i usually chafe against it but the tengo project stuff does it really well / subtly too imo
3 Likes
Darkwing Duck (Headcannon demo) (PC)
(@a_new_duck covered this back when it first appeared in 2019:
)
Demo/prototype thing by Headcannon, on PC. Supposedly also runs on Mac and Linux. Itās freely downloadable from their site:
https://www.headcannon.com/hchc/Darkwing/Darkwing.zip
Itās keyboard-only
so I mapped the keys to my arcade stick with Joy2Key.
The demo runs somehow slightly taller than my 1080p screen in a weird, slightly bordered 1920x1056(??) resolution.
The music and most of the sounds are ripped from the NES game. They pitched it to Capcom (not that Capcom could have made that happen; theyād have had to take it to Disney) as a sequel to that game so it plays kinda the same but now thereās a Guard button that doesnāt protect you,
a battery meter that doesnāt get recharged properly and isnāt really clear on what it does anyway, a recharge timer on your already weak pistol that makes it really freaking annoying, and a grapple line that doesnāt work as well as any game grapple should,
AND recycles your pistol recharge timer just to make things more frustrating.
The single sewer level is bizarrely laid out, enemies and traps are poorly balancedāwatch out for those broken bottles underfoot! = PPPPāthe camera(!) is annoying, and uh well itās got problems.
The lead dev has a short video talking about the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIP0gfDGHpo
It mostly runs pretty smoothly at least and the moving platform grappling bits, while horrible, donāt kill me as much as the dangling bits in NES Darkwing, whichā¦I guess makes this my favorite Darkwing Duck game! = P
7 Likes
played like an hour of risk of rain 2 co-op and refunded it, its cute how things stick to you but its not cute how all the enemies look like the enviroments, like everythings this ingredient in the same latex soup and its just completely unparseable to me. i thought maybe the shitty music was just pissing me off but even after i turned it off and listened to real music i just kept squinting being like āwhat is thisā every enemy is like some slinky fetish lizard its so indescribably blobby, like a really bad egypt urnash comic
also why dont your like, actual guns bullet change? like if you pick the default character you shoot a white dash for the entire game that goes pew pew pew pew at the same rate for the whole game and i couldnt deal with it after 30 minutes. i feel like an alien i thought this game would be super fun
18 Likes
its parsability only gets better in that your eyes are more trained to spot them. however, the gameās fun comes from picking the right combinations of relics to break the game, which often means a shit ton of particles emitting from your body that turns it back around to making it impossible to to see whats going on.
and then if youre unlucky you die an enemyās overpowered attack in one hit because you werent able to pay attention to and watch as your character and loot ragdoll off into space.
i really enjoy it. unfortunately its a big commitment to get things going since you cant save in the middle of a run, at least as far as i can tell??? so i dont really play it often lol. also i play it single player so that probably makes everything slower
5 Likes
DROD: TCB day 12
Well the slayer convention was more of a narrative deal than a mechanical one. Basically over time the archivists have come to believe that their mission isnāt to just record truth but all truth, and those annoying people who live on the surface are too unpredictable to make this a reasonable task. They will never discover the last few great truths as long as they are all puttering around, so telling the slayers they will soon have to kill all of them will solve that problem.
I end up locking them in the hall and escaping to the torture chambers underneath whereā¦ well thereās a lot of things Iād call clones or mimics if those terms werenāt already used for other things. Basically thereās a lot of blue tinted meās down there that generally just cycle through a regular routine, be it spinning in place, patrolling a path or the like. The thing is they all have swords as well so they generally need to be taken advantage of in various ways to kill or manage things you canāt do so on your own (which is more or less every room down here).
