im really keying in on the way the costumes / textiles / materials are detailed / rendered / textured in both re4r and death stranding (which i made my friends play yesterday lmao) they’re both sooooo delightful in that regards like it’s something im really enjoying a lot in game graphics lately and it makes the cutscenes in both games such a delight to watch for me… trying to think of what else has scratched this itch for me. i think ff xvi probably would
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People are already trying to get this guy to put ChatGPT in his game. Dreadful.
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No one has posted about it yet, so I am gonna take the bullet for the forum and try out Dredge. If I think it’s interesting I am sure I’ll make another post.
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this totally doesn’t count but you can play Lamborghini American Challenge by controlling the car with the controller, and shooting other cars with the super scope but it’s more of something for a second player to do (and more of a bonus feature than a real element of the game)
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Warframe continuing its unbroken streak of “introducing gamers to Therapy and Mental Health through metaphor” with the latest update. This (part of the ending, no spoilers tho!) hit me a little hard.
Oh yeah and the new mode is more Sekiro than the normal mode’s Diablo, and you can play it from the start as an alternate start. Neat!
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No, I am on break from Warframe and will not hop back in to see what Duviri Paradox is like. I will not!
I doubt it actually helps the new player experience in any way, but the fact that this new story content is also an alternative starting point for new players is fascinating. Warframe continues to be a giant mess of interesting ideas.
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I tried Warframe a few years ago and the new player experience is a lot like the Destiny 2 new player experience. It simultaneously bores you because it’s too easy and it overwhelms you by presenting a million things for you to do, none of which seem very compelling.
At least with Destiny I eventually played some dungeons which were compelling and fun and made me wonder why the rest of the game wasn’t designed like them. I dropped Destiny when it expected me to grind to get to the next dungeon.
I quit well before I found anything interesting to do in Warframe but I’m still weirdly curious about it. I still don’t feel like I have a good grasp of what it actually is.
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i cannot believvve they made ashley sugoi when u headshot guys
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Put another 6 hours into Brave Fencer Musashi (Im at like 14 hours) and it gets better. This game is more than the sum of its parts. The actual jumping about can be tedious and is maybe too strict, that hasn’t changed but now Im better at it. It keeps getting cuter and weirder. Judging by the number of people Ive rescued and powers Ive achieved I’m in the last 20%.
I really like that the game gives you multiple ways to do things like manage health. I also like that the game does not have a distinct loop of activities like a zelda would. Exploring, fighting, adventuring… happen all at once and sometimes its a proper “dungeon” sometimes its a mountain or a forest. The lock and key aspects are even more varied and vague. Using a power to open something in an area you previously visited could result in anything. Solutions are just jank sometimes. This can be frustrating but it its also really nice to not feel like the game designer is pulling on your sleeve. The messiness of the game design blends into the messiness of the world and the story. It has kid-with-a-stick energy at all levels for good and ill.
The real negatives are obtuse solutions, aggravation from repeat messy traversal and the difficulty of searching for things missed.
I highly suggest abusing save states for exploration and any time you have a choice between 2 teleports as well as scrubbing videos of how to find lost villagers to give yourself a hint. Save yourself some time, you’ll not lose any of the adventure feeling.
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FF1 Pixel remaster looks and sounds lovely, look at this magic shop
It has also been QoL’d to the point of being a museum tour of the first game
We get
- boosted xp and max level
- faster movement + diagonal movement
- autobattle (fast)
- re-targeting if one enemy is dead
- new purchasable cheap ethers making magic points essentially infinite past the earlygame
- full autosave after every floor change
- minimaps + a full map of the current floor available at any time
- the ability to turn encounters off
- probably a ton of other minor changes, I noticed that the devilish corridor with one encounter every step in the earth dungeon is gone
I mean most changes are good but combined they’re too much. The most pernicious change is the addition of maps, as it is now trivial to locate every treasure chest and exit and ignore dead ends. Final Fantasy 1’s challenge originally came from resource management, decision making in battle, and building an evolving mental map of the dungeons which was made more difficult with the constant battle interruptions. Choosing to leave the dungeon near the middle on because resources are dwindling, then getting lost on the way back and dying in a ditch from a cockatrice ambush : that’s FF1. I understand that most people hate all of this and this is a true pastime for freaks but it is the meat of the game. There’s not a lot left if you remove almost all of the friction in FF1
You can set xp gain to 0,5x /0x and press R2 to remove the minimap after every screen change (!) and ignore the random encounter button and full map button and autosave every floor and new items and maybe you’ll have a closer experience to the original game but I’m not an ascetic monk
New font ain’t even that good
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damn… kinda fancy playing the later games with random encounters turned off from the start…
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Dang FF1 is my favorite, all I want is for them to take the flashing FX out so my old abused eyeballs can play it again.
I might try it. Sega Ages Phantasy Star is a bit in the same spirit (although not as extreme) and I liked it.
It’s just too bad there’s no permanent setting to disable the minimap, as a rule I hate minimaps in almost every game they appear in but also cannot resist the convenience of looking at them
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you seen this hack?
