Thought I’d catch up on a favorite podcast so I hopped into Star Citizen as for me it hits a nice balance of being engaging but leaving enough enough brainpower available to follow the plot of whatever I’m listening to.
Got in, realized where I’d logged out and couldn’t have been happier as it generates a bunch of my favorite money makers. Then I realized I couldn’t do them because I wasn’t up on a couple certifications needed to unlock them, but hey, no big deal the missions to get those certifications are local anyways. At most I might need to make one trip back and forth across the system, still no big deal considering how much podcast I intended to listen to.
Ssssso, I called up my ship, headed down the the hanger, strapped on my helmet, and sat down…at which point the ship immediately exploded. This caused me to be stripped of my gear, though because this happened in a safe zone, the gear was just shunted into that location’s local inventory. I, on the other hand, was shunted off to the hospital at the location I had been basing out of…which was across the system.
I then logged out and busied myself doing something else.
I played enough of the PS Vita port of Borderlands 2 to realise that I hadn’t actually played two of the DLC packs I bought for PC back in the game’s heyday so I downloaded that version and you know what? it turns out roughly 10 years of technology development makes this game fucking scream on our now-Ryzen-powered machine at 4K max settings, with the circa-2019 ultra HD texture pack and DXVK translating it into a modern graphics layer - I don’t even get loading screens, it just teleports
I don’t really have someone to co-op it with but maybe I can play through the d&d DLC campaign solo and have some fun with my vintage high level characters, we’ll see
Sounds like it’s probably also not for me, at least not at this time. Maybe one day I’ll burn out on the common contemporary vision for keyring games but at the moment I’m sitting here just wishing Silksong would finally come out.
yeah that was part of what reminded me I’d never actually played it, despite being an absolute tiny tina fangirl back in the day (don’t @ me I have grown as a person since) life just kind of got in the way
198X is a collection of fairly competently-executed homages to classic arcade games, namely:
Final Fight/Streets of Rage
Gradius
Rad Racer
And then also a weird infinite runner ninja game that I guess is inspired by Shinobi, and they manage to shoe-horn in an old PC-style dungeon crawler and try to pass it off as an arcade game. The art and the music are quite nice and gameplay in each is actually decent, so kudos for that.
However these are all woven together by an extremely overwrought framing device where a suburban kid in the depths of teenage ennui finds solace after stumbling upon a local arcade and feels a sense of belonging among the outcasts there. No bonds are actually formed with any other characters though, it’s all longing and video games. Family problems are vaguely alluded to, but no real development happens other than some ham-fisted stuff in the last game where I guess the game and life are supposed to be colliding.
It’s all crap, is what I’m saying. The game is at least mercifully brief but it does little to really capture any true arcade magic nostalgia, so I can’t even recommend that someone younger play it to try to feel that moment in time. They may as well just fire up an emulator or buy an arcade classics compilation from one of the big publishers.
I think Fusion’s narrative justification worked out pretty well so I liked it. Whereas Zero Mission being equally handholdy while importing the narrative and world structure of the single most open Metroid game was completely unbearable to me
I really like the way Fusion calls out the time you’re forced to break from its explicitly stated directives, and when it finally lets go for more or less the same reasons.
But yeah, I’m quick to forget the way Zero Mission just straight up has a glowing orb point you to exactly where it wants you to go. At least Fusion contextualizes it.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land is definitely a game for babby but it is very charming so I will probably go do all the optional objectives (seems as easy as “leave no interactive object untouched”) and collect all the baubles.
I started a sorcerer in this game and got to level 15 and this turns from a very cute and organized take on Diablo into a huge fucking mess, in a good way. Like, the chaos of hordes of enemies in Diablo 2 kind of mess, but with much less bullshit getting in the way of just enjoying it.
I think it’s slight but I’m enjoying hitting numbers on my keyboard to make spells go off and shit. I’m really glad they allow for the complexity of equipping a bunch of spells AND having a second, totally different set of equipped spells that you can switch between at any time. It feels good to, say, hit TWO THREE FOUR to cause a cascade of ice and lightning spells, then slam TAB to switch to my other loadout and hit TWO to get 15 fireballs and then RIGHT CLICK to shoot the fireballs at everyone, all while like 17 enemies are actively trying to murder me. My most recent close call was accidentally summoning an ice wall behind me and trapping myself with the horde. Ooops!
So yeah, I was wrong about this. It’s not very neat at all, it just starts slow and ramps up pretty quickly. I think I will finish this game, hopefully.
(It helps that it also essentially allows a respec at any time, since leveling up is just “what do you want now, you can get the rest later for a price” and equipment is just cards you can swap in and out whenever you like. So if I hit a hard part I can just…change.)
(Oh, also LITTLE TO NO INVENTORY MANAGEMENT thank god)
turns out Borderlands 2 still has pretty damn good gun feel, and the writing in this DLC pack is somewhat less irritating than I expected, there is definitely some charm here, and as a bonus I have a pretty fun Mechromancer Anarchy build from my original playthroughs so I’m glass cannoning my way through with shield recharge noises going off just constantly
Ah, now I’ve gotten to the bit where the comparisons between Tunic and Fez make more sense. At least these are intended to be solved by an individual. Also the game is mechanically coherent as an action game from start to finish, so it’s not a gotcha. Do find it odd how the final boss is much simpler to fight than the Scavenger. I get the concept of a boss who fights you with all of your weapons (Oh, “The Scavenger”. I get it) but she has like one attack too many.
I think I’ve found a puzzle to get the manual’s cover, and boy is that a weird one.
that one for the cover took a lot, the actual execution is soooo long, but very glad i did it
after that the secret that uses page 1 is the only thing i ended up looking upi worked out how to view that information, but although i had the information on how to translate the text, i did not have the motivation to learn that language just for the final piece of treasure. even when i looked up the translation, the information it gives still would have gone over my head - just a completely new approach to a puzzle that i did not see existing anywhere else in the game. it literally took me an hour of trying to connect what is written there to the inputs i found online.
overall i had a great time, i think the way it unravels the mysteries and layers of mechanics is really smart. it came across as four distinct modes of playing the game, and although they are very connected, it mostly is charming in how the secrets are scattered throughout and don’t matter until you want them to.
ok just also found out that demon’s remake has an honest to god damn mirror mode and that you have to pay 25k souls to a statue or something to activate it, lmfao, that’s really fuckin unbelievable, that would be in like a pretty good satire
