You can but “reach” is a good word since you can often get to the room but deny you the relic because you don’t have some late game rock remover.
1 Like
i’m playing heaven burns red
i appreciate that the player character is one of the girls and extremely unserious (at least under my choices). why would i not pick the rude options? i chose to fall asleep when someone tried to talk to me, got into a yelling contest at the school opening ceremony, then yelled at the woman having a speech when she told me to shut up. the comedy is almost entirely the same tsukkomi routine over and over but while it’s not always funny it feels good in a horrible way to have this constantly exasperated friend screaming at my character.
the fights seem like meaningless bullshit, but you can walk around campus/base and go through times of day like it’s a persona (except sidescrolling). there’s the impression i’ll later get to choose how to spend some of my time and build relationships and dating sim stats.
the character designs don’t do much for me in that i can’t remember most characters after a first glance. it’s not fate/go in this regard, in which i could make quick judgments on if i’m going to care about someone or not (and often be wrong), but following along the script is fun enough so they might grow on me.
god, i wish project moon weren’t fucking despicable because as far as evil gacha goes i miss the cast of limbus company. vergilius was so immediately hot in a “i want this man to put out his cigarette on my skin” kinda way. sorry, what is this tangent? fucking gacha games. i’ll play heaven burns red until i don’t anymore.
7 Likes
I commented on this last month that it was a shame that they pulled their earlier steamfest demo as while I liked their prior game I couldn’t get a feel for this one. Well they made a new demo for it that is the first chunk of the game, so figured it was worth updating here.
Quick thoughts: is fairly story/talking heavy at least in the demo portion, sadly has a kinda poor feeling dash you are meant to use frequently (if you use it while in the air you always land with a crash that stops you dead in your tracks for a sec), honestly the demo doesn’t wow but looking back on the trailer afterwards I can better see how it could progress to something fairly interesting.
1 Like
Installs–without telling you–a separate program called “tavernworker”; not clear what it does–people say it’s scanning large sections of hard drive while the game is running, perhaps as some form of anti-cheat. Not uninstalled when you uninstall the game from Steam–have to uninstall separately via Add or Remove Programs, and then clean up the files it still didn’t remove. ; P
7 Likes
I tried Balatro for the first time yesterday. I’d kind of ignored it despite recommendations because I’ve already played Monster Train and why would I want that type of game that’s just normal playing cards? And besides, I’ve never learned how to play poker.
But now I see why it’s so popular. I managed to win a run today on maybe my fifth or sixth attempt. Even if I never play it again (which is possible, as I never played Slay the Spire again after beating an end boss once), I’m glad I gave it a chance.
The combination that did it for me was converting my deck to basically just two suits with an many aces as possible to go with my ace-triggered joker, and getting the “Holographic” joker early on so the multiplier increased every time I added a card for the whole run. It was up to 5x by the end.
And it was the green deck that I had the most luck with, as it provides constant income.
10 Likes
I have the strangest relationship with Cyberpunk where I find both the writing and the combat kind of bad but the interstitial scenes and other aspects along those lines very very compelling and so I wind up putting it on for like an hour a month and making next to no progress and having a good time with it, then god forbid I try to play a second hour I’m like ew
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I have a great love of art that is mistakenly believed to be reactionary when in reality it’s just really really tacky which is why I keep checking in every so often
6 Likes
reviews i saw indicated that the game starts slow and gets more interesting as it goes on, so i’d probably expect more to be introduced. i obviously don’t know. if it goes significantly on sale in the future i’ll buy it and try it probably since all of their games have been worth playing.
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every time they say choom I think of Obama
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time in heaven burns red is fake. so eventually you have to choose which hangout moments you want to be there for, but in order to play all of them you can just spend your daily refreshable energy to wind back time to when you choose and go through the rest
one of my immediate team members turns out is like that serial killer girl from the danganronpas but like, at least for now, flatter personality-wise and missing all the flavor of being a serial killing fujoshi. her personality in serial killer mode is sneering, laughing and repeating her killer name so you don’t forget. her other personality is quiet, sweet and non-existent. supposedly a gamer.
i hung out with the team hacker and protagonist convinced her freshly made ai to name itself and respond to ASS, and then bailed
i play one in-game day every real day, this way i wont be tricked into spending an entire day on what feels kind of like nothing
i also played a bunch of etrian odyssey 3 and the start is still rough. it feels like basic upkeep and maintaining warp wires exhaust my funds faster than i can make them and the sparse fishing doesn’t help. at least now my farmer has the warp home spell so i’ll be saving a lot of money that way. money problems make me feel that beelining through the exp buff of the farmer this early was a mistake, like my problems would’ve been way lessened if i had more regular item pickups in the dungeon.
