Games You Played Today VIII: Journey of the Cursed Poster

[Tuxedo]

Hundred days
I dropped this game after the initial « Stardew Valley for vine moms » story, and the game not having a long press on a stick register as multiple presses.

Like imagine you’re in a menu (this game is all menus) and you have this list of items and you want to select the one at the bottom. To do this you have to manually tilt the stick down then reset it to a neutral position, 5 times. Instead of the game automatically scrolling down when you keep the stick tilted down. Or instead of pressing down on a d-pad 5 times. It’s maddening. I know I’ll never pick it up again.

Picross S9

I was wondering how Picross S was doing these days so I got the latest one?
Mega picross mode is still the best but it feels slightly less satisfying than before.
They kind of stopped caring about the pixel art.
It feels like they’ve taken a real picture of an item and applied a filter instead of drawing pixel art from scratch. As thus it’s often very hard to try to guess what you’re drawing mid-drawing now.
And after all these years of Jupiter Picross games, they’ve done basically Nearly Every Object In The World so each new item is a kind of fruit you’ve never heard about. You’re never drawing a melon or a top hat. It’s only gulashs tirolese and tawny frogmouths.
Color mode is less great but leads to cute and animated pictures. The large paintings made of individual picross puzzles are total filler. And the mega huge 30x30 grids on Switch (handheld) are cool but eye murder. That one grid in the screenshot took me more than one hour.

RPG Time The Legend Of Wright

A delight. Your schoolmate has drawn / made a whole RPG in his notebook and you’re going through it. In practice you’re a little sketch of a cool hero walking around and doing light adventure actions. The RPG elements are a little mirage and in practice don’t matter.
Can a game get by on cute ideas alone? The answer is unfortunately no for me. I feel my brain is not getting engaged and my attention is constantly slipping away. Such a cool little game though. I have a habit of always playing one game at a time but this game would probably be better played as ultra short 5 minutes sessions over a long period. I’ll try it

Soul Vars :

this is « teleports behind you Heh… nothing personal kid » as a whole videogame. Post Souls in media res unexplained story + wonky translation + badass korean kids in urban settings going « i don’t need friends » It feels like every character is muttering their own nonsensical dialogue. I love this

The battle system isn’t great though I got a SaGa-like kick out of understanding all the esoteric mechanics. I think the biggest issue is random battles with too much friction : you need one warmup turn to setup your combos at the start of battles and you can’t just mash your way through at any point. Exhausting after a while

[loki]

bought some games dirt-cheap in the psn sale

hotshot racing is very good, a big step above all the other would-be modern arcade-style racing games. i had to turn the voices off, though: there’s a bunch of playable characters, and they constantly quip while you’re racing. looks, feels and otherwise sounds great, though. plus it’s made by sumo, so buying means i’m supporting local businesses~

ultra pixel survive is slightly more interactive than an incremental game, and getting every trophy shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. it seems to have been made by a small team with genuine enthusiasm, and there’s a ton of unlockable characters, many of whom appear to be people’s ocs and fursonae. so while i can’t really recommend it, i do feel bad about that.

i also got aggelos, which i haven’t played yet (but i am still annoyed that i didn’t buy it physical, back when play-asia had it for like £3), and another game which i also haven’t yet played, but which i’m hoping will be future blog post material

[Cerium]

Why is the score in life/2 alyx Like That? Every combat scenario has to be punctured with some of the weakest Epic! music I’ve heard for a cinematic gun picture outside the uncharted 2 related fever dream I had with the flu. Rest of the game’s fine… for now.

[Tulpa]

Last Soldier of the Ming Dynasty demo

I need to play more of it, somewhat of a souls like, feels like a late alpha, ui is absolutely not polished and the english translation is obvs a machine translation (and is rendered in a visually broken way), combat flow has some elements from mount and blade (reading your opponent’s attacks in order to input the correct dodge while in parrying stance, much like m&b’s directional blocking) and sekiro (staggering opponents and instant kill moves) and some wholly original elements: you build up courage by successfully dodging enemy attacks that you can use for counter attacks, special moves, and other stuff that I’m sure I haven’t discovered/understood. I… think you can learn the special moves of boss characters if you successfully dodge every hit of their specials. Not sure, though. Art direction is somewhat effortful, though still rough around the edges; they’re extensively using shaders to give the world the look of ink wash paintings

definitely a game I’ll keep tabs on

[u_u]

@Tulpa

Last Soldier of the Ming Dynasty

Disappointed that this is not actually about the weird Ming loyalist holdouts on Taiwan or even the Qing conquest in general but is instead just more vague stuff about Japanese pirates… much more stereotypical Ming setting. Also not even at the end of the Ming dynasty but during a period in the middle largely regarded as stagnant but basically stable

[Tulpa]

Oh yeah, I didnt comment on the setting or politics because there’s only so much I could glean from the machine translated writing but I figured they were bad

[extrabastardformula]

Coming up on the end of La Mulana 2. I really appreciate that all of things you can find to collect are accessible during either your first visit to a place or when you have to make your return trip to that place. In practice, this means that there is absolutely no Victory Lap for you to run through the map ticking off the checkboxes. You’ve already gotten the stuff so the narrative keeps flowing. It is delightful as hell coming off of games like Tears of the Kingdom.

[smbhax]

Tried a little bit of Moonring

News & Gossip VII: For Blood and Headlines

[MoonringTrailer]

and it’s great on atmosphere. Ultima IV-style game, apparently, but the dungeons randomly generate their perhaps rather simple layouts.

A little more flashing and animated FX than I would like–oh yeah and a lot of screen shake–but uh I guess not as bad as some games, I dunno.

Probably too much story and typing in keywords to trigger the next dialog progress for my liking. From looking at the reviews it looks like it’s taking people about 17-20 hours to play through.

