I haven’t played this one yet, but Tendy Robot Gardener from the same bundle is SO good, short and sweet and clever, the ideal puzzle game imo.
7 Likes
Planet Laika could be one of my favorite games of all time. I played the whole thing today, it’s like 8+ hours…I can’t think of the last time I was so motivated to get through a game like that. (Although part of it is that usually I don’t have so much free time.)
I heard this game was by Quintet. Some cursory searches about the game led me to a bunch of Quintet fans (?) excited at the announcement, and a few of those who actually played it didn’t like it because it wasn’t like a Quintet JRPG. Those people should have done their homework, because Quintet just programmed & helped a little with this game. This game is actually made by the same company that did Kowloon’s Gate!! That includes a guy who worked on Tong Nou. It should be very obvious just looking at a little footage of the game.
Right in the beginning the narrator tells you the protagonist has 3 people living in his body. Does that mean dissociative identity disorder? You’ll have to play to find out…what it means game-design wise is that you have to bring out each of the 3 people to speak in different situations or to use certain physical abilities, etc…you do this by absorbing evil energy from the NPCs. The game claims that all human evil/sin can be represented along 3 axes (“animal”, “psycho”, and “visual”)…each of your 3 player characters maps to one of them, and each NPC also falls into one of the 3. It’s all color coded, you can see the NPC’s aura when you walk up to them. It’s very videogamey and also sort of literary! You can absorb too much evil and get a game over, which is a neat way of discouraging you from talking to NPCs over and over again.
I feel kind of weird saying I loved it or it spoke to me or something, because it was very dark & depressing. there’s like child sex abuse, domestic violence, suicide…I’m also not sure if it’s saying anything constructive about mental illness. but otherwise the game is just so beautiful & confident & weird, and there were a lot of twists and interesting (to me) adventure game design. towards the end it did start to wear me down, especially that psychological horror sound design, and I didn’t like some aspects of the ending which felt a little rushed. Playing all at once was probably a little too much lol.
Also, what a nice surprise–it takes place during Xmas! There is a lot of Xmas stuff happening in this game! Good week to try it if you still have some spirit left!
29 Likes
In watching dozens of people play Outer Wilds, most folks find jetting around with the jet pack on a planet’s surface pretty intuitive. It’s the ship that proves challenging, particularly outside planetary atmospheres, and that’s mostly because people don’t intuitively understand that a vehicle without atmospheric drag has no natural deceleration, so when they’re holding the boosters down to try to catch up to a planet they’re usually adding so much unnecessary acceleration that they slingshot past and find themselves in an orbit, and rather than reversing thrusters they just try to point themselves toward the planetary body, accelerating the speed of their orbit, which causes the orbit to enlarge, so then they have to thrust even more to aim themselves back at the planet, which just causes further acceleration and an even bigger orbit, etc.
90% of the time, they could have just used autopilot and/or the “match velocity” button to fix the problem. Even if you wreck the ship, you can usually just patch it right back up, and if not, it’s not like it’s a permanent problem…
11 Likes
been playing through EDF5 with Melody. absolutely perfect videogame, i’m so glad there are still games like this that can get me legitimately excited about the medium
anyway my parents gifted me and my brother a digital PS5 for xmas and we still haven’t opened it. i don’t know what to do with a console in 2022! i have been out of the console game since the wii days!
I DON’T EVEN OWN A TV
24 Likes
I got Dragon Quest Treasures and played it for about an hour, delightful as usual although I am still basically in tutorial mode. The restless armor who runs a train station and dresses like an old timey train engineer plus knight is so cute i almost cried. He loves trains!!!
Anyway I really have no idea how the game plays but I’m fully sold on it already, I love the draogn quest aesthetic and i’ve already played through DQ Builders 2 1.5 times. This is really perfect timing for me anyway, as I usually get the DQ itch in the winters.
Also: Dragon Quest Monsters Caravan Hearts is a fucking baffling game. I have put about 3 hours in and a few things are standing out as unusual:
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I’m also still in tutorial mode in this game, sort of - new mechanics keep coming up and being explained in excruciating detail.
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On the other hand, the ration system is so cruel that I am fully out of gold and not making enough back from battles to pay for the rations used to walk the world map. Running out of rations means rapidly depleting your monster’s health with every step. I do not know how to escape this trap and I’m not sure why they let you get into this trap in the first place.
