should one start with the original cut or the director’s cut?
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I love Armoured Core: Nine Breaker in theory, a very Back To Basics games after nexus and silent line (maybe even OG 3) and having a fleshed out disc 2 is certainly an idea but the lack of mech and level variety in its ranking ruins everything. You work out a couple of strategies based on the enironment and the rest is very rinse/repeat until you want to go through the tutorial story which is even worse. Have to wonder if anyone at Treasure liked those missions because Bangai-O Spirits came out four years later and is such a better version of the system. Onto Last Raven.
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Might as well play the Director’s Cut. But you also don’t need to play the DC if the original is easier for you to access, the stuff it adds is cool but inessential.
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The DC content is apparently very slight. Also in the DC version there is no Monster Energy.
I feel like the constant Monster Energy branding of the original is important.
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i have only played the director’s cut so can’t compare but i would at least recommend using a DualSense controller if you have the option
the haptics are incredible and elevate the game a lot, and i think it has the best controller-speaker implementation of any game (not entirely sure that bit works on the PC version, though, but i think the haptics/dynamic triggers do)
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I’m Sam Too!
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Thanks for the impressions! They were very cool to read. It seems a mixed bag where the reconstruction of Tokyo could deserve accepting some compromise 
But is the combat good or boring? Anything similar to it?
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Just a note on DS Director’s Cut: unless they’ve patched it, the save migration process is kinda jank and IIRC it needs all of your open missions to be completed before you can transfer them so I would recommend picking which version you want to play before starting the base game
Transfarring into the new age
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(Even with the no-flash patch there was still the usual NES edge tile flicker when scrolling the screen–top and bottom in FF1. (Another example is the right side of the screen when scrolling along in SMB3.)
But I found the “Overscan” NES Graphic setting in Mesen works great for this. : ) 8 top & bottom overscan cuts off the flickering tiles in FF1, for instance. And 16 top & bottom overscan cuts off the black borders in Castlevania, letting the actual graphical part of the screen fit larger in fullscreen on a widescreen display.
That’s for games in NTSC display mode; in PAL display in Mesen, overscan–it’s set under separate tabs for NTSC and PAL in Mesen’s menu–actually ADDS (black) border area, rather than subtracting it. Not sure that isn’t accidentally backwards or something, but I don’t know much about PAL.)
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that’s bizarre (the PAL behavior). per the docs, “The overscan settings allow you to cut out pixels on any edge of the screen.” it should always be cutting pixels off, not adding them. however, the docs don’t even show separate NTSC/PAL tabs, just Global/Per-Game
sounds like a bug that probably ought to be reported, might mess with it later
a fair amount of PAL issues get ignored or missed in emulators because PAL50 is frequently a meme these days
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Last Raven already proving to be the most secretive game in the entire franchise (having to go into PCSX2’s settings to turn the Black Screen hack off)
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Yeah it probably is a bug, thanks for the back-up on that. : ) Unfortunately the documentation is three years out of date, according to the info in the lower left corner of the docs site Home :: Mesen Documentation ; there was a big re-write to Mesen 2.0 around the turn of the year that changed a lot, probably mostly for the better. I sure wish there were still per-game settings for Overscan, though. ^ _^ I’d have reported the PAL overscan thing and a number of other things (their latest nightly build does fix one problem with NTSC overscan where the menu would glitch if you cleared an Overscan text entry field ^ _^) but they’ve left no means of contact that I’ve found, and no Issues section for bug reporting on their GitHub. Not that I can blame them, really; I’m sure game emu devs, especially for popular platforms, get flooded by all kinds of silly stuff if they leave a reporting channel open. I suppose if I supported their Patreon I might be able to message them there. : P
Update: Oh that Patreon button on their docs site is also out of date, and I couldn’t find them on Patreon by searching.
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The best comparison is bad Serious Sam? The enemies main attack is running at you. There is supposedly a parry system but even on parry I took damage to attacks on hard mode. Since you are fighting on cramped streets you can’t circle stafe.
Do play on easy. On hard the first enemy took 9 hits to kill. On easy that went down to 3! I would not believe a Mikami adjacent game would have the difficulty be “make everything a bullet sponge.” The AI seems exactly the same on easy.
Also you can stealth kill a ghost, because modern video games.
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Plague Tale followup. I beat it.
