how’s that going?
1 Like
Somehow enjoying Yakuza Kiwami maybe more than 0 and 7 (the two other ones I’ve played) The story is just straightforward, I don’t see it developing into mush later like these other two games by focusing on callbacks
Graphics from the long lost « Dreamcast 2 » console
Some delightful purposefully annoying fetch like buying a gift for your crush then having to go look for the thief who steals your gift twice.
Or looking for an employee’s lost mourning band (to keep it for yourself, to go to a deeper part of a funeral unnoticed…) then having its owner immediately take it back from you and having to wait until he’s fired and throws the mourning band into a trashcan to finally get the mourning band back
Sudden ridiculous difficulty spikes though it’s OK since my pockets are already filled with Toughness Zs
14 Likes
That green airship is awesome. : )
3 Likes
I haven’t, but I have played a but of Solatorobo, I might check it out.
1 Like
I think it would make for a neat comparison with Legends. I remember enjoying the clumsy fumbling and bomb throwing.
1 Like
It’s pretty OK. The headline character swap system is in fact very good, there’s a lot of nuanced strengths and weaknesses and room for different playstyles. Also I like how sometimes you wind up forced to play the character that’s less well-suited to a situation and have to improvise.
But the combination of one-way branching stages and secret-hunting only sort of works: I constantly felt anxious I was missing a secret on the branch I wasn’t on, and the level structure makes it very time-consuming to check.
I found enough secrets to upgrade 7 separate subweapons but got confused by having to talk to the blacksmith NPC multiple times, so I ended up beating the final boss with zero upgraded subweapons. I only realized my mistake after puttering around in the hub area after beating the game…
6 Likes
Falling prey to the ladder mimic in Valkyria Chronicles. Getting trapped in the ladder dimension
Some small annoyances aside from glitched ladders:
Could probably safely get rid of every instance of buying upgrades and every other RPG element.
The campaign does that thing where it develops a nice open ended gameplay system, with lots of ways to solve problems, then pulls you away from that repeatedly to give you story missions with unclear goals you have to memorize and execute in a specific order.
I feel like the quality of the levels never quite rises to meet the quality of the basic gameplay mechanics. It’s only very late in the game when you finally get a mission that isn’t a linear straight line and instead lets you go off in whatever direction you want.
I love the game though. I’m pouring hours into it. Love how every unit is a distinct anime character with an excessively developed personality. Love to blow people up and watch them do cartwheels.
16 Likes
I tried doing a bunch of side quests, and it’s mainly “talk to this person, then go around talking to everyone until you figure out where to go” or “just look at the gamefaq guide” in my case. You get extra items, which is nice, and you unlock some nice moments with other island residents. That said I found these to be hella boring. Half of them require me to repair the police station, which I am refusing to do out of praxis
I’ve opened the “main gate” but I need 3 card keys to advance. I can also open up the three “sub cities(?)” which I opt to do, I explored around and stumbled into the game’s version of “Old town” which is totally abandoned, except for a closed off warehouse that houses…
METAL GEAR!?!?
No it’s the Bonne’s again, they’ve survived and are back for another boss fight
This walking tank is very annoying, as it has homing missiles and rockets and lasers and a huge health meter. Thankfully nobody lives in old town so if a few buildings get leveled nobody’s going to care.
Tiesel (sp?) concedes defeat again.
So yes, after the last dungeon excursion I have to get the three keys, they are all in these incredibly liminal underground cities, each of them are teeming with high level reverbots. I have an upgrade that allows me to rapid fire high end energy projectiles, so I am basically shredding everyone in these
Except for this last one, which has a huge walking boss that poops out robots, and the rear hatch is it’s only weak point, so you have to defeat all of the enemies it spawns before you can get to it, and it’s constantly spawning enemies. It was super frustrating! It has a huge healthbar and has 2 sections that spawn enemies. it takes forever to get the population of enemies down because they have a lot of health, and more pop up.
I am apparently very near the end so I’m going to take a break before the last push.
9 Likes
a.l.t. is crazy because you’ll be playing what seems to a bog standard doom map and then suddenly you’re in the most insane looking room you’ve seen in your entire life
there are so many visually inspired pieces like this too. I love it.
