I sure did finish the main story of Dang Old Grandpa 2.
Might take a small break before 3.
5 Likes
Being depressed and tired all the time sure is a great time to power through some VNs though, lemme tell ya.
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I appreciate how much Wrestle War’s Hulk Hogan is straight up Hulk Hogan.
I played a bunch of games over the past couple weeks that I intended to mention here and never did, it’s kinda hanging over me but now it has piled up to the degree that it’d be an actual degree of work so I’m just gonna stream of conscious ramble about them for a bit while trying not to get bogged down.
Deep Rune is the one I wanted to get to the most. It is a Magic Tower inspired game, which is basically where you generally have a top down view of a bunch of enemies where you have perfect info (see how much damage you deal and take with any encounter) and hence have to pick the optimal path of encounters through them. Tactical Nexus is basically one of these, as is this dev’s previous game Myth Bearer (I wrote that up in the giant bundle topic). The biggest difference in this game is that they took that notion and moved it into the mold of a side scrolling dungeon crawler.
I had the luck of ending up playing this the same time as a buddy of mine; unfortunately you are stuck with me writing it up as they figured it out much better than I did. We both picked to play as thief (class benefit: better fall damage, triple damage on back stabs with the starting dagger) and you fall into a dungeon that basically guides you through the first couple screens then lets you figure things out. Early on and honestly through most of the game you are very limited in terms of being able to heal yourself or regain MP, potions can be found but are very rare so you must lean on the full heal you get upon each level up. This means you have to keep tabs of how much damage each enemy can do as there are limited ways to avoid damage, and figuring out when you must absorb some damage vs. coming back later with more health or when you can do more damage (if you strike the killing blow you don’t take damage).
What the side view adds is the ability to get in rear strikes which do more damage, as well as the vertical element which includes climbing vines and trying to survive falls without taking too much damage (side scrolling level design is also much different than top down). What it takes away is more significant though as in most Magic Tower-esque games you get to view a large stretch of field and can see all that info instantly and immediately. Here you only see a given screen/room at a time and until you get there have no idea what the next one may hold. It could be treasure, could be a very hard enemy you can’t even scratch, it is invisible and that changes both the math and the feel of the experience dramatically. The knock some people have on these games is that they feel too solvable and while that is still the case here (and in many games TBF) it only becomes so after you fully explore, until then you have to guess and hope and that changes how it feels to play it dramatically.
The unknown is important here as everything is limited. Weapons here degrade and can break, and while there are limited repair tools each time a piece of equipment is repaired the durability is markedly decreased. When you find a bow (no arrows, those must be bought or found elsewhere) it is such a blessing as it is one of the very few and rare ranged/“safe” attacks (don’t get hit in return) but if you lean on it it means you spend every spare bit of coin on it while the bow wears down further and further as you come across tougher and tougher enemies. Magic has a very rough balance as it feels largely worthless until past the mid-game and even then once you gain some very intriguing options you likely can only afford a few casts before the MP runs dry. This is a game where (up to a point) it feels very possible to fail, to end up stuck in an impossible to survive situation and being forced to restart. You’d keep the knowledge (nothing is randomized) and the game is fairly short (initial run is probably 3-ish hours, future ones less) but it keeps you on your toes, although by the end run if one is clever they are actually much hardier than it seems as long as one doesn’t care much for score.
There’s other cool bits, the end run is legitimately inspired and well-done, there are some solid bits of level design in there at points, I assume the other classes may switch up the early game and the fact that you can play for score does push one towards optimization (you can also reset a room by pressing R so if you screw up or wanna try something you can freely). That said, while the game certainly works I don’t know that it sings? Like noted magic feels like it is paced if not balanced poorly, how it is scored is both simple and a bit single minded and I’m not sure the classes and scoring make it as replayable as it thinks it is. Personally I ended up beating it early while posting an awful score and missing much of the dungeon. I went back to an earlier save, explored around to see what other paths held and what other items and such were around (I initially only found like 2 of the 8 or so very different and powerful rings) and beat it again to get a better score via markedly less cheesy tactics, but didn’t feel the need to take another run to try and put it all together just for the sake of a better number next to my name. Dug my time with it, think it is definitely neat but… one of those games where you feel like it balanced a bit differently it could have been something great, you know?
