I would not have guessed that for you
6 Likes
Sons of Liberty more like buns of liberty
I’m sorry (not) but Kojima keeps framing shots like this so I’m going to keep screenshotting them. I got to fight a rollerblading bomb boss. I’m also using a “spoiler free” gamefaq to help me along, which was helpful for finding the bombs on each strut tower. I wonder how much of the game takes place on Big Shell since there seems to be another half of it I haven’t explored yet.
Visually this game doesn’t need an “HD Remake” since at least with emulation all of the baked lighting and geometry feels fresh, which is still pretty striking.
I like that this guy has a bendy straw because with the suit on there’s no way he can drink out of that cup. Why is he drinking wine in the first place though?
18 Likes
Played the freeware Tetris game Tetris 2K21 in the plus4emu Commodore Plus/4 emulator.
Rather tough (I was pretty much finished at level speed 9, anyway!) Tetris clone, plays really smooth and has a loud grinding music track (originally a Jonathan Dunn track from the 1989 C64 game Run the Gauntlet Run the Gauntlet - Commodore 64 Game - Download Disk/Tape, Music, Review - Lemon64 / https://lemon.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/c64/music/hvsc/mp3/MUSICIANS/D/Dunn_Jonathan/Run_the_Gauntlet-01.mp3 ) that grew on me.
You can only rotate blocks in one direction; I think the CP4, like the C64, had only one joystick fire button.
Stumbled across a silly trick you can do with the blue L block at the starting speed level:
As soon as the blue L appears
jam it right while rotating; the hook will go over the right wall of the well
leaving the two blocks of the L’s tail dangling down! Play continues, and if you clear another line, the lower block drops a line, while the upper disappears
You can pile more blocks on top of it
They’ll continue to descend as you clear more lines
and eventually merge with the main pile. They can be cleared normally.
6 Likes
woah what’s going on with fatman’s skin texture there. also how are you dealing with not being able to aim without shooting in emulation
1 Like
I didn’t know the textures were hecked up. as far as MGS’s signature…control “scheme” it leads to situations where I fumble the controls multiple times and end up restarting a section. Having to commit to aiming kind of sucks but if I release the 1st person view button and then hit R2 I can de-equip something and not shoot but it’s very much a pain in the ass.
Like this section where you’re supposed to choke someone out. you do so by tapping the square button or whatever. Except if you tap the square button and move the left stick at all it does a takedown move, which will cause all hell. you can’t tranq them or knock them out to use the retinal scanner. This took, like, 5 or 6 tries before it actually worked
Then there’s this dumb bridge section where you shoot out the control boxes. One is behind you, there is no visual indication as such. I was stuck on this for such a long time. If I have to look at the guide to figure out where things are I get very annoyed.
Also, this game has Todd McFarlane content in it for some reason
8 Likes
I think i had or still have the todd mcfarlane ocelot figure lol
1 Like
I played Tchia and mostly liked it. I like the boldness of preventing the player ever seeing themselves on the map in 2023, although functionally the waypoint/compass function still kinda Ubisofts it up. I thought the game might lean really hard into navigation, but my guess is the compass marker was a concession for the sake of usability while maintaining some theming which is probably the right call.
The tone really goes hard occasionally given the game is a 12. Chicken beheading, stabbing, someone eating an infant (although camera cuts away from it just before it happens), and a bombing which kills several important NPCs are all right there.
Eventually I dropped off it but can’t quite put my finger on why. Getting around to a particular part of the islands takes forever so you’re kind of incentivised to just sort of wonder in a direction if you want to do side stuff – this is kinda a good thing but I got tired of it quickly. The main quest is not really interesting enough and hits a pretty hard brick wall when it asks you to do 3 gigantic Ubisoft bases in a row and caps it off with one huge base the other 3 were connected to. There might be too little downtime during travel where the player doesn’t really do much while moving to a location other than putting a tack in the map and following it on the compass. Animal possession eventully becomes a desperate hope for birds since they are functionally a much better form of fast travel than the actual fast travel in the game. By the time I was done my entire backpack was filled with birds.
