I got ensnared by the Suika Game. The ‘pop’ when two fruits come together is weirdly satisfying, but the cutesy happy music is so repetitive that it burrows into your brain and gets annoying quickly. It’s like popping bubblewrap while someone next to you plays one of those TikToks with the stock music on endless repeat.
Seems they pushed an update recently that finally lets you change the music … to an even more repetitive and obnoxious christmas carol
Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Asia (PC/Steam)
Wanted SofFS to be on sale in the Steam Winter Sale, where I got Elden Ring–but it wasn’t! Was the last Souls game I didn’t have and got so annoyed I’d have to wait longer to fill in that last gap–just in having, not playing, since I sorta plan to play this one last and who knows how long that’ll take to get to!–that I guess I googled something or other and found through gg.deals (Steam forum goers more frequently mention isthereanydeal dot com as being a site listing only legit sellers) gamebillet dot com, a UK seller of Steam keys, seemingly actually legit distributed by publishers according to other Google results, like Ubisoft listing them Approved digital distributors of Ubisoft games | Ubisoft Help .
Well, so gamebillet dot com listed SotFS (Steam key) for 50% off, which is how much it would go on sale typically in a Steam sale according to sale histories–didn’t go on sale for years, but then two or three in last year-ish–and said the key would uh I forget how they put it but something about work with US region Steam, so I paid 'em w/ PayPal, waited a few minutes, punched the code they gave into Steam, and voila: “Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Asia.”
Asia. Hm. Well, it installs and runs as SotFS, in English, Namco US EULA or whatever at the start, so, hey. = p
I guess the main drawback with getting a key from even a “legit” seller like this, aside from little quibbles like region name, is that gamebillet for instance warns you that the deal is non-refundable the instant you reveal the Steam code to yourself; and Steam doesn’t offer refunds on codes bought from outside Steam itself ( Steam Refunds : “Valve cannot provide refunds for purchases made outside of Steam (for example, CD keys or Steam wallet cards purchased from third parties)”).
on the off-chance that you don’t know about this already, here is a table showing the effects of the derived stat that directly affects how enjoyable the game feels to play:
also personally my favorite weapons in the game are probably the basic mace and spear, you’ve got to use jumping attacks for the mace to really shine though
you’ve got to crank up agility as soon as you have the stats to wield your starter weapons and enough hp to feel comfortable, do it early while levels are cheap. godspeed
bought a Quest 2 because good work thing
I am a basic bitch with bad taste but Tetris Effect in VR has me sold on the whole enterprise
Thanks! Whoa, math. I don’t know much of anything about II, might be saving it for last of all but we’ll see. Good to hear about the weapons, spear is my fave so far in DeS. ^ _^
played Vagrant Story. these outfits are…a lot
I beat every challenge in Toybox Turbos, a game I thought would be garbage but was actually pretty damn good. It beats Micro Machines (the old ones) for me personally simply based on the amount of variety in the challenges. It has normal races, Micro Machines style races (where leaving the screen gets you killed), time trials, but also a few weird ones like chase (where a wall of death is chasing you and you have to stay ahead of it), countdown (where you start with 7 seconds and have to collect clocks to increase the timer), and overtake (where you have to pass a certain number of cars before 3 laps (also the cars explode when you pass them)).
Some of the challenges demand pretty precise play too, which is nice. It’s definitely not an easy game, but it’s also not that hard. I got 3 stars in everything in about 5 hours. Perfect Steam Deck fodder.
The only thing left is to play one online race, then I’ll have all the achievements. Anyone wanna play?
Also, incredibly, it’s not on sale, but keys are so widely distributed that you can get it from a reliable site like Kinguin for less than 3 bucks, so…
I started playing Snake Pass as I recall someone (Felix?) being a big proponent of it. Got through the first set of levels, it is both rather creative and a bit frustrating? Just getting through the stages has been fairly basic so far but grabbing all of the glowy orbs is a bit more of a challenge and the coins… some of those coins are rough. There was one I could not even find in both the second and forth stages, so they can be hidden fairly well.
It does seem to be a rather well realized movement system, but it doesn’t make it easy to deal with. You need to manage your weight distribution to an advanced level fairly early on, so you’ll repeatedly end up with too much leaning forward as your back half slowly drags you to your death below. If I had one complaint it is that the camera is only sort of 90% of the way there at best, it works fine on average but still pops up as a problem a bit more frequently than one would hope.
Even though I recommended he not get me it for christmas because it make my head hurty my dad went ahead and it did anyway because you know boundaries are for big dumb bitches so yes I am playing cyberpunk 2077 again with a mod that removes the head hurty.
Today’s thought: it’s really conspicuous how every other person in this game throws around the word cunt left and right to the point where some guy called me a putito and the game subtitled that as cunt too which is, uh, not what that word means. So they’ll pay someone to say it but won’t tell you what it means… much to think about!!!
Yeah i played about 40 or 50 minutes of Vagrant Story on the plane. It’s such a gorgeous game. The battle system is…really weird! Jam the attack button over and over, then select a body part, then whack at it. In the first battle I didn’t know it was realtime action, so I just stood there waiting for an attack menu to show up while the bad guys were hacking away at me. Is the entire game in these underground caverns? What about gear? Another question: why hasn’t a scrupulous indie developer totally ripped this off.
