Games You Played Today VI (III in the west)

[Tuxedo]

Card Shark: Great concept, wonderful art and plot. The cheating motions that constitue most of the gameplay are (very cool and) just a chore to execute. A too charitable reviewer called them close to WarioWare, I’d call them more like QTEs meet Simon Says

TOEM: I feel like I’m playing a very bog standard Wholesome Game but the feel is excellent. Really like having a a first person camera to look around when the game is isometric-ish by default. Reminds me of early 3D games without full camera control but with an useless immobile first person mode to look at ceilings. Like Ocarina of Time or SMT3. TOEM is like what if a whole game was focused on that first person mode.
By default the camera highlights every object which entirely ruins the game. Took me an hour to notice this could be removed (so like, 25% of the playtime)

TOEM wins handily over Card Shark so I guess Feel is everything

[skelephone]

Another game I played a lot of while sick has been Kynseed.

I picked it up thinking it was going to be “more fantasy-y Stardew Valley” and it absolutely IS that BUT it is also some other much stranger and weirder shit than I expected.

Normal expected stuff:

• it is a normal farming life sim like Stardew and the others, but with less agency than Stardew over the physical structures and layout of the farm.
• You can grow crops, raise animals, submit things to competitions, run a shop, cook food, smith things, etc. like in many crafting life sims
• Time passes more quickly than in stardew–months are two weeks long, days might be a little shorter, can’t tell
• The dating mechanics are here again but the content is much less bespoke/deep than most games in this genre, much more systemic and shallow
• You can have babies, you can die, and you continue playing as your babies into future generations of the world

Okay here’s the weird shit. It’s all spoilers so if you want to play this game then don’t read it.

Weird Shit

All right. You start off as an orphan child in a land of kind of… light fairytale and fun, I guess. There are fey creatures and sprites, and it’s all twee and nice. You and your twin sibling get adopted by some guy who brings you to his village. So the culture of this village is I guess alien to you.

You start off living two weeks of summer at your Uncle’s house in this land of fairy niceness. You have a couple spooky dreams about a shadowy figure, but whatever. That kind of shit happens all the time in games like this.

Then on the final day of summer, your uncle takes you to a ritual in the center square of town. This apparently happens only once every 10 years… real special ritual. There is a fucking wicker man in the middle of the square and two old folks stand in front of it.

The head of ceremonies asks you to choose one of these two old folks.

Whoever you pick enters the fucking wicker man. A plate closes in front of them. Then the mouth of the man breathes out a long stream of rainbow butterflies. The wicker man opens… and the person is gone. They got fucking sacrificed!!!

Your twin sibling is standing there with you and they go “oh my god. you just sacrificed that person. what the fuck.” And your uncle goes, “I’m sorry, it’s just the way of the world.” Your sibling storms off, saying “this place is nuts. holy shit. I’m out!!”

Then you go home and have another spooky dream where you meet the shadowy fey creature from before. It’s a fucking evil looking hare monster with giant ears, and it goes “holy shit that was fucked up dude they just sacrificed someone in front of you. And they made you choose! That was so fucked up!” He then cuts a fucking devil’s deal with you but the implication is that he’s giving you these powers of generational stats-and-skills-retention and rebirth and shit so that you can solve the mystery of this land and stop the fucking wicker man sacrifices.

I guess every decade, the game is randomly sacrificing one of these systemically generated NPCs at a Summerisle-style gathering that the little systemic characters attend. Characters are also born, and can die as well, so I guess there is a flow of disposable NPCs through this very long, slow system spanning what feels like hundreds of in-game hours.

It’s wild that this is in the game, and that the game uses it as a motivation for the player. A lot of these crafting life sims are about making you feel part of a community, giving you this close connection to imaginary friends and letting you feel fellowship with a universally-accepting community that you can poke and prod but which will usually just love you back. But this game wants you to be suspicious of not only the setting and its ancient gods… but also of the regular ass peasants around you, whom you’re marrying and having babies with. You are an alien outside perspective inside this society, and all the people you are trading with and wooing and doing fetch quests for are weak nasty beings who sacrifice other humans for dumb reasons.