The most finicky of these rooms is one where if you step on a switch two of them step out a single tile with their swords at a diagonal right by a growing mud/tar mother (it switches back and forth in this room). You must clear out all the mud/tar in different areas while triggering them to step out and manage the bits growing out in front of them and it is basically an exercise in efficiency with clearing out these constantly growing bits while keeping the central part they oversee managed, and you generally wonāt know until probably 2/3 through whether you have been efficient enough or not. In comparison the room with several dozen blue youās twirling in slightly different orientations to form a maze of twirling blades is much less bothersome. Still overall I think this was a decent little twist on things mechanically, but when the grind comes in this game it really comes.
Anyways I found a lot of explosives and blew up the hall with all the slayers in it so they likely wonāt be a threat moving forward, but those others still want to do a genocide and that probably still needs to be addressed.
5 Likes
When they announced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (hot after/around announcing the impending end of service for Friday the 13th), I wrinkled my nose and vowed, no! No more of these licensed, four-player, asymmetrical multiplayer games that could have the plug pulled at any moment. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and Part 2!) are among my favorite horror movies, but no! Never again!
Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed: Ecto Edition: Alright, look, they made one for my main weakness.
It feels like they āget itā with this one, in a big way. It kicks off with a hyper enthusiastic, incredibly long ramble from Dan Aykroyd. You get a second welcome to the team from Ernie Hudson. Right there, casting the only two actors (well, still living) who give a shit and will put in some effort for a paycheck? Hell yeah. Thereās a few nods to Afterlife (namely the whole Winston bankrolling the Ghostbusters thing, and some little odds and ends around the firehouse), but it doesnāt have that movieās exhausting, overly serious and reverent tone for the source material. Itās goofy, as it should be.
The character creator has the hairstyles ofā¦everyone, I think. Like, a good variety in general, but also the hairdos of Ghostbusters past (live action and animated). āWait, do ya meanā¦ā yes, yes I do.
I donāt remember the ladies of Ghostbusters 2016 having iconic hair, but those are options! For the fans of that one!
Gameplay is, uh, chaotic, but pretty fun. So much shit on cooldowns, but I guess it adds to the chaos. You drop into a level and have to seek out portals that allow ghosts to teleport around and spawn minions and zap those. Easy. That causes a burst of energy that sends ghosts scrambling and patrons of the location in a panic. You can chase the ghosts down, yes (they like to possess items, so if you see a chair scooting around of its own volition, well), but if you donāt calm down the civilians (done by holding a button and pressing the trigger a few times as a wheel spins, some real Gears of War active reload kinda stuff), theyāll fully flip out, run out of the building, and the āHaunting Meterā will jack up a bit (100% is failure, as you can guess).
Playing it on Switch, so I donāt have a way to voice chat (not sure there even is voice chatā¦surely thereās gotta be), but itās pretty clear you gotta communicate a bit with your three partners, pick what youāre going to manage and come together when needed.
In short: āDoes the busting make you feel goodā yeah I think it does.
Anyway if this gets shut down in a year Iām gonna be fucking pissed. $15ā¦thatās solid burrito money right there.
16 Likes
re: risk of rain 2
iāve played too much of this game now but it took me trying it on like 7 different occasions before i finally āgotā it. i kept trying bc i had no idea why people were praising it, like at all. i think the game is way too obtuse for how simple the mechanics actually are. iām still not convinced their game designers are good, exactly.
i really hate that the difficulty ramp is based on time spent, because when youāre new to the game it very often means youāve already lost without knowing it. you have to play the game like a dozen times before you even start to get a feel for how fast you should be going. it gives the player so little feedback on what they did wrong!! even in singleplayer itās impenetrable like a dota. impressive!
i also absolutely hate when roguelites expect you to memorize what all the items do, instead of just fuckin telling you. you canāt make any build decisions in this game until youāve committed most of the items to memory. fuck binding of isaac for tricking other devs into thinking this is acceptable. god forbid prestige āindieā devs have to make a usable UI, sometimes.
also, the only character unlocked at the start of the game is both 1) the most boring and 2) the hardest (at least for me) to play in the early game. he feels like a hard carry in a dota ā once you get some damage items he starts doing things, but before that you feel pretty underpowered. heās one of the few characters that i canāt reliably beat the first boss with on normal difficulty. if i donāt get a good damage or healing item early (random!) thereās like a 20% chance iāll just lose to the first boss, and iāve likely played over 100 hours of this dumbass game.
itās actually wild to me how bad the onboarding is; how did they fumble it soooo badly?
on the other hand, itās a pretty chill time once youāve memorized how it works and have an internal sense of what you should be doing, prioritizing, and how fast you should be going. lol.
