This third European version of Mario Bros. has the pacing improvements of the 1991 PAL version, the air control, bigger, non-flickering sprites with more arcade-accurate color, invisible platforms, icicles, more generous bonus stage timing, and more arcade-like stage order of the 1988 Japanese Famicom Disk System kiosk version, enemy stage intros from the arcade version, and even faster play speed!
My high score so far is about 20K higher than my US version high score. ^ _^ The air control–a brand new feature introduced in the Disk System version, not something that was in the arcade version!–really changes the game!
How do you feel about Mario Clash? I’m not a big Mario Bros. fan but the spooky mood, modern Mario controls, and cross-field throw mechanic, which requires timing and giving up the ability to move, give it a lot of life.
I finally tried call of duty ghosts and used the snoop dogg announcer and its amazing. I don’t think ghosts is particularly good but i am very entertained by the combination of the weird ass bots that sorta act like players (one of them did this weird hopping dance in front of me that was disturbingly realistic) and snoop doggs lines being a mix between funny (“enemy picked up the sticky icky!” “guard dog KIA…it didnt have to be that way. RIP little homie”) and snoops own spin on typical cod (“hind just be chilling!” “bitch have you lost YO BOMB”)
also when you win matches he starts breathlessly fucking hollering at you YOU MOTHERFUCKERS WON GOOD SHIT CUZ I APPRECIATE YALL HANDLING THIS BUSINESS MAN YALL FUCKED THEM UP THE WAY YOU KILT EVERYBODY IN THIS MOTHERFUCKER THAT WAS HARD MAN which is literally the funniest thing anyone’s ever put in a videogame, to me.
meanwhile in infinite warfare method man took the job entirely seriously and has amazing lines like “Homie you got a drone package at your discretion, that means whenever you wanna use it”
Sky Odyssey continues and the missions reach a point of length that becomes somewhat tedious to retry even with a partner. The game also sometimes doesn’t play by its own rules in some later levels where it forces you into a stall state because the drama is more important than consistent simulation. There’s an intensely dumb setpiece where you have to land on an airstrip at the bottom of a narrow quarry with sheer drops all around the edge. Why is an airstrip there? Fuck you, land on it.
There’s a really good setpiece where you pilot out of a ruin and over a staircase of waterfalls, but the engine fails meaning you have to use your pontoons and rudder to steer yourself as a make shift boat through the rivers and glide off of the edge of waterfalls. Real adventure shit. But on some waterfalls rather than letting you glide, the game just seems to arbitrarily decide now is the time to stall, despite the conditions necessary for another glide being met. It felt like the director is shouting my line at me when I could be doing a cool improv. We’re nearly at the end but the repeated attempts due to grazing the ground after a forced stall (!), or stalling on the runway at a speed of 10 knots and subsequently dropping 10 feet out of the air to trigger a plane-ending explosion (!!!) sapped our motivation to power through to the end. Until next time.
re/watching all the Alien movies right now in a weird ass order (³ → Resurrection → Prometheus → Covenant → Aliens → Alien) and just started Isolation last night, lights out, headphones on, think I played for over an hour and…I heard there might be an alien in this game? just thick thick dread so far (tho I couldn’t help myself and spent the first few minutes staring at my bare feet while kicking physics sandals and books around my space bedroom) game is very pretty! playing on Hard because it outright says that’s the recommended difficulty and how can I chicken out on that?
Hard is definitely the difficulty to start with. I love that game so damn much, though it is just a bit too long. I still enjoyed it the whole time. It was the last horror game that ever intimidated me, and by completing it I felt as though I had overcome a permanent barrier for scary media. I did the whole fear litany thing from Dune but irl by going through with Alien: Isolation.
The surprisingly small staff (although I guess most of the bosses aside from Penguin and Catwoman ARE fairly nondescript clowns) of this game was led by a director with no obvious beat-em-up experience, and maybe that accounts for the more-numerous-than-usual horrific Batarang-shooting platforming sequences, and the you’re-just-gonna-get-hit boss fights.
There’s a block button, for Pete’s sake! Which I forgot about until after Catwoman killed me about 20 times with her otherwise pretty unavoidable attacks: warp-slashing across the screen, or striking as you stand up, before you can move or attack. (Thank goodness for the 9 lives & 10 continues cheat codes. :P) Oh you’ll still take damage from most things when blocking, they just may not kill you in three hits, is all.
