Gym six beaten. I didn’t realize you could just do it while getting the save an animal from dying medicine, that was mean enough that it didn’t even occur to me to think, so I went back to the island and beat the fighting gym. I was severely underleveled for the past two gyms and have been succeeding through precise ordering, stat changes and status effects, and exploitation of timing and priority. Despite swearing I would never use a non-damage dealing move all of my battles are now dragged out technical affairs. Which in the context of NPC battles should probably be embarrassing, except that I am underleveled, which I guess still counts for something (about 6-9 levels below enemy pokemon presently, entirely unworkable except for type advantage + prioty or type disadvantage + healing items + stat effects + lots of hp and defense.
Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster
While I think there are aspects of these remasters that don’t work as well as they should, visually, I think it’s less apparent with the Famicom remakes, specifically. with IV - VI, i’d definitely rather look at them through a SNES (or Analogue equivalent) on my CRT - but I - III, with the built-in CRT filter (it isn’t too atrocious with the right brightness) makes the games look like SNES remakes that never were. I think what else works in their favor is that I think of FFs I - III as being really hard and kind of grindy, especially when it comes to making money. the Pixel Remasters allow you to tweak the drop rate of money and exp. which essentially allows me to play them like them in a way that feels closer to a SNES Final Fantasy, in terms of pacing. of course, this means I can complete the games in roughly 10 to 15 hours, which was definitely not the intent of the originals, I don’t think.
I’d still like to replay 2 and 3 on the original Famicom at some point now that i’ve completed both via the PR, but mostly i’m glad i’ve know seen through to completion every Final Fantasy game excepting VIII and IX (i’ll get to them…). honestly, though, I think I - III are more “important” in terms of seeing the whole evolution and vision of the series.
all that said
on to the game: I think III has more fun combat than II, but I think II has a better story and ambience. I enjoyed playing around with different jobs and seeing what works, and it’s interesting how the game really leaves it up to the player how they want to play. some jobs are obvious progressions of others, but nothing really requires you to play the game in any particular way. I think it would be interesting to replay III with the jobs I ignored on my first go around, like Geomancer or Ranger. but truth be told, I did give most of the jobs a fair shot. that they give you two overpowered jobs right at the end of the game, certainly is a design choice.
ultimately I ended up with: Dark Knight, Devout, Ninja, and Sage.
having now played all the formative FF games (I - VI) all the way through, i’m really struck by how much of a turning point VI was. I think FFs I - V all feel like they’re part of the same movement. IV and V feel like much bigger Famicom games, whereas VI takes on a whole new life of its own. we see it continue through that era with Bahamut Lagoon and Chrono Trigger and probably a few others, culminating in VII, where the worlds of those games feel slightly more organic, as though they exist apart from the player.
if I spent more time writing this maybe I could say something more meaningful or coherent, but ultimately I have had fun revisiting this series over the past few years and reflecting on the work of these folks like Sakaguchi et al. in some ways, we could say that videogames learned all the wrong lessons from this series, as generally happens with most works of art as they achieve mainstream success.
I think my highest praise for them is this: I enjoy replaying these games and the idea of replaying them. that’s not really something i’d say about most RPGs from the last 20 years.
Finally got around to Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
I liked it. Flower Sun and Rain and Resident Evil are two of the more obvious influences
Perhaps a smidge too many puzzles, but I only say that because there’s some mediocre puzzles and busywork puzzles mixed in with the genuinely good stuff.
Surprisingly balanced as far as difficulty goes: I didn’t need to look up any hints and I only needed to take physical notes at the end of the game. I appreciate that the puzzles leaned far more towards lateral thinking than doing arithmetic, so an improvement over FSR’s design in that way.
Dreadful controls, though. I understand they were going for a game where you only need directions and a single action button as input but it made menu navigation into a real chore.
Story is whatever, but the act of uncovering that story is really well done, especially the ways in which what is story and what is puzzle is frequently ambiguous.
