Games you’ve played today: Fourteen by Kazuo Umezz

[hellojed]

Two more hours of starfox adventures. I go to a hybrid snow/lava level. Multiple times you have to feed a mammoth food in order for them to open a literal door. You ride a mammoth, but can only get on and off at designated locations and the mammoth has tank controls and moves slowly.

There’s one section where you get behind a turret but the turret barrel covers up where the projectiles go and in order to control the projectile distance you hold and release a button. It’s slow. it’s really easy to miss. You have to kill all the dinosaurs in order to…open a door.

There is an entire section where you run around to extend a bridge (that you need to find three gears in order to operate) so you can go into a cave and do a minigame in order to get a horn, which warps the mammoth to your location so you can ride him through a snowstorm.

At one point you have to carry a barrel that can explode up a circular ramp with barrels coming at you and you have to transfer it to multiple platforms all so you can throw it at a wall that opens up so you can hit a switch to open up yet another door.

Progress is so slow, because it’s all about finding keys to locks. It’s incredibly easy though. so it’s just really tedious.

I got to my first boss battle of the game: the boss eats you after you attack it, and then you’re in it’s stomach and have to attack its organs to get it to spit you out and continue the fight. You get eaten a second time and the boss is over. Did not expect vore.

I am past the point where @hobo says they quit so this is uncharted territory now! too bad it sucks!!! Progress in this game is so slow because you advance to a new area and have to find the 50 mcguffins needed in order to open up a door to go to the next area. Ad infinitum.

The levels are kind of ugly, they have the polygons of an N64 level, which makes sense because this game started as an N64 game and having to redo all the level geo in order to make it look nice would have sunk the project.

Trying to get to the point where star fox actually meets krystal but I don’t know how much more I can stand of this to be honest.

[winkerwatson]

I have completed this game

[L]

@hellojed

Did not expect vore.

Didn’t play either Banjo game I see

[Brooks]

yeah somehow i also managed this

there was a button mashing section i recall being a chore, well more of a chore

[captainlove]

I think I got to Fox meeting Krystal and bailed. Has some decent music at least

[hellojed]

the character designs are very good, and they managed to make everyone have pretty good facial expressions.

[captainlove]

Yeah the world has appeal it’s just a shame it’s such a slog. I think that appeal is probably what has people return to it despite so many issues

[tacotaskforce]

I have played Super Robot Wars Y for 138 hours.

A handsome dragon man threw my fleet through a portal to go fight the end bosses of SRW V/X/T, for fun.

I still haven’t seen Godzilla.

[isfet]

Final Fantasy 2 Pixel Remaster
So I tried playing this game in earnest without a walkthrough on the NES (using my Analogue NT Noir) and was really digging it until I got completely stuck and had no idea what to do next. Then I kind of gave up on the game and moved on to something. Since the Pixel Remaster was on sale recently and I enjoyed the FF1 Remaster enough to beat it, I figured I’d give FF2 a similar try.

From the getgo, I do still prefer the way the Famicom game looks (it has lots of aesthetically pleasing stylistic things like how it loads and exits from battles, etc.), but this time I’m using a walkthrough and wow, I was playing this game completely incorrectly. I didn’t even realize there were other characters you recruited to your party throughout the game lol. Even though it’s clear from the getgo that you need to learn new words and use them, I feel like it’s also a bit esoteric, and it doesn’t help that the world map is not constructed in such a way as to naturally guide you in one direction or another (aside from maybe monsters being too difficult). i’m having a good time with it, and maybe after beating it, i’ll go back to the Famicom original.

Ys X: Proud Nordics (Switch 2)
Multiple sources reported Ys X as being “really good shit,” and as a longtime Ys fan, I wanted to play it. but right before it was released in the US, they announced a new, updated version called “Proud Nordics” (this subtitle lol. there’s just something about it in 2026 that doesn’t sound good to my ears) would be coming out for the Switch 2.

so rather than spend money on a new game that was already outdated, I waited for Proud Nordics to release. I received it on Saturday and I made it through the first boss (i’ve been mostly watching my wife play Yakuza Kiwami 3 this weekend, with myself jumping in for specific tasks or bosses) and I think so far it’s a cool game with combat that feels pretty good to me.

I haven’t especially loved newer Ys titles, if i’m being honest. I don’t think they’re bad, per se, but it just hasn’t clicked. I know people talk a lot about Lacrimosa of Dana and even Monstrum Nox (less so), but I guess my purest Ys love is for bump combat and quick games that have music that amps you the fuck up.

anyway, I think the pacing on this one feels a little better to me than Dana and the combat is more engaging. I like our new female lead, but her pre-order DLC costumes are kind of ridiculous.

[iguferon]

I love half life 2 deathmatch

[Kilroy]

[lonelyfrontier]

Taking a short break from Digimon because I have only played Digimon games for the last two weeks, and am going through some SNES games. Decided that I should finally finish Violinist of Hamelin and now I have to watch the anime or read the manga because I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a character named Lord F-Slur.

I think this might be one of those woke localizations I’ve been hearing about lately.

[explosion]

Just finished even the ocean. I liked it though I found it really REALLY easy. The art and story were really cool, but the actual gameplay while interesting conceptually just never tests you at all so you kinda just go through the motions mindlessly.

[aislesgrises]

any chance multiple characters are named after musical instruments? because in that case i can imagine what happened here

[boojiboy7]

@isfet

I guess my purest Ys love is for bump combat and quick games that have music that amps you the fuck up

It doesn’t have music to amp you up, but the recently released Angeline Era has a lot of fun with bump combat mechanincally and is definitely worth playing.

[boojiboy7]

@lonelyfrontier

now I have to watch the anime or read the manga

The anime is basically a manga on screen with how low the animation budget is. I watched this with some friends way back in our college anime club and it became a running joke in how low that budget was. They blew it all on one giant wave they animated in the final episode that was super fucking pretty, but hilariously our of place given how often the rest of the show just has like a still frame of someone running and then plays the footstep sound effects for it. The OVA was pretty amusing though, IIRC.

[boojiboy7]

@aislesgrises

any chance multiple characters are named after musical instruments? because in that case i can imagine what happened here

Yup, lots of musical names for characters, but I am curious to hear the explanation.

[lonelyfrontier]

Yeah there are multiple characters with instrument names. But I’m not seeing this guy in particular listed in the cast of anything other than this game. The SNES OST does have that name in the track list, so I guess it’s legitimate, and not my immediate thought that a fan patch from 2001 was fucking with me, as was the style at the time.

[Broco]

Yup, lots of musical names for characters, but I am curious to hear the explanation.

Fagotto is the Italian word for bassoon

[lonelyfrontier]

well now that opens up a new can of worms because there’s already a character named bassoon. someone on the dev team must have really loved playing one.