am now winning against real online people about 2/7ths of the time—somewhere between a quarter and a third
it’s funny; you do this long enough, you find a meditative focus similar to what happens in a top-down shooter, where you are able to just step back and observe, see and partially anticipate patterns, and nonchalantly steer around to address them
to some extent
Played Psychroma which was a nice breezy 2.5 hours. It’s a lock and key adventure game set in a block of apartments in the future. All the tenants have lost their memories after realising they all remember meeting the main character in completely inconsistent ways. You don’t really get a chance to sit with this initial premise before everything starts to break apart and the sci-fi reveals start coming. I’m glad it doesn’t save it’s biggest reveals for too late, preferring to get the player theorycrafting on the fly rather than resting on a single twist.
There’s a machine you use to access other people’s memories with a catch that if you view yourself in the mirror during the process, you subjectively embody that person which leads to some interesting trans (-human and -gender) character stuff. Some explore other’s memories for pleasure, others to find out what’s happening, others for prolonging life. It does get stuck mostly in sadness and violating people’s mental and bodily autonomy but works well as a skin-crawler.
The stated chronology of events (which take place over more than a century) never really lines up but I like that its content to leave you to theorise. This is a bit meta but there doesn’t seem to be much discussion of the plot online so it leaves things nice and open without some sort of pressure to interpret one way or the other. There’s a plot point about trying to find an immortal god that lives in the space between our collective memories so that it will grant immortality but it’s all vague enough that you can run with the prompts without the narrative feeling too unstable. It also lets you crawl in almost any context by holding down while walking which I appreciated them leaving in.
I basically stopped finishing games after about 2020 for various reasons that mostly boil down to “I still enjoy keeping up with new stuff but I don’t have the commitment or the compulsion on the tail end any more,” and this doesn’t really bug me at all, though it does make me really appreciate Christmastime when I’m off work and mostly at home for a couple weeks because there’s soooo much stuff that I’m suddenly in the mood to pick back up for a bit
Thanks to @Rudie ’s reminder I picked up the Elevator Action Returns release on Switch for half off, and played a couple levels today when I was catching my breath between putting up ornaments whilst home sick for the foreseeable future. The game is great of course but yeah as far as these retro releases go there’s just a on/off scan lines toggle and an antialiasing filter option that of course is on by default.
Oh and I’m also out of practice on Garou.
Revisiting Wario Land 4 at the moment. I’ve played bits of it and the other games in the series before and only found them to be mostly just okay but was reminded of the anxiety-fuelled escape sequences in 4, along with its delirious sound design, and felt the need to come back to it.
I think part of what bumped me off it before was that I was expecting, what with Wario’s movement being what it is (very speedy and momentum-based), that it would likewise play quite smoothly but it really is kinda the opposite. You move Wario through a level like a literal bull in a china shop, clumsily bumping into small enemies and getting his ass stabbed in the process, the screen always too confined to ever let you make the best use of your speed. I used to hate this kinda thing in the 2D Sonic games but here it feels a lot more appropriate what with Wario being characterised as a clumsy, selfish idiot. He wants to steal all this ancient treasure from a pyramid and in the process gets traumatically sucked into vortexes to other worlds, awakening dark evils (boss fights) in the process. It’s all weirdly engaging as you repeatedly squeeze this desperate, money-obsessed ratman through a series of increasingly complicated and confusing mazes, some made of literal garbage, all the while regularly hearing his distorted, tormented yells as he once again gets violently deformed by an attack from an enemy or hazard. A lesson in hubris for our dear Wario…
Sidenote: also really fascinated/disturbed by the collectible sound collage CDs in each level that you can listen to and the hidden elder abuse puzzle rooms featuring the scientist guy from The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls… Absolutely unhinged game.
playing through Nine Sols at the moment and so far I think it’s great although maybe tuned a bit too far towards the “Hardcore Big Boys Only” direction.
I don’t really agree with doing the Boss revives to full health after death gimmick so early because now I’m going to suspect it every time.
Also I feel like I have to re-learn the parry timing every time I load the game up. I think I’m up to the 4th Sol boss, which I assume is roughly halfway.
I like that even though it’s a ‘metroidvania’ it doesn’t go too heavy on the backtracking, at least not where you have to go across multiple zones to a place you vaguely remembered from hours ago. Instead it’s more like each zone is visited in linear sequence and you gain abilities from new save points when you need them.
I’m also playing Shiren 6, and so far it feels weirdly too easy. I’m on my 4th run and I have gotten to like floor 27, which I think is the final mountain area. Not sure how much extra content there is in this one, but so far I have seen nothing like Shiren 5 with the minsweeper or puzzle side games, or any extra dungeons that aren’t DLC.