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like it’s genuinely captivating in a way no other videogame is to just sit in a bar and watch panam or songbird talk, and to pace around outside then walk back in, but if you actually listen to half the shit they’re saying or have to go fulfill whatever quest objective they have for you then it’s dreck
it’s a very good “falling in love with someone for bad reasons” simulator. unfortunately this is maybe the only part of the game that I think is really good
I guess in the end it’s a better adaptation of new rose hotel or strange days than any other cyberpunk media
6 Likes
Gravity Rush 2 isn’t bad but it isn’t clicking with me as much as the original did and I’m not sure why. I think the original’s world was better built for the game’s flying system (also letting me invert the camera but not the flying controls hurts my head big time) and the story is just less charming if correct in its politics. It also does the thing of giving each region and people very gobbledygook sounding names so that I seemingly have a poor idea what is being talked about at any given time, the most recent example being it sounding like the counsel sending everyone except the super rich to work in the mines yet I landed in the town square and everyone was still there, so I assume they meant they just sent all the most poors to them. Again it isn’t bad but I had hoped it’d be a step up and sadly it went the other way.
3 Likes
A friend cursed me by getting me into MtG, via the online platform, MtG: Arena. It’s crazy how I get more frustrated in this game/environment than I do in DotA/OW2 at times. Granted, the time for a Magic round is far, far shorter, so if I feel like I’ve had enough, I can just walk away, but nonetheless.
Anyways, I’ve mostly been playing constructed. I wouldn’t mind playing more draft/limited, but all the draft formats are pay-to-enter (with free currency if you want, but nonetheless). They do often have nice scaling rewards, and you seem to generally keep the cards you draft for your own collection, so I guess that makes sense, but I wish they’d have add a draft format where you can just play without any entry bar, same as their constructed ranked formats. They don’t have to give you the cards you draft, or any special rewards beyond what you normally get for playing matches. I don’t know, like you register for a draft line-up, and then get to play 5 or 10 matches with that draft, before your deck is poof’d, and then you have to do it again? And you can choose to FF your match-queue if you are sick of your deck early, but it counts as losses. Something. WotC, hire me as a game designer!
ANYWAYS, I actually mainly only came here to gripe, but then added all that on spur of the moment. What I wanted to say was, what the hell is with all these people in Constructed (Alchemy) ranked with the same exact deck that they all clearly copied from somewhere off Reddit or whatever meta tracking website. Like seriously, I think at least 50% of all the matches I play with my entirely custom deck are vs this boring-ass black/white lifesteal perpetual-boost bat&vampire&angel deck.
Do they not feel some sense of shame and self-awareness when they realize that over half of the ranked games they play are mirror matches, and just a dice roll on who gets the best draw and early momentum? Is that actually fun? It’s annoying for me, just to have to face the same thing for the majority of my matches in a game where there are literally 27,000 unique cards for you to choose from and come up with a creative, viable deck (I know only like 10% of those are legal in standard play, but you get my point). There’s no way it isn’t even more bland and tedious for them to constantly mirror match.
I used to lose to it all the time too, which was originally part of my frustration. “Oh golly gee, I’m getting my rank stalled by boring meta-deck Google warriors, how fun.” But I’ve lately been beating them at least half the time, maybe more, so I guess it’s not even a particularly “OP” deck, and I just needed to better understand how my deck works against that one. So it’s literally just boring, why even bother at all at that point.
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gotta write my thoughts before i forget em all cos it’s gonna be too long until i continue my peg mission:
the last story (wii)
wow! i wasn’t expecting anything from this but i actually really enjoyed it. its low production values are deftly swept aside by its brevity and pacing; everything is always moving along at a great clip and you get to hit all the jrpg beats in like 1/4th the usual time.
i particularly appreciated the rate that new verbs were added to the combat, which maybe seems like damning with faint praise but it’s the kind of mechanical pacing that would get offloaded onto a skill tree nowadays (ew), whereas here it was just kinda dealt out without any scaffolding; you’d be in the middle of a battle when suddenly: here’s a new thing you can do! it was so nice to have that part of the progression not taking up any of my mental real estate.
it also looks awesome. not like, graphically or artistically (the character models and facial animations in particular are extremely uncanny at times) but like… as a videogame. each of the aforementioned combat verbs always elevated the average level of videogame-looking-ness; now there’s 3D lines tracking the aggro of every enemy, now there’s circles on the ground everywhere, now you’re running up walls and doing plunging attacks to break spells, like… this is videogames.
also this is a wii game that doesn’t use motion controls at all! what a treat! i get to enjoy bloomed-to-hell smeary muddy wii graphics while big sprawlin on my couch and never worrying about my relation to the wii-mote sensor. bless.
practical/technical stuff aside: this game is so good for hangin out. it’s so unobtrusive and light-hearted and relaxed. i wasn’t super down with the english accents at first (not helped by the weirdly pervasive and left-field sexism) but by the end i was chillin; and it’s better than americans tryna do ye olde fantasy voices.
i really liked the town, and i even liked the story well enough; it’s no great piece of literature, but it was nicely paced, and, again because of its size, it managed to not over-use its story-telling methods/gimmicks (introducing QTEs for the fight with asthar was so hype i was big yellin). it’s still very funny to me that the main bad guy is straight up just ganondorf, like… this game is on the same system as twiglit princess like… people are guna notice. lol.
