still trying Cursed castilla (maldita castilla.EX)
hard for me, but very worth playing
consider it’s an arcade spirit game, so ‘credits used’ means a big shame. I need to train myself for beat it perfectly
9 Likes
I like Axiom Verge 2, in some ways more than the first, but just know it’s a very different game. Like, shockingly so.
4 Likes
I’m too tired to write at length, so…
Polyball: No!
Radical Rabbit Stew: Yes!
3 Likes
I reached the end of Spiritfarer today. I was constantly impressed with the art and animation. The sound and music are good, too. While some characters can get a little long-winded (mostly because you see only one line of dialog at a time), I like that they have distinct personalities and voices.
I don’t know whether it was just the order I happened to come across things, but I thought some of the upgrades becoming available earlier on might have improved the experience. The repetitive tasks and slow travel do serve to let you form some attachment to the characters, but I found that the game dragged a little in places. I think part of that was that I played a little too long per session. There’s always one more thing to do before quitting. And then one more thing.
I found the story clever in a Silent Hill sort of way. No overt horror, of course, but there are some pretty heavy themes on top of the overarching memento mori thing. You eventually learn pieces of Stella’s “real” story along with the stories of the passengers.
Almost all video games involve death in some way (often in a very shallow way), but this game joins the ranks of Continue?9876543210 in actually having something to say on the subject.
5 Likes
After just thinking it was interesting for 10 years started playing Labyrinth of Kanata. I thought I had the Japanese file but this is the fan translation. As a game with a fan translation guess there is a reason no one has talked about it.
I’ve listened to the soundtrack for years. Real nice stuff by Sakuraba. After a twist of an intro your game and 3 others are isekai’d into another world. You are still at your 3DS but have a view point into another world. There is an anime girl who hurts her but and does anime cutesy shit. She’s trying to get out of this labyrinth and the other players have to explain everything and talk agonizingly slow. Then if is dungeon crawl time. Fight balloons and slimes and spiders in a color coded fashion. Since the game is fucking 70 hours long they have to lock strategy for the battle system behind progression. @loki already provided a basic synoposis of the system.
It looks good for 3DS and is trying to run with window into another world/dungeon. The anime girl stares at you and says anime-nothings. You(plural) can’t talk to her but your teammates are giving running commentary on her vtuber live blog.
I want to play until the first boss, but had to quit just now because my 3DS ran out of batteries. Just plugged it into the wall and wished the best when I come back tonight. If my 3DS dies will move on with my life because I just played it wordlessly for 2 hours and am not doing that again.
Maybe next I’ll finally touch Nanashi no Geemu!
Hacking my 3DS for this has mostly been an exercise in mediocrity. Between the last treasure game, this, and Game Center CX3. Almost like I was actually done with this console and ready to move on already. At least there is picross.
4 Likes
In addition to Mario’s 3d worlds I’ve been playing that Taiwanese side scrolling game Legend of Tian Ding. I don’t have the contemporary games vocab to describe it but it’s good. A little too hard for me but that means it will probably be normal to everyone else here. Iirc the basic action of the game is highly derivative of some other recent game (forget what that is called), but the graphics are charming and the setting is very unique. There’s a grappling hook gimmick that feels great but they throw some ridiculously difficult platforming sections that require you to do it flawlessly on the first level. The first action you take in the game is beat up a cop. SB goty 2022.
I got distracted from that to replay alttp. Kinds of surreal how much of the tiny things I remember from playing it as a kid, while also having forgotten a ton of big stuff. Don’t want to go too deep on this but this is my apex nostalgia game I think.
7 Likes
Beat Haven. It sure is French.
Salt & Sanctuary feels fine I suppose, but it is fucking ugly as hell. Turns out any Soulslike needs to have good art or who cares. Quit at the second bonfire.
3 Likes
beat Backbone. it sure is Canadian.
with my new Series X and my gf having recently discovered that her favorite video game genre is adventure/point-and-click/puzzle solving games, i’ve been on a quest to find stuff that we can play together. Backbone was free with Game Pass, so we decided to download it since “noir adventure game” seemed like the kind of thing we’d want.
anyway, uh…i’m not sure if i’ve played a game so obviously rushed out the door since maybe Xenogears. the game’s scope and story are too big for its own good. they obviously wanted this game to be like 3 or 4 times longer than it is (clocks in around 4 - 6 hours), because the story gets so muddled and bizarre by the end, you’d swear you were playing a different game than the one you started.
i don’t want to spoil the entire story per se, but i’ll spoil it a little bit (and use tags where necessary).
mostly, the first two hours of this game deliver what is promised; satisfying investigative work and interesting conversations where you feel like you are really directing what is happening (at this point in the game, i didn’t know there weren’t alternate paths or endings) on the screen.
then, it kind of just stops and you are just collecting things to advance plot points. the plot completely goes off the rails, and nothing you were doing in the beginning of the game has any meaning. oh, and you become Venom and then die, uneventfully.
edit: decided to add the plot points since i have time now:
Summary
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you start the game looking into a cheating husband. quickly, you discover that he has been murdered; his body cut up into chunks of meat to be delivered somewhere.
