Yeah, I am definitely going to play more of that on a CRT.
6 Likes
easily my favorite treasure game itās whatās going on inside my head whenever I need to concentrate
6 Likes
I still donāt like Treasure games, but Treasure Land seems to be the most subdued of them. Itās more palatable to me because itās a mostly normal platformer that has a little surprise in each level instead of soul deadening mediocrity.
5 Likes
I used all my healing items in a side quest battle with slimes. I hope I donāt regret that.
Edit: Got my S rank license in Gran Turismo 3 and beat Like the Wind.
5 Likes
During arm recovery I am resorting to playing PokĆ©mon TCG pocket on autopilot where the AI just plays the cards for you. It is infuriatingly stupid, regularly swapping out powerful PokĆ©mon that could just win the match to send a weak PokĆ©mon to feed the opponent. Sometimes it doesnāt even attack!
Tempted to try a visual novel while I rest so that I can at least just put it on auto and feel like I am Giovanni Bernie progressing something
Edit: my dictation tool misinterpreted something as Giovanni Bernie. I have no idea why
8 Likes
I went on a Dynamite Heady jag a few years ago and had a-lot-a-fun I should try out treasure land.
3 Likes
I finished the main part of Wizardry the Price of Deception without dying! But thereās a whole little postgame dungeon where I lost. To cacodemons. It was a preventable loss.
Cacodemons are like water raising in a flood, very easy to underestimate. Theyāre not dangerous on their own but they can keep calling allies and keep casting anti-magic to lower the chance of ally magic working. I didnāt pay enough attention and got an army of them demolishing my team while I couldnāt heal or cast any other defensive spell anymore. I tried to run but way too late.
Itās the first game Iāve played with the Real Wizardry Game Over Experience which involves :
- the corpses of the dead characters stay in the dungeon and you need to build a backup rescue team to get them back
- The game is constantly autosaving, so yoy canāt reload an earlier save to ignore 1)
I like itā¦ It makes every action more meaningful, and the moment I watched my team died was very powerful.
Iāll have to train the rescue team for like 3-4 hours. If it also dies, Iām fucking out
In this game I was fearing losing my team, but also permadeath, because resurrection rituals can fail, turning a DEAD character into ASH, or an ASH character into LOST (=permadeath)
But in practice, with high enough VIT, resurrection rituals cannot fail. And I refuse to use <15 VIT characters in this game
A new thing Iāll think about a lot is a conversation on the Steam forum going something like:
Ā« the spell Ā« Locate person Ā» says my character is in the graveyard. How can I access the graveyard? Ā»
Ā« Your character is sitting in a grave. Theyāre gone. You canāt get them back Ā»
13 Likes
Dynamite Headdy makes a lot more sense when you get through all the footnotes of Infinite Jest.
4 Likes
so,
uhā
whereas my terry was lagging behind The Girls, at the moment i seem to be more steady with him than iāve ever been with anyone.
winning a hair short of 1/3 the time;
out of the lower ranks and somehow into an overall intermediate range;
starting to physically associate synapses with the character.
like
on the level of my nervous system, right,
i can āseeā about a second ahead of what iām doing
i can sense the weight and length of the manās limbs, feel when they connect or they whiff and have a sense of why
itās like iām present, in my bodyāexcept itās not my body; itās this cartoon bloop.
also uh i finally figured out this whole hit-confirm thing after three decades and countless hours glazing over when people used the term, not understanding and not being in a place where i had enough facility to have useful context for any answer i might receive
just had to figure it out myself. 
with that basic grammar down, though,
god is terry ever a beast with it
just about every normal, in just about every position and scenario, seems to set up a rising tackle or super
and his hop-in buttons are really frickin good at their job
cancel a jumping mk to rising fang? egad, what, why
i think i get why so many fighting game players have turned out to be trans actually
3 Likes
wow bloodborne on pc is really great now
apparently it can still crash and it takes a bit of setup but itās running pretty smoothly at 60 FPS thus far and it looks and feels pretty great. maybe some shader compilation stutters at times? but only briefly early on, then it totally smoothed out. pretty impressedā¦ i find the performance on PS4 quite poor for this game in a way that actively distracts me, so i was immediately getting more sucked in on this version
i used the following 2 guides to get set up:
the video is a bit more up to date than the reddit guide, but even then there are a few newer versions of some of the mods, just look at the release dates for the mods
oh, well i can just share a screenshot, huh:
9 Likes
As someone who has recently played MGS1,2,4, MG2 I decided to also revisit Ghost Babel.
The message of this one being some State Department no-body was manipulating everybody for US interests following the collaspe of the Cold War to maintain US Hegemony and prominence. It has that 2000s approach that it ends with Snake saying heās gonna bring the truth to life and that itāll change things. Nice to have dreams. It also has an even clunkier than usual romance, which doesnāt work.
I respect how antagonistic the conveyor belt puzzle was. A lot of the game is tedious but that was at least devious.
They were trying with the whole game but it doesnāt work. Like they make it as Wordy as Metal Gear is but most of the time it is like this:
Snake You Need To Infilitrate Theā¦
Base.
Could have given the script another pass to make it readable on a GBC.
Even if Metal Gear 2 is a worse game in many ways it is a better experience that is funnier and weirder than Ghost Babel. They really put Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color. Good job Konami. Itās not fun though.
9 Likes
pretty sure the Grinch game Konami made around the same time uses the same engine.
4 Likes
The sole thing I remember about ghost babel was thats the only one agness kaku said had decent writing
5 Likes
Just playing Power Washing Simulator for like the past week or so every day as part of my routine. Checked it out on a whim near the end of January so I could get 8 game pass games played for the rewards points and it turned out to be incredibly addicting. Will probably buy it at some point but then playing it wonāt count towards my daily reward points lol.
