I got to one of the endings in Elephantasy: Flipside. It was clearly the worst one. I thought that maybe I should just leave it at that and move on because I really had no idea where else to go to progress in the game.
But then I tried it again later in the day and found several big new areas, so I think I will keep at it. The game is quite charming but I can’t imagine playing it without ever using any of the “cheat codes” (which the game provides you with right in the beginning).
WWF Superstars GB
Rare put out WWF Superstars only a few months after their second NES game, WWF Wrestlemania Challenge, and at first glance you might’ve thought the GB game was the more impressive, with big, well-drawn, lively sprites, and spirited, if corny, pre-match diss-fests.
But the gameplay is awful and feels like a collection of awkward exploits. For some reason you can rarely hit Select to fling the opponent out of the ring from any spot, even dead center. Why? I think they couldn’t figure out any other way to get out-of-ring action going on. The wrestlers all fight the same; Savage has a different ground strike animation, that’s about it. Speaking of which, there’s no ground game, other than rolling up and down the screen, avoiding stomps (they’re slower than you can roll) and hoping you can get the automatic stand-up grab if your opponent lingers nearby too long, possibly hoping they’ll land the near-automatic wake-up grapple on you–outside of that weird wake-up game, there’s just punches (or Dibiase’s kicks), running jump-kicks, less effective running clotheslines, a throw to the mat, and the rare, awkward turnbuckle dive; oh and doing the same few moves briefly outside the ring, and undergoing the awkward ring in/out scene jump.
There are only five wrestlers–Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, Macho King Randy Savage, Mr. Perfect, and The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase–and only one way to play: through four single-player matches.
Once you figure out that throws have more vertical range than punches, the first two matches are cakewalks. The third gets awkward because suddenly a lot of the throw attempts just don’t work. In the fourth, the CPU is pretty much impossible to throw, and for me at least it became a desperate reliance on happening to get then down in the corner, trapping them with your body so they can’t roll away, and hitting them with successive ground strikes as long as you can keep them there; aside from that, I had to live on running jump-kicks, which are a pain to do with the laggy control.
If only throws didn’t just seem to go largely non-functional in the later matches, it would be all right; but they just seem to stop working reliably and suddenly it feels like a really terrible wrestling game. At least I had some fun pretending I could do Macho Man’s ragged gravel voice as he threw one-liners back at the opponents before the matches.
TT Isle of Man - Ride on the Edge 2 (PS4) - very good, another milestone joint. brutally hard, exhilarating game
I’ve been eyeballing this every now and again. Seems pretty cool. Has FFB wheel support, at least on PC. The track conversion seems a step above anything available for car sims.
Losing my mind at TRIO THE BANSHEE
Has anybody played G.O.D on snes?
Kind of a cute Earthbound play that only has a wink. The game doesn’t have the mechanical playfulness of the Mother games and the script opts too quickly for cheap jokes at the expense of any cosmological grounding it’s trying to go for. Read the first half of 20th Century Boys, instead.
This was a neat effect:
i’m curious what you do about weight pitch with a wheel. is there an analog stick on any of those fanatecs or logitechs or whathaveyuns? in TT Isle of Man you control your weight balance by pressing forward or back on the left analog stick… hot wheels unleashed allows pitching too, actually
Actually you know I guess I misunderstood and there is no force-feedback support. Durn.
But the vidz I’ve seen have the wheel mapped to left-right driver lean and it seems to work fine.
Thanks for helping me to rule it out! Ehehe
By the way, I read 20th Century Boys years ago and it was really nice. A bit too overlong at times, but overall a great game
wheel to left-right works fine for bike games, i’m more wondering about forward-back, or pitch
like, if i gun it off the line with no other inputs, i will do a wheelie and die, but i can survive if i hold forward on the stick… i guess they map it to something else?
Escaping the PCEngine thread to say I started Ys Book 1 and 2. It’s good! I lost about 20 minutes of progress because I died without saving and on the mister the PCEngine core has no save states. That ended my night but I will continue.
Like not a shocker to say Ys is good in the same breath I just said I do not trust modern Falcom. Noticing the overworld themes are redbook and the town themes of fm synth so it can fade in and out the themes. That’s cool as hell.
Playing in Japanese and felt like I was in college again understanding like 2 words of the pre-title intro. There are A Lot of women voice actors in this game! I was fine once the game started with an FAQ open as to what the items do because I knew that was obtuse.
Join the PC Engine Thread folks! Play Ys Book 1 and 2. It’s Good.
I started playing this, too. All the multimedia aspects of it rule. There was an important dialogue and the game brought up a beautiful, oversized portrait while voice acting came in. The slideshow animation in the opening cutscene works since it shows things like seagull wings flapping.
The nice thing about Ys is that you can save whenever and load up with no penalties. Sometimes an enemy spawns near your save, but you can usually get out of it.
Wrestling Empire Steam/PC
Dev MDickie has been making his own wrestling games for 20 years & there sure is a lot of stuff in his bizarre world of Wrestling Empire, done in the low-poly style of Aki Corporation’s fabled N64 wrestling games (he’s also done a game in Fire Pro style)–the crowd holds up “WCW/nWo Revenge” signs–that’s the 3rd-to-last Aki N64 game, the cheap one I picked up in my cart binge of the past few weeks–and N64s.