Lorelei is much closer to what I wanted from blue prince, this actually is a game about exploring a spooky mansion full of gates that are unlocked through puzzle solving and the gradual accumulation of player knowledge, instead of a roguelite where progress is gated by redoing the same puzzles over and over again.
I beat Shining Force 1 today, and man, that was a fun game. I mean, nothing really new to say about it. Just a real fun time.
Ugh… just why? Just imagine you got an engine that could easily capture the mayhem of battling millions of bug (sprites) at once. And then you don’t use it.
At least there is DooM slaughter maps. I always wondered why they never managed to make a good Starship Troopers game. But then I realized that they just never made one I wanted. And that EDF is all I wanted and I don’t need it anymore.
Esoteric Ebb
You know how there are all those Disco Elysium spinoffs vying for the title of “true successor”? Esoteric Ebb is such a game, though it has no connection to any of the former developers, and its inspiration is almost as much Planescape: Torment as it is DE. We have a couple of posts about it in the DE thread here, and I’ll probably post more thoughts there once I’ve finished. At the 14 hour mark, though:
I like this a lot! It’s not escaping the shadows of its predecessors, so far, but I like the setting and the structural design.
Some stuff I really like: each character you meet has a visual assessment through a “behold” check based around whichever D&D stat most governs their personal philosophy. Want to size up the suspiciously magical mortuary admin? Roll your D20 and add your intelligence modifier against a graduated scale of difficulty checks to determine how much of their character sheet you see: their level, stats, “class”, and 4 to 8 blocks of text on their personality and motivations.
Like Disco, a lot of checks aren’t progress gates as much as they might appear; even if you fail, you might still accomplish what you were trying to do, but some kind of negative consequence will be added or threatened. Or if a check does block you from doing what you wanted, you can unlock it by either taking a 1-hour rest or by using a consumable you can find regularly by exploring.
Some structural innovations: this is explicitly presented as a roleplaying campaign. The game opens telling you this will take five or so in-game days, which amount to five to eight “sessions”. Session ends recap the things you accomplished and things you still need to focus on; the title screen also includes a recap of the story so far, which is very well constructed for a game with multiple questlines proceeding in parallel.
In the spirit of D&D, some challenges take the form of “combat encounters.” Despite superficial touches like rolling initiative, characters taking turns in sequence, and spending spell slots to heal or cast defensive enhancements, these events still have a lot more in common with the Disco Elysium showdowns than with anything in the Infinity Engine. Your equipment includes a “weapon slot”, yet none of the weapons you find can ever actually be used in combat—attacks are always at most punches or tackles. Some of the excuses they come up with for why your weapons cannot be used are excellent.
A misstep or two: the journal screen is a scattered constellation of icons that must be selected individually to see your progress for each incomplete quest; you can’t just scroll through a list. Your protagonist’s personality is a little too much just an H.D.B.-style zany loser. While the inventory permits you to filter items by category to simplify finding the right equipment for your situation, the game does sometimes feel like you’re just swapping between your most-used items as you encounter different types of checks. There have been a couple spots with awkward wording, but it’s mostly strong.
Despite these issues, I’ve been intrigued by the setting, and a lot of D&D’s routine tropes feel less played-out in a system that’s more about narrative resolution than about rolling skill checks and saving throws. I like what they’re doing, and I’m eager to see if this game can pull off a moments as transcendent as the best of Torment or DE.
You are about to step back into a time when video games were young and so were we! Remember the excitement you felt when you finally conquered that game level you had previously thought impossible to beat? Those bad guys are no match for you! You can still kick them all over the screen just like old times.
Thanks to cutting edge technology we are able to emulate home video game decks, utilizing the actual cartridge code from the original games on your home computer. This native Win95 CD-based series utilizes the latest Microsoft technology such as DirectDraw.
What does this mean to you? It means better game play, faster loading, authentic game sounds and behavior (original bugs and all). So sit back and prepare to be transported back to the early years of interactive home entertainment.
