Games You Played Today VIII: Journey of the Cursed Poster

doki doki idol star seeker is really good

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also the fmv in zeroigar looks really good. it should be rescued from pcfx exclusivity. iā€™d say the same of kishin douji zenki fx, but since thatā€™s a tie in to a long forgotten anime, thatā€™s even less realistic

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Itā€™s funny because most of my favorite new games are deliberately emulating old games in look, feel, scope, limitations, etc. Truly the indie revolution gave us a feast. I feel bad for people who just play the latest AAA game and think itā€™s the best because they are living in a cave.

A lot of those technical limitations - looking up and down in Doom, sample quality in MGS1 - are what appeal to me! Are guns in modern FPS better because you can reload and the sample quality is 8x that of Doom? I donā€™t think so. Maybe to someone else, and thatā€™s fair, but I donā€™t put much stock into fidelity as quality.

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I only mine I hate crafting

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of course, limitations arenā€™t flaws!

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playing thimbleweed park. love it. i know it only came out six years ago but it feels very prescient for our enshittified moment. love a puzzle about getting a fucking printer to work. thatā€™s a good joke in itself

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Can you elaborate ? What did you try it with ? If I understand correctly it should workā€¦ tho you perhaps need some sort of in-between for eg XInput ?

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Played through the adventures of cookie and cream with a mate over 2 days. Really delightfully sweet and simple game, especially appreciate how some obstacles require you to co-ordinate and count down in real life in order to make timing work. The rube goldberg silliness to you almost every interactable object had me repeating some bullshit about ā€œThe joy of the mechanismā€ until it became an in jokeā€¦ Itā€™s just really nice to jump on a button or turn a crank and have something whimsical and mechanical happen. The game is shockingly hard though? Which is kind of hilarious given itā€™s a fromsoft game, like, they couldnā€™t make a game for babies without going a little insane. The final boss in particular is basically the only challenge in the entire game where Iā€™m is not only
NOT available in good supply but basically non existent, requiring basically flawless execution and a little luck on the bosses attack patterns. That flawless execution did feel way more enjoyable when I was doing it alongside my friend, though, and getting to jump up and hug each other when we finally got the bastard was one of my best gaming memories of the year.

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We also checked out poinieā€™s poin, which was correctly identified as being extremely shiv-core, although like after two hours I Am Good. That game has a way of getting into your mind with the absurd childish way everyone talksā€¦ You kind of have to deprogram yourself afterwards.
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Last thing Iā€™ve been playing recently is anodyne 2, which Iā€™m sad to say is just kind of okay I think. Mainly a taste thing for me because I donā€™t really care about top-down zelda-y games, I didnā€™t expect those sections to always feel like they were ripping me away from the platforming rather than complimenting it somehow. I mostly wanted to experience the writing since Iā€™ve heard great things about it and I do reckon itā€™s pretty special in an understated kind of way. If you like weird 3D platformers and 2D Zelda rather than only one of those things I would recommend it

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To go back to this I think I agree, but in a different way. I still play older games, dig them, donā€™t think technology makes things automatically better, etc.

That saidā€¦ there is a huge impulse among people where the first great game/movie/song of a certain type just stays the best in their mind forever no matter what else comes along in the intervening years andā€¦ well thereā€™s no way to not point to those two games as being among the biggest beneficiaries of that trend in gaming history. This doesnā€™t make them bad games by any stretch, but the reason no other games make certain people feel the same as those games do has less to do with the qualities of every other game and the fact this was their first love in these areas.

Quite frankly if the first successful game of any type was always the best no matter how many years pass things would suck. Iā€™m not exempt from this, if you ask me what the best metrovania is Iā€™ll say Super Metroid without hesitation and I am very likely not completely rational on this front. That said it is good to be able to at least recognize that fact.

