I don’t remember exactly when or why I ended up with the game Clinically Dead in my Steam library. Must have been in a bundle or on sale for a dollar or something. But it’s an interesting little puzzle game. You play as a guy in the hospital who has to solve puzzles in a sort of dream realm in his dying moments.
The puzzles themselves are straightforward (at least those I’ve seen so far) but I like the strangeness and the rough edges.
From what I was reading on a Tetris forum the other day, it appears to be that they find GB Tetris to be too hard and too much of a grind compared to NES Tetris. ; )
Game Boy is not in strong favor due to a few aspects of its design that are generally seen as flaws. For one, it bears a very strong emphasis on physical execution over anything else; the default piece speed is nigh useless, so the d-pad must be rapidly and continuously tapped left or right to exceed it. Moreover, the game hits a sustainable speed at Level 20, so maxing out the score counter mostly involves maintaining a rapid tap rate and merely surviving for long enough rather than aiming to maximize tetrises. The piece randomization is also deeply flawed. Overall, it is considered less polished when it comes to high level play.
– Records: - Original GameBoy Tetris | Tetrisconcept
3-in-a-rows are not nearly as inhibited as the suggested design intended. But more seriously than that, false positives also cause a bias against certain piece types. In a way, you can say that yes, the game is not giving you enough I pieces, because it is trending below 1/7.
O, S, T = 16.1%
J, I, Z = 13.7%
L = 10.7%
Game boy tetris is FAR HARDER to max-out than NES tetris.
Because you need to do singles for like, twenty minutes once you reached level 20 making it, eeeer, totally uninteresting to play.
And I say that because I’ve been trying to break the darn 700k for 2 years.
he only makes single lines in Level 20, and goes on like this for a long time (>200 Lines). So by every line you get an additional ~1’000 points, and so it’s possible to get 800’000.
I suppose there could be some more practical concerns as well. It would probably be harder to get GB Tetris working for streamed competitive play; the head-to-head NES Tetris competitive scene has turned out to be a relative PR bonanza for the Tetris world. And I suspect some in that scene might consider the lower fidelity GB version to be less of a potential crowd-pleaser than the prettier NES Tetris.
Metro Exodus (PS5) - this is a really good game. probably the most enjoyable FPS campaign i’ve played since Half-Life 2 or Halo: Reach. solid narrative, great atmosphere, keen AI, and a world that has just enough reactivity to how you play. lots of subtle verisimilitude. excellent combat. levels which are large enough to allow exploration and experimentation in approach, but constrained enough to avoid ubisoftian open-world fatique. minimal, tasteful handholding. resource management, crafting, and survival elements that are well-implemented and feel meaningful to the game’s thrust, rather than bolted-on mechanics bloat.
there’s a really absurd amount of dialogue in this game. you can just stand around by nearly any of the NPCs and listen to them go through detailed conversations, giving the world neat moments of exposition without forcing them on you.
don’t know exactly how long the game is, but i’m really enjoying it so far. surprised i like it so much - i bounced off of Metro 2033 instantly and never felt compelled to check out Last Light at all
I’ve been playing Columns with my brother… Finally a game I can beat him in!
I love pretty much everything about this game. Possibly the perfect presentation for a puzzle game.
i should probably at least qualify this by saying i have yet to play any of the nu-wolfenstein games and nu-doom really doesn’t do it for me
I loved the first game and hated the second so your post makes me feel compelled to try out this new joint sometime.
My only issue with that game was it had too much gabbing, and the story insisted on this romance between you and your perfect wife, and every character treating the player character like he was their dad that just came home from a long day of work and he’s got presents. I hated being in that first person perspective with everyone cloyingly looking at you with huge beaming smiles. They always go in for a hug, and say shit like “three cheers for Arteum!! Hip, hip, hooray!! We love you!” I gladly walked into the swamps and got him killed a few times after these kinds of scenes.
yeah, I couldn’t do it. Felt like Ukrainians tried to do the AAA player empowerment messaging because their money increased along with a publisher mandate and it came out like very schlocky propaganda
yeah but in nearly every one of those instances you can literally just keep walking and the NPC will be like “oh, i guess Artyom has somewhere more important to be, haha!” or walk away from Anna and she’ll be like “you’re leaving?”
the game rarely actually requires you to listen to them, you can almost always just walk away. that said, i didn’t mind the vibe, personally
they ALSO say things like “great job artyom, but don’t you think you could have snuck by those old farts instead of murdering them all”
Sold
Been playing the gameboy games on Switch and it is major nostalgia since I grew up with 4 of them. I suppose I could just have emulated these any time but I hadn’t really though about them in ages. The dot matrix and blur effect are nice to have in this emulator although it seems you can’t have one without the other.
