^ the thing is Id totally enjoy figuring out and performing this apple death storage loophole.
I want a dragon quest game about the guys that goes out and finds dead adventurers to drag them back to the church for half their gold.
Gotta find the torso and the head if they die to a really nasty monster. Have a dungeon where you get swallowed by a whale to revive a party of pirates.
Drag-em quest Ill call it.
oh don’t get me wrong, i’m enjoying it. but it’s a real bizarre thing to ask new players to do, especially assuming that the rations thing will eventually be a non-issue, or at least not Totally Debilitating like this. especially for a DQ game which has generally had the principle of “you are always making progress, even when you die”
like, leveling out of this is essentially impossible because the monsters just don’t give you enough gold, and if they get one hit on your starving monster you immediately die no matter what level you are. you can just get buried in this hole, and in fact i’m not sure how anyone would avoid this particular hole
I almost uninstalled Dicey Dungeons after several failed runs of thief episode 6 that led me to conclude that it’s mostly up to luck to a degree that most before it didn’t seem to be.
But I finally beat that episode last night by using the wrecking ball and not getting any of the really bad rules. Still just barely, though.
i liked dicey dungeons for a bit but it started to feel too much like all i was doing was making the one reasonable choice at every opportunity. kept it around on my phone though…
we’re playing FFVI now over here, my partner is almost at the halfway point, and my main new thought this time is holy shit the kefka laugh is a masterstroke
this song is really nice but i really really really can’t help but notice how the much of the melody is more or less just a rearrangement of the super mario world theme… and that sony’s lavish tech demo/pack-in is, in fact, straight-up just a mario game with craven sony advertising baked into it
not a bad game! just funny that sony’s go-to “make a people-pleaser! safe! no risks!” is literally “make a mareo!”
Make a Mario, but make it a robot … Italians are too controversial in our “woke” culture
I find this one very catchy:
For me, Astro Bot Rescue Mission is a 3D Mario game that I can actually enjoy playing without constantly noticing ugly visual design choices and other annoyances. I wouldn’t have bothered with it had it not been VR, though I guess it doesn’t make sense to even say that with how integral the VR stuff is.
More Megami Tensei: Neuroheroine 2~~
Grinding to rather absurd levels because it’s fun. ^ _^ The game’s systems feel like they start to work better, for instance once you get your Fire Affinity up to 15–thanks to the dev for the tip!–your companion’s fire spell evolves to a version that actually works most of the time, which makes the whole Whip mechanic work, and it turns out that’s how you do Really Big Damage.
Could probably take on the Prologue dungeon’s boss now but think I’ll keep grinding both because I’m enjoying it–there’s tactics per enemy and with more demon types continuing to appear I finally had to start writing their weaknesses and strengths down because it was too much for my feeble memory to track ^ _^–and because I want to have enough dough to buy the shop’s best sword 'cause hopefully it’ll be better than this weakster doodle sword I started with. Although if it did much more damage it could sorta break the balance with your other attack options so maybe it’s mostly that it does special side effects during certain Moon phases or something.
More and more topless girl demons–in surprising variety–started coming along as I continued to level up past oh level 7 or so. I guess now I know one reason why the Megami Tensei series is popular! = ooo
Between what passes for mise en scene in square enix’s first third dimension translation to the 4K reality of the first third of it’s trilogy, Crisis Core Reunion is a too perfect reconstruction of Guy Stands Slightly Off Centre Of Frame And Talks To Camera In Shot Reverse Shot and Two Characters Stand At Opposite Ends Of The Frame And Quote Exposition Without Moving in a way I found charming in the way slapping a HD filter to a PS1 game ruining the contrast remains a very aesthetically pleasing way for me to play modern video games for all their 310 chapters and change. Gackt seems cool, I wish he was real.
Also played an hour of Pentiment and didn’t like it.
Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp is, surprisingly, a roguelike and unsurprisingly, a gacha game. You can play as any character as long as you’ve gacha’d them and then basically move one character across a 50-turn board game to level them up. Progress carries over but there are so many characters and abilities, to get even a half decent party of 4 takes many hours. This is some ultrafans only, sicko mode, boring-ass grind with an extra portion of why. Why can’t I just develop 4 characters simultaneously on the boardgame? Because collecting all the unique character interactions is its own collectathon which can only be handled one character at a time. Like many luxury goods, the things to collect only hold value for their rarity and not any sort of intrinsic value unless you count getting to play more of the game, which I don’t.
