ah that’s cool. i do sort of wish someone would have make another attempt at the True Crime: LA thing where the game world is based on actual maps. seems like it would be a lot easier now. i guess the recent forza stuff is the closest equivalent.
Castlevania Chronicles (PS1)
Cheesed that unlucky boss on the next try by hiding behind/under a platform.
Some nice-looking set-pieces
but also increasingly cheap gameplay
relying on ambushes
that you’re just not going to avoid getting hit by until you memorize the level.
Was just trying to kill myself off to get to the save screen so I could quit for the night but trundled all the way to getting killed at the final boss area, with the encounter recycled from mirrored in Rondo of Blood but the main sprite art redrawn–for this Arrange mode version–along the lines of Ayami Kojima’s Symphony of the Night designs.
Oh jeepers I’m an idiot, I hadn’t realized Ayami Kojima is female. Well, that rules. Here she is in a ridiculously over-the-top drawing session in Monte Carlo a few months ago:
Hopefully I’ll also remember now to look at the unlocked art gallery of her stuff once I get through all the stages; it’s low-res and lossy but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that just maybe there’s some work of hers in there that I haven’t found yet on the internet.
Back to the game itself, on the plus side there are only two elements that jumped out at me as egregiously breaking the original Castlevania’s Gothic romance theme: the princess/clown dolls from the previous session and the ninja maids.
As breaks from the theme they’re worse but much less frequent than the stuff in Castlevania III, which seemed not to be aware that there had been a theme at all, really.
There’s also this from Chronicles, which is just silly–and not actually very dangerous, either; you can kind of just jump right through it:
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i’ve had that exact description for another game too! i think steam was probably having a cache problem right when the google crawler went through the site.
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Gave up with Lost Paradise after you get a buggy and it sends you on a wild goose chase to a treasure chest you can’t even access yet. This and Ishin have a lot of the bad RGG design choices rolled into one. Stick with god hand i guess
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mine has been doing this with various descriptions for like, 3 weeks now, it’s weird. And it’s only the ads! If I scroll down i get the exact same link but it’s not an ad, and the description is correct. It’s stupid!
But I’m never gonna report it, happy to see Valve waste money on ads that suck, and it also makes Google look bad lol
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Played a long session of Shadows of Forbidden Gods last night and it rules. That exact level of eccentric developer jank that I can handle without getting mad. A lot of the art is clearly taken from copyright-free museum collections, the UI is a bit of a mess, but it has exactly the right vibe… you play as the priest of an ancient evil god that is trying to break out of its tomb and consume the world.
I finished a map as the snake god finally and my giant snake monster came out of the tomb and destroyed the world. My main set of acolytes were corrupted heroes from the generated world factions who’d been driven mad by my dark power. I had a lot of corrupted mages running around causing trouble… I also had a “Mad Prince” by the end of it. Every time they did something really bad, their parents would all contact them and ask “why have you changed?? what made you so evil???” and of course they could not reply within the simulation, they just continued running around serving their dope snake god (me) and drowning the world in Shadow and Darkness. Love those little guys!!
I love that there is a win condition % as well as a “world panic” % which represents roughly how scared all the NPCs are that you are going to win.
Strongly recommend this shit. It’s in early access and it looks like a soup of free and custom art assets but it’s fun as hell. Every time you go to a new city you get this massive list of evil shit you can do on the right side of the screen. It feels like ordering a dish at your favorite old school diner, one of the ones with a thousand things on the menu… a plague??? Murder a hero??? Poison someone?? Sow DISCORD by poisoning the hearts of men against one another??? Use geomancy to explode a volcano?!? Don’t mind if I do!!!
Just unlocked this lady. hell yeah
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this is 10,000% my shit
thank you so much for spreading awareness ab this game!
i feel like one of the reasons i’ve been stalling out of media consumption lately is that i need to branch out and try some other genre’s ( even if i suck, and i will def suck lmao )
i’ve always liked the idea behind ’ god games ’ but one where you get to actually be a dark force?! i had no idea that this is what i needed. i am excited to try this out pretty soon. i found a decent guide for beginners and i haven’t been this excited for a game i haven’t already played / isn’t a remake in a long time. thank you @skelephone ! <3
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I mean Evangelion and Silent Hill are both their own pilings of different things on top of each other so hard they become their own flavor so that tracks for me.
