I keep this one in my collection mainly for the cutscenes.
I would recommend trying the sequel, too.
And did you know that someone recently made a JF clone? (It differs from JF in some ways but I like it.)
5 Likes
landmaker looks and sounds so cool. taito were making a bunch of high quality puzzle games in the latter half of the 90s, and landmaker really stands out from them in terms of style.
(also imo itās better than puzzle bobble and just about equal to puchi charat)
3 Likes
also iāve been playing giga wing 2 and cannon spike. theyāre both really good, but you already know that.
5 Likes
Now that Iāve got a computer that can run it, Iāve been playing ADACA. Which I would judge as ADA-quate. Itās basically just Half-Life 2ās greatest hits by a competent but uninspired cover band. I have been surprised by exactly nothing. They even give you the gravity gun right away.
Iām playing on Normal and the enemy AI is both pretty passive and not smart. I somehow doubt this is fixed by higher difficulty levels so Iām just having a leisurely shootman time. Iāll probably keep going because thereās very little friction. So far ladders are the biggest headache which also feels true to the gameās spiritual predecessor.
I kinda like the setting but I wish one of the factions wasnāt just the Playmobil version of The Combine.
3 Likes
8 Likes
Played a bunch of Lethal Company with some folks last night. Itās really intended to be played online with friends ā you play a bunch of salvagers contracted by a faceless corporation to take a garbage shuttle to various moons where you go into abandoned facilities to try and find vaguely-valuable items that you can take back to the corp planet so that you can pay off your debts. If you donāt pay off your debts they space the entire crew at the end of three days.
The moons and the facilities are full of monsters, some of which are not that bad (bees, locusts) and some are really bad (various monsters, including like Mothman-analogues). Voice chat is proximity-only unless you get walkie-talkies, which you order from your computer and are delivered after you land on a moon by an automated ship with a giant blinky light that plays ice-cream-van music with a sick Casio bassline. We all yelled ICE CREAM ICE CREAM whenever it showed up and hooted and hollered while we hoovered up the items that we ordered that added to our debts (aside from walkie-talkies, weād usually get some flashlights and at least one shovel, which can be used against well, the weakest monsters).
There are some really funny loot items that you can find (my favorite being the clown horn, excellent for sneaking up behind somebody and honking ferociously).
There are monitors in the shuttle that show players, loot, and monsters on radar, so if youāre doing it right, you leave somebody in the shuttle with a walkie-talkie telling people where to go (this necessitates also having somebody in the away team with a walkie-talkie, who remembers to turn it on, to use it, and also to have charged the battery). Or you can all just pile out like a clown-car and probably die horribly. Which really is part of the charm of this game. Itās only ten bucks, and it embraces the jank and stupidity of it all in a really fun way.
We installed a mod that meant that we played with 6 players instead of the maximum four, the mod says it goes potentially up to 32, the makers have only tested it up to 8 though. Weāre probably going to add another mod that allows you to change the color of the jumpsuits, which is maybe taking a little bit away from the difficulty of the game, since the above-head names fade out after a short distance and probably they want you to be confused over whoās saying what because thatās sort of the chaotic fun of it; I want to wear a blue jumpsuit though!
16 Likes
i beat SMT: Nocturne (remaster) a couple weeks ago, marking the first time iāve actually completed playing that game, despite owning the original within a year or two of its original release.
beating the game never really felt like the point - i already knew it was one of my favorites within a few minutes of playing it - but regardless, it always gnawed at me that i didnāt finish it on PS2, so iām happy iāve finally seen it all the way through. i find myself missing it now, so iāll probably go back and get some other endings one day.
i donāt have much to say about it that hasnāt been said before, but itās still one of the coolest games iāve ever played.
picked up Sonic Superstars today for like $15 and for that amount i canāt really complain at all. iāve only played two stages so far, but it feels good and iām liking what iām seeing - iām wondering how Sonic CD itās going to feel, if at all.
also just been reflecting on Sonic (and Mega Man) games lately, after spending a week or two watching people who arenāt very good at them, play them.
i feel like the common complaints are enemy placement is cheap, or jumps are too precise, or you can only know certain things once youāve played and died etc. etc., but to me, these points always sort of felt like the point of playing these games to me.
is a player be entitled to survive every situation they encounter in a game for the first time?
