god how are there are so many ridiculously appealing PS1+2 games ive never heard of. like unmatched by anything but late 80s/early 90s PC games and their contemporaries on the NES and probably the Master System/Mega Drive. So many hidden gems
9 Likes
Boy, I should probably actually finish this game if I’m the only one recommending it. Never got around to setting up emulators on my current computer tho.
1 Like
I remember playing this on a demo disk as a youngun. It’s stayed with my memory ever since and I’ve always had the feeling that I should play it.
1 Like
playing wizardry gave me some kind of horrible cartographers disease i made the mistake of dropping all the other more engaging games i was playing to go through the original NES DRAGON WARRIOR QUEST and map as much of it as i could
shockingly, pairing a low stress fun drawing activity with a lot of random battles makes them more fun/tolerable. This has been genuinely neat though, because ive never played through this version. Its certainly meaner, but sometimes in ways that are telling of a consistent design thats totally different from the remakes & the DQ games theyre based on. Your HEAL spell is very weak and costs 4 MP, but your HURT and SLEEP and STOPSPELL are very effective and cost 1/2 as much, so youre encouraged to be aggressive and use your options, instead of tanking up and occasionally healing. Herbs are a whopping 24 gold, warp wings 3x as much and rarely buyable. it rewards careful forays out into the wilderness, and makes being far from home and low on supplies feel as tense as any 8-bit RPG ever could.
Its weird to remember this is is the only DQ with a torchlight/darkness mechanic, its kind of a shame they ditched that IMMEDIATELY. it is much harsher on the NES than in remakes, your visibility with a torch is a very limited 3x3 tiles around you and the dungeons are tight 1 tile wide corridors. It makes getting the RADIANT spell (which fades in less steps than a torch, but covers 3x as much space) feel like such a relief
Im glad i based my play around mapping, because it creates an inherent reward for that slow expedition-based playstyle & softens the grinding by making it happen incidentally while i draw the borders and fill them in.
All that said. i might have hit a ceiling, because everything near and south of Hauksness (the ruined town where you get Loto/Erdricks armor) is hitting for upwards of 20 damage and im level 12 with the best gear i can have. Im really trying not to walk back and forth grind as much as i can but man its slowed down and i know the endgame is gonna be nasty too lol
26 Likes
Have you tried doing it with 30 of your closest friends, I hear that helps
12 Likes
been playing the management mode in gba final fire pro wrestling. even though this is me speaking from the backwards time dimension, it really does feel like a heavily cut down handheld port of the same mode that’s an expansion for fire pro world.
by which i mean that the fire pro world iteration of the concept expands on every aspect of it exponentially
2 Likes
The weather became cool, I saw that February 24th, 2024 was just around the corner, and that the American Dollar to Yen exchange rate was the highest it has ever been (150 yen to the dollar.) So i went down to Bookoff and bought the worst Playstation Five they had.
I then spent yesterday watching things download. The UI of this thing is completely baffling. Finding out how to turn off menu noise/music was so deep in the options tree.
It’s actually a tinted grey-blue not white? That was surprising. It is large.
So I played Demon’s Souls. The AI seems slightly more aggressive and the new intro sucks and now backstabs are bad ass bro. It sucks. But it is still Demon’s Souls…
I was not prepared for how dumb Returnal is. I beat the first boss after maybe 4 hours of play by just circle strafing. I can attach parasites to my body to raise my Integrity. I use my Visor Scan to Discover Xeno Artifacts. I got a Xeno Type Blade recently. And the Xenos had a way to record the past. The player character was impressed by that. The Xenos installed Vending Machines that I can use Orbits to pay for goods and boons.
“I feel compelled to let the parasites attach to myself” yeah because it gives you a 10% boost to critical damage. The parasites helpfully tell me what they are gonna do to me before I attach them.
20 Likes
30th anniversary of sonic 3’s pal release?
8 Likes
please make sure to post about how it doesn’t work well and isn’t worth it instead of the opposite so that i don’t have to do anything i might regret please
7 Likes
29th anniversary of my pal release
16 Likes
Sorry Feb 29th 2024
1 Like
I finished up Castlevania III (Famicon/Japanese edition) and a couple quick thoughts.