Also not sure if I am a fan of the new artstyle. The pixel art in Shiren 5 was great, this looks like it’s going for a sort of diorama model aesthetic similar to maybe the latest Zelda, only they don’t really have the graphical fidelity to pull it off so it kinda just looks muddy.
Finished Stalker 2, Shootman ending. I liked the story overall despite not liking the Metro-style cutscenes, quest reactivity was greatest in the first half of the game and was all but gone by the second half, aside from ‘big choices’ around which factions I aligned myself with (kind of a no brainer, one faction was FSB-coded fascists and the other was the jokerfied protagonist of one of the lesser sequels). The 1.1 patch is great, though. Post-patch Prypiat became a true warzone. Monolithians, mutants and loners having firefights across city blocks, so deafened by the noise of their violence that I could take out stragglers without drawing any attention to myself. I immediately started a new game to see if the lesser zone also became a warzone but thankfully this wasn’t the case, despite what unreliable reports on social media claimed.
Stalker 2 really does feel like a sequel to Stalker even in terms of development: overpromising and underdelivering, and needing constant patches to get the game to a point where it somewhat resembles what it should have been (Shadow of Chornobyl took like 6 months of patches to get to a point where it didn’t crash after five minutes on my computer back when the game was new). The best atmosphere and vibes in video games overall.
One thing Stalker 2 does better than any game I’ve played is sound design. I love the sound design. The way the characteristics and reverb of each room transforms every noise. It reminded me of the first two Thief games. And, much like those thief games, the stealth mechanics are not overly gamified. NPCs can hear and react to anything you can hear.
Between the soundscape and the attention to detail with the architecture, I found it to be a great experience as far as virtual tourism goes. Nothing else mattered, I could sit around a campfire with a bunch of irradiated losers, play guitar, and listen to thunderstorms, on foot I spent most of my time taking pictures of bus stations and fanciful ukrainian murals.
I also appreciate how unrewarding certain battles are. There’s no point to fighting random mutants you encounter. Unless you’re facing a chimera, use the better part of valor and run away or else you’re needlessly damaging your armor and weapons and wasting precious ammo.
I was disappointed that the extent of its gender powers, outside of entry to the gentleman’s club, is a handful of gender powered moving platforms. Good soundtrack though.
Played more Atlyss. It’s a very simple game but I like it.
Honestly the trope probably needs to go in the fridge for 10 years
There’s some new DLC for the new monkey ball that adds some much harder stages along with godzilla (bad) and Vocaloid Sensation Hatsune Miku who is objectively better than at least half of the cast even if she is £5.39 including VAT. Spending hours replaying these stages over and over again I might have been too quick to dismiss what this game’s attempting as I’m finding a lot of the level design decisions more palatable and the candy gloss vomited over the post deluxe games blends into the ether moreso than later games (Banana Blitz HD is even cheaper than Godzilla and even less worth it). Spin dashing itself has a very Sonic Twoness to it where you rarely feel Required to use it but it’s there if you’re bad (me) outside a few tutorial-esque sections.
You can play as Axel from Crazy Taxi in this. Here’s his key art.
I’ve never really monkey’d ball’d should I just play the 2 gamecube ones in Dolphin or is there a recommended one out of the almost inscrutable naming scheme of the modern releases?
yes
After a year I finished the PC Engine Patlabor adventure game. It is basically (is?) an episode of the show, told with non-animation and sound. Lady Rude kept talking to me during the finale so I couldn’t tell you what happened because I couldn’t pause it! Still my…third? Favorite adventure game I’ve played on the system so far.
I followed it up with Double Dragon 2 for the PCECD. The opening cutscene has a woman threatened with BAD THING so it is pretty unpleasant to leave in attract mode. I don’t think there is terribly much distance between Golden Axe and Double Dragon but Golden Axe has Dragons and weird little ridable bug dragons and you go on that big Turtle and it doesn’t have murder platforming.
GT7 is really fabulous as a racing game, but the overall structure of it is kind of agonizing so far. just go ahead and give me the rest of the menus now, game. we don’t have to do this “OK, go back to the cafe now” dance anymore. just let me do races and get new cars and tune’em up, lol. am i still in a tutorial mode after 5 hours??
at least the racing is exquisite
hate to tell you this but the entire campaign is a tutorial
Outside of complaining about the minutia of the physics in 1 versus 2 I’d say emulate the xbox version of deluxe if you can (NOT the ps2 version) or get banana mania which is 75% off on steam (excluding the decent GBA game and the new one the rest can be safely ignored)
Personally the GameCube controller is pretty key to the experience
this was agonizing because i just wanted access to the Nurburgring and that didn’t happen for several in game hours, i put the game off for like a year before coming back so I could finally unlock it.