You, on the other hand, are a wise immortal spirit who rejects their pagan folkways or whatever, both metaphorically as the player and literally as the character in the story.

It remains to be seen whether this will keep up for the game… I suspect that the Goddesses you sacrifice to will turn out to be bad, but also the hare monster who gave you a death pact will probably also turn out to be bad and impossible to trust. But we’ll see.

I have seen too many people tweet that they want to make “haunted animal crossing” or whatever, serial killer stardew valley… but I haven’t seen anyone remark that this game is already that. The darkness of the setting is not always foregrounded, and it sometimes does conflict with the gameplay, which is mostly trying to build that same sense of belonging you have in Stardew et al… but the fact that this is in here at all is wild to me.

---

Anyway I’m having fun playing. I made a death pact with a supernatural being and at the end of every year, if I’ve died in a dungeon, he skips my life forward a year for every death. And I think my life is currently hard capped at like, 39 or something… I paid years of my life to get some buffs. Excited to see how this plays out as I get closer to death!

In general the game seems slightly more aimed at adults than others in this genre. There are a surprisingly huge number of cock jokes in the game and a whole fertility mechanic where you can craft and consume fertility drugs and sacrifice goods at fertility shrines. The wedding ritual place is surrounded by a lot of stone pillars that look extremely phallic to me, lmao. It’s interesting to me that this game is aimed at older players to the exclusion of children, rather than simply a regular life sim with some content in it that is suble enough for adults to enjoy… most games in this genre do not stick a bunch of wicker man sacrifices and community alienation sequences and hard-on jokes into their otherwise normal-style cozy life sim.

Hoping it stays interesting!

[cask]

@cask

Breath of Fire 3 - I vaguely remember the ending being a real downer too.

Damn it was even worse than I remembered

Extended Breath of Fire 3 ending Summary

After running around a fairly standard (if small) midieval RPG world for awhile your group decides it needs to go talk to “God” and figure out why it decided to massacre your entire race 400 years ago. Basically this involves crossing the ocean, which noone has ever done before. Luckily there is a giant black metal freighter that people have seen off in the distance from time to time but never responds to any attempts at communication (creepy!) that seems to be able to weather the heavy ocean currents.

You eventually get on that ship and find that everyone on it has been dead for hundreds or thousands of years and it’s been following a busted automate cycle, wandering around the ocean with no rhyme or reason for who knows how long. You reprogram it and head across the ocean to find God!

You arrive across the ocean and find essentially an entire continent covered in garbage from an ancient civilization that was far more technologically advanced than what you had seen up to that point. Beyond the literal mountains of metal robojunk there is an endless desert that you wander for literal weeks, eventually killing your camel (in-game your only way to get back to civilization if you get lost) for water.

Anyways, you come across an advanced city 90% swallowed by the desert. Therein you find “God” who is basically a …person? from the previous civilization who watched that civilization kill itself and bring about ecological collapse, hence the endlessly expanding desert you just traversed that will eventually swallow the entire world.

That person is using all of the remaining climate control technology left available to keep the desert from swallowing the tiny little corner of the world that you came from, as the rest of the world has already been lost. You are all that is left. Also she commanded what humans were left to wipe out all dragons 400 years ago because she correctly surmised that they could destroy that little corner of the world and now she has to kill you too because you are the last dragon. (The dragons tried to run but ultimately allowed themselves to be wiped out rather than fight back which would have probably ended the world… somehow).

You and your friends say no, we will take our chances even without your help, and hey this particular dragon is the main character and this here is a PSX RPG so we are contractually obligated to kill God at the end, so sorry. The game ends on a bittersweet note of uncertainty as your characters look out over the endless desert no longer contained by the climate control systems (they all exploded). Roll credits.

I still can’t recommend playing the game on original hardware because of the text and walk speed which is a real shame, but what a singular experience. Excited for BOF4 (which I’ve never played) and finally beating Dragon Quarter (which I played the first half of 15 years ago but never finished).

