Which game is this?
2 Likes
SF Rush 2049
3 Likes
Ah I get it now. Thanks!
1 Like
I also played Inkbound with a friend today and it was pretty sick. It’s a gosh dang MORP
4 Likes
The Classic Score Attack mode in Tetris Effect: Connected on PS4–a free update from the original Tetris Effect–is technically a multiplayer mode, but the players don’t really affect each other, so you can play it single-player vs an AI, or an empty controller. It was made to reproduce the tournament play used by the Classic Tetris World Championship ( thectwc.com / Classic Tetris - YouTube ), in which two competitors play Tetris simultaneously on two NES consoles, each trying to outscore the other. So, even though it supports multiplayer, with online support in Connected, the players are each playing their own single-player Tetris session–it’s just that they can see the other player’s session going there as well, with a live comparison of the scores. The default setting is that a player’s session ends automatically two minutes after the other player’s ended, but you can turn that off.
I’d been planning to keep the AI player on the lowest difficulty setting, so they would die off quickly and just leave me playing by myself, but I found it was sort of fun to have them there playing next to me–and it’s a way to judge how good the game thinks you are. So far, I’m at least slightly better than the level 3, “Decent,” AI. = D This is the best I’ve ever felt about my clumsy Tetris playing! ^ _^
My initial plan actually was just to start my own Player 2 using my second controller, and just let their blocks drop so they’d croak almost immediately, but the AI P2 is ready to go by default so it was just easier to go with that.
By Default, Classic Score Attack mode has lots of flashy effects going on
–but rather amazingly, you can turn ALMOST all of these off–mostly through the game’s main Graphics options menu, and the bouncing of the playfield under the Gameplay menu. You can also tweak the rules of the mode before starting the play session. The one flashy VFX I can’t seem to turn off is the big firework starburst from the middle of the playfield when a player’s session ends. ; P Still, with those options settings made, it’s one of the LEAST flashy versions of Tetris, and probably (okay I’m biased) the best-looking-and-playing one of those. I really do like that remixed “8-bit” music.
I said to myself while playing that all I’ve been looking for all this time is something like the old NES version of Tetris, but realized afterwards that back in the day I was probably more into the Game Boy version, which had come out first (end of July '89–NES version was November), and felt a bit more elemental somehow. But the NES version was nicer to look at and listen to, so that wasn’t bad. (You can play a version in Puyo Puyo Tetris that has GB-style pixel art and sort of the music, but not the classic style of play–and it has all sorts of silly effects over it, and copyright claims on the music on YouTube. : P)
And Classic Score Attack doesn’t strobe the screen when making a Tetris, unlike the NES version. It’s probably the best Tetris mode, ever. I may be slightly biased.
The game doesn’t have a score leaderboard for Classic Score Attack, dang.
Of the companies involved in the game, Enhance is Mizuguchi’s production company, based in the US but with a Tokyo office. Resonair is his Japanese game design studio: “produced by Enhance” according to their web site. Monstars is a Japanese studio that of late appears to have worked exclusively on Mizuguchi games Rez and Tetris Effect. Stage Games is an independent Tokyo game design studio specializing in the Unreal Engine and Unity, and for Tetris Effect involved specifically with the Connected upgrade.
7 Likes
I’m still having fun with Chained Echoes. One thing I’ve experienced with the game is that a boss will sometimes totally annihilate me, and I’ll wonder how I’ll ever be able to beat it since there isn’t really a way to grind. (There sort of is, but it’s tedious enough not to be very tempting.) And then I’ll try it again using a different approach and beat it without much of a problem. I think the key to most combat in the game is managing the overdrive meter and not letting it hit or remain in the red.
The writing continues to be somewhat uneven. Most of the time it’s perfectly serviceable, but there are occasional annoyances such as the bad Old English and the modern/Internet slang that I mentioned and some weak anime-style comedy* (fortunately rare).
*The game did commit one of my show-stopping annoyances that’s typically a sign that I’m not in the intended audience for a thing (a character calling another character a “pervert”), but due to it being a tame example combined with sunk cost and the game’s strengths, it isn’t going to make me abandon the game the way I might an anime show.
