19 Likes
This game is really boring! Wow. When I think “zelda like” I think that raised my expectations but this game is a lot closer to Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo Kazooie. There’s wacky sidekicks. There’s a million things to collect that open up doors to collect more things that open up other doors. Right now 2 hours into the game I have 5 currencies I can collect that each unlock something or another. There’s even a shell game right at the very beginning of the game
The first part of the game all you can do is carry explosive barrels and throw them at things or put them on switches as Krystal. krystal then gets trapped in a krystal.
I keep thinking about Miyamoto smoking a cigarette and going “we need to add SEX APPEAL to the starfox IP” while reading an issue of vampyria. I wonder what brand cigarettes he smoked.
Anyway. Star Fox goes to dinosaur planet and find’s Krystal’s staff. Then her floating head appears and talks directly to Star Fox crazy style.
I played for about 2 hours and most of the game was the same thing: Go to new area, progress until I need to find a Key to open a Door. Find Key to open Door that contains a Key which opens another door and then run back to open the Door from the beginning. Keys are mushrooms you find, or crystals, or literal keys, or bombs you plant. These become currencies and eventually you have to keep all of them stocked so you can continue to progress.
You eventually get a little sidekick Dino who follows you around and does commands like “find” secrets or “stay” on switches.
Attacks, Commands, and Items are all in the C stick menu so you’re constantly swapping things out to map to the action button A. Because these are all keys to different doors you’re in there a lot. Shoot plant, collect spores, plant spores, blow up plant, go through hole, find upgrade, use upgrade to open door, collect key. Ad infinitum.
Star Fox Assault, despite being 5 hours long, did not have the massive amount of filler that Star Fox Adventures has. It was also challenging and made me really sweat in a few moments. This game has thus far mostly put me to sleep. Progress is pretty steady but it isn’t very challenging.
The one hard part was a jetbike section where you have to hit 2 other jet bikes and make them blow up, I was stuck on that for about 10 minutes because it was mostly just frustrating.
I can see how this game was really popular in the furry community at the time because it’s a lot of pretty well designed characters Running Around, Saying Lines, and Doing Things. Not sure if I wanna play through the remaining 18 or so hours of the game though.
21 Likes
Next time you play really consider the layout, design, and everything about the ghost-dinosaur’s item shop.
When the enemy dinosaur has space-ships and the friendly dinosaurs are scared of the “bright star” disappearing every day, I don’t know Peppy, maybe just let the evil Dinosaur have it. Also who is the ghost dinosaur selling his wares to? Because it isn’t the stegosaurus outside that is scared of its own feces.
Yes Fox we need to you to throw this ball at this Prince Triceratops who is like all the other non-bipedal dinosaurs, dumb as rocks. Its surprising they are capable of speech.
Turns out I have a lot of Star Fox Adventures material.
11 Likes
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Zelda 1 (the disc system release, I presume), so upon realizing this I took an unfortunately extended break (well only about 90 minutes or so) from working on music stuff to play up to about half way through level 8 last night. The last time I played it a couple months back was the second quest so this was a bit more leisurely.
14 Likes
Romeo is a Dead Man is the kind of B-game I miss. It is by most measures pretty awful and tedious but it has enough going on in terms of upgrades and style that I can marinate in it. I got really excited when I saw these PS3-ass transparent grey dialogue overlays in cutscenes:
If this also excites you then please join me in the target demographic.
The writing and story are so loose it’s almost refreshing as it never really ties together to any sort of conclusion or consequence. It takes a sort of exquisite corpse (lol) approach where people do things and words are said in little half-connected micronarratives or stretched across the premise. You’re a half-dead cyborg who fell in love with a woman who became an interdimensional god and has to hunt her so space-time can go back to normal. Romeo himself comes across as not really having a consistent outlook though he is a conspiracy theorist which is not something I’ve played as much. The star-crossed lovers theming is very surface and unfortunately accounts for the game’s generally misogynistic tone though I suppose it’s not unsurprising from this studio. A lot of women getting violently murdered or transformed and then you come across this note:
Otherwise, it’s gory eclectic-style space adventures, though the visuals are extremely dull for the most part. Aggressive asset reuse of basic town buildings and hope you like cubeland. There’s a surprisingly large supporting cast which make for a sterile but cosy hub aboard the ship which are rendered in 2D. There are references to other Grasshopper games guys! The guy from the 25th Ward runs the shop! It’s all quite comfy but also hangs together as loosely as the plot.
