Last night in my dream I was playing IIDX and attractive and cool people came up to me and wanted to be friends because they thought it was cool to play IIDX, so now I am playing Empress on PS2 at level 3 which is all I can handle
16 Likes
I declare myself a master of the Neo Turf. Victory was even broadcast live on twitch through Povertycast to an enormous audience of 2. Have learnt some harsh lessons about hooking and slicing and subsequently finding out though. Also that bunker shots never go as planned.
15 Likes
Played the Kirby and the Forgotten Land demo. I enjoyed it with friends but even by Kirby standards it was a bit too easy, it made me feel like the oldest adult. Perhaps I shouldâve tried Wild mode. I picked up a Waddle-Dee cage carried by a bird who couldnât give a shit and became viscerally aware that I was 31 years old. I love the horror of the mouthful transformations but I think Iâm out. Also, I know this is been Kirbyâs design for a long time, but I feel like he is really off model, like his face is too big for his body and his body doesnât sag as much as it used to. I need that sag.
Aperture Desk Job was interesting for about five minutes but then itâs premise takes a turn to be a fairly dull turret section interspersed with skits. Some of the briefest, mildest jokes are made at the expense of massive retcons. I know this isnât canon or whatever but I have to wonder who is this for? The game screams on its store page that itâs designed for a controller [specifically the Steam Deck] and then, in one segment, Iâm told to use the keyboard, microphone, and mouse. Ultimately its interactions arenât that compelling and I kind of wish it was just a âtest random products with humorous consequencesâ game the whole way through.
Have been playing more Final Fantasy VII and I have some takeaways. Cait Sith is a fucking villain and this barely ever gets discussed and this is the thing that has bothered me the most out of anything.
Aerisâ death has ambitious presentation but suffers from the same overreliance on text and basic animations that a lot of key beats rely upon. Outside of CG it just becomes Cloud blathering. I feel like this is where 7 Remake 2 has to end. Itâs really hard to fully appreciate this bit in 2022 after playing Remake and having osmosed the spoiler for more than 20 years.
Too frequently the party say nothing/have nothing to say. Iâm still really enjoying the game but it really has become the Cloud and Sephiroth show. I feel I have massively, accidentally sequence broken the game and I wonder if they didnât want to have to make sure party dialogue wasnât always contextually accurate. It just feels like Cloudâs journey. Who the fuck is Cid? Why does the party tolerate a member taking a child [a party memberâs daughter] hostage? I know everyone hates Sephiroth but itâd be nice to check in with them about it.
Combat in this game feels better than combat in any Final Fantasy game and I have no idea why.
16 Likes
the last time i played through ffvii (2016? 2017?), i also came away with a new appreciation for how good the combat feels.
2 Likes
the second i logged on the fucking guy who threw my daisy down the welll sent me a PM
there are twice as many people playing as last time i was ona nd they got rid of the confusing amunet and all sorts of other quality of life stuff i have been playing for hours and things are slowly coming back to me and AHHHHHHH I LOVE GEMSTONE
14 Likes
my nails arent usually done liek that i was at a wedding
1 Like
i have âleveled upâ to 5 in beatmania as well as significantly improving my rhythm, so Iâm getting Bâs and Aâs on songs that I almost fail. Itâs an interesting system where scoring and grade are two separate things, and I prefer to feel the groove and get my timing as tight as possible, since getting full combos on anything is still way out of reach. when I get home Iâm gonna have to emulate empress and play it on my hitbox lol
9 Likes
I really think a lot of the lasting impact of FF7 (the rest of it is, of course, production values) is that it introduced a mass market western audience to the possibility of melodrama in games, but the melodrama as actually presented, uh, leaves a lot to be desired.
7 Likes
Played about 8 minutes of As Far as the Eye and decided I hated the UI before I even got through the tutorial. Iâm out.
Crypto Against All Odds is a crypto-themed tower defense game that doesnât really do anything interesting with the theme. I also quit this one after about 15 minutes.
Truberbrook is absolutely beautiful and also chock full of adventure game bullshit like constant backtracking. You should play it though because it is so damn striking, like nearly every new locale stunned me. Itâs kinda like Wes Anderson stop motion animation. Itâs remarkable how convincing some of the lighting effects etc. are. The character models and their animations are maybe the weak point but sheesh, this game looks great. I bailed out about 80% through because I didnât care about the plot and was starting to get burned out by all the obtuse puzzles.