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you then find yourself on the trail of a conspiracy wherein the Apes (the overlords of this animal world) are apparently eating other animal…people?..at private dinner parties.
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you team up with a journalist who is investigating a night club owner. the club owner owns the club where you discovered the dead guy (she is apparently supplying the meat to the apes).
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you find out she’s involved with the science minister, and they’re researching something called “The Artifact.”
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you confront the scientist, and then uh…the artifact possesses you and you become Venom, i guess
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you unceremoniously kill your friend (the taxi driver who, arguably, is the best character in the game and in the game enough to be like a second character) and then get taken in by a group of romanticized unhoused people
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you watch a longer-than-five-minutes song around a campfire (not sure of actual length; i skipped the cutscene after 5 minutes)
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the camp gets raided and you get kidnapped
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you get tortured and tested on in the lab and then escape
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you die
8 Likes
I think between Radical Rabbit Stew, Candleman, and Quake I’ve settled upon a pretty decent rotation of “games I’ll play a few levels of at a time and then leave alone for a while.”
But in the meantime I’m looking for something else to scratch an itch I can’t quite identify.
I tried Honey Rose: Underdog Fighter Extraordinaire. You, the player, act as the angel on the shoulder of a young woman who is trying to balance her parents’ academic expectations with her own dreams of being a pro wrestler. The protagonist continually refers to you in the second person and asks what she should do, etc. It’s a life management sim/visual novel thing with occasional real time 2D fights. I like the art, and I love the premise!
But the writing isn’t great, at least not in the early going, and the real time fights are real bad! The latter especially is a shame because they are obviously going to be a big part of the game. I don’t think I’m going to put more time into this.
Got to what I guess is the first boss which I was dealing 15-30 damage against and they had 5000 health and 4 mooks.
Dying meant being kicked back to the fake-out 8bit game and then being confronted with an overpowered boss. Wow love to get my ass kicked twice before a game over.
Anyways the battles went on for too long and I had to watch the anime slowly open every door.
Miserable game, will not play again.
1 Like
Gran Turismo 3 via PCSX2 with the USBqemu wheel mod and my Logitech G29 is interesting. The FFB is a lot better than I expected. I adjusted the linearity and dead zones a bit, but further tweaking will be required.
Further tweaking will be required on the graphics settings as well. I wonder if I’ll ever find a combination of settings I’m perfectly happy with.
Blasting around the Sunday Cup races in a red Trueno with the precision a steering wheel offers is a really odd-but-good feeling on a game this old.
9 Likes
I wish they’d add Charles Bronson as Mr. Majestyk to fortnite
7 Likes
I’m a little less than 3 hours into Little Dragon’s Café and so far the coolest thing that’s happened is my little dragon turned purple because I kept feeding him steak bowls.
A very pretty little island the game takes place on, hope they let me see more soon because the daily routine of ingredient gathering and customer serving is getting stale.
1 Like
hey I beat Radical Rabbit Stew last week! That game’s pretty good. I wish it had a more active level making community, there were a lot of good ideas that didn’t get that much time in the main game.
I’ve been playing Die in the Dungeon, this pay what you want itch rogue lite game you can play in your browser, where you build up a bag of dice while going through a 20 floor dungeon. There isn’t that much game here but the central mechanics are real interesting. You have this grid where you put your dice down to do things. You can boost dice a certain number of slots away using these purple boost dice. If it’s a +3 boost, 3 slots away get 3 more to their dice face, and so forth. That means lower amounts hit more of the board, which means if you get some free to use dice the more economic boost dice can technically give you more bang for your buck.
(Excuse the MS paint green lines and red text, it makes a lot of sense when you actually play it)
Enemies can also put things on your grid which you have to fill to avoid a negative consequence, or can block it outright. Unfortunately there doesn’t end up being much strategy and there’s too much variance, since the enemies hit you in a random range which can be in a range of like, 2 - 6 for a basic enemy, which is a bit hard to plan around when you can’t even put out 6 shield in a turn. Plus there’s only a few dice types and one boss so you don’t end up having radically different runs or anything. It isn’t that hard either, so the runs you lose end up feeling like a cop out once you figure out the games flow chart. I still think it’s neat, with a bit more content it could be a real good time.
