Does sega rally 3 have the sick road deformation that sega rally revo does cuz I love that game so fucking much
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Yep theyre the exact same game im p sure
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I literally got it for $3 like a week ago lol
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I played a bit of the new demo of Sea of Stars, the upcoming indie Chrono Trigger pseudo-fangame. I wasn’t impressed.
Like Owlboy, it uses detailed, lavish pixel art to depict someone’s off-putting deviantart OCs. The backgrounds are great but the portraits are just a little weirdly proportioned in a way that low key drives me crazy.
Its writing just feels very off in a way that’s hard to pin down. I think they’re self-consciously trying to recreate the awkwardly localized NPC dialogue of the SNES era, but you can tell they’re trying too hard. They don’t hit the mark, either. Instead of cute malapropisms and quirky weirdness like they seemed to intend, a lot of the dialogue reads more like your coworker’s confusing Teams message before he’s had his coffee.
The humor is grating, like, the joke they seemed to like the most was just a pirate having a silly name. He’s called Keenathan, and he keeps on saying his own name, and all his pirate friends keep emphasizing his name. They really dine out on Keenathan like it’s the funniest thing. There’s a joke about his name in the trailer!
I 100% downloaded this demo just because the trailer mentioned it had music by Yasunori Mitsuda. Well, it turns out he only did a few tracks as a “guest composer”. As I was playing, I listened carefully to each song to try and see if I could pick out Mitsuda’s work. I could, for three reasons:
- Most of the music was trying way too hard to ape Mitsuda’s style but lacked the panache.
- Ironically, the actual Mitsuda song in the demo was clearly his because it was the only song that wasn’t trying way too hard to sound like a Mitsuda track. It was nice but he wasn’t swinging for the fences on this one, not that you can blame him.
- The demo introduces the Mitsuda track with a non-diegetic message that goes “this area’s not in the demo, but stand here on the overworld and you can hear Mitsuda-san’s first track he composed for the game!!!”
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It’s been years since I played either game so my memories are a bit hazy, but IIRC the second game sort of tries to structure itself more like a typical JRPG. So there’s a main hub town you can walk around with a tavern where you get side quests etc, and several exits that lead to the main wilderness areas. So instead of picking a mission and getting dumped into a combat area, you have a quest marker on a map that you run towards and kill things on the way.
I think it still has the portals that spawn monsters, but there’s less emphasis on them (I may be mistaken about this though)
I think I remember liking it more than the first, but it’s also much longer and wears out it’s welcome well before the ending.
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As the sole The Messenger liker on this forum that’s dissappointing.
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Eh, I mean, I only played the first three “scenes” of the demo and got bored and turned it off. Bad first impression. The actual gameplay itself seemed like a competent simulacrum of a SNES jrpg, but the vibes turned me right off. Maaaaybe the full game will be better. I’m not gonna find out!
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we’re playing chrono trigger over here… frog’s design, even when he’s just standing still, way too powerful… toriyama the god…
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I’m gonna trick someone into playing Crimson Echoes so I don’t have to.
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the way he hops for those crits
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Had a rough patch in Garage: Bad Dream Adventure where I had to use this obscure Japanese language FAQ (hanamushi.jp/garage/garage3.htm) just to figure out the last bit of the MSQ. Unfortunately I got stuck on a different ending track that it doesn’t even discuss, so had to muddle my way to the end.
The game gets a bit too deep into its Jungian metaphors at a certain point and is ultimately quite abstract about what is going on. If you’re looking for everything to be neatly explained, this ain’t it, but its ideas are fun to chew on.
I got locked into the ending where I doom the whole world since I didn’t fall back in love with my alter-ego’s giant immobile lover, modified beyond agency. I instead deigned to fall in love with one of the girls at the fuel station and so I doomed the species.
