Ha… haha… hahahahahahahaha
Game has been on my wishlist for years and hasn’t gone on sale in the last 3 years or so and only once in its entire history. Trust me, I’ve been waiting for that last bit for a looooooong time…
Also I played a bit of the Bonfire Peaks demo and it seemed very solid.
Woops, a game has hooked my brain very hard and it just ate my morning. Iris and the Giant. It plays similarly to Slay the Spire but the biggest twist is that you are fighting a grid of enemies and whenever you kill an enemy/destroy an item/pick up powerups everything shuffles forward. Including the staircase you need to reach to ascend to the next level. Some enemies can attack from behind the first row, many cannot. In some regards it actually reminds me of Enyo even though that’s a very different game.
Also! Your deck does not reshuffle, and if you run out of cards completely you lose the game (alongside having to not run out of HP). So this game is not so strictly focused on optimizing a deck build because you are sometimes greatly incentivized to grab a whole mess of cards just to avoid running out after some grueling encounters.
You can earn permanent upgrades between runs that come in the form of Memories (basically skillpoints you can assign/reassign to turn on/off passive buffs) and Imaginary Friends (also passive buffs that you can toggle on/off, but obtaining these requires to you to meet certain objectives during a run). So you can make things a little easier and have a sense of progression or also be a true hardcore believer in The Heart of the Cards if you want to dive in without any help every run.
There is a story here, about how a little girl is trying to face her inner demons etc., you can mostly skip it although you’ll be interrupted by the same vignettes every run (you can skip them but it is still annoying). I love the art, it’s minimalistic flat style illustrations that I think work really well.
I’m a little surprised this game seems not to have made much of a splash. Maybe it was just regarded as another Slay the Spire clone and disregarded. And I guess that’s fair, a ton of clones came out and few of them were really much good. (I kinda liked Night of the Werewolf which played things pretty straight other than having a lot more looping narrative stuff going on).
Anyway! I guess this one is going to be in the rotation for a while.
I have finished RDR2 at 62 hours played. It was really lovely for about 25 or 30 hours. The movement was clunky but it also encouraged me to try to play more deliberate, and slowly. But as the mission structure with its suffocating limitations became familiar, and I learned this game has a total of 110 story missions to play through, I started rushing for the end and the movement just felt in the way of almost everything I was trying to do. Most of my time playing this game was dead sensation. I was really interested in the character moments you get during the missions and cutscenes, because they are really good. I don’t know if all that was worth the time I gave the game though. In the end, I think the mission design and structure become unbearable way too early in the duration of this game. If it were shorter (it would never be), or if Rockstar just let players have some freedom I really think it would be a game I want to slow down in and learn to enjoy its movement texture like I have with other awkward controlling games in the past.
The funnniest thing about this game to me is just how many things get bound either to USE or SHOOT. If you play through the whole story, with your shootin or usin fingers alone you will: build a house, brush a horse, milk cows, scrub tubs, lift legs to suck venom, and then suck venom, pull people up off cliffs and pull them in close for hugs. And you will confuse them all the time too. The buttons have no identity and in stressful scenes you never know how intensely they will complicate a simple action like stopping someone from choking Arthur, and you will never understand why it is one button over the other.
Probably from hanging around a puzzle game discord too often but a SSR clone doesn’t do much for me anymore, but Mirror Drop was really refreshing. The puzzles are pretty simple but they make you think in terms of like abstract math which you don’t find in too many games.
Feels like a cool museum exhibit – found it really striking and beautiful.
they still haven’t fixed Fanatec wheels in Forza Horizon 5 (what is this, some form of revenge for the Gran Turismo partnership?), so I gave up on that and played some more Dirt 4. damn good fun with a wheel, though a bit tricky to get the force feedback set up right - it’s pretty aggressive about recentering to begin with, but once dialled in it feels solid. It’s also making me wish I had a handbrake lever rather than on-wheel button, oh dear
the biggest issues I have with it, really, are that none of the tracks are in any way memorable - they’ve gone for a generated-from-prefab-blocks type of track system, which does mean you can generate your own custom ones (though you can’t manually edit individual segments, boo! just influence the parameters of the generation algorithm) and they’re equally convincing versus the predefined ones, but there’s nothing to distinguish them.
there’s a real deep state of focus you enter where you’re just focused on the road ahead and listening to your co-driver’s course notes, and that’s fun in and of itself, but there’s no track you’d ever go “damn, I want to improve my time on that one” because they’re all so completely indistinguishable
there have been games which did this kind of track generation before - I played hundreds of hours of V-Rally 2 as a kid - but I still remember those tracks; SS01 Australia is burned into my brain like it’s the route to the local shops and I’m hungry - something doesn’t quite stick to your brain with the ones in Dirt 4
Tales of the Neonsea made a really bad first impression on me and one Steam reviewer mentioned being 14 hours in and still going, so I bailed on it.
Cyberhook failed to fill the void left by Clustertruck the way I wanted it to, plus it for some reason kept making me go through the tutorial if I backed out to the main menu? I ain’t got time for that.
I also called it quits on Candleman, because it keeps asking me to do pretty finnicky platforming while subject to fixed camera angles and poor visibility, which is a really great way to enrage me. If not for that I think the ambience would have kept me going. I like the core concept, but the camera thing is a huge misstep.
Video games giveth, and video games taketh away
that’s fair. while i am a fully SSR-brained person i think puzzle games are an especially subjective thing because there are a lot of people who just can’t stand them or can only stand certain types of them. people who are left cold by SSR or other games in that mold (i.e. the Draknek games) might still really enjoy Mirror Drop just due to the novelty of what kind of game it is, and i don’t want to downplay the coolness of the environments visually.