5 Likes
While sick with COVID I have played a very large number of games, several of which were shockingly dumb. I am playing shit I would never play normally because I am waking up with a lot of brain energy every morning after spending every day just not moving at all. I have immense patience, a quality normally inaccessible to me, but cannot stand up for more than 15 mins without getting very tired. Tradeoffs!!
So far the dumbest game I have played is Gamedec, which I got in the Humble Monthly some time ago. It is a vaguely Disco-Elysium-esque no-to-low-combat detective game where you play a detective… who works inside videogames… and only videogames… in the far cyberpunk future… where yes yes ifyoudieinthegameyoucandieinreallife. Not all the time. But sometimes! People play on “couches” which are VR gamer chairs with helmets and life support systems. And reality is called “realium,” and games are called “virtualia”… I cannot get into it too far without giving myself a headache but the jargon in this game is nuts. It’s wild.
And I think that’s partially because of the localization. This is a Polish game, I think, where you play a Polish game detective (“Gamedec”) living in cyberpunk Warsaw. Whatever fun Polish cyberpunk stuff might have been here has been localized into the grave. Everyone has goofy ass Anglo names like Timmy and Bob and Haggis (yes Haggis) or whatever.
I named my guy Fred. The first thing that happened when Fred the Gamedec woke up in his apartment was a giant like 10-minute interior thoughts monologue thing, like at the start of DE, but instead of making interesting discoveries about the world and myself, I was forced to make a lot of binary choices that the writer obviously assumed I would find intriguing and character-building (I did not and they weren’t). First I had to choose whether I wanted to drink coffee, tea, or whiskey. When I picked coffee I had to decide whether to eat synthetic beans or expensive beans or cheap beans. Okay, whatever. The next thing I did was dwell on the Controversies of the Day… which included the topic of “Digital Love.”
This game has the classic commercial-cyberpunk-product problem of just… not understanding cyberpunk, I guess, and not understanding the real world either. Any story set in a far VR future should not be framing “dating someone you only know in VR” as a controversy. People are solving this problem emotionally in the present day; I do not believe that it would be an issue in Cyberpunk Warsaw. Absurd.
This trend continues throughout the game. You may imagine that with a start like this, the game would be really really bad about characters appearing in these VR worlds as animals, or as people unlike their non-game identities, and you would be right; the story has some macguffin reason for why it’s bad to play as a being too physically different from your IRL self and teaches you this through a quest which allows you to police the gamer identity of a talking unicorn.
When I quit playing, the game had only just started to broach the topic of “playing as another gender” but it didn’t look like it was going to handle that particularly well, since the NPCs were constantly misgendering the only character in the story who appeared to be playing that way (absurd also that only one person was doing this).
The first game you go into is a VR alleyway called “Twisted And Perverted.” Two characters introduce it to you by remarking “ahh, the game that mixes sex with violence.” Like, they use almost that exact phrasing two times back to back in almost directly following sentences. I was very excited for Twisted and Perverted to be extremely horny and deadly but it has very little violence and only one sex act. It’s just a lot of guys standing in an alleyway and talking about how much they like to kill and fuck. You cannot kill most of them and I don’t believe you can fuck any of them. One of them leers at you constantly but the worst thing I could get them to do to me was to give me VR Beer. The whole execution of this idea is extremely milquetoast and stupid and full of social dilemmas that were old in fiction 50 years ago (salaryman searches for horny wife, etc).
Apparently every VR world you go into has its own UI. The one in T+P counts points for kills and deaths. I was able to kill two people and kill myself two times using a land mine. I finished the investigation with 1500 points.
In this world you meet an outrageously dumb “rogue esports player” NPC who has, minutes ago, ruined his own life by ragequitting a match of the game “Goodabads” (???) to chase trolls. He says this kind of shit to you constantly.
He agrees to follow you to help solve the case but to keep him around you have to constantly lie to him and say that you are solving this case in order to hunt down Trolls.
I was so shocked and amused by all this shit that I finished the first investigation out of a kind of rubbernecking curiosity. It’s not good! There are a couple really inspired mechanics in here but the bullshit they’re drowning in is too much to bother putting up with.