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individual and collective artists can hone their technique so that progress can be observed in their works but this is not a linear, teleological process. Operation Ares is 100% a worse novel than Fifth Head of Cerberus and Book of the New Sun but both of those are much better than The Sorcererā€™s House. However there is also honing technique to be more appealing to broad audiences. To continue using Gene Wolfe novels as an example, The Wizard Knight is not one of his best books (itā€™s good but not great) it is one of the easiest to recommend to someone who has only read mainstream swords-and-elfs fantasy. It isnā€™t better, or more polished, but it is a more fashionable sort of fiction.

similarly, game design is awash in fashions that people, both lay and professional, confuse for signifiers of quality. The rat-with-a-morphine-feeder design of modern upgrade systems and pseudo-rpg mechanics that swamp all modern games (especially in the AAA space) arenā€™t better than the pure arcade rhythms of Doom, but they are more fashionable. Navigating deadly non-linear labyrinths used to be the norm of FPS level design but that has fallen out of fashion in favor of linear corridors, and Half-Life is a pioneering example of this style of FPS design. Is it sensible to say that the linear narrative-laden corridor is a better design than the Doom dungeon? Not at all, it is merely fashion. Both Doom and Half-Life are rightly regarded as classics, and neither game would benefit from being more like the other.

This meandering post of mine kind of gets at why I hate the phrase ā€œquality of lifeā€ because it suggests that the way to make the Best Video Game depends on implementing all the fashionable features of modern games, and it suggests that the points of friction in older games are necessarily flaws instead of design elements that, intentionally or not, produce a coherent experience.

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all the film serials of Louis Feuillade feel a bit like silent era Mann to me as well

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broken age didnā€™t have enough vomiting in it imo. thanks ron

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i have been playing a bunch of TG16/PCE and 32x lately, mostly due to using some xmas money to beef up my catalogue for both consoles.

on the Duo, i was finally able to get my HuCard copy of Splatterhouse Chrome working after finding the original creatorsā€™ blog detailing that removing a protective sticker would fix the issue i was having. the Analogue Duo is, in many ways, a lot more finicky than their previous products, and so there are a lot of cases where things may or may not work, it seems, mostly due to how the HuCard slot has been implemented.

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anyway, the game is a hack of Spatterhouse that, according to romhacking.net, ā€œfeatures new levels, enemy AI, color palettes and even a restored weapon from the arcade version. The difficulty is extremely high, so even those familiar with Splatterhouse will face a serious challenge. The game also contains far more gore than the original.ā€

iā€™m not a Splatterhouse aficionado, but this sounded like a cool thing to have in my collection, and it doesnā€™t disappoint. tough as nails, but not in a way that feels annoying, so far. i need to spend more time with it, but iā€™m just thrilled i got the thing to work at all. it also seemingly has branching paths, which sounds like a fun addition to the game formula.

on the 32x end of things, i got a copy of Space Harrier for pretty cheap and itā€™s a really nice port of the game. i think, overall, playing through more of the 32xā€™s catalogue, itā€™s clear that this really did have some kind of potential, but the timing. oh, the timing.

i think i made the right choice to not get one as a kid, but i probably should have gotten one for super cheap when Toys R Us was practically giving them away, like a friend of mine did at the time.

i think the canceled Aliens vs. Predator arcade port would have really been fun, but alas.

i guess the thing is, a beefed up Mega Drive/Genesis does feel good, but it should have happened so much earlier.

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In the russian stalker mod ā€œnew arsenal 7ā€ you start without a flashlight and itā€™s rng if the trader sells one so you will have to reload the game dozens of times until he does. This hole was made for me

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Are you saying basically itā€™s nostalgia or something else like that?

Not nostalgia as thatā€™s generally for a whole era, more like certain experiences more or less imprint on people.

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aha office space joke. I donā€™t think anyone under like 30 even watched office space so weā€™re reaching the point where red stapler + tps report doesnā€™t mean anything.

This game actually really does the mid 00ā€™s office space malaise really well. Like to the point where I could say itā€™s a period piece. the old CS:Source version of CS_Office. The office levels feel like the backrooms before the backrooms.

One thing I hate are The fuckin invisible electric ninjas. I hate invisible enemies in FPSes!! theyā€™re unfair and cheap! Even though stalker has them too!

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theyā€™re not actually invisible in stalker though they have a similar visual effect to anomalies which is already something your paranoiac zoned out ass is always searching for

but theres mods make them so they cant be hit when invisible and mods that make anomalies actually invisible so im coasting on easy street right now

i shut off the brain scorcher by the way and i have all these handgun bullets left

IM USING BIG BEN NOW SO I HAVE NO USE FOR HANDGUN BULLETS

lets watch a zombie get sucked up by an anomaly! you gotta use your eyes real good cuz if i got any closer i would be shot to death by monolith men in exosuits, and theyā€™re suicidally devoted to their murderous cause





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image

same hat

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instant neuron firing detected:

:servbotsalute:

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