Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

[woudww]

i’ve been playing a credit or two of guwange every morning. the 360 arrange gives you more control over your spirit thing via the right stick while also not tanking your own movement speed, making it ez mode but also an edifying 2 characters on 2 sticks deal.

frothfully copped deathsmiles 1+2 and fed thru 1 to prepare to play an xmas shmup on xmas. im treating every cave game as something to be cherished nowadays so while i’m in no rush to get through them all i couldnt pass up the seasonal opportunity

[Rudie]

Maybe I missed Louisiana too much, but I sure did plow through RE7 in the past two days. I feel the same as I did with booji years ago on his couch: I hate how scripted and friction monster but not the first 90 minutes are. Just trying to find flags and can’t figure out if you’re supposed to be hiding or running. Once finally they let you play the game I enjoyed it’s monster restraint. I liked all the trap doors and things. The structure is weird (what RE doesn’t have weird structure Rudie?)

Now I guess I’ll wait for the Re8 expansion to go on sale before I touch that on PC. Go back to that RE3 on the mister. On hard mode because as I said before easy=lol.

[jdoe]

Pogochamp

This is worth checking out. It’s 100 pogo challenges, something like monkeyball but with a pogo stick.

The foundation of the game is the intentionally finicky but quite versatile pogo mechanics. It starts out with basic challenges, from just pogoing across a room without falling, to jumping a stair, to somersaulting through a hoop…

…however, eventually the game starts getting creative with its pogo gameplay

Swimming with a pogo stick

Playing the piano with a pogo stick

Gaming with a pogo stick

The game continues to mess around with its silly pogo mechanics. I’ve gotten through the first 50-60 challenges, I’m curious to see how far the developer went with this. It only has 12 reviews on steam, the game deserves better.

[HOBO]

Yo this rocks

[jdoe]

yeah this is the exact sort of game where it could of been featured by some youtuber and become pretty popular. there’s a “getting over it”/“qwop” nature to this. instead it just languished in obscurity for like over a year. i only discovered it as it was featured on one of those mystery tournament contests (players race to finish a game going in blind, these are often a good way to find interesting obscure steam games).

i think the developer knew they had something good with this game. they recently reduced the price from $10 to $3 (currently on sale for $1.50) probably in a gambit to get some sort of traction, though i feel like youtubers propelling random games to success is not like it was 5-10 years ago.

[drastic_bb]

playing raw danger… one of the only christmas games that matters…

this game actually displays something like a genuine understanding like… cinematic aesthetics

one of the first things you see is this zoom like this and it feels like, well, cinematic?

there’s even a dof effect

and a lot of the framing in cutscenes just seems to get it

youll just have to play it if you dont believe me

and you know… this, to me, is actually a really nice looking game. i mean the character models arent excellent or anything but they actually understand these ideas of framing and like… level design in a basically fromsoft-esque way imo

and like… your flashlight is in real-time and everything. a game with actual lighting! crazy i know…

it’s just like insanely vibey constantly raining and you have a real-time 3d step counter too which is the kind of thing that blows my mind.

also all the architecture and buildings and interiors feel like… extremely fetishistically real. getting to this cafe offers a similar feeling of relief as getting to the one with the portishead poster in silent hill

highly recommend grabbing the undub off cd romance lol

idk… in a lot of ways this is like a survival horror game but without really like any kind of “gameplay loop” or, like, horror (well i guess natural disasters are horrifying) but i mean it’s really going for a lot of the same things i think as resident evil or silent hill (or mgs for that matter) just without like, giving you any stupid combat (and is obvs better for it). i just really love the way it reconfigures these abandoned malls and shuttered train platforms into videogame spaces but they still feel real and lived-in. it’s a lot like ico in a lot of ways too… you could imagine a version of it that had, like, cinematic platformer-y running jumping and climbing i guess but it doesn’t even have anything like that just a little hop you do when you run off edges.

