The gear and optimize stuff is easily the worst. I honestly have no idea what the plan was here. I feel like a good game design rule of thumb is if you need a button to automate something it was a bad idea in the first place.
I hate to say it but as much as I really enjoyed the combat in this game I actually ditched it to replay FF15 after snagging it for $20 in the Squenix sale. As crazy as all the Stranger of Paradise stuff is and even despite the combat quite appealing to me it has a bit of aā¦ discount candy kind of feel. Itās sort of just the sugar, which is great for maybe a few hours but when you ask āok what else do you have?ā the answer is recycled FF14 assets and more samey combat
I have played some Tunic recently and I gotta say this game has only one trick up its sleeve (hide thing behind other thing so camera cannot see it) and I feel like after about 4 hours I have really seen every possible version of that trick. Countless versions of that trick. Enemy behind thing, chest behind thing, secret door behind thing, walkway to thing hidden behind thing but the goal still visible, etc.
I find it very smooth and easy to swallow though so I will probably continue poking at it a while. I have it installed on one of the computers where I do work and I noodle on it while Iām blocked on stuff sometimes.
I was surprised I was able to avoid getting spoiled on the new story content in the DC from the PS5 release until now, but turns out the reason for that is that thereās almost no story content. Truthfully the most exciting part of the DC is that they added a direct road from Mountain Knot City to Lake Knot City.
A shame that most of the ranked events theyāre doing are in the combat trials, but I might keep checking in to tinker with routing out top times for the ranked delivery events.
a while back I took the time to get as many late 90s early 2000s pc games as I could to run at 640x480 integer scaled up with dgvoodoo, with the reshade port of crt-royale on top of that. dgvoodoo only works with direct3d or glide stuff so thatās still a lot of opengl stuff from back then left out though. seems to me that running something in a low resolution scaled up should be a basic easy thing available for everything but what does everybody want instead, widescreen patches and texture packs. film nerds all intuitively knew ted turner colorizing old movies was a crime against humanity, but videogame nerds are all themselves the ted turners of games. but anyway, I thought it was interesting how max payne at 1920x1440 vs max payne at 640x480 with 8x antialiasing was only a barely noticeable difference anyway. kept thinking I was messing something up and it was at a higher resolution because it looked so good. we were already seeing all there was to see, any more just exposes what isnāt there and closes the imagination window
We played Overboard tonight, which has absolutely rave reviews, and honestly I found it really disappointing! Absolutely something in my āI wanted and expected to like thisā category.
I feel like often the trick to a good narrative puzzle (maybe honestly my favourite kind of puzzle) is that when you try and fail you still gain new information (i.e., outer wilds, sexy brutale, heck even phoenix wright). This game feels like it opens a lot of leads that then just likeā¦ fizzle out with no clear pathways except trying every dialogue option. Theyāve limited repeats and make you go through the whole game again (or jump overboard yourself) I guess to avoid people brute forcing solutions, but it mostly that gating just makes it feel like I need to see the same content thirty times in order to actually find out if thereās anything I can do to meet x objective, which seems important but who knows?
Thereās also a weird hint system and a bunch of assist features, none of which feel like they solve the problem of trying to guess your way through a massive dialogue tree. Iām really surprised this game won so many awards! I really do not feel like it sticks the landing at all I guess
I couldnāt run anti aliasing at any level on anything that didnāt kill my framerates until almost 2010. I long wondered how people did it, because even when I would upgrade to what was once high spec I still couldnāt run older games decently enough with it. Even now itās pretty much the first thing I turn off of Iām having issues.
Though Iāve never been a resolution junkie anyway, as I would always lower resolution before turning down details and shit, until the curse of lcds and native resolution made going below that a problem.
Iāll never play this bizarre quasi Final Fantasy game but the idea that 15ās combat is substantial and that by contrast Strangersā combat is insubstantial is terrifying.
I would 1000% play an action game with FF14 assets. Likeā¦ Yes. Please. Give it to me. Elden Ring Diablo Alike with FF14 dressup and scenery? Mounts and shit? Come on of course
The nice thing about FF15 is the combat isnāt very good so they just let you hold one of two buttons. Stranger of Paradise has like thirty competing combat systems and gauges and seventeen different ways to parry and party commands and single button loadout switching thatās also an attack cancel and while it is cool, itās less cool doing the same dungeon for the third time because they didnāt have the budget to build more dungeons
While I too know the sting of buying a brand new full price AAA game only to realize oh no itās bad, I definitely recommend that if you are having a bad time you play something else instead. āYou can just leaveā as they say
Ace Combat 7: I was surprised to find this game had Japanese audio. I mean I know 3 is in japanese but it turns out Ace Combat 2, 4, and 6 had English voiceover even in Japan. (2 has a big vertical box onscreen where Japanese subtitles show up the entire time you play.) I prefer not hearing oo-rah! target neutralized! nice shot kidā¦ type stuff in english. Now I want to try 5 & 0 next which apparently have dual audio options. but hell I would try any ace combat game now, 7 is really good. On the other hand it is hard in light of current events to play a game where you fly a fighter plane and blow up so many ground targets.
I will probably play 3 retranslated edition nextā¦I was thinking about this song that @ellaguro put in a mix many years ago, wanted to see how it was used in game and was not disappointedā¦beautiful game.
This post was supposed to be a list of games I played recently, but Iām tired of closing this draft window every time I log on
Played a lot of Patrickās Parabox and it is really really good. Great sokoban type shit. Really interesting core mechanic, good balance between required puzzles and extra ones. It is the kind of game where random noodling in a puzzle really does teach you a lot about the problem you are solving, so Iāve found that noodling on something I am stuck on here to be less annoying than in other similar puzzle games.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land continues to delight. I have just realized that there are hidden challenge levels around the maps you have to look for and now my completionism meter is really off the charts.
Nearly all of the āupgradedā copy abilities seem more annoying to use, and nearly all give Kirby an uglier hat. What in the world were these artists thinking.