11 Likes
I grabbed a few of the cheapest games in my Steam wish list, as if I need more games. I found this one quite difficult to grasp at first, even the simplest mode. But after a few minutes at least that one made sense. (Itās basically Combo Pool but with triangle shapes and no physics.)
This might be one of those games Iām glad I supported but donāt end up playing much, given how impenetrable some of the other modes seem at first glance.
8 Likes
i think my biggest problem with risk of rain is it looks the way people described wind waker when it came out. like its actually that kind of ugly that everyone convinced themselves wind waker was (i dont like wind waker but it looks amazing) like i HATE the unity look. you know how unity looks. its instantly identifiable. and its even worse cel shaded. if it had anything aesthetically interesting or pleasing out the gate i might have more mercy for the infinitely boring gun that you shoot the entire time that never changes but its just kinda tasteless and incoherent at this point.
like isaac had an aesthetic and a theme even if it was repulsive. this is just like, what if sci fi blobs and lizards. maybe theres some grand story that unfolds as it goes on but giving me absolutely nothing from the start isnt a way to keep me playing a game, especially if im just plinking at infinite spawning enemies that spawn even harder when i use the menu. like i cant stop to LOOK at any enviroments so even if they were pretty itd be a waste
fun fact: risk of rain 1 made it into INDIECADE 2014 but the guy was like 'oh im bigger than those small fry" and ghosted the festival so i stole all his booths for my ARG that year. so hes got that going for him. thanks for the booth
oh also
all teh guides are like āstart on drizzleā but when you select that mode its like HEY YOU BIG BABY DO YOU NEED YOUR HAND HELD and normal specifically says āthis is the way the game is meant to be playedā so it has that fucking āfilter skill issue you suck gamerā attitude IN THE MENU
20 Likes
I think I was a bit further from the end of SMT IV than I had previously thought, I didnāt realise there were two entire alternate universes you had to traverse before the endgame. I spent pretty much all of yesterday evening after work trying to deal with Kenji who was kicking my arse. I managed to beat him, but the choice I made after locked me into the Law route.
I figured I had managed to stay neutral for most of the game without really trying so I wanted to try again to see if I could get the neutral route, and of course it took way longer to beat him the second time. Finally I managed to beat him this morning on the train and now I am a filthy neutral.
I also finished a playthrough of Little Goody Two Shoes. Itās pretty good. Itās a lot less of a life management sim than I expected which is probably a good thing because who needs more crafting systems and farming (thereās a field for crops in your backyard which made me think youād be growing stuff there, but the only farming done in the game is by NPCs unless you count the egg collecting minigame).
Iād maybe describe it sort of like a minimalist Persona, where each in-game day is split into periods that only move time forward when you pick one of a bunch of events (usually either work to gain money or go on a date to increase relationship level), and in place of RPG dungeons it has sort of Yomawari-style horror puzzle segments.
I think they pretty much nailed the 90s shoujo anime aesthetic, although it does have a bit of a āHow to Draw Mangaā look to it sometimes, but that adds to the charm of it I think.
Usually in dating sims I think they have you playing as some generic vanilla self-insert with a choice between a variety of anime girls with the usual personalities, but in this game youāre more of less playing as an Asuka Langley Soryu type with your options being mostly different variations of Anthy Himemiya.
The ending I got was pretty horrific and depressing. I went back and re-did the final day with a few variations and got 3 more endings, 2 of them different variations of horrifying and the other more happy and uplifting. I think I missed a bunch of secrets around town that would have led to the āsuper secret true endingā or whatever, so Iāll probably do another playthrough and see what I get.
