…I mean, I started the next area full of stone golems and new giant stone golems, which are 2x2 tiles big and when stabbed break into three normal sized golems (and one pile of rubble where you stabbed). Hasn’t really been much so far beyond having to manage where the rubble piles you create when you kill one end up so that you don’t trap yourself. There was a tricky bit where you had to maneuver and switch between several oddly shaped floating platforms while not letting the giant ones step on them as the platforms are then too heavy to move, but it turned out that the weird tiles floating in space I was having to maneuver around were actually the type that collapsed if you stood on then off of them which… made things much simpler the second I figured that out 90% of the way through said puzzle.
Curse of the Golden Idol is frankly really really close to Obra Dinn as all you do in both games is witnessing character deaths as instants frozen in time and figuring out what happens from there. And both games both use music, sense of surprise and dark humor the same way.
The notable difference is the use of 2D vignettes in Golden Idol as opposed to an exporable 3D space in Obra Dinn meaning there’s no real clue hunting, the focus is only on figuring out the mystery with all the clues immediately laid bare
Re Chants of Sennaar, another aspect that contributes to its simplicity compared to Heaven’s Vault is that most of the words are very simple since there are many different languages to decipher. « You » « Me » « Take » « God »
seasonal live service games are the equivalent to forums switching to discord, these are the times we live in, an ephemeral constantly evaporating present unsustainably hurtling towards a doomed future
Pac-Land (Famicom) - from Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 (PC/Steam)
The graphics are shockingly shrunk or simplified from the arcade version but they kept the crazy control scheme which freaked me out at first but within minutes I was waggling the stick to jump and pounding the buttons to run R/L and screaming and feeling kind of like is this where I have a heart attack and having a great old time. I got way farther than I ever remember getting in the arcade version (bout 1/2way according to a walkthrough video I checked) I mean yeah save-scumming 'cause Mesen had no cheats ; D
but the checkpoints are pretty generous and sometimes even move you FORWARd and also bits are cut out like in the very first stage you don’t even get to SEE the fairy queen THAT sUCKS and you wouldn’t even know you had the flyin’ boots but you only have to go like a half-screen back toward town and then it suddenly kicks you forward to a new stage I don’t think I ever saw in the arcade version because I never got anywhere (checked: that one doesn’t show up until stage 7 in arcade). Anyway I eventually quit because you keep repeating mostly the same stages but sometimes going L instead and they just fill them with more ghosts bombing more baby ghosts at you and it was getting TOO SCaRY also it was bedtime
I probably wouldn’t like this nearly as much on a pad as on the arcade stick; during set-up I was playing on keyboard and that wasn’t very fun : P; on the other --hand–, all that stick-bashing probably not great for my dumb old shoulder oh well
Note to self: yes waggle the stick to glide down from the springboard, clear the pool & feel amazing
Played and finished Knuckle Sandwich over the past 2 weeks. The handful of us who’ve been involved with the Melbourne game dev scene have felt the looming shadow of this game’s 10-year development cycle as if the game was just part of the scenery, and now it’s out, and is it good? Yeah it’s pretty good. I’ve described it as the best “Mario and Luigi” game, because it has virtuosic presentation, incredible music, a disgusting amount of novelty and one-off moments and mechanics, But an incredibly middling narrative. Just super lukewarm writing. Superficially it’s a whimsical comedy adventure with a heart, like most games in the quirky indie RPG lineage, but unfortunately spends about 70% of its runtime stringing you between kind of just ok dungeons with the absolute minimum of connective tissue, character beats and plot. I’d still recommend it, especially at the basically perfect runtime of 10ish hours, but it’s not really what I’m looking for in a peg.
this came back to bite me for like the last 45min before beating the final boss. feel like I pushed through a lot more of the game than you’re meant to without having the wall run ability which a) made things harder (but also more frictively fun to push wall kicks as far as I could) and b) made the remaining territory to cover kinda underwhelming, places where wall runs were very much the “key” to a “lock” so I didn’t get to enjoy experimenting with/integrating this into my, ick, I’ll say it, Player Expression exploring earlier
final boss still underlined the ropey combat but not a bad note to end on, think I took longer than most people with this (8hrs). this thing’s only $6! it has (according to vginsights) sold 145k copies in about 4 months, pretty much a single dev (see edit), no publisher, colour me impressed!
