i’ve played in that space that even mildly approaches the creativity of this free RPG maker game by a solo dev. just shows how little things have changed in some ways.
anyway, it seems like the original developer was the one who initiated this remake (unlike Cave Story where Pixel wasn’t involved at all or Yume Nikki where the original dev just seemed to be advising/not directly making it) so i hope it made them some money.
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… I spent far too long writing up a custom config file for xidi, a directinput wrapper, so that I could play Crimson Skies pc on a modern controller with controls resembling the xbox crimson skies, all without losing access to analog inputs.
So anyway, Crimson Skies pc is still a good time and now I have a new bit of emulation software to become obsessed with the possibilities of. I can surely write a competent config for Freespace 2, right?
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I’m looking for the most unethical CD key reseller website around. I need one that GUARANTEES that every key I buy has been stolen and ripped off. this is the only way I can pay money for Midnight Suns while Denuvo keeps blocking warez groups from cracking new games
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Oh yeah, Crimson Skies also has antifa dna in its bones. Like the third mission involves me destroying a british base and a work camp to help out the (independent, uncolonized) kingdom of Hawaii (almost every mission involves fighting imperialists)
ah the days when you could have explicitly left politics in a game without controversy.
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I gotta get Crimson Skies working again, the game stopped after like 3 missions
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I figured this out after the meetup btw
In the xbox crimson skies, you can’t continue that mission until the briefing voice clip finishes. The buttom prompt just doesn’t appear before then. An absurd oversight in the interface
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ohhh dang!
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Bayonetta 3 is probably the worst game I played this year. I legit enjoyed We Are OFK more than this. I’m halfway through but I have to vent as I can’t recall the last time a pretty basic game premise was fucked up this hard.
Actual combat makes up what feels like less than 50% of the game. This is perhaps my fault for trying to get everything in a level the first go around but doing a lot of this side shit gives you pretty useful bonuses and weapons you can’t get elsewhere. Basically, each level has pretty gigantic open stretches of nothing because the game introduces demon-summoning as a key mechanic and, with it, lots of movement and traversal options tied to each weapon. The intended playstyle fits the puppet archetype like V in DMC5 where you just summon stuff and avoid enemies, except in Bayo3 you can summon then move back then summon etc. The problem is summoning just takes forever and is less dynamic. It’s a neat premise at first but then the game becomes unwieldly and almost every part of the experience is ruined by it.
The demons are so fucking big the camera has to make Bayonetta a protagonist-for-ants as she is often reduced to a small stick figure on the screen. I’m sure this looks really cool in footage but to a player this is the first strike against it. It becomes hard to reliably dodge and attack and the demons don’t really add much other than a powerful attack that takes ages to execute. Half the time the camera is making giant demon models transparent just so you can roughly understand what is going on.
Outside of combat there are just a lotta huge stretches of less engaging not-combat in this combat-oriented character action game. Not-combat includes:
- Setpieces where you just run/move through crumbling environment
- Setpieces where you basically play rock paper scissors with a giant golem
- QTEs
- Umbran tears (hidden animals in the level you have to chase or find, their hitboxes are minusucule- fuck these tears)
- Little platforming tasks
- Timeline shifting platform challenges (at what stage in time do you need a broken platform to be to get somewhere)
- On-rails shooting
- An Uncharted 3 walking-sim desert sequence which is so close in its storyboarding it feels like an homage
- Playing as a cat demon for about 5 minutes (entirely new control scheme and animations for 5 playable minutes in the entire game)
- Elevator Action homage (could these sections not have been side-missions? It was neat the first time but not multiple times in when the core combat is better realised).
There is a collectable that, when hit, starts up a platforming trial where you have to collect 5 floating pieces in the environment before a timer runs out. If you fail the challenge, which you will in later levels because the traversal options are not the game’s bread and butter and some are just really difficult, restarting the challenge plays the same unskippable Zelda-esque cutscene which shows the position of each of the 5 floating gems. How is this still in a video game in 2022? Let me skip.
