I thought I could expose my kid to Kirby?? But it turns out the second to last boss in the last Kirby game is some Resident Evil abomination that would have permanently scarred me as a child
Fortunately my kid seems to be fine so : not a bad parent (yet)
I strongly agree that human beings weren’t meant for 40x30 Jupiter picross, it sounds like it’d take 3-4x more time than 20x30 but it’s more like 20x. Just sitting on that screen making no progress for 30 minutes… then filling one square out of 1200… then sitting there for 30 more minutes…
I beat the floor 20 boss and got to floor 21 in Let it Die. The bosses haven’t been an issue – I haven’t died to any of them or the sub-bosses, yet. It’s pretty easy to farm Stingshrooms to boost my attack, though, the ones that make you invisible seem to be considerably more difficult to find. I wound up dying on floor 21 in a tunnel trap with somebody that had a flame sword while I was wearing armor weak to fire. The camera in this game can be really shitty which makes dodging kind of hard in some areas – usually I bait them out into the open but I was locked in. I’ve switched to armor that doesn’t have the fire weakness.
I need to get to floor 25 in order to unlock better fighters, but I really need Wire Mountains and Scratch Metals to get my armor and weapons up before I go back to floor 21. I think the floor rotation today might have a way for me to bypass several floors to get to 25 faster, but I’m not sure. I’ve been farming Goto-9 for Green Candle Wolf Metals but it’s kind of tedious going up, killing him, going back to the waiting room to reset him, and then going back up. I’ve been able to get a decent amount of Lifeshrooms from the pill bugs and Stingshrooms from scorpions from the area that leads up to him, at least, which I can use to survive new floors and to take on bosses respectively.
I wish there were ways to recycle decals to get new ones. It seems like the most you can do is sell them or get points towards non-decal stuff. It doesn’t really seem like spending the 50k for random decals is worth it – I mostly get garbage and duplicates I don’t need.
Finally completed Whispers of a Machine after letting it sit in my backlog for ages. The second game from the Kathy Rain dev, which Kathy Rain felt like an episode of X-Files, Whispers is an Outer Limits episode. Largely logical puzzle design, maybe to a fault, but then it’s harder to design an easy adventure game than a hard one. The game’s special sauce is an affinity slider that determines what kind of cop you are by how you treat people, either Authority Cop, Empathy Cop, or Analytical Cop, and each of those activates different cop powers that change how you approach puzzles. It’s functional, but significantly less important to the game’s design than the story is.
It’s another game from a parallel timeline I imagined after playing The Dig, where the adventure game format of videogames would be the ideal media for stories that fell inbetween TV and movie budgets.
i also felt 20x20 was kinda easy. 40x30 is the exact breaking point for me tho. i can just barely manage the 30x30 ones but those extra 10 columns (300 squares) is so much i feel hollowed out if i finish
happy for the chill picrossers who can sit there for multiple hours staring at one puzzle tho
jupiter will release a new picross soon featuring famous paintings and some vtuber, i wonder if the scale remains the same
dragon ball z kakarot doesn’t do the famous “IT’S OVER 9000!!!” scene
glad i was able to discover this after i hit the three hour refund window! sickening state of our industry that this kind of scummy business practice is still allowed!
at least we have dead yamcha in a crater…small comforts in this bleak world…
Worked my way through the ending of The Outer Wilds over the past 2 weeks.
Amazing game. Totally fantastic. The best inspirations taken from from Myst, Metroid Prime and Majoras Mask. Outshines all three of them while reinventing the puzzle adventure genre.
I played like an hour of The Gunman Chronicles. one of four old games from the 4 pack of action software I got in Anchorage. It’s a very pulpy FPS with western sci-fi motifs - everyone has a southern accent. The first level is a space station, which partially blows up, but then the other NPCs are like “no big deal, keep going with the tutorial”. The tutorial includes…a tank? The weapons all have multiple fire modes so even though there’s like 4 in the whole game you can mix and match fire modes to suit whatever situation you’re in. The first level is a bunch of jungle ruins, there’s dinosaurs - in the first level you fight veloceraptors, evil space cowboys, a brontosaurus, giant scorpions, and crocodiles. I am not sure why this game escaped into the sands of time, it’s highly entertaining and somehow still runs on windows 10. This game is made with the Source engine and you can see how each bit of Half Life was repurposed from a brainy sci-fi shooter to a wacky space adventure. There’s even shades of…Halo? In here?
