“I know the Yakuza games can be hundreds of hours long if you try to 100% them, but there’s no way 5 is really twice as long as 4,” I said, a fool, as I check my hour count as Saejima arrives in the village and find myself maybe 20 hours shy of my total completion time for 4 alone.
Game’s pretty good, though…was kinda upset that it suddenly started running like shit on my Steam Deck for some reason? Like, I had 60 FPS going all week, no problems, then the other day I kept getting sudden freezes and massive frame drops.
Tried all sorts of things but finally just settled at capping it at 30 FPS. It’s fine. It’s fine. Whatever plays smooth enough.
Was horrified to hear Saejima’s interjections during his image training karaoke session with that hostess, though at least when he actually sings it sounds fine. Real “oh this is why he wouldn’t go into the karaoke place” moment.
I like that the enemies in Avowed ragdoll like crazy when you kill them but otherwise the combat feels like it has zero weight or impact to it whatsoever and why would I bother playing yet another game like this if it’s gonna be like that…
I’ve been palying Trails of Cold Steel II a lot and havea write up on that in the works, but I am also taking a break to play the PSP version of Brandish, which damn is so much fun. It’s also really funny how fast it is once you get down how to play it.
finished final fantasy 6… my first playthru in probably literally 15+ years… i did indeed “doublecast ultima” on everything that moved and mostly used the no random encounters charm hidden in narshe world of ruin to walk to the bosses. prior to this my main strategy was to use smoke bombs to run from most fights lol. i think the fact that you can run from most random encounters in most JRPGs is overlooked lol (despite the genre’s reputation for grindinggggggg it’s often been my experience that that is usually not a very effective strategy and players interested in like… exploring the RPG mechanics and gameplay can find ways around it)
(another virtue of 90s jrpgs, a lack of concern for balance since jrpgs are often about noble and worthy goals like Killing Everything That Moves, Doing 9999 Damage, etc. etc.)
one of the things i thought about a lot playing this is that the storytelling is very good (played a patched i found on CD romance that uses the ted woolsey 90s “final fantasy III” script with the names of items and spells changed to the ps2-era standards and some minor uncensoring). i know no one has never said this before.
walking around an internal dreamscape of one of your party members as he remembers times with his wife and child… that’s the stuff
i’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the vastly more limited and elliptical methods of storytelling in like 90s games in particular are great because idk… the same reasons you don’t want a film or a novel to have clunkily literal storytelling (something i think not just games but films and whatever else as well have done more and more, to my detriment, as i get older) either probably lmao. i think that given the limited cartridge space, even the number of letters in the script had to be a consideration…
also thinking about how newer games maybe wouldn’t go for a final boss that is a nihilistic clown transformed into a biological / technical tower designed by a great artist inspired by a bunch of italian renaissance art while like a four movement organ piece plays lol.
also how i think a lot of the imagery in 2D pixel gaming in general is kind of underrated in terms of weirdness and basically completely unconcerned with explicability…
but yes… i needed to play something with Great pixel art on my new old crt (that i’ve had for twenty years but havent used in ten and which looks as good as the day i found it on the curbside…)
Started Tunic! It’s…hard for me to gauge how I feel about Tunic. I think I see why a lot of folks around here hate it. But I also know the specific ways my taste is orthogonal to SB consensus and Tunic seemed primed to be one of those.
If I had played this in 2015, I think this would have been my perfect videogame. Silent protagonist, organically unfolding world to explore, light SoulsBorne elements. But I’m not sure 2025 Tigress wants this nearly as much as I did then. There’s been a lot of games in this mold, and basically none of them nail what they’re trying to pull off as well as Hollow Knight does.
And even if the execution is tunic is good a lot of it feels…like…overturned and focused on game maker’s toolkit style ‘good design’. It has it’s moments! Like when I realized the game was expecting me to engage in friendly fire. It also, crucially, does seem to allow some cheesing. Thus far there haven’t been any real “There is literally no way to interact, just want the boss do some shit for a minute” attack patterns, and a surprising number of tools work in fights you wouldn’t expect them to.
That said I’m…compelled? I sort of worry it’s a rogulite style compulsion loop. The game is really good at doling out one or two points of upgrades, or a new piece of knowlege, or just a cave with some currency in it. Imagery grows and changes, you get hints at later areas before you can reach them…and I feel clever when figuring some of this stuff out even though it doesn’t actually seem that clever when I stop and think for a second.
It’s clearly a crafted game, but I’m not sure it’s an amazing one.
beat northern journey. shit owns so hard it’s unbelievable.
it’s the most successful expression of like, an adventure story that a kid would make up: “and then you climb a haunted ice mountain and then you go down the big slippery slide and then and then you go underwater and fight beetles with a harpoon! and then there’s lava–” like it just keeps going like that it’s miraculous; it’s such setpiece-oriented game design, which is a paradigm i don’t think i’ve experienced since raw danger. the whole thing’s designed with the confidence to do something really cool exactly once and then move on to the next bespoke really cool thing.
i’m so glad i went back and gave it a second try (cos i fell off the first time cos the combat is dreadful and i wasn’t really sure it was going anywhere) cos this is one of the best game i’ve ever played, period.
