Got two thirds of the way through Fire Emblem Engage this month without engaging with anything in the hub world because I assumed it was going to be side diversions for people who want to smooch their pretty boys or whatever. Finally hit a brick wall in terms of progression and discovered I was wrong. There are actually a ton of ways to upgrade and train your units over there, but they aren’t explained to you until you walk up to the prompt and press the A button. There are so many incremental boosts and resources I missed out on throughout the first two thirds of the game that I can’t make up for now and it just feels awful, and I don’t know how I should allocate the few resources I do have or if that would even salvage this run. The first two thirds of the game were a lot of fun, but I’m calling it here for now.
I’m interested in the game as well; seems like it’s buggy as shit in the initial release and their Steam reviews are an absolute dumpster fire.
With the major caveat of course that Steam reviews are notoriously unreliable thanks to brigading and other factors, Cyanide does have previous though in terms of releasing buggy/half-assed titles, plus it seems they’re continuing with their grifter-ass pricing models.
Glad you’re enjoying it - and happy to hear that the controls have ‘clicked’ somewhat. I really do believe that they add to the tension in the caves - turning it into a sort of odd real-time third-person blobber.
Got the Plasma beam in Metroid 2 but it sucks, can’t hit anything reliably with it even if it does the most damage.
Finished Phantasmagoria 2 the other night! I have to apologize to Trevor Barnes. He’s a real one, a true friend! No one else tried to tell me to get the heck outta that place! Plus, I like the special moment they shared near the end.
but yeah, fuck that last puzzle. that’s some shit that made no dang sense to me. also could not figure out how to defeat my ma’s disembodied head for a minute there. d’oh
also picked up Not for Broadcast for a lil bit. my partner and i have been trying to play a bunch of fmv games. it’s a nice weekly activity to have together. I reaaally like having to follow the speakers in interview situations and doing the quick cut reaction shots, but when they added the bleeping mechanic and music bits it got my brain all mixed up. it’s super fun to pretend to work in a newsroom, but i was way too high at the time to do a good job of it. the jokes are super fuckin silly and over the top, but not too grating- at least not yet. excited to play it again and get better at my job so i can support my family.
haven’t had time to play much else. mostly been watching my partner, B, play Isshin while I do school work. can’t wait to start my own farm and befriend a buncha good dogs then go out and beat up some bad dudes
i’ve heard 1 person interpret that puzzle as the game’s way of recreating the confusion/dissolution of Curtis’ frame of reference for his reality in the player. tbh not an effect i personally got out of it (tonally fitting adventure game bs is still adventure game bs) but pretty interesting
ah, sure, that’s an interesting take. thought it was more something about the alien tech being incomprehensible to like cement the idea that you are def not One of Them even tho yr the duplicate. But yeah bs nonetheless
plasma beam almost feels like a trick in M2. nominally, it’s the most powerful weapon by a ridiculous margin, but the spazer already kills everything in 2 hits so it’s not like the extra power ever matters
I am waiting to write-up my thoughts on Syzygy for the puzzle games topic as at the very least it is an interesting experiment but like… I feel like I am close to the end but can’t figure out how to actually win? It is a puzzle game with a world map and there seems to be a clear exit point but I’ve basically gotten to it from multiple different directions and I can step on just about every tile around it except the actual one (long story tied to bizarre game mechanics). I’m now just sorta wandering around trying to complete puzzles I skipped or are also in the area to see if eventually something triggers something, but there is a non-zero percent chance that the actual ending is tied to a distinct second puzzle type I am not seeing or is somewhat obscured. Legitimately odd game.
Spent my lunchbreak playing Villager.
It’s essentially Banished meets Harvest Moon in that instead of directing people to build, gather resources etc. you have the ability to do so yourself. This sort of alleviates some of my main criticism of Banished and makes the whole thing much more forgiving. Quite nice looking for a Pico-8 title as well.
I love/HATED key dungeons around this part when they have the stealth mantis reaver bots that strike fear when you hear their foot steps. Loved that bit in the first room where you try to play the floor is lava because if you drop to the lower floor that’s where there are a few stealth bots looking for prey.
yeah i found them last night!! they are effectively creepy and scary. i am stuck on a boss where the only weak point is their head, i had to give up because it was past my bedtime
Is that the hockey pucks stacked on each other with noodle arms guy? I don’t remember much other than strafe and dodge then jump and shoot when the window presents itself.
seems like the only way, hard to do when youre sleepy
Got a PSVR2. I haven’t tried other headsets other than the PSVR1 and a few minutes of an old Dell Windows mixed reality headset, and most of the games out are just ports of old games, so I don’t know there’s a lot of new to say about it. It’s an incredible improvement over PSVR1 though. It’s resolution seems to sit somewhere between 1080p and 1440p- it’s still a bit more aliases than what I expect from my 1440p monitor (which, granted, I’m not looking at point black with my eyeballs like you do with a VR headset), but it has enough resolution and clarity that games can make fine details in textures rather than the really blurry blobs of PSVR1.