So I got the bad ending. It’s pretty horrible. You basically destroy the world’s fuel supply (which is a giant female machine modified to provide all fuel, she dies because her lover died and split into you and another self who also died). You also get an item that makes you immortal so you alone are materially unaffected by the consequences. However, you have to play out the consequences by living the remainder of your time there, going round the various NPCs and seeing how it turns them to murder or starvation until there are no NPCs left. Eventually you just go around the world by yourself. You can still fish but fuel is required to fish so eventually you can’t do anything except walk around a dead game world. I looked up the good ending (you just watch a cutscene where you escape the nightmare world) and I think mine was more interesting.
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Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition (PS5) - very, very, very indebted to dark souls. the twist here is you start as a gnarled naked dude and when you come across certain bodies you can inhabit their shell. then when you take mortal damage the first time, you get kicked out of your shell. you can try and get back in it (takes a second), but if you die again either in naked form or in shell form, you get a game over.
the combat in this is probably the best analogue any of these non-From souls-likes have had, feels pretty good tbh. there’s a “harden” mechanic where pressing L2 will harden your body which deflects most blows. it has a few second cooldown after you use it. you can actually use it in the middle of attack animations, so it’s a pretty effective “oops” button in combat
Syphon Filter (PS1) (PS5) - soupy game. it feels truly awful to just run around in this, like the base movement controls are just unimaginably bad. somehow the shooting controls are actually pretty great, conversely. the voice acting is really bad, but pretty entertaining as a result. everyone just spews terse sentences full of context-free proper nouns and shit at you in every cutscene, it’s bonkerino. i like how you have to really explore these little PS1 setpieces and pull out the flashlight and stuff, it almost gets puzzle-y at times. worth checking out, but definitely a frustrating game (lots of cheap deaths and long checkpoint gaps)
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playing final fantasy xii, i got the switch version forever ago after liking but falling off it on ps2, and never got very far in it. in the spirit of redeeming a wasted purchase i decided to go into it as fresh as possible with a mindset of maximum appreciation for all the polish and baroque fussiness… even so it’s quite rough at first, you get a fetch quest, and then you’re in a sewer, and then a castle basement which might as well be a sewer, and then it’s back to the sewer, and then you leave the sewer and are thrown in prison! which is also a castle basement, and a sewer! the magic of videogames is truly all of the exciting worlds you can encounter.
but i’ll try to keep going, i like the salammbo via vagrant story aesthetics and the GAMBITS and the wilderness areas which aren’t quite open world and are more like ingeniously contrived boxes which feel both more sprawling and more dense than you’d expect.
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That would be its Bubsy 3D heritage (it uses the same/modified engine)
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LIMBO (PS4) - i think i’ve decided i quite like this. it’s a very quiet game, and i appreciate that. i don’t mind dying a lot, or the checkpoint spacing. vibing with it
edit: oh, i was on the very last puzzle in the game, and i finally figured it out. the ending was good.
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the first several hours of plotting you can feel them desperately trying to patch it into something shippable, then it improves considerably for a while, then it falls off again
the good parts of the game are more or less bookended by the two “run around town persuading people” minigames
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YESSSS, thanks for this! I was so mad that I couldn’t replay that clip to take a picture of that scene. I am a computer idiot and always forget that youtube exists for stuff like this. I can’t tell if they’re just being goofy or if they were being racist or what, but wow what a scene
what could possibly go wrong?
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Hungry Giraffe (PS3)
I love the weird long neck and floating giraffe head and eating junk food and fruit and bonking into anvils and the wacky sounds and that the game is 1080p even though it’s a “mini”; but I ate something that strobed the screen purple so I guess I’m out, drat.
Sega Bass Fishing Theme (PS3)
Had the game and the fishing controller on DC, didn’t play 'em much. : / The flashing words and thrashing fish in the PSN store video didn’t compel me to buy the PS3 port for $9.99 or whatever–but hey, there’s a free XMB theme, and it makes your PS3 say “Dreamcast: Guess Who’s Back?” in the corner!
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feel like the atmosphere and music of the Golmore Jungle (and ensuing areas) redeem the entire game
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