it’s going away??
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Something is… not next month but in May PlayStation 5's PS Plus Collection Being Removed in May - IGN
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GOW Ragnarok was really feeling like homework so I put it down for a bit and went back to my Breath of Fire series playthrough and trying to tackle a few games I’ve got physical copies of one last time before taking them for trade in.
Breath of Fire 3 - Vibes are immaculate and the 2D art is best in class but the slow text speed is an absolute killer when playing on real hardware. I’m also continuously pleasantly surprised by how much of the story is a real bummer. Almost every named character you meet in the world sucks and is either out to get you or make a buck off you or both. For example, there’s an entire section where two overpowered goons are trying to ransom you and your party (who are two young kids) away or sell you into slavery. You keep almost getting away but they are always right on your tail and it’s admirable how stressful the entire section is, and how satisfying it is when you finally powered up enough to get to kill them. The world also feels very alien and scary and it’s very easy to get killed in the early sections. I vaguely remember the ending being a real downer too. Highly recommended to play emulated at 3x speed.
Judgement - Third times a charm maybe? I just finished watching Ikebukuro West Gate Park (the 2000 TV show) which has real Yakuza vibes and, sure enough, I was told it was a major influence on the first Yakuza game (I guess the main character is a direct influence on Kiryu and supposedly his model was based on the actor). I’ve already played all of the mainline Yakuza games and have tried Judgement a few times before but it never stuck, but I’m in the right mood now and enough people on this site have told me the ending is great and the second game is really good so here we go again.
Nioh 2 - Another game I’ve tried a bunch of times and I always peter out around the same point (near the end of the second section). I like the maximalist take on the souls formula but it feels just too samey, the game keeps throwing historical figures at me which I’m sure would be cool if I knew who any of them were, and I’m not into the sengoku-fashion-souls aspect so I feel unfortunately this one is finally going to the trade-in bin. I tried my best!
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I think just them being included in Essential. they’ll probably still be available in Extra
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PS home screen > Games tab > scroll right, select PlayStation Plus
Scroll to Benefits tab, select PlayStation Plus Collection
Go thru the list of games and do Add to Library for each
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thanks, i’ll do this tonight when i get home.
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Judgment is unfortunately lacking in many respects, notably how one style is given much more focus than the other and how pitiful your character feels until later in the game. The sequel exceeds it in every way.
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having never played anything yu gi oh before, i put yu gi oh zexal world carnival on my 3ds. so far, this is a surprisingly simple game. like there’s a lot of cards that have their own unique powers and rules, but they’re explained well enough on the card’s text.
maybe as i get further in the game, it’ll introduce more complex stuff, but for now it’s fine. also all the npcs have ridiculous names, i love it
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judgment took a few hours to click for me and then i really enjoyed it
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I admire Neon White more than I enjoy actually playing it. I guess it’s not for me.
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Finished the Coliseum with Kiryu in Yakuza 4, other than the tag battles. Fuck I love this game!
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Yeah, the rules aren’t hard at all. Where it gets complicated is just when you have so many effects you can do on your turn with your cards, and you’re trying to think about what order you want those effects to activate in to get you your best setup on your field. That game is all about making giant combos on top of combos of card effects, and at the highest level it’s all about one-turn-kill combos.
One of the nice things about yugioh video games is that the TCG has been around for so long that there are thousands and thousands of cards to choose from. Lots and lots of different deck archetypes and strategies to play with.
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Actually, speaking of TCG’s, the first booster set for card fighting Vanguard dear days came out yesterday, and I spent in total around $90 for the season pass and some ancillary DLC. I’m at like 98 hours now and still need to work through three more story modes.
It’s interesting to be able to look at a booster set and see there’s only ~32 new cards for each nation, and a lot of those cards are designed for specific deck archetypes. So while they are like 180 new cards in the entire booster set, the actual number of new tools you have for any particular deck is a lot smaller than that. There are a lot of cool new deck archetypes in this booster set though, as it coincided with the release of one of the new seasons of the anime. Looking forward to playing around with those.