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On the other other hand, I still only have one monster and no way of getting more as far as I can tell. Absolutely baffling. Why are they preventing me from engaging with this game??
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So instead of monsters, the game seems to be more centered around managing your party of humans? Sort of? Like, I have 5 different humans and 4 spots and their turn order matters a lot, and party composition etc. But they all only have one skill, and they do their thing automatically so…it’s just weird.
I’m going to play until I can at least see the breeding system because so far this game is really quite bad. But the heart of DQM is always breeding so…I gotta get there at least.
12 Likes
The dev runs a great local arts collective, really nice guy. I moved out of the area but I still do their book club meetings online since its one of the few groups Ive found outside of this site that Ive enjoyed talking about games with
2 Likes
I kept thinking about whether or not you were going to get Treasures whenever I saw ads for it, based on your love of spinoffs in that series.
3 Likes
I was alerted to the fact that GTA Online’s winter mode (where everything is snowed on) was active, and having never tried it (I’ve usually been away from my PC or console setup, or forgotten about it altogether) I logged in. Somehow it had been long enough that I forgot how absolutely soulless and vile that game is. It’s so desperate for you to cash in to the machine, just constantly bombarding you with ads for content, and until you do cash in there’s almost nothing there for you to do.
Things weren’t much better when I sunk hundreds of hours into it as a deeply depressed person back on the Xbox 360 version, but like, you could at least play a race or five. As it stands now, I believe the lack of crossplay is what gets in the way; if you play on PC with a gamepad you are only matchmade with other PC gamepad players. And worse, it groups you further by aim assist setting, so there’s basically nobody to play with.
And that’s before we even discuss the state of the public lobbies for the game. I don’t think I’ve logged in a single time since the PC version launched where there wasn’t at least one person running hacks and teleporting around nuking other players for fun. It’s nigh unplayable. I guess Rockstar have decided this is a good state for the game to be in because it remains profitable in spite of it.
8 Likes
Completed Demon’s Souls Remastered in time for the new year.
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The image above is something I don’t recognise being in the original game. The cross seems reminiscent of the various swords and ring motifs in both the Nexus and the Old one’s resting place. Birds only ever appear near the Old One as well. This implies a deeper connection to Boletaria which I think is kind of interesting in retrospect given all the founding myths and how the northern regalia and old king Doran are said to have travelled to this world along with the old one.
I’m not sure any other Souls game has had a crueler run to the boss and I was half expecting them to put a shortcut back in the remake. Instead they do a tease of a shortcut by adding a new unlockable door near the tower where you climb up to the Fat Officials. All it unlocks is a new piece of armour. The elevator ride is a particular slap in the face but on repeat attempts it feels like the designer asking you if you remembered to tie your shoelaces and are certain you’ve been to the loo. In this remake going up the elevator conjures up the image of the game’s conductor.
They cannot wait to reveal to you the weight of their arrangement, the rousing epic of the original theme, delivered by who but a muse! Surely my cochlea will be gilded through their mastery and I’ll really enjoy the new bits where the orchestra goes duhduhduhduhduh. Truly no-one has gamed like this before. The Sony money is secure. Honestly, the cowardice of the new sound never stops irritating. What is wrong with a solo organ? They sound amazing.
King Allant is slightly janky in terms of locking on to you as the target in this game. It’s softer and more forgiving and doesn’t feel quite right. I remember him being much more relentless in exerting more pressure on the player but in this he tends to take a step back a lot more or gets caught up rotating slowly back around to face you.
Throughout my playthrough the Crescent Falchion was just too fucking strong for my build. I wanted to resist using it, but the INT bonus is mostly unmatched by anything else I worked towards. It’s boring but it works. With warding, dull gold armour, dark silver shield, beefed crescent falchion and Doran’s Ring do the job.
The conductor’s standing ovation now earnt, I have basically finished the game but still have some thoughts.
The Old One
New Old one looks a bit off in this. In the original, I think they tried to convey the scale of the entity with a flock of birds flying nearby but the effect always looked a bit strange to me. Oddly the effect is preserved here where the birds appear stationary with the odd one occasionally flapping but it still feels very static. The Old One’s design also feels like something that was made under strict technical limitations and a time budget. it’s essentially a large fallen Christmas tree of stone and branches. Here it looks oddly minimal.