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Courtesy of my Netflix subscription I am playing Too Hot to Handle
Never before have I embodied a player character so demonic
I guess this is based off a real reality TV show. The jist is, a bunch of people get suckered into thinking it’s just a regular Tropical Island Dating Show, but actually
There’s a prize pool that will pay out all the contestants if they can keep it in their pants. Predictably some of the NPCs find this very challenging and don’t care as much about the money and soon there is a rift between the Fuckers and the Trying Hard Not To Fuck folks who are desperately trying to preserve the cash pool, which gets dinged every time people even so much as kiss.
It is funny to contrast this with a more traditional dating sim because for starters everyone here is extremely forward, rather than timid/clueless, and the setting and age of the characters actually make it make sense for there to be constant Sexy Situations.
However, as in most dating Sims, all but two characters that form a couple early on are into you above all others so your dilemma is how deep into your Ho Phase you are.
Indeed.
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The predecessor game has more ways to play and is significantly jankier, if you’re curious as to its history.
Still need to get Forbidden Gods. It looks so good!
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Found 15 decent-looking Castlevania level-mod rom hacks on romhacking.net that are compatible with the modified PRG 0 version from the Anniversary Collection on Steam, so those should be keeping me busy for a while. : D
Went through the 9 GB Castlevania Fan Game Collection in archive.org
but of the non-flashy (all the OpenBOR ones were right out : P), not-terrible-looking/playing ones I could get running in Win11, I only came up with three; two of those refused to run fullscreen and also seemed to have no save support; the other seemed pretty darn good but eh I guess I’ve decided to avoid encouraging fan games that use direct, unmodified content swipes (sprites, MIDI, etc), which that one does. So I guess I’ll stick to the rom hacks. : )
Huge respect to the people making them too after poking a bit at the NES Castlevania “Stake” editor = o ^ _^
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Oh wow, I actually watched some of the show this is based on with a friend, it’s hilariously stupid. The fact that they made a game based on it is amazing, I need to play this with my buddy STAT.
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Castlevania Chronicles (PS1)
Oh it actually reloaded up to right before the final boss, how about that. On easy settings, the final boss fight isn’t really tough at all once you work out which tool to use. The Ayami Kojima-style redrawn Dracula sprite in the Arrange mode is all right, the other, X68000 one looks a lot less cool than the incredibly similar fight in Rondo, though.
(Oh I had been confused, the X68000 Castlevania came out four months BEFORE Rondo, sheesh.)
A Time Attack mode unlocks but didn’t really call to me.
The playthrough did unlock all the Ayami Kojima gallery art, nothing I haven’t seen on the web already though I don’t think.
On first glance the Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost demo being much closer to the Twinkle Star Sprites pastiche Phantasmogoria Of Dimensional Dream than the 9th successor in the gensokyo lineage Phantasmogoria Of Flower View (The Best Game Of All Time) should be very surprising as it would mark a La Petite Princess-esque regression. Yet in the context of the 3rd Gen ZUNisms (Double Dealing Character onwards), it works.
Battles are MUCH slower than in previous versuses, opting more for a tug of war approach between patterns than bullet strobing. To make up for this, popcorns kernels are burnt, making them withstand more damage and only comparable under hard fire which is a good trade off. I don’t fully understand the new spell card system yet but it compliments this growing in escalation as it goes on rather than the cheaper tactics of 1st/2nd windows, which is missed although by the full game this’ll be ironed out and at minimum the best versus shooter of the past ten years with what little competition there is (Rival Megagun 
).
Also the new sprites are nice.
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my Collector’s Ed. of Osman/Cannon Dancer finally came, so i’ve mostly been playing that. i’d say it feels about as good as i remember it feeling to play the game emulated on MAME many years ago so…at least it’s not a downgrade from that. the CRT filters are ok, but i may switch to just some pure pixels - i’m never quite satisfied with how these filters generally look on 4K TVs, though they’re better than they used to be, for sure.
the Challenge Mode is closest to the original arcade version, and it gives you one credit per level, which feels reasonable. ideally i’d like to be able to 1CC the game, but so far i’ve made it to the final level with the current default Challenge Mode rules. kind of forgot how much nonsense the game throws at you in the last 1.5 stages, but i’ll push through it eventually.
the stuff that comes with the Collector’s box is neat, but idk if i’ll be hanging the cloth Osman flag in our apartment any time soon.