-
This is probably the worst “Classicvania”, right? I mean the Gameboy games are likely worse and I wouldn’t say it is a bad game but some years back when I played the original CV for the first time I was struck how despite its reputation as a hard game it was actually balanced fairly well. It feels like with III it had to be “CV, but more!” as rather frequently it felt like something was taken from the first game but pushed to be more, and IMO said balance was largely lost due to it with things just often being plain annoying more than anything else.
-
That said I still respect the game as it is ambitious as hell. Multiple routes, stuff like stage 2 where the bridge collapses so you have to climb back down the stage you had just climbed up, multiple playable characters with Grant’s wall climbing in particular standing out as often dramatically changing how one approaches situations. Even the graphics themselves while at times not as clear as would be ideal (multiple times I jumped onto what I thought was a platform that was just a background element) are doing their best to be evocative and the soundtrack is strong by NES standards.
-
The big twist in the ending with the guy’s name being Grant Danusty after years of my user title here being Danasty threw me for a loop. I checked and the NES/US version is the same, I feel like I’ve been lied to for years.
20 Likes
Car Battler Joe Biden
10 Likes
I never had the drive to finish this but my takeaway was very similar
My impression of Sparkster (SFC) is a mixed bag of lopsided early difficulty (see Stage 2 Deathtraps) and moments that replicate that very specific MD Blast Processing in ways that felt good about (the superior) Rocket Knight Adventures
I’ve yet to complete it though, and while it replaces the Gradius homage with a Twinbee one the robot fight is vastly unfair and downright aggravating
3 Likes
I finished Castlevania III (JP version anyway) whereas I bailed quickly on II, so I guess II is my least favorite. III seems to be quite well regarded but I didn’t really take to it, whereas I really liked the original. And yeah those vertical sections in III are the worst! ^ _^
3 Likes
i don’t really have a comment on the rest of the game (other than it’s good and i like it), but akumajou densetsu (castlevania iii) has perhaps the greatest soundtrack of any famicom game. it is just astoundingly good
11 Likes
For years I’ve looked longingly at those Steam Next Fest/Summer Games Fest PC demos, wishing I had a PC that could run them. And this year I remembered…oh wait, I do!
I’ll probably update this as I dip into some more games before the demos get voided out (what happened this SGF to me, anyway), but so far:
Jussant: This is alright. I thought I’d have had my fill of this sort of climbing playing Grow Home, but it’s pretty nice. Not…too much more to say than that. It’s not the longest demo, but it’s quiet and pleasant.
RoboCop: Rogue City: On the opposite end of things, this game is loud as fuck, goddamn. Gonna echo @notbov and say this thing feels like a relic of gaming past, but in a way that’s almost endearing. It’s not like there hasn’t been 30+ years of terrible RoboCop games, but you can tell the devs really throw themselves at the license and try to do their best by it.
I watched a cat push a can several times until it fell off a scaffolding. I also got the in-game justification for scoring you after each mission, and found out I let one of the hostages die. Whoops!
It’s also incredibly funny that you can just stomp around the levels and collect evidence. Like you can shoot the hands off a bunch of goons and poke around the corners and find a fake ID. Finally, justification.
I somehow managed to sneak up on a guy (how?! RoboCop is so fucking loud!), grab him, and toss him high up at a wall and splat him. Also grabbed like 20 computer monitors and chucked them around.
I…might love this busted game. I should at least play their Terminator game that came out a few years back.
12 Likes
The RoboCop game has the same problem as like every Jagged Alliance successor, in that it’s supposed to be satirical and american but the reality ends up being that like every single conversation thats supposed to be funny ends up being bizarre and stilted because the developers are actually humorless European jank guys who exclusively make licensed games. The side quest where the three drug dealers discuss economics makes deus ex human revolution look like genius natural writing
On the plus side it has soldier of fortune dick shot reaction technology. The game however unfortunately looks like Cyberpunk 2077.
13 Likes