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I’d actually forgotten there was full screen flashing = o, I was thinking more of sort of palette inversion effects when monsters take a hit and that kind of thing. … Oh, FF1 didn’t have that. Well hey this does the thing, great! : DDD
Hm the only other RPG flash reduction patch I see there is one for Phantasy Star II, dang my hopes were up for the genre in general for a sec. ^ _^
Anyway this is cool, I can get FF1 now. : D Thanks for the link!!
(Found just one more RPG flash-reduction patch in more searching: this FFIII one Romhacking.net - Hacks - Final Fantasy III NES Tweaks which comes with optional flash-reduction patches–but they don’t stop sprite inverting when monsters attack, for instance.)
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there’s this too:
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Ah yeah, Cocoron was one of the few that came up when I title searched hacks for “flash” on romhacking.net.
In regards to the question in the OP there, for NES games it seems more common than not that they’ll have some kind of flashing going on. : P And for RPGs, on any system, ever, it’s nearly every single one. And indie pixel art games now have taken flash and excessive screen shake and similar nonsense as necessary proof of how 90s retro they can be… Anyway this has been discussed a number of times already I think so I won’t keep ranting again. : D At this point I don’t actually mind that much, it’s helped me focus on the few nice games that don’t do it. ^_ ^
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Maybe doing a low health playthrough would make me think of those effects differently though.
Here you go @Tony , Ghostwire:Tokyo impressions. I have visited and lived in Tokyo for over 15 years at this point. I know the city pretty well. This is the most impressive representation of the city ever shown in a video game. It looks stunningly accruate. Except, there’s no people! They all got Spirited Away but an evil dude wearing a mask!
Which brings me to the first criticism, the main characters suuuuuccckkkkkksss. He’s a coward complainer who you hate to listen to but since he got possessed by a badass ex-cop ghost hunter ninjitsu master he can do a bunch of cool shit, then turn around and just like…stumble around as a kaiju movie extra. It sucks so bad. The evil dude with a mask also kidnapped your animemom sick sister. Which gives the player stakes to stop the evil dude who maybe entrapped the souls of let me check the games math 286,000 people.
See you can save some people, 100 at a time, by holding L trigger at glowing blobs of people. Don’t think about the math of how many times you’d have to hold L to save all the people, because I sure did and boy am I mad!
speaking of holding L you gotta hold L to rip the souls out of every enemy in combat, that also sucks and is boring! I started the game on hard and that was a terrible choice. Everything was a bullet sponge. It took me 90 minutes to finally have the courage to go, “let’s see” and on Easy the enemies are exactly as difficult but take less than a Working Designs Patch amount of hits to kill. I ran out of bullets multiple times on the first world encounter! and just had to sit there and let them kill me. Despite the numerous tutorials I did in fact of a melee attack that was free to use, otherwise you have to constantly destroy floating things on the streets of Tokyo to replinish your health. Fucking thank god I lowered the difficult and could.
I did one side quest where I helped a youkai I recognized from Shin Megami Tensei. Everything Japanese gets a database entry and all of JAPANESE IMAGERY would be most at home on the souvenior street of any given tourist destination in this country. Then mostly tried to focus on the story and where the evil-fog-that-kills-you would let me I tried to see parts of Shibuya I was particularly familar with.
More Pictures with commentary
He Keeps talking to the ex-cop inside him by looking at his hand and I kept making a bunch of jokes to myself about jacking-off.
Yoji-kun, I need you to render like 20 fucking more books on every table of this cafeteria.
I could buy exciting new clothes for my…first person action game. clothes like, cargo shorts?
The most beautifully rendered arcade in a video game inside a perfect underground shopping mall and it is in this game about shooting your hand at slender men.
At one point I went through a house like PT or Devotion. I got reminded how cool those games are. The movement reminds me of Dying LIght, the zombie parkour game. You can lasso Tengu to get roof tops (?) so the game is much more vertical than I expected. Which is that there is shit on roof tops and you gotta either lassso or take a shitload of stairs to get there. I am confused as a Tokyo resident how they have been changing the names of districts in Shibuya just enough that I cannot process them. I was supposed to go to the top of an observatory and feel like i went around the backway and that was fun it let me do that, till it locked me in the actual path to go which was pretty boring.
It moves fast and it looks great and it is filled with JAPANESE IMAGERY. I knew it’s biggest failing going and it is still true. It’s just a video game. It is really really just a video game. I kept waiting to reach the point where I would skip every cutscene because they just were boring and predictable. You bet the evil mask guy is your father who secretly died or your to blame for your sister’s anime illness that allows her to see the ghost world you’re now in. Ugh. If you wanna look at lot of Shibuya in stunning realism and then shoot headless schoolgirls with your fingers and talk to your hand and pet the dog here’s a video game.
I’m going back to replaying Death Stranding with Sam “Porter” Bridges, The Man Who Delivers.
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death stranding is so fucking good. i can’t stop playing it. i haven’t played any other games in the last few days
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