Lol, that’s hilarious. And yeah, Garriot is definitely full of himself.
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I guess all of these map paintings and names come from Denis Loubet, just like the cover we discussed a few days ago. Because Richard Garriott always bullshit details in interviews, while Loubet always answers fluently in any comments lol.
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With romhacks I can play infinite worse-versions of my favorite games!
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Must own in local NAS.
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I’ve been playing this slowly over the past week and have gotten far enough in to find out that there is basically a second mode/game deeper in the hub area that is a quick stage-based puzzle platformer using the same mechanics as opposed to the more open “several larger areas with a key path through but side objectives and hard to reach stuff scattered about” layout that is the game proper. It also appears to be rather good if slightly less notably so.
I already know this is gonna be the random “why did no one play this?” game I bug people about for probably the next year or so.
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played an hour of B3313. I really like it, although I don’t think I’ll ever finish it. Mario 64 always felt like it would always contain secrets and mysteries that you’d never find - like secret doors and hallways - and B3313 really captures that feeling. Also the overwhelming feeling of finding a new area full of levels.
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Good Luck! (Do not hit the yellow switch!!)
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uh oh
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wow I posted in the news thread instead of the “what are you playing” thread again. time for bed.
except I just remembered: B3313’s greatest feature is the Mel Blanc yelling sfx when Mario gets hurt lmao
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You might be okay, or you might need to restart. Here’s what it did:
It permanently randomized all flags in the game
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oops
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Game rocks.
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well, I’ve been back on my shmup bullshit lately. I’ve been picking away at Battle Garegga specifically for a while. despite its brutal difficulty it’s a game that can be relaxing to play in short bursts, because of how flexible the design is. one of my bigger shmuping weaknesses is routing. garegga, meanwhile, is a game that doesn’t want you to do too much routing: rank is going to affect the cadence of your play; your medal chain is going to force you to improv your moment-to-moment movement and keep you constantly scanning around no matter how much you know about how you’d like to move through the level design; and the bosses all either have random patterns, lots of destructible parts that change how you approach them, or both. because of how variable it is I also don’t ever save state practice, I’m only doing full runs (or resetting full runs). I will inevitably have to save state grind parts of stage 6 and 7, but not yet! you get into a groove in this game where you move around in a lot of weird zig-zag patterns, because that’s the best way to react to drops, and it can help you get the fuck away from bullets that you don’t see until they’re about to kill you because garegga is a bullshit game if you’re not playing the M2 version.
I’ve hit a couple milestones in the game recently that felt good. I’ve gotten to the infamous stage 6 turret wall a couple times, and I kept a full medal chain through the first 5 stages. I’ve not done these things together, and I’ve not done them on any run that I would consider particularly good outside of those specific accomplishments, so I’ve got some relatively low hanging fruit to capture in the near term. but most of my runs are still throw away reset fodder
speaking of routing, I’ve gone back to DDP DOJ some. this is probably the game I’ve done the most routing on, and most of my play time has been save state grinding whatever section I feel like working on at a given time. but I haven’t played this game in quite a while, so I just picked it up to do a few runs to see how bad I’d be. the first couple runs were very bad, but then I had one where I made it to the stage 4 hidden extend, which I promptly failed at because I don’t remember my strat for it. playing this game right now feels very weird, because I’ve forgotten most of my routing which makes everything feel off, but then my hands will randomly pick it up for a while and my brain will click into gear before falling off again. snatching at things with no rhyme or reason in some neurotic fugue. good times.
aaaand I’ve also been messing around in Espgaluda, which is a game I originally started playing somewhat seriously as a break from DOJ or Ketsui, because those games are relentless and galuda has an anti-relentless button you get to press whenever you want. I decided to watching a routing video on this game, which is something I’ve never done for any shmup. galuda is sort of an odd choice to do that with, because it is relatively easy and open for a Cave game. but unlike any other cave game that I’m familiar with (I think?), the second scoring extend in galuda is non-trivial. you have to do a fair amount of scoring to get it, and I know my best runs (stage 5 boss) I was really nowhere near it. so now I learned some dumb tricks to help with that.