3 Likes
played (most) of the stranger of paradise demo. it is the PS3âs magnum opus. it feels like fable if it was made by platinum and written by the team behind FFXIII. i love it. it is far too much. everyoneâs drip is off the charts. what the fuck is going on. jack is autistic and noone can convince me otherwise, ive never felt more represented in a video game than him only commenting when someone brings up his special interest and listening to nu-metal and isolating when the world doesnât make sense
played the kirby demo. i agree with @captainlove that it was like, way easy (even tho i played it on wild mode) but i cant help but feel charmed by it. i love that the way it saves on memory with far away enemies is drastically reducing their framerate; its a more interesting stylistic choice to me than just like, distance models. i think its cute! also the upgraded abilities operating in the world differently is fun. mouthful mode is hilarious. i like the mouthfeel of the different powers and the way they each make me think about space. i like the fact that they decided to use set camera positions, it just feels good. also dope that you can still tilt the camera around, despite this; its literally never helpful, its just fun
oh i played the triangle tactics demo too. uh. i think its a fantasy novel with an ⌠okay tactics game on the side. i wish it was more difficult and i wish portraits displayed when characters talked because they are beautifully drawn and rendered. the one nice thing ill say is that i think its cute that theres kind of an emergent strategy of if someone breaks off from formation, you have someone else go and literally stand back-to-back with them. that kinda owns actually, it feels cool that a back-to-back surrounded by enemies standoff is just, like, smart strategically. mostly its pretty whatever tho
14 Likes
Iâm honestly surprised this has taken off to the degree it has because it feels almost fourth wall breaking somehow, like itâs too stylistic an optimization, but I love it too
9 Likes
Spent the weekend splitting my time between Elden Ring, Gemstone IV, and Final Fantasy XIV. What a bounty of riches, I feel like Iâll never run out of good videogame.
15 Likes
THIS IS A TRIPLE THREAT OF AMAZING LEISURE
5 Likes
oh man im having such a fun time in gemstone, im a professional lockpicker, heres a dwarf appreciating my work
i learned how to throw my shield
heres my pet rat in his pokeball
O HMY GOD I FORGOT I HAD A PET SPIDER!! my nails were painted and apparently that takes up my special slot, but i REMOVEd my nailpolish and now⌠theres a pink spider crawling all over me!!!
I HAVE ALL THESE ACTIONS
if i rub it it changes color and it changes between like 20 fucking colors so im never rubbing it again
omg i had to do COMMUNITY SERVICE FOR A FUCKING HOUR TODAY becuase i tried to disarm a trapped box but it was really high level so a cloud of poisonous smoke erupted, endangering the public but only INJURING me
they made me get ledgers for different towns and the nplay stuipid memory games with them, like 'how many ledgers were from icemule? how many ledgers in total" for 20 minutes and then for HALF AN HOUR i had a trowel and my prison clothes nad i was crawling around the town park digging up weeds. and like every once in a while the weed woulld be stepped on by a PC in the room, so i had to NUDGE their foot over so i could get at the weed, in my âfruit-stainedâ prison clothes, HUMILATING
but before that i got to ride a (player owned!!! for a mere 50 million silver [the exchange rate of silver is 2.8 dollars per million, its been steadily going down since i started playing. i saw someone on the merchant channel seling a fucking axe for TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS LAST NIGHT oh yeah the boats]) ship and we shot cannons at other ships until we could board them and then we killed PIRATES. this is a whole new feature of the game that didnt exist last time i played!
anyway heres me and veronica smashing on dudes. gemstone rules
17 Likes
finally after all these years Iâve made progress in myst. all it took was 200 hours of elden ring to completely exhaust the caveman murder kill parts of my brain so the thinking parts could work.
30 Likes
Gemstone is outrageous
3 Likes
GT7 missions have borked tires after a patch so I canât even go back to that game and try to salvage it by playing what seems to be its best content 
So I booted into the Stranger of Paradise demo. The cutscenes in this game run like absolute garbage on PS5 and at times, it looks like a late PS3 game in terms of fidelity. Luckily, itâs pretty smooth during gameplay. The combat in this game feels immensely satisfying and feels way better than any prior Square attempt at making an action RPG out of FF. Being able to guard certain types of enemy spells and temporarily being able to cast it back at them a few times is really neat.
The only other issue I have with it is the difficulty. Iâm not a talented Souls player and it took me 20 hours to beat the first boss in Nioh but I never felt challenged by much in the demo. Iâm told the latest demo changed nerfed the hardest difficulty to the point that it is easier than the middle Action difficulty (intended for people who have played an action game before, their words not mine) was in the past demo. I think it makes sense for this game to have difficulty options, but it feels like a mistake to not have a hard mode that caters to fans of this specific sub-genre, especially when the systems seem to have so much depth to explore.
Iâm probably going to pick this game up later anyway, but the lack of challenge bumped it down my priority list by quite a bit.
7 Likes
it turns out it wasnât even difficult. the difficulty was all in just being on the island at the beginning and it being all new and no immediate objective or any information to go on. oh and the mine shit, I had to draw a map there, maybe I missed an ingame picture of a map somewhere. I enjoyed the noticeably 1993 music
6 Likes