Would you believe that this puzzle game is based on a Newton’s Cradle based on that screenshot? Fortunately you don’t have to as it is named Newton’s Cradle Puzzle Game which is so uncreative that I respect it. All it takes from it is that if one ball moves into another it sends it flying, but if two or more move together they stick together. Also you can’t directly move the white balls, I think they made that part up. Anyways it is sadly mediocre, the same dev made Unitied and I’d recommend playing that game instead.
Schildmaid MX is a hori shmup from some euro fellows. The main thing it has going for it is that you have a shield that activates when you get hit by a bullet, at which point running into bullets gets you points and keeps it active a bit longer, as does killing enemies. When that runs out you are vulnerable until it can recharge once more. It is odd in that for large stretches of time you while not invulnerable are very hard to kill which makes it feel a bit more… manageable I guess? It also makes you play through a mandatory tutorial followed by having to play through easy mode before unlocking normal, easy is easy enough that I got a 1CC first go. It is a pretty neat gimmick, level design isn’t great and most stages feel very samey, bosses didn’t feel particularly inspired either. I am not sure it is actually good and actual shmupheads might hate it, but I had a decent enough time rampaging through that easy mode for 20+ minutes.
There was a demo put up for Temple of Starlight that I played solely because of the aesthetic. Basically certain parts of the environment only exist when a matching color light is shined on it, you have to either switch, turn on/off or eventually rotate the lights around to get to the exit. It seemed fine, don’t think I’ll check back on the full release. Fun fact: it has moral choices and all the voice work feels like it is done by the dev’s friends, I consider at least 50% of that to be a positive.
The Crystal Golem is like a 25 minute long Soulslike if all you wanted from those games was the combat and absolutely no level design whatsoever and if 80+% of the combat options also weren’t present. It isn’t particularly good (would basically be a functional early prototype) but beyond liking the aesthetic I love that little crystal golem guy you play as. I grabbed that gif as his head regularly rotates like that and it made me love 'em. Give your character character I say.
I also played that Astro Bot game that comes with PS5s, it is better than I expected and even though I generally don’t care for that flavor of fanservice seeing a little robot cosplay as the Maiden In Black is odd enough that I can’t hate on it. Beyond that though after every other memory of this game has left my mind the fact that there is basically a love song to GPUs on the soundtrack is so utterly insane that I’m not sure I can forget it. Much better than it should have been.
Oh yeah, almost forgot Imaginaria. It is basically a point & click visual novel someone made about their time working at an Antarctic research station, which means it is much more interested in being informative than putting together anything resembling puzzles or telling a specific story. That said I knew very little about what it’d be like to actually live in Antarctica so I found it interesting enough. Thought the “1-bit” artwork was cute enough as well.
You know what, I’m too tired to go back and proofread that. Hopefully it is coherent and spelled close to right.
17 Likes
Time to finish Steins;Gate buddy. Maybe…hmm…maybe not. But if you are already dealing with Dangol’ you’re probably okay.
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Star Fox 64 owns.
Castlevania Legacy of Darkness owns. I’m going through this castle going who designed this? Satan? Like this castle was designed by The Devil you know? I am also playing with save states because you can fall down a hole and it’s time to restart the level idiot. That has to be miserable on real hardware. Glad I never suffered that. It’s really neat seeing Castlevania in 3D with all the verticality and death of the 2D games.
Okay watching a GDQ run and getting pits in my stomach at these later levels. Will probably finish the fun climbing up Castle Dracula from the outside and call it quits.
15 Likes
Yakuza 4… This game actually rocks. I’ve been playing these games lately and altho they all appear to be exactly the same with very minor iterative improvements, the actual overall quality varies pretty wildly game to game. 4 might be the best iteration on what’s essentially the same basic battle system as the first game.
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What’s worth playing in the PlayStation Plus collection?
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Bloodborne is in it.
I love The Last Guardian eve with its flaws.
I am on the team that enjoyed the new God of War (not the newest one, the one before it).
FF XV was odd as hell and I don’t think I ever grasped the story but the characters were neat and I dug its vibes.
The Last of Us Remastered and Uncharted 4 are definitely games of their ilk.
Others seemed to enjoy Monster Hunter World.
I added Resident Evil 7 to my library to maybe check out at some point.
Ratchet & Clank and the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy were kinda mediocre but I’m sometimes in the mood for that flavor of platformer.
