Damn this sounds rad
1 Like
I like ElecHead more than almost any game Iāve played, at least in a long time.
The overall core conceit simple platforming mixed with a unique mechanical hook for exhaustive but nonrepetitive variations on environmental puzzles is, basically, my catnip, and often what I aspire to in making my own stuff. I feel like this has almost never been done better.
There is a room in this game where you have to collect as many little trinkets that appear in random places as you can in a short timeframe, and then you can try to collect even more to set a high score. I played this for an hour and a half yesterday when I should have been knuckling down on my freelance work, just trying to get to 40. That room alone is maybe my 2021 āgame of the year.ā
I had been a little nervous about its mild resemblance to a āMetroidvaniaā in its structure when I first started, but the way it implements itāthe game is largely linear, rooms become almost trivial once youāve solved them once, coming back to old rooms with new eyes/upgrades (there are only two) really changes the way you think about solving some very clever puzzles, thereās fast travel that breaks the game into manageable chunksāis kind of brilliant.
When Iāve finally cracked the solution to some puzzles (which i sometimes have worked at for 10-20 minutes, gave up on, and then came back to the next day), Iāve cackled at how clever they are (and occasionally how I couldnāt see the solution before).
Itās really aesthetically cute and confident in itself, with a stripped down palette and swappable themes like Downwell.
Iām now down to just 2 pieces remaining that I need to collect to end the game or move to the final area or whateverās behind a door, and Iām not sure where they are, and as much as Iāve been enjoying this, I may need to seek some help online for how to solve these last little bits.
Anyway, it may not be everyoneās cup of tea, but if the words āpuzzle platformerā donāt make your eyes roll back so far in your head you choke in the year 2022, I canāt recommend this enough.
In conclusion, [ito_thisholeitwasmadeforme.png]
22 Likes
to be fair it also crashes a lot
1 Like
sounds like my experience running HoMM2 and HoMM3 in the past few years lol
HoMM3-but-it-looks-like-2 is something Iāve wanted for 20 years
2 Likes
itās been in the works for half that time!!
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i beat this shit head via my awful strategy, then went ahead and did it 10 more times against the OTHER shit head. at one point i had my armageddon guy at 99 spell power due to the 5 top-tier wand artifacts i had. then i gave all those wands to my sorceress lady and finished cleaning house. incredibly dumb map but it was good.
6 Likes
my copy of Mega Man The Wily Wars arrived the other day. i had just replayed this over the summer on my flashcart, so itās nice to notice that the slowdown is indeed improved in this version (still pretty bad at times, though).
i really enjoy these remakes, but they lack a bit of the character of the NES games. in some instances, enemy sprites are completely misinterpreted and just wrong (this is rare), but this gives the game its own flavor, strangely enough. since the artwork and style is uniform throughout each game, the original trilogy is a bit harder to tell apart than it is on the NES. itās not bad, but sometimes you wonder if they understood what gave some of the original stages their vibe.
though uncredited, proud New Jersey resident and Mega Man X3 composer, Kinuyo Yamashita, did a nice job with translating the original tunes over to the Genesis sound chip, with only a couple that i canāt abide in comparison to their NES counterparts. i have to imagine playing and arranging this many tracks had to have been an incredible amount of work.
17 Likes
I mentioned Globesweeper some time back (think minesweeper on a globe). Iāve been picking away at the absurdly large triangle version of it (each triangle touches likeā¦ nine or a dozen other ones) and starts with over 3800 mines you gotta mark. This is an absurd endurance challenge and I decided too much of one so I allowed myself to make a backup of the suspend save after every successfully marked 1000 mines. Iāve been picking away at this for at least several hours now over many sessions and tonight was near the end andā¦ I mismarked the very last mine and blew it all up. Fortunately I have a save from back when I got down to 1000 left but that is legit at least a couple hours work down the drain in a flash.
I also realized I started playing The Last of Us 2 over a month ago and still donāt feel close to any sort of ending; I finished far Cry 5 in just under 3 weeks and that was an Ubi openworld game where I did most of the side missions.
5 Likes
I am loving this game it is totally my kinda party house thank you for exposing me to it
3 Likes
Okay I played 20 minutes of Deathās Door.
That a podcast spoiled the one big joke has made me itchy. It will just itch me the whole time if I continue playing. The game is completely unvoiced and text based until you get to some boss a few hours in who yells āYou Little Shit!ā I mean that would be a good joke if I didnāt know it was coming.
