Pokemon DLC is crazy hard. The new kid version of the elite four seem to be level-balanced at 80 though I’ve seen people recommending being at level 100. Everyone on my team’s tanking one or two hits at most unless we play with synergy shenanigans. The trainers also don’t subscribe to only one type which is a breath of fresh air but I also feel like a 5 year old screaming ‘you can’t do that’ as I lose fair and square.
11 Likes
Tecmo Bowl (PRG0, NES)
More strategy than I’d anticipated! Had to switch to weaker DB to get past Montana/Rice SF; it seemed to throw Montana for a loop. ^ _^ Whew! Fun times.
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Spark in the Dark demo (PC/Steam) (demo also on itch)
Soulslike + Diablolike + Roguelike? New tri-hybrid super-hardcore genre: SDR aka SparkintheDaRklike!
Dark Souls-style combat, a Diablo feel to the dungeon, high camera, and monster placement, & roguelike permadeath & procedural monster, item, & certain dungeon element placement–but I think the main dungeon architecture stays the same from run to run.
It’s hard / I’m terrible at it, don’t think I managed to clear more than a half-dozen rooms or so before some monst or 2 would KO me.
Might like non-permadeath option, but I suppose that would probably make the game too short. I die in under 10 mins so a demo is all I’d need for a good while. But:
No official controller support in the demo! Update 12/30: But Steam user Heliax’s submitted Steam Input layout works fine on my DS4, set up along the lines of a Souls button scheme. I’ll have to play the demo again with that; used mouse/keyboard for this first play, where all the various key inputs together felt like a bit much for an action game.
I like the minimal inv management: you only carry one weapon or armor of each type. Pick up a new two-handed weapon, for instance, & the game pops up a comparison between it & your current two-hander: hit one button to keep the old item, or the other button to drop the old one and equip the new one.
Didn’t feel much difference between the 3 play choices–they read like Explorer, Nightmare, Middle Option. In a Google-Translated thread from Russian, people called it the difficulty setting.
There are 4 character classes: Warrior, Blacksmith, & uh thief, ranger or so. Only tried Warrior bc I’m simple.
Can rest on a bed, but has to be behind a closed door or else nightmares will prevent healing wounds, updating your journal (‘p’), reading found books, etc.
Certain darkness starts to kill you. The small, very nondescript Lamp somewhere near the starting point can save your bacon. I found a fancier lamp further on once. Standing under a wall lamp heals you, as long as you aren’t under attack by a monster.
Heavy weapons can knock enemies down. Complaints your character makes in combat, like saying they really want a sword, or they can’t pierce the opponent’s armor, are hints a different weapon would be MUCH more effective vs that opponent.
Hits can inflict debilitating effects that really pile up; one dose of spider venom can reduce your speed 30%, leaving you at the monsters’ mercy. One bad trap snap while facing an enemy can equal curtains, too. Retreat doesn’t feel like much of an option but maybe is doable to some degree? Maybe I didn’t run far enough, or you need a door you can close? I got easily disoriented in the dim sameness. You get shiny gold coins specifically to use as breadcrumbs and I didn’t try that.
Some weapons can do multi-hit combos, but don’t be like me and just think you can go non-stop combos, that failed. Gotta know when to hit Space to skip backwards, out of range. Of course there’s Soulslike a Stamina meter–rolling, blocking, attacking, etc drains it. Update 12/30: A developer posted on the Steam forum yesterday to reassure everyone that development is still ongoing.
Couldn’t find much on dev Stellar Fish; on LinkedIn someone saying they work there identified as Ukrainian. No dev comment in 2 months, some users are worried. A 2-year-old demo video looked very similar.
3 Likes
Sable sure is buggy, had the player model disappear off the sandcutter & interaction icons stopped appearing 30% of the time. wonder how this made it past Sony QA “campfires glitter like crazy when camera rotates” uh sure, particle systems should forget how many particles they emitted & restart on each frame if the camera moves. framerate suffers in blank landscapes. guessing this is mostly Unity troubles
why is every NPC written like a BBC children’s presenter
8 Likes
Killrun is a time-trial FPS thingy, which I played hoping it would be like The Club but it really isn’t. I think there’s other games of this ilk which I’ve heard more about and are better, so I am probably not going to put much more time into it.
2 Likes
Sable feels like a game where the different people involved with the project were making different games and they never figured out how to bring it together at all. i guess it was one of the first signs to me that a game could receive a lot of hype for the aesthetic and then be just kind of an incoherent mess beneath it. it makes me sound like one of those guys who is obsessed with the idea of random indie games being “scams” or whatever, but i can at least understand that point of view when you have hype so blown out of its proportion for things where it’s not clear exactly what they are at all underneath. it was just weird trying to play that game honestly and it not even being really clear to me exactly what they were even going for.