Until Dawn was basically a horror David Cage game made by a competent team instead.
I liked Batman Arkham Knight but I have a soft spot for Batman, if you enjoyed Arkham Asylum or City it’d be a safe pick.
6 Likes
In my experience all the Arkham games are iredeemble trash
Uncharted 4 is totally skippable but probably everyone should play TLOU just so they know where Prestige TV Games are at now. Like to just keep abreast of the AAAA single-player money burner
RE7 is a great fuckin time, just a hoot, highly recommended
FF15 is actually an insane game and I ended up loving it even though it definitely, definitely sucks
4 Likes
Using this list because Playstation website is a pain in Japan:
On the PS2/1/3/PSP side:
Siren PS2
Siren Blood Curse
Echochrome
Everyday Shooter
Alone in the Dark 2008
Asura’s Wrath
Beyond Two Souls (lol)
The Bionic Commando games were well liked at the time but I think we’ve all agreed we were a little desperate and you could just play an actual old game or Hollow Knight now.
Castlevania Lords of Shadow (yeah why not)
Champion Jockey!
Deception IV
Detuned (takes 20 minutes)
Dragon’s Lair
Gravity Rush!
Hakuoki (Pretty Boy Dating Visual Novel)
Hamilton’s Great Adventure
Ico
Linger in Shadows
Lost Planet 1 2 and 3!
Mamorukun Curse (vert widescreen shooter with big PCEngine vibes)
Ninja Gaiden 3 (it is just press buttons YAY!, not Razor’s edge which is also on here.)
Puppeteer
Quite a lot of Resident Evil
Split Second was often talked about as an under appreciated gem
The Last Guy!
Strider is a fine 5 hour search action
Tokyo Jungle.
God damn there is like 3 years worth of Ratchet and Clank.
4 Likes
One of us should resolve to become the Ratchet and Clank Poster and be driven to madness and quit video games as they play 20 Basically Fine Video Games in a row.
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Adam Sandler movies are the Ratchet and Clank of the cinema.
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I play a Ratchet & Clank game once every three years or so and I think that’s about as much as any sane person should.
I started playing three games recently and should write about those as well.
Art Style: ZENGAGE is one of the not-bit Generations games for the DS that are no longer readily available that I actually just purchased before the store went down as opposed to learning how to hack a 3DS as I have a legit soft spot for the original run of bit Generation games (still have their boxes out, they look classy).
It is a puzzle game where you slide around the squares/tiles so that they match the colors of circles/beads placed around the playing surface. Presentation-wise it lacks the style of their earlier games and the song it plays during any tutorial segment is truly awful, here I’m gonna link to its morse code atonalness
It is odd in that the first two sections feel very hard but given they add a new mechanic each area it is steadily getting easier and the puzzle design keeps shifting into something less “push around for a while” and more “figure out the few necessary moves”. Anyways this may be more thought than the game requires as it seems to be rather middling, I mourn loss of access to games like this but this particular one likely won’t be all that missed unless it takes a notable upturn soon.
Metro: Last Light Redux I am playing solely because the randomizer I use to pick what random PC game to play next selected it (I think it was a free giveaway on the epic store at some point) and I didn’t think I could run it, but googling “can you run it” and checking swore I could, and I realized this was likely as much as I’d ever be intrigued by the game so may as well try. Turns out it runs well with everything set to low so figured I could play through a few chapters a day and see if there is anything to it.
I would sum up my thoughts on the original Metro game as less than the sum of its parts, some nice ideas and I felt it tried but ultimately unsatisfying. Last Light seems like it is likely to suffer the same fate after playing through the first six or sections. I don’t want a particularly hard FPS experience as I am awful at the games (I did not set this to survivor or ranger, left it on normal otherwise) but man is the AI dumb. It was dumb in the first game to but basically I trip an alarm and everyone runs around in a panic, rarely ever exploring or going after me unless I am spotted and stay spotted for a good long time. My plan to address this is to get spotted less but… you know, I kinda suck.
Also the early section has you as russians killing a bunch of nazis and while killing nazis is great (and these folks are definitely nazis) given the current situation over there and the justifications for it… it is something.