Iāve also been playing Like a Dragon Gaiden. I donāt really have much to say about it but I find it funny to be playing this alongside the above game as it sort of balances out the hyper masculinity with the girly shoujo stuff
13 Likes
emulator has neogeo games, and bust a move aka puzzle bobble 2 on it. so i decided to see how far i could get in puzzle mode and hit a wall. also it branches Outrun style. there are a ton of levels in this game. later levels can be really frustrating. another cute childs game that gets nails hard
7 Likes
Puzzle Bobble 2 is def the best one, I love the cute vocals in the music (āPow! Pow!ā)
There are some real nasty puzzles in the final 2 levels on the centermost branch, but I found most other branches were relatively feasible to 1cc after learning how to aim into gaps and where to stash excess colors
8 Likes
A couple of points I forgot to mention that might be worth taking into consideration if anyone is interested in getting it:
I played it on Switch and the motion of the screen scrolling felt weirdly jerky to me, like either inconsistent framerate or something in the way the background scrolls. I havenāt seen any comments on this in Switch reviews so maybe itās just me, but I usually donāt notice framerate issues and this was a bit distracting for me and sometimes a bit disorienting. Turning down the CRT and bloom effects reduces it a bit but itās still there.
Thereās a few points where getting killed shows a brief death sequence with full screen red flashing. The CRT filter dulls the effect quite a bit, but it still seems like a point of concern. Also towards the end of the game thereās a lightning storm that causes full screen white flashing and it is surprisingly aggressive. Like maybe 5 flashes in quick succession sometimes, and the storm goes on for a whole period of the day. Iām not photosensitive but even I felt like it was hurting my eyes a bit.
3 Likes
bloodborne notes:
i bought the dlc because a huge cthulhu hanging off of a wall reached down and crushed me, then did it again when i came back for my souls, and i remembered from some youtube video or something that thatās what entering the dlc area looked like. joke was on me though, that was a different wall-cthulhu
but i did enter the dlc area and run around looting stuff and dying repeatedly. i could technically take down the hunters but it was too costly in terms of time and blood vials. it was all worth it when i found the beast cutter, in dark souls terms the weapon that toggles between a 1 handed zweihander moveset (except it looks cooler and makes delightful chunky metallic sounds and wooshes) and that 2 handed axe moveset where the r1s are vertical and then horizontal. on top of its other qualities, it has that little bit of extra range that the threaded cane is missing. the saw spear is now in storage and the fire-infused beast cutter is my anti-beast weapon, the tontarus is my anti-pale rubbery guy weapon, and iām still frequently swapping in the threaded cane for one or the other
i also ended up taking the shortcut to the lecture hall and picked up the augur - fantastic! now my build has truly come online, i have two ways of bullying those poisey guys with the sacks and the one huge arm that i used to have to carefully dance around
lore-wise it seems like this is a world with an alternate system of genetics and blood ministration (digging up and injecting ancient blood, another fromsoft petroleum analogue) destabilizes your form in a way that accords with your character, you can go apollonian or dionysian with it and turn into a glowing space orca or a grungy dirt werewolf. but the werewolf side of things is stigmatized by the church, who seem to be imitating the pthumerians and undergoing the same physical transformations as they did. was the hunt always about purging beasts? it seems the answer may be no
there sure are a lot of wailing women in this game
still not sure what was going on in hemwick but the witches there were covered in eyes, like the lanterns of the transformed members of the healing church and iirc something in the lecture hall. so it seems like some kind of gnosis thing with several distinct paths to it
iām going to go back and explore the forbidden woods next. i hope thereās a little more to byrgenwerth than the lecture hall and that i can find it by going in the front door
edit: oh my god the jacobs ladder fast-walking dual axe dudes in the chalice dungeons. more enemies with freaky unnatural locomotion like these, please!!!
edit 2: also the nightmare frontier has gugs in it. a lovecraft deep cut
20 Likes
The two kinds of No Nut November
6 Likes
graze counter is pretty good and the devs clearly really love cho ren sha
100% orange juice is a boring waste of time and inexplicably takes up nearly 4gb
3 Likes
On this note, Iāve been playing the studioās slightly earlier released (just a few months ago!) remake of their older game, Pocket Mirror: GoldenerTraum.