In one part you’re trapped in a cage while a brawny man in a hat tells you about the time you abandoned him to die and he got eaten alive but killed the beast from inside, and now he’s hellbent on revenge. Games need to do this more.
I had a friend in high school who was hype for Gunman Chronicles back then. He followed news about it on bbses and in PC gaming magazines. Ultimately it disappointed him. I think the lengthy train ride section at the start kind of killed his enthusiasm a bit because that trick only works exactly one time and only then in the game that did it first. Or maybe he wasn’t into the dinosaurs I don’t remember. That and I think it got kind of middling reviews at the time.
It’s cool that you rediscovered it. I never played it but I still remember hearing about back then so it’s wild to me to see it resurface 25 years later. Let us know what you think about the rest of it. I don’t think it’s a very long game.
I don’t remember who was talking about Tunic earlier and not feeling it and others were saying maybe give it a bit more time to grab you but I read those posts and decided it was time for me to go back and give Tunic a second chance to grab me. I had started Tunic back when it came out, played less than an hour of it and set it down until now. Well now I’ve spent probably six or seven more hours with it since then and, yeah, I think Tunic is pretty dang good at the moment.
Initially I wasn’t quite feeling the whole “discovering how the game mechanics work is part of the game” thing because a lot of games do that now in the post-Souls game design environment and it’s like trend-chasing to me and thus boring on some level but the artwork in the manual and how that’s all laid out is so well done that it makes the trope interesting again. Now I want superbly designed in-game manuals like this for every game and I want every game to make me hunt down each page while playing the game.
I don’t know if it will be nearly as interesting once I’ve found all the pages and learned all the mechanics and finished the game but right now, partially through the game with all these big gaps in my knowledge of the game that are increasingly closing with each play session (this evening I figured out how to make offerings at the save points to upgrade my base stats, for instance), it is really compelling.
It’s clever that the player acquiring knowledge of the game’s mechanics mirrors the player acquiring knowledge of the geography of the space they’re exploring. The main conceit of it is satisfying intellectually once it clicks with you that that’s what’s going on but the framework of the game itself is all kind of… basic? I guess? Or maybe the simplicity is masking something more interesting that will reveal itself further on. I’m still kind of early on, I think. I only discovered the first real boss type enemy this evening. Guess I just need to keep peeling away at it.
tunic is both sort of interesting and (imo) definitively not a good game. it is more like “aw, cute, you tried” to me than anything else. i’m endeared to it to a degree. the music, in particular, is pretty good.
but the game is at least half combat, and the combat is unforgivably bad. irredeemably tedious and poorly tuned. the cute tricks they pull with game knowledge aren’t enough to make up for how horrible this major and persistent element of the game is. i can only recommend turning all the combat assists on.
anyway, i think Tunic might have one or two more secrets for me so i’ll still withhold final judgment for now, but i’ve already played way too many hours of miserable combat for that part of the game to ever redeem itself.
edit: regarding trend-chasing, it’s actually the faux-souls combat and bonfire bullshit that’s egregious. the manual stuff is the best part of the game
i basically know nothing about how to play actual pinball. however, i’ve always wanted to get into pinball because i enjoy loud noises and the the analog doohickeys built into tables. i’ve played the odd round on an actual table here and there, but i’ve never truly got a hang of the physics of what i’m supposed to be doing with the flippers to make certain shots. i understand that ball goes down slope, but how does ball go up certain angles? what relevance does that have for the digital pinball of compile and KAZe? probably very little, but i’ve finally started getting into them this last week. no real big observations other than alien crush is very nice to look at, but i don’t think the table itself is especially well thought out and playing for score seems to hinge on breaking the cocoons on the bottom screen over and over.
One of the things about pinball is that hitting the table is part of the design. The tricky bit is that, while tilt exists to tell you you’ve gone too far, you’re also going to have to have an understanding with the arcade staff as to how much shunting they’re going to tolerate.
