I’ve been hesitant to try the demo for Extreme Evolution because I want to get the full effect (whatever that effect might be).
Somehow I already had Moons of Darsalon on my Steam wishlist. It definitely looks promising.
2 Likes
Give Up the Ghost: a puzzle checklist (PC/Mac/browser)
I beat the first five puzzles and felt kinda smart. ^ _^ I usually hate teleporters but I guess I didn’t here. = OooOoo Love that little ghost. Keen work by @Gate88
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Watched my brother beat Alex Kidd & The Enchanted Castle. A terrible game, worse than the original on Master System… Some charming graphics, tho!
Then we played thru Fatal Labyrinth. Pretty funny little game. The music loops too quickly. Charming end sequence.
8 Likes
Got a unicorn mount for my white mage in ff14 that I never noticed before because I never did the level 3 quest given out by the same quest giver. Once that was done i could see the quest and get the mount.
6 Likes
been playing wario land 3 on switch online and this game kinnddaaa sucks. i mean it’s full of amazing ideas and personality, but in place of lives/health, the game wastes your time as punishment instead, with you getting constantly knocked or sent back. one of the worst offenders is a boss that inflates you if you get hit, so first you got to wait for your body to float up and pop so you can exit, then you have to climb back to the boss room again. then there is turning to a zombie, where you sometimes have to backtrack SUPER SLOWLY to turn human again and blah, wasting my time is like a major game design choice and i hate it
luckily switch online has rewind so i quickly realised i can just use that a lot instead of constantly re-doing sections when i fuck up, letting me enjoy the other parts of the game
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thanks for trying it out 
looks like the new version of firefox has weird timing issues with that version of tic-80 haha. maybe i’ll get some time to look into that soon!
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going out - very much one of those first game style games where someone makes a blocky little self-insert representation and sets it wandering around a cartoony town with no real aim in mind beyond trying to fill things out with goofy little text conversations… but in 3d!! instead of rpg maker. it’s a fun effect seeing 3d games handled this loosely. all the blocky little cartoon people have surprisingly slick and elaborate animations that i’m 99% sure just come from miximo, but it’s a fun contrast, i like that there’s a nightclub area dedicated to showing off all the stock 3d dances, including your own if you choose to try some (0-9 keys to perform dances - my favourite was where the guy held his arms out to the side and just slowly raised each leg to hip height. why would you do this in a club??). my favourite character was the bouncer using the same character model as every other person in the game but set to 2x scale.
the three musketeers - most of the game has you walking around a vast blue untextured field in search of an undisclosed landmark, i assumed it would be easier to find the meeting place of the other musketeers if the textures loaded but checking again now it looks like the blue field is in the screenshots too…? well i walked around a while and perforated some varlets. your guy is like twice the size of the mob soldiers and proportioned like the guy in one of those virgin vs chad reddit comics. enormously powerful legs.
a time traveller’s guide to past delicacies - when i downloaded this i was set to make a sassy remark like “how can you tell whether or not something is an artgame. a. when the filesize is over 1gb.” but it turns out it uses full motion videos!! so it’s justified. the format is an alien cooking show where you get talked to by a puppet, drag and drop abstracted ingredients into blenders and things to make different dishes, then things expand from there, there’s a grid zone framed as an accidental insert from a training video, some rogue transmissions, first person exploration time travel segments where you hear dubiously accurate info about dinosaurs etc… all my speed but i feel like it could have been quicker and sharper i guess. the assets in the different segments are higher quality than the jokes they’re making, the different parts all go on a bit longer than they need to make sure you see everything in them, the comparison of your exotic recipe gathering to that of historical colonizers… like i WISH hernan cortez was just an amiable time travelling sock puppet deadset on making the world’s worst tamales but idk how far this comparison conveys his specific flavor of misdeed. am i just bitter because the download was 1gb? perhaps… i looked it up and apparently gabriel knight 2 was 2.7gb so it’s well within the limit of exactly how large a videogame can be allowed to be. i guess i’m on the wrong side of history with this one. if i ever get a time machine i’ll go back and fix my attitude. i liked the star block texture in the maze. maybe the sifl & olly comparison is a hard one to live up to.
