Getting flashbacks to when something like this happened in the beginning of Skyward Sword with the tutorial for the parachute thing. Took me so long that I think it was the first time a game had come close to making me cry out of frustration since I was a little kid.
Definitely set the tone for the rest of the experience I think
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It’s really wild how obvious Ages was the one they spent the most time and money on. It has way more original assets, way more elaborate dungeons, multiple very different overworks maps, and the outside dungeon segments are significantly more involved. The time travel puzzles are more in depth than the season puzzles somehow despite theoretically having less states to work with.
Plus it has an actual story!
…but it’s 90% extremely mid sokoban style shit and annoying mini games.
What a bizarre pair of games.
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Yeah, for every bit of extra scope it gobbled up it turned out worse, slower and more repetitive.
Seems like they overcorrected on Minish Cap which just unrolls itself with barely any player involvement.
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When I replayed the Oracles games a few years ago, I think I remember bouncing off Seasons when I got really frustrated ( I think it was either hunting down the PlayStation icon keystones, or some tedious bits in Subrosia). I came back to it later and completed the annoying bits with a guide, and then did Ages and found it to be significantly better to play. I think the season switching mechanic as well just ends up being more laborious, while the time travel doesn’t get in the way as much?
I don’t remember the boring sokoban shit, I guess I probably just like pushing boxes 
I remember reading a long time ago that they planned there to be 3 games, and the 3rd one was going to be a kind of remake of Zelda 1, but they ended up rolling that game into Seasons or something.
5 Likes
Been playing a lot of Cardfight Vanguard and came across a terrifying ability.
And then all of the enemy’s units starting holding hands. They all became friends! The horror!
So I did what I had to do: I sent them all to space prison for their crimes.
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g2a
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I beat Wario Land 3. the music box motifs are legit beautiful
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Yo they got digital Cardfight? 
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this is literally what i did a few hours ago, good thinkin.
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Yeah, it came out on Steam and Switch this past week and it’s pretty good! It’s nice to get a TCG with an actual single player campaign and no micro transactions. I can finally actually try out all the different cards and deck archetypes without having to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars. It only covers the current Standard/Overdress era though, if that matters to you.
2 Likes
I can’t remember if I posted at the time I lost a minish cap playthrough about halfway through and my main memory was how I kept getting lost because I was playing an hour a week and with that amount of distance the maze like overworld went out my brain every time.
3 Likes
That’s a good way to put it, there’s not enough variation between [dungeon zone] and [map zone] and it becomes indistinct as a result.
Now, this formal separation is the major difference between Zelda and Metroid’s world structure, so why does it degrade a Zelda instead of just pushing it closer to a Metroid feel? Probably because of the more substantial and denser puzzle obstacles blocking movement.
Minish Cap was right next to Metroid Prime 2, which really pushed the world traversal right to a limit. I didn’t have any problems learning the map as an infinitely patient teenaged games player, but even back then, as I was clearing out the map, I thought, this is a bit excessive. I recognized I would lose the competency to move in that world a couple months after I put it down.
5 Likes
I had a dictophone as a kid and used it to record Wario Land 3 music so I could listen to it whenever. Some of the day/night themes are incredible.
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I haven’t had much time to myself lately, but in my little bit of downtime yesterday I played a tiny bit of hard mode forest in PSOBB til the rando I was with had to go and the first of those big guys in F2 showed up.
I had burned my right thumb pretty badly on a hot glue gun on Friday night anyway, I switched over to something mouse and keyboardy to give it a break and opted for Quake Champions. I had only put a couple minutes into it originally and didn’t really like it then but I enjoyed it more this time.
It’s like a midpoint between Q3A (yay!) and Overwatch (boo!). Each character has a special ability that can be used every so many seconds but also you pick up guns from around the map and every character can use every gun. There’s a couple new features that remind me of weird external programs of varying degrees of legitimacy that people used to use alongside the proper Quakes—there’s built in timers and announcements for the quad and pentagram spawns and there’s even a slight degree of wallhack-ish vision in team games and for the big power ups where you can see solid colored versions through one layer of walls within a certain radius.
