i feel like if it had come out now atom rpg would have AI slop portraits but it’s kind of charming that they just stole as many pictures as they could from the internet. I’ve run into the Village Detective from the old Soviet movie of the same name, Shurik’s neighbor from Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession, a depiction of Aliya Moldagulova from an old postage stamp, one of the guys from Psy/Stray Dogs and uh Jay from Red Letter Media as a neo nazi who runs a snuff torture dungeon. it really feels like the post-soviet culture version of Wasteland
6 Likes
the indie eurojank fallout clone of choice is Underrail imo
3 Likes
underrail is great, it’s mechanically way more interesting but I like how unhinged this game is and how sometimes you’ll randomly get critically hit in the eyes for all your HP by an insect
4 Likes
Just like how bees were the most dangerous monster in od&d
To be fair I would lose all my hp if a mosquito stabbed my eyeball
8 Likes
Last night I played the Jean Claude Van Damme mission in Hitman. I flubbed it at the end (there are so many scientists in one area you gotta clear, my gambit of “chuck a wrench in a corner to distract one and throw bottles of chloroform at the others to knock them out” didn’t pan out) but it’s a pretty funny mission overall.
5 Likes
oh, this was the other day but i played an hour or more of mario odyssey on my nephew’s nintendo. i ended up teaching him how to make a mii avatar for your profile so he had to make a peter griffin one for himself. are kids super into family guy because of fortnite or something?
anyway, mario odyssey is like… FINE I GUESS
it’s no (insert old person game here) and certainly no (insert itch.io platformer here)
it’s huge and there’s something everywhere and you have decently versatile movement even tho it’s straining against some kinda limitations, probably cause nintendo don’t want a repeat of their best 3d platforming, and then the joycons also kinda suck some joy out of it, such miserable devices
it does all the things a sorta expensive extremely tested game should be doing with surface level weirdness that makes people talk about how crazy it is to see a “normal” human next to mario and then you redirect a bosses attack back at them three times and get moon bananas
it’s perfectly all right and fun actually but like… i can’t feel particularly inspired? i don’t need to play this game actually.
also played a bunch of a restarted run of 7th dragon while away and this game is both annoying and cool. i feel somehow really frustrated through story scenes, altho i love running around and talking to everyone getting updated non-essential dialog. i don’t know what makes me prioritize like this.
my party is a gloomy chuuni princess, a preciously serious samurai, a cheeky rogue gal and a sleepy fluffy boy wizard. specced the princess for ailments after my hexer experience and i’m happy to say it’s all working out. ailment characters are very good actually, it’s fun putting the huge enemy party to sleep and then take them all out while they are helpless. dungeon rpgs are all about being an efficiently murderous monster and we’re doing it. steadily exterminating all 666 dragons watching that metroid counter go down. neat game.
15 Likes
lifeformed is great! co-composer Janice Kwan is also very good and i suspect some of my favorite melodies are hers
anyway, far as the game goes i’ve continued making progress. wow, the beginning of the game really is quite sloggy, huh? it breezes up a fair bit once you get the shield.
the fucking combat, though. it’s just. not very good? and there’s SO much of it. and the healing flask starts out SO weak, ugh.
i’m enjoying it alright still. it has a lot of moodiness, which i attribute to the lighting and soundtrack. i enjoy looking at the manual, it’s nicely drawn and laid out.
it still threatens oversaturating my tolerance for frustration frequently, tho. it’s entirely because of the combat - i don’t really know what to say about it other than it doesn’t feel good at all.
4 Likes
One of the highlights of the game for me was accidentally cheesing a boss with a glitch because it was a pain in the ass, I was like “lol get fucked, Game”
2 Likes
I’ve been playing Fantasian. It’s a pure sleepytime old people JRPG, which really makes me wonder why we couldn’t have an attempt at more mature themes. 15 year olds aren’t playing your game Sakaguchi, you can drop the teenage plotlines. Imagine the new Grey’s Anatomy season trying to appeal to the youth
Feels weird watching a game trying so hard to ape the Final Fantasy 6 to 10 bombast, progression, and mainstream appeal, without the budget and as a niche game. And also unfortunately without a true sicko system like espers / materia / GF / equipment skill learning / sphere grid! I heard it adds a regular skill tree in part 2 but that’s too little too late (and too bland)
The big gimmick is that you can « store » random enemies and then fight them all at once. Though you don’t actually fight the 30 enemies at once, they appear throughout the battle. And they all come with a 2 turn delay. In practice these mega battles have been pretty easy so far, you just have to line AoE attacks up just right so they hit ~3 enemies every turn. I have to imagine everyone do these mega battles. Activating regular random battles after you gain access to that gimmick must be torture.
