FFIII is a really charming Boy’s Adventure. I enjoyed how it thematically and mechanically escalated over its runtime.
5 Likes
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: it’s well executed and pretty funny once you’re throwing hammers at fascists but I’m not sure what’s supposed to pull you through more than an hour or two of gameplay. I already know what Indiana Jones is about and I don’t rewatch the movies.
4 Likes
Managed to get all the way through Kiki Island in one go thanks to my trusty steak knife.
After that I also beat the Sumo Dungeon with the same equipment.
Very satisfying to see the froggy guys fail to pull me with their tongues because Sumos are too heavy
9 Likes
I am happy to report that D2 has added Dinosaurs AND Aliens to the mix.
8 Likes
True to midlife-crisis stereotypes, I’ve developed an interest with driving cars quickly on the eve of my 40th birthday. However, I’m absolutely terrible at driving, so I’ve been splitting my time between drilling lessons in GTR2 (2006) and doing freeroam drives in Assetto Corsa.
Also I’m playing Metaphor but will refrain from comment.
8 Likes
Life Crush Story is a match-3 with a funny twist.
First, choose a random family to be born into in the hopes of getting a good start:
Over the course of the game you are trying to fill one of three color-coded meters representing: Things You Like, Things You’re Good At, and Things You’re Randomly Interested In. There are also Time tiles that advance you through life stages (Baby, Old Enough to Walk, Boy, Student, Young Adult, Adult). You try to avoid clearing these as much as possible. There’s some other mechanical nuances with the matching but nothing that mind blowing. If you match 5 tiles you get a Fate Card which bestows a bonus/malus of some kind.
Leveling one of these meters up enough and at the right life stage gives you a shot to unlock a little skill test (all of the “tap the screen at the right time to win” variety; there seems to be some intentional input delay to make it harder). If you succeed you get a good ending, or maybe a “kinda good” ending. So you might begin by randomly finding out you’re good at Sports, and eventually you try to become a pro baseball player. If you fail you set your sights lower to being a youth coach, etc
Most of the endings are some flavor of bad or at least a bit melancholy
Even some of the “Good” endings are a little distasteful
I’ve been playing off-and-on between other things trying to unlock some of the endings
Edit: I forgot, unless you get Rich Parents you will eventually have to take out a loan which replaces one color of blocks with money bags that need to be cleared in order to keep up with your payments
18 Likes
I must have gotten the luckiest seed ever in Shiren 6. Three companions joined me, which made most of the monsters easy as hell and everyone was levelling up like crazy. I found a wishing shrine that took me to a place full of revival grass. All my companions had been lost before the end, but because I had blessed invincibility grass the boss went down pretty easy. I think I only used one revival grass.
I thought that was the last main story dungeon, but it seems there’s one more, where you get to turn into a dog
13 Likes
peripeteia goes on the list of lowpoly games that runs worse than monster hunter strive or dq11 on my dinky laptop. i had to lower settings until the hud icon drawings are barely legible. it still looks great and seems interesting as a (possibly) scaled down deus ex where you get to be a cute but maybe kinda cruel amnesiac cyborg
i wish i had a maybe somewhat stronger computer, alternatively that everyone who uses unity learns to turn off all the things that do nothing but make computers chug. i swear those effects aren’t worth anything
11 Likes
I was wishing for a map that I could move the numbers around on. the story gimmick felt kind of shallow, and I’d correctly named everyone by the beginning of act 2
the mechanical gimmick is pretty good & reminded me of The Last Express, wish there was a real mystery to solve
1 Like
Out most fearsome foe yet… nine fish on the deck of our boat…
My buddy and I are now 50 hours into Tales of Rebirth, and the combat is still enormously fun. I really love how they kept this fresh and challenging.
Tales of Rebirth Continues...
We’re having to regularly use all the systems available to us to keep pace, including completing every janky-ass minigame they deigned to include:
This boat minigame is probably the best-implemented one of the bunch, being about at Mario Party 2 levels. It was hard but largely because the paths you must complete are not clearly laid out at all, leading us to again return to the ol’ pad of paper to map out what we’d done and what we hadn’t.
Really makes me feel like a lot of JRPGs were fucking impossible without some kind of guide, back in the day.
Case in point: By far the most insane, difficult minigame I have ever seen. A kindly Old living in a shack in the middle of nowhere (how were you to find this??) tells us that he can’t sleep, because he keeps having crazy-ass dreams. We agree to jump into his mind and sort it out (not a thing we we can do!!!), leading us to discover that this man actually is manifesting his magical powers, and this has taken the form of a minigame arena in the men’s locker room:
What followed was the single most harrowing, ball-busting pit of chaos we have ever experienced, taking every ounce of our ability and every cosmic whim of luck we could grasp onto. There’s no fucking way this minigame received any amount of testing or refinement.
Wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The minigames yield big permanent boosts to your characters, so honestly, to play it at the difficulty we’re at, they’re essential. It does feel good to be turning the tide of these battles thanks to our good Christian work at the bathhouse.
Story-wise, Mao is with absolute certainty the main character, now solidifying a crazy backstory that is befitting the hero: He is in fact the creation of all the elemental gods creating a single huma life, so they might understand mortals and the world they live in.
It is the height of absurdity that every now and then Vaigue will speak and carry forward the same, unchanging plotline he’s been on since the start, which is, “I am worried about Claire.” I cannot imagine what the developers were thinking beyond that evidently the protag must always be a sword-wielding pallet swap of the other twelve games like this, so the box art will sell better maybe?
We are currently most of the way through your standard “there are 10 boss monsters, find them and kill them” story, which kicked in after the initial (and very good) storyline concluded. Because this portion of the game takes so long, it’s increasingly strange how every town and NPC we interact with must now tell us about the same plot beat: That huma and gajuma have inexplicably become incredibly racist against each other, because of an evil force called The Will, which we both unleashed by accident and have to destroy.
As a result, every single conversation is someone saying “I wasn’t racist before, but I am now” or “The people were didn’t used to be so racist, but they are now!” or “I’m racist against you, go away!”. It has gone far, far beyond getting old, is now Old, and holy shit there has to be something else to this story.
A thing I am starting to realize about the Tales games is that their most interesting content is somehow always trapped in lore or backstory that is never directly explored. It’s just there to create the world. Why not explore the history of the gajuma and huma? Why focus completely on this one single plot beat about The Will? Madness.
So yeah, the story is a bit stale at this point. Hopefully, once we defeat the last boss monsters, it will change gears a bit. Or, the game will end? In which case I sort of wish it had decided to do more with the very cool, very well-rendered world they built.
8 Likes
Really enjoying this so far. A Gunbuster-style visual novel/adventure game in the spirit of those countless PC-88/FM Towns titles. This team has done an excellent job capturing the best parts of those titles - the music, the crisp and clean visuals, the pacing, the crunchy-ass sound effects - and wrapped them around a story and cast I’m finding quite good.
Just got through a bit where the power cuts out to your ship, and you must work to get the different parts of the ship communicating, so you can restore power. Really effectively created a sense of dread and isolation, and it was a lot of fun working the problem until everything’s back online.
Found myself sucked into this until the wee hours last night. Always a good sign.
9 Likes
Very glad you got through the first storyline which is very good. But there isn’t much else after that yeah. As you are finding out.
2 Likes
as mentioned elsewhere, i went to arcade club leeds on firday night, and among other things, i played a bunch of credits of dodonpachi saidaioujou. i’m really gonna have to get a switch one of these days, what a fucking game.
also, is anyone ever going to figure out making a home version of baby pac man? would’ve been great on the 3ds, but obviously it’s far too late for that now. it’s not even that great a game, i just get fascinated by it whenever i’m able to play it.
8 Likes
the fucking pinball game in baby pac man is the worst ever, i kinda liked standing around the cabinet at the unicorn to watch people be excited by the concept and completely defeated by the execution
14 Likes
Seems someone made an Atari 7800 port somewhat recently, shout out to the old heads, altho obviously it skips a more natural dual screen setup
9 Likes
whoa!
2 Likes
Went slightly further down this rabbit hole theres also a more straightforward emulation via pinmame(YouTube description has instructions on setting it up on windows). So double shout out 2 emulators/homebrew/bootleg preservationists/etc.
slight digression; Virtual pinball rly impressive as a collaborative effort, ppl scanning in physical marquees, recording audio, simulating physics, dumping roms, compiling it together, self selecting for whichever part of the process they can add to.
Or like, someone updating the compatibility & adding a backglass to someone else’s wholly original hypothetical solid state era Mr. Bubble pinball table. theres so many ways to make art
14 Likes
I have “finished” Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity as I think I’ve tracked down most of the endings and all the stages I am going to (there’s a set of timed levels where you are given a couple specific forms and have to pull off a difficult task with them and… well I suck at them and am not enamored with them).
I feel whenever I mention playing/beating a game, particularly a rather SB game, that I should really write something about it but while I dug it a lot I don’t really have a lot to say about it. I recommend it, it does some cool things in a “I know what best practices are, I don’t care” kinda way, often very cool looking but often much grayer than one would expect, it is neat.
14 Likes
a Steam Next Fest prelude
hey the devs behind The Phantom beat them up decided to drop a demo to ride on the coattails of the Fest but seemingly not as part of it
I played the demo hungrily because I am a masochist
okay I was going to talk shit about this game
instead I now think the game has it
I don’t know what it is but it’s got it
absolutely deranged
mindboggling
I’m gettin’ the vapors and brainworms
I don’t think anyone should play this
now I have to play it until I make the gun useful
13 Likes
is billy zane in it
7 Likes