Games You Played Today VIII: Journey of the Cursed Poster

[hellojed]

Finished Trip World. A game with 5 stages but with no saves, so the entire game must be done in one run. Thanks to the power of savestate abuse I was able to finish it. The 2nd to last boss is nails hard, it’s basically an evil version of you, and they can do overhead dive kicks and dashes and stuff. Then the “final” boss which is a pushover comparatively. I don’t know how they expected people to do the whole game and then get three tries at the final boss, only to have to do the whole game again. The sprites are so cute though. Here’s a level 5 midboss

What’s also interesting is some of the maps have multiple routes.

all in all, GB games remind me of why I like videogames in the first place.

[lonelyfrontier]

didn’t mean to marathon the entirety of astro boy tonight, but i did and it’s still among my favorite games of all time

[RT-55J]

been fulfilling my patriotic duty as a ZZTer by playing some Oktrollberfest games so I can judge them (afaik, judging is limited to just game submitters)

Kitten Hallway 3: Kitten Hellway _{by WiL and Lovelovekitty}

This is both an endless runner and an incremental game (except you’re the one being run at endlessly). It starts out rather unfairly, with a death wall that comes fairly often and is guaranteed to take away at least 1-2 lives. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and unable to progress if you make poor purchasing decisions at the start. However, once you figure out what the best decisions to make are, the game becomes dead easy. I ended up resetting all of my progress, and with just a few better choices I was able to fully max out my score after only a couple dozen game overs, with dozens of lives to spare.

Verdict: Fun little time waster. Wouldn’t really classify it as trolly though, except with how some decisions can keep you quite poor.

Chicken Shock _{by km (not our km, another one)}

I playtested this. Plotwise, it’s a silly little yarn where you have to find wire cutters for your friend (for their chicken coop). The complications to this simple task ramp up steadily, as doing one thing requires you to do another, more obnoxious thing first. Both the gameplay and narrative work together in interesting (and sometimes annoying) ways to troll you.

Verdict: Of the worlds I played, this one plays most like a traditional ZZT world. Recommended if you’re in the mood to be pleasantly annoyed by a videogame.

Silvio’s Cellar _{by davidjamesmcn}

This is a one-board game where you have to escape a cellar. The twist is that completing it requires you to use the cheat prompt. Even so, I have no idea if I finished it in a remotely intended way.

Verdict: 5/5 trolling — impossible to recommend

Anserganger _{by PogeSoft}

This image is delightful:

However, it is not in the game at all, and the game has nothing to do with it. The actual game itself is a repackaged version of a weird mockbuster/shmup the author released a few months back, but made more annoying in celebration of the oktrollberfest season.

Verdict: i was certainly trolled, alright

The Mewtonia Expedition _{by PogeSoft}

okay, this is Pogesoft’s real submission, and it follows his Indiana Jones expy “Idaho Gino” on trip to a floating continent at the behest of his talking cat Frida. It’s pretty short, with only 3 boards of gameplay (plus a couple more with digitized photos of cats). There are a few japes, a few annoying bits, and a few things that are slightly inscrutable — all the essential elements of a good trollgame. Not a bad showing — could be better, could be worse.

Verdict: cheat in the dark maze room for a surprise

throws onto _{by Kaeselord}

A very rudimentary shmup by a friend of the organizer made during the final weekend of the jam. Just see how many bullets you can pelt at the invincible while being cursed by random status effects, until your own pitiful nerd mortality gets to you. Not a ZZT game, but possibly worth a couple minutes.

Verdict: the game over is the most novel way i’ve been spoilered in a long, long time. possibly recommendable just for that

---

5 more games to go (including one by a_new_duck!)

[Grandpa]

I’m a sap and gave New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe another go.

I still think it’s ugly as hell, and hate that dying kicks you back to the map (even if you hit a checkpoint! I get it’s so you can use a power up if you want, but surely, as a port of an older game, there was an opportunity to streamline this), and while it’s in line with other older Mario games, the whole “you gotta play til you beat a castle in order to make a permanent save” sucks for my creaky 3X year old ass.

But! I’d be lying if I haven’t enjoyed some of the little level design quirks and secrets. The little off to the side wall jump routes that you can use to bypass the rotating cogs in the first castle and all that.