King Allant’s VA returns which was neat. His speech about the old one as a gift from god is something I think about a lot. Whether it’s an interpretation or whether it genuinely is the case, the ‘poison to the poison’ line sticks with me in 2022.
The new credits are weird. They have this odd series of concept art that almost works like a digital comic but doesn’t really go anywhere and just shows random characters. Freke is displayed prominently but I don’t know why? it’s also about 500 times longer than the original due to the amount of contractors and outsourcing they used. The music team (and outsourcers) takes about the same amount of time to roll by as the entire credits section for the original PS3 Demon’s Souls team.
Little things
Damage numbers appear above an enemies head but you can’t have more damage register on the bar than their remaining HP if the amount is too low.
E.g. IIRC in the original if I do 50 damage to an enemy with 2 HP left I see 50 damage done. In the remake I only see 2 damage done no matter what attack I do. It just makes it feel off -a weird brain thing. Arguably it’s helpful for making more accurate HP estimates of enemies but there are so few enemy types generally that you get a sense of this pretty quickly in most levels.
When you return to the Nexus your eyes adjust to the light there and it’s a neat technical update that supports the storytelling of the area well. If you teleport it into a gigantic room with the ambient light levels are very low from an outdoor environment, your eyes would probably take a moment to adjust as it initially seems dark and then brightens. It also highlighted the fact that the Nexus is literally lit by candles because it has no windows and no other apparent magical way of lighting the environment. Having an immortal candle maiden now seems like part of the design of the shelter from the beginning.
You can spawn from one archstone to any other from any archstone except while in the Nexus. This is presumably so that you are actually forced to interact with the giant arch stones, but is otherwise a good quality of life feature when you are ‘out in the field’ although I didn’t discover it until about 20 hours in. The load times are so quick it almost doesn’t matter.
Not sure if this was in the original either but the Maiden in Black walks towards the Old One, but in a highly unsteady and slow way because she is blind. Was a neat touch.
17 Likes
omg… i straight up played mgs2 for 8 hours yesterday its simply the best. all the way from the vamp fight to solidus… i was probably stuck on vamp and the mass production eva i mean ray battle for a couple hours each tho dark souls shit tbh.
the part when you find emma… twilight sniping filtering in and out as you go in and out of the water… press the action button to hold hands and yank her around and you can feel her heartbeat in the controller… and you can accidentally knock her over if you bump into her… this game is simply the best.
vamp and the sniping section are both noticeably harder if youre doing a 0 kills play, maybe the only parts where the differences feel like they really add up. well maybe the big tengu soldier fight too but why wouldnt you want to use the sword for that regardless its just toooo cool.
i just really think this is the coolest game… also so funny how mgs4 basically retcons all this shit (liquids ghost⁉️) but i guess a game that concludes with “the shadow leaders of america died 100 years ago so the spirit of the white house itself has manifested as a ghost inside an ai to steer the proverbial ship bc it feels threatened by people online Posting too much” is kind of a hard plot twist to write a “satisfying” triple a game sequel to. also the game ending with like a… maybe 1.5 hour hideo kojima spec-fic codec call dump is not my favorite thing and it happens again in death stranding. i mean i know lots of people cant stand that stuff but it happens…
(i dont really ~love~ mgs4 like the way it wraps up the plot of the series isnt great but i do think it’s reasonably entertaining i mean im in deep enough where i think something like “metal gear rex vs ray” is so fucking sick i squeal and kick my feet in the air)
i wish i had a silenced socom pistol to shoot out security cameras irl with…
24 Likes
So I’m going to be honest: I think my feelings about this game wound up being about the same. Clever! But also, after not too long my appetite for what it’s doing is sated. This is definitely a me thing, though, as abstract-ish puzzlers don’t always hold my attention.
2 Likes
That’s acceptable. Since you mentioned the game’s cleverness, I assume you figured out the main gimmick and what it was leading to. In which case it won’t really have more to offer than its conclusion, which I found ties things up in a satisfying way. (The entire game is about an hour long, even if you’re slow like I was.)
You might have more fun with Core Keeper, if you get a chance to try that one at some point.
Not to be confused with Dome Keeper, which I tried last night on OneSecondBefore’s recommendation and also enjoyed.
3 Likes
I keep playing some of the Overgrowth campaigns (expansions, I guess?) and they both feel like Quake expansions in that they kind of push the mapmaking tools a little bit but they string together abstract spaced together using warp gates. The story makes less sense and you get bits and pieces of it through notes you find scattered around the world.