It was interesting going through the deck recipes that you earn in the game and realizing that in your 50 card deck, 27 of those are for the most part kind of automatic and don’t have a ton of variability. It’s the remaining 23 cards that you really build your deck around, and when you factor inbyou want multiple copies of each card, you’re really looking at around like maybe 6 to 10 unique cards you’re building your entire deck around. So it’s a lot simpler to build decks that I thought.
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Been enjoying Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection a lot. Super good collection with great resources.
I’m surprised at how well some games hold up although some are still epilepsy beep nightmares like Black Widow. And then the Atari 5200 and Jaguar are mostly unplayable, but the stories are fascinating. I finally see that the Jaguar spirit was carried over into rudimentary game engines like MMF2 with their in-built, awful, digitised sprites and frantic action.
They’ve got great dev interviews that provide context and they really lay into the company. They discuss drug use, bad management, pay conditions. Overall, it’s refreshingly unsanitised without losing the sense of celebrating the craft. Like they were basically inventing new genres every month, whilst also putting up with all sorts of dumb corporate shit. There’s a really heartening restrospective that caps it off with a brief tribute to the 2600 modding scene. The whole package feels valuable and more emotional than the typical retro compilations tend to be, and I have absolutely zero nostalgia for Atari. I highly recommend it.
It feels like a videogame exhibit curated properly, which they almost always aren’t when there are videogame exhibits at actual museums/galleries. I went to the War Games exhibit at the Imperial War Museum recently and it fucking sucked. Curator just putting video games next to random war artifacts like it provides insight, while the opening room has to explain what videogames are to the normies for the umpteenth time. Just put Atari 50 at a bunch of stations instead.
Here are my highlights:
Yars’ Revenge – 1982 - Atari 2600
It reminded me of the few games I’ve ever actually made. They often shared a design philosophy of the extremely pared back one-screen design which is so common to the 2600. I never dabbled in 3D games because I felt like there was still so much to do in 2D. Yars’ gave me the warmest feeling of a faith in human creativity to make something odd and unique within strict limits. Most of the games in the collection just boot before you can see the manual so they were often jarring or made little sense so if you’ve never played/heard of it try guessing what is going on here.
The enhanced edition lets you put a fancy modern skin over the original code but I kinda prefer the 2600 look and the single droning roar over the new music. I love that the game naturally pushes you towards little strategies, either sniping with potshots and making quick hit and runs to activate the Zorlon Cannon, or going all in and using the screen wrapping to dodge the mess beyond the neutral zone. A game after my own heart.
[Neo] Breakout – 1976 [2022] - Arcade
Good sequel to Pong. Almost always fun no matter the version. I gotta give it to Neo Breakout which is the 2022 ‘reimagining’ even though the collision is borked. Balls act screwy at the corners of bricks and will sometimes bounce back exactly the way they came or through walls. You had one job ball!
Food Fight – 1983 - Arcade
I, Robot – 1984 - Arcade
I’d never heard of this before playing the collection and I think it’s actually a neat idea for a maze-style game with a unique fail condition (don’t be airborne when eye glows red). The 3D graphics gimmick actually hides a really simple and original arcade game. Sometimes it’s nice to move quickly as a robot and movement is progress a la Splatoon or Pac-Man. It’s like a more frenzied Qbert that turns into a very basic ‘over-the-shoulder’ shmup after each level. It comes with a 3D brush art mode too where you can draw with terrific polygons.
Missile Command – 1980 - Arcade
Arcade version of Missile Command is still the best even though later ones add powerups and a more forgiving ammunition system. This one is very fast, and you have to think about missile launch sites in a more strategic way since the left, right or centre bases can run out. It’s also the most beautiful and remains the best use of the phrase ‘the end’ in any game.
VCTR-SCTR - 2022
A medley of classic vector games. Playing the original Asteroids still sticks with me for how magical vector games look. It’s like games’ version of the organic lively look of hand animation. VCTR-SCTR does a decent job of emulating the look but is a bit of a pain to actually play. Moving through the different games (Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Battlezone(?), Tempest) is novel but the Battlezone bit is far longer and more difficult than all the others, so each run feels like you’re doing a ‘run’ back to this bit. Still, this is the closest to playing vector games without a proper display.
Centipede – 1995 - Gameboy
Of all the versions of Centipede I still think the Gameboy version (not in this collection) is the best since its sound gives the best sense of dangerous space. The arcade (and other versions), are just weirdly harsh and hollow sounding to me.
