Henk Rogers’ Go is really chompin’ my chalk. My inability to read the game board and tell whether I have closed territory or a points advantage is fucking me up. Makes me feel mega stupid. I am doing my best with the resources available but I’m starting to dislike its flavour.
I’m playing on a 9x9 board and I lost a game 22-20 because I was sure I won until the count came in. It’s quite hard to know without counting all intersections as you go which I think I need to develop as a part of play. Putting a piece down is basically minus to your score in the big picture (the game wants efficiency not mass) but I find my attention gets hung up on options that turn rather than identifying when an area of the board is closed.
Not only that but the Go masters are laughing at the machine I’m constantly tripping over. You can just overtax the CPU player into quitting. I need to learn with a human player is the conclusion.
There’s a video on how to do this already on Youtube but for some reason it has porn superimposed over the board. I don’t know why. But here you have it, the solution to breaking Henk Rogers’s terrible AI in this adaptation of a board game I enjoy playing.
Sakaguchi really made no compromise for that Fantasian final boss, the guy has three forms, each has a bunch of tricks and gets gradually tougher at low HP and .
Final boss 3rd form just used Big Bang which you needed to protect against by buffing defense + debuffing attack + switching to a tank-only part that can guard? Cool now he’s summoning a white orb that’s itself summoning new foes, a black orb that absorbs one player character until destroyed, and a bunch of other elemental orbs, before finally absorbing every enemy he’s summoned to power up an enormous Supernova attack in 3 turns?
Insanely long, insanely cool final boss. It took me 2 hours + a 30 minute ending. Imagine the Japanese salarymen on their commute trying to beat this guy. Not using their phones all day to not have the app auto-close so they can continue the fight on the evening commute
I am the first person ever to have finished Fantasian
To hell with the ugly is a very nice 3-4 hours. Worth playing for the frisson of seeing a 1948 French book faithfully adapted into a videogame. It feels refreshingly distant from the « +6,7% bleed duration»s of the VG world
In practice, it is a light adventure game with light genre shifts like say mario rpg battles and Ace Attorney deductions.
The tone itself is… pulpy noir, at first. It changes later. The ending’s great.
The protagonist is very enjoyable as this hunk with absolute confidence. Everybody finds him a bit tiring to be around yet is attracted to him for his physique. The way he condescendingly talks to his less attractive friends …… god. Just look at this jerk
The game somewhat reflects its protagonist with this constantly magnetic art and sound direction + unpredictability that made me more than willing to ignore my distaste for like, QTEs and half baked stealth sections
HOLE: I guess this is an extraction shooter, ugh, but it’s single player so that’s still fine. Sort of Receiver by way of killer7 + Hotline Miami. An impeccable, wordless aesthetic of equal parts tacticool action and maybe-meaningless horror/magical realism. It just sort of… stops, after a while, which is a bit disappointing. I say this very rarely, so it’s high praise: I would like there to be more of this game. I guess more weapons and maps and “content” would be cool, but that’s not actually what I want - I want a climax, I don’t want a plot that concludes exactly, I just want the game to build to something. It’s halfway there. Hopefully this gets a Receiver 2 to its Receiver 1.
I’m late to Assassin’s Creed talk, but if you’re really curious about where the Desmond stuff goes, some AC Valhalla spoilers: at the end of AC Valhalla your modern day character, Layla Hasan, gets tricked by 900 CE era assassin Basim, who is actually the reincarnation of the alien god Loki, into swapping places and entering Yggdrasil, which is, uh, a giant robot tree that’s basically a giant multi-person Animus. Layla dies (she drops the staff she got from Kassandra, who got it from Pythagoras 2000 years earlier, Basim snatches it because it’ll not only keep his body from immediately dying, but it also contains the soul of his alien god wife), but her consciousness persists in Yggdrasil, where she meets a very familiar sounding, distinctly Nolan North-y entity who doesn’t really know his origin, just that he needs to figure out how to prevent the same end of the world conditions that Desmond tried to avert with his sacrifice at the end of 3. So that’s, y’know. Probably Desmond, as code or something.
