Played through 95 percent of Parking Garage Rally Circuit.
I love a racing game thats this mechanic heavy.
You only really use gas and drift. The cars themselves are not fast while driving normally. The game is all about drifting untill sparks appear releasing to get a boost and then trying to get into another drift before the boost runs out. Boosts stack in terms of speed and duration. So the more you do it the longer it lasts on release. While sliding you maintain your speed and get stuck to the ground allowing you to slide over crests that would normally send you flying. As the tracks are mostly very tight spaces it becomes like a little action puzzle where no traditional racing knowledge or technique is needed.
Its a tight, fast game that gets you into the action instantly. Perfect coffeebreak game.
Thoughts on presentation
its visually gorgeous and most importantly easy to read at speed. The physics can make it accidently hilarious.
Its annoyingly āretroā however with bad crt shaders and 4:3 scaling options, frame rate limiters and such on by default (if i recall right). Turn them off. The game is easier and more fun at higher frame rates with a wider field of view. I think the game is such a frantic experience and so unlike any older game that presentation customization of this type is sort of meangless. Chunky cute rally cars were not the subject of racing games in the 90s and when they did make rally games they took pains to be overly serious with a veneer of realism.
They also didnt have amazing live instrument sound tracks like this game. Though ive come to hate the song āanother levelā due to repetition of the refrain.
Over the past few weeks I have been playing Meteorfall which is a deck building roguelike yadayada. Maybe mechanically the most interesting thing it does is that spell cards have charges that either need to be recharged by other ability cards or when you elect to rest at certain times in each run.
The gameās artist, Evgeny Viitman, strongly channels Adventure Time in the player character and enemy portraits. Like honestly one guy is just Finn with armor and a beard lol
played a bit of saints row '22 and it is still amazingly wild how off the mark they were thinking that people who play these things want to hang out with quirky relatable suburban millennial sitcom roommates
Wanderstop. I have on my notepad āBoring?ā but this isnāt quite right. The premise is that you are the worldās greatest fighter but have become burnt out and during a trip to see a combat master to train with, you get trapped in the middle of the forest by your own exhaustion. Because youāre too physically exhausted to go anywhere you are gently coerced into working for a mid-forest rest-stop that only serves tea. The game loop is you planting, growing, making, drinking, and serving tea. The game and plot both want you to take it slow and not try to rush or optimise too much.
This is Davey Wredenās next thing and it feels like the project is trying to do something with the cosy game genre but has been beaten to the punch by how weird and twisted many cosy game premiseās already are. This just feels quaint by comparison. Stress = bad! Take it slow. It seems to suggest cosy games could be a good meta contrast to the many action and combat games that are highly stressful. The problem with this is most cosy games basically make this case by simply existing and showing their pleasures and have done so for a long time.
The game offers a lot of sassy dialogue options and the ability to constantly prolong or completely shut down conversations is neat but thereās not really the wiggle room to enjoy roleplay or much of a payoff to a lot of this except to just say āoh itās neat they did thatā.
Although itās primarily a fantasy setting there are many anachronisms(?) that kinda irked me. I think itās meant to be part of a running joke that there isnāt really a consistent world. People constantly refer to things like astronauts or everyday modern technology but also witches literally cursing people and fighting arenas where people swordfight. Probably the clearest connection to The Stanley Parable writing-wise which also played fast and loose with having no grounded reality but it fit much better there because of what it was doing. In Wanderstop I feel like it just threatens to undermine the tone which wants us to seriously treat burnout as an impetus to change gears. Like somebody wants to write a comedy game and is sneaking in what they can into their dayjob.
As for the actual gameplay, the music is super chill but doing everything isnāt really that relaxing. I find having to juggle the orders and inventory spaces actually was a little stressful. I wonder if it could have just had a far more automated set of actions and if this really wouldāve hurt things. Like why not make it extra easy and let us just relax as we go rather than get hung up on all the stuff. People are griping that thereās no twist like The Beginnerās Guide but I think it just needs to have its goal refined. Do we want to say something or just make a relaxing experience?
I do think the area around the tea shop is good at that very particular game quality where you just run around a space for its own sake. Iām a couple of hours in and I can see that the tea recipes and your characterās back story are the two big carrots for things to develop along but Iām not hugely compelled.
I love starting a mission in GTA 3 and going ādaphny would absolutely fucking hate this.ā This time it was the first mission for the yardies where you compete with three suicidally dangerous AI drivers, plus the orientation of the start line is reversed if you approach it from the payphone, and the checkpoints spawn all over the fucking place including behind you. And guess what: they hate that fucking mission!
those fucking missions! it doesnt matter who wins as long as you lose. they want the checkpoint to spawn directly behind you and before you can turn around two cars come and t-bone you on either side. thats their goal
I got the itch to hurt my brain in a very specific way again so it is time to play the next Zachlike on my list, which is Infinifactory. It threw me off with an initial bit which is like a simple first person walking simulator that exists solely for you to get used to the controls, donāt really associate the companyās games with likeā¦ polygons or existing inside a physical space.
Got through the first two areas and it hasnāt been that hard just yet, the last few I did were the first where I had to stop and think things out for a bit before executing a plan that more or less worked after a few alterations. Iāve mostly been relatively efficient which means it must be early on, Iām sure Iāll soon hit the āwell it was ugly but it workedā point of my playthrough.
The demo for this game is fantastic. If you want 2001 edgelord internet directly into your veins and I apparently do. I couldnāt believe how much the poison nostalgia wrapped itself around me. I yelled āHell Yeahā right before the game yelled back āHell Yeah.ā
It is of course spawned from Sonic-fangame so it has an absolute ridiculous Smash-Bros level of tech to it. It was intimidating. I couldnāt handle it. I did manage to UNALIVE the boss with my 500 caliber sniper rifle.
Will buy on release. Not sure I can handle playing it. If you like 2000s internet, anime metal AMVs, absolute bullshit 3D Platformer tech and the level design to encourage it then youāll enjoy this. The demo made me laugh a lot. I also felt that deep recessed part of my teenager self coming to the surface and had to make a concentrated effort not to say bad words so maybe didnāt like what kind of person I became piloting the Psycho Gundam/playing 500 Caliber Contractz.
part of this is the trailer for the game heavily implies that thereās some kind of twist. i was kind of shocked when i found out that it is basically just a normal ācozy gameā except that itās āabout traumaā because that wasnāt the impression i was getting from that trailer at all + knowing it was a Davey Wreden game.
Iāve heard people argue that the initial premise is the twist but itās like the kind of idea you throw out in a conversation thatās not really strong enough for a whole game premise. Like if it was an action game that pivoted to cosy or vice versa or became a hybrid then maybe weād have some interesting friction.
I think what I was hoping for, at minimum, was that the gameās control scheme was for an action game, but they take the sword out of your hand and you still have to use those controls for watering plants.
They do a little of that with the animations for gathering tea leaves and sweeping being more traditional weapon swing movements but idk if it goes much further.
Makes me want a main line sports game where the career mode actually starts with your athlete being like 35 and on the verge of retirement after a journeymanās type of career. You play like three games of actual sports action and then itās a sim where you invest in a small business