WALK AROUND LA - part of a series of glorious trainwrecks games by different authors playing with the mysteries of the default rpg maker tileset. nominally, it’s a map of LA, a city i’ve never been to. as i walked around the sprawling network of roads, oceans, trees, bushes etc it was fun to try and extend as much good faith to this idea as possible. maybe that broken tower is a particular roadsign the author knows to navigate by, at the series of intersections like this one, maybe those deserts are houses, maybe the big plains of forest outside the main area are a day trip you could take in real life. main complaint is that there’s no music as you’re wandering when i know for a fact the default rpg maker resource pack has several excellent songs. why not try them out? you could have a lot of fun.
16 Likes
This is good to know.
1 Like
got the Evil Genius 2 music stuck in my head. I ran halfway through the tutorial a few weeks back and the youngest latched onto it. now every time they play I am invited to come and see how they have researched more projects than me, unlocked all the room types, look these guards have stun batons for capturing agents but these ones have semiautomatic pistols for killing them. not that the difference matters, the captured agents go straight into pipeline for the ‘interrogation chair’ and transform into body bags, to free up space in the cells for the next group of ever-spawning soldiers sent to investigate why no one comes back alive
I tried to explain economy actions and resource management but they have perfected the art of manually switching the power off for equipment that’s not currently in use and selling bunkbeds to fund purchases of more guns/clubs/security cameras
anyway I played it for a bit more today and it seems nowhere near as hard (or fun) as Evil Genius.
2 Likes
Learning that to unlock all the cars in Ridge Racer 4, I have to…get second place in some races. This game has so many layers, damn. The cover car is only available if you get 2nd place in the first two races. You end up playing the game…a lot…over and over again. It’s nice to unwind with after work, going through a whole campaign in one sitting. The drift cars are much more forgiving than the grip cars, which take so much concentration to drive.
6 Likes
Rage quit the Grey Fox fight without bothering to save the state or make a save, which means I have to do a bunch of bullshit over again. Oh well. Lots of “you wasted precious ammo on a failed strategy” feelings. The stupid guided rocket section took like 9 tries. I think I’m angry because I know it’s not in service of anything but some kojima bullshit.
“It’s just like one of my Japanese animes…”
5 Likes
i saw you playing gambit earlier… it’s going to be okay
3 Likes
Gotta bank those motes. I know drifter is definitely cutting me in for my fair share of the proceeds
6 Likes
I’ve played Wanted: Dead for a few hours. I can already see people trying to reclaim it as a misunderstood cult classic in the making, and it is eyebrow rising since it’s far removed from, let’s say, God Hand or Binary Domain quality. Still, it -is- the kind of game reviewers are particularly unkind towards: no polish, no proper introduction to the intended combat flow, an offbeat sense of humor which makes it easy for a lot of people to laugh at the game while not realizing they were meant to laugh alongside it, late PS2/early PS3 Japanese action game era style experimentation. Mindblowingly amateurish execution of some aspects (legitimately some of the worst sound work I’ve heard in years) turns it all into a cocktail that is extremely hard to swallow for some, but the good news is, if you’re a fan of Cavia/Red Entertainment style action, I think you should be happy with it despite the very poor reviews.
The combat system is a pretty freeform combination of a TPS and a basic character action game: it’s about constantly being on the offensive while not exposing yourself to too many attacks at once, a lot of largely destructible cover everywhere, limited magazine capacity with a lot of ammo drops, gun users can usually be easily dispatched of with headshots from afar but it’s a waste to shoot them when you can easily approach them with your sword, melee specialists are better off being fought using melee but punish each mistake harshly so you might prefer to unload all of your ammo when a ninja jumps out at you at the end of a grueling fight (you get three medkits and one revive at each checkpoint to alleviate how quickly you can die). The combos are pretty basic and don’t allow for a lot of player expression, the enemy design is functionally varied enough but visually monotonous (everyone in the first stage looks like Isaac Clarke), there’s a dynamic limb severance system that’s visually impressive but it isn’t immediately clear how it dynamizes the combat itself. Without proper nudging and feedback with regards to what you might be doing wrong, it’s easy to get stuck trying out ineffective tactics and getting frustrated, the balance definitely feels a bit off from what all the polished mainstream games offer (and a fair amount of technical jank doesn’t help). But when the game shines, it approaches the same sweet spot as Ninja Gaiden or action-focused Resident Evil, a constant switching between aggressive action and reaction, backed by pleasant slasher-shooter-slasher-shooter tempo changes.