Kirby’s Dream Land, Tetris, Wario Land 3 and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. They are all excellent and all held up enough that I completed/played them all a ton this year so far. Kirby is a nice and breezy run and WL3 and SML2 are just the best platformers on the system.
Metroid 2 I never played before but am surprised at how compelling it is.
I think it’s interesting that people were finding Echoes punishing when this game’s save stations don’t heal. This wouldn’t be a huge issue, but I find that the energy recharge and save stations are just a tad too far from each other which tends to incentivise slowly farming enemies for health and makes it easy to get into relatively high-risk dead ends. Dark Aether may be incredibly hostile but at least I can choose how and where I take a massive exploratory risk. I suppose save states negate all of these design issues these days but still.
No map makes it the kind of game I love where navigation comes to the fore as a key challenge. It’s way better than NES Metroid and feels like a proper iteration of that game, like NES was the prototype. It’s been discussed in the selectbutton podcast before but the way the music gets more and more deranged the more you explore is so good after the initial heroic theme. The lack of environment variety but the occasional metroid husk got that real ‘deep in a cave you shouldn’t be in’ feeling.
Also kinda neat that the game is basically just ‘hunt down 39 monsters’ over a long period. I wish more games tried a simple goal like this which is made complex by the environment.
Now Fusion, Dread and the 2 remake are the only ones I haven’t touched.
Ah, so it is a clone. I should point out that to my knowledge all of Sachen games are built from the ground up… they didn’t do bootleg bootlegs, just lots of clones, sometimes with interesting aesthetic twists (they also made a few original games too).
Sound like a buncha babies to me!!
I at some point a week or so ago expressed concern early on in OlliOlli World that it seemed like it may lack the teeth of the earlier games. This was clearly a mistake as I’m up to the fifth (and final?) area and it is just absurdly rough now if you are actually going for all the objectives or god forbid the “gold medal” scores.
So: the cover car for R4 is the Assoluto Bisonte, except I can’t seem to unlock it despite getting 1st in each race. In fact, other cars that are features in the game’s cutscenes don’t seem to get unlocked when I go through campaigns. I start digging through old gamefaqs to try to find out what I need to do in order to unlock this thing.
I then discover a terrible secret about Ridge Racer 4. You get different cars unlocked based on how you finish each race! In the campaign, which is the story of your racing team going through Real Racing Roots 99, you can advance by getting 3rd or 2nd place in the first few rounds of the game. If you win them, you get a faster car. But if you get 2nd, you get a slightly “worse” car, the justification being that you as a driver aren’t worth spending money on.
So to get the Assoluto Bisonte, I have to get 2nd place in both the first 2 races. This is hard for me as I have people pleasing tendencies and even letting down a fucking game NPC gives me anxiety.
But it works! The Bisonte is mine!
But there’s another twist, if you keep getting 2nd place, you don’t get a “new” car, but you get a tuned up version of the Bisonte. So to get the hottest version of it, you have to sandbag all the way until the final rounds of the campaign. But this is actually harder because you have to win the hardest races (and they are hard) with a “worse” car. And when you do that, the racing team director likes you even more, because that requires more skill.
This carries through to the rest of the campaign, so the final race is you and the Bisonte, but it now goes 185 miles an hour.
So if I want to unlock every car in the game, I not only have to beat the campaign with each car manufacturer and team, but with different combinations of finishing results! There are 320 cars in the fucking game! Some of them you can’t get unless you trade cars, which is only possible with a PocketStation, which was never released in the US!!!
This is how every ridge racer is, there are a set number of cars and then there’s a bunch of subtle permutations of those cars, each one is unlocked by doing a different series of races with the same cars. It really gets a lot of use out of only 8 tracks. If the soundtrack weren’t as good as R4’s, or the styling of everything, or the way the cars handle, this would be absolute misery. But for the past few days it’s been really nice to sit down after work and do a set of races to relax. I am really learning the tracks and the handling model this way.