6 Likes
continuing my “games i’d only play with Game Pass” trend:
What Remains of Edith Finch - i don’t recall people discussing this one here; maybe they did. anyway, what is the videogame equivalent of Oscar bait? this game feels like it’s following the Big Fish/Forest Gump style of story telling. it mostly accomplishes its mission, in that regard. the first few times the game shifts its play style, it’s neat and surprising. after a while, though, it wears thin. definitely has the “no, videogames are actually not for children, see!” vibe to it. not unpleasant. gf found the ending kind of depressing and not really a good enough pay off.
non game pass game:
Demons of Asteborg - holy shit, this rules. while it’s multiplatform, i recommend playing it on a Genesis/Mega Drive, if you can, as it’s really impressive for the hardware. a cool concept of “what if we added search action to classic Castlevania” by which i do not mean Metroidvanias and by which i do mean: levels are broken up into sequential order, but each stage has exploration within it in order to advance to the next level. solid controls and everything else all around. only had enough time to play through the first boss, but it happily has a save feature so i’ll make more progress tonight.
edit: thinking on this, i guess the MSX Castlevania is kind of like this, but Asteborg is definitely a tighter experience
8 Likes
Nioh 2 is alright!! It’s not Dark Souls (the 2/3 of the first game that I played) and I don’t get the same feelings from it at all. But I actually really dig the level-based structure vs. the pseudo-open-world of that game. It gives me specific goals and challenges to meet, and while it’s far less mysterious, it’s a lot more approachable.
The combat for me has boiled down to finding about 3 attacks I like and just finding the opportune times to use them, but I enjoy that. There seems to be a ton of room for complexity (as someone mentioned somewhere) but there’s no real need to use it. And finding the opportune times is a pleasant enough friction for me.
I think it leans a little too much into the “you’re gonna dieeee” thing, meaning that boss fights are a little too hard. And I don’t think that certain enemies telegraph their attacks appropriately, so it can feel unfair. Luckily, leveling in this game seems to make a huge difference so I’ve been able to power through things that otherwise wrecked me.
I guess the biggest “it’s not dark souls” thing is that there’s no rhythm to the combat, or at least not to me. It feels like I’m finding opportunities to strike rather than performing an elaborate dance. This is okay! I prefer the dance but I enjoy this as well.
It’s also funny because I feel like Dark Souls was very specifically teaching me how to play, meaning my brain was engaged directly in that learning experience. “When this happens, do that, then this, and try to add another element to see if it works”. It’s a very conscious feeling for me and failure is (usually) instructive.
Nioh 2 is a lot less conscious, and a lot more intuitive. I’m not learning as I play (that I can feel, anyway) and failure often feels unfair. But when I come back to it after a good night’s sleep I’m performing a lot better, meaning I learned something.
I dunno, I dig it. The AAA trappings (massive amounts of useless loot; “3.6% additional damage in High stance when at full health” type bonuses; elaborate crafting systems that are totally unnecessary for most of the game; oh my god another fucking menu huh?; maybe a little too polished; etc.) are a letdown as always, but I find the core of the game to be enjoyable and interesting.
Also playing it in co-op is a blast and way fucken easier than trying to do the same in Dark Souls.
11 Likes
as you can see by the 1/2 star review i gave it, i did not enjoy that game.
1 Like
yeah i had to post this in lieu of not currently being sure of when we will hang out yet so i could talk shit
2 Likes
i know someone who worked on that game who is very nice. i fully expected to like that game going in esp with the glowing reviews it got. i think that’s part of why i ended up disliking it as much as i did.
tried out Tetris Effect on Game Pass and the first area on normal I was like, cool, I’m vibing with this, and then in the second it lifted the speed cap and suddenly I was super, super owned
I remain just not very good at fast Tetris, alas. Even dropping the difficulty to easy didn’t seem to help, it still sped up to the point where I was screwed. Might give it another shot in VR mode (was surprised this is in the game pass version, neat!) but otherwise I don’t think I’ll be doing much more sadly
also gave Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator a shot, it sort of just doesn’t have an introductory tutorial so you spend a while pushing buttons to see what happens. I appreciate the level of dystopia it’s on, but man, just a little intro to what you’re supposed to start out doing would’ve been real helpful
2 Likes