The Cage Spiral
2 Likes
Gran Turismo 7 is Extremely pleasant and a perfect cleanser from a week of playing Elden Ring nonstop. I only wish itād let me just sit in the goofy car cafe and look around.
7 Likes
Even if itās not my style, I got a bit curious about Atelier Ryza. Has anybody played it?
2 Likes
ryza is really good, i started it the week before endwalker came out and havenāt gone back to it since then but the thirty or forty hours i spent on it i really loved. itās just like very well done anime/jrpg comfort food, if your interest is piqued at all youāll probably have a good time with it
6 Likes
Iāve tried Atelier games several times (the latest one Iāve tried is Totori because it was especially highly reviewed), and always stopped playing after an hour or two. Knowing your taste I suspect youād have the same reaction, and Iād only recommend getting one on discount.
Atelier games are fine, they have a solid core loop, gorgeous concept art and creative mechanics. I want to like Atelier, actually itās my kind of game. But theyāre produced by a midbudget studio on a breakneck one-a-year schedule and a lot of small quality issues accumulate to drag down the experience. I hope weāll get a high-production-value one someday.
2 Likes
Iāve played a few Atelier games and generally enjoyed them all despite them being obviously C tier budget RPGs. I think the one I enjoyed most was Ayesha, but hereās my thoughts about Ryza:
- the story is kinda generic, i think this is mostly due to the characters being a bit bland and the attempt at a more standard save-the-world plot falling flat
- the battle system feels very chaotic and confusing at first, but once you get used to it i think it mostly works. Itās sort of a mix of ATB and some kind of MMO style system, where you control one character at a time and wait for your meter to fill and build up points to unleash special attacks.
- these games are all very dialogue heavy, so expect to be interrupted from your alchemy constantly for cutscenes.
- despite appearances this is probably one of the least horny Atelier games? Still a bit horny tho
4 Likes
found a gem on steam, control smooth like OlliOlli, so much fun with keyboard (joystick is terrible), deserve waiting for a price off
2 Likes
Thanks guys. Maybe, then, I will give Atelier Ayesha a try and see what it is about, if I can find it at very low price.
1 Like
I always wondered about this because the focus of Atelier games seems to be Cute Anime Girls but it always seemed like, not horny. Are they actually pretty horny?
Iām playing Tender: Creature Comforts which basically has you using Tinder for space aliens and so far
- One person has pretty aggressively cut to the chase and asked me on a date
- Another just stopped replying and Iām not sure if itās just because they got busy or because I said I travel too much to do pet ownership
- I have had someone unmatch because I am a Libra
- I saw my āexā on there and had to resist the temptation to swipe
This is the most realistic game Iāve ever played
7 Likes
Iād say the games generally are pretty tame on the surface, but thereās a bunch of weird lewd stuff mixed in there that kinda feels at odds with the general wholesome nature of the rest of it. Most of it is just innuendos in the dialogue and occasional lewd images when you complete a characterās sidestory.
The prime example is probably Roronaās mentor, who is basically a creep with an unhealthy interest in young girls and is implied to do inappropriate things to Rorona in her sleep. I think this might be what got the game slapped with an R rating in Australia.
Thereās also the usual anime trope about girls comparing bust sizes, and in Totori thereās a swimsuit competition scene that goes on way longer than it needs to. Not to mention the bikini outfits unlocked from the outset in the DX versions.
Oh and the scene where Rorona finds out the key ingredient for making homonculiā¦
Compare that to Ryza, where you have a few horny character designs and jiggly breast physics, but besides that thereās basically nothing lewd or crude. Unless thatās all saved for the DLC.
5 Likes
In episode 4 of Quake I think the game becomes over-fond of traps, teleporting in enemies, etc. I like that thereās a greater emphasis on taking advantage of powerups to overcome what would otherwise be very difficult sections but I dunno. Itās starting to wear me out. Like I sigh with resignation every time I see a suspiciously placed box of ammo or switch because I know the walls are going to drop to reveal a monster closet and like, I dunno. It feels too much like the devs saying āGotcha!ā Well, fuck you devs.
11 Likes
Played a bunch of GT7, but my thoughts about that are already in the car game thread
Also started playing Halo CE co-op with a friend, having never played a Halo before and wanting to do something on the xbox. It plays uh, really well. Guess there was a reason it was so popular! We stopped just before starting Silent Cartographer which he was really excited to play next so I guess itās a big deal! Helps that itās (of course) absolutely perfectly smooth on a modern console, but the moving and aiming feel nice even compared to games today. Also using an xbox controller was a welcome reprieve from the dualsense, I hate that controller more by the day.