The field of view seems wider as well, and maybe it’s those two things in conjunction that is conveying a sense of scale better than PSVR1 ever did for me. I don’t know why but objects and worlds in PSVR1 still felt small to me for some reason while I really was able to mentally consider the robo dinosaurs of Horizon VR as being the size of real animals. It’s quite a difference in experience.
The biggest thing is probably just ease of use though. The mess of cables, the limitations of the camera-based tracking and PS Moves, and the breakout box really made the PSVR1 kind of an ordeal to put on and put down. PSVR2 is literally just a single USB cable and you can just pick it up and turn it on.
Got a bunch of games to try out. Horizon is very much an “intro to VR” type experience, but works well in that regard. Gran Turismo 7 feels like The Real Deal- it looks fantastic. Pistol Whip seems like a known quantity and now I see why- it has a really good rhythm and has the dynamism and movement that most VR shooters lack, which is ironic since you’re technically still mostly standing in place as a player.
While try a bunch more later.
Edit: one big complaint about Horizon: you cannot set the game in a place like looks like Iguazu Falls or something and yet you can’t hear the waterfalls at all. Out of respect for spacetown I’ll assume the sound designers were overruled for the sake of not giving players a headache from the constant roar of water, but then maybe they should have made the game in a different setting rather that totally breaking the immersion.
Resident Evil 8 VR is cooler than I could have ever imagined, wow. I don’t know how standard all of its two handed controls are in VR controls these days, like manually holding and reloading guns, ans opening your jacket to pull out flashlights and stuff, but I imagine there’s very few games with it’s level design and scale. Holding a flashlight and walking through a pitch black garage in the VR tutorial filled me a trepidation for that game like nothing else, at least until I started up the actual story mode and realized something about it just isn’t scary at all. Maybe it’s because the trailers all told you it’s about goofy monsters like werewolves and stuff, but it just does not strike fear in me like the tutorial made me think it would.
I also forgot to mention that the PSVR2’s real killer feature is the instant load times. Load times in PSVR1 were incredibly long for some reason. Iron Man VR was actually a really cool game mired by multi-minute load times. That game would be leagues better on PSVR2 due to improved load times by itself
Since last we left off I fixed a boat using the yellow refractor I found. It took a little bit of walking around to do because the door you need to get through to talk to the one NPC who can move it forward is locked before you get the crystal, and unlocked after, and there’s no visual indication of this, you just have to kind of talk to everyone and try every door…again. But we get a boat and then proceed to get into a naval battle with the Bonnes
And then it’s the kreepiest dungeon yet! It’s under a lake so everything is dripping in water, there are hallways with water walls, there are invisible enemies which stalk you and appear right before they strike. It’s pretty spooky! I had one come at me when I was playing late at night. I hate invisible enemies because they’re invisible.
Then you fight this Studio Ghibli Castle In The Sky robot, and to be fair I feel like Mega Man Legends has earned the right to use the Castle In The Sky Robot having lovingly ripped off most of the aesthetics but then put their own future-retro spin on things. Castle In The Sky is a good movie and I’d like to live in that universe! But this robot…the only time I’ve used cheats in this game. you can only hit his head for damage and because he’s so tall the shots don’t hit unless he’s charging or you’re far enough away. I am pretty sure without cheats and savestates I would have given up here, since you have to do the whole dungeon all over again after losing!
So with that out of the way, you can take the red crystal you just stole and then fly out to the last dungeon. This one is even kreepier than before. Lots of old technology. A lot of well designed and hard robots to defeat. This right here is the generator that turns on the elevators. I didn’t wanna touch it because it looked very ominous!
You also get to fight a small room full of spider robots who drop bombs! Very stressful!
Roll sort of ponders the moral implications of stealing from these dungeons, since the reverbots are trying to stop you. In this same dungeon Megaman also ponders why he’s able to read the old language that the ancient computer equipment uses. Then you get the three keys and turn on the computer, which opens up the final gate!
then theres an air battle. This is an autoscroller. Z targeting is useless due to range so you have to kind of sit there holding z while aiming around. Megaman’s turn speed is too slow for this. this first part is generally easy.
then finally tron bonne herself. You have to really lead your shots to get any damage in. this fight frustrated me pretty bad, since she’s fast and also launches rockets at you which are impossible to hit, so you are taking constant damage.
Then they die horribly! Megaman and Roll contemplate whether they were too hard on them. Well, they tried to kill y’all multiple times! IDK.
I plan on trying to do some side quests and look through gamefaqs for things I missed before tackling the final (?) dungeon.
Dumb question, but have you played Tail Concerto?