I donāt have too much to say of it, other than it very much feels like an adventure game rooted in being an RPG Maker game with some slight action/QTE elements. Not a knock on it! Itās just definitely way simpler in scope than what I played of LGTS.
But, like LGTS, the art and atmosphere is incredible. I donāt think the game is super long (there are many, many fail states, though I donāt think you can permanently screw yourself overā¦at least I donāt think so), and apparently a few different endings.
Always impressed when a 2D game like this, even with a cutesy shoujo art style, can very effectively evoke horror and dread. Pretty good stuff!
3 Likes
100% orange juice is good but only ever in multiplayer with friends
2 Likes
that is belivable
1 Like
I did my Ghostbusters write-up after only playing a few matches. Got a few more under the belt, so letās seeā¦
At levelā¦4? 5? You level up super quick, so I dunno. Anyway, around there, you gotta talk to Ray, who has paid some shady folks to desecrate the grave of Tobin (of the Tobinās Spirit Guide fame) to nab the first edition of said guide from his coffin. You open it, and as they did with Ivo Shandor in the 2009 game and, uh, Ivo Shandor in Afterlife, they have Tobin becoming some sort of powerful ghost who somehow turns you into a ghost? Itās not explained (not yet), and maybe a flimsy explanation for the asymmetrical multiplayer, but hey! Theyāre trying!
So, playing as a Ghostā¦so far it kinda sucks! As best as I can tell, your goals/priorities as a ghost are to:
- The big goal, the main goal, is to achieve a 100% Haunted status for a level. You can do that byā¦
- Haunting as many items (chairs, tables, signs, museum displays, etc.) as possible.
- Scaring the shit out of civilians, preferably to the point where they run out of the level.
But! Ghostbusters! Those guys! Because of them, you gotta:
- Try and find your Rifts and move them, if possible. There are three Rifts per level, and they let you respawn as many times. Theyāre destroyed upon respawning, but can also be destroyed if the GB team can sniff them out with a PKE meter and open fire on them. At the start of the level theyāre hidden in pretty obvious objects (haunted dolls, creepy statues, etc.), so pulling them from those objects and putting them in, say, a planter on top of something, buys you a little more time.
- You can attack GBs directly, but itās handier if you can sneak up on them and sabotage their proton packs, then lay into them. Theyāll get slimed, which can incapacitate them, and increases their terror meter, which obscures their vision and makes them unable to calm down civilians.
All this shit takes energy, which you can replenish by hiding in objects around the level and letting your meter refill.
Itāsā¦itās a lot of work! Iām bad at being a ghost! But the penultimate ghost you can unlock is one I had as a kidā¦I gotta do it, for himā¦
I had one round bug out when the person playing as a ghost dropped from the match when they were losing, and got replaced by a stationary but otherwise invincible bot. Kinda sucked, but I did get to run around the level and complete my Molds, Spores and Fungus contract, and laying into it with the beam a bunch leveled up my thrower and pack a ton. So, uh, not ideal, but worth sticking around.
I dunno! I could see it getting boring, sure, and I just cannot handle all the micromanagement of ghost gameplay, but the game is pretty fun. For all the quirks and rough matches Iāve had, they go pretty quick and Iām compelled to go back, so. Yeah. Pretty neat for something I wrote off as āoh, another one of theseā when it was announced.
Plus I guess you can transmog your gear (or apply a skin overā¦I dunno, yāall know what I mean) to look like the Real Ghostbusters equipmentā¦hell yeahā¦a little high five to 4 year old me, desperately trying to find the cartoon on TV as it left syndicated broadcastā¦
14 Likes