14 Likes
Wo Long demo thing
good: they made a Nioh version of Sekiro
bad: the PC version stutters every time an enemy attacks
game is sick when it’s working
2 Likes
fond memories of data the monkey
4 Likes
Meanwhile, while you were watching MILF Manor, I was fighting the final boss
So in the previous session you get all the keys to unlock the Main Gate and open this up, Megaman has a bad feeling about this…
It’s…megaman juno? They’re some kind of mysterious robot. They want to kill all the life on the island immediately as part of some kind of cleansing program. We get a few references to Megaman’s backstory, which he (and the audience) is mostly confused by. Juno traps megaman, then the Bonne’s show up and bust him loose, because he’s the only thing that can stop Juno of course.
Anyway one more hallway which has some light enemies and then an upgrade that maxes out your attack, handy for the final boss that you’re about to face…
I feel like Data’s dialog here basically spawned all of the PSX creepypasta genre. It’s the door before the final boss, he knows much more than you do about the situation, and up until this point has basically been a cute little robot buddy but he’s now wistfully contemplating how things are much more complicated now…
Juno has initiated some kind of future-past-techno cleansing system, which includes a space satellite. It’s very ominous. I like that this goes all the way to space and basically upping the stakes.
So now it’s the final boss. He has laser arms. He has a charging attack. He has a stomp attack with explosions and a shockwave. Dodging them all is difficult, but after a few tries he finally blows up…
OR…DOES HE
SON OF A BITCH
Yeah I should have known, this being the 2nd PSX game I’ve played this month, that the final boss would not be the “final” boss and that there’d be something 5x harder behind the first phase boss, which was hard as nails already. I was frustrated because this guy stomps, he’s got fireballs, charge attacks, and when you take enough health off he has a very hard-to-time shockwave and laser attack. Even worse it feels like megaman can’t move or rotate fast enough to do any damage as you’re constantly jumping and running away from everything. It’s very easy to get behind the 8-ball, lose the rhythm of the fight, and get annihilated in like 6 seconds.
And the entire time I’m like “i could just turn on cheats and finish this…” but I didn’t, I sorta came here for the grind and the frustration. I finally beat the motherfucker right as everyone else had had enough of Milf manor and was leaving for the night.
But…it’s too late! In the process of fighting Juno has delayed you long enough for the space obelisk to arrive to annihilate everyone
I love this shot. This is the final episode of the anime shot where the defeated enemy is all fucked up but still smiling, and the hero is still trying to intimidate them even after their world had been turned upside down and everything is ending.
And it would…except for…
Data!
Data comes in and basically overrides the ancient computer system to…not destroy the island. I remember this scene after my neighborhood friend beat the game and it felt really very strange but in a good and unexpected way. Data lets on that Megaman created him to save his memories, but he can’t tell him about them just yet…they were really betting on a sequel
Anyway, Roll gets back in contact, nobody on the surface is none the wiser of what just conspired below the surface, that Megaman is actually a thousands year old automoton that has erased and transported his memories into a robotic talking monkey to prevent some kind of “Mother” program from finding him.
Anyway, it’s time to say goodbye, in grand JRPG tradition, to most of the NPCs on the island.
And roll credits…
BUT THEN, there’s a post credit scene! Remember when those were good!?! The Bonnes are still around, have kludged together a ship out of all the ones that Megaman blew up, and are slowly floating their way to another island, with the huge crystal they stole out of the main gate in tow. Maybe I’ll see them again…in the Misadventures of Tron Bonne.
I enjoyed this videogame-ass-videogame. I enjoyed coming out on top against a tough as nails final boss. I enjoyed the boring parts. I really felt like I had gone on a mini adventure on this little island, gotten to know it, then said goodbye. I think the simplicity of the design really works in it’s favor. It’s…somehow…better written and has better camera shots than most AAA games of today.
I don’t really have anything more profound to say, it’s 130 am and I am way past my bedtime yet again playing PS1 games.
30 Likes
Took a break from Hitman to check out more of those Humble Monthly titles I gain access to every month. This list is not ALL Humble monthlies from the last three months… but it’s mostly that. The ones that aren’t are ones I borrowed from a steam library I have family sharing with, haha. Basically, I only played these indie games because I got access to them for far under their selling price. I do this every once in a while and the rule is I have to play each game for fifteen minutes. I played all of these way longer than 15 minutes and while I didn’t really love any of them, the ones that i hated were at least hateable in interesting ways.
