games you played today: winning eleven

[loki]

picross myra hindley

picross copyright infringment

[Grandpa]

Speaking of Mario’s Picross, I finished the Kinoko Course…onto the next set of puzzles…

Not sure what possessed me, but I sat down today and played pretty much the whole thing of Steamworld Dig in one go. Pretty sure I’ve done this before (on Vita? I think?) but the game is still a pretty good One Afternoon Game.

The way a bunch of the achievements are absolutely missable is devious as hell, if you give a shit about that sort of thing (I don’t really!). I just barely eked out the “buy all upgrades” one since I accidentally let a lot of ore get smashed. $0 balance at the end.

I’ll have to play the sequel some day, I hear it’s alright, too.

[COINTELBRO]

Avowed

my prior exposure to this series is playing the first 1/3 of pillars of eternity 1 like 6 times and then reading spoilers for the rest of it. the worldbuilding is charming: the world is entering the modern period; souls, gods, and reincarnation are all real but they’re also essentially mechanistic and material. the gods, who definitely exist, but can also be killed by the setting equivalent of atomic weapons, are the legacy of a hubristic precursor civilization who loved imperialism so much that they engineered the gods via mass sacrifice of human souls so that their culture’s worldview could be fixed in place forever (for example, the god of rebellion is a self-defeating, self-mutilating loser). fun stuff

it feels like too much work to write actual paragraphs but if i don’t just post these thoughts will probably be gone forever so:

• the environments in this game are beautiful, detailed, and palpably artificial. traversal is fun, the mantling mechanics are generous and you can use them to get up inclines it looks like you shouldn’t be able to

• they nailed the feel of guns imo. my character has the arcane scholar background, since the setting’s version of science is pretty interesting, but on this vacation to the colonies their main priority is to get in a lifetime’s worth of gunplay. every shot is satisfying and you can spec such that you can slow time down to aim precisely.

• i’m also into this first-person implementation of evasive maneuvers, you basically have bloodhound step from elden ring and can use it to jump backward or to the sides

• i’ve been wandering around the countryside in areas i’m underlevelled for and between exploiting leashing behavior and headshots being strong it’s working out pretty well. the areas i’m supposed to be in are definitely going to be a cakewalk once i find them though

• had objective markers on for the first few quests and they made me view the environment as an annoying impediment to moving in a perfectly straight line toward the floating UI element

• i’m going to try disabling them and see if the writing and map give a decent enough indication of where things are

• minimaps / radars are also fucking weird, like i’m here in the embassy in the main town and it looks like there are three enemies milling around on the other side of a wall to the north

  • yeah it was 3 giant spiders in an alley, i climbed around on scaffolding until i found them. now they are dead and the radar ui element is soothed, no more red or movement
  • maybe i can also get by without the minimap

[Rudie]

I fell through polygons while shimming in Beyond Good And Evil and turned it off.

[meauxdal]

pikmin 4 is kinda slow but it also kinda rules

[Tulpa]

Second major area of Avowed is less boring than the first though its still a bit dull

At least the situation in the second area isn’t just filler: wizards using corpses as free farm labor + technology to infuse the soil with soul juice but now they face a famine and some are blaming the necromancers for the famine. That’s a workable scenario! Still feels a bit like plain oatmeal but at least its a visible problem in the world! Almost wish they swapped the order of the regions, and you saw this necromantic farmland first and whatever shit happened in the first area second.

[iguferon]

Can’t wait to never play another game again because the marvel heroes private server is now largely functional!!!

