we got the big ol’ ugly tuxedo PS5 and have been trying out the quarry. lmao the music is so bad but it’s been fun to choose our own adventure I Know What You Did Last Summer type of movie. i really wish that things would quit it with the meta, winking at the camera shit about like being aware of its influences/what its ripping off. like, dude, stop elbowing me; i get that you get it, calm down. i can’t wait for the football player character to die! hopefully at the hands of hunter channing tatum…
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I have played this twice: once with my wife and again streaming with friends where each friend chose their own character’s decisions. I like the backwards-hat meathead and Dylan the most as characters.
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ahaha, oh no! those are my least favorite so far. ryan is my summer camp crush, for sure.
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started a hard mode file in fire promoter.
progress definitely seems a lot slower: at the end of the first year, i’m still right at the bottom of the rankings, my roster is still tiny, and i’ve barely improved my training facility
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Alright this game whips lol. It’s kind of a BotW-like but there are some neat wrinkles
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Watched a playthrough of God of War Ragnarok. Its main moral can kinda be boiled down to that one tip from How to Win Friends and Influence People about learning to admit when you’re wrong quickly and emphatically. Except it does it by forcing its characters into combative provocation and mostly asking for forgiveness.
Felt really loose at times where characters just walk in and out of scenes as the situation calls for it but without really stopping and asking the most interesting questions about what is happening in the present moment or elsewhere. Why does the Draupnir spear make it so a precognitive God can’t predict it? Give me a diagram. It also waits to answer a lot of questions until the very end which often doesn’t feel super satisfying and feels more like the writers revelling in having planted a seed that didn’t germinate for 20 hours. Yes, there’s payoff but it doesn’t always feel very interesting. Like why bother explaining Jormungandr getting knocked back through time in the most incidental way possible? The game presents strong but sparsely speckled character moments/writing amidst mountains of feckless banter. It’s enjoyable but you aren’t often left with anything to chew on. A game of the year that you’ll never play or think about again.
The game is still trading on that sentiment of ‘can you believe this is the same series which had all the sex minigames and ZOOSE?’. Like to the point that it’s a parody of God of War 3 – what if God of War 3 was resolved somewhat amicably through justified military conflict.
The reason I didn’t play it is because the air juggles kinda felt goofy to me in the original (well… 2018) and it felt like a lot of the combat is maintaining this state as much as you can. Also, not a huge fan of every ornate chest just having a random 3 digit amount of hacksilver. Feels like half of the game is hacksilver acquisition.
I liked the depiction of Surtr the most of any god. Heimdall’s actor really feels like he was taking notes from Marc Alaimo’s Dukat.
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I’m playing the demo of that bayonette spinoff game on the switch and uh… so far it’s surprisingly pretty dang good. maybe my expectations were low but i has genuinely interesting mechanics and the production values are much better than they need to be. I’m impressed so far. not sure if it can sustain itself for an entire game though
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Pro Wrestling NES
I knew the legacy of this game and somehow it still took me a while to realize I could do other grapple moves by pressing the other button + directions. ; )
Pro Wrestling was made for Nintendo by T.R.Y. Co., Ltd., with game designer & programmer Masato Masuda & a graphic designer ( プロレス (任天堂) - Wikipedia ). “Masuda mainly watched All Japan Pro Wrestling at the time, and was impressed by the match between Giant Baba and Abdullah the Butcher.”
T.R.Y. “later merged with Sonata to become Human” [Entertainment] ( Pro Wrestling (NES video game) - Wikipedia ), where Masuda would create the first games–through Fire Pro 3, as far as I can tell–in the Fire Pro Wrestling series. Pro Wrestling pretty much plays just like a Fire Pro game, with the wrestlers coming together simultaneously for a grapple–the difference being that instead a single, precisely timed button press deciding grapples, as they are in Fire Pro, in Pro Wrestling it’s pretty much whoever mashes faster (although heavier grapple moves are harder to win with than lighter moves, at least until the opponent is worn down).
Masuda regarded the mashing–or specifically, being able to use auto-fire to win–as a problem, thus the change to precision timing in Fire Pro; but it seems unlikely to me that any Fire Pro game–maybe not even all of them combined?–got near to Pro Wrestling’s popularity: “Published in 1986, Pro Wrestling is celebrated as the biggest and best-selling wrestling video game release of the 1980s, shifting 1.4 million copies globally.” The Google Translate-ed Japanese Wikipedia page says “it was particularly popular in North America”…“1st place in sales for 2 consecutive months.”
Mashing is fun! ; D I’m bad at it, but I’m bad at timing, too. Anyway, Pro Wrestling doesn’t have any options, ie no difficulty setting, so you’d better just mash good. I’d be fine with this but there aren’t that many moves–the six or so characters all have pretty much the same moves except one or two unique moves each–and so few characters that apparently you have to loop through them three times to get to the final boss, of whom English Wikipedia says “It is worth noting that some Nintendo aficionados consider the Great Puma to be one of the most difficult boss characters to ever appear on the NES.”
