Shocked, baffled and taken aback that #97 turned out to be bad
6 Likes
Finished Unbeatable. It rocked. Big giant swing of a game with a ton of effort and gumption through to the end. Glad it was patched so I could finish it (there were still graphical glitches.)
4 Likes
Was reminded of the game The Fool and His Money and decided to dig it up but I lost my original code and key, but apparently the dude just sort of disappeared, his site is gone and there’s no way to buy it or recover your codes officially. Frankly I’d have been happy to give him another 20 bucks, but here we are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/puzzles/comments/11cmb75/a_fool_and_his_money/
Anyway, this word/puzzle/logic game is a neat collection of ideas and games that I really enjoyed and I highly recommend looking into it.
4 Likes
The way I was just going along with the plan, choosing to “Move” random objects when prompted, seeing them gathered around each other like this, with no idea what the fuck was happening, only to be surprised that what is being put together here is a fuckn raft…
this game is so cool
20 Likes
Pro Pinballs Timeshock, Big Race USA, and Fantastic Journey are on GOG for $5.99 each; I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy them because I’ve never been able to get into them, really.
I do recall downloading, installing, and playing a PC demo of Big Race USA. It seems to be here Pro Pinball: Big Race USA Demo : Cunning Developments : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive and installs but won’t run in Win 11.
There was a 2012 Kickstarter for remastering all four of the original Pro Pinball games, they even threw in famous real-life pinball designer Pat Lawlor’s name. The Kickstarter wanted $400K and only got 174K
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1790321238/pro-pinball-revived-and-remastered
It sounds like Timeshock was in progress at the time (I also remember a fancy shadow-casting lighting engine animation preview shown off somewhere); they got that one finished–as “Pro Pinball Ultra”–but that seems to have been it.
2 Likes
Every day another Derelict Star. Sometimes a room just makes you mad. Almost to 400 qbit points though!
9 Likes
The tale of Diminutive Holé, wandering paladin
Typical RPG shit - the local pigs harassing me for getting my soul sucked out of my asshole by a giant machine nobody understands
I uh don’t think I’m a good culture fit for the paranoid psychotic local lords immigration campaign
something I love about pillars is that paladins aren’t like divine or whatever, it’s more about joining an order that reflects your values because living by your convictions is what actually gives you power. as a kind wayfarer my passion and belief in goodness intersect in such a way that I can kill assholes with what feel like tiny nuclear explosions of righteous flame. So I will kill every fucking cop in town if they come anywhere near me. That is a promise.
this game looks so good. icewind dale with Future Graphics
14 Likes
Pipistrello and the cursed yoyo is going for the GBA look. You get to see a fake GBA cartridge inserted into a fake portable console before playing.
On Switch, docked mode defaults to a zoomed out view with the portable console in sight. You can fully rotate the console and play it tilted if you want. It’s got visible scratches…
In portable mode, you can’t see the console. It’s like you’re playing it! Nice touch having a different portable / docked experience there.
The GBA influence can be felt in the spritework obviously, but also in the somewhat claustrophobic zoomed in field of view, that’s fairly rare nowadays. I like it
The yoyo (main weapon) gets used in clever ways for some puzzles and enemy encounters by bouncing around right angles, though it’s nothing too deep. Its Zelda really
I thought this was going to be a slight experience but after a short intro, I was plunged into a huge dense urban overworld. There are 4 big dungeons only, but each offers more variety than I’d expect from Zelda. I sense we’re looking at portable Zelda runtime, with 0 filler. It is also criminal how such an unknown indie game could have so much perfect animation, unique spritework and detail…
The game’s got bite… which is almost unheard of in the realm of this kind of GBA era Zelda-likes. I’ve lost dozens of times already. Losing all hearts means losing some cash, and restarting the room with full health. (Or is this only 3 hearts?)
