I guess I’ll give it another go at some point with your encouragement and pro-tips in mind, if only just to spend more time with our dinky alien buddy… what a cutie…
I like that everything you’re destroying is mostly made of metal too. My conscience is clear! Didn’t manage to get a screenshot of it but I also love that your little lives at the bottom of the screen start applauding you at the end of each level. Lots of lovingly added little details in this thing… it’s got that 
arcade magic
Great Greed is interesting? all the names are food - one of the towns is called “Shishkaberg” . there’s a dog named “Calorie”. most of the enemies are food themed. the auto save is merciful, it saves after every battle you won, which is good because you can die really easy. Not a lot of strategy other than hit the other guy and not die.
there’s an entire george costanza bit verbatim in esoteric ebb lol
i installed Super Mario 64 Co-op DX which is probably the most accessible, easily moddable fork of the SM64 recompilation. since playing Sonic Unleashed and Majora’s Mask recompiled a couple months back ive gotten pretty fascinated with game recomps hehe… modding the shit out of Majora and having a free look camera was a pretty smooth way to replay it (game still owns btw)
i like to be able to replay beloved games ive beaten a million times in a fresh way, and as a girl (but i repeat myself). So i went thru Super Mario 64 almost entirely in first person, as Toadette, packing one thing even Mario doesn’t have: A Gun
…
ive also been picking my way thru Pokémon Emerald and am up to Victory Road. This is my first serious attempt at gen 3 and damn is it a good Pokémon game. it feels less, immediate? than the first 2 gens, which are forever iconic, or gen 5.1 (Black & White) which is still my high watermark for best designed Pokémon campaign. like it took a bit to get into, which is why ive fallen off before – the first half is very linear and i felt pretty constrained on what ‘mons i could get and use. Once it opens up, though, Hoenn becomes maybe the best, most dense and detailed region in the series. people seem down on all the surfing & diving routes but i’m really into ‘em, i like how much there is to explore there. The towns are universally fantastic and unique. It’s just a good big fun RPG adventure overworld
the gen 3 roster used to be my least favorite but it’s grown on me – the designs are more garish & overtly toyetic than the first two generations, but they’re also where Game Freak started to really lean into sheer biodiversity and trying to represent specific animal species in Pokémon form, as opposed to doing a platonic ideal of “rat” or “bird” or just kinda letting Ken Sugimori draw some cute kaiju and call it a day. (Not that i’m knocking cute kaiju, i love Rhydon and Kangaskhan and the Nidos as much as the next gal)
also theres just lots of cute touches like the weather & environmental effects (the water reflections & footprints in sand/ash/snow still look rad), and the berry system, and Pokémon contests, and the weird “pick a word/phrase” mechanic that exists purely to be cute and liven up the world (love the recurring trainer duo that’s a reporter/cameraman, who “interview” you after each battle and then you can get a little news segment next time you check an NPC’s TV)
many people are saying this
also here’s my cool SECRET BASE which is another pointless (even moreso without multiplayer) but cute mechanic. HAVE I EXPRESSED HOW CUTE I THINK THIS GAME IS YET SHOULD I USE THAT WORD 8 OR 9 MORE TIMES
bodega skitty
Had fun dabbling in King of Fighters XV. The game’s a bit too quick and motion input heavy for my hands but I had a good time. Not a huge fan of SNK’s 3D work but I appreciate they know how to make things feel impactful. They do a pretty good job of little character interactions in the story mode as well. I just pissed about with Maxima, Hinako, Mai for a few hours.
i’ve also done this..
there are a lot of obvious issues with this game, but i think im way more positive on it than most people seem to be. i think the live service idea does actually make sense for a skate game, even if it’s fundamentally a broken system.
also, a lot of the worst issues in the game were there in 3 for me, so it’s a pretty linear progression for the series.
most importantly, it still feels as good as ever to skate around in, so i’m just loading it up everyday while i’m sitting around listening to music or podcasts
Finished Link’s Awakening DX. Not the first time (or even the tenth time, probably) that I’ve beaten LA in some form, but I always forget how lame the color dungeon is (the damage reducing tunic is appreciated, though), and how they get rid of angel Marin at the end, assuming you never die.
Still partial to the original, I guess. Also, despite having finished it, I cannot recall an iota of how Link’s Awakening on Switch was in comparison. I guess I could replay that again eventually, but I probably only recall the original for good reason.
Yeah in spite of all the questionable things in it the fact is that the basic skating around is still as solid as it’s ever been. I personally am at the point where I just load it up once a week to see what new challenges or parks have been put up, but I’ll probably keep doing that for however many more months the game lasts.
So I played through this this weekend and I’d like to push back a bit on the “probably reasonably hard” difficulty and such. I didn’t play the original version and maybe that was simply absurd, but I play a good amount of them myself and some rooms in this were downright cruel (last one in particular). For the sake of context I would offer than if one has not previously trained themselves on the original version the parts with rather precise repeated mid-air momentum managing bits will provoke a legit “you gotta be kidding me” response and many many dozens of deaths.
FWIW I did like the… let’s say outside the box swings it took, it wasn’t as strong as the main platforming rooms but I am generally down with games that do stuff to really throw you off and leave you unsure of what could possibly be around the next corner. I could see it being very hit and miss for people though.
I don’t remember how I managed the late game stuff in Circle of the Moon long long ago so I took a break from that last night and started Hello Kitty Island Adventure since my partner had been playing it. It made me really appreciate the slow pacing and smaller scope of New Horizons.
Maybe after photographing a bunch more hidden gutatamas I’ll be ready to return to Dracula’s castle and tackle that damn arena area.
makes sense – already having the muscle memory for love means it’s hard for me to judge. the original absolutely was absurd though; it’s not even close to the same league. there were singular rooms i spent 90+ minutes on in the original and had friends that spent even longer. the last room in this game is closer to the middle difficulty of the original and it just escalates from there.
“muscle memory for love” is the name of a lost meat loaf song
Jim Steinman would eventually release a version of it on a soundtrack for an 80s movie no one remembers.
Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox)
so now, on top of everything else, i find myself proving wholly unequal to the exacting challenge of Bungie Software’s First Person Shooting for the Inept & Possibly Drunk and/or Stoned
lol thank you for the user title suggestion and thank you to whichever mod assigned it before i even asked
sinisistar has barely any level design, feels awkward to control, has super plain and easy enemy patterns, and i love it. it’s so gorgeous and there’s always something new horrible going on and the environments are amazing. unfortunately i didn’t bother going the extra mile for the full 18+ patch yet, maybe some other time, they get away with going surprisingly far anyway. full on decapitation? yay
maybe the extra content can explain to me why finding that slug before the last boss is important. it just seems important enough that i have to theorize, what if its someone who matters to her transformed into a slug? i accidentally alt-tabbed out of the credits for 3 seconds so hopefully i didn’t miss an explanation there. that’s pretty bloodborne tho. what if the slug is her sister? her sinisistar? was it all for slug? love this game. it’s so brutal. chased a guy down a pit only to have him eaten by the sluglord and by the time the fight was over and the slug exploded i got to see his digested face inside. awesome!
i hope many more experience the same confusion
Yeap!! I was fully believing there was some sort of patch to replace the “beware coward” vocal samples with something dirty when I was reading that.
