tried out the demo for Wo Long this weekend
i think it’s a good game and cool, but since i can’t even beat the first boss, yet, i’m getting flashbacks to Sekiro and thinking better of purchasing the full game.
like i think these games rule and in theory are well made, but they just make me too angry. i can easily see myself getting very, very mad at some point further down the line, since i’m already feeling that sense of “why didn’t this work, this time” with boss 1.
these natsume remakes are wonders of the modern age and i hope they never end
coming in foaming at the mouth and breathing heavily to remind everyone that the Natsume/Tengo Project remakes have one credited artist
No.
Uh, yes. Seems to freeze at 1P/2P select for me though, I wonder if it doesn’t like my ROM dump. I don’t particularly feel a need to have 5 rather than 3 enemies onscreen plus sprite flicker anyway, though. = oo
Actually, I think the pace of the game as it stands is rather magnificent. It really feels balanced and planned, a careful presentation. You get to appreciate the way they gave different behaviors to the various normal enemies that constantly mix things up: one type charges right at you, one type flanks, one type jumps in a high arc at you, one walks in slowly for a grab, etc. It’s quite remarkable and works really well! They did a great job with orchestrating the AI in this.
I suppose possibly if I’ve played it to death years from now and can cane it on the hardest difficulty I may start to feel differently. ^ _^ Hm possibly also if I was playing two-player (which is almost even more unlikely than me getting good ; D).
Pizza Tower is fun and creative. I’m kind of dragging my feet while playing it, revisiting levels, etc., because I’m dreading the second boss. (I have no idea what the second boss is but if it’s harder than the first one then it will be quite a pain.)
I’m glad the escape sequences are pretty generous with their timers and still let you explore. I did the second lap on the first level and as far as I can tell it’s just extra points so I can safely ignore that for the rest of the game.
Also, if you wait a while in the darkness on the screen where you select your save file . . . .
As a sicko whose main criticism of Celeste was that there were not enough levels for me waste time retrying over and over I’ve been having a great time with Strawberry Jam.
https://gamebanana.com/mods/424541
It’s essentially a giant Celeste mod that features 100+ maps split across five difficulty “lobbies”: beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert, and grandmaster. The mod is a giant collaboration between 350+ people and it features custom art, music, levels, mechanics, everything!
Since so many people are involved, each level feels pretty fresh – they have disparate art styles, level design tropes, layouts, mechanical ideas, etc. Each level tends to explore a unique facet of Celeste, whether it be a deep dive on a vanilla Celeste mechanic, a gimmick (e.g. doing a level blindfolded with text intructions), puzzles (stopping time, moving blocks), or an entirely new modded mechanic.
It feels a bit like Mario Maker or Dreams but without all the low-effort submissions! I’ve played through the beginner and part of the intermediate levels and the worst levels I’ve come across are “interesting, but flawed”. Some levels can feel a bit like a romhack – a little obtuse and it can take a while to figure out what’s being asked of you (I would not be surprised if there was some overlap between people working on this mod and SMW romhacks). But it is still very satisfying when you finally figure it out!
I also think some levels are visually dense or don’t do a good job making hazards and platforms visually distinct enough. This is ultimately a minor complaint because I wasn’t going to one-shot most of these levels anyway, and the first time you hit the spike, well, you know it’s there now. All levels have those binocular things that let you pan around a room, so you could scout it out thoroughly if you really wanted to.
In terms of difficulty: within each lobby levels are marked green, yellow, or red. Green beginner are about end game Summit difficulty, but red beginner levels can approach B or even C-side difficulty. By the time you get to the intermediate lobby you’re at late DLC difficulty, so I assume harder lobbies blast past that and enter SMW kaizo romhack territory (which is fine be me!) Unlike Mario Maker or some SMW romhacks, I’ve found the checkpoint placement to be very generous and fair so far.
One thing I appreciated being a little rusty at Celeste: the mod features a “gym” in each lobby that teaches all needed Celeste mechanics in-depth with examples and practice areas. Frame timings, hitboxes, like 5 different types of dashes – all explained with relative clarity!
Once you beat all the levels in a lobby you’re treated to a Summit-style level that takes the mechanics and themes of all the levels you played in that lobby and strings them together for a final challenge. I was not expecting this at all and it’s quite neat and a good recap of everything you went through.