Played the Decarnation Demo and found it nicely put together. It’s mostly very scene-focused with the odd mechanical experiment. You’re a cabaret dancer in 80s Paris with a generally declining life satisfaction and you’ve recently posed nude for a sculptor leading to a horrible encounter in a public gallery. It feels like The Neon Demon meets Cronenberg except it’s about female bodies in the visual arts and how this traditionally chafes with the humanity of subjects of the gaze rather than supermodel culture specifically. It’s not long before you scream away strange lustblobs in a dream sequence. It’s actually quite well-written for what it is. The characters feel relatively grounded, and your character has a lot of relatable anxieties and preoccupations. Looking forward to the full thing since the body horror so far is compelling even if playing the game is mostly little life vignettes. I like its use of heavy black borders to make the game feel more closed in.
Replayed Opus Magnum after 5 years and am still stuck trying to make a sword and invisible ink. I love how beautiful the game is, but it makes me feel stupid when I forget an alchemical combination or realise the thing I spent 20 minutes tuning can’t function. I need to stop and plan but have no patience. Demonstrating the machine in action is just too tantalising and I end up demoing after every change rather than blueprinting and refining. I am never measuring and frantically cutting up the board.
I’d like to check out other Zachtronics projects but feel like I need to retrain my brain to get into them. I appreciate they frame their key systems alongside an ethically conscious narrative, and they feel like excellent videogames I can’t quite broach.
Played a pretty early access facility-builder game called Zombie Cure Lab because I’ve actually wanted to make a zombie cure research facility game for years and was delighted to see one.
Found it pretty annoying in its current state… the room building features are particularly rough and lack a lot of the room/wall/layout modification tools you need to play a game with room-building features. I found the button for merging rooms but was unable to get it to work after 20 minutes of experimentation, haha. Doesn’t seem ready for primetime yet.
The game is also a bit too RTS-like for my tastes… the zombies attack on a day/night cycle, but you have to venture outside your base to collect wood and stone in age-of-empires-like resource collection depots. I found this extraordinarily unimaginative. In a zombie game with survival mechanics, I should be in the ruins of a city or town and should be looting buildings and collecting contemporary-society resources like metal and concrete, not plopped down in a map that looks like Warcraft or Age of Mythology or whatever.
That all said… I did find it incredibly charming. Your goal is to freeze zombies into blocks of ice, then process them through a series of machines that turn them back into humans using vast quantities of resources. So hitting a zombie with a bunch of wood and berries apparently turns it into a “Level 1 Humbie,” or a human-zombie hybrid that lives in your base, eats raw meat, and can be assigned certain rudimentary tasks. They can be slowly turned back into normal humans through immensely expensive research gates and increasingly demanding “treatment machines.” As they get more advanced, they are capable of more complex or higher-trust jobs. If they don’t get enough meat they become angry and must be frozen by your guards using snowball guns before they bite anyone.
Right now the population stress math gets out of hand really fast–after three waves of frozen zombies I was suddenly in a massive resource crunch to feed meat to all my humbies and had to make a massive kitchen full of meat machines operated by humbies themselves. It started to feel like the space shuttle problem… like I was spending fuel to transport the fuel into space so that I could spend fuel to transport more fuel to transport the rocket, etc etc etc. And not in a fun way. But the whole idea of a facility management game with job schedules and multiple worker types and a goal of upgrading all your workers to become human scientists again is super charming.
You can’t kill zombies at all in this game. I like that! I want to make a game someday about quarantine facilities and zombie curing or whatever with a similar ethos… but if I did it, there would be way less resource collecting and way more facility design. There would be negative pressure containment rooms and decontamination processes and airlocks and zombie treatment pens and different types of zombies that need different types of containment protocols. And I would absolutely not have this system of turning zombies into weak workers who drain resources, haha. I would have all the zombies with names like “Patient 34X” and when they get cured they’d check out of the damn hospital! I like facility management games… RTS resource collection mechanics are the stuff of my childhood nightmares now.
Yeah, I remembering pondering how the VR-ness of Astrobot is tied to its quality, and how to consider that when trying to asses how good of a game it is. Maybe for something like Astrobot (and maybe all 3rd VR games), technically you could adapt any of these games into a non-VR game and just control the camera with joysticks. And maybe it might be not as interesting if you play it without VR. But I don’t know if that makes the game bad, or if that’s how to really look at these games.
Your camera control in VR is certainly taken into account with level design, but I guess the most important contribution of VR is the experiential aspect. The sensory experience of being inside the world is so strong, and it just can’t be replicated outside of the visor. A world like Astrobot is designed to to be looked at as just as much as it is to be played. And I think that experience of just being able to be inside another world is integral to the purpose and appeal of many VR games, even if by a “gameplay” metric they’re relatively simple compared to traditional game design.
