it’s especially wild to me because the first 4 games in the series have such rewarding progression, but they have clearly entirely abandoned that approach at this point
3 Likes
in GT Sport you had to level up in order to drive the Nurburgring and the way around this was a custom race where you took a kei car and raced it against a lemans prototype for 99 laps, you set the custom race and let it go for like 3 hours then crossed the finish line to get ‘2nd’ place and get a ton of money and xp. i felt so stupid for doing it but the progression system was stupid, I was playing that game every day and still making marginal progress
9 Likes
After nine and a half hours I have now both left Vatican City and fired a gun (not even my own, punched it off a Nazi and then shot another) in Indiana Jones.
(Neither of those things are complaints, to be clear!)
8 Likes
I took a break during Giza to go back to the Vatican and the college to find all the stuff I missed my first time through. Now I’m back in Giza and I’m maybe nearing the end of that one but I’ll probably stick around for a bit to find/do all the stuff before moving on.
Xbox tells me I’ve spent around 27 hours or so with the game so far and I’m sure at this rate there’s probably another 20 or so for me to go. I inadvertently spoiled some of the future locations for myself but that’s all good I’m glad to know I still have a lot more game left.
At first I avoided the combat but honestly it’s pretty easy to temporarily break stealth, kick a few asses and then dip back into obscurity so more often than not I just end up beating the dudes in my way rather than trying to navigate around them when I’m trying to get from point A to B.
Plus I’ve been getting all the books so I may be a bit OP now since the game is already on the easy side as is.
4 Likes
Only allowed to do it if the credits start scrolling, like in DKC.
6 Likes
Finally played some of Gran Turismo 7’s dirt tracks. Gran Turismo has a Gran tradition of somehow always putting dirt racing in despite sucking a lot. The tracks generally suck. The physics has always sucked. The cars are fine - it’s really fun to rally a subaru wagon. GT7’s 3rd person camera can not handle jumps. The car just moves erratically on the Z axis and sometimes the camera snaps back into place suddenly on landing, it’s really nauseating. Granted getting a camera to be responsive and also impart a sense of inertia and weight in the vehicle - and also handle jumps well - it’s very hard to do (I’ve done it) getting dirt physics just right is very hard to do (I’ve also done that) so I’m really bummed at how GT7 has fallen off here. The AI is really bad at dirt racing too, as it’s always been.
Really kinda wish they’d just overhaul the dirt physics and fix the camera, but what do I know.
7 Likes
Been relegated to switch gaming while on holiday and I’ve been struggling.
Nine Sols game seems fun but the frame rate or something seems off during play (the backgrounds seem… jittery? to me and it’s kind of making me motion sick) and I can’t seem to get comfortable with the chintzy switch shoulder buttons being so critical for parry/dodge. Might give this one up and play it on gamepass on my pc when i get back home
Great Ace Attorney the standard text scroll speed is too slow and I can’t seem to get the text expedite feature down (it sometimes skips text boxes for some reason I can’t quite pin down) but otherwise this seems to scratch the pheonix wright itch. It’s my best option right now so I’ll probably stick with it
Balatro incredibly addicting but much like vampire survivors I’m not sure I’m not just playing a screen saver. I’ve already put so much time into it vs spending time with the in-laws so I’ll probably have to delete it because it’s so easy to just grab one more game when I should be socializing.
5 Likes
Is this the Ace Attorney thing of presenting breathless speech as auto-skipping dialogue boxes or something else?
1 Like
Yeah it seems a bit bad in certain areas like the Pavilion. I think it’s mostly okay except in large areas with fancy stuff in the background
1 Like
Sonic Frontiers (PS5) - one of the most inscrutable and baffling games i’ve ever played. i am not certain words like "good’ or “bad” actually apply here. i will try to keep playing because i’m curious what the fuck it is doing and i can’t really grasp it yet. i pressed some D-pad inputs and accidentally switched the active song to angel island zone from sonic 3 and it was like. well, shit. guess you can just do that literally whenever. just like you can go into the options and start tweaking the hell out of all sonic’s traversal values like it’s fucking beamNG.drive or some shit. max out top speed? why yes. gotta go fast…
i don’t know how to give you anything coherent about this game, honestly. incredible. it’s the kind of thing that makes one almost wish one was a sonic fan. i feel like all the things that prevent this game for being “for me” are definitely “for someone”, and that someone is most likely: a sonic fan.