[meauxdal]

Middle-earth: Shadow of War (PS4) - this game is pretty cool so far. playing on one notch up from the basic difficulty, which was probably hubris because i am getting my ass kicked by way-too-many orcs at once

my heart broke for @BustedAstromech when i booted it up for the first time and got a dour notification about how the devs were “listening to feedback” and “gold is no longer available for purchase in the shop” or whatnot. what a bad first impression! what a miserable little industry this is! just had this real pang of sadness at seeing that thing pop

anyway the game itself is really, really funny. i love the orc personalities so much…

as one of the people who really enjoys that panned rings of power show, it’s given me additional context and reasons to be interested in the narrative stuff going on, so that’s nice

Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition (PS4) - this game is very strange. i don’t necessarily dislike it, but it feels off somehow. what the hell are these default controls? dodge on square, attack on circle, teleport on triangle? that’s… weird… the combat doesn’t feel very good, everything has a strange feel to it.

i do like The Boys, the characters are fine

the music is aggressively light and breezy. it’s good! just weird. the whole vibe of this game is weird. i really don’t know what i think about this so far at all.

Trials: Fusion (PS4) - more games should just have your friends show up as ghosts in your game automatically. some of these levels are disgustingly difficult… also everything that isn’t the main trials stuff is bad

Dragon Quest Heroes (PS4) - i love DQ and i love musou, but for some reason this game is putting me to sleep. the attack combos feel really slow and inflexible in this compared to my most recent musou, Warriors All-Stars, which is much snappier and more fun to control.

graphics are a mixed bag. art design is sublime, and i absolutely adore the character designs and the japanese voices, but for some reason this is this one of those games that has no anti-aliasing whatsoever? everything has PS2 jaggies lol. it looks pretty bad. any old basic AA solution would have made a massive improvement, no idea why they left it this way. that said, the game does seem to run at a pretty solid framerate.

anyway, i do like the characters a lot, so i might keep plugging for now. just not sure i can deal with how slow-paced this is

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands (PS4) - the character models look hideous in this for whatever reason. most of my playtime so far has literally just been hiking around on mountain roads for several miles on the way to and from my destination, where we shot some people. most of it was just quietude, sprinkled with the SFX of my character getting repeatedly winded from over-sprinting. not sure about this one… i do like sneaking around but something doesn’t feel right here

[loki]

i can’t remember how you get it, but i’m sure there was also an alternate ending where ryu and teepo decide to stay with myria, who continues watching over the world

i might be misremembering though, 25 years later.

[cask]

You are remembering basically correctly (it’s just a yes/no option before the final boss fight) except Teepo is already dead (you killed him earlier when he tried to bar your way to meeting the goddess) so it’s just you living for eternity in a room that looks like a forest, complete with birds that keep crashing into the walls and dying because they don’t realize they aren’t outside.

[BustedAstromech]

Make sure you crank it harder again if you get too comfortable – dying about 3 times an hour is best.

I never had more fun working on that than the months I spent building stuff to troll my embedded QA tester. Just cranking up the difficulty of everything until the funniest things happened. It’s a pretty sloppy and frequently unfair game but it gives you all the tools to do the same back to it.

Not enough of the people who worked on it were into wrestling

[iguferon]

@BustedAstromech

Not enough of the people who worked on it were into wrestling

you guys shouldve hired mdickie for that one, Wrestling Revolution/Hard Time invented the nemesis system

[smbhax]

“Fortune’s Foundation” solitaire variant in The Zachtronics Software Collection (GOG PC version)

When I had first looked at Fortune’s Foundation it seemed impossible; the big breakthrough here was realizing that the space in the middle, under the crystal ball, is not just a single-card hold space, but a regular stack-holding play column, left blank by the initial deal.

And I only figured that out because I’d switched the “Tarot Movement” bottom option on the options screen from the default “SINGLE CARD” to “ENTIRE STACK,” as recommended by posters on the Steam forum for greatly reducing mouse clicking necessary to flip stacks of cards over–

–which you need to do sometimes, since in FF you can make stacks of cards in either descending OR ascending order. And that works hand-in-hand with the big gameplay tip I got from that forum, which is to always have an open card column–for flipping stacks, and so forth! And I hadn’t realized the game STARTS you with an open column until I clicked what I thought would just be a single card in there, but since I’d toggled that “ENTIRE STACK” setting, it also moved the card that had been under (above) it in there, so suddenly there was a two-card stack in what I’d thought had been a single-card holding spot, and I was like, waaaaaaaait a sec…

The first deal I happened to get put both ends of the tarot in reach. : ) But it took a lot of digging to get the 2!