I love that the games list on xbox has actually useful filters like āco-opā and ālocal multiplayerā. I cannot believe how bad the ps store is, it donāt think itās been anything but the absolute bare mimimum since itās inception
15 Likes
I tried the demo for Potato Flowers in Full Bloom on my Switch last night. It seems to be a cute yet sincere dungeon crawler.
Exploration is first-person and grid based. Actions like opening the party menu, talking to an NPC, and engaging in battle slides the perspective into a little diorama.
Encounters are symbol based and seemingly one-off. (Iām not sure if they reset on subsequent dungeon runs). Enemy markers so far remain stationary. Engaging a battle from the side delays enemy actions, and engaging from the back give you some stat advantages.
Battles are round-based more so than turn-based. Before each round starts, you can see what each enemy is about to do. If theyāre going to attack, you can also see their target and hit chance. Then you select your actions from menus. Confirming your selections starts the round and everyone acts in real time.
This real-time aspect is interesting because your skill descriptions indicate how much time they take to execute. So the dodge roll (evasion up) skill I selected for my one character whoās being targeted might be too slow to mitigate an attack from a quick enemy. On the other hand, my other characters might kill that enemy before it attacks.
I guess turn-based games also have these kinds of considerations, but the actions all happen concurrently in this game.
Most actions, including guarding, deplete stamina. Some skills also deplete spirit. The only way to replenish stamina during a battle is to rest for the round, which leaves you vulnerable. Stamina refills after battle. Spirit refills by resting while talking to an NPC. So far, there are no consumables and i have no health restoring skills!
Another neat mechanic is that you can only see your map and mini-map if youāre near a light source. In a pinch, you can light your torch to check your location. You can also use the torch to light candles on the walls, leaving a permanent light-source at that location.
But the torch is a limited resource. Lighting the torch expends more of its meter than taking a step with it lit. So sometimes it might make sense to keep it out for longer instead of putting it away and lighting it up again the next time you come into a dark space.
Iām pretty enamoured with this game based on my progress with the demo (I finished the tutorial dungeon, and there seems to be a bit more to do yet). So I might buy the full version the next time Iām in a buying mood.
My one gripe is the camera control. When youāre in a diorama scene, both the x axis and y axis are what commonly get referred to as inverted. But theyāre opposite in first person exploration. Thereās no option for adjusting these. At the same time, camera control is a nice to have but not essential feature for playing this kind of game.
13 Likes
woop finally beat factorio for the first time
it took me a really long time to do it but I didnāt really do a ton of research on how to make things more efficient because I would rather have my game be mine complete with all of the mistakes I made, and boy did I make a bunch
7 Likes
Itās one of the hardest games Iāve ever played and it just sat there, machines humming, while I decided how ambitious and hard to make it for myself.
3 Likes
I started playing Chicory, but I went away bored. Maybe I would have enjoyed it if I had been younher and with less experience with videogames. I get captivated by games like Undertale or the Mothers, but this, no.
1 Like
tried out the weirdly hidden VR mode in Euro Truck Simulator 2 for a while with my actual wheel setup and wow, itās pretty great, though suddenly takes the game from happy on ultra settings to medium being pushing it
being able to glance left and right AT ALL without it feeling either sluggish or like it gets in the way of everything else is a total fucking game changer
it does have the unfortunate situation of nighttime driving seemingly making me sicker than daytime driving, presumably because thereās less contrast with the stationary dashboard vs the moving exterior, but hey, still fun until I feel ill and have to bail - finally truly simulating what itās like to drive for eighteen hours straight and then have to lie down for 6
16 Likes
Itās really great how much VR changes this sort of behavior ā glancing to get the contours of a room or check periphery is hard to give up and so natural to us.
And looking up ā 3D level design is supposed to treat āupā as an unlikely direction and a place to hide secrets but the ability to look changes it entirely.
7 Likes
Itās not officially out yet, but I got the chance to play through Mines of JZT yesterday. It was good!
Mark was a somewhat prolific ZZTer in the mid-90s, and JZT is his browser-based ZZT-like that he started making a few years back. I learned about his first JZT world, the Villiage of JZT, a while ago and found it to be a pleasant riff on ZZTās Town. It managed to find interesting iterations of classic ZZT board concepts, and was a good showcase of the new things his engine could do. (My main complaint was that a few of the endgame boards were too hard.)
Mines of JZT is in turn a riff on Caves of ZZT, but whereas Caves felt phoned in compared to Town, Mines feels like an iterative improvement over Village. Concepts that Caves and Mines share tend to feel more fleshed out in Mines, and all of the brand new ideas are quite clever and well-executed, like a dark cave you have to explore without torches of your own, or the new Asphodel Housing Projects in the underworld.
One caveat with the two JZT games is that, while they use a hub-and-spokes layout like the original ZZT worlds, progression is now more linear instead. (This didnāt bother me, but I thought it was worth mentioning.)
7 Likes