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ScourgeBringer - roguelike with some neon monolith style art (you know what I’m talking about. Where a game has a lot of neon and everything is an Ancient Ruin) and some fun animations… unfortunately I don’t like the combat at all. I would love this for a platformer dungeoncrawler but every screen is just a tiny arena battle vs some floating enemies and you just do air dashes around constantly and curse when you bump into the walls. Oh well.
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Crown Trick - haven’t got deep into this but it’s a turn based light strategy roguelike. Pretty mediocre writing, and there’s way too much of it in the first hour. Early content is very simple. Steam screenshots suggest that the later bosses get very cool and complicated but I’m not sue how long I gotta play before I get to that stuff. I may dive deeper into it but I feel like I’ve seen a lot of this stuff before in many of the turn based roguelikes I’ve enjoyed over the years, and I’m not super interested in diving deep into another one right now. Art is cute though. And I think I could see this being an accessible entry to the genre for someone who hasn’t done turnbased roguelikes before.
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Shapez - conveyor belt automation game where you cut up shapes and paint them and rotate their halves and quarters around and stick em back together. The shapes in your factories combine and stack like pieces of paper in a collage, which requires you to do a lot of waste management and processing if you want to optimize… like, if the game asks for the right half of a square, you can cut a square and spin the left half twice and now you have two right halves. Unfortunately, I got sick of it all real fast because it’s grindy as hell. I should have known something was up when the start of the tutorial said something like “warning! this is not an idle game!!”… the problem is that the volume of shapes each quest requires you to produce is so large that it sure as hell feels like it should be an idle game. It’s interesting to me that the game has no mechanics that prevent you from treating this like an idle game, building a small number of factories… and just waiting for them to finish producing the massive resource caches you need for progress.
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Morbid: The Seven Acolytes - 2D action game which seems to contain the influence of… wait for it… dark souls!!! I have played many of these over the last five years!! This one is pretty ok. I played about an hour before running out of energy and I did like what they were doing with the environments a lot. There’s crouch sneaking and hiding in tall grass… most of my experience has been setting up ambushes for fishmen. The art is fun in an “everything looks muddy and there are fish lying around everywhere” kind of way. The enemies are fun looking. I kept getting my ass kicked by giant red octopi with glaives and shoulder pauldrons.
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Rise to Ruins - finally tried this out! It’s kind of odd. It’s a village sim/tower defense/god game kind of thing. Bits of it feel a little like outsider art, or like a space alien trying to operate in the settlement-manager genre… the UI is very underbaked in very weird ways, for example. I’m having a good time with it though, will continue for a bit probably! I have played it longer than anything else on this list.
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Hokko Life - painfully exact Animal Crossing clone. you appear on an island, chop trees, plant flowers, and recruit animal people to come live in little homes on your island. Almost every feature of Animal Crossing is 1 to 1 replicated here so far, except perhaps for the house debt thing. Instead, you get your first house for free after repairing it and buy houses for additional townsfolk to live in for a strict cash-and-supplies payment. So maybe that means that this is the real ethical Animal Crossing choice after all?? It also has much more robust furniture customization features, and those are a big part of its advertising. This makes me think that it is also aimed at the people whose Animal Crossing sophistication yearns for new horizons, rather than only PC gamers who don’t have a Switch.
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Eldest Souls - I saw people joking about this one’s name/aesthetic online a few days ago and immediately went to my Humble Monthly page because it seemed like the kind of thing that service would give away. It was! Yeah, it’s a Soulsborne 2D top down thing and it seems to be entirely bosses only? I defeated the first boss in one go, and then died like 20 times to the second boss, so I put it down for a bit. The thing is, if it’s bosses only, that means it’s also ripping Titan Souls (2015). Like, when you play it, this is very explicitly just Titan Souls x Souslborne. I wonder if the Titan Souls devs care? I hope not–they released Death’s Door recently, which is an advancement of their skills and good and fun in a way Eldest Souls has so far failed to be for me. I may return to Eldest Souls for a bit, because there’s some stuff about it I’m still trying to figure out if I like, but if I don’t kill that boss quick then this is as far as I’m gonna get in this one.
