I’m really rusty. I used to be able to hit 250,000 pretty reliably. This was the first time I came close since it hit the Switch.
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i only skipped playing it for a day and i’ve completely forgotten how i was doing this. can’t pass a single lap on time
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Still playing Deaths Door I think about halfway thru the second big area. They went for swamp level a bit prematurely IMO but haven’t lost my interest yet so that’s a good sign. The music in this game is so good, really does a lot of heavy lifting re: helping the environments not feel too cliche
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two more Chozo artefacts to collect (forgot how literally outside the box that control tower one is) and still vibing with Prime immensely with a few quibbles:
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lock on could be more generous, especially with the warp happy (already a recipe for frustration with the Gamecube controls) Chozo Ghosts, like these bastards will spawn with their crotch right in my face but I guess the lock on target is their chest maybe and I can’t get a hit in, and they can totally cancel your charge beam and fuck up your visor and you’re kinda expected to use thermal to track them also (more HUD fud), annoying
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B button to dash and jump, it’s a dynamic that I concede maybe just requires more mindfulness on my part but in the heat of battle, attempting a lateral leap to avoid a shockwave attack only to remain grounded sucks
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backtracking is an essential delicious friction but still, some more Souls-like shortcuts to connect a few areas would provide some welcome endorphin injections
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some of the geometry leans towards feeling disingenuous, could be clearer that’s it’s not functional or ideally, could be made to be functional and facilitate more open ended-approaches to platforming and getting around in general (I don’t think the representational/aesthetic qualities have to suffer to lean into a slightly more Quake-like regard for relating to geometry) the platforming does hold up though!
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some bosses feel too homeworky, sometimes lock and key Zelda shit and sometimes (the rock one) going on for way too long, it’s a bad sign when this image pops into my head because I’m getting too bored to want to stay alive
game still rules though!
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Hot Wheels Unleashed (PS5) - this is the same developer as Monster Energy Supercross (Milestone), one of my favorite PS5 games. they also do the Ride series, MotoGP, and SuperBike World Championship.
given the racing cv, no surprise that this one is also a gem. caveat: the monetization is gross and in your face. this is the main issue with the game.
otherwise, the music is stellar (including some raucous funk on the menu screens), the graphics are gorgeous, the framerate is a perfect rock-solid 60, and the racing is extremely well-done. physics are wonderful, collisions are wild and dynamic but not too punishing, track designs are lively and exciting (more Mario Kart than Forza), and there are hundreds of little cars to unlock.
there’s a really great livery editor, and you can even use different paints, all of which look sumptuous and extremely, appropriately toylike on the PS5. you can even go online and browse a massive library of user-shared liveries.
the single-player campaign is pretty engaging. you’ve got an exapnding world map with new challenges and races opening up in every direction as you progress, so you are pretty flexible in how you want to tackle things.
just an absolutely fantastic racer.
but yeah this OST rips way too hard for a fucking hot wheels game:
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Sort of a long lost title for me, I can’t get past the first 30 minutes before giving up, but maybe now I will. A lot less intimidating than I remember it being for some reason
This game would have really benefited from a dual analog controller, but the default control scheme which uses the L1/R1 buttons to turn and the R2 button to target, alongside generally flat dungeon design, it kinda works. I could see someone adapting a RogueLike dungeon crawler using these mechanics and format.
There’s an interesting mundanity in the first half hour of the game, after the tutorial dungeon and the crash landing, there isn’t much music except for the sounds of birds and after you land gramps goes to get immigration papers.
Certainly a major tonal shift from Metal Gear Solid, really has JRPG trappings adapted into a 3D 3rd person shooter.
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Double Dragon II: The Revenge (NES)
in “Kunio-kun: The World Classics Collection” aka “Double Dragon & Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle” (PS4)
I started out on easy (“Practice”) but uh that only goes a few levels
so I had to restart on medium (“Warrior”) and it turns out that doesn’t let you fight the final final boss or whatever.
Oh well. : P
You get back to the difficulty selection menu after entering the continue code,
so it LOOKS like I could load my last medium difficulty save, die, enter the continue code, pick the hard difficulty, and in theory get to the true final battles and ending. … I’m not currently feeling motivated to do that; the boss fights in the initial ending weren’t very fun.
But I suppose if I were ever going to play the game again, it would be picking up from a save near the medium ending there, because I sure as heck don’t ever want to go through those platforming parts earlier in the enemy base.
They aren’t nearly as bad in Naxat Soft’s later PC Engine version, which is much more generous with lives, has more responsive controls, and omits some parts entirely, like that hellacious locomotive at the end of mission 5.
But the actual fighting is better in this Technos Japan NES version. Punchier and crunchier.
Weapons disappear as soon as the batch of enemies who dropped them disappear. : PP
I played in 2P Play B mode to steal my brother’s lives,
and did have to use the continue code that I found on GameFAQs–just before reaching the end of the medium difficulty game, it turned out.
You enter that later levels continue code with the 2P controller, just because the game is sort of mean. This was slightly complicated by this Japanese-region PS4 game reading the X and O buttons backwards on the game’s input config screen when playing under my US profile on my US PS4!