if anyone is out there wondering what would be a good entry point for Cave shmups, I think galuda is probably the answer. before galuda, cave made games that were varying levels of Very Hard, and sometimes weird; after galuda, they experimented with difficulty a lot by often releasing games with wildly different modes and versions that you have to pick between. some of those modes and versions are easier than galuda, but you can end up getting the sense that they’re not complete or ‘real,’ and it can be confusing to figure out what you want to play and why. galuda doesn’t have any of those problems, it’s one game with one mode and a gimmick that’s easy to understand. it’s very good and it’s still hard, but it’s a well tuned and approachable way to learn how these games work.
anyway, is it a good idea to bounce around all these shmups like this? no, that’s why I never end up clearing any of them, I have brain damage
13 Likes
unplanned phone game post:
yeah I’m playing Endfield
no I’m not getting into the weeds with factory building and automation
no I didn’t give them my PayPal deets and have the game drain hundreds to thousands from my bank account because I’m not insane enough to directly give a video game my payment details
it’s very low stakes, no FOMO, relaxing open map hoovering times
ZZZ:
they had a coop event
the coop event was actually literally Granblue Fantasy Relink with ZZZ characters, and I mean literally literally and not figuratively literally, they even had link time and chain bursts
the end result: hey it’s time for a third Relink playthrough
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the switch port of dodonpachi daifukkatsu has a mode where you play as the daioujou ships, with daioujou rules, and it’s so much more fun than vanilla daifukktatsu.
i think what this really means is that i should get a copy of daioujou.
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Deadlock’s new Street Fight mode is really fun. No farming. You get random items each round. Only one lane. It’s really fast paced and rounds last like 5 minutes.
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almost immediately making myself a liar
off to hell I go
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I’ve been playing Monster Rancher 2 DX via Steam. Being able to just select CDs from a CD database to generate monsters is cool and makes it easy to do things like generate a bunch of Sueki Suezos (they live for one week (time passes in weeks in these games) but have very high stats) early on, enter them into every low-rank tournament, and accumulate a bunch of money (though, you wind up sitting through a ton of funeral scenes – I think I’ve used up something like 36 Sueki Suezos). This way you can actually get into appropriately training a monster with the No Rest methods and you can accumulate Gemini Pots (reduces stress by -1 every month and it stacks).
Correction, I’ve killed 44 Sueki Suezos.
Blue Kato is one of the better monsters to start with because it has A stat gains on Intelligence and Speed and a B stat gain on Skill. If you fuse a Blue Kato with a Gordish (Kato/Gali), you can also have it start with Tornado Slash which is arguably Kato’s most useful skill. I was raising Life and Defense because in the higher ranks it gets harder to dodge some monsters, so its Intelligence is down a few points. Since my monster’s form is Skinny from living off of a strict diet of Tablets (to reduce stress), Mint Leaves (to reduce stress), Nuts Oils (to reduce fatigue), and Bananas (also to reduce stress by 10 – Mint Leaves reduce by 50% which is better when stress is higher), my effective Speed is 999 even though it’s only at 851. I only have 212 weeks left with this monster and it’s already in Elder lifestage, so I’ll probably wind up combining it with something soon.
I tried raising a Balon (Tiger/Gali) because it’s aesthetically my favorite monster but its lifespan is so pitiful (like, 290 weeks?) and it pretty much skipped Prime (the stage of life when a monster’s stat gains are the best) and went straight to Sub-Prime. In the North American release of OG Monster Rancher 2 on PSX, all of the lifespans were apparently increased by 100 weeks. Since the 2021 port is based on the Japanese release, all of the lifespans are 100 weeks fewer than what you were used to when you played the game on PlayStation. It’s a bit frustrating and sort of necessitates using Plant Disk Chips when combining to get another 50 weeks of extra life and having Gold and/or Silver Peaches to push their stage of life back by 50 weeks so they can spend more time in Prime (though, as mentioned, my Balon never seems to have hit Prime). There are mods you can use via Reloaded II that will let you skip the drill cut scenes and show your monster’s Stress and Fatigue at the bottom of the screen, so I’m hoping somebody makes a mod one of these days that will add back in the North American lifespans because some monsters really take a hit from having such short lifespans.