(Heard about WE from krangledangle in his 1st Revenge video WCW/nWo Revenge (Part 1) - YouTube )
WE embraces jank. For instance, I couldn’t find a way to start the game’s main mode, Career (there’s also a “Booker” career mode, where you play the person booking wrestlers for fights; it’s a full on business sim with haggling contracts but I do NOT find making financial decisions relaxing so), w/ a brand new character & I sorta accidentally picked the wrestler styled after MDickie to start it; wanted to undo but there’s no restart! Have to delete the save file, whose Windows “AppData” path is at least mentioned in the manual, http://www.mdickie.com/guides/wempire.pdf . In Steam, uncheck cloud saves, delete the local save, re-enable cloud, wait for Steam to detect a file conflict, & resolve it by telling it to accept the local file.
The WE “Universe” of ~10 wrestling organizations & 350 wrestlers–all but 20 or so of whom are said to be based on real-life pro wrestlers–ages & runs its own matches & changes leaders & evolves in Career; your wrestler–presenting gender notwithstanding–can bear their own bloody mini-wrestler child ( not for fainting fathers GIVING BIRTH TO KIDS IN WRESTLING EMPIRE! - YouTube ).
I started boringly by changing a tattooed guy into my own, comforted in knowing I can change even gender any time. Early career has been mostly straight wrestling, aside from ring invasions by hulking onlookers; the ref usually deals with them, although this can cause them to miss things like me trying to pin the opponent. You can play a referee & design your own ref costume!
Strangest thing in my fledgling career has been a “table match” ending in ~1 min when my opponent fell onto a table from the apron.
Bad at pinning people, but finding which moves to use and even change them out in the editing mode is starting to make sense and I feel like I’m getting somewhere. Relatively simple controls: 4 buttons & 1 control stick for the actual wrestling moves.
Variation comes from goofily animated interactions, including w/ props and weapons scattered about, ring invaders, the varied areas in which you may end up wrestling (graveyard, airliner, etc), & the fully physical ref. In the bumbly physics model–WE uses Unity, which explains how MDickie has expanded it 2 years and counting on PC/Switch/mobiles–you can climb on or pick up and throw/swing just about any object.
Camera settings are awkward. You can turn off Gore.
In Career you can try to challenge just about anyone to a match, or to being your wrestling partner, and in Exhibition you can set up any combination of stuff.
Found myself going back and poking at the free demo so much I felt obligated to pick up the full game. You can get near-infinite wacky replayability just messing w/ tweaked random exhibitions in the demo! Experimenting more in the full version now though & I think if I stick with Career I’ll be able to get it good & weird.
Oh! Game is 30 fps like AKI N64 games. “Smooth” Speed setting is 60 fps. 200% speed also 60. Accidentally played mostly 100%/30fps after the save reset. 110% would be 33 fps; think I’ll stick to “Smooth” then. Pause menu settings (Camera, Speed) don’t save on their own, have to trigger a save by say toggling a setting in main game Options. AA helps but VSync chokes.
Oh the funniest thing I forgot to mention about marvels avengers, is that me and everyone i know whose played it has fallen into the same trap. Theres a “play now” and a “operations” option on the main menu and which one would you pick if you just started? If you picked “play now” congratulations enjoy this weird cutscene that takes place after every other piece of story in the game that makes no sense before we drop you in a hub. You were actually supposed to pick the first operation because that’s the start of the campaign. You got fucked easily
Vampyr (PS4) - incredible OST. Fantastic RPG, dunno if this is European but it feels like Eurojank in the best way. And seriously this score is astoundingly good!
honestly the biggest failings of vampyr are the excessive amounts of combat and the uneven writing
Aesthetically and conceptually, the game’s great.
Time to take a tour of Gran Turismo 3’s vision of Seattle. It’s based off the version from Gran Turismo 2, so there’s some…inconsistencies with reality. I’m racing in the “80’s” series and the game pits you against the AE86 from Initial D (this is in fact a special version you can only get by winning a certain race)
First up the Viaduct, which is now totally gone, but by 2001 when this was released I think this part of the viaduct had been dismantled. It started around the stadiums and didn’t continue much that far south from it.
A much more obvious flaw: the inclusion of the King Dome. Which was demolished in…2000, A year before this game was released. Maybe they kept it in because they spent so much time on it. It’s also in Gran Turismo 4! which came out several years later!
Also of note is Safeco Field. I don’t think you can cross the railroad tracks here IRL. Actually right here is a very weird 360 looping bridge that goes over itself so drivers can go over the tracks
I feel like this is accurate but I remember there being a lot more buildings here. you can see the onramp in the distance. The attention to detail here is still really good, you can read the “kingdome” road sign
I believe there is a pasta resturant on this block, and when I worked in pioneer square (this neighborhood) I could never eat there because the line went out the door.
Lastly the very famous “sinking ship” parking garage. Where it stood used to be a very opulant hotel, and when it was torn down and replaced with this the Seattle building preservation movement was started. It’s that ugly. I used to walk past it every day. Someone once IRL jumpscared me from there.
so lightfall added a grapple ability that lets you create a point in thin air or grapple to anything with collision even if it’s in motion. that includes: enemies, projectiles from weapons, items you can throw, other players, pieces of level geometry. it’s extremely goofy adding this kind of flexibility to a seven year old game and giving players new ways to break traversal completely. an old dungeon that used to involve rotating man-cannons to get around between islands is now about firing and quickly grappling to a rocket (for me, at least)
they also just put the dang titanfall lock-on sidearm in right down to bending bullets around corners. it pairs well with floor-is-lava hijinks
my hole made for me etc 
metal max 3 on ds is a lot more exciting than metal max xeno on ps4