The weirdest thing about the game is its artistic sensibility. I can imagine the game’s moodboard being just these three videos:
The game’s creative director is a Russian guy who’s obviously obsessed with American and Japanese popculture (the trashier, the better) and it clashes the very Japanese console gameplay with some very 00s PC slavjank, hm, aesthetic concerns. You get a very unique feeling when the first Ghost in the Shell-inspired boss fight of a game from creators of Ninja Gaiden ends with a long scene homaging Samurai Cop, complete with the main character kissing the Commissioner who just chewed them out on the forehead and cracking the boss’ tough facade. Nearly all jokes are vulgar and/or nonsensical and/or terrible. One of the first dialogues between your teammates is as follows:
- Hey Doc, how does it feel to be an alcoholic?
- Hey Herzog, how does it feel to go down on your sister?
- I am from Wisconsin.
When the gunsmith played by Quiet from MGSV fixes your weapon between missions, she either tells you the definition of the anthropic principle or schools you on how “fixing a relationship that you were not committed to in the first place is an ill exercise in self-deception and vulnerability”. When you eat ramen, a previously unheard narrator tells you a Wikipedia definition of ramen and a bizarre rhythm game starts. There’s a flashback where the cop heroine shoots a guy who shot his wife, then sits next to their kid and starts talking about an anime called Space Runaway (…Ideon?) with him. It feels like an attempt at Grasshopper Manufacture-like idiosyncratic approach, but the unwieldy tonal shifts and the austerity of low budget 3D environments make it come across as a huge Russian dude telling you deadpan jokes in a thick accent. You’ll get a 100% sincere bright-eyed homage and a 100% stupid Kung Fury-tier joke in five seconds and you’ll like it. The cast sounds like it was hired off Fiverr (the main heroine’s lines in particular are mindblowingly horrible), and you never know if it was meant to be an ironic device or just ineptitude. It’s a bad vibe, but it’s an interesting one, and it allows the game being unpredictable at all times, which is still a very rare thing to say about a videogame. I kind of had enough, but I kind of want to go back.
28 Likes
Seems slightly more interesting than Devil’s Third was, which is the closest comparison I can think of. That game was straight up unfinished.
2 Likes
just finished metroid 2, still my favourite metroid game. or maybe fusion is my favourite… it’s one of my top two favourites at least
finished super mario land 2 again, i know people here like the first one because of how weird it is (which i also enjoy, and i also appreciate how short it is) but i think mario land 2 is a better game and has personality and charm of its own, even if it’s not as out there
finished kirbys dream land, both quests, still a super fun and super short game. the second quest was harder than i remember. i think i like this more than all the other dreamland games (but there are better kirby games)
played a bunch of game boy tetris, still holds up, though i’m no pro player so it might have exploits they all hate
i expressed my thoughts on wario land 3 earlier, i got to a bit where i dont know what to do next so think i’ll just drop it, i’m just not getting into it. i can see why other people like it but it’s just not for me. even though i love wario 
up next on game boy switch for me is gargoyles quest, looking forward to it
oh and i played on a real game boy today because i found some bootleg carts at an op shop!
the first only worked on my OG game boy, and was a bunch of Sachen games. First there was shitty rally x, then… serviceable othello, then shitty klax, then a single screen arcade game that i think might be original?
other bottleg cart was a 44 in 1 which was of course only 8 games actually. has some straight pirated games like dr mario, samurai showdown, also a crayon shin game is on there, and terrible bootleg mario game that uses the crayon shin game as a basis
also a bootleg version of donkey kong land 3 which is hilariously awful. this one is weird because there is an actual donkey kong land 3??
anyway bootleg carts are fun
13 Likes
Gargoyle’s Quest starts very difficult but meets a nicely challenging plateau. Positioning is wild, like a mix between gradius and Mega Man.
1 Like
Thank you for your service 
3 Likes
duck adventures appears to be a port of the arcade game berlin no kabe/the berlin wall. it’s still semi-original though, as no official game boy port exists as far as i can tell
2 Likes