However, you get different dialog from the driving team director with each win result permutation. They even react differently if you retry a race a bunch of times. I guess Ridge Racer 4 is the Tokimeki Memorial of racing games.
Oh! Jeepers. = o
I’ve had my eye on Taiji since release and a few people I know spoke well of it, the price/lack of demo scared me off jumping in immediately but I hope it is as good as I’ve been lead to hope.
I also started up Syzygy today (I have to look up the spelling each time) and it is one of those simple seeming puzzle games that I seem to be having a tricky time wrapping my head around, curious to discover if it eventually clicks for me or if I’ll just be left flummoxed.
I died to the Grey Fox boss fight because even though I beat him, he explodes after his health goes to zero and I was caught in the blast radius. Kojima fucking sucks shit.
I’ve been playing Deaths Door which is pretty fun (for me) but feels a little too much like it was designed to be pitched and blurbed as “what if a link to the past was also dark souls”
It just feels kinda like low hanging fruit I guess? I can’t think of the right idiom or cliche to describe that but I feel like you get it
Anyway I am grateful they did not feel the need to insert a souls recovery gimmick into the game, but it does feel like the sort of game that would benefit from making death a little more… Meaningful…? Considering the plot. Like there is no in universe explanation for your own death even though the whole game revolves around death and before you leave the hub world they make a point of telling you that you become mortal when you enter the world. And then the apparent narrative stakes of the game are that you’ll be stuck there as a mortal until you die, but actually you can just come and go as you please? Idk maybe it will make sense later BC the game also does that thing where the fundamental details of the game world are revealed to you very slowly and without context. I guess they are aping the dark souls ambient narrative storytelling style too. But those games feel like they have much meatier lore trickles and spills than this does.
Anyway it’s very cute in a grim way. I like that it has a quirky macabre style that doesn’t seem too indebted to Tim Burton or whatever. Everyone is copying Ghibli these days but this game at least tries to put their own spin on it, a little.
The plot is weirdly similar in some ways to Spiritfarer? But maybe that’s just because it’s one of the only semi recent games of this caliber I’ve played. I feel like indie game about death and mourning and letting go or whatever is such a stereotype, I guess they’re probably all like this now. Weird Shit! Hope everyone’s doing OK. Out there in indie game dev world…
The best aspect of it to me is the pacing and structure have some interesting surprises. I’m spoiler tagging this in the event anyone is interested in this game but hasn’t played it yet somehow, but tbh it’s not a huge deal. Just some stuff that pleasantly caught me off guard
So, because the game rips off Zelda you know you’re gonna be doing some dungeons, finding some keys, acquiring some items that unlock new movement abilities, etc. And because it rips off dark souls you know you’re gonna be fighting a spectrum of boss like enemies and different configurations of regular mobs and stuff, and also unlocking shortcuts to make backtracking faster. It does all that stuff, but the mashup of both also makes it easier to break out of the very rigid overworld - dungeon - new ability - boss - return to inaccessible areas to get more loot -repeat formula. It still does all that stuff, but the first time around at least it feels more seamless. Like, when you get to what looks like a Big Chest, it actually makes you go thru this gauntlet of enemies before you get the treasure. And what feels like the first dungeon has long stretches with no enemies, then you get to an area that’s almost all combat, then it goes back to being very empty. I sort of like that combat feels more pointed and purposeful because of this, you are not just swatting away garbage enemies while trying to solve puzzles or whatever. Either you’re in quiet rooms just kind of looking around at stuff, or you’re fighting, but if you’re fighting that’s going to take up a lot more of your attention.
So far at least I also feel like the balance of things very obviously inaccessible without new abilities vs stuff you actually can get immediately if you think about it for a minute is pretty good. Like most of the time if a treasure looks out of reach, there’s actually some way to get it, so now I spend a few more minutes poking around to try, instead of just running right past things I can’t immediately figure out how to get.
I’m only just past the first big boss, the urn witch, so perhaps after this the formula will just repeat and it will feel less spontaneous, but so far I’ve enjoyed not really knowing exactly what will happen next, even if when it does I recognize where they stole it from pretty quickly (again, usually Zelda)
I had a very good time with this game and although I think you’re right that in some ways it’s very “safe” it does just enough that it didn’t feel like a complete rerun.
Delightful little NPCs as the game goes on, too