Despite being a game I paid upfront for, there’s a ton of microtransactions for if you want to wear a Shambler head as a hat or a threewave flag as a cape or whatever. When I logged in yesterday I already had Q1’s player.mdl unlocked as a alternate model for the Ranger so I don’t really feel compelled to go beyond that mercifully. I’m suspecting I bought the game because that was a promo item or something. The Q1 rocket launcher remains the only TF2 thing I’ve ever paid for (and I think that was just a promo for buying Q4 the right weekend which I otherwise wasn’t too interested in).
The maps seem pretty nice and are what won me over this time. There was one that seemed to come up in the votes more than others, but otherwise it felt like an interesting enough rotation. The longest yard appeared as an option once but shockingly didn’t draw any votes (I swear that was the number one map on Q3 servers, and I never liked it). I didn’t recognize any of the other ones. The single player bot matches seem pretty locked down (presumably because of all the modern shooter style xp and stat tracing) so I didn’t see a good way to explore the full map list in game.
Matchmaking was super slow though. It would take like five minutes between matches to search, connect, and load each time. Unlike the old games where each player would join when they’re ready, I think this is married to the concept of everyone starting simultaneously.
If I had my Q3A disc handy and if it still has a big enough player base, I’m not sure if I’d settle for this version or not over that. Maybe I’ll get into it eventually.
7 Likes
i played quake 3 arena with the folks in bachelor’s discord recently so there are certainly opportunities, disc or not (i do not have a disc)
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Oh nice! I had a really great time with UT2004 and Q1 when we did that!
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Went right through Blinky \\^+^//
Apparently this is called a “booey.” = P
Video of it where I freak out so hard I don’t know what to do with my mouth = OOoOO 1227: Arcade Game Series: Ms. Pac-Man PS4 \\ 41K -- & right through Blinky!! = D (A "booey" @ 12:30) - YouTube
8 Likes
Been playing Gears 5 through Gamepass (which you can get for $1, cancel, and continuously re-up for $1 forever), since I’ve been craving a shooter lately.
Gameplay-wise, the gunplay is the best of the series, and the new mechanics are generally great (through all the Jack robot shit still kinda sucks). I like being able to pull enemies over cover and messily kill them with a knife and such.
The new monsters are pretty roundly shitty, which is the same problem I had with the new Halos. A lot of them are just bullet sponges, or one-trick ponies. I skipped Gears 4 but I’m guessing these robots were introduced there, and holy shit is it not fun to fight these things. I’m sure they’re identical to grubs in terms of armor, but it’s just not satisfying to spray them with bullets.
Boss fights, as always, absolutely blow. This series has never figured out how to do these.
The storyline is actually pretty good overall. This is marred by the fact that I do not give a shadow of a shitte about these characters, which are disappointingly just normal-ass people with normal human bodies, and not crazy roided-up football player-space marines voiced by bombastic personalities like John DiMaggio or Lester Speight. It makes it all the more noticable when these O.G. cartoon characters show up after some dire subplot about a civilian massacre.
This series has never figured out if it’s good dumb himbo fun or if it’s a dark, grim tale of survivors fighting a desperate losing war.
I certainly think it’s better the dumber it gets, but, honestly the story is usually decent enough that it’s not a problem.
Best part of the game by far has been this stretch I’m in where they just let you use a wind-powered skiff to traverse an Antarctic environment that’s really quite beautiful and open, letting you progress at your own pace and sprinkling in little character interactions whenever you park or are en route somewhere.
In summary, as usual, the best part of this series is the gunplay and the environments, and Gears 5 delivers there well enough to be fun.
8 Likes
did you notice that they’ve completely removed the parts where the two players get split up onto different paths for a bit (“gears parts”). zero stars
third player controlling robot in co-op is pretty cute though
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Never played the original but the newer Odin Sphere has less in common with Muramasa than I’d been told. Only beat Gwendolyn’s path so far but the smaller spaces and menu swapping gives it more in common with Princess Crown which is neat. I like Vanillaware’s art in general although I liked what they did in GrimGrimoire more so far.
6 Likes