There are things I think are very good. Upgrade flexibility is pretty neat. There’s a skill tree that takes the form of a maze arcade game with powerups dotted around the maze. It’s quite challenging to make an efficient route through but you can minmax very strongly as long as you plan the route and you can respect any time. Eventually it becomes very hard not to waste resources doubling back but I’ve never seen an upgrade system like this and it’d be neat to see other games try this. You unlock weapons very quickly but only about half are what I’d say make for effective builds.
They take the cooldown skills from NMH3 and build a whole farming minigame around it so you can create or fuse skills to build up a solid supporting arsenal of zombie summons (called bastards). It’s tedious but was satisfying to engage with by the end.
I think this might be the character action game with the beefiest prep phase of any I’ve played which ends up defining it in my memory. It’s arguably novel but also maybe a bit too grindy. Actual combat is fairly basic but jank enough that breaking the system becomes the hook to pull you through. Levels are often long and difficult to swallow so figuring out rapid DPS becomes a priority quickly.
The final level is a full on SMT dungeon but you can fall to lower levels if enemies are so inclined and there is fall damage. They put so many flying enemies in this level I’m fairly sure the designers want people to feel an emotion akin to ‘the tension of being about to be miserable’. There are also side dungeons where you navigate labyrinths made up of whatever modkits the level team had. They remind me of many of the latter Yakuza dungeons in that it is pure corridor jogging. This is where I should probably just list all the dumb shit that makes the game bad:
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You cannot cancel attacks very quickly so you need to get used to the exact rhythm of some weapons that lock you in if you press a little too insistently.
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One of the main pick ups is a tesseract which you must hold X to access through a lengthy spinning animation and pick up one item. In some cases the game makes you pick up multiple of these, very slowly, in the same room. You will rotate so many tesseracts just to collect necessary crafting materials. They tease you in the late game with tesseracts that contain multiple items but still force you to pick up like 5 in a row at the end of each Yakuza dungeon.
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Growing bastards (cooldown skills) is fine but the menu requires that you individually qte each one by pulling them out of the ground, assigning them a randomly generated name and watching them slowly walk off screen. When you have unlocked 8 slots for growing them this just becomes stupid. Let me harvest all.
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You cannot skip bastard fusion custcenes.
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Reloading takes so long early on that it sort of disincentivises using ranged weapons in combat. They feel more geared around exploiting AI and picking targets off before you get into the fight.
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The rocket launcher sucks, even with max reload speed. Just a shitty weapon.
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There’s a very lengthy stealth sequence that lampoons Silent Hill. It goes on far longer than it is interesting for.
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Most of the voice-acting is kinda meh. I think the game would just be better with vocal barks or gibberish sound. Would help make it feel even more surreal.
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The game has a ‘light/dark world’ thing going on. I didn’t mind it but some would probably hate that the ‘dark’ world doesn’t have a map. ‘Dark’ world physically shares coordinates, but it doesn’t visually resemble the ‘light’ world so you better have a good spatial memory that lasts between loading screens.
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Some enemies do a ground shockwave type move which you have to jump to avoid. Your jump just goes straight up and down about 2 feet off the floor and in like less than a second so your timing better be incredible.
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Combat quick menus are very convoluted. You hold left to select gun, right to select weapon and use the corresponding face buttons to confirm. You better memorise which face button is what. You can also hold L1 to activate cooldowns on the face buttons and consumables on the dpad. Up is your generic estus heal (fine), down sheathes your weapon (useless). This mapping just feels too much developer logic to internalise and consumables are so perfunctory you can just ignore a whole element of the game without much trouble.
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The final boss doesn’t want you to engage in melee combat. It will just kill you if you try this too much. No other fight punishes you in this way.
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I like all the crazy animated sequences but they really need to stop using these in marketing to suggest these might be more significant than they are. There’s a post-credits sequence that features prominently in the marketing and it’s good but not a reason to play this.
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There are too many side dungeons and they’re all the same.
In my mind the game is saved by a few things:
- I am an aesthete so I can just be pleased by new visuals and music if they happen often enough and they do.
- Defeating enemies has a satisfying slowmo effect applied.
- Upgrade flexibility is quite nice and coupled with jank makes for a chewy problem to solve. When you finally start breaking things it feels like you are one-upping poor design decisions.
- It’s much better than Killer is Dead which I was dreading this would be a clone of.