Tempest 2000 - 1994 - Atari Jaguar
This is the most 90s shit for the most 90s console and its hilarious the killer app of the Jaguar was an arcade remix. It’s really excellent though. The soundtrack is pure energy, and the game is much easier to actually play than the other versions of Tempest which are often stiff and finnicky. Rave on.
Malibu Bikini Volleyball – 1993 - Atari Lynx
The only one that stuck with me from the Lynx. A big part of it is the CD player function and the fact that some of the music sounds wistful and bittersweet – some might say boobly.
It’s fairly easy to progress as long as you serve first since the opposing team are not very good at dealing with your AI partner’s return shots.
Ninja Golf – 1990 - Atari 7800
It’s just OK.
Yoomp! – 2007 - Atari 800
There aren’t many 800 games in the catalogue but this stands out as being the only game from the 2000s in the whole collection. It has cool music synchronisation too but the game feels like a minigame somehow. Well-made but diversionary.
Star Raiders - 1982 - Atari 5200
Pretty impressive for its time but that’s a running theme for a lot of the earlier titles. It was much cooler to hear the devs talk about how obsessed they were with playing it. It must have felt limitless at the time.
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Playing Bravely Default II. I don’t love it, but Charlotte Ritchie voices one of the main characters, and I loved her in Dreamfall Chapters, as well as her non-videogame work. She doesn’t have a lot of voice range, but her standard voice is so pleasant. It’s not nothing. It also means I’ve played her entire vidcon oeuvre.
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one of my FAVORITE ARCADE GAMES EVER it got delayed til my birthday (like the month i was born) becuase the developer got into a car accident near moffett field (also techincal difficulties and regular development nightmares, but when i was losing my mind i came up with some wild backstories that i just like to think about sometimes for fun. like it was delusions in the moment and its turned into fun world building). i might be going to california extreme again this year and so far thats the only place ive been able to actually play a cabinet version of i robot. man the atari collection is getting the classics into everyones hands, i love it
the UN-GAME was so ahead of its time too. i love visiting doodle city!
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I was struck by how pure and unrestricted by convention it was. They really were just like ‘fuck it, let em draw with the 3D’.
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apparently development was such a nightmare there were rumors that atari shipped a bunch of cabinets to japan to have them throw em in the ocean but the guy was like NO I JUST WANTED TO THROW THE CONTROLS IN THE OCEAN
i love the attract mode where they teach you not to move when the eye is open. proto andross has such 'tude
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In Minstrel Song I wanted to do a victory lap around the world at the end of the game to explore places I haven’t been to and get easy rewards but it’s been the opposite of that. 0 new quests have been finished and 0 amazing treasures have been found. Meanwhile:
I got to an underwater dungeon that held one of the Mythical Fatestones and the fatestone was just… not there. The ominous pillar was empty. No boss, no dialogue.
I met one guy in an abandoned fort who ran off to the crystal city to plead to the king. Went to the crystal city, he’s not here.
One tribal village in the steppes I visited earler is now completely abandoned though all the infrastructure is intact. Very eerie. Couldn’t see any trace of the villagers anywhere. Except the horse. The horse is still here. Reminded me of the awful giant termite invasion in Romancing SaGa 2
Went to an underground cave underneath another dungeon in the desert, one unidentified squad / sect was there, only their leader was talkative and he told me « you shouldn’t be here!! »
Every town in one region got destroyed by a rampaging monster that’s just sitting there in one of them now (He’s too difficult to beat) All the people are gone, presumably dead
I also tried to get some info on a failed quest - the emperor was sick and I was supposed to get a cure for him. Then after a while he just got better on his own. QUEST FAILED. Very suspicious but no one had anything to tell me about it
Souls games also do this unceremonious abandoning of loose threads but it just works way better in SaGa because the games are less famous. You can type « where is big onion guy Dark Souls » on google and get the entire questline with each step detailed immediately on 50 awful SEO sites, while with SaGa it would take just a little big longer so it’s a little easier resisting googling
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Hi folks! I’m holding a 24-hour tiebreaker poll to pick a console to explore. We’re split between the Saturn and PC Engine. The poll is here. Vote fast!
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