MML has a habit of doing 2 stage boss battles, but giving you no real way to heal up between them. For the first real fight against Tron Bonne you fight 3 robots, then she comes along, but after reloading and visiting the upgrade shop it becomes a little easier.
Then there’s another multi bot battle, this time against ground bots that attack City Hall, A Bank, The Police station, and a bunch of rich people’s houses (let em burn, I say) and flying robots that bring new ones in.
After nearly saving City Hall (the voice over goes “Mission…complete???” if it’s in smoldering ruins) MegaMan goes to…help the cops fight the pirates, who are now digging up the forest and participating in radical praxis
All the mechanical designs in this game are fantastic, from the tanks to the flying ships and everything.
Anyway after attacking a bunch of tanks you fight Dad Bonne. It’s one of those weird multistage fights where you slow him down and then hop on a moving platform, still haven’t finished it.
I’m not fighting the controls, I’m liking how strafing left to right while firing in a direction sort of turns this into a 3d shmup? The bullets all have the same visual language, it’s about dodging fire and waiting for an opening, and pretty much every enemy is different.
Right now not much of the parts are unlocked but I like how you must mix and match the 2 slots you have so you can change whatever playstyle you’re going after. Long range for air bots vs rapid fire.
One thing I noticed is…the mouths match perspective with the camera. I’m not sure how they do this other than having a set number of perspectives match the mouths, but this makes the characters faces a lot more dynamic and have more depth than they normally would have. They also only do these shots from the front because from the side the illusion wouldn’t work.
They can actually do the mouth thing fine from the side too, by putting texture alpha to good use. The relevant textures look amusingly like broken teeth when you see them in the texture sheet.
Played the homebrew NES game “From Below,” in Mesen 2.0.
The game is available as an NES ROM, downloadable for free from
So this is what Gears of War programmers do in their spare time. ^ _^ Designer/coder Matt Hughson ( Matt Hughson - YouTube ; here’s that podcast episode of 2 Dudes and a NES where he talks about making the game: https://www.bitbrosnetwork.com/podcast/episode/1ecd1dde/mighty-final-fight ) and team have made a remarkably smooth NES Tetris game. The changing colors on the blocks aren’t always my cup of tea, but the game plays like absolute butter in Mesen 2.0, and the music is way better than it has any right to be; the whole thing has that absolute “can’t stop playing this right now” addictive quality of classic Tetris.
In the default game mode, a pulsing kraken tentacle pushes up random columns of blocks to stymie your Tetrising–complete a row of blocks around it to scare it off; it sometimes completes them to stymie itself! There’s a mode where the tentacle moves based on your block drops rather than simply on time passing, and then there’s Classic mode where the tentacle is gone and you can just play something that feels a lot like classic Tetris, only with modern amenities such as pushing off from the side walls to allow blocks to spin freely, and the option to have pushing up on the controller drop the block instantly (“H.Drop,” ie “Hard Drop”; although I couldn’t figure out what the difference between “Hold” and “Tap” are for that–they aren’t covered in the downloadable pdf manual, and tapping up seems to drop the block instantly with both of them; also it was more confusing because “Hold” sounded like holding a piece in reserve like you can do in some modern Tetris game, but it didn’t seem to be that at all).
And I very much appreciate that aside from perhaps the sudden switch of color across the entire screen at level-up sometimes being a little jarring, and a two-or-so-stage white screen at game over, the author has largely avoided inflicting flashing/flickering/shaking VFX on my eyeballs. : DD For instance, completing a Tetris just clears the four lines of blocks with a cool sound, rather than strobing them at you like Nintendo’s 1989 NES Tetris does.
Also pretty much every time I meant to start a mode I hit uh one of the face buttons that took me back to the title instead of starting the mode; you gotta hit Start for that. Oops. : P There really doesn’t seem to be any reason to go back to the title though, it just pans right back down to the menu.
Played Classic Score Attack mode in Tetris Effect: Connected on PS4.
Zoomed the view in and realized the gosh darned blocks are blurry. Blurry 2D in new games has become my biggest pet peeve of late! There was that blurry Shanghai game, a blurring of some of the game with a certain setting in Zachtronics Solitaire Collection–and now someone had the gall to make a blurry Tetris game!!! RAWHWHGAHGHA
After defeating the last boss, the game gives you a Class A pass, which lets you into the entire island. Now the real game begins! It’s just me seeing how far I want to go into these labyrinthine dungeons before I make the long trek back to the surface. Very much has the spirit of a Roguelike even if it isn’t randomly generated.
This slightly-too-excited video Tetris Effect: Connected - Winter 2023 Update Explainer - YouTube explains that the update to the game that just came out today adds a single-player Classic Score Attack mode, under the “Effect Modes” main menu item, and that now it has a leaderboard and the two-player one doesn’t because one player could speed-play ahead and, since both players get the same succession of pieces, that could in theory allow the other player to see farther ahead than they’re supposed to. Why anyone would bother I don’t know, but anyway that’s their excuse for not having a leaderboard for scores from the two-player CSA. : P
So I tried out the new single-player CSA (yes I had to reinstall after just having deleted the darn game), and the blocks are still small, dark, and slightly blurry. The tiny playfield is at least in the middle of the screen. (They also made a big deal about this update adding a vertical, “Tate” mode on Switch, and saying how that lets the game really take advantage of the vertical screen space–but the playfield in the Switch footage shown is still so zoomed out that it could probably just as well fit at the same size horizontally!) But, I suppose because there’s a leaderboard, you don’t have the Match Options menu like you do in the Local Multiplayer CSA, where you can set stuff like the method of piece randomization; in the single-player CSA, it’s just on uh well probably the “Classic” randomization method or whatever; definitely not 7-bag, anyway.
