games you played today: winning eleven

[american2004]

yakuza: like a dragon -
this is like the south park jrpg but with addictive mini games. my knowledge of what a good jrpg is is limited, I’ve only beaten and loved Star Ocean 2, SMT3, SMT:DDS, and FFX. i got close to beating G.O.D. Growth Or Devolution but my xbox xs emulator save got wiped. i felt a spirit playing those that i don’t feel playing this. i don’t think this is a good jrpg, but i will beat it

sid meier’s civilization six -
this is my first civilization game. i wish there was romance options. i’m buddhist gilgamesh and i want to fuck abraham lincoln

[OneSecondBefore]

I just finished Crow Country. Not bad. By-the-books retro survival horror with a modern control scheme (but the option to switch to tank controls). I didn’t find it especially scary, but that’s OK. It’s a gorgeous game. It has sort of an mid-90’s CD-ROM aesthetic. I never messed around with that CD-ROM the band The Residents made, Bad Day on the Midway, but this is sort of how I’d imagine that looked. Aside from one incredibly poorly designed optional puzzle (the mushroom one, for anyone who’s played it), it’s straightforward, simple but satisfying adventure game puzzling. Not a lot of friction. Pretty short, which I appreciated.

The story was alright. I didn’t care about any of the characters, but I was hooked by the mystery of the player character’s identity. There was some clever stuff there. I liked how her observations of her environment revealed details about her that cast doubt on what the game initially told you about her. You think she’s an adult cop at first, but then you inspect a cigarette machine and she’s like, “I’m not allowed to smoke those”.

I also liked the main supernatural conceit. The twist wasn’t that original, but the way it was executed was cool. MAJOR SPOILER: What if a La Jetée situation were interrupted by a robber baron from the present unknowingly strip mining the time portal’s infrastructure for gold, causing the time travellers from the future to emerge mutated and aggressive due to miscalibrations… and they’re carrying a horrible plague from their post-apocalyptic time.

It’s the coziest survival horror game I’ve played. It doesn’t do anything radical or new… It’s an enjoyable time if you like the genre.

[lofia]

been on a slightly annoying tangent trying to figure out what i want to play, if anything at all. sometimes i grind for gil in ffx so i can buy some stuff from that one travelling merchant guy, and when i get bored of that (like 10 minutes usually) i either run around learning blue mage spells in ffxiv or i browse steam, eshop or pstore and get real indecisive and critical about my shopping habits.

ALL THAT SAID there was a break in the clouds today and i just ran around in an expedition taking pictures of endemic life and other creatures in monster hunter rise. you can spend so much time waiting for a poisontoad to do a cute thing so you can take a photo of it. instead of just watching altaroths suck up honey you can watch and take a picture of one when they do. i am looking forward to zoning out again and taking photos of more bugs.

[falsedan]

@daphaknee

bad mannersing

I think it without the ‘s’, so it sounds like

[wourme]

I have played some more Stellar Blade, that game I started out of obligation but gradually warmed up to. It continues to do impressive things and also annoying things. My overall opinion leans positive, though. I’ve been a little surprised at how much body horror there is.

I think my favorite part of the game is the way the lighting looks on the spiral stairs in the luxury suite of the space elevator. And I don’t even have a 4K/HDR display.

[ArOne]

Sat down and did a full course Mouthwashing session. Grade A+++ experience. The influence from Evangelion and Anno’s love of words across the screen is thick about it but unlike the former it feels much more strongly woven into the thematics and tone of the experience. Just really beating you on the head with it for the parts that might be a little to subtle. Loved it. Would take a brain wipe to play it again.

[MimeParadox]

Hanging out in the River City Girls 2 post-game, finishing the fetch quests and trying to see if I can get that one locked door to open–I now suspect it opens automatically on New Game Plus–and was fighting in a particular room with one bar of stamina left, and then suddenly the screen changes, normally a solid indicator that I’d lost the battle with not dying.

…except, instead of the game over screen, I enter what turns out to be one of the game’s secret rooms, which is just distinct enough and unexpected enough that for a moment I thought the game had a mechanic where sometimes you just Chris Houlihan yourself into Kunio-kun heaven. But no, it just turns out the game has secret rooms, so that’s another thing I have to traverse the city looking for.

Still, those fetch quest occasionally come with actual good rewards. By far the best is an accessory that changes the gravity settings so that actions that normally only move characters a few feet instead violently rocket them across the screen with a violence, which is bad for combos but still really satisfying to see.

[Mikey]

Pwned by your own petard

[Felix]

just beat a very difficult Rogue Trader boss called the INCONGRUOUS DEFILER lmao

this game has a really really excellent power/difficulty curve where toward the late game you are fighting exponentially harder and stronger bosses and somehow managing to keep up. it makes their irrational addiction to throwing boring trash mobs at you in the early game seem even sillier in hindsight because the encounter design is actually quite good once it finally ramps up a lot… on Daring (1 click above normal) difficulty I am winning a lot of these later boss fights on my 2nd/3rd try by the skin of my teeth which feels perfect

[Kilroy]

23 missions left to S rank in Armored Core 6. It’s getting very frustrating though.