The way to get permanent upgrades is fairly weird, you need to go into debt, paying half of your earned money towards reimbursing that debt, and getting a debuff in the meantime (like atk -2 + monsters can’t drop health anymore) you can’t just pay off the debt. In practice, I’m always under a terrible debuff because I’m never not aiming at a new permanent upgrade
Plot, just like in some 90s cartoons, is some mix between childish nonsense and topics that would fly way over the head of any kid. Energy price surges are at the core of the plot.
My only real complaint is that the jump is fairly joyless.
Forever delayed Mina the Hollower is coming at the end of the month and it may not be anywhere near as good at that one
16 Likes
After Gothic II giving Risen a try. It’s fun I guess but I think it would be a very unpleasant time for anyone who isn’t a Piranha Bytes fan.
The game is violently seventh gen, and I honestly don’t know if I’m sure if it’s “good” or I just love Piranha Bytes faction system and convoluted quests.
I plan to play until I get bored
5 Likes
You know you’re playing a Josh Sawyer RPG when bullying the town miller is obviously the correct option in a side quest. You can be confident approaching a mill in his games, knowing that the owner, without fail, will be a sniveling, potentially actively malicious loser. It might be a horrible little dirtball of a town with no redeeming qualities but at least everyone can agree the miller should be shot. We will develop political consciousness in Gilded Vale yet.
9 Likes
SLAYERS X
SHORT VERSION: I love the idea behind this game, and the envionment design is fantastic… I had a great time exploring the weird world of Zane. But the actual shooting part in this game is pretty subpar and frankly made me feel relieved when the game ended.
LONG VERSION:
Yet another game I wish liked more than I did… I still liked it enough to beat it, but much like the game this is spun off (Hypnospace Outlaw, which I also liked), I guess I was expecting more?
The concept is that a character from Hypnospace is now an adult, and found a design notebook for a FPS mod he made when was a teen. Now as an adult, he has made that game and released it.
I’ll start with the things I like… some of the weapons feel good, like the rocket launcher and glass launcher… and I especially like how the glass launcher works, because you can get more ammo but just running around smashing windows and screens. Brilliant!
I also liked the cheesy rock music, the green, red, and purple colour scheme the game had running through it… some of the enemy designs are clever, such as the needle head guys. You can talk to rats and get them to fight for you if you bring them cheese.
What I loved most was the environment design… all these real world environments re-created in this Build engine style, with it’s own edgy comic aesthetic layered over it… we got a small town, a fairground, a trailer park, a grocery store, a minigolf course, etc.
And it’s so maximialist! So many details all over the place… stupid signs and decorative items placed everywhere, so many things you can interact with Duke 3D style… and there are constant explosions and such, again as in Build games.
Things fall apart when the areas get more abstract… they just feel like non-sensical collections of ramps and platforms, feeling more like Po’ed than Duke 3D, and can be disorientating.
The levels also have awful flow… it’s all key hunts, with the keys and doors being on opposite ends of maps… and once you get to one side and find a key, a new exciting path back doesn’t open, it’s just going back over the area you’ve already explored (oh, the levels can be too large btw), feeling more like Redneck Rampage than Blood or Duke… though often the game will spawn in new enemies to make the trek back more interesting.
At least, it would be more interesting if the combat in this game wasn’t such a drag. The enemies aren’t interesting to fight, have terrible AI, aren’t placed in ways to make intersting combat encounters, the different enemies don’t compliment each other well, they don’t feel good to shoot (not enough feedback), too many are bullet sponges (especially the rocket guys and enemy spawner things), the game loves to rush you with enemies in tight places, there is always too much shit happening on screen so you can’t see what you’re shooting at/dodging half the time, enemies keep turning at an angle to make them paper thin which was really annoying, half the weapons feel awful to use, there isn’t enough ammo because the game wants you to use the S-Blade but it’s not fun to use and just a pain in the ass… basically, as a FPS, this just doesn’t feel very good to play.
I mean, I guess this is also true of Build games which always felt way worse to play than Doom, but this felt bad even for a game in that style.
