Nine Sols so good
4 Likes
Any tips? I find the parry timing is far too wide and the Unparryable bounce attack awkward.
Like ironically I would find it easier if it was harder. The ātellā before the attack is half a second too long.
1 Like
I am not very good at it so I am not having that problem, and itās necessary for the tells to take a while because you will get an ability to parry those attacks midgame that takes longer to do than the regular parry which is almost instant. Iām going to sayh that I kind of hate that ability, not sure if that one was inspired by Seikiro like the general parry mechanic but itās releasing the parry button to block those attacks and it feels kinda bad to pull off, unlike much of the game prior.
4 Likes
21 missions left in AC 6 now, and every single one of them is a chore.
7 Likes
In my Top 100 I made the comment evidence suggests you canāt make a better game than Rocket Knight Adventures. Based off the 3 other times they tried (The Evidence) Iām right.
i watched Booji play Sparkster Genesis yesterday and I keep thinking about it. He got to a boss where you have to line up and do a fully powered dash toā¦unscrew a screw. You have to do this 5 times. It is unpleasant for a number of reasons but it is repulsive to me. I am completely turned off playing the game because of this tedious horseshit. I was saying crazy things like Mic and Mack Global Gladiators was more fun (it is.)
I feel like something is calcifiying in me in The Year Of The Super Famicom to absolutely not-suffer inert tedium. Itās the textual thing as holding down a button to charge a shitty high jump to clear a higher than normal block or using the red laser on the red enemy.
Itās a level of hardlock that failure is not on the table but success is a lock and the game hands you the key and says put the key in the lock. I canāf fuss with and cheat or wiggle. I can only do exactly what the game asks me.
This is why people like Mario. And like Seiken Densetsu 4.
15 Likes
Monotonous Bullshit Non-choices.
If you do not make a decision, did you play a game?
4 Likes
I played Revolution Idle for a few days and it gave me an existential crisis about the pointlessness of action that is keeping me from sleeping right now.
Action in the sense of āto actā. Like all actions are in a chain that inevitably lead to death and what is the point. Like sure donāt hurt people, care for your loved ones as a default but that seems so rote.
Anyway, I canāt say that I liked it.
6 Likes
SSX (PS3)
Iāve never really been into board sports, winter sports, or EA Sports for that matter, but somehow this game directly stimulates something passing for a pleasure center in my dumb brain. Mash buttons and levers while falling down a stupidly steep frozen mountain and the game lavishes wild audios and videos upon you. Iāve read that the early games in the seriesārather than this last, reboot oneāare funkier, more arcadey, more beloved, but I tried SSX Tricky for instance and felt nothing. So itās something kinda particular to whatever it is EA Canada did here and Iām glad they did and that an old podcast I happened to listen to 12 years later mentioned liking it.
The game is sub-$10 used on eBay, and still on PS3 PSN for $20, along with a couple DLC things: I skipped the retro characters pack but got the free whatsit and the paid one that adds another mountain or something.
Runs good for me in RPCS3 with a few tweaks:
- Configuration - Audio - Enable Time Stretching: checking this box fixed music stuttering
- Manage - Game Patches - 1280x720 Resolution, 60 FPS: enabled 'em, definitely smoother with the 60fpsāand the gameās default resolution is apparently 1120x584 ; D
6 Likes
I havenāt played yet but have purchased the next game in the Eldrum series. I guess I showed up at exactly the right time to binge the series, having just finished the first two
2 Likes
not today but last Saturday for game night, my theme: āHigh as a Cloud, No Guns Allowedā. the impetus being to introduce friends to Sky Odyssey. secondary objective: experience the arc of Pilot Wings from SNES to 3DS with Kaze no Notam and Magic Carpet thrown in for good measure.