It looks fine. The enemies are little puzzles to solve. At one point I went behind the scenery and the camera flipped around to show me a ladder I could go down and a hole I could enter, I got 1 out of 4 Life Upgraders. That also made me itchy.
Weāll see.
I also wanted to start Neo World Ends With You but it didnāt recognize my save from the demo because region stuff I suspect. And my time is so limited I donāt know if I want to take my daily two hours to button mash through the first two days of the game. Maybe Iād flip and just try to seat-of-my-pants the entire game. Could be fun. No side-quests, no grinding, just what drops for me.
Three highly divergent attempts later I have finally managed it. Iām now managing a tightrope act as one instance of mismanagement causes about half of the realm to raise up in war against my tyranny, probably because most of these territories were conquered on the claim of āuhh my bishop said this was mine because i told him to say thatā. Probably need like a generation or two to legitimize the mythos of the kingdom.
After my current guy dies there is a slight split in inheritance where my dullard older son gets the entire kingdom while my younger and extremely duplicitous son just gets Connacht, so Iām excited for some really telegraphed fratricide.
15 Likes
Gurumin is really good and further convinces me that Falcomās One Trick is Meaningful Upgrades. I love that level 1 of the gas mask is 50% reduced damage from gas, and level 2 is 100% reduced damage. Whatās level 3 even going to be? Is gas gonna fucking heal me? It rules.
Why canāt other games do this though? What is it with modern game design where level 1 will be like, 13% reduced damage from a single element under certain circumstances if youāre lucky, and level 2 is like 15% reduced damage from a single element under certain circumstances if youāre lucky?
Honestly donāt even answer that question, itās skinner boxes all the way down.
Anyway Gurumin is cute and has a DnB adjacent song so Iām into it
17 Likes
WHATEVER THE FORMALITY EQUIVALENT TO SIR IS FOR A THEY (please let me know to insert here),
Falcomās āone trickā? First they are the only great games publisher left. They are a sacred cow to be defended from this bleak bleak world. There is no one-trick.
But if there was āone trickā they have itās writing so good that you can push past multipole instances of incest and still argue they have made the best JRPG series of all time. Wish theyād take out the incest at least in localizationā¦
Also glad you liked this goober of a game.
2 Likes
actually, its this. you nailed it in one. you have to say this whole thing every single time
anyway iām definitely being a little facetious about their One Trick but I do think itās the bedrock of their game design from the games i have played which notably includes none of their JRPGs. The writing in Gurumin is actually really charming as well.
Anyway Iām trying to remember all the falcom games Iāve played and I think itās
Xanadu Next (fucking monumentally great game, absolutely perfect, no notes)
Zwei: The Arges Adventure (fine but didnāt get into it)
Ys: The Oath in Felghana (burned out in it but it was not bad at all)
Faxanadu (barely counts)
Gurumin
So yeah Iām clearly into their action content, and the big thing those all share is that Meaningful Upgrades thing. So thatās my theory!!
6 Likes
Upgrades that give you straight-up immunity to major game mechanics also one of the things Brogueās design philosophy is about. I recall in this interview he also specifically mentions total immunity to gas as one example:
The whole game needs to be designed with that in mind. Games end up with like 8% reduced damage from fire when they fully design a game first and then try to add upgrades without fundamentally changing the experience.
7 Likes
I hate incremental upgrades with a passion. āIf the value is below 50%, the player wonāt even noticeā is my rule of thumb. Only hyper-optimizers care about the 5% stuff. Thatās also my biggest problem with games like Diablo; getting an item that has 1% more fire damage than my existing item or whatever isnāt interesting at all. These are ābuild-craftingā games, so let me craft a build dammit!
17 Likes
That reminds me of how I fought Orphan of Kos like 100 times while having a +15% damage to Kin bloodgem equipped. But it turns out Orphan isnāt a Kin so it was doing nothing at all. What I shouldāve been equipping is a generic +10% damage to everything bloodgem.
I didnāt notice the difference or think to test it. But I sure noticed that in ~five of those attempts, I brought down his health to <10% before failing at the last minute
4 Likes
nothing drives me more crazy than ten percent upgrades like itās not enough to notice until you donāt have it anymore then you lose your mind cuz everything feels wrong when you donāt have it (FUCK YOU PELOTON ((not the bike I mean fuck the bike too but Iām talking about the power)) and your slight movement speed increase FUCK YOU
7 Likes
god can you imagine incremental upgrades in a VR game of all things because I sure canāt and yet somehow thatās the entirety of our gameās system design
12 Likes