playing jagged alliance 2 on a laptop for the first time so I can have a totally immersive experience while buying guns on the internet and taking stupid personality quizzes. its never been so fun!
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Beat the saturn version of sotn for the first time. The graphical downgrade is a huge hit to the game overall, but if it was your only version it’s fine. The new areas and weapons aren’t really anything to write home about, but Maria mode is definitely an amazing inclusion. I wish they used this version for the psp port, she’s so much more fun and way cooler than her just using the l’il maria moveset.
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ok so the thing i found out is that jagged alliance 2 has problems on win10 where it crashes and it corrupts your saves etc etc , the two things that seem to fix this are using the 1.13 patch or JA2 stracciatella, and 1.13 adds a ton of guns and other shit including the infamous drassen counterattack while stracciatella is just trying to get the game running on a modern OS. thats great, that sounds good. the problem then becomes it has three rendering modes one of which looks right but everything’s tiny because it’s unscaled 640x480 and the other two make the game look fucked and the text impossible to read (update: this was cuz I needed to set my resolution to half of 1920x1080.) ok guess i’m using 1.13, which is annoying to download and configure because you have to fuck with ini files to turn shit off unless you like 30+ blackshirts on like literally day 3 of the campaign or getting ambushed by adjacent tiles 24/7. ok i go through all of this. ive been trying to play ja2 for like 2 hours now…
WHY DID YOU CHANGE THE FUCKING CHARACTER CREATION TO MAKE IT LIKE THIS YOU FUCKIN WEIRDOS
you can choose to be somewhat sexist very sexist or a capital g Gentleman. the fact that the appearance options you get are literally ugly homely hot and LIKE A BABE really lets you know a dude came up with this one. Fucking brenda in the porn store in san mona looking for the for women by women section would BARF.
I JUST FUCKING TURNED IT OFF AND WAS LIKE THIS IS NOT WORTH THE EFFORT. what an awful first impression. i cant even imagine if i hadnt played this before
i guess i’ll play stracciatella and figure out how to make the pixel perfect mode actually upscale. i would hardly call the original game like…PC or whatever but come on.
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Played Kirby’s Dream Land a lot as a kid and never played Kirby’s Dream Land 2 so this may just be nostalgic rambling. I think I kinda dislike KDL2 overall. It’s a straight ‘bigger is better’ sequel and the animal friends are neat for the first 3 areas and then the game drags.
The bigger animal friend sprites mean some levels are just annoying to navigate. Your character becomes two blocks wide when it doesn’t look it, and most gaps are designed for a 1 block Kirby. The game feels too long. Longer than Kirby’s Adventure somehow despite having the same basic structure. Kirby’s Adventure had better hubs as well, every hub is basically the same in KDL2. Boss attack patterns are really stingy on giving you a means of damaging the boss, so you’re often just waiting for the boss to cough up a star rather than having a quick dance with them.
There’s an inverse relationship between the appeal of an animal friend’s sprite and their general usefulness. The owl is easily the most useful in terms of movement and has some of the best powers but kinda meh sprites. The fish is such a goob, I love it, but it’s only worth keeping for water sections. Because the fish simply exists, the game has tons of water sections to accommodate it which also slows the game right down if fish isn’t with you. Some levels are really uninteresting devolving into trial-and-error mazes or trial-and-error autoscrolling.
Finished it but cba with the secret ending. Kirby’s Dream Land is so much leaner and more enjoyable as a one shot with the additional mode to encourage mastery of a narrower set of levels. I think the animal friends gimmick could’ve worked better with a similar length that encourages repeat playthroughs through the combinations of animal and copy ability rather than sheer number of stages.
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Control (PS5) - having played a lot of Returnal lately, this has some similar feelings in a few different ways (movement, gunplay, psychedelia, shifting environs). really enjoyable title thus far, the writing is fascinating and the complex is really compelling
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (PS2) (PS4) - still can’t invert the camera on the X axis. still can’t skip any of the dialogue or cutscenes. daxter never shuts the fuck up and his voice is incredibly obnoxious. i’m still early in the game, but the level design is pretty decent, at least. i’m a sucker for 3D platformers so i’ll keep plugging.
Resogun (PS4) - wow! housemarque is quickly becoming one of my favorite developers. this is a pretty novel take on defender/fantasy zone wrap-around shooters, but the execution is near-flawless. incredibly addictive!
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You should definitely try out Nex Machina one day, to see the final game they made before deciding arcadey games weren’t a viable financial business and pivoting to what ended up becoming Returnal. It’s their take on Robotron and it’s sublime.