Also in the intro movie when Sydney gets shot by a fucking arrow and pulls it out made me FEEL THINGS. The cutscenes are so good, the edge lighting effect they have is incredible. It looks so good.
I fucking suck at Mr Driller, i cant get more than 500 feet.
I’m pretty good at making drum loops but any kind of melody of bassline sounds like complete garbage. Trackers are a really neat way of making music, maybe I can make something eventually
Basing this off a maybe 18 year old playthrough where I declared this might be the best game ever made:
You do get gear. The world is fairly small but the enviroments own.
There are 3 damage systems that are built on top of each other and can really mess with the player’s head. You have sharp/blunt/pierce and monster type and a third thing I can’t remember. I mostly just paid attention to sharp/pierce/blunt and got through the game on real hardware just fine. The game is only like 12 hours long! What a joy for a game this good to be this short.
Like there are a lot of variables but I just went with my guts and skill and saw the ending gracefully. Maybe I am just a genius like how I can play Resident Evil and get the neutral ending in SMT without trying.
The final boss only having 700 HP sticks with me. What a possible number in an RPG 700 is.
more specifically it’s 666 >:)
anyway we got an xbox series s and today we will use it to play otogi
finished death’s door (beat the official final boss anyway, still some wandering around to do for 100%)
i really appreciated it actually, keep in mind i’ve never been a big fan of either metroidvanias or souls games, or 2d zeldas for that matter; nothing against those genres they’re just not my particular niche, and out of all those genres, i think cave story is the only one i’ve ever finished
i don’t think this one particularly grabs you as well, it feels sort of pro forma for the first few hours and if i hadn’t been playing it with @digs backseat gaming i might have grown bored
but i think after that it starts to show its charm with the understated humor of its writing
i really appreciated how the first time through each level you parse so many objects as background scenery, only to understand after unlocking x ability or grokking y game mechanic that those objects contain and always contained a gameplay potential you hadn’t been aware of. pleasant surprises, made possibly by a very painterly aesthetic for a 3d smooth-poly sort of game, which while it’s clear enough which buttons you need to push to keep moving forward is sufficiently vague that the true pathways contained in a level can be somewhat unclear only to be explicated later
there were definitely points where i didn’t know which direction to go to move forward. but it was a pleasing friction especially because i think they got the difficulty and especially the punishment for dying just right, the fact that you’re never set back obscenely far and the shortcuts unlocked along the way make it usually straightforward to get back where you were. it felt like what if a souls game decided you were its friend
i read some old posts and many of them were bagging on the game, i guess since im not a genre fan for the things it’s doing i’m not as cynical or bored of them as i could be. like @u_u said back in march i’m also a fan of how the secrets were done. none of them felt obscenely secret, barring the puzzles relating to the sewer grates - they still don’t look like sewers to me and they don’t function as sewers either, there’s no sewage!! they’re basically little tunnels more than anything. we could tell the pads served some purpose but we figured they were teleporter pads of some kind, and groundpound to activate them wasn’t obvious at all.
only a few bosses were obnoxiously difficult namely some of the mob encounters in the last few hours, silent servants, and the final boss. i’m prepared to forgive them given that i don’t have to do them again
yeah overall really liked the way the lore seems to expand around you as you delve further into the game, the dense level design that seems to develop more complexity the more abilities you acquire and the more you pay attention to it. really nice
little crow and forest spirits are very cute also
used hints to finish collecting the shinies and judiciously for the 100% stuff cuz there could be a looooot of backtracking otherwise. but the game overall does a good job of keeping a bored gamer from reaching for the walkthrough, with little ingame clues and hint systems
please let me know if you have any questions or want any help i can’t let my decade of using trackers and lsdj in particular go to waste
i really liked lsdj when i tried it earlier this year. it’s very expressive for how simple it is. i instantly understood why it gets so much praise.
There was also a visual motif that for the entire game I largely just shrugged and went “sure, the concept artist came up with something cool and they just rolled with it” and then all those Bull Headed doors are used as an attack by that late game boss and they turn into like full bulls and charge you and I really appreciated that. I like when some little detail that mostly blends into the background suddenly gains Significance.
Count me among the folks who really liked this game even in spite of having played so many of its inspirations
i wonder if it’s spoiled me on trackers tbh - when i tried the polyend tracker ages ago i felt like it was so limited in comparison
yeah, and i think that’s a result of a lot of design work, actually, that was forced upon the creator by having to
I gave this a shot during my summer of PS+ and dropped it after the first main boss so… yes, this. I’m actually a bit shocked to read about these good touches as I was excited to give it a shot and was just left cold by the whole thing, like if after the first boss one goes “you know I think I’m good actually” it isn’t going well (hilariously on my PS+ summer ranking I put it just above Returnal, where I died to said first major boss and felt that was enough). Apparently I quit right before it tipped its hand a bit, oh well.
TBF I do think that I’d have played longer if it had almost any other aesthetic, it’d be a lie to call it ugly but it was one of those experiences where 30 seconds in I went “man I really don’t like how this looks at all”.