[Rudie]

Metal Warriors for SNES: Owns

Nights Into Dreams: OWNS

Detana Twinbee for PC Engine Hucard: Fantastic. I managed to Loop 1 Clear it tonight. No one Loves The Bell System, but with skies this blue and a game this relatively easy going it worked out.

[Sykel]

After Mikey talked it up, I tried to play Metamorphosis some more but my opinion hasn’t changed much.

It definitely gets better after I first stopped… the environments and writing gets better, and I enjoyed exploring the insect society. But it still feels like a game primarily made by environment designers, and I got sick of al the mid platforming and fetch quests. And while the insect chatter is amusing, the story itself doesn’t go anywhere and it really feels like they didn’t know how to expand or explore Kafka’s works in any meaningful or interesting way.

I ended up YouTubing the rest of the game (and glad I did). It could have been a really cool game but yeah, it feels pretty underdeveloped. Glad I ended up playing/watching the whole thing though, there was enough interesting things going on even if it didn’t all come together

[Mikey]

I feel like we’re basically on the same page, I just summoned the will to push through the dull fetch questing. A very good game for screenshots

[Tegiminis]

Finally resumed my Command & Conquer revisit after stopping in January and I realized why I stopped: Generals is simply not very good. My nostalgic recollection of it betrayed me.

The campaigns are only 7 missions long, and the missions are only 10-20 minutes, but they feel an hour long and somehow the pathfinding, unit AI, and just generally everything about it has gotten worse. There’s also minimal novelty missions like no-builds or commando missions - the only real example is probably the Chinese mission where you have to blow up a train bridge, which was maybe the highlight of the playthrough - in favor of base-build slogfests through cramped maps. I beat several missions by just dropping infantry behind the enemy lines and capturing their buildings. Garrisoned troops are significantly worse in this one.

Also there’s no real plot or FMVs??? Like… c’mon!

Hoping Zero Hour is better.

Edit: I’m two missions into Zero Hour and it’s already 10000% better lol

[thecatamites]

continued trying to scratch the cdrom itch by playing Star Trek TNG: A Final Unity, a multimedia game i found at a thrift store in one of those big old boxed editions by the excellently named Spectrum Holobyte.

mostly it’s an adventure game - you select dialogue choices and then have point and click segments done in a sorta maniac mansiony way where you have to select what batch of guys you want to teleport there and switch between. BUT there’s also a crazy amount of totally optional simulationism under the hood for star trek micromanagement perverts. some of the UI is great!! i assume this is based on something from the show but having your navigation screen be this and getting to spin it yourself and like click big chunky buttons to slowly move your cursor around a 3d space unit by unit is very appealing

i have no idea whether you even need to use this screen bc most of the plot related flying is handled automatically. but you can set space coordinates and warp speed manually if you want. i think it might just be there to let people fly directly into black holes for funny game overs?

similarly there’s an engineering screen with a dozen inscrutable sliders for all the parts of the ship you can move power to during fights… or you can let geordi do it automatically. there’s a tactical combat screen with different individual buttons for every possible type of dogfight maneuver, including options to specify whether you make a barrel roll clockwise or counterclockwise… or you can let worf do it automatically. in each case the automatic option is on by default. i refuse to believe 90% of these buttons even do anything but they might???

i’m choosing to believe this isn’t a videogame abstraction and this is really how starfleet computers work in a post-scarcity future where humanity is free to chase its dreams of weird interface design

the adventure game part is like… a mixture of fussy adventure game logic with fussy startrek logic. i tried to teleport a lady out from under some fallen machinery but the teleporter was i guess not in great shape so it just materialised her dead body on the floor instead. it seems pretty generous about the extent to which you can fuck up and keep playing, and its kind of charming being able to three stooges your way across the galaxy.

[MimeParadox]

Decided to buy Fashion Dreamer, because it was the one fashion game most easily visible on the Switch store and it was on sale. Unsurprisingly, it is woefully deficient when it comes to body type diversity for characters, and while it knows well enough to not try to say it segregates clothes by gender, that doesn’t stop it from actually segregating clothes. Less egregious but still annoying is that it seems like I won’t be able to find corsets that actually work as shapewear, or silhouette-altering clothes at all–boo to the game for not catering to my specific fixations.

That aside, I’m having tons of fun creating looks for María–my initial “muse”–and for the various other characters she encounters. One day in, I’ve also gotten some people online to create looks for me, which is I really appreciate.

One of my first real looks for María

I did not copy them; they copied me.

An actual consistent style begins to emerge, with various items “designed” (recolored) by me.

I do quite like the variety in hairdos.

Finally, two looks made for me by what I hope are actually real live humans.

[winterk]

I’m consistently blown away by the attention to detail, smoothness, and stability of Baldur’s Gate III, now that I’m finally playing it. You can tell the team were overflowing with cool ideas and I’m glad they’re doing their own thing now instead of giving Hasbro an officially licensed Spelljammer or Planescape or etc. game.

[Tulpa]

baldur’s gate 3 is already like 50% a spelljammer game. It’s about space aliens invading faerun

so I’m glad we got one good spelljammer game out of the curse of working on D&D licensed products

[Kilroy]

I’m 10% of the way through Armored Core 3 with 100% success rate for missions. Going to save scum to make sure this remains the case. The old armored core games are so hard to afford parts in lol