If you’re cool with tricky platforming and want an excuse to play more Celeste, I would recommend giving this pack a try! It’s not perfect, but the average quality is pretty high and there’s A LOT of it. I’ve put about 10 hours into it and I’m not halfway through intermediate yet, so I’m pretty confident there’s more Celeste here than I’ll even want!
Metro 2033 (PS4) - revisiting this after finishing exodus. pretty good, better than i remembered anyway
Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4) - surprisingly compelling a few hours in
Returnal (PS5) - kind of a slow-burn game, but extremely satisfying. also extremely hard!
glad your opinion improved
Could also be that you enjoy the redux mechanics more than the mechanics of the original release. I remember that metro 2033 was particularly brutal compared to other shooters of the era, but when I played redux I was surprised by how much it was smooth sailing compared to my first playthrough.
The Death and Return of Superman (SNES)
Superman is slow to move after missing so he’s probably gonna get hit. His hit range is weak, both horizontally and vertically (isometrically), so there’s a good chance he’s gonna miss. If he accidentally hits two people at once, for some reason one of them won’t stay in hit stun, and he’s gonna get hit. The enemies attack instantly with their long range attacks. Some of them–some super bosses, or just punks with weird chainsaws, for instance–are not really hit-stunnable, and just keep attacking as you hit them. If a flying enemy appears–which is almost a given in about half the waves of every room in most of the later stages–you have to stop fighting the guys on the ground and take to the air immediately, otherwise you’ll get strafed repeatedly; and then you do the same air wiggle routine twice yet again to KO the flying guy before you can maybe go back to the ground grind. The stages, especially the later ones, are long, with samey room-size areas of insta-spawn, insta-attack waves of the small variety of the game’s enemies. There are infinite continues–but you have to restart the whole stage. There is no difficulty setting.
It was excruciating and I finally had to save-scum the last third or so and it still took six hours. … There were times where the bizarre grind almost felt fun in a sickly way as long as I played by its don’t-actually-try-to-outpunch-anyone rules, but then it would do something mean like hitting me from across the screen for the bajillionth time.
In theory Superman (or whichever of the Supermen you’re assigned to play on a given stage) could fire back with his Heat Vision, only it’s a) incredibly slow and b) does like 2 pixels of damage. You can hold the fire button to delay firing it (even more…) but it doesn’t seem to do any more damage that way. …
Also the game starts to strobe the screen when smashing automated enemy defenses in flying stages late on, argh.
(Okay I was going to just not mention them but I can’t resist, the horizontal flying and shooting stages are awful; I suppose it could be an emulator thing–though I doubt it–but the game cannot keep up with animation and sounds so it feels like it’s falling apart as it sends the same flying robots at you again and again; you hold the fire button and sorta wiggle up and down and they kind of chunk apart and disappear; the game seems to know that the whole bit is a failure as it streams health powerups at you the whole time.)
(Okay well and in the rest of the game there’s the feature of throwing enemies into the background to smash the background section by section and reveal scripted powerups–which is a pain. Or constantly lurching into the air to fly up to the ceiling to see if they secreted a powerup up there. “Powerup hunt” is not a bullet point I felt I needed on my games but you sure get to do it here.)
yeah, i originally played 2033, but playing 2033 redux this time. i don’t actually remember my original attempt well enough to point out any specific differences, though
i’m only playing on normal difficulty (the lowest available, lol) and still getting my ass kicked in most set pieces, but having a great time
2033 vs exodus is interesting in that 2033 is way more interested in being a “shooter” (gunplay takes up a bigger fraction of your overall mechanical loop) as well as having more prominent survival horror elements. exodus is slower, more considered, more stealth-oriented, and significantly less horror-coded
this is clearly going to end up with me giving the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games another go. i played a few hours of the first one (heavily modded) many years ago but was waylaid by difficult gunfights and never made it out of the first few areas
Ended up in Portland on Sunday with basically nothing to do because everything was shut down due to the weather. So my partner and I did the one thing we could find that was nearby and open and went to the barcade Ground Kontrol.
We played a bunch of stuff, but the big discovery for us was Joust, a game I’ve heard a bunch about, most of it amazing. But I’d loaded up some home ports in emulators over the years and had never figured out what the appeal was. It clicked this time in a big way. I think a big part of why that happened this time was that multiplayer transforms the experience of the game in an incredible way. Another big part of that was that we were more or less stranded there and had to find something to enjoy.
