it took an embarrassingly long time to figure out why guns were broken on our zomboid server, my friend installed some goofy tactical animation mod that was calling something every tick for every player on the server, so every time you picked up a gun everything would break and then you couldn’t ever put it down. I kept this in mind while coming up with my characters backstory
I found an ATF hat on the first zombie I killed so I was like, she’s an ATF agent who was at Ruby Ridge (the game starts in July 1993) and resigned because of how fucked up it was. She has PTSD and can’t hold a firearm anymore without getting upset. Now she’s a hardware store employee in this town in Kentucky.
this explains everything and would be awesome except we just fixed guns so now she’s going to be surrounded by them all the time in a form of extreme exposure therapy. oh well. I’ll stick to my stupid self-imposed roleplay restrictions anyway lmfao
I got one of those DS Pico carts that came out recently and popped it into the DS Lite I imported from Japan ages ago and have so far played…some Mario Kart DS but mostly Picross 3D.
I had to try a crazy sounding method to get my left shoulder to be more responsive (holding the button tight and blowing into the frame), but it worked, and I could use items again. Harder than I remember it being…maybe they’ve made Mario Kart too easy since then… Picross 3D is still great, I both love and hate that fucked up little duck creature.
As for the DS Pico - it feels way, way, way better than the R4 DS, as build quality goes (I’ve never used an R4 that didn’t feel like it was gonna break in half at a moment’s notice). About the only thing the R4 has over it (for me, anyway, there’s probably more I’m unaware of) is a soft reset function. I know these things have a higher power draw than standard carts, but I didn’t expect my DS Lite to be empty after charging it to full after playing for a few hours. Not sure if it’s the cart or the aftermarket battery I got for this thing. Oh well.
The game world is 100 spaces wide. It has a random assortment of KEYs, LOOT, DOORs, and GOBLINs. Keys open doors. Loot gets goblins out of the way. The edges of the playfield are impassable and depicted as clubs. There is no failure or win state, so I guess this could be considered a “non-game.” If there’s nothing you can do, you can reroll the world by pressing Esc then typing RUN.
The game clears and redraws the entire screen every time you move, so the effective framerate is like 1 FPS (optimistically).
There’s nothing really here, but the code is organized well enough that I could see an 80s kid easily bolting a bunch of stuff onto it with no problems.
Indika: weirdly little discussion of this game I could find on here, but then this post by the inimitable@captainlove does pretty much cover it. I don’t have a lot to add other than the interaction of this summary with my personal peccadilloes: this game is a powerful walking sim, probably just below Gone Home and Soma on my personal best-of. It recognizes that mechanics are important even when they aren’t central and leverages one-off minigames much more evocatively than the meaningless goofy theatrics of my personal walking sim villain, Edith Finch.
Rarely is the guilt and shame of a protagonist rendered so ambiguously and well, certainly Silent Hill 2 quality at least, and probably more interesting because of its gendering and patriarchal context. Indika is smart and can correctly identify the hypocrisy that powers the world around her, but is weak and always chooses the wrong reaction to these insights, usually by denying the autonomy of others even as she is ashamed of asserting it herself. The game never blames her for horrible situations the world puts her in but is pitiless in depicting her own role in perpetuating pain on others.
It’s so difficult to write a persuasive Devil… that this game is able to do this is testament to its quality.
I am up to the final “act” in Solas 128 (looks like roughly a quarter of the game left) and I am increasingly starting to suspect that I just don’t like it which bothers me as it has nothing but positive reviews (albeit not many of them) but IMO it has both actual issues on top of knock-on effects from choices it made. Legibility is often an issue which is a massive deal for a puzzle game, there were a couple puzzles where with the default “all effects on” view it was simply impossible to tell where a bunch of ground markers were, but more pressingly you often have to bring pieces from one screen to another but it is never clearly indicated when that is possible; you basically have to pay attention to the border region whenever you move to the next screen to see if there are any spots that carry over (the answer is usually no). That shouldn’t be the puzzle, make those bits stick out so one can tell what is in play at the moment.