I’ve managed to unlock most of the monsters by just playing the game. I’m still missing Ducken, Jill, Undine, and I think Beaclon mostly because I haven’t felt like doing the things necessary to unlock them. I need to raise a Worm for Beaclon, I believe, and I need to raise a Hopper for Niton and Undine, and Jill and Ducken I believe require me to feed monsters Cup Jellies at the beginning of the every month to accumulate jelly diamonds or some nonsense.
I raised this Blue Thunder (Centaur/???) to use on Expeditions. You can make a decent amount of money off of Expeditions (I found like, 6 Pure Silvers once, those sell for like, $4k/each), but your inventory even when your House is maxed is pretty awful and it’s also bad when you have 10 Gemini Pots in your inventory.
Tecmo made some changes for this port – outside of the stuff that was either censored or removed from the U.S. version being in this version (because it’s built off of the Japanese version) and adding a CD database to replace the disc stuff, they added a shortcut to the Monster menu, added a log to show the last like, 8 weeks of your monster’s Training schedule, fixed some bugs, introduced some new bugs, gave it a retranslation that’s just as janky as the original from like, 25-ish years ago, visually stack items (so instead of 10 individual Gemini Pots, it’ll show Gemini Pot x10, but they aren’t actually stacked), and increased the amount of monsters you can have frozen in the lab from 10 to 20.
It feels kind of half-hearted. I’m not sure why they didn’t either increase the inventory or give you more house upgrade events to increase the inventory space. This is a game where you’re playing hundreds of in-game years, so I don’t feel like adding that later into the game would ruin anything. I’m also not sure why they didn’t include a North American Mode or something that increased the Lifespans by 100 weeks like the OG North American release, because that really makes a big difference for some of these monsters. Like, they’re not even worth raising outside of trying to challenge yourself to see how quickly you can get them strong enough to rank S and to win all of the tournaments after that before they die. Also, they should’ve added a shortcut in the wrapper to the File menu. I save pretty much every week. More tournaments would’ve been cool, too – stuff like a Soft Girls Tournament for Pixies that are 4+ years old or a FIMBA-only tournament would’ve been cool. ALSO, doing something with that test at the beginning would’ve been cool. It does nothing. It never did anything, all it does is take up time. If they did a proper MR2 remake, I’d love for that to determine what trainer you get. Instead of Colt, maybe you’d get Fleria from MR3, or maybe on a new game plus you could get Holly from MR1 (you actually fight Holly in the IMA vs FIMBA tournaments in MR2, so I think it’d make more sense to have it in a New Game+).
I’ve yet to touch Monster Rancher 1 DX. I never played it much – I rented it shortly before MR2 came out but only played it for a few weekends, but I think it has a much better aesthetic and everything just feels quaint and cozy. I kind of want to check it out, but I also want to play Monster Rancher 2 Advance and Monster Rancher 3 again. I was big into MR3 when it came out – it’s a bit more chill and simplified vs MR2, but it has a really nice aesthetic and I think is a good entry-point for Monster Rancher. Monster Rancher Advance 2 is pretty much the closest thing to “another Monster Rancher 2” that we ever got, and it’s pretty good.
Also, some pro-tips for MR2:
- Your monster loses stress when it fights in tournaments and wins. So, before a tournament, you should make sure your monster’s fatigue is at 0 with a Nuts Oil and just leave its stress alone because it’ll most likely lose all of it after winning the tournament (but don’t forget to give it a Nuts Oil after the Tournament, it accumulates something like 20-25 Fatigue after a Tournament and Nuts Oil will reduce Fatigue by 28).
- Generating Sueki Suezos and entering them into low-ranking tournaments at the beginning of the game is an easy way to accumulate the money you’ll need to actually raise a good monster. Most of the time, your opponents will forfeit.
