Honestlh I am here for it.
So this game has unlocked my usually-dormant completionist urge and Iām probably going to wind up hunting down all the baubles. I will say it is doing a slightly better job of keeping some of its secrets than I thought it would. It continues to consistently delight with all the graphical touches and animations, and the soundtrack is great. Iām going to find some other game to alternate sessions with so I can make sure I donāt power through this too quickly or burn myself out hunting down collectibles.
7 Likes
iāve been thinking about this and i may be the only person in the world who likes the mechanics of MMOs but hates basically everything else.
It turns out my dream MMO is one that I can play entirely alone and is done in 20-30 hours at most. I just want to hit buttons, I donāt want any commitments to other people, I donāt want the game to update and give me more content, I donāt want exciting live events, I donāt want balance patches or PVP or raids or endgame content or guilds or lifelong bonds or any of that
I just want Fantasy Life and Book of Demons, apparently.
7 Likes
A little Steam Library Roulette as a Kirby break:
12 is Better Than 6 is, more or less, western-themed Hotline Miami with a somewhat fussy control scheme (centered around the manual reloading processes of six-shooters, shotguns, etc). You also need to right click to manually cock the hammer for every shot which is maybe one piece of verisimilitude too many. I could see how maybe the tension of having to time your reloads in the middle of combat could be an interesting little tactical layer on top of the twitchy shooting, but in practice itās not really jiving with me.
Itās also got a seemingly arbitrary ink-on-paper visual style which, honestly, makes the game harder to parse than it should be. The narrative isnāt any good either, which makes me not want to put forth the effort to improve.
Shelter tasks you, mother badger, with escorting your five young through harsh wilderness and keeping them fed and safe. It is, mechanically, an excruciatingly slow walking sim/escort mission where you have to basically keep your little ones topped up on food and not let them get separated from you because theyāll get picked off by predators or other hazards. I got a few āchaptersā deep before I lost all 5 of my young. The aesthetic is interesting. Sort of a low-poly, flat-shaded thing. Cool soundtrack! Iāve probably spent all the time Iām going to with this. To my surprise this game has 2(!) sequels, with one due out soon. In the sequels you are a Lynx and an Elephant, respectively. Thereās also an MMO(ish) take on this game, called Meadow, which Iām downloading as I write this because I want to see what this game is like. I expect itās more or less a riff on Tale of Talesā The Endless Forest.
4 Likes
Champion Jockey - G1 Jockey & Gallop Racer: the unholy union of Koei and Tecmo, the two companies still actively making horse racing (but not management and training, thatās Winning Post), combining their powers into one game about horse driving during the era of motion controls
making your horse do things good is like trying to rub your belly and chew gum and walk at the same time except you are telling your body what to do with a steering wheel and a Bemani controller. also it has Ridge Racer-ass music during races, which, sure, okay
Alpine Racer 3: Namco paid Yukes to make a PS2 skiing game and it absolutely whips ass, back when racing games could be arcadey as fuck and sell you a whole-ass game with less than 10 tracks because fuck you, play it over and over again. also also has Ridge Racer-ass music (though I guess that makes more sense than the Falcon 4.0 of horse jockeying games)
Severed Steel: maximal video game other shooters are you even trying 12/10 buy now
9 Likes
This looks hard on the eyes like that one STG folks were enjoying in January.
There are a lot of visual options in the menu, so depending on what you mean this might be easily adjusted for.
You can turn off all the flashing stuff like enemy silhouettes and text popping up.
It would still have harsh contrasts with lots of dark areas punctuated by neon highlights.
I think Iām about halfway through Harmony of Dissonance. I like Juste. I like getting lost and wondering what cool new background and tileset Iāll see. I like offense and defence. I like collecting furniture. The combat and level design is awful and Iām really enjoying it.
10 Likes
I got a weird feeling in my gut when I had an endorphin release from being able to recognize this as, like, the same Koei UI as the officer gallery in a musou game
3 Likes
Kirby posting:
Perhaps almost too well because sometimes Iād be amazed if you could stumble across the solutions to some of these things other than by accident or by having the game tell you after you first complete a level. Even with very close observation thereās just some stuff youād never be able to guess at, imho.