EDIT: I wanted to double check whether this was actually made by a single dev and it appears not. had to do some digging to find this: https://x.com/HyMyNameIsMatt/status/1728206406581670255?s=20 idk if others were involved, there’s no credits in the game that I encountered/could find and the game’s attributed solely to rittzler in all the press I’ve seen (not making any insinuations here just wanted to clarify!)
EDIT EDIT: ok, I found this on the itch page:
Programming, Animation, 3d Modeling- rittz
level design- rittz, matt
enemy designs- technicolor-yawn, rittz
textures- rittz, matt
music- potatoteto, pluswplus, still crisp
oh i think i played a demo of this ages ago! the combat and style felt very adjacent to earthbound so i was surprised it wasn’t an influence. and the writing was servicable. it looks like they’ve zazzed up the combat with barkleyesque little mini games, i’d probably give it another go
ive never played this but the extremely strange adventure game (?!) Pac Man 2 The New Adventures is clearly riffing on/trying to elaborate on its visual style & perspective on the Pac-Man
Namco was really trying to figure out “what defines Pac as a mascot character in the Mario/Sonic era?” and i guess for awhile they hit on “smiling dipshit round man who runs around doing stuff out of your direct control”
Grounded is super good, I’m loving this game. First survival craft 'n wham I’ve played since The Forest, and it just feels like every system has all the quality of life improvements I’ve always craved from these kinds of games. You can move full boxes of stuff around, you can parry, you can put together basic structures in the middle of nowhere with just an axe.
The setting and thus the exploration is probably the highlight for me. There’s so many times when I’ll be delving into an area and then come to this realization that I’m on a discarded glove, or fighting ants around a cookie, or running through an anthill, and it won’t hit you until you notice something that makes you think bigger for one moment.
Big fan of how this game basically makes you act like a bug as you go about survival, crawling into soda cans to slurp up sugar water, or getting wrapped up in a spiderweb after being in a rush. Good stuff.
I like the way this and Forest told a story bit by bit, as you reached new areas or found evidence. I don’t know how common having a story is to games like this but I remember them being completely absent from the likes of Space Engineers.
The combat gets kind of annoying in that most bugs seem to take 5 more hits than they should to kill. That said, once I really got into the Mutations menu and started getting the weird rare weapons, that improved things a lot. I journeyed into an overturned charcoal grill and forged a burning katana from the carapace of a rhino beetle. Pretty dope.
Lethal Company continues to own. I didn’t even realise it was a rogue lite until I worded my last post poorly, but I really like this game a lot and am glad it isn’t based around trapping the player in a novelty loop of finding more and more mechanics and new things, it doesn’t feel “content” driven. A large portion of my enjoyment comes from the fact I have very little commitment to doing well, which means I can largely play for the audience while I bumble fuck around. The contrast between “playing” a horror victim, and then being ejected into the waiting room where everyone’s been laughing at your performance is super gratifying, and I can’t think of another experience like it. There’s a bit of that in TTT and other social deduction games but they’re so inherently adversarial, which brings out a lot of Type A-ness, usually to the detriment of the groups fun. I’ve sown the seeds for a 9 person session in the near future, and I genuinely can’t wait.
Trine has been incredibly fun. One of my friends who I usually play CS with was fixated on trying it out. There was a vague air of shame in suggesting a puzzle game about wizards and knights into what’s typically a group that plays competitive shooters, maybe rightly since 2 of our 5 immediately vetoed it, but the sheer enthusiasm the rest of us brought has made it one of my most enjoyable gaming experiences all year. I’m not really sure how good the game is, at the bottom of it all, but the voice chat erupting in cheers when someone does some incredible platforming, or when the knight sends another character into space with the gravity shield, or when somebody falls on a trap and gets locked underneath a box, have been unmatched. It’s been an actual blast janking our way through the puzzles. We were just going to play this for a little bit since it was on sale and then probably move onto Risk of Rain 2 after, but I think at our current level of excitement we might actually make it through a few of the games in the series, depending on how puzzle fatigue sets in.
Disgaea 1 has begun to be absolutely miserable. I’d reached a point where all my characters were 12 levels lower than the basic mooks, and the challenge I set seemed impossible. Having given up on that, catching them back up has been such a bore. It’s a real pity, I’m only about 8 stages away from finishing the game. Disgaea 1 just doesn’t have that many of the mechanics that make grinding fun in the later games. It also doesn’t have that great an interface layer for your gear or skills. There’s a real sunk cost fallacy in play here but I think I just need to spend a 4 or 5 hour session finishing it off, just so I can be done with it.
