i got a copy of the tenchu standalone expansion, shinobi hyakusen!
it’s made up of 100 fanmade stages (made using the stage editor that was only in the jp version of the original game. what’s the deal with ps1 western publishers and assuming we didn’t ant creation modes?).
you start with 20 unlocked from the start, and you unlock one more every time you finish a stage within the par time. and it’s really difficult! not impossible, though. i’ve only played the first few stages so far, but the difference in clear times between just my first and second attempts is massive
Overload is the best of the bunch to me, and the one closest to my Descent ideal. Miner Wars stunk (and the dev team went on to make Space Engineers, a much more successful game) and Sublevel Zero is… okay? the Roguelike generation in it is really shallow and the combat isn’t very good but it’s pretty and came out before Overload so
it’s not like descent at all except for combat but NeonXSZ is still so perfect and reminds me of descent + gta when i play it
One of these days I’ll get around to trying Retrovirus which is the last Descent clone I have left in my backlog.
But for tonight, cleared another chapter of Sizeable. I might not actually “finish” this one until December. There’s apparently seasonal Christmas levels that can only be played after the 21st of December and I’m enjoying this game enough to keep it installed until then. I’ve even set a calendar reminder for myself.
I also made it a few levels deeper into Quake, which I play like a complete coward. Will I run like hell to an exit instead of fighting a Shambler/Deathknight duo? Yes, absolutely. Will I also allow boobytraps to slowly chip badguys to death when they just sit there, not reacting? Yes. Will I also hang back and chill out while a pair of baddies duel to the death because one of them accidentally caught the other with friendly fire? Will I spend probably too much ammo slowly sniping at an enemy through a small gap while they pace back and forth, unable to counterattack? Yup! I’m surviving and that’s all I care about.
had my first death on this character to the (appropriately named) Meatwhipper The Wretched, who immediately quadrupled in size & attack speed and slamdanced me into the corner like a used car sales inflatable tube man from hell
I’m not gonna lie, your posts about the game actually make it sound really cool, I’ve long dreamed of a detective game that refuses to have answers, like a Memories of Murder: the video game kind of thing
I liked Paradise Killer’s approach to it. There is a set of canon culprits in the murder conspiracy (the ones who confess after you’ve convicted them), but in your capacity as detective-prosecutor, it’s within your power to present the evidence in such a way as to convince the judge of anything, true or not.
To see if it was possible, I did one run where I got all 12 suspects scot free, and another one where I sentenced all 12 to death (that involved convincing the judge of four mutually exclusive narratives at the same time, but they’re a divine judge apparently beyond logic).
yeah. I felt like Paradise Killer was, in the end, just a little too ambivalent about sticking the landing as a result, but seeing as so many other investigation games are so pat, I appreciated the experiment (and in a way it felt more consistent with the rest of the game progression anyhow)
Yeah, and Paradise Killer’s world is wildly irrational and unjust, and it becomes clear that the crime you’re tasked to investigate is not even “the real crime” in a moral sense.
So the trial had to be consonant with that vibe. You can choose to find satisfaction by applying logic and untangling the web of conspiracy in your own mind, but you can’t expect anything from the broken system.
It’s one of those games where it’s ending up sounding more interesting thinking about it after, or writing it out here, but in the moment of playing it was really frustrating. another week I’d probably be ready to give it 4 stars on action button. maybe others will like it more, or knowing what’s coming will be less frustrated. but it’s more like instead of the game refusing to have answers in a zodiac or a memories of murder type way, reality and the answers become whatever you just decided. I think I might of liked it more if it was one long case dragging on just to end with no definite answers
I also keep thinking about it because this is actually exactly how I would prefer to play most crpgs. most of them I look up the endings to quests and stuff ahead of time, I don’t care about making choices in the moment. If a game wants me to make my own character tweaking some stats at the beginning isn’t good enough, I want to be half dungeon master and write out and go through the most fitting or interesting story for them.
I don’t know if that works for me in a detective game though. but I don’t know that I ever thought to even imagine such a thing before. the 100% Subjective Detective, despite being the guy with the science crime fighting kit when everyone else is just doing hunches. a mystery game where at the end of the mystery you gather everyone in the dining room and decide what the mystery actually was.
obviously the next step is sherlock holmes vs fantomas, no matter how bizarre the crime holmes can link the evidence and make it true and no matter how much holmes solves fantomas can always make any impossible escape or identity change a reality, anyone can be accused of being fantomas and it’s always correct.
Man this game… I played through all of it because the dungeons and numbers were pretty nice
But the devs are all videogame nerds stuck in 2005, and, while I don’t think they have been outed or whatever, their game is very explicitly conservative/fascist. Which might not even be conscious to the devs themselves, seeing as they’re videogame nerds stuck in 2005.
