hoooooly shit. looks wild lmao
2 Likes
I’m a little more than halfway through Save Room, a puzzle game made up entirely of Resident Evil inventory organization. The trick, in some levels, is using up consumable items in the proper order. For example, you may need to eat a rotten egg to knock down the “player health” displayed in the upper corner, then mix two herbs into a medicine and then use the medicine to heal the damage. Weapons also need to be reloaded, and boxes of ammo can be consolidated, etc.
Not exactly groundbreaking, but a nice little piece of Zen for currently less than $2 on Steam.
I’m also playing Knotwords so I guess I’m spending a lot of time today arranging things in grids. I also picked up Dorfromantik so I guess I’ll go place some shit in another grid now.
14 Likes
I might have to uninstall Dorfromantik. I still think it’s a good game but I accidentally played it for like three hours after work today. I didn’t realize that getting slightly better at it would make the game take forever. It didn’t get boring, though. I had no idea I had played it for that long until afterward. The Factorio effect.
6 Likes
I played a high concept and nicely made RPGmaker game from last year today. I don’t think I’ll ever like the pace of slowly walking through tiled areas and buttoning through dialog. The only RPGmaker game I’ve played that didn’t make me feel like “do I have the time in my busy day to walk to the other end of this hallway and back?” was Space Funeral. Like a lot of modern big budget games bring the momentum of their gameplay to a grinding half because of cutscenes or menu navigation, it seems like there is a genre of RPGmaker games about creating that dead momentum deliberately. Not for me. Wish I understood.
6 Likes
A visual novel with a sense of place and embodiment, and a restriction on the writing to fit into snappy text boxes.
7 Likes
Convulsing with rage as I remember the 15 minutes in the middle of that To The Moon sequel where they let you run
11 Likes
Try sraëka-lillian’s RPGMaker games, there’s no walking whatsoever in any of them
In their latest one, only the final boss has any dialogue and even there you can attack to interrupt it in the middle of its speech. I reviewed it here a few months ago
6 Likes
seconding this, sraëka-lillian is a good friend and a diabolically smart game designer
3 Likes
We’ve now seen the entire meager library of the 32x.
8 Likes
Beat 99Vidas, not what I excepted, full of pop culture/youtube memes, but not completed development, same enemies repeated level by level and only change color.
But I love this little sence, you could beat punks with Brazil / Argentina football clothing in game.
3 Likes
played a bit more stranger of paradise and it’s just like, fine? not as funny as i hoped, the nu-metal airpods scene is probably the peak, the combat is nowhere near as good as nioh and i’ve seen it hit <20 fps a couple of times on a 3070
the loot mostly seems to consist of fedoras? so the main dude keeps reminding me of clive owen in croupier
11 Likes
Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe [SPUD] is better played than watched. Watching would be a more miserable experience if you’re just interested in content. If you want that you might as well just read the list of [new] endings. The game is more for those who haven’t played the original/mod.
There’s a good chemistry in the empty environments which lends them better to an awkward empty horror than straight comedy in most cases. Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist felt like some of the team’s attempt at purer comedy and it came off as super flat and unremarkable when I played it. SPUD has a lot of awkward quietness and desolate environments that work when a more intense moments creeps in to let the loneliness smoulder a bit. Horror and comedy have a lot of overlap when it comes to surprise or suspense and I feel like the comedy is generally not the strong suit since you can outguess most of the punchlines but not so much with the more subtle unpleasantness. Some of the newer stuff especially feels like this despair is what makes for the strongest parts of SPUD. I also think I have a huge tolerance for walking around empty space and revelling in tedium so… Would I recommend it? Morbid curiosity will probably help you.
They really do go for it with the bucket joke. There’s like 19 ending rewrites all for one running gag which is kinda admirable.
The game’s visuals, I think, get a bit lost in the conversation and there’s some great tone setting by how level design frames vista reveals. They’re very often supported by strong spy-fi and dark industrial palettes that are a garbled mess when taken as a whole. It’s one of the ways the player more directly engages with the events as well so it stood out to me on this go around with it.
9 Likes
sold by your review!
1 Like
After about 3/4 of the game Save Room runs out of ideas and kinda gets stale. I’m going to quote my own Steam review here real quick:
A sequel to this game could use a strategy layer beyond the puzzles, maybe the unseen “player character” needs to manage these resources across puzzles in order to accomplish “objectives” that happen off-screen. That way you, the player, needs to think big picture while also juggling what will fit in the inventory. You may be forced to discard some items in order to finish a puzzle, but be strategic and carefully consider what will be most useful going forward. Then the state of the inventory and “health” in the next puzzle can reflect whether your choices were good. Put some of the “survival” aspect back into things. In this way it’d be closer to the original spirit of what made fiddling with your inventory so engaging in the Resident Evil games. Granted, that would be a much more complicated game, and I applaud the dev for even taking this concept as far as they did!
