i like that killer7 makes the first level feel like ur attacking a castle
15 Likes
just replayed this the other night. it’s such a tight design and introduction to all the elements you’re about to encounter. opaque and mysterious the first time, comforting all subsequent times
3 Likes
Nothing in the first several hours of Rhythm Thief, a very whimsical Professor Layton-esque adventure, prepared me for a random character to pull out a gun and straight up shoot a child.
9 Likes
okay i finished Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
in spite of the many spirited defenses of it here, the inverted castle never really sold me. it just feels like a lousy combination of not different enough areas from the regular castle (and lacking almost any new plot/story to keep things going in addition to not having the novelty of exploring new areas with you anymore) and also annoyingly random/arbitrary what items or weapons you have when you encounter stuff. the boss battles in particular became really bad. not that i’ve ever felt like Castlevania boss battles were particularly great. but they were definitely the worst part of the game to me overall.
i guess it’s just a matter of you had to be there.
i got about 1/2 of the way in before taking @isfet’s suggestion and deciding to farm the Schmoo enemy for the best weapon. i learned it’s like a 1/580 chance or something to get the best weapon, so it’s pretty low. i tried a bit with some Luck potions but never could get it. i even tried to go back to the Library and use the high jump to like mess with the Librarian, which sometimes gives you items. it’s supposed to maybe give you a luck ring, but i could never get it. i did get a rather hilarious “Axe Knight” armor that transforms you into a goofy axe wielding armored guy. but i gave up on that after a certain point. i also could never really consistently get a hang of doing the high jump… so i can’t imagine pulling off the inputs for any of the more advanced moves in the game. not that it seems like you need them. but it does make me wonder why they’re there. that’s the sort of half-assed maximalism that i’m not sure i really admire.
eventually you get a luck ring from beating a boss (a horrible, stupid giant zombie guy that made me curse at the screen many more times because of the amount of times you get poisoned and swarmed by flies in spite of the core boss not being hard outside of that). but even after getting that item and going back to the area i could never get the Schmoo sword. i actually gave up my Schmoo farming and ran back into the other room and then the first Schmoo i killed immediately had the sword. so i took that as a sign.
by that point i was probably 2/3rds of the way through the inverted castle and had seen enough and was just ready to call it quits by blazing my way through the rest with the extremely overpowered sword. i don’t regret it. i enjoyed everything pretty much up to the inverted castle, and the initial novelty of it i guess. but it just exposes how much this game becomes a taped together mess once you lose the balance of progression and the sense of wonder from unveiling new areas.
i liked the small details, and the enemy designs. i sort of wish the fiction of the game was developed more comprehensively. it seems like they got really excited about designing weapons and abilities and enemy design and didn’t think too hard about how any of it would tie together. that seems like a bit of a lost opportunity, esp because other Metroidvania style games have done that better.
i don’t know, i get why people like it. it does feel unique, even in the bad ways. i also think it’s an example of why the old ways aren’t necessarily better at all. a lot of stuff that felt like obligatory expectations for mainline japanese games of a certain type at the time that just now feel bizarre and miscalculated. i expect a game like Tomb Raider 1 to be a clunky experience because that’s all i ever hear about it now. but given the amount of praise and adulation it still gets and how everything is still based off of it these days, i expected SOTN to be less of a complete mess overall than it was.
of my PS1 games i played for the first time recently, i’d say it’s still slightly better than Tomb Raider 1 because of the spectacle and creativity of all the details. but worse than Silent Hill 1 because that game has a coherent setting and narrative in addition to all the cool details.
14 Likes
Far Cry: New Dawn (PS4) - an incredibly cowardly game. not that this is surprising coming from ubisoft, but the narrative in this one is really fucking stupid.
i enjoy the game loop in these things a lot, and the largely frictionless progression and mindless open-world craftathon gameplay makes it easy to play for long periods, but i definitely still would not recommend any of these games
this is probably my favorite FC that i’ve played so far on account of the tighter, more focused map compared to 5, scavenging (forfeiting) outposts for higher rewards, and how enjoyable all the guns are.
