in the castle garden, link peeks in a palace window (at zelda’s urging) to see ganondorf kneeling before the king. ganondorf turns to see link peeking, and link gets spooked. zelda tells link not to worry as they are just kids and ganondorf has no idea what they are planning
i love this so much.
I’ve always wondered what the online experience was like in the for Matching Service games, I wish I could find video of it being played from back in the day when servers were still up 
Despite having a similar structure to metrovanias, La Mulana 2 does not really feel like one. It’s really Zork-y in its puzzles and in the sort of playful cruelness the the design is all about. Feels more like classic Interactive Fiction than most current Interactive Fiction seems to
i like this as a nod to Marin singing the Ballad of the Wind Fish until you talk to her
and the Lon Lon Ranch theme is so nice!!
i love that authentic country twang this is really unique among Zelda music
i could play through Ocarina in my sleep so its hard for me to be objective about it but i think its safe to say the soundtrack is all time excellent. the N64 sound is really underrated imo? listen to that Malon vocal sample thats so good and cute lol
I don’t know how to handle all these good posts about Zelda and Pokemon stop making me want toreplay my favorite games from when i was 10 lol
i probably would have liked this game when i was 10. I couldn’t get the SFC version of wizardry 6 to work with an English patch, it kept giving me garbled characters and graphics and freezing at character creation. if that sounds like a fixable problem let me know
Otherwise im playing the DOS version and its a pretty cool game. its not that different from classic wizardry but it’s cooler imo and more my personal thing. I made a whole party of the 6 new races, i like all of them flavor wise more than the boring to tolkien classics but have mixed feelings about the character portraits. the mook one is horrifying so i used a gnome or something instead
Its interesting that you have a hub level instead of a town menu. I like that it is laid out like a fairly plausible castle, with lots of paths onto other floors and locked doors to entice you. I keep getting killed by bandits or falling off the parapets or touching a dead body and making have my party yartz themselves to death so im happily in my element 
i do miss music a little. and im already bored of the castle wall background which is too bad for me because afaik that’s the only wallpaper in the game!!
oh yeah and i tried Might & Magic World of Xeen after turning off the voices so it wouldn’t freeze (i stole both of these games). the only comment i have so far is this game is a clownshow its so fucking goofy
Oh yeah, Might and Magic games almost all get really goofy by the end, but Xeen just sort of assumes you’re jumping right in from III and it absolutely dispenses with the pretense of being a straight ahead fantasy adventure fighting goblins and cultists and just goes straight into “our DnD group can’t stop making Star Trek and Monty Python references, so our digital RPG is gonna roll that way too”
Just because I liked it doesn’t mean I can defend it.
Wrapped up Doom Episode 3: Inferno today. Some decent levels… I liked the earlier ones better, and none more than the levels in episode 2 I think. But then I started Episode 4: Thy Flesh Consumed and these feel like shit Final Doom levels. The second level by Romero is almost too much, but it’s fun if you can eke out a victory. It’s sinister not just fucking stupid like I think some of these others are.
I love Inferno for how it makes you claw your way back up from having a pistol over the first 2 levels. E3M2 (the level shaped like a hand) is one of my favorites for how you have to creep your way through it and use cover, and find all the weapons caches hidden in the little corners.
then the rest of the episode is mostly big mazey dungeon crawl levels that im mostly very into!
I have no idea how to have fun playing episode 4 without save scumming it. Romeros levels are clever but they’re so mean lol
I’m still mostly playing Armored Core 6.
And some Warframe.
But mostly Armored Core 6.
I love my fucking robots.
Usually listening to the Friends At The Table podcast/show, in particular, the current season named “Palisade.”
special mention to the new world computing logo dragon. i really really love him
and then the DRAGON PHARAOH???
i played the north and south: the american civil war has never been so much fun remake, and its mostly failhful except it replaces the sidescroller bits with REALLY janky FPS sections. like, enemies that shoot through walls and headshots that dont hit at point blank. i guess its appropriate since they replaced really janky sidescroller sections, but at least they went by quick. also its really buggy, and also north and south wasnt a great game to begin with
(but i played it a lot as a kid on the NES)
North & South may be my favorite player vs. player video game of all time. I’m trying to think of one I liked more.
Oh, wait, no. North & South takes second place after Tetris Attack/Pokemon Puzzle League. And Rampart is up there, too.
Not tempted to try a FPS version, though.
Episode 4 kinda sucks tbh. i love the orange sky/wood texture combo but most of the levels just don’t hold up either due to being too bullshit hard or just underwhelming. the exception for me is E4M6 which is i think kind of a masterpiece but also way too hard.
also Episode 3 is generally considered the weakest episode by the Doom community but i think it is low-key good after all these years. i think i just love the chaos of hell levels in Doom. especially when they have a bunch of bonkers texturing and stuff done like in E3M3. not sure i’m convinced about E3M2 but i find it less annoying than i used to, and Pandemonium (E3M3), Mt. Erebus (E3M6) and Limbo (E3M7) are great levels to me. also Warrens (E3M9) is easily the best secret level in Doom 1 or 2.
This was not a term used for Doom. It was just how you played Doom. ^ _^
oh sure lol and i didnt mean it pejoratively, just in contrast to trying a level without saving and/or from a pistol start
Im surprised that episode 3 isnt better liked but i love all 3 original doom episodes so maybe i just can’t rank them. I love Pandemonium and Mt Erebus, i prefer Doom when its unabashedly a key hunt through a maze which is why 1 has always been > 2 to me
i can appreciate parts of EP 4 in a kaizo romhack way but yeah no its not enjoyable to play through
Pandaemonium has something I really liked about episode 2, which is that weird style to the abstraction of the story and world which makes the forces of hell and the military seem really integrated with one another. In episode 2 I was constantly (to no productive end, of course) asking what the fuck kind of facility was this that had two giant super computers sandwiching an even larger mural of the icon of sin just down the hall from a room dedicated to lava floors… Doom 3’s literalizing answer to “the invasion of colonized mars by hell” is so far away from the cohesive world I like to imagine when I see these spaces. E3M3 and all of Episode 2 are inscrutable and provocative I think.
most of those levels in E2 (and E3M3 and E3M7) are Tom Hall levels, which still makes me really upset he was booted out of iD software and never officially credited until years later. E2 is also my favorite Doom episode though. it feels dreamlike in places. it’s part of why i continue to evangelize the gospel of Tom Hall as a designer.
Those M&M games belong to a different era where you could get away with including an enemy type that was a caricature of a games reviewer who rated one of your previous games poorly.
Especially considering the reason Doomguy is even there was because of his refusal to shoot Civilians. The military just being plain evil fits the vibe. Of course they find hell.
I have no music or dialogue in max payne 1 under windows 11. I always heard about max payne 1 having sound problems for people but I never experienced it until now. my problems with the mouse skipping around have gone away though