There are real people, loitering in avengers tower right now as we speak…any one of us is just moments away from hearing Pirate Deadpool say YE BE QUALIFYIN’ FOR CABIN BOY NOW

[L]

THIS IS ANTE 2

[Sykel]

i played banjo-tooie with my partner, who grew up with it

not as bad as it’s reputation it suggests! better than DK64 but way WAY worse than the first game. people complain about the large worlds, but it’s not the size that’s the problem imo, it’s the amount of backtracking you have to do and how easy it is to forget where stuff is cause of no signposting etc, and also how tedious a lot of the tasks are (and it feels deliberately made tedious)

also lacks a lot of the charm of the original game, and replaces a lot of it with toilet humour. you can tell this is the game before conker’s bad fur day because you can see it emerging from it. they got rid of the fatphobic stuff at least, but they replaced it with even more racism and also transphobia

BUT i still had fun with it (thanks to my partner guiding me through it) and it’s far from the worst platformer on n64. i can’t imagine 100%ing it though

[Rudie]

Because I found all of Final Fantasy XIII for 100 yen each I am starting it roughly 12 years after I first tried it. You are introduced to Lightning pointing a gun right at your face. I only got to play for 45 minutes before my headphones died. I got to at least see the Hottest Mom Ever In Video Games (RIP.)

I have surprised myself by understanding almost everything everyone said and gotten really mad at all the made up words. Whoever decided their game should have パース and パルズ, well thanks for the subtitles at least so I could figure out there were two different things. I’ve got a save 4.5 hours into the game, maybe after the intro I’ll skip to that.

It feels naturalistic in Japanese. X did as well. XVI was in English. MGS1 and 2 are better in English. my dabble in 3 caught me off guard, maybe 3 should be in Japanese.

That Final Fantasy XIII battle theme might be the best they’ve ever done.

[L]

Last week I played through Betterified VI: Bestified. The basic idea is that the Betterified series is a series of increasingly elaborate April Fools mods of the Super Mario Bros. X example world, “The Invasion 2”, in which every level has been “betterified”. I think the trailer included in that link sells it pretty well:

Betterified VI: Bestified - Release Trailer

Here are some screenshots:

So the nuts and bolts of playing it are like this. Every level falls into one of the following categories:

• Normal-seeming Mario level with some absurd rule layered on top, like a level with “every time you get points in any way, a Marching Milde is shot onto the screen” or a beach level with “every time you jump, you drop a fireball” AND “every time a fireball hits water, it creates a lava tile”. These rules are fairly diverse and varied (both in humour, gameplay quality and resulting difficulty) and end up lending a “minigame anthology” feel to the whole game. The important thing to consider is that these rules are almost always NOT explained at all, and mostly don’t make any diegetic sense, and the initial shock of having to figure them out (including silly ramifications like “killing a Marching Milde gives points and thus immediately spawns another Milde”) is part of the humour.
• Normal-seeming level with comedically dissonant assets (such as enemies or sound effects from tonally different popular games like Dark Souls being inserted). Some of these end up leveraging existing Super Mario Bros. X assets (e.g. the base engine has a partially functional Mega Man player-character which is used for some levels).
• Comedic narrative level with NPCs. These are uncommon, but the writing in them is passably amusing and usually clean (in the sense of swear words or random sexual references). These ones feel like they fit very well into the “parody fangame humour” tradition (in the vein of Barkley Gaiden and Undertale). There is one recurring “arc” about Luigi and Birdo that I find tiresome and uninteresting, but it doesn’t take up too much space.
• One-off genre shift minigames, such as one “level” that’s just a rudimentary text adventure (yes, like Frog Fractions).
• Actually interesting platforming levels without much humour. These are the rarest, but make a decent palette-cleanser when they appear.
• Fully scripted custom boss fights. Having played almost all the bosses, I’ll say they are not easy at all, but still feel fair, mainly due to A) letting you bring in powerups from other levels, including Yoshi or the shoe, and B) you having two playable characters with separate HP meters that you can swap in at any time.

One other thing: there’s a fast travel hub area that, in addition to providing an easy source of powerups, also contains various NPCs that sometimes give side-quests or puzzle hints that unlock additional levels or other rewards. These feel satisfying as extra things to do that make the game’s world feel a bit more layered and surprising (though it still doesn’t exactly feel coherent or grounded), and end up rounding out the entire experience

All in all, this is definitely recommended if you liked Super Bogus World or Barkley Gaiden back in the day. If it had been around years ago (and more importantly was standalone instead of being a level pack for a Mario fangame for Windows), it’d definitely have been an internet phenomenon of some kind. There are a good deal of levels in this that I find legitimately very funny, and even the ones that feel like nothing usually have a fail-state of being a serviceable-but-forgettable Mario platforming level (due to being parodies of levels that were exactly that).