It’s so elegant and clever. I probably don’t need to lay out what’s amazing about Joust for a lot of you, so I won’t go on too long about it, but it’s a new favorite game, I think. My partner was better at it than I was. I think I’m gonna get the arcade version running on my laptop so we can play at home together.
Other things we played:
Also discovered “pulled oats” as a plant-based vegetarian meat alternative there (barbacoa flavored, on nachos!), and that ruled. Gonna hafta try cooking with those.
oh yeah i’ve been meaning to do this + ask sb which mods to get…
Great arcade report, I enjoyed reading this. Really glad to hear someone discovering Joust! : ) (There is a very good PS3 version if you are able to access such a thing; looks like it’s on 360 as well.)
Do you know which tables you played? Pinball has changed a lot over the years; my favorite era by far is the 70s and late 60s, just after the flippers had changed from short stubby maybe 2" things to their current ~3.15" length, and before playfields got really complicated and flashy with all kinds of animating stuff on them and so forth. My favorite table is Stern Electronics’ 1978 Stars
Just bells and chimes and a nice warm glow as you go for various targets to increase point multipliers, pure happy fun. : )
I played Black Knight 2000 and Addams Family, both of which I think are supposed to be pretty well-regarded (or at least popular?) tables?
When I say I don’t “get it,” I really mean I don’t get it. Kind of makes me want to try to understand what’s so appealing about it and what makes a table good and what a good player does, but I think I’m very unlikely to do that lol.
I love pinball…there’s nothing like the feel of rolling a big silver ball down a well-angled chamber
pinball is something i’ve always dreamed about getting deep into but i feel like part of the appeal is knowing i’ll never actually be good enough to get any of those trick shots or intended routes… just banging this big metal ball around an inscrutable maze of lights and score things while it occasionally flashes or plays sound effects at you. the ultimate videogame. i’m still kicking myself for not having change to play the avatar themed one in glasgow airport which had a little plastic jake sully figurine sealed inside a pod.
Gradius III (Arcade) does not care that you enjoy swimming in space as the Vic Viper because it knows better than you; from game over check-pointing, forcing slowdown to navigate bullet hell (accompanied by the inevitable whiplash of normal speed), RNG and no continues
As much as I admire Konami for insisting on 1CC I am eternally grateful that the Gradius III/IV compilation has the stage select option because stage 4 is a feast of obstacle and encounter design that I can truly enjoy Not Winning just to experience it over and over
As much as I try to compensate for the technical issues running throughout the game I can’t help but loathe the stage 4 boss, although I have considered it may be that it conforms to a particular sort of pattern my brain does not compute fast enough to cope with, which somehow rendered both Ikaruga and the final boss of Castlevania Lords of Shadow as somehow Too Much
And I refuse to play the SNES version instead because I clearly don’t like winning much
I’m not sure about Black Knight 2000, or if people were more into the first one, Black Knight, which I think was a big novelty at the time for its digitized speech. Addams Family definitely seems to be regarded as an all-time-classic. I’m not really a fan of either of them–don’t like the divided table or all the swirly lights in Black Knight 2000, and Addams Family just feels way too crowded for me, with awkward shots, especially from the upper right flipper or from below up to the upper right area, and gadgets just crowding in way too close on the left side. It’s got tons of missions and digitized speech and sound effects and props though and people really flipped over that stuff.
But yeah if you can ever find an older table that doesn’t have that stuff, but still has the long flippers, give that a try, it’ll be a very different experience.
And then there’s also the current modern pinball experience which is different again, with incredibly bright, multicolored flashing LED lights, multistory plastic action figures and elevators and things everywhere, and animating HD screens. Which is…another flavor.
What made me “get” pinball was Pinball Hall of Fame on PS2 or Pinball Arcade, whichever one had the table guides. Each table had a guide that moved the camera around the table and provided explanations about all of the mechanics and strategies for beating a table. Until then I had no idea there were goals in the first place! Tables have progression, where you’re hitting certain objects or moving the ball through different lanes to activate a videogame-like “stage” with rules on what you now need to do on the table to beat the stage. Then you work you way through all the different stages.
Figuring out there are explicit stages, objectives, and goals on a table turned pinball into a much more directed, methodical game rather than just randomly hitting a ball around a table and seeing numbers go up.
I will play pinball in seattle with butts ANY TIME