also every item in the game is 3d modelled

also it has this branching network of dialogue choices that bounce thru most of the character stories you play! it kind of like… does the stuff david cage games wish they were doing. well idk. i guess i’m more amenable than most to believing that there could be something redeeming about those games but i dont see myself playing them yknow. not the kind of thing i really am into, making dialogue choices or whatever and stuff, i think that’s generally pretty trite, but it’s there and it’s amusing if nothing else…

anyways i don’t want to sell it short by saying it’s like some fucking rinky-dink simple series game that shows promise or whatever… on a lot of levels it feels like, very realized just missing most of the polish. you could imagine that sony could have kicked them a bunch of money at some point to make a “demon’s souls” or “shadow of the colossus” of their own bc you certainly get the sense that they could… and i mean kyoei toshi even has the actual patlabor, eva, gamera, godzilla, and ultraman licenses all at once which is kind of goated.

this same team of course did steambot chronicles which i love just as much… and believe it or not i havent played disaster report 4 yet…

in a lot of ways i think games like ico, metal gear solid, demons souls are all going for something very similar (and in a lot of ways are sooo similar to survival horror games even if they don’t have zombie nurses etc.) … like sure theyre cinematic but in a much more realized way than having overwritten character banter while you shimmy thru gaps or whatever… and i think irem / granzella has been pulling at that same string for like 20 years now

[DaleNixon]

Hell yes!

[doolittle]

it’s hard (bordering on impossible) for an “open world” to have mise-en-scene whereas for those examples and survival horror games it’s everything

[obspogon]

started minecraft

[ticky]

I haven’t played much more of Keanu Reeves Presents: Intrusive Thought Simulator 2077. But I’m thinking about it. And it’s the focus of this post, really. It’s ambitious, large, and deeply deeply flawed. But I’m sure you know that already.

What I have done recently is installed Grand Theft Auto IV on my Steam Deck. And man, it’s a breath of fresh air in comparison. Whatever you want to say about its particular brand of storytelling it is so much more successful at what it sets out to do.

Liberty City is fun to traverse or wander around, driving is interesting, Night City is barely able to put up an illusion of life.

Cyberpunk is clearly built to draw focus to the higher-fidelity scripted parts, you do a lot of searching the eyes of your comrades as they ponder the ethics of shoot gun at corpo, but it just makes the fact that they made the world as sprawling as they did feel pointless. You spend a good deal of time traversing it, and it’s boring. Driving sucks; your car handles like shit and none of the others are better than it.

GTA IV, a game from more than a decade prior, does a much better job of this. You can go back to GTA IV and still find an interesting thing to do with the driving mechanics alone. Walking in Night City sucks, you have a sprint which has a limit so large you’re going to get tired IRL before your character does.

Nothing interesting ever happens on the way unless it’s a specific, scripted event. And most of those are “please shoot the cyberpsychos in this vacant lot on behalf of your mandatory cop friend”

I think I can see what CDPR were trying to aim for, but they clearly aimed way too high, and missed the mark by enough that their efforts were bested by games from generations prior.

[ticky]

I think to be fair to the game, maybe the most effective thing in the game is its use of montage. That’s a rarely used technique in games for… obvious technical reasons. But it pulls off quick cuts between disparate areas, in apparent full fidelity, with no stutters, several times. It’s like the one CP2077 signature that actually works well. It uses it in the ending of the prologue, and in a couple of sex scenes (lol)

[wourme]

Did you get Raw Danger to work properly in an emulator? I never had any luck with that. But I recently hooked up my old PS2 and I’ve been thinking of playing it again.

Definitely try Disaster Report 4 when you get a chance. It’s every bit a worthy sequel, in my opinion, even if there are things that Raw Danger does better. It’s also discounted right now.

[drastic_bb]

yeah it works perfectly in software render mode!

