Congrats!
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The song Angry on the soundtrack is still amazing for having like a 90s R&B drum under awful SNES orchestral shit. So weird.
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instead of taking the track of praising 2026 Game of the Year Pragmata for being a good game, instead I will praise the writing for finally creating a relatable story about a middle aged guy having a bad day at work and getting through it with the strong support structure of those around him and tackling the situation in a calm manner
that this manifests in Hugh being a mostly invincible robot-killing avatar of destruction is coincidence
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I bought Old School Rally, which is a very specific kind of arcade game that has a purposely simplistic physics and progression system. The stages are all wide roads with sweeping turns. It’s the kind of game you play to cool down or relax. It’s very much someone trying to make a PS1/N64/Early 00s pc rally game. Thus far there isn’t much of a reason to pick one car over another, all you have to do in order to win is beat a certain time in each stage. You don’t pick different tires or change the car setup between races. You basically just hop in a car and go.
If I could describe this game it would be “breezy”. Unlimited retries for each stage. The pace notes are really simple and sometimes aren’t quick enough to be useful. But. There’s something refreshing about having off-brand cars and bouncing them around in the dirt and have to worry about nothing else.
The game also has texture warping (which you can turn off) and a “CRT” Filter which you can turn on. The CRT Filter makes the game look not great. The texture warping adds a bit of charm. There’s also a photo mode.
I was challenged in a few tracks, if you want to go fast and find the limits of the handling model to optimize speed the game rewards you for your skill. I might take a hand at making custom liveries or something.
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@aislesgrises has been playing through Drakengard and is all the way at the very final Tokyo stage with me just watching here and there. First off, for all the talk this very final twist has gotten over the years I don’t remember anyone mentioning this ending as a fuckass hard rhythm game thing. Thank goodness you can pause buffer it although it’s still a real bastard of a time when you get to those final 20 seconds.
So the reason I’m even posting in this thread even though I cannot take a single ounce of credit for finding and grinding out all the weapon stories (she said that in order to make one of the weapons spawn you had to sit and idle in one of the maps for 25 minutes straight??) is that I offered to give this final challenge a try as she seemed to be getting understandably frustrated. Helps that not one bit of previous game knowledge applies at this point so we’re both at the same level here. We traded off with one another a few times and at one point I even got pretty darn close to (at least seemingly) beating it. That’s when she made sure to point out though that “You know I’m not letting you save if you beat it for me, right?”. I decided to end my extremely segmented Drakengard play through at that point.
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As someone who also legitimately did ending E, I salute you both. Comrades in rhythm
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Back on Splatoon. It’s still fun! They added health bars and a movement speed bonus that triggers when you’re doing well, plus they adjusted the hitboxes in a way that makes the game feel easier.
The four minute rounds are also a welcome change of pace from Helldivers’ forty minute missions.
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to be clear i feel like i’m being robbed if i accept someone doing the thing i want to do in my stead
i thought it was cute that ymer wanted to take up this challenge and do it. i would still be trying to do it if he won. no he does not get to save that progress on my save file.
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Pragmata demo: This combat system has the stuff… It made me want to get this game, but I’m worried it’s gonna destroy my already ailing thumb tendons. But yeah, I’m convinced this is a good one. Capcom magic.
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Peter Jacobsen’s Golden Tee Golf Demo
Windows 11 made me download and install the “16-bit InstallShield Support package” from 64-bit versions of Windows don't support 16-bit components, 16-bit processes, or 16-bit applications - Windows Client | Microsoft Learn before it would run the demo’s setup.exe. ‘p’
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I built a gravel road in zomboid by shoveling it into sacks using a dead end road as the source, since it won’t matter if nature reclaims it, putting the sacks in my truck and dumping it on our dirt driveway and the trail all the way to the main road by hand.
Blue line is illustrating the road (oops I stopped it slightly too short, it’s past that Brandenburg railroad track a bit too)
You can see where I had to clear cut through the woods too, after I paved up to that dried up river crossing. This was much more efficient than paving the actual eastern driveway the house has, which is easily like five times longer.
Spending like three hours doing a WPA project earlier today really helped me deal with the stress of losing my medication.