Today I had an idea to fly a fighter in Star Citizen I really haven’t spent much time with since picking it up.
Also today it’d seem the ground crew that moves the ship to hangar in preparation for launch is having themselves a real one.
Dirt 4 is definitely my most played Fanatec wheel game after FH4 and Snowrunner and I agree this is the main thing wrong with it – let me know if you find something else you like as much!
(Dirt 5 is awful, they tried to rip off Horizon and they wound up with all of Microsoft’s garish crap production and none of the sheer budget to make it work)
is it a fun free game to download to my PlayStation
I have no racing games on it so I considered trying it out this month, seeing how the multiplayer is
Will do!
Do you have any recommendation for how to bind controls in Snowrunner? I want to give it a go but wasn’t clear on what buttons I should put where
you have to have the mouse handy for the UI but I thought the default bindings worked great beyond that
not sure if your direct drive wheel can inherit the regular CSL profiles automatically
I think I’m near the end of It Takes Two. I’ve been playing it only whenever my second player visits every few weeks, so progress is slow. Also, the game is much longer that I would have guessed. Not because it wastes your time, there’s just a lot of unique content.
It’s easily the best game of the “series,” though I also liked Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and A Way Out. I didn’t play this one immediately because the cover art made it look like it would be focused on comedy. Which it kind of is, but it also tries to be meaningful and touch on serious topics in a way that you might expect to see in an animated movie for children. It’s not too grating, though, and I’d recommend the game for the generous variety in mechanics and environments.
I’ve been playing it local co-op, but as with A Way Out you can play online when only one of the two players owns the game. (Or neither, if you have XBOX Game Pass.)
it has a compatibility mode but I think the issue is the newer wheel just having fewer games that recognise it out of the box, whatever mode the wheel base is in
Unmemory is an interactive book thing (more so than in the sense of a Visual novel) where there are interactive bits you scroll by as you’re reading the story, and then when something in the text (or a sound cue) gives you a clue for how to proceed/use that item, you scroll up/down and do it! This is very cool as a concept. In practice, I’m going to give myself a fucking RSI in my scrollwheel finger so I’m probably not going to continue. I suspect maybe this game was designed for touchscreens and later ported to PC.
I’ll be honest it took me a hot second when I heard a phone ringing to remember I’d scrolled by one early on and I should scroll up and answer it, lol.
Also there’s a TV that showed pretty significant portions of like, actual TV shows and such. Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was on one channel and how (or if) they got a license to have that in the game I do not know.
Yeah. Really neat but I have a feeling it’ll just wear me out. It also immediately dumped a cryptography puzzle on me and I just don’t know if I have enough brain cells left to focus on doing it.
I tried Sword and Fairy 6 and not going to stick with it. Weird to see pop-anime influence all over The CHINESE FINAL FANTASY or what have you. None of the characters immediately annoyed me, and the cutscenes themselves flowed quickly. The fonts were frequently unreadable crucially the battle text from 8 feet away.
Which hey PC game port to PS4 the controls were also janky, the translation was questionable.
You know I have never played a MMORPG? And any game that has those trappings immediately repels me.
I died versus a Big Scorpion and that felt like a good ending. The evil cult won, rode around on their giant scorpions.
I made that thread today and this just hit like all the boxes of not for this dad, difficult to look at, piles of arbitrary video game bullshit I need to learn, janky and glitchy, actually designed for a Monitor, and long. My actual thought during the hour was “god just give me a AAA game please.”
Maybe tomorrow I’ll try again with PS4 Disco Elysium and those 40 second load times.
We get older this forum is just going to be “I tried a game. I don’t have time for this shit.”
On a whim I finished playing Knights of San Francisco just now. I really liked it. Breezy, inspired music, fun setting with a good sense of mystery. Never feels like there are many gotchas like with a lot of CYOA stuff.
I picked basically the “lawful evil” ending, so to speak, mostly because I wanted to see if that was actually a trap.
I’m actually in the final series of stages in the rally mode of DiRT 4.
They threw this brutal difficulty curve at me that I love. 9 miles of Spanish backroads in ridiculously heavy rain? Sure. 7 miles of fog-filled farmland dirt roads in Wales with less visibility than Turok on the n64? Why not!
Oh and I know we just got serviced but do you feel that misfire?
Make sure not to hit the crashed car ahead of us that the AI seemed to be able to ignore altogether.
The co-driver’s complete lack of fear doesn’t help matters.
“You should push harder. A win here is gonna give us access to upgrades and better events.” As we start a stage in the final championship in a fully upgraded car.
“Middle over big jump” then just as we are cresting the jump “into hairpin right”. Fuck!
Anything less than maximum attack leaves us in second place. Combine that with the AI co-driver who values winning above life and limb, and you’ve got ten minutes of hyperfocused driving where one error leads to tragedy.
Put a couple of hours into Circle of the Moon, the one GBA Castlevania I never played, and I’m gonna say “y’know, I’m good,” and bail. Just, uh, not great! Maybe I’m just a baby and it’s too hard, but it feels like a goddamn mess in just about every way. Boring bosses! Weird gigantic vertical shafts everywhere. Bad writing, for what little there is. Very poor sort of rhythm or flow to the whole thing.
Good music, though.
Dipped into Harmony of Dissonance and it’s immediately calmed me down. I forgot how hilarious it is that right after Juste talks shit to a shopkeep for setting up in the castle, he wanders into a room and says “wow, nice room, it sucks shit though, I’m gonna put a chair in here.” The whole furniture collecting thing slipped my mind.
