I’ve been doing all my gamesposting on my newish blog, so here’s my latest game journal:
Featuring Ikki Unite, Neopets and King’s Bounty
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Oh yeah, I’ve been reading these as you’ve been linking them on cohost and I’ve been enjoying them greatly
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this was really fun! The blog in general seems like good craic and I’ll be working my way through past posts.
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Chapter 6 of Judgement. In the exact opposite of most Yakuza games I’m completely invested in the main story but finding all of the other stuff extremely tedious. The follow and chase mini games are that exact combination of way too easy and boring but the fail state happens extremely quickly if you aren’t paying attention so you can’t just tune it out. Also they go on for what feels like forever.
Also, a lot of the (admittedly really good) side cases are gated by your “reputation level” which you raise by making friends around town, which is usually just stopping by a store 2-3 times and getting a little conversation. Sometimes you get to do a little quiz or have to do a follow/chase mission, but I haven’t found one that felt like anything besides busy work. Also I believe there are 50 of them and I’m totally worn out after 20.
It’s a pity because it might be my favorite RGG main story. Even though Yagami is basically the same level of yakuza-adjacent as Kiryu and Ichiban, the game does a good job of backgrounding the yakuza, making them more like window dressing while you hunt for a serial killer. I was never an anti-Kiryu guy even after 7 games but I gotta admit the main story and side cases feel like the writers were finally able to stretch their legs a bit and it’s really paying off.
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the same level also features what i like to call “the tubes”
also always enjoyed this architecture on the beginning area of map 16 (which is before the previous one)
and here’s another angle on the thing from the VR-themed level @toups posted earlier
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I love Rise to Ruins! It does something really cool with the meta-game aspect where your village is basically always doomed on a long enough timeline - since the corruption grows out of control - so you’re constantly trying to make settlements in other areas, and as your civ grows you get passive bonuses that accumulate for the next run. Also lets you reset the world at any point while keeping your bonuses! Very nice.
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I wound up putting this one down before long because it felt fairly unremarkable, aside from the nice art.
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Imagine I said all of this if half way through I hadn’t done a hard stop after turning a corner and realised they gave the main character in the game jiggle physics. The Ayane side mission is one thing (which felt like a tech demo for a tech demo) but come on, I had to google how old she was before I thought about playing more.
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taking a second shot at Rule Of Rose, the first time i tried was immediately after finishing DEMENTO which was perhaps not the wisest move… actually, this time i loaded up the wrong game again by accident and didn’t realise until the intro movie that i was still in Dementoland. but maybe it was for the best, bc it actually made me appreciate the extent to which RoR feels like sort of a mockery of the same prurient gothic mode - these universes of waifish girls being kind of indefinitely hassled around PG sadism mazes… and the way RoR talks about that fantasy is by evoking it and then failing to live up to it, by making all the constituent pieces sort of vividly unintegrated. the mc is mysteriously hapless and passive, the caption boxes are really strongly voiced in a way that doesn’t seem to fit with any of the characters in the game, the environments are so much more drably mimetic than anything else in the narrative suggests. this last part is what i had trouble with the first time, the way the game just repeatedly drops you in these sprawling and mostly purposeless, drab environments… really makes you pine for exaggerated giallo mansion.
but this time i enjoyed them a lot more, just kind of roaming and digressing and occasionally being funnelled into somewhere new, with a sense of all these other rooms and corridors that you were just rushing past and that felt too indistinguishable and rambling to really get a sense of how they connected. and it turns out that’s one of the main appeals of the game, since they eventually introduce the D.O.G. System, or in other words you get a dog, and the function of the dog is you give it random inventory items to smell and it runs off for you to follow in the direction of… other items which you hope are somehow related to the one you gave it. it’s weirdly fun to have this oblique navigational tool kind of bounce you around through rooms whose layout you can’t be sure of remembering, where locked and unlocked doors change between scenes, where you have the vague nervousness of moving at a pace that’s faster than you might like down corridors after this goofy dog in search of possibly the wrong things. also the combat suckkssss which adds to the effect. there’s very little of it so far but like, if people were willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to silent hill 2 re. the thematic legitimacy of awkwardly flailing at things with a pipe, this makes that feel like God Hand, it’s kind of fascinatingly bad watching your character do the weakest and most erratic little swipes at these evil babies who are themselves constantly attacking in the wrong direction and falling on their ass.
also it puzzled me at first when i was expecting a much more straight horror game but i do like the kings field vibes of finding random characters just hanging out in different rooms and reciting bits of gnomic text at you as you hit the text prompt at them over and over. good!!
