There’s a low-budget myst-like series called Rhem about which I should write a big post whenever I’m done playing Elden Ring because its puzzles are really really great but one notable feature is it tries hard to have all the walkable spots have all 4 cardinal view directions at all times (and up/down as much as possible), and also has a compass, and then in the third game it adds two sections where the view grid is 45° off from everything else just to mess with you.
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I’ve only played the first two Rhem games but I love them, they’re like mainlining a refined, high grade myst puzzle experience.
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I forgot to mention but I did marathon SH3 and finished it with @DaleNixon, really fun game. I liked the story. It took characters and elements from the first game and expanded on them and gave very direct answers to the player in a way that SH2 didnt. I don’t think the way it brazenly presents the tangibility of Silent Hill and the deistic occurences actually detracts from enjoying it as a playable game, and there is still plenty of mystery about it that didn’t get explicitly told through dialogue and item descriptions. It felt more linear than the first game but in the sense that it takes similar level design philosophies and wastes your time less, not just in the way that the puzzles don’t require extraneous backtracking but how Heather says “this is bullshit and I don’t need this so I’m gonna keep moving forward”. Her attitude reflects mine both in the narrative and through gameplay and she comes off as real and genuine, and it is nice to be a girl and feel empowered and also kill god.
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OMG I JUST GOT AN XP BOOST AND THEN GOT TO RP WITH A GM HOLY FUCK THIS GAME OWNS
THURSDAY THERES GONNA BE A BIG INVASION AND I GET TO SHOOT BALLISTAS AND LOAD CANNONS and im much too fucking invested in this now. my life is gone i give it to gemstone
well until 6.1
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ok OG beatmania is a trip, bemani kids these days have it real good
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While I was sick, I took two days off of work. I used that time to do some nominal work on my midterm, but mostly I played Battle Network 2.
I had heard it was bad and I was expecting terrible things considering that it came out a mere nine months after the first. I was really afraid because the hometown and several other places are lifted straight out of the first one. Also, I don’t automatically heal after battles. But so far, I actually like it a little bit more. The pacing has been more balanced between real life and the net. The net has been expanded to include a hub space where people meet. There’s even a forum where I can read conversations between users. Navis, the semi-autonomous avatars that people are connected to, can post separate from their users. It’s bizarre. I can now also travel to the internet in foreign countries. You might think it’s weird that different countries have their own internet, but I’ve found this to be more or less true in real life.
The WWW has been replaced by the netmafia, Gospel. I love everything about what I just said. So far, they have used a gas leak to ransom a child’s life, placed explosives on a major dam, and completely destroyed one country’s internet. I’m feeling blessed playing this silly game.
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I’ve gotten far enough in The Messenger that it has switched to an open world. The movement is good in this.
It’s great just zipping around with the hook and wing suit.
I think it also subtly helps that the ‘open’ world is still fairly linear.
There is none of the labyrinthine qualities of a Metroid game in the layouts.
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The Messenger has the best moment to moment action of any of these sorts of games that and that kind of makes up for it’s faults.
The mileage and expectation they get out of the slash jump is exhilarating.
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borrowed a friend’s Vita to test some stuff and they happened to have the Borderlands 2 port on their PSN account (though I don’t think they’d ever played it, lol), so I had a play with that
I had forgotten how weird and janky UE3 was, the Vita’s apparent memory card sluggishness just exacerbates the weird texture streaming behaviour
nevertheless it’s a surprisingly playable port, albeit with a sluggish frame rate at times, and the Vita’s input limitations certainly make it a little unpredictable, forcing you to hold the device very gingerly by the edges to avoid accidentally triggering melee and sprint (mapped to the right and left of the rear touch surface) all the time
also I can really feel how different a person I was when I was genuinely enthusiastic about these games haha
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So Tunic. Is a Zelda game.
Made by undeniably clever people who have restrained themselves into coloring around the margins, with slow and plodding combat that is aware of newer ideas but balanced until it was beaten to resemble games thirty years old, and with no secrets more clever or insistent than the hidden path obscured by its tilt-shift isometric camera.
The only thing separating it from legions of retro pixel Zelda clones is that it’s too embarrassed to be so naked an homage and is cloaking itself in graphic design and tasteful beats. Instead of an attempt to justify an aesthetic of fantasy, it follows in the Fez school, obscuring and deifying video games themselves as ancient artifacts worth questing for. The most energetic this game gets is in doling out pages of a strategy game and reframing the game as something on a virtual CRT; a mysterious secret language stands in for a time in the author’s memory when they learned to read by piecing clear game items back into words. The true height of gaming: sinking into nostalgia. The dude from Under the Silver Lake would be all over this. It has no interest in building its own language, its own experiences, its own memories.
A game to save for when I’m clawed by dementia, when words come difficult but my hands still remember how to Nintendo.
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Played Warframe and, honestly, I’m just happy today’s patch fixed a bug and loss of function with a key power on my favorite frame that kind of ruined what it was good at.
It’s nice getting to play Hydroid again.
Details
So, sometime last year, or maybe the year before, they changed his “Tidal Surge” power (turns him into an invincible wave that allows him to run into enemies at high speed, gathering them up before ejecting them when the power ends. The power was given the ability to be cancelled mid-dash into his “Undertow” ability (aka turn into a puddle that can shoot out tentacles to drag in enemies). That cancel was lost when an update was made to the power to allow re-casting mid-dash to change direction and has now been returned along with an alternate method of cancelling out of the dash.
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my joycons finally began drifting but luckily Nintendo of Canada is about a 15 minute drive away right around the corner from Clearly Contacts so I think I’ll just run them by
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Finished NG+ on Sekiro… I might platinum this lil baby
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currently alt tabbed out of rpcs3 demon’s souls while I wait for my mana to regenerate so I can continue casting soul arrow at the dragon on the bridge for 19 damage for the next 5 hours
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earthbound 64
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I’ve been playing Alice: Madness returns. At first I heartily disliked everything about it, but then I found out how to make it run in 60 fps and I’m sort of having fun now? It might be because I got to a better part of the game but I doubt that since the enemies and camera are more frustrating than ever.
I’ve never felt a difference in enjoyment from a shift in FPS, aside from making a game run above 15 FPS back when I was using an 8 year old laptop. This experience has justified years of what I assumed was technical pedantry. I have the sudden urge to benchmark my set up and find out how overclocking works.
As for the game itself I like the art direction in a few places but is too British a valid criticism? It reminds me of a dozen platformers I played on the ps2, none of which I can recall the names of. It has a vague movie tie in game vibe.
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absolutely
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I ended up picking up the racing sim bundle Humble are running (mostly because I wanted to try Assetto Corsa Competizione) and trying some of the games, so far;
- rFactor 2: The base install seems to have no content whatsoever? So that’s irritating, you seemingly have to await an in-game, official download from Steam Workshop in order to actually play the game. Also the first run wizard seems to be the only place you’re allowed to map the controls? So it’s now not mapped right because I skipped it, lol
- Automobilista 2: I figured this would be hard but yeah, no real assists available and it really does punish you if you put all the horsepower down at once. Lots of DLC in your face, but that seems to be how racing games are nowadays. Ah well!
- Assetto Corsa Competizione: Okay, this is more approachable to me, thankfully; there are some assists so I can start to retrain my lead foot and not feel like a total arsehole, still really tough - the career intro asks you to do four clean laps of Monza in a fairly fast Lamborghini without fucking up once and I’ve fucked it up about four times now - still, I feel like it’s something I can make happen.
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oh I forgot Drift21 which I played for like 2 minutes so far - seems neat but I am yet to actually get the hang of drifting with a wheel haha
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