I like Blade Chimera.
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The last set piece segment I just played in Jedi Survivor confirmed my hunch about the game - it’s all about the universal desire to have a strong goth girlfriend…
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I have mildly positive feelings about Blade Chimera.
3 Likes
Microsoft have a lil mini dev direct in half an hour. They’ll do some deepdives and 2 of the titles’ developers will be shut down later this year.
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Based on your/Felix’s posts about Jedi Survivor I booted up Fallen Order on gamepass despite not usually being a fan of Uncharted-type games. It’s basically fine, it’s like 85% of the way to something I might really enjoy but it just seems to lack that last little bit of polish in the fighting/writing/traversal stuff that I want to really put it over the top.
I was struggling in the middle bit of the game that mainly has you going back to previous planets with new abilities. Then a heavily eyelinered goth girl showed up who threw me around for a bit and then spent the next couple of hours negging me over the phone and suddenly I was like 50% more into the game as a whole.
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playing Phantasmagoria for the first time to get some more multimedia fix. it’s funny to compare it with Gabriel Knight 2 - phantasmagoria is much more earnestly concerned with being the poster child of “interactive movies” in a way that makes gk2 feel a lot more novelistic by contrast (all the long documents you can read through, framing voice changes etc). so on one hand they took out a lot of the traditional adventure game touches that i tend to like, like all the little character interjections as you click around… but on the other hand the extent to which they went all in on camera work to give the same feeling of density is truly delightful. they were truly going nuts trying to cram in 3-5 different rendered angles of like every single room on any pretext; clicking any item at all can send the camera into another shot so drastically different to the previous one that it can take a second to realise it’s even the same room. it’s one of those things that’s “bad game design” but extremely delightful in practice; YES it can feel quite odd to cycle between three different dramatic angles of the one room hoping one will let you click on the thing you want, but on the other hand, that one triangular closet at the start where doing ANYTHING means the camera crazily cutting between two different behind-the-shelf side views AND a shot looking down from above the main character’s head more than makes up for it imo. i guess the accepted way to get “cinematography” into vgames became variants of the halflife continuous shot and careful landmark placement; it’s a lot of fun here to instead feel like the camera’s basically a new kind of surprising toy, like one of those snakes that pop out of a can.
i do enjoy how lowkey and slow the starting parts are… my partner compared chapter 1 to finding a virtual tour of a particularly cursed real estate listing which is pretty apt. at times watching the protagonist slowly mime in front of a greenscreen shot mimicked the dreamlike pace of old silent movies. some of the puzzles are already kinda bullshit, but i do enjoy that they give you a talking Hint Skull in the UI even if its advice is not helpful (why did i think a skull would be good at adventure games?). i remember as a kid reading a games magazine which asserted solemnly that the gabriel knight trilogy was too scary to play late at night; it’s fun to imagine clicking around the big, mostly silent mansion with the same intensity.
favourite character so far is the local realtor of this quaint 3-store new england village, where his character note being “sleazy” is interpreted to basically mean “mel brooks as the mayor in blazing saddles” and who keeps saying things like “lookit dese getaway sticks!” while grabbing a pair of legs. least favourite character is fuckin Don! moral of the game so far is not to marry someone who dresses like a combined Steal Their Look of leo from twin peaks and paul reiser in aliens.
crypt underworld ass rock textures
29 Likes
i had a demo (from a Demo Disc i collected a lot of those) that covered chapter 1 when i was way too young to play any phantasmagoria and i replayed it obsessively lol
ive always loved that name its the 2nd best videogame name after phantasmagoria 2: a puzzle of flesh
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I beat both the management games and I spent a few hours on the coliseum today … I dont know if Ill carry on with that, haha, it is quite a chore. Just finishing the Amon substories will be enough. For now I can power thru the story!
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played xess against a friend and proved ana is strong
this is like chess but for people who like match ups and/or cool character designs (mostly girls).
every additional mechanic is wild but also more thought out than you might expect from the concept. if you wanted to play chess vs shogi like puyo v tetris this allows it.
it’s free. the filesize is tiny. it makes you randomize a funny username (i got x69ChessFunny)
you can connect to and play with people super easily
12 Likes
i would like to clarify i just counted the cast and this may not be true, my bias just makes me ignore the existence of some (but not all) of the non-girls
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THE RETURN OF THE KING
The year is 2024 and suddenly there’s videos and posts from the legendary developer Genki, and an impossible wish is coming true: they’re making another Tokyo Extreme Racer. Will it be as good as the old ones? After several hours I can say that: yes, it is. It’s exactly the same as Tokyo Extreme Racers of old: Get a car, get on the highway, flash your highbeams at cars, weave around traffic, get some money, spend money on upgrades - and repeat. It’s a good loop. The presentation - compared to every other racing game made by AAA - is REFRESHINGLY minimal. There’s no in-your-face music, there’s no narrator welcoming you to the “speed festival” as a pretense for racing at high speed on public roads, there’s no forced SUV driving section - there’s just one road and your car. Racing game players have been starving for years, and today we’re feasting.