- I’M A DEAD MAN. 死ぬ ワケね~ ダロ~~~
22 Likes
also been enjoying this game, but kind of regretting starting it on the Bitter difficulty, which I selected by accident, because I thought I was just choosing what kind of chocolate I’d prefer
8 Likes
Yeah that’s rough. I went white chocolate because I was anticipating the worst and even that was tricky early on. They really should just let you change.
3 Likes
basically it means I die in about 2-3 hits, so it feels, essentially, like a Souls-like No More Heroes. I think I can probably power through it, but it did make me put the game down for a few days. I just finished the chapter in the mall against the guy from 80s, so it feels a little late for to me to restart.
2 Likes
If you can manage that boss on hard then you can probably get through the rest as long as you keep pace with upgrades. I’d recommend specialising with one weapon and one gun, don’t spread the flowsion.
2 Likes
oh yeah if it’s night all the npcs fall asleep and in some cases this blocks progress because you have to talk to one of them
4 Likes
There’s a reason I picked 1986 as the first crate digging thread…
4 Likes
i played through the carrie route of castlevania 64. the game is uneven but cool.
little boy dracula riding in on his evil winged unicorn was so adorable i started laughing. then he assumes adult form to scare you but dials it back to child mode to try and smooth things over when he realizes he’s losing, its so funny. why did he need to do that when he still had the centipede dragon thing left tho? almost ate shit, awkward as hell boss even with homing magic.
im so glad girl gets easy mode considering how bad dealing with the camera is
11 Likes
Huh? I’m pretty sure you can, I only watched that cutscene once.
I liked how this was suda copying the silent hill steath sequence that goes on way too long in NMH3 but even worse except it’s actually copying fatal frame 4 which wasn’t officially in english when that came out.
The first screenshot you posted was by far my favourite moment in the game because it has a level of sincerity and tenderness that equalled what TSA was TRYING to get at until it was ruined like ten panels later when rickle morty THINK SOMETHING A BIT WEIRD IS GOING ON!!! Further I got into the game I have less and less of an idea how he ever came up with killer7 never mind 25th.
There’s a scene near the end of the game where the adventure is described as a Crazy Thunder Road which rolled my eyes back into my skull except I forgot to take a screenshot and every clip of it online is in streamer mode which has the song removed and no lyrics.
4 Likes
no one told me the soundtrack for linda cubed was basically ryoji ikeda’s dataplex and no one told me that there are a ton of dog based mechanics and some girl just gives you a dog right in the beginning!!! this game rules so far
12 Likes
Linda cubed has a great soundtrack all overtaken by the sound of jingle bells repeated 100x over in seemingly decreasing quality as you get more familiar with it.
I want to play the PC-98 version next year
3 Likes
I feel like I ended up watching that bastard fusion cutscene every time and I might’ve assumed you couldn’t skip. I was a bit out of it due to illness while playing.
I think Suda just needs someone above him to channel the ideas and edit. Mikami did this for Suda on Killer7 and I think Kojima has the same general issue.
4 Likes
i really like how many high pitched sounds there are in a game with so many dogs, which is probably another reason it reminds me of dataplex so much
The album follows a fairly simple pattern: sounds are introduced in seemingly random units: high-frequency white noise and low-frequency stabs, beeps and static like the kind you hear when you accidentally dial a modem number. And then, slowly, over the course of the album, these random bleeps and skips form themselves into patterns. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the patterns reveal themselves to the listener. Computers conduct business at the speed of electrical impulses, after all; the early static and seemingly random clusters of noise that compose the first part of the album are probably highly organized at a level undistinguishable to the human ear, much like a dog whistle.
the way that the bits of soundtrack are attached to what dialogue box you’re on so if you just don’t change the page you can make it buzz forever is such a wild thing to do and i love it. I make the soundtrack
5 Likes
Even with other people at his side like Mikami (good) and Swery (Demon) that kind of story’s so alien compared to anything else before outside of maybe 5% of TSA and 7% of this game. Someone tell him to go back to reading Kafka.
4 Likes
Yeah Romeo isn’t exactly pushing us conceptually.
1% Zombies
2% Romeo and Juliet
3% Conspiracy Theories
94% I watched Rick and Morty
8 Likes
so a while ago i unlocked a thing called “ki feeling” in killer instinct 2013
i searched what felt like everywhere for a menu option or whatever, anything, that would help me understand what this was—to no avail
until today i went back into training mode, which i hadn’t seen in a while, and found a new “theme” option several tabs over in the pause menu, that back-projected a cityscape behind the training grid’s back wall, and swapped out the default training music for this:
7 Likes