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Tried a bunch of phone games, deleted a bunch of phone games
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something i also do a couple of times a year, in the interest of fairness. all of them hateful garbage
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One of my pledge games was The Getaway. Which I think @captainlove wanted me to make sure I post about.
The Getaway was a big deal at release. We, The Gamers, were hungry for more GTA. Here was GTA set in 40KMs of REAL LONDON, inspired by our favorite british movie, Snatch.
A Lot of Words about The Getaway
I eventually had to make myself stop playing. The game made that choice for me, when upon loading a save I had to watch a 5-10 minute cutscene again. Luckily it has already been a day since I played and I feel the memories of it already evaporating.
So! The other huge claim-de-fame of the game is there is ZERO UI. You tell your health by how many gun shots you have in your body, you guess how many bullets you still have. There is no in game map. The US and Japanese versions didn’t even come with a physical map (the PAL ones did.) The only way to navigate the city is by paying attention to your car’s turn signals and blindly following its directions into one way streets and on coming traffic.
What I’ve learned from playing this game is driving in London isn’t very fun. Maybe it is with you know road-signs and understanding your destination. For a game set in London there are zero missions at the landmarks, unless unmarked warehouse is in all the travel guides.
Which leads to another big thing, the game is mission based with no deviations or side content. You go straight from mission to mission. Which is also how saving works, you just load a mission.
The gun play is also miserable. You have to use auto-targetting to even fire your gun, there is no blind fire. You can manually aim, but it is so slow it will get you killed. The cover system is pre-Gears and jank. To heal you cannot be in cover, you have to be perpendicular to a wall and then lean against it.
The whole time you are on foot the player character makes deep-exasperated breathing noises. Even just standing still or starting a mission. It will drive you nuts. I’m gonna make this a real video game review and also say the music is dinky and embarassing. It is not timed or even appropriate for the cutscenes or game play which causes the only amusement in the game as the dissonance takes over.
Because the game is utterly humorless. The game makes sure to call every woman character a “bitch” if she has the audacity to be on screen, and then kills the player character’s wife in the first 30 seconds and kidnaps his kid. This is to give the flimsy excuse as you do greater and greater rampages to satisfy the crime-boss holding your kid hostages. Slurs abound.
I played it because it had held mythology in my mind for 20 years. A friend rented it in college and during the first scene where you are torture one us utttered, “Little did they know, I was resting.” I love a little video game tourism. London’s real roads just reminded me driving in a dense urban environment sucks, all the time. Then came the stealth sections. I ended up watching a walkthrough, and kept noticing all the tricks the player was doing to trying to wrestle the game into a solution.
It’s really bad and unpleasant and has almost nothing to redeem it.
But because it is me, that’s not all. I also tried the demo for Fatal Frame 2 Remake. It’s Unreal so it is the exact same game as Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f, and Slitterhead. The girls look like sex dolls. It was the biggest scare the entire time. The level design is faithful, but don’t think behind the player camera is doing that favors. It looks really great.
Unforunately they like SH2r and SHf decided this game needs combat I think I camerad the tutorial ghost 15 times before they went down. Maybe I’ll finally re-play the PS2 version I said I would when I bought it on PSN 13 years ago.
It does look really really good and it does capture how scary every footstep in an old wooden house is.
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i do this too! the only one that has ever survived the process is desert golfing. i have given up trying anymore, it’s always desert golfing
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Much gratitude for the post.
The Getaway is indeed terrible and I think the hype here was that a large scale British location was rendered at all. Had to go to Gamefaqs back in the day to figure out there was a laser tripwire which triggered poison gas in one mission because the videogame sure as heck didn’t want to represent this clearly.
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Occasionally I’m really pleasantly surprised and have a good time with something genuinely great, and sometimes a predatory micro-transaction-dopamine-drip gets a hold of me for a week, but not this time.
Mikey Has Marked Himself Safe from Browsing Google Play Games
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i love watching streamers play the getaway because it takes them like half the game to realize you can lean against walls to heal. but oh my god the cutscenes are fucking unbearable as rudie said
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look. battle? army? place? person?
1 Like