Like most of the big wild Assassin’s Creed plot points they’ll probably abandon this before the next game or resolve it in a fucking comic book.
i’ll split any further nuclear throne posting off into its own thread but i dusted off my old digitalocean account to host this video to demonstrate how easy lil hunter is to take out using double wrench style
Played a bit of office-themed Among Us-like Dale and Dawson: Stationery Supplies last night. Slackers try to avoid work and sabotage the workplace without getting caught, while Specialists try to keep the place running. The manager fires someone every day.
The AI-generated art in this game brought back memories of the hideous WeWork office from my old job. (I was much closer to slacker than specialist.) The art WeWork had hanging up was even worse. The books were not very inspiring either, though strangely there was a beat-up copy of Kenneth Anger’s filthy gossip classic Hollywood Babylon.
Anyway, on finishing the tutorial I looked at the lobby. There were just two running, equally indimidating: a Turkish language one, and “NSFW roleplay”…
Just one series left in GT3 Intermediate. Everything else is done and gold, and also all of beginner and rally. I also now have several overpowered cars, including one I got for 50%ing the game, which I didn’t even know was a thing. This game became much less grindy in the intermediate and rally portions. Much easier to win enough to upgrade or buy make specific cars, and the prize cars are actually mostly good.
Resident Evil 4 (PS4): got as far as the El Gigante earlier this evening, but will be deleting the save and shelving the game indefinitely as soon as i can find the time/energy. as usual, i find too late that i’ve been Doing It Wrong, and there’s really nothing else for it
Well the last 5 levels of Judge Dredd: Dread vs Death were wrapped up very fast. You kinda just go through a series of boss scenarios with each of the dark judges. They can’t be killed outright because they’re immortal so each has an environmental gimmick to navigate them into a trap. It’s great for the game’s length though since these last 5 levels take about the same time as the first 2 so it never really drags. The whole thing is like 3 hours.
You move at the same speed while crouching as you do standing, and there’s something wrong with the crouch collision so your feet go tipitipitipitipitipitipitipitipi.
I think the musical similarity I’m picking up in other games is really just the same synth voices being used in a lot of other PS2 era games like Timesplitters or Ratchet and Clank. It’s a good mix of dark ambience to emphasise the horror of how disastrous the future is (reminiscent of G-String at times) and mighty driving triphop and jungle for combat.
I guess this can go here, but I wrote a bit about stuff I played last year and a bit more. I’ve been too depressed to write it and frankly probably wasn’t ready to write what I did, but I cranked it out anyway…
finally remembered that I wanted to poke at Starship, the SF64 decompilation thing
man was not meant to play Starfox 64 at 240 fps
idiotic, related detour to recent discourse: it seems weird and kinda stupid that the only rom it works with is rev01 US, the Lylat Wars/JP dub erasure seems… odd
also I miss the slowdown. the game is supposed to slowdown as you fly away from explosions and it’s fucking cool! instead it just trucks away at (whatever framerate your computer can render it at, it’s a fucking N64 game, your vaguely modern computer is going to destroy it) and it loses the drama
did you know you DONT need to have a boss every two minutes? the creators of this game didnt know that
it’s a solid game but it feels too perfuctionary. really lacks the atmosphere and sense of exploration and imagination of the other games. VERY lock and key design. it’s solid enough but yeah it feels overproduced i guess?
I know I shit on Sony’s output in my little write-up, but I’m honing in more on playing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and having a really, really good time with it.
Maybe it helps that I haven’t played one of these since…god, Going Commando? So I missed the other two PS2 games, two PSP games, three PS3 games and the PS4 soft reboot?
Like, for better or worse it plays just how I remember it, maybe with less janky bullshit.
It also looks incredible. All these games using big budgets to chase photo realism when they could be making a sick lookin’ 3D cartoon like this.
I’ve also been using some weird application I’ve heard hyped up for ages called Lossless Scaling to play this. I…don’t understand how it works (I mean you hard cap your game at half your monitor’s refresh rate, start the game, then start the application, and it generates frames to match your refresh rate, that’s how you set it up, but how it works…???), but compared to using DLSS, it’s much, much, much smoother, and lets me crank all the visual settings all the way up. I get maybe a hitch or two here and there, but otherwise it’s flawless. A hell of a lot better than it was playing it without this thing running.