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La Mulana (PC 2006)
Tried after reading @Rudie’s Castlevania thread
Download, English patch: La-Mulana : GR3 Project : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Graphic, DInput wrapper setup: La-Mulana (2006) - PCGamingWiki PCGW - bugs, fixes, crashes, mods, guides and improvements for every PC game
Love the Konami-MSX-styled graphics and chip tunes.
But I still–since trying NES Metroid back in the day–seem to hate feeling lost as I wander around.
My attempt to solve La-Mulana blind has been ongoing since 2016, my stack of written notes always looming nearby. I’ll get you one day, La-Mulana!
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Arcade Archives Tecmo Knight (JP: “Wild Fang”) PS4
The arcade version was discussed briefly in the beat-em-ups thread:
Beat-em-up with unusual art and gameplay. The art is not bad but brutally janky
and I mostly kind of love how ridiculous it is.
The mechanics are surprisingly solid and you’ve really got to watch the enemy beast-men-and-women spacing because one baddy close enough to get to you while you’re hitting another baddy will equal a world of hurt; on the other hand, if you can get even a boss character alone you can beat them down easily (they have no wake-up attacks!)–so of course they come in pairs.
Secondarily you’re wondering the whole time if you can dodge enough on the ground to single one out for a safe ground combo or if you need to risk jumping onto their shoulders–your only form of aerial attack–to rip their head off, or at least do a bunch of damage;
but other baddies nearby can hit you while you’re doing that, or you may miss landing on them and instead land in somebody’s hit range.
Although by the end it was definitely seeming like juking around on the ground until you could separate one enemy from the pack for a quick combo was the safest way to go, so maybe it didn’t take quite as much decision making as all that all the time. Still, it felt more interesting and involving than crowd combat in the vast majority of beat-em-ups; and if you can get the enemy spacing right so that you do a head-grab combo against one, leap off their shoulders and directly onto another, and back and forth between two or three until multiple heads go flying, well, that’s just a ripping good time.
There are also bombs
that the enemies are hilariously dumb about hitting
–or you can kick barrels into them to set them off–with disastrous chain-reaction results.
It’s sort of weird–why are the bombs there and why do they almost always hit them–but keeps things moving.
Aside from attack and punch there’s a transform button that switches you from a little guy riding a big punching guy to a little guy riding a tiger and waving a flail; the flail has good range but only seems to do about half the damage, and seemed the much worse option in every situation in which I tried it–except against the last boss, where it appears to be more or less mandatory.
Despite the seeming uselessness of the game’s biggest gimmick, I’d been starting to think this was definitely one of those “overlooked gems,” but the last two fights are ridiculous; I finally got through the first by happening to get the random dragon transformation powerup whose electric breath kills anyone in a single hit,
but then the final boss kept killing me (well okay actually early on I somehow in flailing around managed to beat his first phase, but didn’t know what to do next and died instead) with his two independent semi-randomly timed aimed attack patterns that cover the entire area around the one place you can hit him, which is drawn to look like a giant flaccid penis. And he doesn’t have a visible health meter, inflicts huge knock-back, and his exact hit and hurt zones are not very clear.
It’s not great.
But after I’d had to continue about 20 times or something, midway through killing me yet again–and on the default settings you only have two lives before it’s back to the previous checkpoint–he just stopped attacking and I was free to bash him to death. I don’t know if it was a mercy rule or if I had happened to land on the magic pixel not covered by his AI routines, or what, but thank goodness. Almost blew the final button mash bit but not quite, and at last it was over.
Guess they decided to grab all your quarters at the end. Up to that last chunk it’s surprisingly good–probably better than 97% of the other beat 'em ups you’re trying to play.
Some of the non-final boss vocal effects are pretty annoying though. : P
And right now I don’t think I want to face those last fights ever again.
I suppose raising the lives per credit setting above the default 2 could help quite a bit with the checkpointing and get closer to letting you quarter-feed through the tough bits.
The rabbit leaning against the TECMO logo at the bottom of the high score screen is Jackey the Jack Rabbit, a mascot attempt. Had one self-titled console game. Jackey the Jack Rabbit | Video Games Fanon Wiki | Fandom (Fake game, thanks @thegodofpoverty for looking into it more than I did gargh)
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Man, that giant gorilla (?) boss is an all timer in terms of looks for that specific type of “giant boss in the background who attacks you in the regular plane” encounters that pop up in 2d games a bunch, shame it sounds like it was rather annoying in practice.
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