I guess I’m supposed to be shocked at how the game ramps up and what the ending is like, but I saw something like this coming the whole time given how they were teasing mysticism and hidden mysteries and so forth. At the end you fight the evil gene pope in a black rat king vs white rat king shonen battle. It’s very funny but definitely not good. On the other hand, I started to buy the relationships between the found-family kids a little more as the game went on, even though the inexpressive faces continued to kill any drama.
I look it up and see it has a sequel? Dearie me. Maybe when that one becomes free.
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Castlevania (NES)
Oh man. I liked the first half of the game and was really upbeat about this, looking forward to all these Castlevania games I suddenly had. Then…then a lot more monkeys happened.
And they started crawling through/up walls.
And other enemies with patterns you have to be patient for. And bosses who teleport onto you while being invulnerable, or hit you from 3-5 sides at once.
Really unintuitive boss patterns I had to die a ton to start to work out. Dang it my brain. Gimme a straight-up fighting game or something, this waiting and patterning is too mean! ;_; (The final final boss is actually more my style, straight to the action that guy is, what a gem. Maybe II will be more like that… = P)
And the color palettes get gross.
They were so good in the first half! So lovely!
And the stairs!!! The deadly, deadly stairs!
Pretty not real sure I wanna try those three later ports of this game now…
Anyway there was a lot of save scummery at the end because I couldn’t deal. Pretty sure I never ever ever would’a got through this back in the day–well, I was smarter then and just stayed the heck away from it.
Didn’t hit the too-many-sprites crash though, so heigh ho! (Note to self: play the Japanese version if you ever play this again for some insane reason, it doesn’t crash. Also, it has an Easy mode. ; ))
(Oh shoot. Now I kinda want to play the easy mode. …)
But first I went and tried
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)
Castlevania starts you in a castle. You stay in the castle. You castle it up. This game starts you in a town.
Then you’re in a swamp or some caves or maybe a forest thing.
And two other identical towns, except when night falls–whenever–
it gets a nice creepy purple palette and Lady Frankensteins are all over,
which is sort of neat but also real boring because you can’t even go to the creepy Church Man
to insta-rest-heal. But I kept hitting dead ends in the swamps and things
and there were annoying respawning floating eyeballs.
Monsters take twice as many hits at night, maybe? It’s like non-linear and you have to talk to side-scrolling townsfolk. And monsters flash when you hit them. My whip didn’t upgrade and I didn’t find any subweapons. Oh I guess I could have bought some holy water in a shop
but I didn’t know if that was a good deal and anyway some jerk had told me I had to
buy a white crystal. It sounded like a set-up but I did it, then a guy like two towns later that I randomly talked to traded it for a blue crystal without waiting for confirmation from me, no trade-backs.
Now we’re action RPGin’! Hey man, wanna blue crys? No idea what the crystals are for. Most buildings you can enter in towns are empty.
The skeleton sprites are ripped from the first game but animate less and do less, and the other stuff generally looks worse. Oh and it tries to scroll smoothly up and down instead of screen by screen like the prequel but there’s tons of slowdown like mid-jump. I bailed.
The music was nice though.
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Having finished the first main route and dabbled with the arena a bit, I see why so many of the coreboys are in a(r)mour with Last Raven as the series’s peak even though I don’t think that’s true. Cleaving the nexus buckshot of missions with no sense of hard curve whatsoever into six and a half weaving paths is a stroke of a genius (slapping a Majora’s Mask esque timer in the corner and a nato plot is a glazed cherry on the top) and mechanically everything manages to feel less glued together than the non silent line 3’s.
It makes sense that 4A feels like FC throwing a bunch of sugar into the generator while 5VD upped the training weights but if this was the last entry in the series then in hindsight it’d be hard to say what much more they could have done. I’m playing Formula Front PSP next over the PS2 version due to the content but its a good send off to the sixth nature of all of it.
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So funny thing about @smbhax’s CV thoughts and screenshots is that back during Fucking Konami Week '15 I played through this same game and rather than post screenshots I used my limited art skills and MS Paint instead and… we have a very similar eye in terms of what makes a good screenshot.
I can’t tell which is the actual screenshots and which aren’t >_>
(…I may have added a few extra scythes, it legit felt like that though.)
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So many scythes! > _<<
Those are great! : D
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Used a hex-editior to transfer my game pass Death Stranding save to steam Death Stranding Director’s Cut because postergrandpa had a code lying around.
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