16 Likes
Can you still just fish for 15 minutes and max out the progression for each island or were they stupid and patch it?
6 Likes
Fantasian Neo Dimension is as dull as Tuxedo described. I’m playing just the demo but I’m already bored straight. It’s really hard not to see this as Sakaguchi just phoning it in since The Last Story at least demonstrated some desire to experiment post-FF. It has an option to replace regular battle music with FF music which seems to undermine one of the selling points, especially since it includes FF music not written by Uematsu.
The battles are slow and lack fanfare. I didn’t get to the dimengeon bit but the core mechanic just making the battles longer seems incompatible with this pacing.
The dioramas are very nice and help provide an old-school prerendered look while still allowing for a dynamic camera. Probably not worth the effort they’ve gone to for the end result compared to something like Cuphead or Judero. When turning corners in the dioramas sometimes the camera swings really quickly around to a new angle which is a bit nauseating. They also don’t look great on close-up which is the case for quite a lot of scenes.
This is the first party member’s reason for joining you.
The whole thing feels unceremonious and too rote, almost nothing really keeping me here. A relief.
15 Likes
I’ve been playing Rogue Slime on my phone for the past week. It’s adjacent to your other roguelike deckbuilders etc. You have three (really four with a special white color) colors of mana, the “cards” your gained abilities come on cards that are different sizes and part of the game is fitting your desires loadout into your active inventory and your backup backpack. You can spend wrong colored mana on abilities but they cost twice as much that way. (E.g., a card with a one Green casting cost can be cast by two red instead).
I appreciate that status effects mostly feel unique. Freeze freezes cards in your (or your enemies’) deck, requiring you to waste an extra mana to thaw them out. Burn sets cards on fire and each mana you spend on them hurts you. Poison acts like counters and the ongoing damage they do per turn ticks down to zero but this also means certain builds can make poison stack up to the sky and it becomes genuinely deadly rather than a nuisance. Cool stuff!
Unwanted cards can be absorbed by your slime (oh I forgot to say all the critters are slimes in different shapes, wolf slimes, wizard slimes, etc). Absorb enough of them and you can boost your HP. There are campfires where you can opt for healing or to boost your max HP by 5. The game generously also heals you for 5 at the same time.
Nothing revolutionary but this game actually has more depth than I expected. Progress in unlocking new maps etc is a bit grindy and there’s a lot of assets being reused with color swaps, and that’s where the mobile game exploitation starts happening but you can have a pretty good time for a while before you run into that too hard. Ads are all completely optional to unlock bonuses and reroll post-battle rewards, etc
5 Likes
if you want a better strategy game recommendation for phone (or even pc!): slice & dice
- a real game with actual tactical decisions
- a good game in the context of all games, not just phone games
- dice are better than cards
11 Likes
Finished Chroma Zero, first person puzzle game that recently came out
Very good puzzle game in the vein of Myst. There isn’t much story or atmosphere, you’re literally just playing around in an abstract puzzle box and figuring out how to manipulate the box (mainly based on various color mechanics). The game explores the mechanics pretty comprehensively while staying focused (took me about 9 hours to finish), so it’s not a huge commitment. There’s more than a taste of Outer Wilds here (including the soundtrack, they a similar style of OW’s theme in a finale that clearly is attempting to re-capture the feeling of the final ATP warp drive/Vessel sequence, works pretty well), but the abstractness keeps it at a distance from how Outer Wilds (or Riven) grounded their puzzles in a defined universe with a history. However, credit where credit is due – Chroma Zero was made by a single person, so it’s pretty impressive.
13 Likes
I ended up putting more time into the Chroma Zero demo and while some more progress was made I definitely ran hard into a wall of “I am probably one key discovery away from being able to make progress on more fronts, but I ain’t even got a clue as to what it’d be”. Definitely seems well crafted but I think my brain just isn’t good enough at these “figuring out how the world works is the actual puzzle” flavor of games. Much respect to those who can crack those nuts.
3 Likes
I like Creeper World IXE much better than I liked 4, which didn’t really hold my interest the way the third game had. I always liked the side-view format of the second game, and this new one brings that back. It might be my imagination, but I think the graphics are more incongruous than ever. By which I mean charming.
12 Likes