11 Likes
Die Hard for the NES had a lot more thought put into it than I’d have expected. You make your way through 7 floors looking for 7 locks to break before you can access the 30th floor where (if you’ve killed all the terrorists) you can face Hans Gruber who until that point spends his time siccing tougher henchmen on you as you mow through lower level bullet-spraying baddies. If you collect radio items, you can eavesdrop on his orders and get a heads up on who’s coming (Fritz! Franz! etc). There’s a timer as well (time speeds up when you enter stairwells which act as safe spots to take a breather and plan your next move). Speaking of movement, while navigating Nakatomi tower, you can only see what McClane (who you control top down Hotline Miami-like) has in his line of sight so if you hide behind a wall for cover, tiles of the map (and enemies) are blacked out, the level constantly masking itself based on this pixel dude’s POV. By using air vents however, you can peer down and get the layout of the floor below. Oh and the Feet Meter. You have a normal health bar and another just for your bare feet because there’s a lot of broken windows and glass produced by all the mayhem. Walking on glass or running too long will slow John down. You can only check your Feet Meter via the pause menu for some reason. Out of all the Die Hard games I played with friends last night (a few) this one sticks closest to any of the movies. INTERESTING.
Die Hard Arcade, the game most loosely associated with the franchise was also the best crafted and all around most fun game of the night. I guess this is what Fighting Force was trying to be huh. Bright colours, crunchily textured polygons, ridiculous cartoon foes (alien linebacker, a firetruck unloading firefighters/youfighters while also trying to pound you with a high pressure hose). We co-opped all the way to the end BUT only after racking up 30 credits to do so. How? By grinding through SEGA’s 1979 arcade title Deep Scan via the title screen. A hilarious idea to make players do this, going from the maximalist cacophony of Die Hard (hit-in-the-nuts “BOING” SFX with comically keeled over animation and all) to the minimalist hush of dropping depth charges onto passing submarines. But the icing on the cake? The master stroke? Once you save the little girl that’s been held hostage by Virtua Fighter reject White Fang, she announces to both her saviours: “Thanks! Now I want one of you to be my new bodyguard!” and you have to turn on your partner and kill them for this child’s amusement! I ended up losing to my friend, legit upset about it, sweaty of hand, but I played it cool B) Played the Saturn version which is apparently a very faithful port. GOOD TIME GAME.
Die Hard Trilogy is dirty and ugly and transcendently so at times. Even the UI has big swinging balls, loud and aggressive, BOLD fonts. I mean, the name entry screen consists of a ring of NPCs and John McClane playing duck-duck-goose with a Glock. This is some sublime garbage made with gusto, I admire it! They were onto something here. Or else they were just ON something. The music, especially the EDM track of the first stage (there are three stages, one for each of the first films (1 is a clunky ass third person murder fest, 2 is a first person semi-on rails shooter and 3 is an abysmal driving goose chase) goes SO HARD
A legit trance was achieved, level 2 is
GTA nastiness with even less wit to water things down. I mean, the game plays like shit but it insists on making you feel its fast food teenage slumber party Blockbuster rental bravado. WILD RIDE, WORTH THE BRAIN DAMAGE.
Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas is unfortunately not as ludicrous as its title, in fact it takes a slight step back from the tasteless tour de force of its predecessor. There are still 3 separate stages with different gameplay styles but this one wants to be its own cinematic experience strung together for a brand new John McClane adventure in misanthropy and machismo. What happens? Well, your old NYPD buddy Kenny wakes you up from your beer can bed of pizza box pillows and invites you to Las Vegas where he’s just been made the new warden of Mesa Grande Prison. They’re throwing a party. A prison party! But wouldn’t ya know it, the prisoners riot and it’s up to John to mow down not only them but countless guards and (eventually, we didn’t get this far though) your pal Kenny because it was all a set up. This one wore its welcome out rather fast, the neutered UI being a sign of how serious this game decided it had to take itself (they probably “got some notes”) ultimately diluting the unhinged vibe of the first one. Ah, and I just remembered, both Die Hard Trilogy games have this effect where geometry (walls mostly) that is close enough to the camera fades out but like in these weird shapes that make the environment look like it’s constantly suffering from dynamically manifested cigarette burns. Really adds to the trash vibe nicely. TOO MUCH PISS, NOT ENOUGH VINEGAR.