Another thing that doesn’t belong in any modern videogame is quicksand which traps the player, requires that they mash, not to escape and jump out, but to move through the sand. Only when you’ve moved to a ledge can your character actually climb out. Failure to do this is an automatic death. So if I mess up the game’s precarious platforming mechanics I am met with a mash or die situation and that’s only based on whether a piece of land is even within range. If not I should just accept I died. This is even worse for someone who physically speaking should not be mashing at all.
This challenge is not remotely related to what these games are about, and I really don’t get why there’s such a heavy emphasis on environment in Bayo3. I can understand cases where you are prompted to use a demon to interact with the environment in some novel way, but the quicksand, the wind that blows you off course, it’s all just frustrating. I don’t feel particularly good for having avoided it and I definitely don’t feel good for landing in it.
Let me play with the goddamn combat system. God you just do too much shit that isn’t to do with combat, it’s like the game is worried you’ll become bored of its core loop. Then half the combat you do do is filled with this Astral Chain, Ice Climbers camera stretching.
The game has a second playable character who’s like an extremely nerfed Bayonetta since they can only enter witchtime by parrying and demon summoning completely removes their defensive options.
Not that the plot is a huge draw but the only thing making me wanna persist is seeing alt-universe Bayonettas in the multiverse and getting new weapons.
I really think I should just quit, I’m getting nothing from it but bad design lessons I’ve seen in games from over 10 years ago.
Really enjoying Signalis on the other hand. When just want to be comfy this is the game for me, especially as we approach sub-zero temperatures. The design is pretty straightforward for the Resident Evil/Silent Hill frame. The biggest innovation is to do with how sections play with cameras and intercut footage of things the player has never seen. You can get items from within strange little mise-en-scenes when you watch a video or pick up an item which lends it a dream quality on top of a mildly interesting sci-fi setting. The walking sim stuff is a nice pace-changer and the game is super breezy as long as you’ve cranked up your spatial-awareness for puzzle solving. The aesthetic is hard to ignore and there’s lots of interesting tensions although I’m not sure how many of them are intended. The cyber punk anime aspect of it all is kind of hovering between homage, genuinely neat world (German automated space labour gone wrong), and the devs just like ‘badass’ beautiful fighting girl Kisaragi character designs.
One minor complaint is please let me see my inventory have a slot taken up when I pick something up. When an item is presented, I can see all the slots available but the game doesn’t visually fill up a slot when you choose to pick up an item. Please do this to help my mental accountancy!
Demon’s Souls update - I’ve decided to forego the order to get 1-4 out of the way, it’s just too big a roadblock for my character.
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new fortnite has big hammer that you can blast off of the ground with then do a big ground pound 100 meters away
why is this game so good
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Reading people complain about the ending to Bayo3 yeah you should quit.
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theres a hammer weapon in daikatana that makes a giant door creaking noise when you lift it and it impacts the ground so hard it launches you into the air like a rocket jump
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I finished off Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons. There were a couple of late game moments that now even a day later I am losing in memory but did make me go “yes! Haha yes!” - Alundra Sicko.
Actually requiring you to read the owl statues for solution to a puzzle made me go “oh come on”.
That the game requires you make some absolute bullshit jumps with speedboots and luck, “oh come on.”
The solution to the mysterious question mark on the beach: “how was I supposed to…” and that is part of a larger puzzle that is “the game should be longer.”
And the most useful warp point is in a terrible location.
It gets a “good romhack” of Link’s Awakening. It made me reflect on all the clever bits of LA like when you get the chain-chomp or the Card Suits Enemies.
I am two Dungeons into Ages and if you wanted more block puzzles than here is a game. What if they were boring and tedious? Within minutes of starting I considered cheating to give myself the basic movement items just to save myself some headache. Then I can transfar to Seasons to probably get some bullshit rings.
What if two boring overly designed overworlds to explore? This game has a lot more original sprites and even some original music (! Novel!) gonna give it two more dungeons before I come to my senses and start playing Lufia 2, confirming my Complete Sicko Status.
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