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the ps2 neopets game becoming like an obsession to me is amazing. also every time we stream it some rando who really loves the game /neopets shows up
last stream someone who’s twitch handle was the name of a character who shows up for TEN FRAMES (he pointed it out) in the game, but was a big deal on neopets.com lore told us about how he got the first gay fanfiction on the neopian times. he wrote 45k words of gay neopet loving and made sure to space out the romance so it got past the censors!! what a beast. he never finished neopets ps2 though and I can’t blame him
the other time someone showed up and was like THIS IS MY FAVORITE GAME and they couldn’t tell us why but they were very helpful with tips. for like three seconds I tried to stop ragging on the game to be nice but ITS REALLY BAD. IT EVENTUALLY BLED THROUGH
my favorite thing about the game is there aren’t recorded voice LINES, like there’s no script reading, but everyone you talk to has an expressive vocal grunt denoting their mood. theres also a weapon shop that MOANS LOUDLY whenever you walk in that I couldn’t help impersonate every time I heard it
that game is a fucking mess but it has just enough personality to be something that I’ll defend to my deathbed
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this is a game I’m hoping to get through this year - I geabbed it a few months ago (along with a couple other Love-de-Lic connected titles) and I’ve watched the intro cinematic a few times but have yet to find the time to dig in.
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Love-De-Lic is french for “Love That Lick”
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Ennuigi (browser game)
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2232
Spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made.
Controls:
left/right: walk around
up: ruminate
down: smoke
(Not mine:)
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Folks who have played Rise to Ruins: I went back to this game and I think my main problem with it is it’s so fucking laborious to do the startup build order to get the town basically working.
You can speed this up, but the game warns you that they don’t necessarily support game speed above 2x… what’s the fastest I can actually go here without causing a crash? This game is interminable even at 2x
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the true mystery of this game to me is definitely “wait, this is the guys who made chulip??” but i do feel like i get it a little more now that i’m over waiting for the survival horror shoe to drop, and am back into just wandering around spying on people… this one’s the Unhappy Shabby Life
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today is the beginning of Return to Drangleic 2023, so i’ll be bringing out my various low level bell keeper builds from when they turned the servers back on last year
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are you aware there’s a recent romhack that does things like increases the amount of onscreen enemies and such?
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keeping the 'troid train chugging with Fusion which I knew going in would be a more direct and less mysterious one and taking it on those terms I’m having a decent enough time, I appreciate the colours
interested to see where the SR388 and Baby Metroid callbacks to series fav (II) go if anywhere
so this is where the DAdam Malkovich shit started huh
was expecting to have a RE3: Nemesis relationship with SAX, maybe that’s to come but so far just glimpses and progression blocking environmental aftermath here and there
why even bother with this dramatic irony like it’s some WHOA reveal when Purple HAL was obviously suss from the get go? at least I thought so
the concept of infiltrating an infected ship composed of simulated biomes from Samus’ past is interesting but there’s a galaxy brain less linear version that really does something magical with it maybe a Prime-type where the robot instructor is minimised or becomes corrupted themselves and unreliably usable throughout and it’s Samus that has (gains the ability) to unlock and lock these zones herself and the player has to be mindful of the extent of the infection (map for macro, visor for micro) of each area dynamically juggling quarantine + navigation while certain power-ups acquired deal with infected enemies best while expanding on how enemies killed yield their X virus to either be collected quickly for health/ammo or else find a new host enemy to create/strengthen, I’m imagining those insect hordes form Prime (Scarabs I think?) massively multiplied and pouring through vents and why not throw some interspecies infighting into the mix while you’re at it…
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TBH I always run the game at highest speed and it has yet to crash on me. Worst that happens is I don’t notice something bad happening to me lol
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