You get a fortune if you win! : )

It was fun, though; Fortune’s Foundation turned out to be just the kind of thing I was looking for when I first started looking at CCGs: a procedural, turn-based fantasy strategy game with lovely art. : ) CCGs didn’t work out 'cause, like RPGs, they seem obsessed with covering the art with migraine-inducing flashing VFX; Zachtronics doesn’t have those, though, just lovely smooth art. ^ _^ And you DO feel like you’ve been on a journey by the end. Will it hold up now that I’ve got the rules down? I think so; Sawayama Solitaire in this Collection, which is shorter, has been holding up just fine; that’s kinda the quicker, funkier change of pace to FF. : )

[HOBO]

Some thoughts on Conker’s High Rule Tail, a Link to the Past romhack sequel to Conker’s Bad Fur Day

The game peaks with the opening FMV. I am glad I spent 20 minutes getting the MSU-1 shit working. It really added to the experience. You get voice overs and movies and lots of songs that I assume were ripped from OCRemix. I thought the FMV was a Snake Eater parody, cuz it has this lounge-y cover of “Sloprano (The Great Mighty Poo)”, but then I remembered Snake Eater doesn’t have that DNA shit, right? That’s 2? Well whatever, who cares what that CG is stolen from, it does not matter, this game just smashes shit together willy nilly, this game’s subtitle may as well be 2 Things, this game feels like it was made by one of those bots that scrapes fan art from twitter for print-on-demand t-shirt shops, this game is about Conker the Squirrel and it was over 8 years in the making!!

The attract screen is a Star Wars crawl about Doctor Who breaking Conker out of jail so they can save the multiverse but the game itself has none of that shit. It opens with “Neo” waking up inside Assassin’s Creed, where he is unable to use the toilet. That is a bad sign, it is very easy to put a flushable toilet in a game, I know this because I’ve done it in every game I’ve ever made and lemme tell ya: I don’t know computers too good. Flushable toilets are way more important than being able to pet a dog! People expect and enjoy them! Put flushable toilets in your games!!

Once you enter the Matrix “Neo” turns into “Conker” and yeah you might say things get a little twisted, they really busted their ass with this thing, they did slack off when it came to toilets but there are a lot of new graphics and stolen graphics and cross-brand cameos. Maybe not the best way to go about making a sequel to someone else’s game but not the worst either.

Over 8 years in the making. I think @physical theorized that the author started on this game when they were 12 and just Never Gave Up which is a sweet yet sick idea that I want to buy into but I bet these guys started getting AARP junkmail like 10 years ago, I really don’t want these devs to be younger than me, I do not want to believe anyone born after 1995 would make a game with OMGWTFBBQ or Chuck Norris “jokes”

Maybe the only post-Bush/Cheney pop culture reference in the game. Maybe the only notable landmark in the very confusing subway station dungeon. I had the hardest time navigating this fuckin’ game, the dungeons are multi-level but the map screen just shows all the rooms smooshed together with no indication of how they link up, I swear I am good at Zeldas but I was very not good at this and it’s at least 75% not my fault. Also there’s no fast travel or world map and the game’s pretty dang open ended so it was a nightmare trying to remember the different areas linked up. Which room in Peach’s Castle leads to Tingle’s Drugs Emporium? Do you have to go through the Simpsons’ house (with Tardis parked out front) to get to the Resident Evil mansion?! Aside from that the game is kinda okay. It’s based on Link to the Past, y’know? Pretty good base to build on. Very big on torch puzzles and I wanted to beat it as quickly as possible so after a point I turned to youtube walkthroughs whenever I felt the slightest bit antsy but it’s clear they wanted players to be able to beat this damn thing and see all the goldarn content they crammed it with!