I got a new high score there–84,711–which put me at rank 69. : P Then I uninstalled the game again.
Continuing my slow grind for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake platinum. The platinum trophy is an inevitability - it’s not challenging as such, just a comfy timesink. The typical plat play experience is just a sort of settling of anxieties as you keep one eye on the FAQ and another on your optimisation notes. The trophies that give me the most anxiety is the getting all 9 dresses and completing all sidequests where the game becomes the filthiest challenge of reading the ambiguous UI of the chapter selection menu. Real searching for meaning in the tea leaves/goat’s liver shit while the FAQ pretends it’s easy. Hard mode is actually kinda fun where you can’t rely on items and have to think about build a lot more seriously, even if it often results in spamming HPUP/MagicUP/MPUP materia.
I like seeing the smaller hints to the original FF7 I missed when I hadn’t yet played the original like Tifa’s (from my perspective at the time) random cowboy outfit and other references to Nibelheim.
I finally played Ogre Battle past like the first 5 minutes or so. see, all the other times I loaded it up, I never even liberated a city on the tutorial map. I would look at the game & ask myself what the hell is this, what am I supposed to do
When you liberate a city in Ogre Battle, there is a voice sample that says LIBERATION and the muffled sound of a crowd roaring. Then you draw a card and the game says Lucky! I find shit like that very very funny…I swear I play video games just for sound design sometimes, to push buttons and hear funny noises
Those voice samples were enough to motivate me through the whole first real battle. Am I gonna keep playing or finish it any time soon? hell no…but at least I didn’t delete the rom this time
I’d never gotten around to playing Metroid II and now it’s on Switch Online which makes it dead easy for me to fire up. And I can abuse save states so I can just play a minute here and there. So far, I’m feeling a little lukewarm. It’s a little bland, visually, not helped by the monochrome Game Boy color palette. The music at least in the areas I’ve been in so far is very hit-or-miss. I’ve left a few areas with a sense of relief just for a change in bgm.
After hearing that Project Zomboid is adding farm animals in the next build I reinstalled it and finally reached the mid-game for the first time: owning a working car and most of the tools to start building in the forest.
Pictured is either the broken ground on my new mansion, or my tomb. Please ignore the pile of 8 improvised wooden planks with nails sticking out of them that I accidentally built while trying to rotate a construction frame.
Unfortunately I might have to drop PZ because it seems to trigger the same stressful dreams that Megaman Legends and the GCN Animal Crossing did. Something about games where you focus on a static object in the center of the screen while the rest of the game world scrolls or zooms around it activates chase/pursuit dreams in my brain.
inspired by @smbhax I decided to emulate the gameboy double dragon titles
What the hell is up with that bridge? I get the gap in the original but the unsupported middle segment here? This is as bad as a kirby game for being a place instead of a videogame playground, except in Kirby nobody is expecting anything but a playground so this wouldn’t even be something that you’d need to forgive.
Other weirdnesses include that this version does not ratchet scroll. You can go back if you like, though you would never need to, unless you climbed ladders. Climbing down off the bottom of the screen is a no no. You’ve got your whole moveset unlike the NES version that forced you to gain XP, and that moveset does not include the elbow smash that dominated the arcade and eventually the NES version, nor does it let you mount enemies on the ground to beat them while they are down. It’s still Double Dragon though, and a good bit of fun.
edit: figured out how to elbow. it’s on!
Finally managed some actual Crazy Dashes after reading a FAQ reminded me that I need to make sure I’m off the gas when I shift into Drive. Can’t handle this new Crazy speed! = oo Crashed a lot–but did manage to raise my Arcade score from $3.1K to $3.7K or something already. Maybe I’m starting to get a little on the right track now, just gotta learn how to drive. ^ _^
My first real session with my new fully public domain soundtrack replacing Sega’s default replacement music, which was triggering copyright claims on YouTube. : P Track listing below. Kept Sega’s menu and character select tracks, which don’t appear to have copyright issues–those are music files name_loop.adx and The_Chase.adx, respectively. Still centering around a Crazy-Taxi-ish punk or whatever sound, but with maybe a little more tonal variety here and there–the bit from Gorillaz in that one SUPERARE track stands out, for instance.
This game has some light Metroidvania (I hate that term) things, in that you need a blaster to get up walls and a high jump to clamber up certain heights. Now that I have a higher jump I’m going through all the dungeons I went through before to see what I can find. This game reminds me a lot of Petscop and that’s probably due to the lack of ambient music in most cases, and the generally empty environments due to hardware limitations.
this game is pretty good at building tension, in this dungeon it played creepy music the entire time and when you got the big crystal nothing happened lmao
Because these dungeons are labyrinthine and can basically take any form, you really don’t know what’s around a corner or behind a door. I’m finding myself more drawn in, having gotten used to the controls and the game’s fidelity, and I’m now in generally unfamiliar territory.
My life revolves around Like A Dragon: Ishin! 50 hours in and at the halfway point in the chapter count I have completely leveled up two styles — swordsman and brawler. However there are still revelations to unlock, as I have yet to complete the “Scarecrow Mansion” training. I think my brother is better than I am at figuring these out. Im pretty good at the combat but it’s pretty free-form. These challenges require one to play ultra specifically.
blood bowl 3 drops in a like an hour but i have to be in transit
reliable property, they can keep doing up the presentation forever far as i care
i’ll play some of yous when i’m back if you like
I know the Gameboy had limitations but the Chozo rooms in Metroid 2 have their secret in literally the same place every time. It is genuinely cool that there are some really useful but missable powerups. Though I suppose you could always backtrack, the early game is linear enough that I’d bawk at the idea if I wasn’t an Echoes mark.