The other part that is more in a “doesn’t work for me” category is that you often have to solve the same room/puzzle multiple ways, but because you often either have too many pieces or sometimes simply the wrong pieces to solve it in a certain way there’s a good bit of “what solution should I even be working towards?” which isn’t as big an issue earlier on when the difficulty is only so high but now that it is in full late-game “we even deactivated the hint system, you’re on your own” mode where you may need to send lasers across several screens or get/move pieces from different ones that at this point are still invisible to you it all feels very… mushy. When I left it felt like I got to a dead end room where I’d have to send some lasers back to the room I was just in to come back up a different way, to send it three rooms to the right and hopefully trigger something there. This may involve having to resolve some of said rooms along the way and… I just don’t think I care for spending so much time trying to determine if a room is even solvable, much less which room among several others might need to bleed into it.
I’d be using hints now to help myself if the game didn’t cut them off :\
What’s that Rudie saw? An untranslated SFC JRPG no one has heard of? Better load it up and find out.
This one is SONGMASTER by Yanoman. The most import thing to say about this game where you play a bard and sing songs in battle is the music does not change when this happens. It is like any magic in any JRPG.
The other thing of note is the music discordantly unpleasant. Some of the worst I’ve heard on the Super Famicom. You keep thinking “this must be an emulation error.” It’s not.
But I lied before, because actually playing this game is torture. The game refuses to let you leave the first Or second town. I think I spent 30 minutes in tears going house to house begging for new dialog. Please, a 1 gold for your thoughts. “There are goblins to the north.” Great I can’t leave town because I don’t have proper identification, those goblins are as real to me as home-ownership.
Thanks very much to @tacotaskforce who scoured a long play then worked backwards so we could collectively figure out this is secretly a Western RPG where you have to take jobs from the informant to activate quests.
After finishing my first quest I couldn’t imagine playing any more of the game. Will the secret orphan with uncontrollable magic powers be the chosen one? YES. Then he revives his girlfriend and does massive damage to the final boss.
Do look up the music it definitely belongs in that thread. It sounds like the transcoder broke and it plays every third note at the wrong pitch. Some of the worst orchestra hits I’ve ever heard.
if you want to keep your tribe together, do more heroquests! engaging with the mythic history of the orlanthi is an essential part of community building
“ernalda feeds the tribe” helps shore up your food system. IIRC, if you ask for a treasure at the end of that one, you’re likely to get some magic cows that make it almost impossible to starve (edit: woops, I was combining the ernalda heroquest with the uralda one. Uralda gives you a magic cow. Highly recommended early game heroquest as it makes food much easier to manage)
If that’s not enough, engage in a lot more trading (if you’re a peaceful or balanced clan) or cattle raids (if you’re a warlike or balanced clan)
Otherwise, the main thing to focus on with food is to make sure you balance cropland and pasture, any advisor good on Animals or Plants will tell you what direction to move that slider when you are on the farming screen
Oh, a really important detail is you do not want to send anyone out during Earth season, whether for raids or exploration. Everyone needs to stay home to help with the harvest
Finally beat Hang-On after months of visits to Add A Ball and probably dozens of attempts. It’s a very tricky game to get right. Traffic is random on each run and it’s very easy to run into someone and crash. I got very lucky in that the one traffic bike I hit didn’t send me into a billboard and I was able to finish. I used the brake more this time instead of letting off the throttle to slow down, which I think helped out a lot. Each time I’d get to the final stage I would almost make it to the end but need 3-4 extra seconds to actually finish. This is about how it felt to beat Outrun on the sega genesis - weeks of repeated runs and accumulated skills and a bit of luck to finally pull off the first running run. Knowing that Yu Suzuki rode a bike is apparent having played Hang-On because I ride a bike all the time and despite the low fidelity actually captures the feeling of it pretty well.