10 Likes
Just beat Pizza Tower, it’s been a long time since a game’s finale was this hype. Enjoyed the whole thing a lot though, they did a good job of making something that’s actually pretty easy to play, hard to master and all the little individual stage gimmicks to mix things up. And the presentation was right up my alley with the goofy/grotesque cartoon angle, but it’s the effort they put in to it that really makes it shine. Peppino barely says a word and yet he has more personality than games with protagonists that have hours of dialog. Like part of what made that final boss so hype was when I noticed his normal idle stance of quaking in terror gets replaced with one of anger, this man has had enough of this shit and it’s time to bring this tower down.
17 Likes
Sky Odyssey
Love it
Struck by how nonsensical a lot of the mission structures are. Take off with a leaking fuel tank from a completely unmanned airport. Every temple collapses the second you loot the map from them, but not when you land a literal plane in them. They just did not give a shit. Fun first all the way. It really is hilarious how this island chain is apparently hidden away from everywhere else, has tons of unexplored temples and mysteries but also has multiple settlements, a railway network, and several airports (albeit unmanned).
Love that the core is just learning the plane and how the environment affects its altitude and speed and a lot of early PS2 games seemed to try and maximise replayability out of an idiosyncratic control scheme and an extremely pared back scope. The game is thankfully forgiving with the strictness of physics when it comes to landings and refuelling mid-flight. Although many people believe that takeoff and landing are the most dangerous times in the duration of a flight, we all know it’s actually when you’re trying to roll through a floating checkpoint ring.
Me and a friend are singleplayer co-opping it and I think the game definitely benefits from playing with a friend. Many missions are about 10 minutes long and there’s no checkpoints. 10 minutes isn’t that long but because a lot of most missions are often navigating to the point of failure, it’s a bit much to stomach alone. With a friend there you can at least hand off or discuss the absurd world premise as you go.
18 Likes
Novelty of Issin wore off a few hours in when you find out they scrapped the taxis from the better games to throw you about half the map from wherever you need to go, chuck in four styles which should have been two max and all the density concessions with each new area planned like a DLC zone rather than anything with personality and its pretty lackluster. Guessing Kenzan’s even worse.
5 Likes
I was going to buy Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, but I have a question before committing: is there local multiplayer and howbdoes it work? I googled a bit but got contrasting answers…
2 Likes
There is a lot to love about the bit Generations series of GBA games, from their clean, minimalist aesthetic trappings, to their frequent experimentation and fresh take on established retro genre conventions. I had it in my head that they were developed by Nintendo R&D 1 but nope - it’s Skip Ltd. at the helm.
Love-de-Lic have a lot to answer for.
Boundish is a compilation of several ball-and-paddle games, all of which present a novel spin on the likes of pong. However, I’m mostly interested in ‘BOX JUGGLING’ which has long been a favorite of mine - I load it up on my Anbernic RG280v on my commute after I complete my daily (and minimal effort) Duolingo exercise, and I lose myself in the age-old sport of playing catch whilst writing kanji in my head.
The game is simple. Scuttle around the bottom of the screen, arms akimbo, and position yourself to bounce the box (beautifully wrapped gift?!) as it falls - the game ends and your score tallied as soon as an orange box hits the ground.
°˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°
Caveats and curiosities:
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There are 3 (4?) ways in which you can bounce the box (wow! - so much for minimalism)
- Juggle it with your hands, the left hand shifts the trajectory of the box to the right, and the right hand to the left. +1 to score.
- Press ‘A’ to bring your arms together and punt the box. There is a sweet-spot to the animation hit-box that will send the box straight up. Up to +6(?). Sour spots will score less points and send the box in wild directions.
- It can land on your head - which stuns you and locks your avatar in place briefly.
3a. You can get a wig (GLAM) which protects your head exactly once. This allows you to juggle the ball with your head without suffering the penalty of being stunned.
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As alluded to, there are power-ups that drop at fixed score intervals.
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Additional boxes are added as further fixed score intervals.
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Boxes can (and will) bounce out of view, beyond the topmost screen boundary - 人(_ _*) <(please understand: this is the best bit.)
