I fired up Helldivers 2 the other day just to see the new stuff available. It’s been probably a year since I last played but I’ve started to think about it almost intrusively.
I like playing as a really fast scout with a strong pistol and light laser. It’s not a great build for solo but maybe there is some good new stuff I can use to make it more jankily viable.
This weekend might be oddly uneventful. I’ll be with a 7yo who’s not into violence a good amount but I’m raring to sneak in some bug smashing.
Had a lot of fun playing REANIMAL with my partner over the past week. It doesn’t contain anything surprising if you’ve played Inside before. But Tarsier games do have a strong vision for storybook macabre landscapes, and they have done well at making consistently intense experiences out of the basic mechanics and set out in the two Playdead games. Super derivative, but high quality. Compared to Little Nightmares, however, REANIMAL is much, much, much more grisly and abstract. The game is, if anything, a spectacle of concept art put into motion. But it’s a lot of fun to play, and fairly short. We pirated it but I ended up liking it enough to buy out of interest in replaying it and trying out the future content.
You can play it co-op locally or online. Big recommendation, if you need more games to play with your friend.
There were even special stealth missions for a while where you didn’t have access to your super destroyer but they aren’t available any more I think. Maybe they’re still lurking on a random bot planet or two.
You don’t need me to tell you about Slay the Spire II, but I will: It’s pretty good! If you like Slay the Spire 1, it’s more Slay the Spire. The returning characters keep the same playstyles and deck archetypes but shake up the card sets in fun ways. And just dropping them into new areas with new enemies and encounters freshens things up too. Starting with a character you know is a great way to onboard into the new stuff.
I’ve only played as one new character so far, but I really like him: the aloof idiotic starfaring king who goes around on a big throne carried by little servant guys. It’s very funny to play my attack card and my king gestures laconically and a magic floating sword hits some guys. I like this game’s sense of humor.
The feel of the game is pretty much the same, which is a good thing. The look of it has been very much improved upon. You can feel the higher budget here. I think the new character/enemy designs are more imaginative and charming than the first game’s too, which sometimes bordered on programmer art at times. The music is very boring, but pro players know to mute games like this and put their own music on anyway.
I have a good friend who’s one of the top Slay the Spire twitch streamers. Right after the game launched today, I tuned into his Twitch stream for a few minutes and I’ve never seen the guy so happy.
Also you cant just not land as you get more tired your jumps get weaker and weaker until you fall out of the air.
There are many very wacky powerups. Some are required to end a level quickly. On continue power ups don’t re-spawn but neither do bosses. Any level over a few screens long has checkpoints.
Most levels are brutal and short. (some are not)
Enemy placement is slightly inconsistent with some random spawns happening from time to time.
Hit boxes are huge.
The game is really funny to me.
Mutant Kun is clumsy and adorable, the enemies are so insanely mean and surprising. Its obviously fucking with you. You just have to be super aggressive and mash through it. If you stay in one place too long killer drones spawn in. The effect of the slight randomness is that you cant simply memorize your movements you have to actually respond to the situation and try to clutch it out.
I “cheated” using the auto fire on my SEGA Powerstick but honestly do it if you plan to play for awhile, it saves your fingers. Doing this on a pad with no autofire would be hand destroying, use a stick.
i played the demo for the first magical drop on saturn, because i heard that yoshizaki mine’s saturn gijinka appears in it. i don’t know if that’s true because this is an unwinnable endless stalemate of a game?!
the cpu opponent isn’t good enough to even come close to beating you, but they are good enough to avoid being beaten forever, especially since you can’t force your own field to scroll more quickly so you either wait around forever to have enough drops to make a good combo with, or you just get very small chains forever. and the game doesn’t have the quota mechanic of its sequels either, so the match doesn’t just end with a win for the first to clear 200 drops.
i kept it going for like 15-20 minutes before just giving up! wtf
I got as far as the hell pit where it basically turns into hardcore flappy bird and had to give up, here’s my lil guy curled up in the fetal position after dying a gazillion times:
I just bought the arcade archives version off the back of this. I bet this game would be really good creepy pasta fodder. It’s ever so slightly unsettling and I could imagine a scenario where you see it one time as a kid and then wonder if you just hallucinated it.
I passed that one! My only real advice is hold right and stay high until you get to the end platform wen you have to drop down, hover and blast the platform clear. Its a 1 segment level. Did you keep the dino robot from the previous level alive? It doesn’t help you but its neat it can continue on.
Yeah this game has a bunch of one-off weirdnesses.
This should probably be considered shameful but I got the platinum trophy in the new live service Skate. I had like most of them just via playing the game but realized I had enough resources to redeem enough stuff to get close to one trophy and was 90% of the way towards the “be at a 4x multiplier for a full hour” (not in a row) one as well so just sort of played an extra bit to accomplish that right before whatever season 3 is starts. Not really a big trophy guy but I had the platinums in 2 and 3 as I played them to death (perhaps 1 as well, there’s no easy way to look this up somehow) so it at least feels somewhat fitting.
I am also right before that appears to be the final stage in Shovel Knight (but I also know how that goes in these games so we’ll see) and like… it is well executed and fun enough but it really is just pure pastiche isn’t it? Like instead of “Capcom’s 8-bit titles” being the starting point it kinda ended up being the whole point if that makes any sense. Again it’s a well done tribute but given the hype I’d have expected it to have more of its own identity, perhaps that is what the DLC stuff is for.