Pilot Wings - Mode 7 Heaven. never saw this on the SNESes I encountered growing up. strikes me as rather hip in its business casual presentation from the cursive logo to the classy tunes by Soyo Okaā¦sound font flirts with the cartoonish
as do the instructors
and you can play as a high diving penguin during bonus stages
but it feels like itās talking to me like Iām an adult. with a job. who likes little play tasks every now and then! tasteful, no-wasteful seasoning of the meat and potatoes (still) novel technology in a way that made me want to savor it more than subsequent entries because the gap between the activities itās attempting to recreate and its ability to do so is wide enough to make for abstractions that feel crunchier and more satisfying to grapple withā¦a yearning simulation compared to later games that possess more nuanced/accurate physics fidelity. itās good! especially enjoyed rolling my little skydiver in the air, the seeing and the feeling of that. apparently your instructors get kidnapped at some point and you have to rescue them in an attack helicopter under fireā¦maybe I will play little bits of this each day in the salaryman (or at least adult with a job) fashion for which I (without much evidence) imagine this might have been considered and get that far
Roger Waters gets it (?) 1:43
Sky Odyssey is one of my favourite games and was well received but I thought we might be able to beat it in one night, absolutely underestimating the learning curve for new people! an ecstatic genericness to this one I adore, from the cover art to the intro pre-rendered cutscene to the UI to the graphics to the you-could-almost-mistake-it-for-text-to-speech narrator and the slow start to some of the missions, my heart sank a little that people might find this one Boring but gradually it revealed itself, through the plane controls, the different mission twists, the spiritually uplifting music, the plane upgrades, the branching paths. in the end people realised this was a great game even if it was going to take more than one night to really get into it. was entertaining to see people struggle and eventually start to come to grips with the controls, watching the little overcorrections and panic that develops into wildly flailing to avoid canyon walls, sometimes pulling out of it, sometimes eating it, some of my favourite video game control moments
Magic Carpet further highlights the tech demo nature of a few of these flight games (Pilot Wings of course being launch titles) or as Peter put it on Bad Influence, āweāve got the engine, now we have to squeeze a game in thereā
pretty impressive for '94/'95! Iād poked at this one casually over the years just flying around shooting rock worms and birds without a clue. this time we consulted the substantial guide and wow: use your default āPossessā projectile (not a gun!) to possess city tents which gain you Mana. find the spell jar that allows you to shoot fireballs and kill rock worms and birds for Mana (which plops out as orbs that physically react with the terrain and bounce and roll around in a quite satisfying way (pure tech demo bravado if I had to guess (the ones in Fable donāt behave like that do they? Iām too lazy to check but maybe this is a Molyneux-ism))) BUT you have to switch back to your Possess spell and shoot these loose orbs and turn them milky white to actually claim the Mana for yourself. once you have enough Mana, you can use the Building spell projectile. to start with, fire into the terrain. your modest castle polygonally mesh-morphs out of the ground. shoot the castle and it evolves into a bigger castle, with a hot-air balloon. the hot-air balloon will go and fetch the milky white orbs and bring them back to the castle for more Mana. more Mana means you can grow a bigger castle until the game is impressed enough and lets you advance to the next (of 50!) levels, sometimes after a pre-rendered cutscene (from 2:06 on, pretty sick)
eventually you encounter evil wizards and more beasts that want to attack your castles and hot-air balloons and there are a lot more spells and I guess it becomes something of a base building flight shooter THINGā¦idk if I find that promising enough for a deep dive butā¦pretty neat game (that I had to hack to un-invert the controls because I personally found it awful to play otherwise). I will say, this put some people on the verge of sleep and I get it. woozy first person camera movement, the constant lulling hum of wind, the sparse repetetive orientalist musical motifsā¦when youāre not fire blasting howling rock worms, hypnogogic stuff
also this story on wikipedia about the early days of Bullfrog (then known as Taurus):
āOne day, Taurus received a call from the head of Commodore Europe, wanting to discuss the future of the Amiga and Taurusā softwareās suitability for the system.[3][4] Molyneux was invited to Commodore Europeās headquarters, where he was offered several Amiga systems and a space at a show in Germany.[3][4] When Molyneux was told that they were anticipating getting his network running on the Amiga, he realised that they had mistaken his company for one called Torus, a producer of networking systems.[3][4] Molyneux wanted the Amiga systems, so he did not inform Commodore of this error.[4] He received them and began writing a database program called Acquisition.[3] Commodore kept asking about the database, and Molyneux gave them excuses because they were threatening to shut Taurus down.[3] When Acquisition was finished, it was shown at the exhibition in Germany, and won product of the year. 2,000 copies were sold to a company in the United States, giving Molyneux and Edgar funds to sustain Taurus.[3]ā
always the grifter!
My personal history with Pilot Wings 64 is, at the launch of the N64, I paid for half of the console with lawnmowing/dog-sitting money while my parents paid the other half for my birthday and at my birthday party we were to play Super Mario 64 (rented from Blockbuster because I could only afford the console!) well my mom came back with Pilot Wings 64 because they were out of Marios. think we went to play outside after about 45 minutes with itā¦I just recall the pre-teen boy snickering that was had over Robin, the busty lady pilotā¦hey, the game knew what it was doing
game looks and sounds tackier than its predecessor (yes, Birdmanās Theme BUT it aināt all on that level, thereās some real somnambulant SNL Blues Brothers band blandness going on) and what struck me immediately was the comparitive lack of friction, this kind of full 3D game action having evolved and been metabolised as Standardā¦it fell kinda flat. itās an ok game though! of course at the time it was all so novel and it fulfilled its purpose I guess and I know it gets much more challenging but idk I became too aware of the Go-Through-The-Ringādness of it all. of course we did at least get far enough to shoot Mario/Wario on Mount Rushmore (and I particularly appreciate the way the LOD textures on Warioās face fade in and out according to distance)
Kaze no Notam knows whatās up. donāt be too much game. have Hiroshi Nagai cover art. have an absolute banger of an OST. have bold, unconventional graphic designed for the main menu. have basic hot-air balloon print customisation to make the player feel some sense of āselfā in your uncaring skies. the cultured taste-havers will forgive everything else and even romanticise and poeticise the lack of control and being at the mercy of five winds, stacked on top of each other to be ascended or descended between as invisible train tracks pushing the player above the sparse terrain as they consult the map, gradually honing in on their target andā¦maybe they wonāt realise they have to throw a beanbag on to the target rather than land on it because everything is in Japanese but they will have got close enough that upon finding this out later, a sense of achievement is exhaled. play it with a firm focus that rests on a billowing blanket of zen resignation. pretty sure itās a work of art. idk how much/if Iāll play it again but pretty sure it is!