[iguferon]

i replayed gta 4 last year and it gave me a very cherished memory… i took roman to the irish bar in steinway, got drunk, we were like playing pool and it was the most awful shitty game ever, i couldnt get any decent shots and roman was worse somehow he would like barely hit the ball and itd go straight into the pocket. it was taking FOREVER. and finally he pocketed the ball like 8 times in a row and i won against all odds??? i was like crying from laughter it was ridiculous!! so as i was trying to call a taxi he got like stuck on a chair and i couldnt find him so i just got in a car and started drunk driving cuz there werent any taxis either. a cop saw me, so i got out stumbling around looking for roman and he was just standing out front of the bar watching 7 cops aiming and shouting at me, and then niko like sobered up instantly and broke out of the arrest animation and my wanted level went up so they immediately shot Roman in the head and like distraught i immediately pulled out an ak and killed everyone around me and had to run away. like 15 irl mins later roman calls me in the game and makes me pick him up from the hospital and then he and niko had a conversation about how fucking miserable america is that felt like an actual reaction to what had happened. i love gta 4

[daphaknee]

well its good to know my reasons for failing bonkey trek over and over and over and over on an iphone when it came out wasnt because of the NEWFANGLED TECHNOLOGY NOT RESPONDING TO MY INPUTS but just because the game is mean and wants me to fail

does punching slower actually make you less likely to remove the donkeys head? which foods are actually good and actually bad. HOW DO I ACHIEVE THE BUDDHA NATURE? i will answer these questions for real this time, in my old age, in the year of the dabble

I ALREADY FOUND SOMETHING NEW A PINBALL GAME WITH ONE TARGET ON THE SCREEN AT A TIME AND IF YOU DONT HIT IT oops caps before the timer hits zero you dont just lose, the game just exits. my high score is 7 which i cannot screencap because im too frantically trying not to die

i havent seen this minigame til today!! i used to play bonkey trek as much as the bfod cricket game!!! i sure hope they added it for the steam version cuz otherwise hoo boy am i an embarrassed gamer

[Tulpa]

Night City is such a remarkably lifeless, flavorless place that I can’t even think of a GTA-style open world game that it compares positively next to

[Felix]

finished pentiment finally. liked it a lot. hope Josh Sawyer likes my game since he liked my Fellini tweet recently

[hellojed]

GTA games despite being completely crass have the best realized living worlds that you can just exist in, I’ve spent more time in GTA just driving around the city obeying traffic and pretending to live there.

[RT-55J]

now that i have parts for a new PC headed my way, i decided to test if my ‘potatoe pc’ was ever a valid excuse for not streaming games. at 480p/30fps it could just barely manage to run snes9x at full speed, so the answer seems to be a resounding yes/no

as for the game, I decided to play the latest, hottest new eSport out there: the Super Metroid Map Randomizer at https://maprando.com/ — it generates a new map from the existing set of rooms in the game and (unlike previous attempts at this kind of randomizer) each area is all proper and euclidean and mappable and such. The people (SM sickos) seem to love it.

The first seed I attempted ended when the game gave me the speedbooster in the plasma beam room and expected me to shortcharge to exit with the pink pirates in the way (I had exhausted all other branches by that point). After that I went to the randomizer settings and bumped up the “shinespark tiles” to a reasonable distance so that wouldn’t happen again.

As for the second seed, I had a few bizarre softlocks early on but eventually started enjoying myself (getting gravity suit, space jump, and screw attack early helped). However, I eventually ran into a situation where I ran into the room with the baby cutscene (where your health drains to 1), but it was at a dead end and the only way out was through a heated room. (I could refill health in one of the dead-end rooms, but when I came back the sequence replayed.) I might get back to this one eventually though.

anyhow, apparently i didn’t click the magic “Save Past Broadcasts” button beforehand so that broadcast is already lost to time, like tears in the rain

[iguferon]

the arma 3 vietnam dlc made by an external team might be the best thing theyve ever released. its like its really 2003 and im playing a new bizarrely detailed czech tactical shooter

also my best friend got me ELEVATOR ACTION RETURNS for christmas so i had to do it to em

Sharp!