ALSO because you get a double-jump halfway thru the story and can subsequently bound morrowind-style across the landscape almost as fast as the vehicles. this never gets old lol
seriously though, ubisoft trying to redeem joseph seed in this game is hilariously stupid
5 Likes
did they like, make a PS3 emulator for PSP for this release? i’m so confused why this works lol
2 Likes
there’s a set of releases for the PS3 that are literal PSP games running in an emulator and have some light extra feature support (some games sport higher res textures)
to the point where you can run the PS3 versions in PPSSPP (but wouldn’t run on real PSP hardware)
12 Likes
Have you played Primal? It’s the only one of these I’ve played in years and I feel like the setting did a lot of heavy lifting to make it feel fresh.
3 Likes
I beat Paranormasight already. It was great.
It surprisingly became chill after a very tense first few hours, but that’s ok. The first part happens at night, and the second part during the day, with all that entails.
The payoff for this was pretty cool!
It is eventually revealed that the player character is materialized as a spirit in the game world, and in-game character choices are essentially a manifestation of the player spirit’s influence
In the prologue you can instruct the main character to kill 5 times, but no matter what he will kill every single time. The narrator simply keeps track on how many times you instructed the kill and how many times the character did it on his own, and the answer to his question depends on this.
If I was this unhinged rich kid :
https://twitter.com/scarmarket/status/1648058166112931842
I’d make a shrine to grieving mom Harue instead, I loved her
11 Likes
Man, and now I’m remembering my favorite bit of Bloodstained, where its version of the inverted castle is a zone where enemies are scaled up 2x, and are “Giant Fly Trap” or “Giant Medusa”. The Giant Rats from the start of the game are there too, but when you look them up in the bestiary they’re next to all the other “Giant” enemies because Giant Rats actually aren’t native to the normal world; they’re rats from the Giant zone that had escaped into the rest of the castle.
Feel like it was a missed opportunity that none of the SOTN rereleases put in an extra enemy or boss that was from the inverted castle, and you find them in a hidden area of the normal castle, but they’re upside down.
20 Likes
i finally played enough of birthdays the beginning/happy birthdays to beat a scenario and now i can say with certainty that the game, despite being very cute and charming, fucking sucks. the gameplay loop is this:
- raise or lower terrain (which also alters temperature)
- back out to an overview of the map and speed time up and see if anything changes
what you’re looking for is for populations of x species to get to a certain amount in a certain type of environment such that species y comes into being, on and on from phytoplankton to fish to reptiles to mammals to hominids to homo sapiens.
the game will guide you a bit, defining all the variables needed to create species y…but it’s always a list of 3-4 fluctuating variables that all need to be met simultaneously and as a result don’t really feel actionable. most of the game is just random tinkering and hoping for the best. not good!
this might all be worth it if the payoff was an impossibly cute little terrarium to lord over, or a hyperfixated look at biological evolution, but the life forms in the terrarium are lacking in number shown at any given time (instead you’re stuck with, say, your one token anomalocaris despite the game pinging you with a “3000000 anomalocaris” ticker) and any sort of tangible interaction with the environment or each other and the data given about each of them is a few bland sentences at best.
there’s also an insistence on using scientific names for everything — did they think people would be going around going “yipee! i evolved triticum”? call it “wheat” and mention that i’m one step closer to evolving “churros” and maybe i’d actually feel something
i poked at this game long in the past and it seemed like all there was to do was raise and lower terrain. i was wrong! there is more to do:
-you can place a river source; this is actually the most impactful choice the game allows imo
-you can put down a rock that makes the area around it warmer. you get only one. ditto for three more rocks: cooler rock, hot rock, frigid rock.