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A subtle but totally charming aspect of the visual design of this game is the score counter. Like a DVD player idle screensaver it bounces in the background, ricochets at pleasant 90 degree angles, changing color and size. It’s sweet. It’s simple. It’s on theme.
The game becomes one of plate spinning in which you must utilise every tool at your disposal to keep the game going. As mentioned, the best bit is that punting boxes will fling them off-screen - forcing you to anticipate the trajectory of it - visualize the movements it makes when it’s out of view - ready yourself for its swift plummet. I assure you: the physics are sound, and there’s no tomfoolery going on beyond the veil, you really can accurately ascertain the exact trail of that box. It can spend upwards of 10-20 seconds up there - out of view - if you hit it hard enough.
You learn when to use your arms to keep boxes on screen, and when to punt them so as to give yourself some much needed breathing room. The pace of the game is entirely set by you, your decisions, your ability to plot out simple physics paths in your head, and ultimately for me - the length of my commute.
21 Likes
i have been playing the tetris tgm port on switch. i am bad at it. i have always been pretty bad at tetris so i’m really throwing myself at the wall with this one but i love that sensation of mechanical mastery. this is the only other game that has done the same thing as iidx where my mind gets thrown into a void. been trying to zero in on this feeling over time:
bullet hell games can brush up against the sensation sometimes, but they ultimately rely highly on practice and memorization, which is antithetical to what i’m looking for. i still think they’re cool, i suck at them like i suck at tetris, i could and will happily play ddp doj and ketsui (without success) for the rest of my life, i greatly regret not picking up the ketsui ds game when i saw it in tokyo, i would like to be playing that on my bus rides home from work, playing tgm has me thinking i should get a ps4 and an arcade stick so i can play it in that format and also pick up the m2 ketsui and ddp doj ports,
racing games are another potential contender, and i have incredibly fond memories of falling into a trance while doing gran turismo 1 endurance races (i still have a save that’s close to 100% i need to finish off, shoot), but there are ultimately too many variables for me, other independent entities in the race (whether human or ai) that i have to take into consideration, fuel and tires to worry about; those few extra factors put a little fishhook into my mental processes and keep me from dropping too far into the mind void i crave. time trialing comes a little closer but even the variables of say, a corner approach compared to a falling iidx note are still too great
so tetris is nice: it’s simple, the expectations are plain, the methods of interaction are limited, and the bar to receive the highest ranking the game has to offer is incredibly high. just like iidx! as i try to engage deeper with it, my appreciation for the systems that exist here deepen: i think the distinct sound cues each block has is a genius addition, for example. as i’m improving my base tetris abilities, i’m also working to incorporate more mechanics like the initial rotation system into my play. moving slowly, but loving the journey!
my runs lately hover around grade 4 in an average round, grade 3 (my record) on a good round (scale goes, from worst to best: 9-1, then s1-s9, then gm); honestly the most satisfying part so far is learning enough about the overall flow of the game to recognize when i’ve made a mistake a couple moves in advance of when it will actually affect me. there’s still so much to learn! i’m quite awful at doing the spin juggling temporary landing system thing, for example, but i’m really sucked in and i plan to stick with it all for a bit. the attract mode plays some demos of what play at the s3 and the gm level looks like and i love watching them, trying to understand not just the mechanical skill involved but also the decision-making behind the block placement…
i have a cheap j360 on order so i can play the tgm ace game; i know it has some adjustments to its mechanics that pull back from a lot of what the arcade tgm games were doing, and it’s not well-liked, but i want to play the duo mode with my partner! also i needed an excuse to get a j360 so i could play shutokou battle x!
iidx is going well too; i passed a new 12 the other day (which is still a big accomplishment for me at this point), and i’ve also been pushing to start hard clearing 11s. i’ve played every 11 that’s in the game, and checking my stats right now it looks like i still haven’t passed 73 of them, i’ve cleared 320, and i’ve hard cleared 117. i’ll keep chipping away!
most narrative/world-based games are on hold until my partner moves in with me next year because i want to enjoy them together (with the exception being xenoblade, which i’ve discovered is comfort food for me…cleaning up postgame stuff, over 100 hours sunk into it) so i’ll be grinding away at skill mastery sorts of games until then. it’ll be a fun year!
pre-posting edit: just did a rank 1 run on the toilet! progress!
21 Likes