Still consistently delightful, have to force myself to put it down during the day so I donāt fritter away the hours I should be like, working.
4 Likes
finished the main plot of Assault on Dragon Keep and it was pretty fun, I think I was spoiled on the finale at the time but a decadeās distance let me have a good chuckle at the ending
I donāt think Iāll be doing much side-questing or returning to other parts of BL2, but weāll see
I then resumed my playthrough of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force wherein Iād somehow lost my progress through the borg ship, now Iām at the āfire a random abandoned weapon of mass destructionā level where I think I got stuck last time, hopefully Iāll work out how to progress lol
1 Like
Iāve been streaming Tunic to my TV and playing it in bed. I love to do it, what a nice game. Itās like the doctors are tapering off the Elden script so I donāt die from going cold turkey.
6 Likes
oh! I also played some Umurangi Generation, which I feel like maybe I need to be less harsh on as a seemingly one-person production, but I felt like it played a little, IDK, off for me
the story is largely told environmentally, which is great, itās got big things to say and it says them well, but I feel like a little flavour text in the beginning of the game (hell, the first ~25 seconds of the launch trailer would do a lot here) or between levels wouldāve bound it together more for me (why am I delivering parcels? what does that have to do with taking photos? the answers are in articles about the game, but seemingly not in the game), and I wish the scavenger hunt type gameplay didnāt have the timer, as that seems counter to the concept of methodically lining up aesthetically pleasing shots - for a game boasting giving the player creative control it feels odd
also I canāt quite tell why but the game seems to look unusually rough on my system, the depth of field is this sudden jarring strip rather than smooth, and looks little like the promo screenshots, even though Iām pushing 4K at max graphics settings
4 Likes
it renders below native on purpose I think, though I couldnāt quite tell why on top of all the other shader stuff
in this respect and others it felt like it really shouldāve come out during the first big wave of unity indie stuff 5+ years ago
I really like the story itās trying to tell and the idea to put like, tony hawk timers on the various objectives in the levels, but I agree a lot of it doesnāt quite cohere
frankly, pixel hunting for film canisters and trying to work out who the fuck āsharkyā is while a timer counts down means I can barely absorb the environment around me, I really wish theyād chosen another way to āchallengeā you, or just let you turn off the timers altogether
4 Likes
Playing Policenauts (Saturn game) on the Switch, thanks to the Cotton2 emulator trick. I am enjoying it a lot, itās quite relaxing. Not that original and also super linear, but itās a bit like reading a sci-fi comics book with 80s taste, with wonderful music.
Not āessentialā (and maybe also less powerful than Snatcher), but recommended.
Also, while slightly overwritten (like all japanese visual novels), itās far from being so as much as Danganronpa or, even worse, Steins Gate games (which I really like)ā¦and veeery far from the slowest of all, The house in Fata Morgana, which has a fantastic, emotional story brutally buried in ultra-lengthy writing.
4 Likes
i am a bit suspicious of the new Kirby, since it has the late Nintendo cuteness and polish that does nothing for me (I have been left cold by both Mario Odissey and Bowserās Fury)ā¦ Please keep posting your impressions because I am curious about the gameplay, if itās somehow original and different from other Nintendo platformers, and if it can be made interesting (even challanging) to play.
yeah this was my experience too, was frustrating because everything else about this screams āgame iād adoreā but actually playing it was just stressful
1 Like
I think the appeal of this particular Kirby game is down to how much enjoyment youāre going to get from poking around in its levels to root out secrets. This is definitely not a game thatās designed to provide tremendous challenge. So far the hardest thing Iāve encountered has been a bonus level, and that was mostly because I think the controls donāt allow for very fine aiming of projectiles.
Hell thereās a ādodgeā move (hold down any shoulder button/trigger, press in a direction to see Kirby do a little cartwheel or back handspring) that I think will wind up being completely superfluous because so far every attack thatās come my way was perfectly avoidable just by scooting out of the way.
I will say this ā as someone who also hasnāt been particularly charmed by Nintendoās vibe the last few years, this one is hitting a little different. I may just find Kirby inherently enjoyable as a little character, though.
6 Likes