-you can drop horny juice on animals (and plants) to make their populations explode
-you can drop freak juice on animals (and maybe plants) to get a rare subspecies to appear maybe
-you can drop cheat juice on a species that just kinda forces them to evolve (which is how i shamelessly beat it after being stuck trying to evolve some pre-mammal for like an hour)
-you can arbitrarily make the world hotter or colder (which totally negates any friction the terrain raising/lowering system has)
-you can put down statues of the game’s vaguely ultraman-esque mascot in various poses
does any of that sound really fun or engaging? it’s not!
to encourage players to not leave the game running on autopilot in the background, sometimes a rainbow pillar will appear on the map indicating an ~ultra rare~ subspecies is about to appear — but only if you press the a button on it! it’s like a glorified qte! fuck off! also the subspecies dies out immediately like every time, like literally as soon as you make time move forward again
oh and this game has a plot! with lite visual novel framing! you follow and old treasure map into a cave, and in the cave you see a light…it absorbs you, and now you’re floating in space and you’re in charge of recreating humanity. what? fuck this game. send post
edit: i am glad this game exists though, god bless the japanese aa game market, at least it makes me feel something
13 Likes
The status effects (poison, curse) in SOTN always went away so quickly by themselves and did such little damage I never bothered using the items that cured them.
4 Likes
I feel like I should just factually state what the last thing that happened in this game was each day I post here, to see if it is in any way believable or matches what I posted the day before.
Last chapter ended with the quoted bit, this chapter ended with the theoretically reanimated Napoleon (with the blonde beard) having raised the hanging gardens of Babylon which had been buried under Paris for centuries. Also said hanging gardens of Babylon are also a flying weather machine, have yet to see any plants.
2 Likes
Unfortunately these terms are still in use.
2 Likes
I am playing a Nier Game for the first time (Automata). I came in without knowing much and the prologue plays like a twin stick shooter 
6 Likes
This game drove me nuts, because I think this was the first Far Cry to implement enemy health bars, so landing a headshot on a helmet-less enemy wouldn’t guarantee a kill (that co-op focused Wolfenstein apparently did the same thing, made me skip it). The double jump is cool when you finally get it, but I had long soured on the game by then.
I do love the real Annihilation-esque environments and animals they’ve got going on. It’s a beautiful game.
Oh god wait no I’m remembering the dialogue for the “teehee I’m one horny old grandma!” companion character. Awful. Bad game.
3 Likes
Beat the first chapter of Trails in the Sky (took 8 hours, this will be the longest game I’ve attempted in a while).
It’s been a very gentle and slow-burn story so far, as it introduces many of the characters who will presumably play a role later in a low-stakes, cheerful environment. There are rumbles of some kind of global crisis here and there but few characters care much about it yet. Most people are living their daily lives and focusing on local problems.
The “dad” character pictured above has suddenly left town to preempt the global crisis and told his adventurer-trainee children to act as his temporary substitute. That’s your party, so you spend the whole chapter doing the minor business he couldn’t be bothered to do, like capture some youkai cats that have been making a mess in the cabbage field, and escort a newspaper photographer to the top of the local ancient tower so she can take some landscape shots.
Normally I would find this sort of game storytelling intolerably slow-paced but there’s something precise and textured about the writing. It has hangoutitude and is full of small jokes and surprises. Some of the details turn out to be foreshadowing for something important while others are purely for flavor, and I sometimes only realized which was which later on. In most games the distinction between “main story text” vs “sidequest/flavor text” is structurally telegraphed, but in Trails in the Sky it all flows together in an organic whole.
Exploration and the combat system were not emphasized yet in the first chapter: it’s been restricting where you can go and what you can fight in a tutorializing way. But those both look promising too. Spatially, each local area always has more nooks and curlicues than I expected, and the 8-direction camera you have to turn to find hidden chests is fresh.
The combat system has both a spatial grid plus a turn order display. The game has obnoxiously not given me any AoE abilities at all yet, so the grid has been a bit pointless so far, but OK. As for turn order, the interesting thing is that battle events happen in the order displayed only if you do basic actions like Fight and Item. Limit breaks can be executed at any time (the menu button is active even while enemies are taking their turn!), whereas spells take time to cast and set you behind in turn order. I really like the balance of complexity and intuitive naturalness here.
11 Likes
I got this Plague Tale game for free on Epic ages ago, and I’ve slacked off on 14 so I started playing other videogames recently.
I thought it was like some kind of walking sim/light adventure game, but actually it’s just The Last of Us except with worse dialogue, wooden inexpressive faces, and magic rats instead of mushroom zombies? It’s primarily stealth based and you even pick up random ingredients to make upgrades with at a workbench. Whose idea was this?
2 Likes
The French
11 Likes