7 Likes
Got my Christmas gets, let’s see…
Psikyo Shooting Library Vol. 1
Psikyo Shooting Library Vol. 2
Ray’z Arcade Chronology
Haven’t had too much time to dip into it, but I can say I’m terrible at RayForce, and had a good time dabbling with Gunbird and Samurai Aces.
Also played Turbo Golf Racing and Toybox Turbos with @VastleCania and @daphaknee yesterday and both were a dang hoot (applies to games and company!). Turns out I may actually have that particular strain of sicko brain that “gets” that top down Micro Machines nonsense.
8 Likes
I could never shrug off the feeling that they had a demo of the often-beautiful and Moebius-esque driving the sandcutter across deserts moments and were like, crap, guess we gotta try and make a game around this.
7 Likes
i thought sable looked exactly like that was the case prior to release, but when i played it i actually had the opposite reaction. it felt incredible focussed and confident to me, a game that understands what it is interested in, focuses on that and has faith in it. doesn’t feel the need to add more ~game~.
6 Likes
I’ve been playing Sea of Stars, and it really is an interesting game that took so many lessons from past games and combined them into something new. Pretty impressive for a turn-based game to make like 75% of the fights feel vital. The writing gets so much better after the intro it feels like they siphoned the intro to another studio. I do wish they’d reduce some bosses HP though because those fights take like 15 minutes, and it’s not hard, it’s just… long.
4 Likes
a mgs4 length of cutscenes played in cyberpunk and I should have realized what was going to happen the second I saw hideo kojima in the hotel bar talking about the capacity for exploring emotions in vidcons or whatever
it does rock that the prologue ends with you eating a big ol blackpill as the world of serious trauma begins to set in lol. the voice acting is great,i dunno if i’ve ever heard the badass videogame protagonist become so small and pathetic and fragile like in an instant. love to have four states of being, tough guy affectation, sweet (only around the wife judy tho), extremely despondent, and huge pussy (i laughed so hard when you meet the domineering militech gal and V suddenly starts melting and is like wuhh??? please don’t be mean to me!!!)
i was planning on giving myself a mental health crisis makeover after my choom expired ignobly in the back of a cab and i developed a serious case of the brain damages and didn’t even get to zero the fucking piece of shit fixer who hazed us to begin with, and the voice acting made V sound so traumatized that it felt like the game supported my plan wholeheartedly. thanks to my power leveling i unlocked the ability to OBLITERATE people with my LMG and shotgun right before this, basically upping the gib count from already high levels to cyberpsycho shit, which feels really thematically appropriate with my dumbass street kid going from being a flashy neokitsch thug having fun with being a gangster to having her life completely destroyed in one real shitty stupid night. especially when the last shreds of her humanity are gonna be obliterated themselves by finding out what happened to poor fuckin evelyn parker
it was fucking fantastic watching my great relationship with the choom jackie disintegrate as he started coming apart at the seams with anxiety, death flagging for literal days, then the shit goes down and it kept going worse and worse before he starts walking around wheezing like he’s got a dinner plate sized hole in his lung and all i can do is tell him he’s gonna see his mom and girlfriend again while V is audibly trying not to cry lmfao. A really spiritually rich guy. Gonna miss him and his kielbasa fingers with all my heart but I’ll see my pal again in NC heaven
16 Likes
I’ve collected 12 Chum eggs just from mild exploring. it feels like gamer bloat to include collectibles. yes I could avoid them but sometimes I jump out a window just for fun and most of the time, there’s one there. can’t wait to meet the NPC who’s all “Oh, my favourite food to cook? It’s Chum eggs! But they’re ever so rare & hard to find… Say, if you happen across any on your Gliding, might you help a friend out and bring them to me? I’d be ever so grateful!” and skip through half their dialogue ‘yeah sure whatever, know where I can get any max speed upgrades’
whole game reminds me of driving around in Jax & Daxter
3 Likes
great skin tone variety here fellas, can’t tell this game was made by exclusively white europeans at all
7 Likes
right click the .exe and set it to run in windows compat mode?
sometimes older games’ checks overflow or break with modern amounts of memory, bits, etc
2 Likes
I’ve enabled compatibility and it still doesn’t want to run. It’s not giving me the error when I launch the config, but the program doesn’t want to launch. I suspect it may be SecureROM not running and checking for the disk? even though it’s in the drive.
1 Like
tbh, pirating the GOG installer/launcher would probably get it working. else running through https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/F.E.A.R. for clues
1 Like
Try getting some more system resources
6 Likes
we have found a solution thank you @Grandpa
6 Likes
whatcha do?
grandpa was kind enough to provide a spare steam key. when i get my credit card back i will try to pay this forward
2 Likes