Pilot Wings Resort is played with Miis and they are here with bloom smeared Wii graphics and, a few tracks aside, some gross Wii Music instrumentated musak. The contemporary lack of friction no longer has the excuse of the N64ās āhad to be thereā novelty. The Go-Through-The-Ringādness of it all is laid bare, front and centre, a souless Newtendo sushi conveyor belt of escalating content to consume with no character of its own beyond Needed Launch Title (also comically forgiving at least early on, clearly failed an objective and it still gave us a bunch of pity points to keep us onboarded). like it doesnāt even have the curio whiff of āweāve got the engine, now we have to squeeze a game in thereā. idk, itās playableā¦and too boring to hate on or articulate the obvious arc of the Pilot Wings series, nobodyās favourite series!
28 Likes
20 left. One a day might be a reasonable goal.
4 Likes
XCOM 2
A while ago, I put an evening into trying this game again but the comic book aspect made me bounce off again. This game just isnāt for me, I canāt deal with the writing. The mad supercomputer mission that one of the bridge crew joins the away team for was the last straw. I wonder how Xenonauts 2 is doing; itās been in early access for a year and a half.
Citizen Sleeper
I finally played second and third sessions of this. The second one was like 5 hours? The game has hooked me on its simple pattern-matching mechanics (you get up to 5 six-sided dice per turn, pre-rolled, to assign to actions; 1s and 2s are good for hacking in cyberspace, higher numbers are better for acting in the real world) mixed with Civilizationās addiction engine of watching reward countdowns tick down turn by turn, plus task prioritization and some resource management. The writing is all right; the worldbuilding is good but thatās a more rarefied concern than the prose quality, which is a bit flat or dry or something. It reminds me of reading a roleplaying scenario; a table full of players moving through this would do a lot to hydrate it.
It is successful as a game in that Iām compelled to see it through to the end. I do have to wonder if itās actually possible to lose without going out of your way to, and how many of the plotlines have resolutions beyond completing or abandoning them. I am finding this game inspiring through its imperfections, not necessarily in spite of them.
8 Likes
We are predator handclasping over how good sky odyssey and kaze no notam are
7 Likes
Iblard Laputa until the day I die.
9 Likes
A game I never heard of but looked cool called Neckbreak was on sale on the eShop so I picked it up. The trailer made it look like a boomer shooter but itās actually more like first person hotline miami. All the action bits are in tiny areas that last about 20 seconds at the most. You die easily, but itās very satisfying to do well in these sections.
There is lots of adventure game/imsim lite stuff going on between all the killing that i really enjoy too. has a great atmosphere and i love the neon soaked aesthetic even if the lighting makes it hard to see sometimes. exploring the cyberpunky world is fun.
bit worried about the story, it feels like itās trying to do the ācommentaryā on violence that hotline miami did, plus reliance on prescription drugs and shitty corporations, etc. and so far itās it swings between cliche and juvenile. but itās still early, maybe it will subvert my expectations. also reminds me a bit of action doom 2 in that itās kinda like a 3D beat 'em up with way too much edginess
but yeah having a blast with it so far.
8 Likes
Infinity Nikki: okay
what would likely happen if you shoved Mario Odyssey, Sonic Frontiers, Genshin Impact, a dress up game and gambling into a blender
and then you poured it out onto your phone
I would probably be declaring this the last platformer anyone would need if Nikki could run and had jank speed tech
3 Likes
BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3: I OPENED A PORTAL TO HELL IN THE FAVELA TRYING TO REVIVE MIT AIA I NEED TO CLOSE IT, a Quake 1 TC
13 Likes
elden ringā¦ they inflated dark souls making it big and round but not in the way anyone was googling about. be careful what you wish forā¦ - the wishmaster.
sort of works for me just bc stumbling down holes and trying to avoid skill tests as much as possible is what i enjoy about all these but keep thinking how funny it is that they solve the traditional way these games sort of crumble apart in the back by just making that first half like a billion hours long. design innovation in AAA!
i do like the teleporter traps alot though thatās a weird old rpg thing i was happy to see return. and a general willingness to just throw you around that big map arbitrarily. if they keep making these i hope they start putting in those spinner traps from a bards tale.
21 Likes
I wanted to play a game yesterday and definitely sat on my steam library staring at Elden Ring, which I have had installed for like a year now, for a full 90 seconds before finally making the call and hitting uninstall. Then I went and bought Heavenās Vault, Scorn, and Talos 2 instead.
11 Likes