Oh whoa it’s got Pac-Man in it (you go into a “NAMCO” arcade ~28:10) and later an apparently “new” variant called “PAC-Jr.” (around the 1 hour mark), apparently exclusive to the NA-only Genesis version. I was gonna say it’s kind of weird they haven’t included Pac-Man 2 in any of the Museum compilations but then I read on Wikipedia that instead of PAC-Jr., the SNES version, which did come out in Japan, had Ms. Pac-Man, sooo yeah better just erase the whole thing from history I guess. : P
Hm apparently it was on Wii U virtual console, maybe that was kinda before they got really aggressive about wiping out Ms.P.
I dunno if they were so much desperately trying to define what a mascot character is as just trying to find as many ways as possible to milk him for all his Pac-juice.
The good news is that I finished off the rest of the giant stone golem area including a somewhat tricky secret room. My favorite puzzle was one where you were swordless and had to make an end-around the room with all of them chasing you to get onto a floating platform, then build a bridge out of them to draw said golems onto a central series of hot tiles where they would crumble except there was not a single extra hot tile to spare so you had to draw them onto it in an organized fashion.
The next area is all three of the mud/tar/gels in play and so far is hell. I spent approaching 90-120 minutes on a single room (the second in this area) that had all three where you have to make use of the specific way the little gels move to get them to stay on pressure plates so you can make your way to the three different mothers (one of each type) and the only way to get out is to make it so that you can lure the last gel from the topmost pressure plate towards you in a single move as you must be standing on top of the door or else you won’t be able to both stab it and be able to then leave. Carving out a path through the room full of gel so that this last lil one could do say took ages and was beyond finicky (I checked, this one room took 2567 moves which is a lot). I more or less had the solution for a long time but getting everything lined up for it to work is what took such a long time, I really dislike tar/mud/gel.
Anyways I still have most of this floor to deal with tomorrow, although my friend who is playing a bit ahead of me (is currently taking a break at the final stage for me to catch up) says that is the worst room of the lot so hopefully the rest won’t be a complete disaster.
I think Pac-Land and Pac-Man 2 are amazing for the fact that a Japanese company canonized the look of their mascot and most famous character for some 15 years based off of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon
Managed to roll the same boulders over myself repeatedly because at first I thought I’d have time to dodge or something after smashing their cage open
and then I didn’t realize that a) you can save and resume mid-stage! and b) the boulder positions but not the cage status reset when you do that, so if you load a save made right in front of the broken cage after the boulders had rolled out…
watching my partner play link’s awakening (good version) and she keeps hookshotting enemies to stun them and then picking them up and throwing them into other enemies… what the hell…
I put another two or so hours into this floor on top of the 90-120 minutes I put in yesterday, by room count I am just past the halfway point. By this metric it should only take me another 3 hours to be through.
The issue is that even when relatively straightforward these rooms can still be a grind, one in particular was fairly easy to puzzle out what must be done (after attempting a quicker/sloppier idea) and still took just over 4600 moves to execute; I bested my friend who spent over 6k moves on it.
Actually let me put it this other way, I only cleared four rooms/puzzles total today (game has “over 350”) with a fifth one I put some time into but decided I clearly was on the wrong path and decided to leave for later. It’s just a constant “manage your moves so that when the 30 turn cycle finishes and the mothers expand things you aren’t screwed” and it wears on you after a while. These are my least favorite types of DROD puzzles/floors and this may be my least favorite of the bunch.
At least I have an idea how to tackle the one room I walked away from earlier, might not be correct but it has the whiff of sensibility on it. That would I believe just leave three other rooms, which likely can’t take too too long, right?
Oh yeah, confession time: whenever I find a hidden room I generally stop and try to solve it right then, I’d guess I found less than half of them but so far this approach has worked fine. When I went to check a replay (oh yeah, the game saves replays for all your successful room completions) earlier to check how many moves I took I saw the hidden path to a secret room. I loaded up to check it out and… it looks like a whole lot of what I don’t like. I’m gonna pretend I never saw it, please forgive my weakness.
I guess I got shadowbanned in mwiii either for making fun of a guy for having like 70 kills but 2 confirms in kill confirmed, a mode where you got to pick up a dog tag dropped by the enemy after you kill them for it to count for anything, or for telling a zionist to die. so now I’m stuck in a meat locker 24/7 map with the worst of the worst cod players for 7 days. everyone says they were framed while clearly cheating
