on topic:
starting to get more comfortable with the more snappy screenshotting-tools of current gen consoles:
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yes!!! i thought a couple of times while playing y7 how much you’d appreciate it
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Wytchwood (PS5) - the game is pretty neat. vibe is less twee than i expected, though it does have some really annoying idle “humming” voice acting, which, no, please stop doing this. game’s about witchy crafting, gotta collect myriad ingredients to craft an increasingly complex web of stuff to do/craft other stuff. visuals are nicely drawn and the music has pleasant (if somewhat generic) acoustic guitar strumming going on. unfortunately, this game, despite being totally 2D and very straightforward visually, has some issues. for one, it randomly will start dropping frames sometimes - i couldn’t figure out exactly what caused it to do this, but i don’t think there’s any way a game like this should be doing this on PS5. something’s clearly wrong. i also ran into several pretty gnarly bugs where my inputs would stop responding, i’d get stuck in the crafting menu, my character would start walking around on their own, and other strange foibles. i want to like this, but the technical issues are really holding it back, imo. if there’s a PC version, i might recommend trying it there, as the PS5 version needs a patch or two
Ridge Racer 2 (PSP) (PS5) - holy shit. this game has every track from Ridge Racer, Ridge Racer Revolution, Rage Racer, and R4 (and a bunch of others besides), 62 cars, and 64 tour events. the racing is butter-smooth, the music inifini-slaps, the visuals look incredible uprezzed (aside from the shitty bilinear filter used for the 2D elements- why are you so afraid of sharp pixels, sony?!?!?). honestly this might be the actual best RR game (sorry R4)
Raiden V: Director’s Cut (PS4) - goddamn this game owns. the cheer system is inspired. the border info overload is perfect. the banter between max and eshiria is hilarious. this game is a fucking perfect angel and i will treasure it forever. i do have one lone complaint - there’s no way to sort the online leaderboards by “friends”. you either look at your own scores or the greatest scores in the world - that’s all you get lol
Jedi: Fallen Order (PS5) - enjoying this, but mostly due to the music and visuals being really pleasing; the lighting in this game is fantastic. the combat is just a bit too… idk the word. dirty, maybe. nothing feels “clean”. also, it’s been said before, but holy shit cal is mindnumbingly boring as a main character lol. this is the only PS5 game i’ve played thus far that has “long” load times (30+ seconds). if they are this bad here, i’m imagining they are truly disgusting on last-gen consoles
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played a bit of this on steam and it was a little buggy there too. it’s probably been patched since then though. i found the backtracking to a bit tedious and the ost monotonous. i liked crafting and helping whoever i ran across in the woods though. ultimately, i didn’t finish but i may go back to it one of these days ( is what i keep telling myself )
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huh, that’s a real shame. doing some research, looks like every version has various, easily-encounterable bugs and it doesn’t look like they’ve been fixed
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damn, that sucks! i thought at least the steam version had been patched already!
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i’ve been thinking about revisiting DDS - i never beat the first one, but i own both. feels like a waste to not play them. i remember it being fun, but coming off Nocturne, it was a hard act to follow.
forgot to comment, re PS5:
yeah this is hugely noticeable to me after coming from the Xbox. i understand that the Elite controller is in the range of 2-3x more expensive than the Dualsense, but i have to charge my Elite controller maybe once every 2-3 weeks, whereas the Dualsense gets all tuckered out after only a few hours.
i bought an extra one when they were on sale a few weeks ago to combat this, and it’s made it more tolerable, but sheesh
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a succinct way of putting it re: smt nocturne… dds is the one that feels closest to me tho. ig it doesnt hurt that it shares most of its dev staff with it and is on the same like engine or whatever
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Classic indie RPG from 2002 finally translated. Has a reputation as one of the best RPGMaker games.
Started playing this yesterday and it’s real solid. Rather difficult meat and potatoes RPG focused on exploration, combat, and secrets. You need to use “crystal” items to activate save/teleport points, and your ally party members are all “genies” (they work a little bit like pokemon with elemental strengths and weaknesses, and they even have little houses you can visit inside their bottles). All enemies are visible on-field in the Chrono Trigger style and you are encouraged to avoid most battles by running past them.
In the first dungeon I could only handle basic green slimes who give almost no gold/XP. There was a mandatory blue slime fight blocking the way (next-easiest slime), and I was able to beat it but it was basically a boss battle, it took twenty turns and 6 healing herbs. I cleared the dungeon by mostly avoiding or running away everything else, and I discovered four or five secret chests behind hidden passages, and came back to town with a bunch of single-use items and at level 2.
I checked the resale value of my items and I noticed I got a “soma” single-use level-up item, worth far more than everything else at 2000 gold. Good item but like 300 green slimes worth of gold sounded like an even bigger time save. I sold it and, after some deliberation and save scumming, spent it all the second-strongest weapon in the shop, a Claymore (crush+slash dual type, tripled my attack stat).
I tried it out against a blue slime and this time I killed it in two turns. I went back to the secret treasure room full of blue slimes and grinded them for 10 minutes, coming out at level 8 and with 3000 gold
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Playing Cardfight Vanguard Dear Days for 80+ hours, opening hundreds of booster packs, loading a deck recipe and seeing I still only have one of a dozen triple rare cards I need to make the deck is a good reminder to never play physical trading card games.
(It’s good there’s a card crafting system in the game.)