That’s OK by me.

[Rudie]

Play zelda

[sleepysmiles]

oh ive been meaning to try a Zeldo, whats the good one?

[smbhax]

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R Demo (PC/Steam)

According to Wikipedia, the PS4 and PS5 versions of the demo were only online for a week. This Steam version remains available.

Pretty minimal demo–five of the full version’s 50-some base characters, just one stage, and just VS CPU to play, basically–and past all the flashiness and JoJo weirdness it’s actually a fairly simple fighting game: 3 attack buttons, a Stand mode toggle,

a KOF-2000-Striker-like “Assist” button,

a side-step dodge button, a couple standard chain combos–one of which can be turned off if desired–and 2-3 supers per character.

I think. The action feels very solid and meat-and-potatoes-y. I like my fighting games to be on the simpler side and to my surprise, ASBR IS kind of on that side. Probably not highly balanced…it does keep getting balance patches. : P

Lots of yelling! The sound levels are oddly out of whack. I wonder if they’ve got them sorted out a little more clearly in the full version.

I wasn’t gonna get the deluxe version with all the DLC and stuff right off the bat buuuut it comes with five or six extra costumes or colors or something and urghghghggh oh these companies know exactly how to trap me.

I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be too flashy for my eyeballs = oo

I looked at the Story mode in the original PS3 version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpucf97iSl4 and it was just text blurbs between matches–not cinematics or anything. So no big loss there probably.

[siobhan]

Skyward Sword >:)

(I am dead serious even though i know i am wrong)

[Broco]

The Faces of Evil for CD-i

[siobhan]

I finished Metal Gear Solid 2! Showing my hand here as a particular kind of freak because the last quarter had me screaming about danganronpa v3. Big fan of the emotional core of the story, the actual theme/message i can kind of take or leave because i don’t really respect the darwinian fixation enough to be impressed by them proposing an alternative i guess lmao but it’s still neat.

Happy that I wasn’t punished for playing a physical copy, the boss fights are much more tightly tuned and the levels never get cruel in the way I felt the first game stooped to eventually. That being said, wow, there is a lot more friction in the normal level traversal. Found myself in a lot of situations where I essentially have to hope there isn’t an enemy around a corner because I don’t have a node scanned yet. Not a huge deal but really awkward? The guard chases also seem more hassle than they’re worth to try and evade or fight, eventually i just let them kill me for the clean slate.

Fortune is my fave and fatman is an icon

[RT-55J]

@RT-55J

5 more games to go (including one by a_new_duck!)

Unphased by John D. Moore

I completed this.

My brain is melting.

Recommended for the true doom puzzleheads on the forum.

[MintyJuffowup]

Dark Savior

[meauxdal]

i’d love to hear more about this if you wanted to expound on the “skyward sword is good” thread. i didn’t hate it as much as some people, but i got aggressively bored with it and stopped playing shortly after the first dungeon because i found the sky island hub incredibly uninspiring. i did kinda enjoy that first dungeon, tho

do you prefer the wii version or the switch version?

[loki]

every neogeo pocket game is so visually beautiful. obviously last blade 2 is one of the best-looking games of all time, but last blade: beyond the destiny completely redraws everything in low colour/low resolution/sd style and also looks incredible.
even the black and white games like king of fighters r-1 and samurai shodown! look great.

i’m really looking forward to looking into the rpgs on that system when i have time. i know pretty much nothing about any of them, plot or mechanic-wise, but i know they all look cool.

[a_new_duck]

I wasn’t asked but I’ll say that I finished Skyward Sword a month or two ago, and I was shocked at how good I think so much of it is. The level design is consistently interesting, fun, and inventive. Mapped onto the right stick, the sword controls are actually wieldy, and it’s surprisingly fun in combat (except for the context-dependent special finishing move, which is too hard to execute).