“it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a slingshot, to treat everything as if it were something to piss off”
no idea what I’m doing here I think I’ve killed Pac-Man in the first 10 minutes of this game more than all my time spent with the original. kinda rules though
when he gets impatient and taps on the glass at the pause screen, playing on a CRT is most verisimilitudinous
edit: ok, figured out how to get Pac-Man to look at the bottle on the sign and piss off the crow into attacking him, knocking down the bottle in the process so Pac-Man could milk the cow into the bottle and bring it back to Ms. Pac-Man to feed Pac-Baby. guess I was lucky to have dropped the bail of hay on the farmer beforehand assuming he would have taken the milk from me on my way back otherwise
I still think calling this game Pac Man 2 is one of the greatest things to ever happen in the history of video games. It would be like if they had called Mario Kart Super Mario Bros. 4
I started playing For Answer (Thank you @Polygonzo ). I’m still at the stage of testing things out, failing, and feeling like all of my builds are missing a coherent vision. There’s a couple of weak missions where I get strapped to rockets and shot towards an industrial fortress. The fortress shoots large pulse cannons and I have to dodge them as if this were Sonic Unleashed. I just finished Chapter 1, and feeling better about what I can and cannot do. It always feels good to start the game because I am greeted by this:
I wanted to play more robot games, so I also sat down and learned Ranger-X. I was always intimidated about its idiosyncrasies, but it’s really not that complicated. The first level is a flat field with enemies. Even though they give you a robot companion and six-button layout, they still want you to know this is a game about shooting things until everything is destroyed.
That’s not to say the rest of the game is plain. The second level is a cavern filled with one-off mechanics. It greets you with a power generator connected to a turret. I blasted the generator and the turret shut off. Later, I see these small crumbling bits of rock. I blast them and it turns out they’re eggs that hatch leeches. I was in agony until I accidentally shot the ceiling and a ray of sunlight obliterated the leeches that were pursuing me. Later in the stage, there are rocks that can be rolled around to destroy enemies, but usually I just hurt myself. Why does the second stage have this many ideas? The first stage didn’t. The third stage didn’t either…
I played it this morning on normal before realizing there was an easy mode. I loaded up easy tonight and didn’t feel much a difference in the challenge. Of course, I was bummed to discover this is one of those games that doesn’t give you an ending unless you beat it on the normal difficulty.
Peripeteia is exactly what the Steam page says it is (inspired by Deus Ex, STALKER, EYE etc) but I am the exact target audience for the post-soviet anime cyberpunk catholic fever dream Thief game so that’s fine. The level design is extremely EYE so maybe don’t play it if you don’t like wandering around labyrinthine and grimy dark places for 20 mins only to reach a dead end. I think trying to judge it on its “gameplay” merits is maybe a mistake though - it’s kind of like how a bunch of the mechanics in cruelty squad like the stock market are more there for the vibe than anything serious.
I got a MiSTer the other day! I’m loving it. It really does look and feel way more accurate than emulation, especially for N64 and Saturn. And it’s so much easier to use than RetroArch… Just a little bit of configuration when you first set it up, and then you almost never have to tweak a thing ever again! I’m the kind of guy who wants to actually play the ROMs. I know there are people out there who secretly just want to play with the settings, but that’s not me. But it’s all love, baby.
I started Linda Cube and it’s so charming right off the bat. You know how in most JRPGs you can point your guy at some random object in the world, press A, and get some nice little flavor text? In this game, sometimes you press A and you get a beautiful Tatsuyuki Tanaka illustration. This is a game that understands the basic animal appeal of pressing the A button to receive a present. Anyway, I’ve barely done anything in this game so far but I already think it’s the coolest shit I’ve played in a minute.
I also messed around with an incomplete fan translation of the original N64 version of Animal Crossing. It’s amazing how well they nailed the concept right off the bat! There’s not really any reason to go back to this version because the Gamecube one we got is pretty much the same game with just a few new things added. Even the music is the same! But yeah, it was nostalgic to dip into this. The writing was so much better in this first game than in the recent ones. The villagers are so mean to you in such funny ways. Just incredibly condescending, making rude remarks about your cleanliness, how uncultured you are, etc. It’s so good. You really feel like a barely-tolerated newcomer in a pre-established community. I wish Nintendo hadn’t gone and cozy-fied this series by making you the all-powerful, animal commanding, terrain warping mayor god of your blank slate tourist island.
playing Murder by Numbers, another picross based visual novel, this time set in the 90s and about a string of hollywood murders, where you play an out of work actress who becomes a freelance crime fighter with the help of a malfunctioning robot she found in a parking lot shortly after getting fired.
Gotta be honest the actual game has a hard time living up to how neat the premise is, but that’s kind of to be expected with how much zany gets crammed into the story. It does a much better job of treating the vn stuff and the picross stuff both well than most of the other picross vns I’ve played on switch. Recommended.
Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge: This is definitely better than the first Gameboy CV game, featuring things like actual background art and a player character who isn’t perhaps the slowest protagonist in gaming history. I’m not sure it is really recommendable beyond that or merely as a curiosity as most of the other original-style CV games are much better than it, and I think I died to that stupid penultimate boss as many times as I have any other CV boss, but by early GB standards it is pretty okay.
Firewatch: Beyond taking place in the woods and being a story-heavy game I really didn’t know anything about it, which probably helped. Not your typical gaming story, liked being in the wilderness, I enjoyed my few hours with it but could see others bouncing off of it hard.
Doki Doki Literature Club: Was a mistake, now I know better.