This is one of the gamergatest games
there’s an eye rolling « this game has a lot of violence and gore, if you can’t deal with it, get out » disclaimer at the start
the protagonist is a crusader, crusaders and christianity in the middle ages are being painted in a favorable light throughout the game
there’s 1 gleeful endorsement of an execution by hanging
there’s a vindicated fear of being replaced by suspicious traveling individuals
when faced with an ambiguous choice, you always get awarded more good points for being a fascist. Spare the nice skeleton? He was secretly evil, now one woman is dead. -3 good points.
I felt malaise after a while, just playing the game, seeing that worldview, thinking about those fucking devs in arrested development. Which never happened with other games like Ys 9. I would pay to retract the money I spent, and I really need to spend money on literally any keyringvania game
To complement my work-frazzled nerves like a fine wine, I’ve gone ahead and finished episode 2 of Quake. I am becoming a little more bold. Maybe only Shamblers give me much pause, and to be honest in a lot of situations dangerous enemies can be cheesed a bit because their pathfinding/ability to track you seem somewhat poor. But I’ve gotten into the rhythm of circle-strafing around Death Knights and Fiends, and grenade-dueling Ogres.
I appreciate that episode 3 dispenses with the formalities a little and let me pick up a double barreled shotgun almost immediately so I could mow down Grunts. Running up on them and one-shotting them is very gratifying.
played all the post-riven myst games recently, what with the recent humble bundle.
myst 3 is good but maybe underwhelming coming off myst and riven. very light.
myst 4 is way worse and for the opposite reason. everything is too much. the visuals are so incredibly busy and full of movement, as is the sound, and the very constant music, and on top of this it has quite a huge load time between movements and some very involved and busy puzzles which i barely have the energy to pay attention to with everything going on.
uru and myst 5 are both great tho. they are both wonderful to move around and just look at, without feeling overwhelmed. will admit i didn’t solve all the puzzles in these games clean, tho i did spend a considerable amount of time on each. i definitely care more about the environments the puzzles are in than the puzzles themselves.
I’m playing the new Horizon (on PS4—I’m not made out of money like some kind of money golem) and it’s the biggest One of Those games I’ve ever seen, which is good if you like Those and I guess bad if you don’t like Those.
I’m still enjoying it because fundamentally I like to be a little guy and I like to have my little tasks, but in some ways the veneer has worn off the first one and, like a lot of the latter Assassin’s Creed games, you can see the calculating cynicism at almost every point of development. It has Witcher vision because it was good in the Witcher 3. It has crafting because it was good in The Witcher 3. It has a glider because it was good in Breath of the Wild. The dialogue is noticeably a bit more Marvel-movie than the last one. Imo Horizon always floated on having a relatively novel sci-fi setting (although basically just for the staunchly conservative world of games; it fails to ever be as weird as almost any book), but it’s really showing that it has no ideas that aren’t just recombinations of other things from big budget games and movies.
I can say a lot of good things about it for sure—the robots are cool as hell and fighting them rules, it looks totally gorgeous, the exploration is good, the setting is interesting and every NPC looks like they took (to quote Vinny Caravella) “way too many items out of the cosplay tickle trunk,” but it still feels like… you can literally feel the money oozing out of every single second and obviously that’s good in some ways and a real bummer in other ways.
Finally beat legend of tianding. The last boss is very hard. This is the first game I’ve completed on hard difficulty setting and I honestly don’t think my mind and body are cut out for this sort of thing. Every time I succeed it feels like I’ve tricked my self into unlocking some sort of superpower reservoir that isn’t meant to be tapped. I mean like Mario 3d world proved too much for me at times idk why I put myself through it. For the culture I guess. Anyway I need to do something much less reflex / reaction time based for awhile so my nerves can recover. Idk how y’all do it lol
I had a harder time getting into the first one than I expected, even after Spiderman which I found agreeable enough by Sony prestige AAA standards – the presentation is just a little too much and not enough for me at the same time. I probably would’ve been tempted by this one on a purely $$$ level if not for the fact that there are a half dozen big budget games I’m interested in also coming out in the next month after like a yearlong drought, and the reports that she natters to herself even more obviously in this one.
Also the buttons on the normal switch controller really aren’t built for this. My hands hurt so bad… I think I need to get a different controller if I want to play another action game. Are any of the non Nintendo made ones cheaper/good?
I only did the professionally-mandated Le Grand Tour of the first Horizon and enjoyed it well enough, but nothing has turned me off the sequel more than hearing this repeated a few times.