19 Likes
iāve been playing half-life again and laughing every time gordon gets gibbed by environment traps iād forgotten about (that āsplatā sfx is really iconic)
i think i get frustrated with dying when it isnāt otherwise funny or an interesting consequences of my actions. āboring and deadlyā probably winds up feeling cheap
19 Likes
Elden Ring (PC/Steam)
Itās prettier
and runs better
than Dark Souls: Remastered, but the things I failed to click with in that are still in this, and now thereās berry picking and other conventional open world stuff on top of that.
If going more modern in the series has been less compelling for me, I wonder if I went more ancientā¦
5 Likes
YES NOW THATS WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT PERHAPS YOU NEED A PLAYFIELD FIT FOR KINGS
15 Likes
Not quite that ancient yet. : )
I did have The Ancient City a long time ago, actually, and after a few sessions was kinda feeling into it a bitā¦but apparently not enough to have ever gone back to it after that. Looking at videos of it these days, the camera makes me a bit nauseous and I definitely donāt want those flashing FX on my dumb eyeballs, so I guess that oneās out.
The camera isnāt bad in the videos of the PS1 games Iām seeing, and the flashing isnāt AS bad. Not sure Iād have the patience for a pace quite that slow. Hm Shadow Towerās a bit faster, isnāt it? But more flashing. Well, I donāt think Iām going to rush out and get these yet, but Iāll keep them in mind as possibly possibilities. : D
2 Likes
play Shadow Tower Abyss I love that game, itās got guns!
13 Likes
I had no idea
5 Likes
Max payne 1 and 2 are like less than $5 on steam. Iāve played the first 15 minutes and the game manages to be more cinematic and better paced than most modern AAA games. I can already see the lineage from here to what Iāve seen of Alan Wake 2.
5 Likes
sometimes on this forum I feel like āhey have you heard ofā¦The Velvet Underground? theyāre pretty goodā
9 Likes
Thereās a moment in Max Payne where youāre creepin on some guys and their cellphone rings, and the ringtone is the theme to The Good The Bad and The Ugly, and it just fits perfectly. Itās so cliche it wraps around to being subtle
3 Likes
Look I know no one wants to trust the decrepit old pc gaming men but we werenāt lying about this stuff!!
6 Likes
DROD: TCB day 14
Today was all about the new type of mud/tar called āgelā that I quickly spied in the tutorial but otherwise had yet to come across in any of the other DROD games. It has the distinction of being the oddest of the three to have to deal with. Where with tar you can cut into it on any flat side and mud on any curved point with gel you can only cut into it at any sort of indent into it (picture a heart shape, you can only cut in the very top between the two humps). This makes cutting into it a bit more particular. Fortunately the devs took mercy on the poor player having to deal with this (or perhaps simply wanted everything about it to be different) as a couple of its other behaviors are much nicer than is typical.
If the room has a gel mother that causes it to grow only the bits of gel directly connected to said mother will actually expand, which for the most part eliminates the whole war of attrition aspect. The individual gel bits also have very odd AI, so odd that I honestly have no idea how it works. Whereas mud and tar bits generally move towards you in a straight path like a basic roach trying to swarm you gelā¦ doesnāt? Some of it does, but some of it waits even when you get oddly close and while I am sure there is some logic in play I couldnāt even begin to guess it.
Still these sections always make me tense up and while it āonlyā took me about 80 or so minutes to clear this area it felt much longer and I am glad to be free of it. Now I just have to deal with the pirateās cove, no clue what gimmicks it may hold but I wager itāll be a bit more welcoming of one.
4 Likes
Oh wow! Did not know that game existed, thatās pretty cool. (Iām avoiding realistic-ish handgun-wielding games these days, though. Too real, blah.)
3 Likes
Iāve now seen 20 minutes of We Are OFK and it is a penis-haver asking a woman to let them jerkoff in front of her and then she says no and they start crying.
Edit: to represent pronouns.
15 Likes