The third is OlliOlli World, which I bought on PS5 early last month with holiday moneys and just got announced as a PS+ giveaway game for this month. They got me on that one. I have no clue how many of you played the earlier OlliOlli games, I thought they were both legit great fun but I generally enjoy skating games a good deal. World is a big shift initially, I knew it had shifted from sprites to full 3d cartoon-looking polygons (while still basically playing like a 2d side scrolling game) but I was not prepared for all the lore. The game starts with them laying out the truly insane scenario, let me steal a summary from google:
Thanks, theverge. At least in this initial section there is a bunch of dialogue before and after each stage and while it does give you an early “press x to listen, press o to tell them to cut it out” prompt before each one I don’t know what compelled them to feel that this made things better. The prior games had zero story, now I spend time talking to a weightlifting seagull.
The game starts very easy and has a bunch of tutorial stages, and there are several key mechanics I know are there that they haven’t even touched upon yet. I get it a bit as the prior games have a reputation for being difficult, likely due to being difficult, but early on I was struck by a very specific “oh no they took something I liked and made it awful” fear. I no longer feel that way as it is starting to require a bit more at times but I worry it will end up removing all the difficulty and making it a “if you want it to be hard make up your own challenges” experience. That’s not inherently bad but as someone who doesn’t usually enjoy chasing higher scores just for the sake of it I prefer the game giving me a crazy “combo these three areas while scoring X amount of points” gauntlets to drive me.
9 Likes
I’ve played pretty much every Ratchet and Clank game on release apart from some of the portable spinoffs and All 4 One.
I think they occupy a niche which isn’t adequately filled by anything else which kinda explains why they are such a AAA flagship still even though they’re very clearly a B-Team series at this point. Some of the games are actually pretty bad when compared to each other within the series but I don’t think enough people care to hear my takes on why.
Ratchet and Clank is a 00s cartoon show that was moderately popular and inexplicably keeps getting renewed or rebooted in some form or another. It’s Teen Titans?
1, 2, 3, Into the nexus, A Crack in Time, Rift Apart and Deadlocked (in co-op), are probably the best.
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beat the iron golem in sens fortress after putting the game down for a few weeks to replay fft + mgs3 and finish dds1. what a good game… i now possess a +15 pyro flame too!!!
anor londo is so cool… love these empty wide expanses of marble i could see how smth like this could be this overelaborately baroque area instead (which is what i feel like a lot of “soulslikes” (including my eternal rivals at bluepoint…) go for instead of like… the relative plainness of demons and dark souls)
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I’m sick and my sleep schedule is wacked so I got up at like 3am and gambled like Hell in Yakuza 4. Made a cool mil with Tanimura B) very nice
Im very excited for the end-game content. There’s a few things I want to tidy up that I got locked out of finishing due to railroading such as collecting the Allies for Akiyama, completing Master’s training with Saejima and completing the coliseum with Saejima. I havent started Kiryu’s part but I plan on doing all the Gang Encounters, Komaki training and the coliseum.
As Ive played more Like A Dragon games I have become more thorough as opposed to less. I think that’s a testament to the games deepest strength and longevity.
Ive gotta make a tough decision as to whether or not I pre-order the upcoming Ishin… Also want to get the PS2 games again, I havent played them in years.
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PS Plus Essential only comes with 20 titles in the Collection + the monthlies, you have to spring for Extra (to get some current titles) or Premium (to get the Classics)
also the 20 title Collection is going away in a few months so claim them all now
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Needed a palate cleanser after the long and grueling task of beating Tactics Ogre remake, so I spent some time with Callisto Protocol. Feels good to dive back into a good ole fashioned, bone-headed American gaming experience. Josh Duhamel plays the lead which is cool but I think it would’ve owned if Jake or Logan Paul would’ve been cast instead. Those guys are boxers right? The battle system is essentially Punch-Out, so it would’ve been fun to see the Paul Brothers star in a game where they go toe-to-toe with roided-out humanoid freaks. Anyway, yea, after like 80 hours of Tactics Ogre I’m so ready to just stomp on some corpses and force-push mutants into giant spikes.
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Puzzling Peaks EXE is a little puzzle platformer where you knock around a ball with rotating platforms to get it to a goal. It has a narrative about a corrupted video game or whatever but who cares. Pretty decent little game to play in short spurts on your phone while you are holding a sleeping baby at midnight.
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It’s hard to even tell what the PlayStation collection games are, it all just seems mixed into the “catalog” you get for getting PS Plus Extra.
No idea how to take advantage of this thing before it vanishes next month!
3 Likes