The vibes of the game overall are really good, particularly the look and feel of the ocean and the music variety. But, so much of it is characterised by light tedium enough that I found I didn’t really value my later time with the game. It’s frustrating because there’s a lot of elements that I should like on paper but are just kind of tedious to play through.
There’s a treasure map quest with vague sketch directions which should make exploration engaging, but I just lost interest since some of the locations require having a certain animal to hand or to work against the game’s, mostly slow, travel.
Almost every major cut scene is subsequently accompanied by a rhythm mini game. I love how bold this is but the songs are really long and the percussion focused songs don’t sound/feel good to do. I came to dread these scenes. I like how clearly they cribbed from TLOU2 for the guitar mechanics and made it more functionally useful in this game. Also, you can just play it at any time which is something that would have been kind of nice to do in TLOU2.
It’s a good-sized world and the boat is a nice tentpole. I like the Mwaken shenanigans that you eventually unlock. They’re good NPCs and make bases slightly more tolerable. Sadly, I won’t finish it.
6 Likes
yeah the 3 big bases section is basically a game-killer, on top of the other pacing issues you mentioned. that part of the gameplay loop is even more tepid than the rest of it, and to brickwall you with a massive chunk of the worst part of the game all at once like that, oof
i do think the sailing in tchia is really fun, i keep hearing the goddamn wind waker music every time i set out
2 Likes
Cross-promotion
1 Like
It’s the first time I used a skip gameplay feature in a game and even then it felt like a huge gaping hole that shouldn’t be there.
Sailing is top notch though and I think traversal is good as long as you have quick access to the right animals.
I just hate posessing 500 oil lamps to do the camps.
2 Likes
meet your maker’s economy is just too asinine and tedious. i love the concept of the game, and building bases is devilishly fun, but the grind is far too sadistic. i think i might be out unless they make some adjustments
4 Likes
I did my second session with the Fist of the North Star boxing game today. It’s probably not a good use of time and I wish there was actual gore in the challenge levels. I have one more day left on the demo version, and I’ll probably make the surprisingly expensive leap since I don’t think anything has gotten me motivated even to do minor workouts regularly in a long time and I don’t always want to die relatively young. I think I finally figured out how to hold the joycons so I’m not accidentally hitting Home or zooming in with my pinky finger every couple right uppercuts.
Even if the heads don’t graphically explode, maybe this’ll at least make that Instagram jackass jump in the pool.
8 Likes
Tried to play the PC version of Killer is Dead which i must have got free at some point, but some sound effects don’t work and the sound cuts out altogether whenever anyone speaks. For the first mission i thought it was a stylistic choice.
6 Likes
I played He Fucked the Girl Out of Me as it was one of many suggestions linked in a blog post by ellaguro a while back. I played through the whole thing in one session. It’s pretty short and I found it very absorbing. I’m quite interested in the trope where a person is represented by a cartoonish abstraction when they’re dissociated from the world/reality in some way. Goodnight Pun Pun is my best analogous example.
CW Trauma
Choices presented to you feel like a good simulation of the associated lack of choice and shame as the lead/author/you navigate the stigma of trans identity and sex work. You can’t really freely interact with the dialogue without considering the weight of the response. You’ve got to watch yourself. It feels like a solid attempt to get the sequence of trauma down in the form of the player’s journey through the scenario.
The idea of having something riven from oneself is a theme I love since it expresses something pivotal to the person despite them having something removed or taken away. The irony being that losing aspects of ourselves reveals who we are/were in more detail. Like that old riddle about the hole. That cartoonish abstraction trope helps this along and I think it’s why it works to draw the player in. Having the main character amplified through simplification presents a window in for people who don’t have the lived experience of the author only for the more concrete representation of the author to be flipped on as we approach the traumatic event.
The walk home was a particularly great bit where any other dramatic retelling would have the music swell and the key traumatic incident the centre of the composition. Instead, it’s just a quiet and empty drudge home. ‘No profound change, no knowledge, no sadness’
8 Likes
On today’s episode of Metal Gear Solid 2: we get an infodump and an underwater mission
The “use the guided missile to get around the electrified floor” is a dumb callback to the original Metal Gear Solid and is right about the same amount of goofy bullshit I’m used to. Then you meet The President and things go Off The Rails.