I picked a Suzuki Swift as my starter car because it’s an exotic machine not available in the US. I start racking up wins and pretty soon it looks like a taxi.
Just like the games of old, each racer you defeat has a little bit of lore attached and you can read about them in the lore menu. This is so much better than how other games do it - with cringy dialog and VO. Each club has a different vibe. The Rolling Guys I recognize from the TXRs of old - they’re back - and still in AE86s.
In between races the screen stops and some literal poetry goes up on the screen. Need For Speed could never do this.
Anyway. It’s in “early access” but it’s pretty fucking complete. I have some minor complaints but those are minor complaints. Shoving this game in the face of every single AAA car game designer until they understand - this is what we want, this is what we always wanted, it’s dead fucking simple and it works. Pay attention. I’ll see you on the C1 loop.
28 Likes
if you have not seen it or played it yet, i strongly recommend Phantasmagoria 2. i admittedly have just watched a let’s play/review and not played it myself but it’s truly peak 90’s cinema from everything i’ve seen. i don’t really wanna spoil it beyond that.
12 Likes
I am basically stopped before what feels like a point of no return in Jedi Survivor (I assume it is a soft “can resume after ending” one but who knows) and will say that you are likely not doing anything wrong. FWIW the map is moderately good at marking paths you have not taken and if you do side stuff will eventually get a reward that marks all unfound things on your map, my advice is that if you are digging things look for bigger areas you may have missed but while getting 100% likely wouldn’t be too hard it seems like it’d be much more trouble than it would be worth.
Fisherman is great, I am seemingly missing just a single fish and am tempted to try and look up where it is to see how his epic/rambling tale actually wraps up.
Game remains technically impressive while clearly on the verge of collapsing at any moment.
Barring an epic stumble at the end it truly adds that last 15% to the 85% the prior game achieved, to use the comparison from a few posts back. I have some issues here and there (game is a bit easy TBH) but this does feel about as well realized as a big budget Star Wars game ever would be.
5 Likes
Been playing Pokemon Leafgreen and despite Kanto being my least favorite region I’m still having a good time. Team Building in Pokemon is always such fun and I try to mix things up and use Pokemon I haven’t used in a run before. Also been playing Hamtaro Ham Hams Unite which is a delightfully cute little adventure game. I loved the anime as a kid so its a nice little nostalgia hit. Final Fantasy 16 is another game I’ve been playing through and honestly it kinda rips, the combat is fun and Cid is genuinely the best I love him so much haha. And then I found out there is a Smash Bros Ultimate scene in my small town area so I went to the most recent tourney didn’t do too well as I’m a fairly casual player but I had a great time so I’ll be going back and probably gonna start playing Ultimate a bunch again which I had fallen off like a year or so ago.
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I do love that they went wild with the writing in this one. Not just giving all the aliens and people dialects and accents or whatever, but more…actual character? Than a lot of Star Wars stuff?
I just fought a bounty hunter robot that, I’m pretty sure, told me to piss off.
Also like Felix said earlier, it seems like they stepped back from going hard on the Dark Souls thing and went for more of a traditional brawler type game while really ramping up the platforming. Some of these Force Tear platforming segments are absolutely brutal and absolutely the sort of thing they should have in here.
Even with standard gameplay stuff, I got the side mission to check in on some Jawas, and the platforming for that segment, with the planet at night and shit being barely visible, was super satisfying to finally pull off.
Game’s…game’s pretty good, I think. Except when it crashes, like it just did to me.
3 Likes
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oh nooooooooo FF7 rebirth is really dull how did I forget
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World of Horror: really wish this were as good as its’ aesthetic
edit: I don’t hate it, to be clear; it just feels like it could and should have been so much more- the wasted potential is constantly smacking me in the face.
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did you all know that when Hajime mashite quit square and they canceled the last ffxv dlc, they decided to publish a novelization of the alternate ending they were building toward instead, where luna fresca comes back to life at the end and they have a happy ending?
the writing is not quite holding my attention but I think it’s funny how much more successful XV is as a big sprawling multimedia franchise than their prior attempts were
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hajime tabata*
1 Like