- I really like how interrogations fully require you to pander to the subject’s needs and fears. If you stand up for your own principles during an interrogation, or make helpful but harsh recommendations to a person who is fucking their own life up, you will fail. You just have to flatter the person and say stuff they agree with or terrorize them by pushing their specific emotional buttons. As far as I can tell you get rewards for doing either, so you can just be super flattering and nice and solve the puzzle that way without being a dick… but you still have to win the deduction puzzle of “what does this person want to hear”?
- The skills system is kind of amusing. When you say challenging or provocative shit to people around you, you earn points in a sort of four colors corporate personality test inspired system and spend them on abilities in a small skill web. Unfortunately the web is too small, you get some colors of points too often, and it’s too hard to target specific points, so actually redeeming the skills feels too difficult-- I was always missing Red Points and couldn’t buy things with the huge quantities of other points I was getting. I think a system like this could be fun with more scaffolding and a more intense focus on only giving the player points for saying the riskiest possible shit. It could be a fun way of forcing the player to roleplay an edgelord, which is what the game seems to want you to be in general, haha. It ends up being a version of “you get better at the things you do repeatedly” but with a little added agency for the player.
I quit playing when I entered world 2, which appears to be some kind of farming game.
This game really really sucks and I do not recommend it. There’s some stuff in here which would probably make a lot of people confused and uncomfortable at the same time as it’s also making them extremely bored. I dunno. Cyberpunk Warsaw deserves better
22 Likes
Trying to use the Mister MSX2 core with saving is a gigantic pain so I just grabbed the Disc 2 ISO of MGS3S and loaded that up to play Metal Gear 2. I think maybe the only Kojima game I haven’t played at this point.
It seems worse moment to moment than my now at least 10 year old memories of Metal Gear NES/MSX. They took all the ideas from it reused them and made Metal Gear Solid.
It has the post battle soliloquies and playing it in light of The Phantom Pain is neat. You will get spotted constantly. It’s rough like a old computer game is.
The PS2 version is very easy to play though.
I also tried Excitebike 64 found it way too simmy for my tastes. Surprisingly so. While I was sick I had started Doraemon 64 1 and 2. 1 looks like a Mario 64 romhack but Doraemon gets a gun. 2 is top down and a bit better looking. I tried to go back to 2 then my eyes got wide and I wondered what the fuck I was doing with my time.
I’ll try 3 as well. Maybe I’ll even try a Bomberman.
8 Likes
I DID IT
I DEFEATED THE AMON CLAN IN YAKUZA 4
7 Likes
Getting close to plat’ing Star Wars: Racer Revenge (PS2) (PS4), got darth maul unlocked. wasn’t he supposed to be dead at this point? whatever, it’s all non-canon, they’ve got episode 2 anakin podracing so it’s all fanfiction anyway lol
just need to unlock young anakin and darth vader and i’ll be done with the platty. they are both pretty gnarly to unlock, you’ve got to best some really good dev lap/race times
4 Likes
Racer’s Revenge is so good. Makes me wish someone would invest in more podracing. I remember some of the higher difficulty cups being pretty unforgiving.
1 Like
I wonder whether this might have been deliberate, due to the existence of Star Fox?
in the ~painted world~… this is the third area (sens fortress / anor londo / painted world) in a row that just feels like Pure Encounter Design in that really re4 / god handish way… interesting how the game focuses on this to a greater extent after its basically dropped the idea of the total interconnectedness of the first half ig. really tho it feels like barely any games Get It to this extent besides souls games and the previously mentioned capcom ones yknow. it’s like… doom level design stuff imo
12 Likes
They were working on that dinosaur planet game for the N64 before Nintendo turned it into a Star Fox game
2 Likes
The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection (GOG PC version)
Once I got the rules down, Sigmar’s Garden, Proletariat’s Patience, Cribbage Solitaire, Kabufuda Solitaire, and Shenzen Solitaire felt too easy, to the point where I feel like I’m just shuffling cards around and could be playing something a little more interesting instead.
Yes I am playing Kabufuda on the Easy setting but somehow just being more and more limited in how many cards I can move around at the harder difficulties doesn’t seem compelling.
Cluj Solitaire defeats me. I can’t seem to get it; probably doesn’t help that I can’t seem to remember the V, D, K, T face card sequence; my brain also can’t seem to handle the possibilities opened up by the “cheating” mechanic where you can put any card out of sequence on any other card, but then can’t play anything onto it and have to play it back into something in-sequence. The black and white minimalism doesn’t help me get into it and I don’t think I’m going to keep trying.
