This game’s online matchmaking system is so stupid I hate it. Still waiting for our goobers to get on the same virtual machine and play for an indeterminate amount of matches before one or the others of us ranks out of the floor. I beat a guy with my ‘day 1’ Elphelt which felt good and then lost every other match. I’m not very good at Guilty Gear and that’s unlikely to change. I like her mixups but my muscle memory is kinda borked for anime fighters. I cant [air]dash often and rapidly enough to consistently apply pressure without just jumping into everything thrown at me. Other than the cool animations I don’t really like how Strive reads visually. Some elements are more distracting than helpful I think.
I started AssCre One as research (never really played the series, was so influential for modern games, gotta see where it started). I fell asleep just now on my horse to Damacus so it’ll be a different day.
The whole game is Dubbed into Japanese so I am playing on hardmode. Makes it easier to zone out when two polygon men stand straight up and talk to each other for 5 minutes.
I have a lot of thoughts so far but having The Story and THE STORY and Stupid Video Game Bullshit and Contrived DNA Memory Whatever it’s amazing anyone over the age of 22 took it seriously. But when you finally get to a city and there are all these people walking around and you’re in the low-land and look up and see a castle and you take the winding road up. That part is so cool it’s a wonder why they need all this bullshit. They wound themselves so tight giving complications and then trying to explain the complications. I guess Lost was on TV and everyone really wondered what the polar bear doin’.
In short I “shot the hinges” by standing in a 2012 doorway trying to run past my captors who were trying to get into the room to talk to me for 10 more minutes about my special memory DNA. They could not get by and I could not take a clipboard to an unarmed man and woman holding me against my will. But I could stop a “flag” from happening by standing in the doorway of my escape.
From one nintendo gremlin to another, I finished up Wario Land 4 and decided to revisit Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland.
...let me tell you my Tingle tale...
I originally picked it up a few years after it came out, having regularly spotted the gaudy boxart sporting Tingle’s big, jubilant grin in the secondhand section of my local gamestop, a modest price tag of €5 tempting me to try it out. Seemed like someone really wanted to get rid of the thing…
The back of the box blurb only furthered my curiosity…
I’ve always had a strange affinity for Tingle since watching my older brother play parts of Majora’s Mask when I was little. Odd little videogame guys are kinda my thing, in case my username didn’t already give this away…
Anyway, back when I bought it, I remember enjoying a lot about it. It’s really gorgeously animated and full of goofy little characters. The main narrative thrust is Tingle (currently a schlubby guy in a pair of tracksuit pants that the game lets you name, yet to be bestowed with the title, joie de vivre and green tights we’re familiar with) gets himself into some kind of pyramid scheme cooked up by someone named “Uncle Rupee”…
Uncle Rupee wants us to donate our hard-earned money to grow his tower to “Rupeeland”, an alleged paradise where our protagonist can indulge his every vice.
In essence you have the bones of a traditional Zelda game (overworlds, towns and dungeons) but with an extraordinarily harsh economy, that regularly forces grinding out resources to the point of extreme tedium, and a lil imp-man who’s pretty shit at fighting and so has to hire a bodyguard to do it for him while he focuses on his true strengths of map-making and cooking.
Squeezed between these bits are the actually enjoyable parts where Tingle gets to interact with a host of other charming characters. A few seconds later you’ll be forced to bribe these same characters for more information, losing additional money if you offer them too much or too little. It means that playing it you’re left with this conflict of alternating between having a good time and a bad time in rapid succession. Each session I’ve had with the game has inevitably ended with me cursing having ever played it, only to find myself thinking about it again later and yearning to revisit my dear goblin friend. This game is a scam, advertises itself as such explicitly and yet I can’t help myself from coming back to it to eke out a few more tender moments with my favourite green guy… god help me…
Remember Quimdung, who used to post at SB1 (Bonkey Trek, etc.)? It turns out they have continued making games. I played this one last night, Jubilane, which is a Hexcells/Proverbs-type game with good music and atmosphere.
It seems almost too forgiving until it starts adding in more colors.
All i have played is Ridge Racer 6 but honestly I miss this kind of ultra competent videogame. The way you unlock things is really interesting - there’s a huge tree of races and you can pick branching paths, once you enclose an area you unlock what’s inside
There’s also three different types of boost depending on how much you saved up, and I couldn’t trigger these because the instructions were wrong. And there’s a few games where you can only charge boost while you’re boosting, but I thought the game was bugged because I couldn’t charge at all.
Thinking about how when this came out reviewers were probably like “this is barebones compared to what else is out there” and now in 2025 we are in a desert of arcade racing games - everything is done by indie outfits who are barely funded and maybe not making much money when a high gloss product like this could only really happen with a publisher.
I could probably make a ridge racer like, I have internet friends who also like ridge racers and are into the aesthetics, and we’re all unemployed, soooo
Played some Dojo Masters, it’s great. A two-button fighting game with 6 martial arts that play very differently. I like when people do smaller projects that rethink some of the conventions of the genre with an incredibly constrained set of rules. I feel like every ‘character’ is kinda not my thing though. The closest I’ve found to a main is Taekwondo which feels like a good mix of fakeouts and simple combos with fun movement. Alas, almost no-one is playing this online via matchmaking anymore and I’m not that keen on going into a random discord server just to play a few matches. I’m really doing well for being horribly late to various fighting games this month.
tell u what, playing through day 4 of pathologic 2 while fires surround this combustible city is a strange feeling. hard not to see the huge, looming smoke clouds as the sand pest. not to mention, there is a church down the street that tolls its bell every hour. life really imitating art out here
