you can hold R2 while in the air to do flips and rolls. this is great. every game should let you pull a sick gainer off a cliff
the metastructure is basically ubisoftian lawnmower sim with the free-climbing/gliding mechanics of breath of the wild, including the grip/stamina meter. the big wrinkle here is a mechanic called “soul-jumping”, which allows you to possess any animal you encounter, as well as quite a few inanimate objects (oil lamps, barrels, fruit, rocks, etc.). the soul-jumping can be combined with the BotW stuff to great effect. for example, you can soul-jump into a bird, flap up over a mountain peak, then jump out and use the glider on the way down. just fantastic freedom of movement
the mountainous islands are extremely colorful and lush, with fantastic verticality and stunning views everywhere. possessing birds and just flying around is magical.
the lawnmower sim stuff is basically the weaker part of the game, but even that is somewhat elevated by not giving you a direct player marker on the map. this little bit of fuzziness really helps ground you in the world, and they did a good thing by allowing you to keep the map or compass up on-screen while exploring, if you want. helps prevent that feeling of having to check the map every 5 seconds
Sonic Frontiers (PS5) - interesting game. definitely prefer this to basically every 3D sonic i’ve played since adventure, but to be fair i’ve skipped most of them. the PS+ Premium trial was only an hour long, so I didn’t get to see too much, and what I did see was… mixed. the combat in particular seems pretty meh. the camera kinda sucks.
the cyberspace music, on the other hand, is great. and i do enjoy the range of movement abilities. mostly it just feels kind of… boring? i’m just kind of ambling around, picking up rings, going through little zippy setpieces that give you a collectible and deposit you back where you were.
lightspeed dash off the bat is nice, but i kept getting redirected in weird directions rather than dashing through the line of rings i wanted.
idk, i’m kind of interested to see more, and while this is certainly a solid, competent 3D sonic game, i’m not convinced it’s a particularly, you know… good game
the speedrunning tech for frontiers is great. highly recommend looking at some runs. there’s a momentum-conserving dash cancel like in spark 3 that’s tons of fun even as a layperson
So I think just played the best Sonic Fan Game. I emulated it but apparently it runs on sega genesis. it looks like grim dark cringe and it sort of is but the level and boss design is often clever and pretty fun. At least as of the second Zone. The end of zone boss was a wild 4 part ordeal. Its graphically cohesive and constantly pulling clever tricks. Ive encountered day/night shifts and weather changes. It understands sonic is about accurate platforming rather than outright speed. Though speed plays a factor. I hope you are good at jumping out of a spindash for instance. Or using panic dashes to slip under boss attacks. Its clearly sonic 3+k under the hood.
The music is stolen from all over, a lot of castlevania FM covers and music from Rusty (PC-98). Its all bangers so far.
The ring system is great
You start with 50, every time you get hit you lose about 10, you can recover rings up to the maximum of 50. Rings are sparse and usually in groups of 3, once you hit max rings new rings are visually faded out.
The game makes sure that before a boss segment you have enough rings to try. It just assigns you 50 rings when you enter the area.
There are no lives and no limit on retries.
Enemies are more aggressive than normal sonic speed bumps and have novel attacks. They die in showers of cartoon gore. Some monsters you pop like regular sonic enemies while killing others cancels your momentum.
The sonic sprite has been altered to make him more expressive. Ive seen tired sonic, surprised sonic, angry sonic. Its just neat.
yeah, that’s my main complaint. the atmosphere is fucked with considerably on the ports. i’ve never played the ps3 version tho, so idk if it holds up better than the all the rest.
I was playing world war z last night because i like to drop into random console players games and carry them through levels. all i could hear over this guys mic was the echo of his tv audio and him munching chips for the entire level until suddenly he stands too close to me and tried to heal and i hear someones dad hollering MOTHERFUCKER GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!!!
This person’s great. They understand that you can turn any song into a Sonic CD tune by merely ripping off Pacific State by 808 State, and they did such a good job of it that I put it in one of my house music playlists.
played the octopath II DEMO for a bit. maybe i started off with the wrong character, and i didn’t play for very long, but i found the dialogue an empty husk of what i’m actually looking for in a jrpg. the game is getting glowing reviews for reasons i can’t really understand. i’ve never played the original so i can’t compare the two.
it looks. . .okay. i find the combo of pixel 2.5D mixed with modern flat looking anime effects to be. . .jarring and unflattering. the music that seems to be getting a lot of rave responses is relaxing but not really memorable? i started off as a cleric / inquisitor character. his power is to manipulate people more or less. i didn’t really like the implications of this going forward, so i stopped. maybe. . .i’ll try another character? idk man. . .
i know i’m not the only person who probably gets suspicious when games get a lot of acclaim and glowing reviews these days, and this seems like a very cynical sort of take on what made this genre interesting in the past.
chasing the dragon at this point
it’s enough to make you wanna cry
there are definitely some glowers out there, but in reading about this game i got a lot of negative sentiment expressed repeatedly:
the characters don’t really interact or acknowledge anything in any of the arcs? just like the first one, it’s a series of paths that you can do in any order, but due to this, they basically just have the party not really interact with anything since they don’t know who will be with you and when or what you’ve seen from previously played arcs. it’s just like… why? anyway my impression from reading stuff is it really fails to improve on the most glaring issue with the first game and while it has some improvements, it is kind of a fundamental failure as an RPG
i didn’t check a lot of places but on steam the rating is ’ overwhelmingly positive ’ with tons of pple talking ab how wonderful it is. my impressions are that it’s really bland, despite having a nice dressing. it really depresses me that this is the standard now. i’m starting to realize why certain companies don’t even bother to cater to older audiences. we’re not as easily impressed.
magazines are also def raving ab the game if the trailers are any indication. lots of ’ a return to nostalgia ’ and all this other bullshit nonsense that is honestly kind of making me mad the more i think ab it. the ship has prob sailed for major studios making anything of substance at this point.
i found a decently discounted steam key of dragon quest xi tho.
i completely forgot ab it tbh, but. . .maybe this’ll actually be the one that i get immersed in. i remember pple here saying that it was p decent! i also appreciate that it has length to it, compared to some of the other stuff i’ve been on the fence ab. i need a good fantasy world to fall into! my favorite jrpg is almost 20 yrs old! wtf!
if i don’t like dragon quest, it’ll be a very depressing end to a what was a p cool chapter of my gaming life ( and honestly my identity lmao )
in a last ditch effort, i found a p cheap copy of triangle strategy too. i’m not sure if i even like team asano based on what i’ve seen on offer tho. i played a bit of the demo but was very angry that it just wasn’t fft so i couldn’t actually be objective ab it’s actual merit.
i’ll prob. . .start it before dq just to see if all this hype is worth it.
i think people really like the battles in octopath and that covers for a lot of its faults for them? i can see that, it’s a neat system, but i need more than that for a long game to grab me
imo dq xi is a perfect palette cleanser after that, it’s a fun character-driven adventure tale that doesn’t forget to develop the people you’re spending 80 goddamn hours with