Volume 1 contains 10 ColecoVision Classics - Beamrider, River Raid, Mountain King, Sir Lancelot, Nova Blast, Strike It, Pitfall, Tank Wars, Quest for Quintana Roo, and Tournament Tennis.
The 602KB demo file is no longer on the Telegames site, but it is on
The demo is just a single file .exe, tracks how many times you run it, and only lets you run it 3 times. (Does it track this in the registry or something? If so I couldn’t find where.)
This 1997 demo actually does run in Windows 11 which is kind of impressive. I should have taken a screenshot (the graphic at top is from Wikipedia) because the pictures in the HUD were flipped upside-down. But the games seemed to work fine, I think like Space was probably Action and arrows were direction and number keys were number keys and you might need like * and stuff sometimes.
I clicked on Pitfall and it worked although I never liked Pitfall–although I think all my experience was with the whatever Atari version my friends were obsessed with–so I didn’t play it much. It wouldn’t let me click on any of the other games after that so I don’t know if it’s just that the only one in the demo is Pitfall or if it only lets you play the first one you picked, which would be pretty bizarre.
I downloaded it in the faint hope that it might magically have a legally distributed version of the ColecoVision BIOS, but no dice, at least not obviously. ; )
The next year Telegames put out another CD-ROM ColecoVision compilation, Colecovision Hits Volume One, which included I think all 10 of the games in the earlier compilation, Personal Arcade Vol. 1, plus 20 more. I found an iso of it–and failed to get any BIOS out of it ; D; if that had proven possible I would’a bought an old disc of it off eBay–but no demo. That compilation has Pitfall AND Pitfall 2 lawl. ^ D^
You are about to step back into a time when video games were young and so were we! Remember the excitement you felt when you finally conquered that game level you had previously thought impossible to beat? Those bad guys are no match for you! You can still kick them all over the screen just like old times.
Thanks to cutting edge technology we are able to emulate home video game decks, utilizing the actual cartridge code from the original games on your home computer. This native Win95 CD-based series utilizes the latest Microsoft DirectX technology.
What does this mean to you? It means better game play, faster loading, authentic game sounds and behavior (original bugs and all). So sit back and prepare to be transported back to the early years of interactive home entertainment.
Volume 1 contains 30 ColecoVision Classics - Alcazar, Amazing Bumpman, AquaAttack, Beamrider, Blockade Runner, Campaign '84, Cosmic Crisis, Decathlon, Dragonfire, Fathom, Gust Buster, H.E.R.O., Keystone Kapers, Meteoric Shower, Moonsweeper, Motocross Racer, Mountain King, Nova Blast, Pitfall, Pitfall 2, Quest for Quintana Roo, River Raid, Rock N Bolt, Rolloverture, Sir Lancelot, Skiing, Strike It, Tank Wars, Tournament Tennis, and Zenji. Fun for the whole family!
A few of these are in
but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. ; ) Well okay let’s say that you can extract all 40 games from it with a Python script from GitHub, but no BIOS file–and despite what Google “AI” top-of-page blather says when googling these days, there don’t actually seem to be any ColecoVision emulators that can run games without a BIOS file (some emus come with the CV BIOS built in, which seems to have confused Google); and the only known legal way to obtain such a BIOS is apparently still to get a ColecoVision console, an EPROM programmer, a hot air rework station desoldering kit or whatever, and dump the BIOS from the old console yourself. So I guess I’ll just be sticking with Flashback’s janky beveled GUI. ; D I did make a Steam Input community controller layout for the DualSense for it since a lot of folks on Steam were complaining about Flashback’s lack of controller support.
Tried to play Black Myth Wukong today as the PS5 version has seemingly been updated enough to function much better now and it turns out that whatever changes they made to get it running well produce the most screen tearing I’ve ever seen on a console game, and the only option to fix it without possibly putting it in quality mode (which everyone seems to hate and is a bad option for me personally because…) involves a setting not supported by my current tv. I guess it’ll give me something to look forward to in hopefully several years from now.