I played Caravan Hearts so long ago and I remember almost nothing from it but IIRC you just need to power through the beginning very fast. It’s like the beginning of Final Fantasy Legend 1/2 in which money is extremely tight and you have to rush
Too many RPGs with inverse difficulty curves.
Speaking of I played the Front Mission 1 « remake » and that game’s systems are busted. Each battle is a struggle, you’re constantly low on cash, every 1 or 2 battle you have to completely change setups for every wanzer and carefully consider each upgrade like it’s Armored Core. Until some of your guys get skills and become Pretty Good then snowball into Total Carnage Machines in like two battles as there is no xp penalty from being a higher level and they eat levels like candy and every equipment upgrade is now immediately obvious
I really like the pissed off mom who joins your team to see you die, though she starts underleveled and that’s just a death sentence in that game
The remake didn’t touch the numbers at all and just made it (much less legible) 3D with airbrushed portraits. Doesn’t look too bad, but 2D was just straight up better so this has no reasons for existing
I just find it funny how Square released two beloved late SNES TRPG remakes one month apart with such a large gap in care and budget put into them
setup primehack + hd textures and kb+mouse ui prompts, sick…
Every Shadowrun player has, at least once, dreamed of a DocWagon campaign
Lets do a docwagon game
i feel like i’m having a stroke
watching my partner unreal engine slow walk through a burning alley hallucination of sephiroth as the advent children glitchy sfx pops off
i’m sorry this game is dire
the battle system aims to give you as many button presses as possible
I remember seeing Gigant on the Steam new release list and being struck by how it looked, I’m glad someone played through it and let us all know what wonders it contained and that it wasn’t me.
ok first games played post of 2023!!
my path of exile saboteur is chuggin his way up the map tiers & while i was starting to slow in progress once i hit defensive issues around tier 12 (out of 16) some lucky drops and good luck in trade has me clearing tier 16s comfortably and feeling pretty good about the build
ol goth_sabotage is now too complicated to display correctly on the official website, so we go to screenshots of the fan created desktop character planner tool. this is an endgame tree pretty much filled out, or at least the particular slice that i’m working in. POE’s tree is organized radially with each class starting at a different spot on the interior of the circle. you’re free to path outside of your class’s starting zone but it requires more points spent on the tiny travel nodes that make up your character’s basic strength/dexterity/intelligence upgrades.
my character is the dexterity/intelligence hybrid class that sits between the pure intelligence witch to his northwest and the pure dexterity ranger to his south. this spot gives you tons of access to magical offense and defense plus tons of evasion by reaching further into the ranger’s area below. the downside of this placement is that you’re on the opposite end of the tree from all the buffs to physical defenses, leading me to randomly getting one shot by beefy physical attackers when i’d previously been cruising thru just fine. evasion is a powerful defense layer but sometimes the dice don’t roll your way.
path of exile has a couple ways to deal with this problem and i had to take advantage of two of them:
i’m not so big on the tower defense tho, sorry to get anyone’s hopes up about the nun. i kept searching trade boards for an amulet with the skill i needed. this was demoralizing because they were all too expensive by like 300 orbs lol, why do i play this it’s just like capitalism, but then i stumbled on a lucky find and remember the joy of a great Scuffed Bargain:
this thing is pretty whatever to basically anyone else (few good modifiers, corrupted so it can’t be modified anymore) but thankfully all the mods are actually helpful to my niche build and it was dirt cheap so i won’t mind tossing it for an upgrade later.
this is a neat way to add more passive skills that aren’t restricted to your little corner’s usual choices and make this game even more fucking complicated
thru trade i picked up this fella & socketed into my Jewel Hole, subtracting a few points from my defenses lower in the tree to unlock the ability to run the Determination aura, a skill that adds a powerful magical layer of armor on top of my gear, for way less than the massive 50% of your current mana reservation cost it normally requires.
speaking of recharge, i love this passive that gives me no real downside (my evasion is wayyy higher than my energy shield) while giving my energy shield a top-up the first 3 times i get popped by something. between this and the armour from determination this little murdertwink finally isn’t getting dropped in one hit and my other defenses (life recovery when my traps detonate, recharging energy shield, freezing stuff solid) do their work
also shouts to this big gaudy pile of scarabs for being easy as hell to flip for chaos orbs to afford those fancy skill tree changes above. you need to turn a bug into some screaming heads? you call me
and uhh i guess fingerless silk gloves??? i don’t know why this happened and i did not pick any of these up
ok!! feeling in a good spot to fight big bosses soon, in the meantime,,,,,
