two weeks of vacation from work ends tomorrow. played a good amount of games during the break
armored core 4
game is amazing, longpost is here
final fantasy vii
lovely little toybox of a game, every screen a diorama. materia provides just enough tinkering to the battle system to make it engaging without being exhausting. made cloud a tank, barret a dps supermage, and nanaki a buffer/healer. many of ffvii’s setpieces are weird pieces of infrastructure in remote areas, so how could i not love it?
initial d extreme stage
i grew up playing initial d arcade stage version 3, the champion of my local arcade with a 100+ unbroken winstreak. extreme stage is a port of version 4, which was a big hardware leap (think like ps2->ps3 levels of quality). i’ve been curious about it since i that time in my adolescence and finally got the game as a gift for myself for my birthday in the twilight weeks of 2023.
with the hardware leap, not only are the graphics overhauled but the physics are as well. initial d has never been a realistic racing game but the physics in v4, and extreme stage by extension, are about as far off what feels natural as possible. i’ll assume you know the theory of out-in-out cornering – extreme stage works on an in-in-out principle. it makes no sense, and the only way to play the game successfully is to empty your brain of everything you know about driving and submit yourself to the whims of this game.
the story mode features multiple people to race on multiple mountains. each person can be raced twice, once in dry weather and once in the rain. i beat every person twice, and there isn’t much to do outside of that (time trial mode and then a dead multiplayer mode) so i suppose i’ve done all there is to do in the game.
i will say the one cool thing about initial d compared to regular racing games is that the courses (happogahara, for example) have so many frequent turns, all varying slightly in their angle, that it starts to feel like a rhythm game in the same way that sekiro sometimes does. racing games are good at inducing flow state but races in initial d put me in a very different place than, say, a gran turismo endurance race. it’s neat.
wangan midnight (ps3)
although this is a licensed game, it is the final console racing game by genki (of genki racing project, the “tokyo xtreme racer” studio), released a year after the 360-exclusive shutokou battle x. it’s really neat to see the final iteration of their craft – they’ve always prided themselves on accurately recreating the tokyo highway system for their games, and my wife and i actually did a bit of sightseeing in free run one of my first times booting up the game. we passed through odaiba, trying to find a pedestrian bridge we crossed over the highway on, and realized that the only reason it wasn’t in the game was because it hadn’t been built yet when the game came out.
anyway, this is a better game all-around compared to initial d extreme stage. there is more to do, the physics feel more logical (not that they’re amazing, but they’re workable), and i don’t have to see shuichi shigeno’s art or listen to eurobeat to enjoy the racing.
along with dodging cars and navigating corners, the main focus while racing is not overheating your engine. i spent a lot of the game doing this unpleasant dance of pushing until my engine was about to blow, coasting until the engine cooled, and the pushing some more. i realized after reading some old gamefaqs posts that i was doing it wrong, and what i actually needed to do was find a very particular point in the analog throw of the right trigger where the speed was increasing slightly but the engine heat was staying steady. there’s a very tiny window with which to do this, felt like it was probably a 3% range of the analog throw and it actually shifts slightly over time as the engine speed increases. long story short, find a sweet spot on the trigger and stick to it. kind of torturous on the hands, but “realistic” so i appreciate it.
one thing i wish was still alive was a multiplayer mode where it seems that you can just cruise the highway system with other people and challenge each other to one-off races at your leisure. the servers are still up, somehow, but of course nobody plays.
i’ve beaten the main stories with akio asakura and tatsuya shima (devil z and blackbird, respectively) and i’m tying up all the little side stories now.
3d picross
getting close to the end of this one after playing it in little bursts for two years. at first i thought it was harder than regular 2d picross, but now i think it might actually be easier as you have a whole other axis of information to work with.
the game’s mascot is strange, though: a treacherous cubist duck thing that eyes you snarkily and dances around. also, all the music in the game feels patronizing.
i’d definitely play the 3ds sequel someday.
persona 3
played a couple hours but i think my wife and i are dropping it and not committing to a playthrough. looks neat, sounds neat, but it’s just too shounen-y.
i’ve beaten it before, about a decade ago, but at that time i was playing the portable version; it was a nice treat to be able to actually run around the school, mall, etc. in the ps2 version. it doesn’t add much that’s tangible, but the persona games are all about really living in a space over the course of a school year so being able to actually move around a 3d environment (with plenty of nice little details, lovely lighting and posters on the walls and all that) adds a lot to that feeling.
final fantasy viii
played for about an hour, spent most of that time on the balamb garden class computer. don’t love the change in art direction in this compared to vii. walked out onto the world map and laughed out loud because of how silly the scale looked. i never beat this as a kid; only made it to, maybe, disc 2 back in the year 2001/2002 so i plan on seeing it through this time. interested to see if wife and i warm up to it more.
beatmania iidx
yep, still playing. my goal this year was to beat the 10th dan course (course of four songs that you must clear to earn the third-highest rank in the game, i’m currently at the fourth-highest rank – the final song you play in 10th dan is this evil chart) and i was unable to accomplish that, but i’m still happy with the progress i’ve made – i’m starting to get AAAs on a lot of 10s, AAing a lot of 11s, and clearing/hard clearing some more 12s. also been doing online multiplayer when i get the chance and i’ve been doing pretty well, got a full sweep in the last two matches i played with randos.
there are always better players, and there’s such a long way to go between where i am and where i want to be with the game, but i really love playing it. i try to approach it less like i’m playing a video game and more like i’m studying a martial art. it’s always humbling, always tests my mind and body, and there’s always something new to improve on. what an amazing video game.