Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

oh worm? damn that explains a lot

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good news: there’s a level that’s skeet shooting and the weapon selection is hilarious

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I tried Diablo 3 again on a whim, it is so tasteless I feel like (Ghibli’s) Miyazaki blasting that AI zombie demo. By far the worst game I’ve previously liked playing
Feels like the skinner box treadmill is a lot less effective than I remember and the ugliness of the rest of the game is more apparent as a result. Maybe playing incremental games at work has made Diablo 3 obsolete like it has made Disgaea obsolete. I really should make that incrementals thread……. The games aren’t your grandpa’s Cookie Clicker anymore

Please touch the artwork: there’s something about Dutch games…. it feels like their devs have all reached self actualization multiple times? Sure, make a puzzle game about Mondrian.
Unfortunately, only the first art gallery out of 3 is really worth visiting (And brings context to the paintings) Still, this makes for an excellent Game To Show to a Normal Person

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Bloodborne again, stuck at Vicar Amelia so looking at Chalice Dungeons. holy hell this game is good

worked out how to clown on Snatchers, still terrified of Executioners (but now have Tonitrus to carry me). slowly untraining my bad habits: pressing your luck with multiple attacks instead of 1-2 dodge, assuming the health bar is empty and not landing the final hit

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this game went from making me kinda mad that it’s cynically puppeting these pristine queer sexless characters around to just ending up to completely not make any waves in the culture at all, which in retrospect is no surprise.

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Saturday backloggin’:

Solstice is a visual novel by MoaCube who also made Cinders a very long time ago. Their art style is quite unique, though I’m hesitant to unreservedly call it Good because it’s just slightly off-putting. Anyway this game has a pretty cool setting, but the characters are all completely unlikeable and their dialogue isn’t believable for the most part so it’s hard to sit through. Moving along!


Approximately 10 minutes of The Bard’s Tale was enough for me, thanks. If I want dumb jokes and cheesecakey fanservice I’ll just go read manga.


Space Run is basically just a tower defense game except your tower is a cargo ship and there aren’t waves, per se. You build everything as your ship traverses the level. The writing is absolutely painful. Whoever wrote this game’s dialogue does not know the difference between a motto and a slogan and I want to hit them with a book.

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I’m still irritated OFK have more money than me and continue being mad should I ever actually make money

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If this were the mid-2000’s someone would have made a cheeky “we ARENT OFK” flash game about the band breaking up.

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i played through sonic the hedgehog again

the backgrounds in starlight and spring hill are so nice. i want to go to them

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I’m at the point in FF3 where every dungeon has enemies which multiply and I just can’t deal.

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okay i beat Silent Hill 1. i got the worst ending. not going to bother to replay it any time soon. i can’t imagine going immediately back to replay a full linear narrative game like that multiple times to get all the endings. people back in the day truly had less going on. also i didn’t take any more screenshots. other than this altar i guess:

also there’s a Sonic Youth reference i’m sure some of you know already about:

but yeah, a big reason i played this is cuz i’ve played through SH2 several times over the years due to getting my videogame opinions from Yahtzee in the late 00’s when i didn’t know anything else. but had started playing through this one several times and just never got very far into it. so i’m happy to finally close that loop.

it really feels like a vast majority of the pieces were already there in place for SH2 to utilize to have a more coherent/slightly less absurd plot. i think SH1 is a little bit scarier but slightly dumber in a few ways. also i hated those stupid sewers, and the stuff around the endings. and running away from evil dogs and hopping humpers and pterodactyls. the enemies outside in Silent Hill proper in SH2 are much more mellow. but i am pretty impressed with what they were able to do on a PS1 in this game tho.

my best friend from 7th grade thru high school was a big Silent Hill fan and is actually the person who introduced me to the game. he had terrible taste in music (sorry David) but whenever he got really excited about a game he usually had a good point. (i remember he was extremely obsessed with Star Ocean for PS1 to the point where i eventually bought the game but never got into it as much as he did. i could see where he was coming from though!)

anyway he had me play the opening parts of Silent Hill 1 back around whenever the game came out - presumably like 1999 or 2000. i don’t think i was really in the mindset for horror games around that time. i watched him play a little and had a vague memory of one part so it was nice to connect that vague memories of that section to the actual game. finally sitting down and playing through something you have a vague memory of years later just feels nice i guess.

i’ve never finished SH3 or played much of SH4 but i’ve also seen way more of those games, so this one was a little bit less spoiled for me than those. will play through all of 3 eventually at least though.

anyway, i give Silent Hill 1 an 8.5/10. it didn’t quite blow me away but was still generally very good. next up on the list of “PS1 games i’ve started playing multiple times but never got very far into” is Tomb Raider 1…

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That and also new game+ gives you an option menu to up your ammo absurdly and such if you want making it way quicker to get through in addition to just knowing mostly what you’re doing in general for all the places you’ve been.

IMO SH2 loses a lot of its bite outside when you realize you can just run from everything very easily. I can see not liking it but I prefer how SH1 one made it harder to run and make you decide whether to fight things or just try and stealth it and avoid them.

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i cant wait til i see eric roberts in one of these cheaply acted mobile game ads that i get in shitty little p2w games

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I tried Paradise Killers but I could never shake a vague feeling of embarrassment and so I stopped playing it after an hour. The FPS movement felt great, and the rest was commendable but not exactly my thing.

I tried Mind Scanners and while I like the central conceit quite a lot, and the art direction is cool, I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to continue playing it after the first hour, especially since the minigames making up the psychiatry tend to feel repetitive and frustrating.

I tried Last Call BBS and ended up playing Solitaire until 4 in the morning while watching Northernlion play Rumbleverse.

Gamepass is excellent for looking at a couple of a game’s ideas, thinking “neat”, and then promptly uninstalling. I’m tempted to try and give some more Zachtronics games a proper shot, particularly Exapunks, but after doing some Shenzhen I/O a few weeks ago it reminded me too much of learning MIPS or parallel processing libraries in C, but without any of the real life risk reward associated with it. Shenzhen I/O seemed neat though.

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i played silent hill 1-3 for the first time at the start of covid and enjoyed 1 the most, maybe it’s just those dither patterns

replaying death stranding via game pass, now with all 144 of the frames and not being told off when i try to play my own music, feel like this one requires a shoegaze soundtrack

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Similar GamePassin’ here. I went back to Psychonauts 2 and…I feel like grabbing a perfectly fine dog and go “why don’t I think you’re cute?”

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You should ask the people in town! Or alternatively: dark knight attacks prevent enemies from multiplying, might as well get two of them

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Been a long while since I last played, but I think the Dark Knight skill or weapons help with these enemies.

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After serval days addicted in board game, the first video game I pick up Linked Mask

The one mix the Jump King and 2D platform action!

If you enjoy dismantling Jump King’s level, it will be a perfect high frequency strategy-action-ideal challenge-control friendly-retro-style video game

If you’re not, this game will be a nightmare trash

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That’s the ticket. Everyone tells you as much. I just don’t wanna level two new jobs just for this last dungeon :sob:

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