- Fight in the Gemini Cup in the fourth week of May every year till you have at least 7. I have 10 because I like Katos but they naturally dislike Tablets, so the extra Gemini Pots offset that (Tablets reduce stress, but if you feed a monster something they don’t like, it increases stress, so the Tablets effect is dulled).
- A monster that Dislikes Battle just means they get lower stat gains after Tournaments, which isn’t a big deal because Tournaments give shit gains to random stats. A monster that Likes Battle just means they gets slightly higher gains after a Tournament, but it’s still negligible. So, if you get a combo monster that has good stats and skills that carried over, but it Dislikes Battle, it’s not really worth reloading.
- There are a ton of discs in the CD database that generate the same monster, but they often will have different offsets applied that affect their starting stats. You can re-generate the same monster from the same record in the CD database and you’ll get slightly different stats with the exception of a few monsters (there are a few that seem to be jokes or references so they’ll always generate with the same stats (like 19 across all stats)). These offsets can also affect lifespan – sometimes you’ll get a monster with a few more weeks of lifespan which is pretty important for some of the monsters with very short lifespans.
- The sub-breed of a monster can affect things like their "preferred” stats (what stats you get higher gains in when training) as well as their guts rate and lifespan. Plant subs, for example, will often do well with Life (as in HP, not Lifespan, though I believe Plants do have long lifespans, too), and Pixie sub-breeds will do well with Intelligence and have higher a Guts rate (Guts are basically MP but it restores over time, some monsters restore it faster than others; monsters also have Withering techs that can reduce your Guts). Tiger subs will usually do well Speed.
- Blue Kato (Kato/Tiger) is a good starter because it has an A in Intelligence, an A in Speed (thanks to its Tiger sub), and a B in Skill, which are basically the three most important stats for an Intelligence build, so its gains in those stats will always be relatively high. Most monsters available to you at the beginning aren’t going to have two As and a B for their most important stats. Suezos are good, too, though, they often have a Bad nature which can make them more prone to Cheating on drills. There’s a Suezo/Jell you can generate from Kiwi/Pome in the CD database that has something like 1143 base stats, which is about 400 higher than the average of about 650 base stat that’s a good starter (outside of the Bad nature, but you can fix that with items).
- Expeditions will be where you make most of your money every year. There are like, 3 of them per year, I believe in February, June, and October. There are requirements before these trigger that you can look up on sites like LegendCup, but you need to make sure you have the monster you want to take on the Expedition out on the third week of the prior month. You’ll also get Gold and Silver Peaches from certain Expedition locations. Make sure your monster has no fatigue before going on the Expedition – if you send it on an Expedition with 0 Fatigue, it’ll come back with somewhere around 70-80 Fatigue that you’ll need to address immediately with a Nuts Oil and a Rest to avoid your monster’s lifespan taking a hit.
- The MR2 Advanced Viewer makes tracking your monster a lot easier, and it works with both the emulated PSX and Steam versions of the game.
- Once you’ve made some money off of murdering Sueki Suezos, you can start the No Rest method, which is relatively simple: You feed your monster Tablets at the beginning of every month, then you give it a Nuts Oil (if you’re just starting this, you don’t need to give them a Nuts Oil if they have no fatigue), you do a Hard Drill (one of the drills that raises 2 stats and lowers 1), then in the next week, you give them a Mint Leaf and do a Soft Drill (one of the drills that only raises one stat), then the next week you give them a Nuts Oil and do another Hard Drill, then the next week you give them a Mint Leaf and do another Soft Drill. Once the shop starts selling Bananas, you can use the mod that either always give you the -10 Stress bananas or changes the color so you know what banana you’re getting and start using Bananas on the second week, which will you to do three Hard Drills for the first 3 weeks and then a Soft Drill on the third week (so, Nuts Oil/Banana/Nuts Oil/Mint Leaf).
- Monsters are essentially free with the CD database in Monster Rancher 2 DX, so you can just blow through them figuring the game out.
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I remember putting a fair amount of time into the original PS1 Monster Rancher (and cheating a lot) but I never did finish the expeditions in it. It seemed like your progress saved in them; was never sure if you were intended to reach some end point in them and that’s what counted as the game’s story.
1 Like