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oh also i bought shteamdeck
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nice. what will you play first?
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Funaki Masakatsu Hybrid Wrestler: Tougi Denshou SFC
Technos Japan’s brutal life simulator!
Starting from age 18, my career wrestler aged a year per match; by their upper 20s they began losing moves;
by 30 their skill numbers were definitely going down way faster than I could build them up; by 34, after going undefeated with them to that point and finding the game much too easy, I could no longer win a match with them, even against opponents I had crushed before. Nothing left to do but click “Retire” and have the game show a celebratory picture
as it deleted the character.
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lego marvel superheroes might be a better avengers game than marvels avengers. lol. there is literally more variety in the levels, boss fights and enemy design than the 800 billion dollar square enix game.
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everyone who was ever at the middle section of well6 in quake team fortress, playing as medic, hoplelessly chopping at your buddies with your medic axe while they run out trying to cross the no man’s land to the enemy fort only for them to be immediately exploded the minute they step out and spray polygonal chunks all over your character doesn’t forget a thing like that. anyone remember the sb tf2 game where me and my sister had a chain of teleporters directly from our flag room into the enemies and back? nonstop instant flag deposits. total turret coverage.
capture the flag on blood gulch, isn’t nobody who was there who doesn’t think that wasn’t some of the greatest shit of all time. so how come there isn’t a capture the flag mode in destiny? there’s a sportsball mode but it’s not the same, you need two flags and two forts, not one sportsball. valve turned team fortress into a capture point hat market thing. what is going on here? you can tell how good capture the flag is because the minute money accruement wrecks a developers brain and humanity they lose interest in it.
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Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition (PS4) - this one is growing on me. i like the way the systems fit together. the car stuff is neat since it gives the open world a bit more of a layered feel. i love that you can bop out to soundtracks from classic games in the series in the regalia. the hunt stuff is great, one of my favorite bits from 12. not a huge fan of the fishing mechanics, but they are decent enough. wish this had a PS5 patch as the 60 FPS (lite) mode is a bit rough visually, but the other modes are just too sluggish imo.
best thing about the game is the music, lots of breezy tunes
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Others know more than me, but I think Capture the Flag has gone out of favor in place of variants that try to fix the spikiness. The edge a team needs to score sometimes wouldn’t build up for twenty or more minutes, and the way a better-prepared team could dominate made it hard to fit into shorter game sessions. The thinking that calls it bad is: games should have more scoring opportunities for most players, games should have consistent length, games should have consistent score tables.
It’s just like sports. Could you imagine a low-scoring sport where goals are really hard and games often end in ties becoming popular?
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the one-ball sport mode in destiny is excruciatingly low-scoring and got a really chilly reception, yeah. only like three maps are even big enough for it because they’re making one type of map now with almost no lines longer than 40 meters or so
i think the drive for the design goals you mention is about right and it coincided with the shift from servers/LAN to matchmaking
titanfall 2 had ctf; apex could, in a better world
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that sounds right, people have mistaken CTF for SPORTS when it is actually WAR
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titanfall 2 ctf was probably the most fun I had playing a shooter since like 2004 easily
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one of the most exhilarating experiences playing a game in my life was playing IRL paintball CTF in a large wooded area when i was a teenager, it really is perfect
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My kingdom for a server browser
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Yeah I used to work at a summer camp for kids with diabetes and we would do the most unhinged CTF games and CTF variants, with like 120-150 kids ages 6-15. We had a lot of unique rulesets to avoid scrums/fighting around the flags and the best, most popular one was one about collecting rocks that had been spraypainted gold.
If I recall… the whole camp was open for the game, and each team had a “prison” on their side of the camp. If you were tagged, you had to go to the enemy prison on their half of the map… and if someone from your team got to the prison, they could individually tag everyone in the prison area and “set them free”, granting them a free walk back across the midline separating the two territories.
Scoring, however, was not focused on a specific point in the game area. Scoring was based on I believe the raw poundage weight of golden rocks you collected and returned to your scoring area, which was… I think??.. separate from the prison? The camp would be seeded with a ton of these rocks hidden all over the place and kids would have to go deep into enemy territory and search it for rocks in order to win.
I think when too many rocks had been collected, there was a golf cart filled with milk crates that the camp administrators would drive around the territory, dumping more rocks out the back. You were “not allowed” to follow the golf cart but kids tried to do it anyway. This usually proved dangerous because of the tagging. I believe counselors would also take rocks in buckets and dump them in other areas to keep it interesting…
I played this game as a kid probably age 14-15 and then later as a counselor I helped to operate the game. Best CTF variant I’ve ever played IMO
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