I’m glad I didn’t have this game without save states on the NES as kid, the whole end section would have been pure digital torture
(or really, most sections after mid mission 4!); I probably wouldn’t have known the continue code (which turned out to be pretty generous, starting you at the beginning of the last level you reached–I sure didn’t have to save-scum painfully for as long as I did here), but even if I had, I would have inevitably entered it wrong at some point and had to restart from the beginning of the game–like the easy difficulty setting makes you do after just the first room of the airship level. : p
I missed being able to throw enemies into other enemies like you can in the PC Engine version.
I hadn’t noticed before, but all of the I think five screen sizes from which the collection lets you choose are very slightly blurry. Phooey. (I was playing in 4:3 Zoom mode this time.) And the control is pretty laggy, but it’s less so in the QualityUp version, which I guess suggests that the amount of lag is an intended part of the emulation? I don’t have an actual NES with which to compare it.
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When I replayed Metroid Prime several years ago I found that it held up about as well as I recalled but man, the Chozo Ghosts stuck out as such a pain in the ass I groaned whenever they popped up.
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finally checking out the dark spire now that it can actually be emulated now. boy, it is really making a terrible first impression. it’s coming across as the wizardry equivalent of a developer thinking that the most appealing aspect of dark souls was the difficulty.
also shout out to me finding out that the reason my thief was completely useless is because they were. cool let me the 1000 exp i need to have a thief be a goddamn thief. oh, i only get about 10 exp per fight? great!!
edit: got the disarmament ability and i still have a 100% failure rate at opening trapped chests 
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I played some of this today. it’s incredible so far.
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(Looked up A.L.T.)
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Can second ALT rocking. Liz and I did two streams of it almost 10 years ago now and I loved it!!!
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ALT inspired a sequence in one of my early games
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A post was merged into an existing topic: daphnys radioactive ukranian inclusion zone
I am aware that the controls in the Legends games frequently irk people, and they’re unmistakably the most ‘dated’ aspect of the series - telling of a time when moving characters around a 3D space hadn’t been codified and ‘figured out’ - but golly gosh if that isn’t what I love most about the games. Dungeons play out like free-form Resident Evil encounters, with less intense (but still present) resource management and comital vehicle-like controls.
I hope you get through the first 30 minutes! The first game has charm in spades, but is also just remarkably well structured and demonstrates pretty clear, considered design decisions throughout.
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I’m still waiting for a MegaMan Legends dual-stick aiming romhack. I absolutely love the colorful, chill pop art vibe of that game but I have never been able to get my head around those controls and I always drop out after the first town. But man, that town… Kicking the can around the shopping mall antechamber trying to land it in the trashcan, listening to like 15 different genres of CD in the music store, going to the clothes shop and getting Megaman’s introspective thoughts when you look at the mirror… Beautiful, everything that made the PSX great in one slice. You can really feel that packing-it-in multimedia excitement that came with the move to CDs.
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in addition to the stream i did with James like 10 years ago, i streamed all of ALT in like 2016/2017
also i’m glad i could plant this seed with more people. ALT starts off real strong, then is a little bit more inconsistent in the 10-21 map range, then ends strong.
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Again, though, I’d argue the controls are part of that PSX experience (PSXperience?) and are just as telling of developer excitement, creativity and approach to design and development in the wild west days of the fifth console generation that you outline in your observations of their multimedia experiments.
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The rgg games really scare me because whenever one comes out it’s like the game laid a last of us fungal parasite in my head and I can’t do anything but play or if that’s not possible think about playing the game until i’ve burned through enough of the side content to break out of my completionist fugue. This one is really grindy in particular and now that it’s in english harder for me to resist chewing on the list of tasks even longer than usual for these games. I played the import way back during the drought of english yakuza releases and even though i couldn’t read anything, in going through the motions i felt it scratching the ugly itch these games generate for me.
I like the “another life” farming sim mode’s gamey depiction of crop raising as arranging blocks on a grid tetris/re4 style. The cooking is just applying the basic yakuza button mash and hold minigames to cooking the meal but i like that they took another mundane domestic task and “yakuzafied” it into a thing you can do as a break from the game’s usual rhythm/feedback loop
The combat and skill grids, movement, physics and being originally put out in 2014 the whole uh “game feel” being patterned on 5/0 really gets me going in a way i can’t articulate, maybe the feel of moving a realistic but still a bit wooden/artificial action figure through a diorama world of similar little guys with the rgg studio/amusement vision arcade immediacy as a layer of polish on the thing.
Maybe i’m just projecting that last part onto these games but i feel that bit of personality/arcade legacy in movement there, like if you transplanted a monkey ball or f-zero gx car into a modern open world it would feel like Kiryu sprinting around on a checker boarded racetrack.
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No, I think you’re hitting the difference between the legacy movement driven by the character’s internal physics, with animations laid on top, and the modern system of animations that drive the movement, giving you a body that takes lurches to turn and stop in a way that feels alien to a smooth joystick.
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