[hellojed]

Trying to play MGS3 and I dunno, the controls which were unique and challenging in MGS1 are just awkward in MGS3. I’ve been in this fucking ruined factory level for what feels like forever now.

[smbhax]

Trying to see if I can play Angband on a 4-way arcade stick (Hori Real Arcade Pro V Hayabusa 2017 PS3/PS4) 'cause for ergonomic reasons I want to spend less time mousing and keyboarding. ‘p’ So I’m mapping Angband roguelike keys to joystick buttons with the JoyToKey PC shareware program.

I eventually realized that a) there are two of the eight buttons on my arcade stick face that I don’t want to use for ergonomic reasons, b) I don’t want to have to hold buttons down–like I was doing for the Shift (Run) and Ctrl (Tunnel) modifier buttons–for ergonomic reasons, and c) the Enter menu can activate Run and Tunnel. BUT having Run buried a few menus down pretty much negates its usefulness so I still need a dedicated button for that, I think (similar-ish story with Tab for shooting)–but I can use the activate button for it (,) rather than the modifier (Shift) you have to hold. So stick controls:

HJKL for movement on the stick
then face buttons:
Enter
Escape
Tab (shoot)
, (activate run)
R
D
and Start/side buttons:
Y
1

Technically that also gets me one diagonal movement, up-left with Y ; ). Otherwise, though, can’t do diagonals, which poses a distinct tactical challenge, shall we say–and necessitates lots of tunneling to get through diagonal tunnel bits. ‘p’

R, D, and Y (these are lowercase; uppercase in JoyToKey is shown by “Shift” being noted) are for submenus, which can’t be operated by the shortcuts on the Enter menu: R for reading details on something highlighted with lookaround (x), D for dropping stuff off in buildings in town, and Y for confirmation dialogs.

The “1” is for inputs where I need a number, like custom sleep durations, dropping quantities, or buying quantities in shops. Might switch to 4 or something?

Inscribing magic arrows to the top of the quiver won’t be possible, dargh.

[username]

I finally got around to playing through Kunai this week.

I note it as I thought I had a memory of seeing it get a review or something on IGN, but that doesn’t actually exist (I checked because it is rare for IGN to write an article about a game like this). Apparently Rock Paper Shotgun wrote a quick preview a year or so before its release but I don’t think I ever saw it. I decided “well I guess it must be a SB thing then” and one person did mention it… but then I noticed there was a single earlier mention, and it was by me posting a screenshot of it in the random game names topic because it had a robot blacksmith and I always made sure to mention every blacksmith anything in there.

That really isn’t worth noting, except before I closed that tab another screenshot from that same post stuck out and I realized I’ve so far played through two different games I randomly posted about on that single day back in February 2020 in this year alone.

I googled that date (February 6 2020) to see if it had any significance and apparently it was the date of the earliest confirmed covid death in the US.

Anyways Kunai is a firmly “fine, I guess” small metrovania where you can swing around but the combat isn’t great and the level design is… you know, fine I guess.

[Father.Torque]

I’ve been playing this game on and off since you linked it and it fucking rules, I would recommend it to anybody

[Tuxedo]

@extrabastardformula

Coming up on the end of La Mulana 2. I really appreciate that all of things you can find to collect are accessible during either your first visit to a place or when you have to make your return trip to that place. In practice, this means that there is absolutely no Victory Lap for you to run through the map ticking off the checkboxes. You’ve already gotten the stuff so the narrative keeps flowing.

This is a level of being good at La Mulana I cannot fathom. I’m constantly doing return trips to older areas and failing to make progress

[Sykel]

Finished the OG Zelda for the first time thanks to rewind. I liked exploring this cryptic world and discovering its secrets, and the fact that I got to the final area without realising I missed the entire second dungeon… non-linearity, baby! But boy howdy, is it a chore to play. The controls are so rigid, and all those bullet hell dungeon rooms are a nightmare. If I didn’t have rewind, I wouldn’t have bothered because the combat just isn’t fun. They really improved that in the sequels.

[iguferon]

Mount and Blade 2 is a worthy successor.

[Gate88]

@Sykel

If I didn’t have rewind, I wouldn’t have bothered because the combat just isn’t fun. They really improved that in the sequels.

if by “improved” you mean “reduced the friction of” then totally, yeah. combat in other 2d Zeldas is a largely trivial affair that is there to break up the monotony of exploring all the time. i think it’s the right choice to emphasize the game’s strengths but part of me laments that Zelda gave up its maze game influences after a single entry. i’ll take awkward and weird and oddly difficult over mindless sword mashing most days.

incidentally i might currently be working on a top down Zelda-esque game with an increased emphasis on maze game mechanics. i’ve not seen a single Zelda clone acknowledge the arcade part of the series’s dna so i guess i have to be the one to do it.

[OneSecondBefore]

Yes, I just started this and it’s really cool. It’s cracking me up that your handler talks exactly like Roast Beef, but I kind of like that.

[extrabastardformula]

Oh there was hellacious amounts of backtracking for me in La Mulana 2. What I’m referring to is that I found what I needed in my travels, and approahed the puzzles as I found them or came back with a sense of purpose. Once I had unlocked the final zone (I assume it’s the final zone anyway) I’d done what needed to be done and was not set up to do one big last run through the entire map with the engame power set searching out wee heaoth and ammo upgrades. Pretty much once I was at the entrance to spiral hell, I had just a couple apps left to find and the clues of where to poke for them were pretty evident.

edit: it feel more Metal Gear than Zelda and I appreciate that is what I’m trying to say

[Infernarl]

Did you find the dungeon under the tree on your own?

[Tegiminis]

I finished what they have up until now so I’m eagerly awaiting the next drop!!! It’s so good!!!