Sidenote, I heavily dislike how each skill is trapped inside a bubble or transparent cube, I can’t tell any apart in battle
The other big gimmick is that the backgrounds are real life dioramas captured on camera then added to the game. It’s definitely not handled perfectly (the « seamless » screen transitions are a mess) but it’s still completely magical. I’ve been a #1 videogame diorama hater ever since they became a trend, but have to admit this one won me over
Fantasian also has no shame putting a bunch of treasure chests everywhere where they don’t make sense, so exploring feels extra super great.
IDK I’m always feeling slightly distracted playing this, it makes me want to check my phone all the time. Admittedly, slow safe beloved JRPGs like Dragon Quest and Breath of Fire always do this to me
22 Likes
Wow the Diorama thing makes me interested in a game I otherwise did not care about in the slightest
3 Likes
aden is like 3 hours long and the entire second half of the last chapter i just keep being amazed
also, hey, this 2d beat’em up does camera cut perspective flip in exactly one area during dialog. WHO DOES THAT? and do i need to keep saying how great this game looks?
i dunno if anyone else made any but beat’em up of the year, surely
12 Likes
I saw this has a demo which allows save data to carry over so might give it a try before buy. I consider the diorama’s a big draw.
1 Like
Having serious issues trying to join my partner in a session of Atlyss. I didn’t have the same quest they did so a portal didn’t open up for me - then steam wouldn’t let me connect to their session - and now the steam overlay just won’t appear?
1 Like
Retroarch Netplay has opened some doors to truly enjoy some Sega Genesis games as intended which includes Toejam and Earl. As a Co-Op experience for twenty minutes I loved it. It is just walking around with your bud opening presents and some weird stuff happens. The intense 90s tude of it is fun. It works despite how hideous and unappealing the characters are.
Panic on Funkotron is really racist. It has you throwing bottles at African American children so you can throw them in garbage bags back to Earth. It’s really horrible! Is the game about being cool and chill and funky? No it is about working hard to eliminate undesirables. Like umm…children and construction workers. Trash game.
It is absurd these characters got 4 games based off using the word “funk”.
7 Likes
sega of america still has not paid for the crime of the panic on funkotron commercial
7 Likes
So finished up Gravity Rush 2 and I really want to know how development on this game went. I’ve talked already about how the mission design generally wastes all the seemingly good component parts of the game, but I gotta take a sec to address the narrative (spoilers, obv).
Game is set up by a 20 minute long interlude anime posted online before release, body of the game is split between two sections (new world/old city) each with its own issues and villains that don’t really overlap except for the very end. You defeat the fully-gone-Akira “final” boss, the evil mayor is shown mid-brief credits roll impaled on some wreckage lamenting their choices and the second it wraps up you can almost literally here the game director yell “oh fuck, we forgot the lore!” as immediately after you see a glowing yellow lady and if you follow her around the city you can trigger an epilogue/endgame set of several linear chapters (as opposed to the game’s general open layout) in a row with virtually no connection to anything else in the game with all new characters/environments/stories (same enemies of course, you see all of them by about the 15% mark of the game). All of this is to explain as much of the protagonist and world’s past as possible, you finish this and have to sacrifice yourself but not really.
The main sequel hook from the first game is untouched as it is saved for the free DLC episode that would have to fit in sometime near the exact middle of the base game. Finishing it requires changing the past so that the events of the DLC and much of the first game no longer occur; everything ends up virtually unchanged aside from that one specific bit.
After all that I still have no idea who the mysterious pair of villains are from the interlude anime who put everything into motion, I can figure out which of the game’s villains was responsible but no one even resembling them appears in the game itself.
Just absurd “can’t figure out which sequel story pitch to go with, let’s just go for all of them” energy, the game had a director but clearly could have used another one.
9 Likes
hmm the Indiana Jones game is in fact a significant degree worse after the Italian chapter… after that it becomes less Hitman and more Uncharted. The cutscene direction is still great and the big setpieces are awesome, but the straight up platforming and stealth stinks and they basically pushed it as far as it could go in a hurry, so here’s hoping that chapter 3 is another change of pace
8 Likes
man this is the realest shit ever and it makes me so mad/sad. i want old people games with old people stories god damn it.
16 Likes
i think toejam and earl are very very cute, as characters.
toejam however is not a cute name.
6 Likes
I think I can remember from an interview with the creators in Max Overload magazine, that they had no idea what that word meant when they decided on it for a name
4 Likes