I’m getting more used to the combat, but find myself relying on shotgun dropkicks most of the time because it’s the most consistent way to dispatch enemies and not get cornered by 2 or 3 enemies. It does feel like I’m actually doing damage to them, rather than going through robotic hack and slash animations until their HP reaches zero. Sometimes combat feels unfair, but that’s a product of the game’s dedication to it’s own definition of realism.
I do think the character models feel more alive than anything else I played, and I chalk that up to the massive amount of procedural animation that’s going on so that they react to everything. The character costumes are also pretty fantastic, and the game has it’s own sense of fantasy style that I dig. (Also, the garments take into account animal physiology, like tails and ears, which I like haha)
11 Likes
Bagman Strikes Back (PC)
Windows version: Bagman Strikes Back by LC-Games
C64 version: Bagman Strikes Back (C64) by LC-Games
This is the author’s second remix of the 1982 maze game Bagman by French company Valadon Automation, and he changes the screen from vertical to horizontal, condenses the options to adjustable Difficulty only–but now with per-Difficulty high score lists, condenses the width of the stages, so now with the wider screen there’s no scrolling necessary, and, with assistance from his brother this time, adds 20 new stages instead of the 2021 Bagman Comes Back’s 8.
The condensed, non-scrolling stages make a huge difference! In smaller mines, the guards can cover far more of the maze, there’s less just walking back and forth, and in effect the whole game is more sped up and intense. Oh and there’s also a bonus/time limit now, so you can’t just meander about as much as you like! = oo Also there’s no more guards scrolling into view suddenly in such a way you find yourself trapped, which is really good. ^_ ^
6 Likes
night and napalm in arma 3
nobody has night vision in the 1960s so everyone keeps launching flares and taking turns shooting at each other when they are low enough to illuminate the ground. much better than using the flashlight which mostly just gives your position away and gets stuck on no matter what you do because its arma so your blinded in first person by this huge cone of light that originates where your characters eyeballs are. because not even a flashlight works normally in this game, fuck you for wanting to percieve things at night
this is pretty good though
this isn’t
10 Likes
What I’ve been up to during the holidays:
- Been playing Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest for the first time, at a pace of a level or two a day, and I finished it last night. Fantastic platformer, and there were only a handful of levels I considered to be frustrating or BS.
- Vibing with the early game in Dragon Quest VII. I’m starting to look forward to unlocking the vocation system in what I think will be ~10 hours, as only having one and a half spells per character 10 hours into an RPG is kinda disappointing.
- Started Xenoblade 2. Love the whole aesthetic of this game, and the combat is starting to click midway through chapter 3. Anyone who thinks the Poppi sexualisation stuff is creepy in English should be thankful they aren’t playing it in Japanese! I wish this game didn’t run at 320p in handheld mode.
- Started a co-op run of the Legendary campaign in Destiny 2: The Witch Queen with @rye, as I wanted to experience it before Lightfall pushes it into irrelevance. It’s pretty good so far, and it’s nice to catch up with an old gaming buddy after a few years of absence from the game.
- Beat Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which my mom got me for Christmas. It sure is a Mario Kart, but it’s no Double Dash!
16 Likes
Yeah I’ve just been using autopilot whenever it has been an option and things have mostly been fine, also it seems very hard to damage the ship where I’ve been so far as long as you try not to do so.
I put a good 90+ minutes into the game today and am unsure if I made a lick of progress? I found some things and some alien writings but since it all resets I’m not sure if I’ve done enough with any of it to “count”? Like with Majora’s Mask and Chulip there were definite markers that progress was made but I feel like I’m just wandering around and getting nothing done here.
4 Likes
if you get new details in that little mystery database on your ship, you’re making progress.
5 Likes
learned how to do the “crouch turnaround aim cancel wiggle” in Super Metroid, checked a box in Map Rando, and generated a seed:
been enjoying gradually learning more and more sicko-level tricks, though i might hit a wall with them soon. i’ve completed 6 seeds so far, and while i’ve been enjoying it, the game is kinda too big for this kind of rando. there needs to be a setting that uses only 1/2 or 3/4 as many rooms. i feel like the average clear time for these should be between 1-2 hours instead of the 2-3 hours that i’ve been seeing.
9 Likes
dirge of cerberus would be really fun with pointer aiming. missed opportunity for a wii port. mr kitase… call me…
8 Likes