The first name listed under SPECIAL THANKS is Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry. You can really feel his influence all over this game. All the dirty stuff reads like it was written by some Sleazy Tarashi motherfuckers who ain’t never even seen a boob. There are no tittys up in here, nor are there any butts, dongs, or the slightest whiff of hole. Also there aren’t many actual jokes. Also there’s no piss. Half the reason I kept playing this was to see if you ever get to piss. We all know Conker’s all about piss. After clearing the 9th dungeon (Star Wars-themed, you get to dress up as a Stormtrooper) I was finally able to use a toilet, but it was just text that said “whizzzz,” I did not get to aim my stream, or control its flow, or even listen to a sample of someone urinating. And I didn’t even get to manually flush! Being a pissing squirrel 0.5 out of 5, how do you make a Conker sequel without piss, that’s Conker’s whole THING isn’t it?!

The sword charge attack shoulda been spinning in a circle spraying piss!!

Wait sorry I’m wrong. Here are some Goron tittys. I think. That could also be a blond caveman with bangs. I dunno, I don’t remember what they said, they popped up during the 5 minute stretch where every NPC I talked to could have gotten me banned from Twitch, was really playing with fire when I streamed a self-rated AO game, guess I really am a bad boy after all huh…

Oh I was wrong about the intro FMV being the game’s peak. It was actually when you walk into a giant Phony Substation console and meet Rouge the Bat, who is floating in the air and listening to the Cantina theme from Star Wars. If you ask me that’s as far from “sex music” as you can possibly get even though I’m sure a good number of nerds have “snogged” to it. Here’s some advice if you make the mistake of playing this game: do not tell Rouge you’d “rather shag Toad” than accept her sexy healing powers! That will earn you a Game Over!

Game does some Lavos shit and lets you fight Ganon once you find the silver bow (obtained by throwing a slingshot into a toilet occupied by Chuck Norris) and the green lightsaber so I gave it a shot cuz I didn’t wanna play the second half of the game. I failed, even with cheating, so I just watched one of the endings on youtube. The end, I had a lot of fun, I don’t recommend this game, go watch a movie instead. Go watch Tár.

[OJV] Conker's Bad Fur Day - Sloprano (The Great Mighty Poo) - Live Orchestra

[Father.Torque]

@meauxdal

Middle-earth: Shadow of War (PS4) - this game is pretty cool so far. playing on one notch up from the basic difficulty, which was probably hubris because i am getting my ass kicked by way-too-many orcs at once

Highly recommend playing on the highest difficulty and toughing it out. This game has one of the coolest power curves I’ve ever seen, where you start out incredibly fragile and smoothly transition over like 20 hours into a teleporting death god. The worse it is at the beginning, the more fun the contrast is later.

[skelephone]

@skelephone

In general the game seems slightly more aimed at adults than others in this genre. There are a surprisingly huge number of cock jokes

We figured out why. Kynseed is Lionhead Studios survivors. The people putting the cock jokes and fertility rituals in this game worked on Black and White, The Movies, and “EVERY Fable game.”

Our goal as a studio is to continue the spirit of Lionhead with games that are charming, humorous, very British, and eccentric.

It’s good to have goals!

[BustedAstromech]

@skelephone

The people putting the cock jokes and fertility rituals in this game worked on […] “EVERY Fable game.”

this is also who we had writing the orc jokes

which is why the game is like this

[Mikey]

@BustedAstromech

Make sure you crank it harder

Words to live by

[hellojed]

playing the circuit mode of Rush 2, which seems to pick a track and then set random variables on it, a campaign is 27 races…theres only like 7 tracks in the game.

its hard to impossible to get first because of how hard the cars are to control. shortcuts are fun but almost always take longer than the track itself

these rush games existed mostly to use cheats to unlock everything and then use as a virtual sandbox, which was fun enough honestly.