3 Likes
went slightly down this rabbit hole & the writer of Ghost Babel / credited writer on all MGS games pre-4 (seems like primarily did optional codecs in 2) when he left 2 japan studio in 2005 apparently wrote an SRPG game that came out february 2023 which i have never heard anybody mention in the slightest anywhere?
18 Likes
I think it says a lot about Football Manager, or at least about my relationship with Football Manager, that the week before the DFB Pokal Final, and two weeks before the Champions League Final, when, as the manager of Union Berlin in the year of our lord 2049, I was already trying to figure out what tactical approach would work best, first, for second division Stuttgart, who play a 4-2-3-1 DM Wide, and second, for mighty Barcelona, who play a āBrazilian Boxā of a 4-2-2-2 DM/AM and who also feature my former captain, whom Iād ushered gently out of the exit door two seasons ago, that most of the time spent with the game was going through literally hundreds of scouting reports that had just come back from the FIFA U-20 World Championships, a giant virtual stack to go through, most of them ending up on the floor and a select few marked in red ā retrieve more information, if possible.
Because even if youāre near peak competitiveness now, what good is that if things just fall apart five years down the line?
(Even if youāre already 20+ years down the line. The fire still burns.)
That two days before the DFB-Pokal Final, with the news that Mexican star striker Narciso Gonzalez Romero, the leading scorer in the Bundesliga this season, with 26 goals in 29 appearances, had tweaked his knee in training and was now questionable for the game, is taking place simultaneously with haggling with the agent for a Brazilian teenager because you discovered his contract has a 10 million Euro release clause and even though you donāt think heāll ever play for you (heās lazy, his defensive positioning consists of a disheveled, wall-eyed slouch, and he couldnāt mark an exam paper), youāll make two to three times that amount at least when you resell him to another European club in three years time. And, even though you literally have over a billion dollars in the bank, you could use the money.
It is a lot of spinning plates, to keep everything in balance. Itās soothing and deeply, deeply cruel.
(Last year, we went out in the Champions League semifinal to Milan, a team that boasted three former Union players, that Iād sold to them because while Union was doing well, we could use the money. We could always use the money. We arguably outplayed them; however, our goalkeeper decided to have a nightmare game, basically throwing two goals in for them in the second leg. We couldnāt recover. I viewed it as a sign of character that I didnāt sell him afterward.)
We lost to Barcelona in the semifinals of the Champions League two years ago. Itās been three years since we lost in the CL Final to Liverpool, the first time weād lost to them in the Final after beating them three years in a row some years before. It says a lot about my relationship with Football Manager that Iād still really like to beat Barcelona.
12 Likes
I finished up Owlboy and while my overall impression is largely unchanged (it is a bit better than the first third hints at as it goes from two long stealth bits to zero afterwards) I just want to write some nice things about it.
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It has a rather unique set-up in that you seemingly only play as the owl fellow, but aside from a spin attack that only really stuns things he lacks any real offensive options. You can only really attack when holding a second character, whose attacks you aim with the right stick and fire/do other skills with the right trigger. You can also only hold anything when flying (no double jump, pressing jump while in mid-air lets you fly indefinitely) which leaves you passive when walking/in the air as much as possible which is at least a less typical way to go about things.
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The game has a desire for any genre cliche or mechanical necessity to be explained in-universe. The silent protagonist is an actual mute who gets bullied for it early on. You can switch to/select a partner to carry while flying with a push of a button for mechanical reasons, but they make sure to have you stumble upon ancient owl technology i.e. a handheld teleporter before you need to do so. The air gets thin enough near the top of the world that your wings can no longer get enough lift, which both works to prevent you from flying upwards forever and is a major late game plot point. All of these things are revisited/pointed out several times across the game.
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I liked that the tutorial bit was several times you tried to do something and messed up, with your teacher berating you for your screw ups. It is a small thing but I liked that it is a different framing than one usually gets.
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There are a few occasions where it feels like their dream game pokes through into reality, and they are neat moments. There is one bit where you fight a giant robot snake boss and once you defeat it you land on its head exhausted, only for it to come back to life and fly away. This results in you having to pull on its head to roughly steer it as it flies in a blind rage, your orientation shifting as it does some large loops in the air through flying/collapsing rocks as you try to keep track of which way up is while you are now upside down. Eventually you are trying to steer it through some narrow passageways, ricocheting back and forth off the walls satisfyingly whenever you graze them, probably my favorite bit in the game. There was also a brief āninja gaidenā-esque cutscene for a major all is lost moment with some lovely incidental animation tossed in.
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For a self-described ālove letter to pixel artā I wish more of it was distinct, but there were some lovely views in it.
So I got my value out of it, had a decent enough time, donāt think Iād recommend it but there are worse ways to spend some time.
12 Likes
Thank you finding a game that was for no one.
8 Likes
Namco Picross is stupid fun. I love deciphering pictures of Pac Man and Tekken characters (unironically)
10 Likes
And sometimes, everything just comes together.
This wasnāt a triumph of style, of effervescent football. We started out in a 3-5-2, two attacking wingbacks and a pure destroyer in front of three centerbacks. In the second half, they switched from their Brazilian Box to a more pedestrian 4-3-3, and we responded by matching their formation, bringing on four new players at 54 minutes played, a gamble that paid off.
The goal came from a corner, from my half-fit captain, playing in his second match since injuring his Achilles in January, whipping the ball in to where my half-fit vice-captain, playing in his first match since injuring his hip in March, headed it off of the post, and in.
After that, we dug in, held onto the ball when we got it back, and squeezed the life out of them like a giant python. Glory is not always to the brave.
8 Likes