I’d dropped the game before finishing the first dungeon back when it came out on the Wii because I’d been pretty underwhelmed and exhausted by Twilight Princess and its constant busywork and getting to a dungeon and getting one (1) item that solves one (1) type of newly introduced obstacle and will only ever be used again when that same type of obstacle is redeployed just to remind you you have other items. I was pretty sure Skyward Sword was more of ‘this shit.’ But 12 years later I found out there was a lot more to it.*

Instead, the game opens itself up in interesting ways each time you get something new. There are a handful of rote Metrovania-like feelings where you get to an obstacle and you’re like “Oh, I’ll get an item that’ll get me there. Where’s the gd hookshot already.”

Basically, each time you make progress you open up a new level. After a certain point, the new levels are largely cleverly repurposed or expanded old levels, which is good! The primitive caveman gamer brain in you may say “that’s lazy,” but it’s actually good when it’s done well, which it is! And the new level usually comes with some new ability that will be essential for navigating the level. And those things combine interestingly in environmental navigation and puzzle resolution and even occasionally in combat. Of course some of the levels are dungeons, but the areas outside the dungeons that get you to the dungeons are also levels. That there is no open ‘Hyrule field’ and locations are discrete portals to the surface or pretty compact floating islands is no accident. This is a goddamn linear videogame that if anything is hobbled by its vestiges of ‘exploratory’ ‘adventure’ design. And it’s a pretty good and clever one!

That said, there’s a lot about the game that sucks. The stamina bar sucks (there are a handful of times in the game where I was like “oh that creates some interesting or fun tension” but not enough to justify having to stop running every 9 seconds for the entire 35 hours you’re playing the game). Fi sucks. Fi calling you “master” all the time and making those irritating “projected probability of success” jokes all the time sucks asssss, man. The glacially paced opening sucks. Some of the dialogue is abysmal. They reuse one boss fight one too many times.

But man, I actually really enjoyed Skyward Sword.

*(Also, dialog boxes were really slow on the Wii. I think they’re better on Switch. Or my tolerance has gone up (unlikely).)

[Stree_Overlord]

Today I played the rest game Boneraiser Minions. Well, okay, it’s considered a rest game in that you don’t really interact with it, other than the fact that you do have inputs and you move it around to try to avoid monsters.

For me, partly that’s okay, you know, it’s okay, I get it, that is, if I want a game that doesn’t require anything of me, I want it to require less, I want the game to be able to play itself more than it does. If I have to do something, then let it matter!

[dedede69]

i’ve been pretty picky over what roms i put on this new rgb30, but i went ahead with the full ngp/c libraries.

[hellojed]

tried playing dive alert, spent a good amount of time trying to move forward in the tutorial.

i keep dying in dragon quest 1, i think i have to grind to get through this first dungeon, which im really underleveled for

[Wizball]

@a_new_duck

Fi sucks.

Link is not verbal so the role of the sidekick in every game was to inject personality into story moments where someone is talking to Link and he can’t react. Then they go with the non emotive automaton thing

It’s been awhile since I played but I feel like I remember moments of someone saying something to Link, him not reacting, Fi making a computer statement, which is also like a non statement. It was like can we just move on

Which I think sums up most of my problems with the game. Having this formula established and slotting in weird new parts into familiar beats, but the new stuff slotted in no longer serves the same purpose the old stuff used to fulfill. Like the skyworld is slotted in as the new overworld as part of the formula but it doesn’t do anything or add any value

I agree though that the linear stuff and dungeons were fun. Just a lot of Zelda baggage they didn’t deal with well imo

[sleepysmiles]

it is kinda neat in retrospect how many elements that really work amazingly in Breath were recycled from Skyward. like i remember hating the stamina circle too but it’s essential to BotW. needing to manage breakable equipment instead of just getting permanent shield upgrades. the paraglider is basically the sailcloth done with a lot more freedom (itself was another go at the deku leaf, one of imo the cooler items from Wind Waker… which also was a retake of the deku scrub’s helicopter flowers from Majoras Mask… theyve actually been trying to work flying physics into Zelda games for awhile huh lol)

People have talked about how Link Between Worlds was the bridge to them feeling more confident shaking up the Zelda formula i can see how Skyward Sword was the start of that bridge. its even trying to marry the more “realistic” anime Link art style with the cel shaded cartoons style, which does NOT work for me in SS but imo looks fantastic in BotW (best Link yet, he should be both a handsome teenage elf and a strange little goblin man obsessed with breaking pots and using chickens as a means of conveyance)