Given that I tried the demos for Rubato and Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, it is odd as both games sort of embrace the collectathon mentality that I thought fell out of fashion and that I was never the biggest fan of. They each seem to be doing their own interesting things around it, Rubato almost has a bit of Resnijars energy to it while Yellow Taxi is built around a somewhat unusual for 3d platformer control scheme, but personally it’s a bit of a push and pull between finding that neat while the concept of wandering around to collect a ton of MacGuffins scattered about exhausting to consider. Think I’ll end up tossing the first one on my wishlist and wait for a big discount.
Oh yeah, also tried the demo for The Artisan of Glimmith, a puzzle game by some of the devs behind Island of Insights who are basically trying to avoid the many pitfalls of that game. It basically comes down to them building a seemingly uninteractive world to place many grid-based logic puzzles around. Tried the demo and the puzzles were on the easy side but seemed structurally neat, world appeared to add nothing, it having over a thousand puzzles makes me a bit wary (it also uses the word cozy to describe itself) but it does seem to otherwise be down my alley.
Gym seven beaten. This is taking an embarassingly long time. I feel like grinding would actually take less time, I’m perpetually forced into attrition and status tradeoff battles. I talked trash about ice type trainers but badge seven took a second attempt. This is solely because @gimelrey demanded I settle on this team, which again, is:
Normal
Normal/Flying
Normal/Flying
Water/Flying
Water
Rock
Which maps to:
No type strengths or weaknesses, but innately little HP/defense
No type strengths, weak against ice
No type strengths, weak against ice
Type attack weakness, no type defense strengths or weaknesses
Bidirectionally weak attacks
Oddly, several supereffective attacks which are also my strongest attack moves, and most hp and defense, but type weakness against both ice and ground moves (this pokemon is a Graveller)
So my thought was, on first try, whatever, Graveller is high level, I can use the Seel he sends out first to buff stats, then time rollout so that it doubles in such a way that the second and third pokemon are one hit knockouts. The problem is, I needed more healing items than expected. I also needed to use a special defense x and a special attack x, and for graveller to have the shell bell it had, and to make extra special sure my speed was maxed out before firing off the rollout, mostly because Dewgong is insanely fast but also because Seel has Icy Wind which always reduces speed.
This “same strategy plus” approach paid off, and I got it on a second attempt. Though I got knocked down to one hp between attack type advantage and hail being an ongoing environment effect. And then hail kept going AN ADDITIONAL TURN but thankfully Shell Bell took me back up to 14 hp which was enough to tank the hail. If that had failed I would still probably have been ok because Croconaw, Furret, and Mantine could have done enough chip damage given that Pillowsine can’t use Rest. I also had Revives and enough potions. But as in life, my Pokemon intuition of “do the stupid and wrong thing better” has once again paid off.
played a little groove on fight on our newly hacked saturn with my gf before bed, i play solis + popura just like this playthrough. i don’t know what i’m doing but i’d like to learn because it’s such a cool game and it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about it online.
besides the atlus + range murata connection the devs went on to make princess crown!
I love this game. I love that you can just become a fairy whenever you want. One of Zelda II’s few peers.
I sat down and played through I Write Games Not Tragedies, the previously mentioned English Emo Visual Novel. It’s good. It’s filled with some nice real humans and your character is an asshole. I still feel like the music is a mismatch with how much they are talking about myspace and scene music and MCR but what are ya going to do. It was a lovely story about human beings told through a video game.
Then I played Tuffy and the Tower of Bones until my vita battery died.
Relooted is ‘that game about [re]stealing African artifacts from museums’ but it goes a bit beyond its premise to be a pretty enjoyable indie project.
The parkour is simple and eventually gets mixed up by having recon and planning phases which makes it feel more like a puzzle game than a straight speed-running thing. The casing gets very complicated which is good for having more interesting things to do but also annoying for more things that can go wrong in both the mission and with the material of the game itself.