[idiot]

started rise of the ronin. people seem very upset about the pc port but i’m definitely having a case of Works on My Machine
was prompted about how i’d gain experience for ‘collecting cats’ and killed a fella named matthew perry
seems pretty good

[parker]

I think rise of ronin’s one big weak point is there’s no just regular talk button for npcs. either they’re someone you can raise your bond with and you can do that and you get a couple dialogue options per level or you just can’t talk to them.

my sister and I had canceled black ops months back for ai art, for the little bullshit tokens and banners and icons and things they include in their bundles they sell to generate the illusion of getting things for your money, microsoft begging on the corner with their tin cup can’t afford to pay an artists for that junk anymore, and fell back on fortnite, a game handcrafted by artisans. but apparently in the next modern warfare, which isn’t until like 2026 I think, they’re bringing back dmz as a more purpose built mode instead of an experimental thing tacked onto their warzone mode. and the campaign is supposed to be more 2019 mw style etc. so just like captain price teaches us you draw the line wherever you need it. or maybe by then they won’t just make infinity ward do the same thing they made treyarch do with the ai shit since apparently warzone player counts are half of what they were and they’re already doing all kinds of remember the good old days of original warzone to try to get people back.

[Mr_Mechanical]

Balatro came to gamepass a couple weeks ago which led to me finally checking it out which led to me getting the phone version so I could play it anytime anywhere which led to me winning my first run just now with the red starter deck.

Dang this really is as good as everyone says it is huh.

[smbhax]

Gran Turismo 5 XL Edition

Curiously enough, doing the game’s HDD data install option fixes all but one of these emulation glitches. The other just showed up in RPCS3 two days ago. ; D

~ ~ ~

Update: According to RPCS3 graphics guru kd-11, the artifact in the background of a few menu screens (upper right screenshot) only occurs on Nvidia graphics cards–not on AMD cards: Gran Turismo 5 [BCUS98114] Black graphical artifacts in main menu & pre-race menu backgrounds - first seen in build 17590 · Issue #16856 · RPCS3/rpcs3 · GitHub

~ ~ ~

Update 2: As a workaround, disabling RPCS3’s AA removes that artifacting. But kd-11 has already submitted a fix for the root problem, so the workaround shouldn’t be necessary once the next RPCS3 build is out (they generally update multiple times per day)

I wonder if the fact that the AA-enabled artifacting doesn’t occur during races means that the game doesn’t use AA during races. It certainly doesn’t LOOK like it does–very jaggy. ^ D^

~ ~ ~

Update 3: Actually, that was part of the bug–AA just wasn’t working, I guess, because now that I have the build with the fix, RPCS3 build 17640, there IS some AA during races. Much less jaggy. ; )

I kind of liked the jank of the jags but I guess I could always turn off the AA setting if I really wanted them back. ; DD

[drastic_bb]

got a thrift store ps2 for well below the going rates i’m seeing on ebay and at other stores and it works just fine…

just found a random dualshock 2 i had laying around my room as well as a copy of sky odyssey… one of the true ps2 secret classics that ive been on about for 10+ years probably. love the handling of the planes, perfect balance between simulation and arcade sensibilities, immediately just becomes a game about finessing the controls through big, tough as nails, one shot youre dead, do or die levels and scenarios (second mission has u refueling from a moving train) with actual like Vision and design behind them… emerging from a canyon to see shafts of light breaking through clouds over water, low poly flocks of birds (there are a lot of sensibilities this shares imo with AM2’s games) … i got like 5 copies of this over the years and just hand them out to real PS2 enthusiasts and lowkey expect some kind of gaming youtuber to drive the price up on secondhand copies once the retrogaming enthusiast market learns it exists and is honestly superb… but that hasnt happened yet lol. actually when i tried to sell my entire ps2 collection (along with the ps2) a few years ago sky odyssey (along with kof XI!) was one of the games the secondhand shop wouldnt even take.