i wish i had something smarter to say, some kinda thesis on Why This Game Is Good Actually, but hopefully the amount that i’ve written can suffice.
go play the last story it’s wonderful.
that’s the only game on my list that i’ve played since last time. next up is probably koudelka but that won’t be until next year cos i’m going away for christmas and i wanna play it at home on the CRT w buddies watching.
demon’s souls (ps3)
maybe you’ve heard of this one.
i played this a tiny little bit like way back in 2016 when i first moved in w dylan, but only up to the first boss (which i don’t think i beat cos i’d never played a fromsoft game at that point) so i basically went into this completely blind – i’ve never seen this played anywhere else and had no idea what to expect. turns out… it’s just (“just”) castlevania! it’s got big long linear-ish levels with high-spectacle and (mostly) low-difficulty bosses at the end of them. it rules!
now don’t get me wrong, i love birds-nest corkscrew gordian knot level design as much as the next idiot, but i was surprised at just how much i appreciated the more linear approach. it meant that the hard bit of each level was the run-up to the boss, rather than the boss itself. and as a result, bosses got to be way stupider and more gimmicky than they would become (by and large) in the later games, without overstaying their welcome. the few bosses that were more (what we would now consider) traditional, were the ones that stood out to me as the least fun entries, because i spent enough time in their respective levels that i was abraded by the inevitable rough patches.
a couple of my housemates are playing (“playing”) elden ring rn, and i found it so instructive to experience these two games in such close proximity. and it made me realise that i fucking hate elden ring. i don’t wanna dodge speedrunner-arms-race attack strings for 100 hours. i want encounter design god damn it! i want levels, not biomes!
speaking of, i cannot emphasise enough just how fucked up i was when i discovered that you can mantle some waist-high walls in certain places. my trust in the honesty of the geometry was absolutely devastated. it makes sense that they removed this in the later games but also it owns so much.
also also, it is wild to me how much stuff they got right on their “first” try. like easily 75% of what makes dark souls sick is right there in demon’s souls.
penny’s big breakaway (pc)
oh my god i love this game.
i actually played all the way through this when it was on super duper sale on humble bundle one time, but i enjoyed it so much that bought my own copy after moving to my new computer (it’s runs a-so-nice on my lil laptop) and god damn it is so good to boot up a game, play for 5 minutes, complete a level, then turn it off and go back to whatever i was doing feeling refreshed and inspired.
the movement is so expressive and elegant, and the speed is absolutely perfect (v important to me). the levels are (mostly) easy and a delight to navigate. there’s a lot of really subtle and low-key tech-flexes happening, especially in the water levels (which are also somehow the best levels; go figure); i will never tire of surfing across those beautiful sine waves.
i’m pretty sad (but not really surprised) that it didn’t review as well as it should have. i’ve been talking to my housemate stella (maybe one day i can convert her to the sb life) about this, and we agreed that it was probably a case of “getting what you asked for” syndrome; it’s the thing that sonic fans have been wanting for years: a good and inspired 3D sonic, with authentic jank and bugs and everything! that’s how you know it’s the genuine article! and as a result people are way more critical of relatively minor (and, were this an actual sonic game, maybe even expected and appreciated) problems than they might otherwise be.
idk. i don’t usually care about how well a game does, but this was such a delight that i’d hate for future works to be pre-emptively made more conservative as a result of gamer opinions.
anyway game rules. it’s probably my goty.
oh i also played cape hideous and i don’t have much to say about it other than it’s probably the best thing ever made and everyone should play it.
videogames! pretty alright sometimes.
23 Likes
kinda tempted to say that you should push to the next part of the game (it goes back to GR1’s city after the halfway-ish mark) but also I broke my brain doing treasure hunts in the favelas in not-Brazil so the idea of any of that having indistinct names and landmarks doesn’t register at all
every.
goddamn.
hunt.
7 Likes
FWIW I don’t think the game has those treasure hunts any longer, I think they were tied to the online portions which are no longer functional.
Also I mentally can tell the difference between the poor, middle class and rich sections of the game world and have a decent enough mental map of the upper two at least, but if you put a gun to my head and asked me which of them is Jirga Para Lhao (a name I just googled) I would likely die.
1 Like
going off the top of my head (note: I cannot tell you how long it’s been since I last played the game, possibly not since the day the Switch launched), you start at the docked slave town, that leads into the marketplace and then going clockwise, you have downtown, the shipping district and the park/rich people (although that’s also kind of middle-ish). descending puts you at the favelas and ascending puts you at the military and governing class
(note: I platinumed this video game)
most of the problem is that the first game clearly delineated each section with a theme and music, whereas the entire middle/sea level section of not-Brazil is its own region and none of the districts have a presentational identity so it mostly blurs
oh, I was there.
9 Likes
Hell yeah I played Last Story at US Release and only remember my one sentence review: JRPGs by way of Gears of War. And the town, vaguely. Also who the last boss is.
I really wanted to like Penny and then uh…didn’t. I’ll buy it next time it is on sale, I suppose.
4 Likes