I read a guide about how to do the Stairs pattern in Puyo Puyo last week, but that somehow made me even worse when I tried to put the tips into effect in a couch match. In theory I could now do 6-chains, but in practice I got covered in garbage before I could do anything. When I got home, I was raring for revenge and stayed up until 4am learning Sandwich. That’s gotta do the trick
There’s two people in my area who also play Puyo Puyo, and one of them is an “experienced beginner” much like me and the other is a monster who does 10-chains. I’ve been ambivalent about actually trying to get better, because a likely outcome is my skill level ends up perfectly in between, so every game is now one-sided. But we noticed last week some buried handicap features that should do the trick if that happens (which is maybe not as likely as I thought, anyway).
when ymer is playing on the deck i play on the 3ds and that would be mostly etrian 4 but i’ve also tried to put some time into layton vs phoenix wright. i’m noticing a problem with the premise, because i enjoy running court cases a lot more than i do layton puzzle-exploration, so it ends up feeling like i’m being held from doing what matters when i keep finding puzzles everywhere. also feel tired getting both protagonist pairs acting like usual together, somehow even worse when the pairs mingle. there’s that crossover keep-in-character-ness that feels grating. would’ve eaten this up if i played it around release 12 years ago tho. not sure what happened.
I just finished esoteric ebb last night and my feelings are pretty similar to yours though I think I skew more negative…
I like the planescape approach to justifying every game mechanic as an objective fact of the setting even if I find the use of dnd stats as your disco elysium cast of inner voices to be somewhat overly constrained.
The comedy often didn’t work for me which makes the moments it did stand out.
The setting itself is inventive and was unexpectedly the part I was most drawn to. Like mystara, it runs with the conceit that the gods are more like very powerful wizards than divine beings, there is a hollow earth that we only hear a few details about, and the world itself is a highly artificial construct. They manage to follow these conceits to some interesting places.
The electoral politics that form the b-plot of the game are perhaps the second greatest weakness in the writing: too imitative of Disco Elysium, too close to the real world. Repeats the same mistake of DE in turning marx and lenin into a single figure responsible for both theory and praxis. Like DE it creates a political framework that contains a curious lacuna compared to the real world. The following ideologies are at the forefront: fascism, capitalism (going from liberal to pure oligarchy), communism (going from ML orthodoxy to social democracy), authoritarian technocracy (wizard fascism) and apolitical (the joke option). Notably absent is any sort of left-libertarianism. No anarchocommunists, no communalists, no syndicalists or platformists. Not even an anprim joke character.
This was fine in DE because politics was mostly channeled through the voice of a zany idiot protagonist but in Esoteric Ebb, the zany idiot is only one of many who is eager to express every possible political stance except the tendencies I named.
Marrying the few political positions available to the framework of dnd stats meant that the political content rang false to me. It was like playing dnd with a well intentioned demsoc.
One way esoteric ebb really differs from both DE and Planescape Torment is in allowing more player agency: the main plot is more than just a wild goose chase and it is possible to ignore the central mystery entirely. DE’s a successfully written visual novel but it is not really much of a role playing game. EE tries to lean more heavily into agential play where your choices actually change a situation instead of letting the player passively receive the story.
The concept of a game undergoing indefinite maintenance is wild to me. Did they finally fly too close to the sun, and the state censorship agents are overseeing a complete graphics overhaul?
I have sustained a gaming injury. My thumb is sorta raw from Cyber Shadow. Also I don’t think it’s related, but my right arm is also extremely sore today. Truly being a gamer is a dangerous line of work.
finding out means, on some level, interacting with elements of or the entirety of the game’s community as a whole
I’ve seen enough of the English-side chat to know that, no, actually, it’s bad enough that I’m playing the endlessly horny game that I then have to interact with the incredibly horny, racist and sexist playerbase (a horny anime game with racists and misogynists playing it, crazy, I know) to actually figure out what’s going on with it
as it is, the game had already gotten bopped by government censors for being too horny a couple of times and had been running fine for a year or so after that (which, again, one line in a text file disables the less-horny designs) and the only thing I can think of is the current rate-up unit is a girl who might be under thr age of 18, it’s unsure, but she was in cryosleep so she’s actually the 10000 year old dragon and they gave her a unit where she stance shifts into a well-endowed adult lady and I don’t know if censors saw this as just too blatant or if another random design tripped a breaker and they’re now having to do a third review of every skin in the game (the base skins are pretty horny and the paid skins are very horny)
it’s whatever, I’ll just reinstall SAO Fatal Bullet while crying and jacking off to whatever weird porn I’m into on my second display instead
needless to say I loved it and (as in disco’s ending) got called out by the game for constantly jumping between and effectively maxing both the marxist and ultraliberal factions (other political points: zero) as if that’s a normal instinctual thing to do
I’m making myself actually play the dumb emulator handhelds I have, and after beating Link’s Awakening DX a few weeks ago I decided it was finally time to do The Legend of Zelda proper, uh, proper (I had a Game Genie as a kid, so, y’know).
Anyway, it’s good. It’s also kinda infuriating. You take for granted obviously bombable walls and the little plinking noises less obvious walls make when you just gotta bomb with abandon all over the place in this game. Worse, that damn candle. One little fire puff per screen…get outta here…
Managed to find the last two dungeons real early on, so hopefully I’ll remember where they’re at when I need to in, uh, two dungeons I guess.
I think Darknuts can…folks I’m sorry for the vulgarity here, eat my “nuts”. Enemy that can only be hit from behind and deal a ton of damage and just sorta wander around randomly.
the Adjutant is literally married to every single playable female character, even the 19 year old feral girl with the mind of a 12 year old that you literally treat like a daughter-sister
one of the cosmetics was wedding rings for everyone