probably my only complaint about it is the color palette is a bit drab… but there are some real moments of beauty breaking through from time to time

also features a score by famous film composer otani kow…

has anyone seen “only angels have wings”…

[username]

Hopefully FF XIII does not kill your PS3 like it did mine, if it is an older PS3 model beware as it seemingly is a thing the game can do for reasons?

[dogs]

i beat fear. it’s pretty good. great ending. it did take me 16 hours to get to that ending though, so.

game has basically the perfect level of graphical fidelity imo. i was whinging to dylan about how we never needed more graphics than this – and yes i know it was a fucking monster graphics beast back when it was released (the target framerate in the benchmark is 40!) but like come on please we peaked here why does everything look the same but run worse ok i’ll shut up.

level design was pretty chill, although i thought it was weird that like, enemy types are basically never mixed. you’re only ever fighting one kind of guy at a time. which is strange to me coming from quake as my primary fps cos like the way to make encounters interesting there is to keep mixing up the enemy combos and placement. iono it didn’t make encounters boring. the geometry was still doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. anyway i played through like 90% of it on “impossible” difficulty (i think that’s what it was called?) once it became apparent that the proclaimed super intelligent ai enemies were actually really pretty normal.

i appreciated that it was still a game with like hit points and armour and shit like that. i think if this had been a contemporary game all those numbers would have been abstracted away in favour of a more “immersive” experience. idk i just like knowing that i only have a couple hit points to work with! it’s tense and exciting. it’s also cool that u can lose health and ammo during the spooky flashback/hallucination sequences too. i feel like that’s not an intuitive decision, but really makes everything that much more unsettling and unstable.

shame about the one fat person in the whole game huh.

[Rudie]

Bad thing is all Ps3s are older now, but this one is a Super Slim that I just cleaned and thermal’d.

[captainlove]

Never content with my fill of PS2 ninja games I persist along the Shinobi line and played more Nightshade. It’s brighter, more colourful, more accessible. There’s more of a brightly lit joy about your movement and abilities than the hazy night coolness of Shinobi. I’m not sure if there’s a reason this doesn’t show up on those lists of gems more often. It feels like it has everything I want out of a game like this. The music in Shinobi was good but I groove to Nightshade more.

It has a control scheme (and options) that I feel get you to the core of it a bit more. You have a kick to break guard, can charge attack, do little combos with spinny knives. Easy mode and more options just get me to what I think is probably good about Shinobi if you have a bit more patience. Although it sounds like you have a more advanced toolkit, Nightshade is really just a very sequential kinda experience. It’s not like you flip around dodging enemies to whittle them down. More like encountering enemies in space the same way a Guitar Hero player encounters notes.

I’m enjoying the puzzle of how many dashes (side or neutral) and jumps and hits and kicks do I need to get through the chain of enemies they lay out and in what order. One level is all about breaking mirrors to destroy demon barriers and the enemies always conveniently make a staircase to them in a way that makes only videogame sense. Some mirrors are over bottomless pits

When to lock off has taken me some getting used to. The last level I did was a horrible difficulty spike where you’re jumping between exploding trucks on the motorway. Touching the road is instant death so you better be ready. At one point they make you wall run on some trucks and it took me a sec to realise that if you leave lock-on ‘on’ it prevents you from wall running. Not sure if it was intended as a hard skill check but I fell to my death so many times because I thought I hadn’t got the right angle to start wallrunning. I nearly quit the game right there and then but tasted the sweet nectar of persevering with bullshit.

Getting the Tate is the best. Especially when they flood a room with enemies and you get 30 Tate ～(^▽^人)

I really did find Shinobi (PS2) lacking by comparison and I don’t know if diehards really swear by either game.