[isfet]

i’m continuing to work my way through Hi-Fi Rush and i’m continuing to enjoy it, but it does do a few things that irk me.

before i get to that, i feel like the marketing for this game did everything in its power to make me disinterested, when in reality, all it actually needed to do was to tell me this was an action game developed by Shinji Mikami’s new company. and yeah, it plays like one! even the unlocking/purchasing of moves and whatnot is directly out of Devil May Cry. it’s not as complex as DMC3, of course, but it does gradually add more and more layers to the action. the buddies you call in, for example, remind me of playing MvC2, a lot, in terms of how they function within combos.

the music is also mostly fine, as the large majority of stages are songs written by the studio’s music team. i’d put most of it in the range of like, Japanese indie rock and Yoko-Kanno jazz. it feels like they front load the game with a lot of the licensed stuff, though i still haven’t heard a Zwan track. did i miss it? is it for the finale? that’d be funny.

anyway, critiques - so much goddamn platforming in this game. i swear, it was like they played Double Dragon 1 & 2 on the NES and were like “this is what was missing from brawlers for the past 3 decades”

which…that’s sort of sick, but also is annoying. it’s not as though the platforming and exploration is all that great, and it often feels like a way to extend stages beyond their welcome so it isn’t just a series of tunnels and fights. there are a few puzzley type areas which are ok, but a lot of the time, i feel frustrated by having to do what the game wants me to do. it’s also pretty punishing with it’s timed segments - mess anything up and you just restart from the very beginning of the section.

there are moments where it feels like the writing team was at odds with the design team - i know it’s supposed to be cute and funny when the characters break the fourth wall and comment on how annoying or weird a level design is, but it always begs a couple questions…

for example: in a museum level, we are jumping over bottomless pits and pools of electricity. “i thought this was a museum,” our numbskulled-main character says out loud to the player, making reference to the fact that so much of the level has almost nothing to do with its theming.

it’s like the part in the game where a character says that they “can’t believe” they need to tell you to avoid some crushers on a conveyor belt.

THEN DON’T TELL ME

and if the level design makes no sense THEN CHANGE IT

don’t point out what could be perceived as a flaw - do not remind me that i am playing a videogame - please, stop.

it doesn’t actually happen that often, but when it does happen, it takes me out of the game.

[meauxdal]

Kinetica (PS2) (PS4) - whoooooo boy, this is a weirdo. a real freakazoid. apparently no one has talked about this game on sb2. the closest is felix saying god of war (2005) used the jak & daxter engine and notbov helpfully pointing out that it actually uses the kinetica engine

the emulation on this one is kinda jacked up. sometimes the gradients in the boost bar get messed up, and there are weird visual artifacts here and there.

the game is also 30 FPS with unstable framepacing and intermittent drops, as well as disgusting amounts of hideous motion blur and some kind of strange filtering.

it looks real bad, worse in motion.

the art design is bonkers. all the racers are just folks hunched over holding onto these weird wheel-thingies. takes huge inspiration from the fifth element, even has a dead ringer for that sort of sci-fi faux-opera singing from the movie in one of the tracks.

track design equates player confusion and disorientation with “good”. i don’t hate it! but there’s something perverse about it. if you take the wrong “path” you might have to drive way more of the course than if you take certain jumps and just skip tons of shit. the AI is punishing as hell and relentlessly fast

the handling feels very indebted to f-zero x - you’ve got a really responsive, grippy base handling model, but once you turn hard enough to lose grip, you go into a pretty sluggish powerslide that can be hard to exit. if you use the brake to initiate a slide, you can double-tap the accelerator to get a boost out of the slide, which also exits the slide cleanly. however, touching a wall or another racer during this process cancels the boost. you also have a sharper grip turn on L1, which is somewhat more reliable, but doesn’t give you the possibility of getting that speed boost on exit.

you can hold down R1 and wiggle the control stick to do tricks. while holding R1, you can’t turn, so all your analog stick inputs are translated to tricks. tricks can be comboed, and increase your boost meter

the game is alright, but definitely an acquired taste. the 3rd season championship is brutal - you have to come in first in every race! i’ll report back if i can get thru it

[BustedAstromech]

I always saw this as an escaped Kinetica contestant

[drastic_bb]

fighting ornstein and smough

[vegetables]

Started playing phantasmagoria 2 not knowing much about it. What a wild ride of a game! I missed taking pictures of the sexy scene bc I was hollering at them, holy moly.

Having a lot of fun with it, FMV is so cool