And you can crouch during the non-isometric bits, or at least the Penguin fight, as far as I can see from YouTube. That might’a saved me another Continue. ; P
The music and ambiance is top-notch, and the art is mostly pretty good, in a very consciously “we have to be bleak and colorless like this American movie” way. Heck I even sorta liked the weird Batmobile sprite-scaling driving & shooting sequence.
But that ~15 minute stretch in the middle–insta-death platforming, two Camping Catwoman fights, and the Non-Isometric Penguin fight–felt like pure hate. Even with the very generous continue checkpoints (like, when I had to continue after getting wiped by Catwoman or Pengy in those boss fights, it rather surprisingly started back up right before those fights). Maybe if I go through knowing some of the game’s tricks it won’t be quite so maddening.
That screen-high giant mechanical duck boss with the pattern you can’t QUITE squeeze past without taking a hit is totally gonna kill me a dozen or two times again though.
I’ve been playing Alien Isolation too after seeing Shakespeare Aliens recently, though I’m only checking out the DLC which I never looked at. I’m of the opinion that the main game is wwaaayyyyyy too long, like there is a perfect place they should have stopped but they just. keep. going.
So I thought small DLC bits may be better. So far I’ve only played through the two Alien DLC with weaver and other cast members popping back. they’re pretty neat but it’s also very focused on re-creating the ship from the movie and certain events. the ship itself isn’t built well for the game’s mechanics and there are bits where you have to follow an exact script and i had to look up a guide just to figure out what to do because it wasnt clear, and also during these bits the alien AI is very scripted and the illusion is lost
still, got a kick of it, and it’s short and breezy
there are actually no forced-stalls in the game, but the arcade simulation of the game does simulate up- and downdrafts rather crudely. You can test this out by unlocking the gold UFO in target mode, which cannot stall.
One tradition of every Gran Turismo I have played: you end up building an overpowered Do Everything car and it seems like that car is going to be the Impreza STI Wagon. I am trying to slap the biggest turbo I can on this, then enter it in a bunch of rally races, so I can win rally cars and participate in some mid level races. Unfortunately, rally tires cost like 25k, or a whole fucking car’s worth of money for some stupid reason. There is a rally race that takes place on tarmac, on the wet street version of Special Stage 5, except my car isn’t fast enough. Also: sometimes you lose by fractions of seconds, which is really funny to me.
This game is so cruel because the cars you win are so much more underpowered than the cars you race with. So in order to participate in this World Series at the end of the Beginner races you have to earn a race car somewhere, or grind to get 300k credits to buy one, which is hard because you’re spending so much money on upgrades to make your cars compete in the first place. le sigh
Like take this car here, the C-West Silvia. It’s the fastest car in the “Beginner” level “World Series” race. In order to win it you would have to…beat the “Amateur” level “World Series” race. A whole level above it!!
Good to know. I must be retroactively excusing my own failings. In some situations it’s challenging to tell exactly what is happening since wind is a tricky thing to ‘feel’ through the camera and plane physics. Although I think it generally does a good job to feedback when you need to correct course.
Broken Sword 5 smells like reruns of Poirot, a videogame for old people if there ever was one. Michel Ocelot-ass graphics. A protagonist that refuses to run under any circumstance. Always waiting for someone’s animation to end + one or two seconds before talking to them (basic politeness) There’s a strong enough hint system that it’s always moderately pleasant to play
I remember the puzzles in Broken Sword 1 (only other one I’ve played) as mostly grounded but they’re absolutely unhinged in this one. Lure a guard by filling a miniature manneken pis with whisky and putting it on a cart then pushing the cart in front of the guard to make him want to piss and go away. Ok.
I like how you catch a coackroach in a match box early on then…. The protagonist just keeps it in the inventory forever, and if you keep interacting with it he eventually gives it a name and can feed it cookies
I could not stomach the constant tedious random battles and extremely tiresome dungeon design… I hear the later games are less annoying and give you more options
I liked the battles in the second game more and I’ve really been meaning to play the supposed peak, 3. But that will have to wait until after the PC Engine thread comes to an end.