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Arcade Archives Shusse Ozumo (PS4)
Hamster Corp’s page says of the 1984 Japanese arcade game by Technos Japan that “‘Shusse Ozumo’ is the oldest sumo arcade game.”
The arcade game been spelled “Syusse Oozumou” elsewhere.
Unlike most Arcade Archives, there is only one mode; also, since the 1984 arcade game was Japan-only, the screen text is Japanese; the in-game manual is English, but the brief move list is a bit inscrutable.
As far as I could figure out, you hammer the action button to shove the opponent; if you shove them out of the ring, you win.
They may reverse your positions suddenly; this is the “Downward Slap” move done by pressing down (“Throw” is up, didn’t really get that one to work); it’s similar to a counter move in fighting games; I’m terrible at those, and I was terrible at this.
Some CPU opponents use the reversal frequently. Each opponent has different facial features, belt color, and fighting tendencies, and you may face them more than once; they may be tougher later.
A match can also be won by knocking the opponent down.
You can do this with a motion direction + button when winning a grapple you initiated on the opponent; grapples are initiated by moving into the opponent and won by hammering the action button quickly; this is easy at first, but has to be done more and more rapidly against later opponents.
They may initiate grapples on you, in which case you have to hammer the button to fill the gauge so as not to be thrown/floored/moved backwards.
Outside of grapples, pressing up-forward+action slaps at the opponent’s face; if it hits, they turn a deep, angry color, and fire a flurry of slaps at YOUR face; if enough of these connect, you are knocked down, losing the round.
I couldn’t find a way to fire a flurry of slaps of my own, so I think the purpose for your own, single slap is a) as a caution against sloppy shoving (forward+action), or b) to set the opponent up for a Downward Slap counter.
Winning moves builds up your “marks,” shown as red blocks in rows below the top game UI. Expending a mark with the secondary button gives your wrestler a brief burst of energy, allowing them to land one or two super-powerful slaps on the opponent, bashing them backwards, or, in a grapple, to raise the grapple meter faster.
There’s timing to shoving, tricky due to the hopping steps your fighter takes; later opponents come in aggressively, leave you little time, and aiming very successful shoves, or landing grapples that require more and more rapid mashing to survive.
For me, after the first few matches or so–which can be prolonged, by management of the opponent, to build up a large supply of marks–the game becomes resource management: knowing the opponents’ tendencies–and strengths and weaknesses–so that you expend your supply of built-up marks most efficiently; the supply will tend to dwindle vs the increasingly tough opponents, but in theory, intelligent management and accurate use will see you through the top rank of opponent, if there is one.
You don’t have to win every round. White or black circles appear on either side of the upper UI: a white one for winning, and a black one for losing. Your opponents may come in with their own circles already.
If you have one black mark, you can’t afford to lose another match–but if you win the match, the black mark is cleared. With a win, you get a white mark; two white marks gets you to a BONUS GAME round–but I’m not sure how those differ from regular rounds. The opponents seem to come, stay, go, or come back as they please; maybe the Japanese text between rounds explains this.
I could build up a row or row and a half of marks in the early rounds: enough to see me through a certain number of rounds, but no more, as the opponents just got too tough to beat without more boosts. I think I’d have to learn the opponents better.
I got to 19950 pts: ranking 236 on the leaderboard.
236 is, I will just happen to mention, the exact number of M.U.S.C.L.E. action figures Mattel brought out in the States in the mid '80s.
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on the subject of 80s games based on traditional japanese combat sports, you should try champion kendo on sg-1000
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Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (PS5) - utterly confounding. the original is… OK. it was a different time. i love the music. this one is garish and just… why does this exist. the HDR-fried pixel art is uncanny. i think i feel about this game how most people seem to feel about balan wonderworld
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also, could we get the previous two iterations of this topic unsticked as well?
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I just unstickied them myself (you can do that by clicking on the pushpin icon FYI), but yes that’d be nice too.
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when not plugging away at re remake, my free time is being taken up by lunacid. i’m willing to overlook the whole “faux psx aesthetic with a vhs filter” thing that i am extremely not a fan of, probably because every other game like that is some cheap jump scare bull shit. also, you know, the playstation using a cd format and not the cassette tape that was prone to wearing out. there’s a pretty fun action-rpg here. as one of those freak kids who grew up playing stuff like king’s field instead of tomb raider, i’m digging it. should’ve picked vampire as my starting class, but i guess that’s what multiple save files are for.
environments and monster designs are sick, but the npc designs are…they’re not bad, but extremely ill-fitting.
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Every time that game updates I’m hoping they’ve patched out the anime girls and the one NPC named after Sheryl Crow (???)
They really spoil the vibe!!
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I have been picking away at Axiom Verge 2 the past few nights as it’s one of the PS+ game of the month and… I looked up what I wrote about the first game and my main complaint was that the main/intended path through the game was at times poorly communicated and that could very easily lead to going in the wrong direction for ages. Axiom Verge 2 has the exact same issue except it is also much less interesting to look at and I like the combat less. After the first two nights I’d have also said it was so by the numbers even if solidly constructed none of it stood out at all, but it then had a solid little twist that was actually pretty clever so that’s no longer fair. I think it is very much just for those who really love these sorts of games though or who only plays one every five or so years.
Anyways gonna go check a FAQ for the third time to see exactly how to stop wandering in circles yet again.
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