That leaves Sawayama and Fortune’s Foundation. Sawayama still feels hard to me; plus, it’s the only one where at least at the beginning as you deal from the deck, you can’t see all the cards, leaving that feeling of mystery, romance, and anticipation that is probably kind of vital to standard Klondike solitaire. And after dealing off the deck, you probably have a longish sequence of cards to work through, and if you do get through it, it feels like you’ve been on a journey.
Fortune’s Foundation feels insanely thick and complicated: you’re building up not just the four Aces, but also a 0-21 Tarot sequence–from both ends simultaneously, ideally–and even stacking numbered sequences is agonizing, because you can choose to stack them in EITHER increasing or decreasing values–yet, you can’t move stacks, only single cards, so re-organizing any stack probably involves exceedingly complex gyrations around your few precious hold cards. In a seeming nod to the difficulty, you are granted the only undo function in the Collection–but it’s just a single card undo, and it feels like you have to think so far ahead in FF that a single card is pretty much nothing–it’s just taunting you. But man, if I could clear it…
(From reading Steam discussions, the key thing for FF seems to be to get a column free: once you’ve done that, inverting stacks is simple. And the bottom option on the Options screen even makes the card flow when inverting automatic! Oh and the second-to-bottom option changes the numbers on the Tarot cards from 1, 2, 3 etc (forgot these are Arabic numbers duh) to Roman numerals I, II, III etc.)
OH. Solitaire Forever II (from Steam; to remind me what regular Klondike is like–and it’s like, just clicking through cards and yes waiting for that gambler’s rush of knowing you beat chance if you win; less compelling than Microsoft’s appallingly smooth ad-ware Solitaire that can guarantee you a solvable deal and even lets you pick a difficulty level for it, like, even a really easy one so you just win win win oh hey you leveled up don’t you want to keep playing and you know it’s just a couple bucks a month not to be interrupted by those full-screen video ads…) gives you the seven games in the initial list free–the others of the 302 solitaire games require a non-Steam $9.99 purchase. I kinda like those big janky (that is configurable, as is almost everything else) 3D cards, though.
8 Likes
It is the Steam next demo fest deal and of all the demos flooding the new release list today the one that grabbed my eye was Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity, which is the next game made by the Space Hole fellow which is both very much in the same vein as the Space Hole games and very much a new direction for things. Let me included the store video and a screenshot to get around having to describe the presentation:
Unfortunately these games run poorly on my desktop so I can only get so far into them (same desktop I am currently playing through Metro: Last Light Redux on, optimize your games please) but it is almost like an odd ball rolling platform adventure game? It appears these stages may have more than one exit, that you can pick up things that let you change into different forms at the cost of some energy, and things you can pick up to raise your total energy level. It does feel like there may be a bit of “come back to earlier stages with later forms or more energy to find a path to a different set of stages” as some of them definitely feel like three or four different potential paths laid atop one another. I can’t tell for sure how it will pan out as as soon as the game became more complicated it began running at half speed for me, but it is definitely interesting and is probably worth keeping an eye on to see exactly how it unfolds.
Assuming it is like most Steam fest demos said demo is likely only up for the week.
7 Likes
Oh yeah, also still playing through OlliOlli World and it has an increasingly baffling set-up in terms of how it is introducing its mechanics. I am still being taught some even midway through the third of what I believe are five main sections and at least one key one has yet to be mentioned (that would be manuals). All these things can be done if you know how to perform them, but the game doesn’t tell you about them or really require their use until they are tutorialized and like… this is a baffling way to handle a skating game. For those who have played one before, could you imagine the game waiting until the halfway point to tell you how to spin in the air while performing a trick, or potentially 70+% through before mentioning manuals (which is fundamental to building combos).
I’ve seen this crop up time to time in recent games but the decision to basically transform the entire campaign into a long tutorial can make sense in a multiplayer-focused game, but it seems some single player-focused games are doing it as well and it seems like an awful fit for those. OlliOlli World is mechanically fine but it feels like it is gonna go “okay, now go play with all your toys” after it is already 80% done while the prior games did the same by the 20% complete point makes everything feel very dumbed down.
7 Likes
Canon
5 Likes