The game is rough and the camera is flicky. You can play through it mostly without issue but there are some really bad checkpointing problems since checkpoints do not exist between the start of the mission and when you first trigger the alarm after setting up routes to all necessary treasures. The game also let’s you mix and match different route combinations which in one case led me to being cockroach motel’d in a dead-end which required me to exploit the ‘manual restart’ system. A greater number of linear levels would be nice but they are paced towards the end quite well.
The writing is surprisingly good at maintaining a light tone despite being about a very depressing historical subject. The late 21st C future setting obscures real locations and conflict to an extent with robot guards and museum locations residing in ‘the old world’ or ‘the shiny place’. Technology is advanced enough to have flight lanes of flying cars and its ambiguous which countries are the current imperial powers. There’s internal disagreement on the plan to loot museums throughout, particularly as the team get embroiled in connections to international crime. At the same time, the practicalities of the heists are glossed over a lot for the conceit of level design. The most versatile weapon in the gang’s arsenal is tables. As long as tables are in the blueprints, no ledge is untouched and no door can be fully closed. Robot guards are used instead of humans and so the ethics of having to incapacitate human security or deal with law enforcement directly is safely out of the picture. This doesn’t necessarily weaken the topic though. Heists provide informative history on every item which tell the story of archaeology, pre-statist Africa, the circumstances of various empires, and cover a wide range of periods. Some artifacts are prehistorical, others are literal human remains; there’s even a rifle!
As you build your crew there’s fun meta-jabs about how the jobs realistically would overlap. Your security guy who hacks doors demands the hacker who later joins the group leave the doors to him alone. There’s an interesting aside while planning a heist on the Tower of London the characters are describing bonfire night/Guy Fawkes’ Night without referring to it by name as if it’s some sort of strange and alien holiday that no-one has ever heard of. The Tower of London has an inaccurate map that you use to practice on in the heist VR simulation which works well when its showtime and half the assumptions about the level are wrong.
I learnt a lot. I found out about the game Morabaraba. I learnt, to pile on to my eternal shame as a Brit, the largest Crown Jewels contain the ‘great Star of Africa’ and others carved from the world’s biggest diamond. One of the artifacts, the Akan drum, was looted by slavers, taken to American shores and misidentified as Native American for centuries.
Nobody can talk about the game without their politics out on display which is, I suppose, one of the benefits of the game existing. Bad faith arguments about repatriation, history, and justice litter Steam (‘what is theft really?’; ‘no African leader is perfect!’) while people writing positive articles about the game avoid the difficult questions about such a subject by being effusive before presumably taking their kids to the café at the British Museum.
The game meanwhile actually shows its characters struggling with what they are doing, and its rosy ending is almost surreal in how neatly it wraps everything up in a bow (no charges are placed, no lawyers are called, no legacy is unsaved). Its utopianism is almost the most disturbing thing as it sort of dares us to think about such a change in the real world. We all know that these artifacts will be returned over centuries, if at all, rather than years and it will always be under dubious faith as power decides what it will and won’t do on its own terms. Not because it played Relooted.
Finished Beyond Two Souls. At the end you confront Willem Dafoe, who has gone from reasonable and compassionate person to deranged monster in the course of a single scene, and one of the prompts you’re presented with is ‘Move’. I assumed this meant you would physically move out of his path since he’s pointing a gun at you. Instead you move him emotionally with your words, which inspires him to commit suicide with the gun, whereupon his ghost appears, he’s his old self again, and he’s immediately happily reunited with his family. There is an achievement for this with a description like “Make Willem Dafoe see the truth”.
Cynical and evil game.
I played a lot more of Cyber shadow today. It’s pretty good I’m definitely getting into it, but I hate the way that there’s basically no i-frames as far as I can tell. it’s really easy to get hit once and then just get juggled around until you die. Also it’s looking like it might be shorter than I thought it was gonna be. I’ve already got like all of what I believe are the primary upgrades so I’m guessing there isn’t too terribly much more left.
crystar was faster about making me fight lil sis than i figured. we are moving to loop 3 because nobody is happy about that. ok so nier comparison is wrong, it’s instead that thing where you send something to the past to slightly change things into a different bad until, maybe, it’s all good. like 999? steins;gate?
i’m sure there’s a future where we can forgive kid sister for killing an entire bus worth of people and also eating the souls of your parents and making fun of your dog dying. maybe.