After the first loop (you may have to do an extra match after if you’re playing King Slender, as I was, 'cause he’s the usual champ you fight and uh I guess there’s a bug) you win the 1st of 2 belts, then you’re “defending” it for the next two loops; lose in the first loop and the game is over; lose (ie, don’t win, ie, get a draw–or probably also get pinned) in the later loops and you have to start those loops again!
So, I didn’t make it to the final boss because it got hard and monotonous and I quit. The gameplay is quite solid, it’s just you’re trying to do the same thing over and over as it gradually takes longer and longer to wear the opponent down.
Okay a couple gameplay things could use work: the CPU picked up from the mat is somehow able to strike first at me but I can’t seem to strike first at them when they pick ME up–is my timing that bad? eh probably–also when they pick me up, I can USUALLY not get hit by their strike by holding the d-pad up or down, even though their usual spin kick seems to hit right on me. And running attacks have to run a real long way before they can be triggered. And the only way to hit someone on the canvas is to jump from the turnbuckle, which is weird.
And the color strobe after win is obnoxious. : P
Pro Wrestling’s not a bad game. Maybe Fire Pro would’ve gone huge if it had stuck to mashing? Or not, with auto-fire abuse, I dunno. Anyway, current Fire Pro is pretty fun, and this is where things started for it (yeah Fire Pro Wrestling started with Pro Wrestling, hey). And it was the 1st wrestling game to have an isometric viewpoint!
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Does it make you want to have babies though?
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Was introduced to SPHONX, a straightforward adventure game about doing archaeology stuff in the future, this week, and played the demo.
What makes it compelling to me is how strange the writing is. Imagine joking repetition taken to its most comic extreme, but missing the last bit of polish to make it sound like a joke instead of like an LLM stuttering. It’s all voice-acted and the VO has strange accents and cadence. There’s a banana in your inventory that has bespoke combination lines with every other inventory item in the game, and to my knowledge no actual puzzle use. Odd and funny! Worth peeping.
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Storyteller came out today, and I’m not impressed. Probably would have worked better as a toy than trying to press it into a game-like-shape. Predictably people are unkind to the game’s length (under 2 hours) but this one line from a review caught my eye
Because unless I’m missing something the game’s ending is literally Daniel Benmergui telling you to go write your own novel. How tragic that someone can’t even comprehend that as a possibility.
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I liked the original enough 14 years ago that I was still obliged to buy and play through the whole thing today, but I don’t think it acquitted itself too well as a 2023 retail release
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I finished it in under two hours. When you view the credits, which are past the final page of the book, it shows a library check out card on the back of the book referring to it as “volume one.” The sequel baiting comment is not coming out of nowhere.
The game is very very short, yeah. It’s a fun toy but it’s so slight and quick that I can understand why people are a bit let down. I am glad I played it though.
5 Likes
hmmm
This scene right here is where I think the game won me over because this is the kind of surreal thing that you only really find in art films or comics. The music, character designs, and visuals and SFX all give this game a sort of collage look of things pieced together. You find stuff and figure things out. It’s cute and neat.
23 Likes
Retro Gamers seem to think Captain America and The Avengers (Genesis) is a bad game. I don’t know maybe. It was delightful though. I played it a lot as a kid and I liked it just now. Stupid comic book plot, weird voice samples, D-rate cameos and villians I don’t recognize. Hawkeye on a little scooter-jet hunched over like an action figure. The entire game seems to be BLUE. The music is jaunty. Good job Data East.
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Capt. America is a good game on the console but in 20XX, I don’t think there’s much reason to revisit that specific version when you can just as easily play the arcade version
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One time while visiting my godmother and her family in my hometown, she generously gave me an electronic Simon game as a birthday gift. I played with it for a little while and then somehow got it in my head that if I slyly complained about it she could be convinced to return it to Toys’R’Us. It worked and the next day we drove to Toys’R’Us in Lafayette so I could swap it for a Video Game. I ended up getting Captain America and the Avengers for SNES, on my memories of playing the arcade game, an the fact that it was discounted to a Simon-equivalent price. I remember being disappointed in the console port, and as time drew on, myself - the neglected cartridge an early chilling reminder of my own selfish obsessions and the scheming lengths I was willing to go to in satisfying them.
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not that it ever held up past 2 seconds of imagination but the idea that without profit motive nobody will do work is immediately dispelled by how any random gamefaqs guide is 100x better written than any clear as mud paid site content farm guide I’ve ever read for destiny or ffxiv. unfortunately there’s usually better information in random reddit threads
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i realized lately that there is a truly staggering amount of knowledge about (recent) games in the psnprofiles.com trophy guides and forums. these fuckers find every exploit to get that easy platinum, no stones unturned
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Unfortunate you didn’t like the game, but if i ever get someone a gift and they don’t like it i am relieved they tell me so we can actually get them something they like
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