I find the underwater controls to, how should I say: suck ass. There’s underwater mines for no reason. It’s impossible to navigate. and I’m always forgetting that up = up and for some reason I expect swimming controls to be inverted, which fucks me up every time. Every time you surface for air it resets the camera orientation so I forget which direction I’m pointing so it gets very easy to get lost
Then I get to do an extended escort mission after this I assume??? The entire time I’m swimming to E.E. I’m like “am I going to have to go back the way I came?” and: yup.
13 Likes
recently(kinda):
xenoblade chronicles
this really scratched the part of my brain that i’ve been looking to get scratched since i was a kid: a game that feels like an mmorpg but is single-player. i’m a big loner, but i love the scope of mmorpgs. all i want is a big mmo-y world to explore and a main story that i can ignore sometimes and dive into plentiful sidequests (which encourage me to poke around the big world more) for a while. even if the world isn’t quite as big as i’d like, xenoblade has got that. plot was fine, kept me motivated enough. world was nice! it had verticality! verticality is cool – that’s how you make cool and engaging landscapes. i moved out of indiana for a reason.
phantasy star universe was close to hitting the spot for me when i was a kid, but missed. can’t remember why in particular. i need to check out the ragnarok and maplestory ds ports. there’s the dot hack games as well – i know those have a fake bbs as part of the worldbuilding/story stuff which is always a thing i love in games (shout out kaidou battle)
i put a lot of time into this; i played the new switch port epilogue (more of the same, pleasant), then thought about doing the postgame stuff. i got my characters all to 99, took on one of the postgame bosses, and died nearly instantly. realized i’d have to do a lot of fussy gem optimization and stuff so i dropped it. now that i’m a salaryman i’m lazy.
ys i&ii
played the psp version, emulated, with a crt filter (honestly it looked even nicer than running a psp-3000 into a crt with component cables, which i have done. feeling like this is the start of a turning point in how i engage with games). speaking of me being lazy, these two games rocked. lovely lunch special sized games. i’m lazy, so you know what i loved? not having to hit a button to attack. i also played these with a guide because if there’s one thing i know about myself it’s that i no longer have the patience to contend with 80s-early90s game progression design. with a guide, i could enjoy these as an enjoyable romp through an lunchbox-sized world rather than like, run through mines endlessly trying to find some obtusely placed room.
ys ii felt like a solid improvement over the first, just about everything that can be expanded is expanded in a way that makes sense. combat now includes a magic system, npc interaction has a tiny bit more depth, the world is a bit bigger, the leveling system goes higher, it’s more engaging and enjoyable. good sequel. the closest comparison from the time period i have for these games is the early zelda games and i gotta say it, i enjoyed these more than any 2d zelda i’ve ever played (save for the worldfeel of link’s awakening). to be fair, i have beef with 2d zelda right now because i was playing through lttp recently and got my ass beat over and over by some boss that i already can’t remember while streaming to my wife and i looked like a chump! whatever, i don’t care about having “gamer cred”, and even if i did the fact that i play iidx competently gives me enough cred that i can easily take a loss on something like this.
anyway i’m temporarily afflicted with the “falcompilled” status now, which might end up lasting for a while. we’ll see!
beatmania iidx
going to the arcade after work twice a week and playing this after only going once a week for a bit and seeing my progress slip. i’m at a really critical wall right now that i want to push past (getting into mid 12s) and it’s coming along, bit by bit (as with everything in this game). i’ve figured out a good way for my sessions to go now: i’ll warm up getting AAAs on 7s-8s for a round, next round i’ll do the same for 8s-9s, third round i’ll push into 10s, fourth round is all 10s, then i’ll start pushing into 11s and after a few rounds of that try some 12s which i rarely pass but oftentimes at least improve my score or miss count on. none of it feels like wasted time because i’m always progressing on something – lots of AAs in the 8-9 range that i’m cleaning up and turning into AAAs, and lots of 10s that i only have an A on from a long time ago that i’m pushing up to at least a AA. i’m working on hard clearing 11s to make sure i’m actually hitting everything and i’m pushing more and more of those up to AA as well. iidx is good, iidx is hard. it’s my favorite game. someday i’ll hit kaiden and then i don’t know what i’ll do with myself.