Apocalypse puts us in prison yet again, which is probably where I belong at this point. All these games with their flood of Brucey one-liners (this one actually has his voice and likeness though) are starting to bleed together. My brain might also have started bleeding at this point but Apocalypse is maybe only second to Arcade in terms of being an action video game. Just a no nonsense (OK, there’s plenty of nonsense) run and gun game that does some nice things with shifting perspective, foreground and background targets but also some not so nice things like when you’re asked to use the strict directional movement for platforming at diagonal angles. It’s got some juice though, 100% Bruce juice, like a dirty rag soaked in The Fifth Element + Twelve Monkeys wrung into room temperature can of Tecate. Good flames, gotta mention the flamethrower. Aslo love the video textures applied throughout. In the prison level, it’s the warden (I think) screaming at you Big Brother style, here it’s a music video courtesy of POE:
The thing that will really stay with me however is that we, and these games, and their fetishization of fireballs manifested chaos and destruction in the sleepy suburbs of Phinney Ridge. While playing Apocalypse, an eruption of light flashed through the window. We rushed outside. The neighbours were burning their christmas tree (idk why they still had their christmas tree (or why they immolated it on the grass on their front lawn*)). A video to commemorate the event:
TOO HOT TO BE CONTAINED BY TV
The Fifth Element is SHIT. God awful platforming and shooting and you have to do plenty of it. We persisted until we got to the point where you could play as Leeloo, couldn’t hold out for Chris Tucker but they give you a bit him at the title screen which is nice of them. TRASH YOU WON’T EVEN ENJOY THROWING AWAY
Hudson Hawk is an NES game we’d never played for a movie we’d never seen** so we watched the trailer and fell to pieces jumping right into the game after it ended, confronted with the character’s cartoonishly large forehead. Obviously, we were losing our minds at this point in the night. You kill dogs and cops and birds with baseballs. We didn’t remember seeing any baseballs in the trailer… Anyway, we completed the first mission which was to steal (?, idk if Hudson’s a thief or what and I will NOT bother looking that up) DaVinci’s painting of a horse. Which we got to marvel at in all its glory upon completion:
WE LOVE THAT HORSE
Finally, our minds were truly lost. Our mental capacity misused and misplaced so that all we could do was retire and go to bed.
*The aftermath of our psychic influence over a suburban family
**OK, if you’ve made it this far, WHY did we play a bunch of Bruce Willis games? Well, our movie night (most of the same people) decided to revisit a pair of his films (Unbreakable and Die Hard With a Vengeance) when it was announced he’d be retiring. For some reason this turned into a mini-marathon (The Fifth Element, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, The Sixth Sense, The Last Boy Scout) and bled into our game night - WE ARE NOT BRUCE WILLIS FANS WE DON’T KNOW WHY WE SPENT THE BETTER PART OF A MONTH GIVING HIM THIS SPOTLIGHT but idk it was fun, dumpster loads of reactionary uncle beer gut fun and now it’s time to put an end to this inexplicable chapter of our lives (after we watch Hudson Hawk this week).
31 Likes
Assemble With Care was, uh, not great. The writing was pretty ham fisted, which maybe wasn’t a huge surprise. But the repair gameplay was, uh, hm. Did I expect a “realistic” representation of what it’s like to repair electronics and mechanical devices? No, not really.
Did I expect the internals of every electronic device to have mysteriously missing/disconnected wires (which, by the way, all just look like full-sized, bizarrely elastic aux cables). Gee, no wonder why your record player wasn’t working! Someone disassembled this before I came along and crossed all the wires while it was sitting on your shelf. Maybe it was gremlins?
Yeah, this fictitious town has a terrible case of gremlins, just fucking with everyone’s gadgets.
At least this was short. Woof.
6 Likes
Bruce Willis is in a surprising amount of FUN video games.
3 Likes
Honestly really enjoyed the Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition—the bucket creates a kind of cool situation where you know how to get all the endings now, but they’re all different and sillier, so it kind of takes the frustration out of poking around and just leaves you with the anticipation of “oh haha I wonder what it does to this ending?” it’s a pretty good goof!
1 Like
I’ve actually never played Stanley Parable (though I’ve seen a little footage of it). Maybe it’s time to give it a go.
Think I got a code or two for it
1 Like