I haven’t been keeping regular so I guess I should phone game post
the Z’s: okay I forget when I last phone game posted but they added another Void Hunter lady and it’s dog girl who’s really soft-spoken and she has giant ears and a fluffy tail and she seems kinda strong and brainless so I guess that’s good. also they gave everyone a free rabbit lady with goofy animations and she seems bad unless your account is new or you never pull supports (please pull supports)
also they added the vtuber idols they’ve been teasing since before launch except now they aren’t vtubers (well, I guess Aria is a vtuber if you consider a robot projecting a hologram while in public over their body to be vtubing in spirit if not by letter of definition) and, damn, y’all really coasted on that hype for one and a half years and they’re fairly generic in the end? at least Sunna is a support (pull supports)
Genshin is somehow still going: I have capitulated to Big Meta and invested in lunar shilling and gotten Columbina, who is an archongoddess of the true moon (explaining this would be an extremely long and stupid aside going into years of lore and plot but the short version is Teyvat, the world Genshin takes place in, has a false sky), who helps enable and buffs lunar reactions and she’s fine I guess. shame she seems to be for foot fetishists, though I’m a fan of her floaty and flighty animations
they also added Zibai, the White Horse Adeptus (again, the game is collapsing under 5+ years of lore it’s only addressing recently), who spent a couple thousand years split into three parts and now she’s whole and she seems normal except when does multiple personality stuff. she’s a geo unit and I am legally obligated to pull all geo units and her power is to be the lone lunar crystalize (excuse me, lunar crystalize) carry and she’s also the only geo DPS since the game’s powercreep started amping up in 5.0 (the game is currently in 6.4) so she’s automatically good (instead of slapping an asterisk, I’ll just say that the caveats here are having Columbina, seven copies of a 4 year old geo support and her dedicated support that ran along with her, who you also need 7 copies of and he literally only exists to buff direct lunar crystalize damage, which Zibai is the only unit who does this and shockingly everyone was malding over this because getting copies of a 4-star unit is bullshit RNG and infinitely harder than getting a limited unit and I was also in this boat as I managed to get as many copies of Illuga, her support, as Zibai herself, which is amazingly insane RNG for me but also points to how stupid it is).
anyway her gameplay is you press her skill button and she gets a meter and every time you fill the meter, you can press the skill button again and she throws a horse at enemies and this makes a neighing sound. so her gameplay is smashing her horse button and hearing horse noises
video games are stupid and I enjoy them
Arknights Endfield: yeah it’s fun I guess. it seems weird that they want you to pull new characters but don’t give you much of anything to do with them. I will probably regret complaining about the lack of combat content at some point because combat content is inherently tied to shilling which in turn means pull newest unit stupid
Snowbreak:
I don’t know, the game’s servers went down on March 3rd for “maintenance” and they’re still down and I don’t feel like investigating it
the end result for me is the game is dead and I miss it and the 20-40 minutes I spend playing it every week
Watching a stream of Rubato has inspired me to construct a new pair of axes which taxonomise all game humour forever
All great invention comes at a cost: in order to assemble this, I had to permanently sacrifice my ability to be asked questions about it
Abstract = moment-to-moment humour, such as sight gags or juxtaposition
Grounded = long-term humour that builds on itself or the world, usually character-based or satirical
Vibes = emergent, implicit humour
Jokes = explicit, granular authored moments
Having to go back through the entirety of a level in Cyber Shadow for one upgrade you couldn’t get the first time around is a lot for this game to ask considering how brutal it can be. My patience is being tested having to do some really hard shit twice, but at the same time due to how hard it can get I feel like going back for the upgrades is more than worth it.