ellucian banner 9.0
this is the database software i use all day every day for three and a half years now at work. it is very clearly software from the 90s that has been prettied up and added to over time rather than ever seriously revised. it is a mystery from a different age and i love poking at it, trying to make sense of it and learn its full capabilities. everything i do is in these obtusely named screens akin to magic spells like SOAIDEN (that’s how you search for database entries) and GUASYST (how to see which offices have records on the entry) and SZPADUP (how i merge duplicate database entries, but i can’t forget to pull the PIDM info out of GJIREVO when I do that).
we don’t have any sort of internal manual on it (in my team at least) so everything is hearsay. i missed out on the zelda 1 playground rumor era but i have this and that’s enough for me. “can you search for people by their email?” people ask me, and for years i said “no”. imagine my surprise when a colleague moved to a new division and said “hey i found out something crazy from my new team: go to banner and type in GUISRCH”. lo and behold, there was a screen where you can search for people by their email address.
right now it seems like the possibilities are endless so long as i can find the right spells. about a year ago i contacted the tech team and have them give me a list of every screen i have access to and told my boss “i’ll make a guide for banner for all of us!” but then realized when i looked at the list that i’d be losing one of the things i enjoy about this job: the sense of mystery in this obtuse database software. i quickly stopped working on the guide and made it a point to forget what i saw in the list. i only hope my boss forgot about it too – it hasn’t been mentioned and i did great in my performance review last month, so i think i’m in the clear.
it’s one of the most beautiful things to not know something in its entirety and to still get the experience of discovering something. weird as hell that i’ve found it in some archaic database software, but hey man it’s 2023. i’ll take all the dopamine i can get.
ys origin
played this most of the day yesterday and got up to (what feels like it has to be) the final boss but i stopped to hang with my wife and give my right thumb a damn break. yes, i now have to use my thumb! the bump system is no more and i have to hit a button to attack. bummer. the older i get the less good i get at doing that. i’m playing as the axe girl which means i have to hit the attack button a lot lot lot lot lot lot. i was thinking about beating it today but i might still hold off to give my thumb one more day of rest. maybe i’ll watch some movies instead.
it is more ys in just about every way and i’m very much in the mood for that right now. just wish i could auto-attack. i am such a fan of this 2d sprite on simple 3d background look (ragnarok online really hit me as a kid) to the point where i somehow want to make some sort of game (or at least little diorama i can walk around in) that looks like similar to it. smile game builder, maybe?
demon’s souls
i’ve beaten the game a few times now so i figured i’d go for the platinum with a guide to really see everything the game has tucked away in its corners. i’m decently far through the first playthrough (did all the pbwt stuff except for the exclusive black phantoms, which i’m starting on now but the 5-1 phantom is a real slog!) and feeling almost sad thinking about actually knowing this game in its entirety. i stopped before the final areas of elden ring last year and put it down for the same reason – i didn’t want to relinquish the anticipation of there being new stones to upturn in a fromsoft world. i think this is a weird thing about me but i am who i am. excited for the elden ring dlc no matter what it is because it means that there is more for me to poke at and make a mental map of.
i cherish the dreams i have from childhood where i’d go into the laundry room and there’d be a new door tucked behind the water heater, leading to rooms i’d never seen before. spatial novelty and reinterpretation is everything to my brain.
31 Likes
I tried that “remastered” version of Diablo 2 because I’ve never played Diablo 2 but I’ve always heard it’s fun and I know it inspired the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games (which were great).
From what I’ve seen so far, it’s definitely better than Diablo 3 (which I found utterly empty and boring) and I could see myself playing it occasionally when I feel like something mindless. But it’s also one of those games that I can see is likely to make me constantly think that maybe I’d be better off spending my time doing something else.
10 Likes
If you have similar anxieties about loot grind games like I do, then I think your estimation is right and if you got into builds an climbing seasonal ladders in D2 you probably would feel an existential dread. But the blessed thing about D2, for me, is that it feels like it actually has an ending in the campaign. It’s a nice adventure where you actually seem to go places. And in the end some crazy stuff happens and it’s like the game just feels like it has reached an actual climax in the story and journey.
5 Likes