It got to the point where I just ran past enemies if I could because I couldn’t be bothered dealing with the combat. This was very true for the pen-ultimate level which totally blew when I tried to actually play it properly.
The humour also quickly grew old. I do like the idea of things in the game showing the kind of person Zane is and the life he had growing up and the one he has now, i.e. a loser putting his shitty boss in the game and making himself so awesome, and even better was finding the secret area where the guy who Zane roped into making the game complains about him, like hidden rants in code…
But the majority of the writing itself was just not funny or clever, and I was tempted so hard to skip every cutscene. The constant toilet humour also gets old almost constantly, and all the one-liners are bad… I get that being bad is the point, but they aren’t bad in clever ways, they’re just annoying. They all felt like when youtubers say “heckin’” or whatever instead of curses.
And ultimately I just didn’t buy this being a game designed by a teen. There are definitely some clever ideas here and there, like the ones I mentioned, but I don’t think they nailed the high concept idea for the game. It misses far, FAR more than it hits, and mostly feels like adults trying to make a game a teen would make. Badly.
The game is at least quite short, like it’s the shareware episode of a full game. I’m fine with the length as I felt pretty done with it by the end.
So yeah, I had a good time exploring the weird and fun environments, but the actual shooting part of this first-person shooter game left a lot to be desired.
18 Likes
got bored of pragmata and played bloodlines instead
good decision
13 Likes
I’m stuck in Sam and Max because I didn’t talk to Max before he came back from the burger place bathroom and now he won’t go to the bathroom again. I loaded a save from before but he won’t go to piss to begin with at all now, like there’s some invisible order of events I took originally to stimulate his bladder. This game is incredible.
9 Likes
Played a little bit of Easy Delivery Co. It’s a very melancholy game set in a frozen town, and you do little deliveries in your kei truck. I like it a lot. One element of the game that’s neat is having to get out of the car, lower the tailgate, and physically pickup and drop off the stuff for every delivery. The game world is really cold, cold enough that you can’t be outside for too long or you’ll freeze to death (?) all the characters look like Animal Crossing cats.
25 Likes
The version of Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks was some weird hack that just cut off the cutscenes midway through. Then I got to a point where I don’t think a necessary flag triggered and was stuck. It’s really asking you to juggle too many different button pressings in the combo all with their own too many frames and I guess they connect in someway, in theory. This game started it but they’ve been mining good will for MK1-3 for 20 years and I’ve enjoyed it every time. Going back to this, i don’t know. I don’t need to play this again.
The Fast and The Furious ファストアンドフリイース for PS2 looks like a fake game. It has this smeered graphic quality that makes you see it for two seconds in the background of a TV show. If I had to guess all these assets were taken from Wangan Midnight for PS2. It also seemed to be auto 16:9. I couldn’t play for very long because of life, and I didn’t play very long because there is so much loading. Just loading all over the place. Audio Advice from Little Bowwow. There are so many ways to play this exact game without constant loading. Like my favorite NEED FOR SPEED (that’s the name) 2016.
I only put it together writing this post that FnF is not called that here, In Japan. It is in this game that has a lot of katakana over the menus, because Japan.
7 Likes
I finished Roadwarden yesterday. I was a good Rad’arden. It’s a text based game with a rich and interesting world. It lets you travel around freely, which is a good choice. Makes it feel open. You play on a timer, I probably missed many interesting things, but I also found some.
Gonna Esoteric Ebb now
7 Likes
I regret to inform everyone I am still playing elder scrolls online. I am probably depressed and burnt out.
11 Likes
So I got down to what is likely to be the final challenge for everyone in Tunic (Getting the final manual page, which is the cover ), had to get a hint to nudge me in the right direction to start but once I got onto it (and after my first couple notions were dead ends) I finally managed to get on the right track and got through much of it… except for the penultimate bit. Had an idea, didn’t work, slept on it, had no idea, tried looking for a hint and ended up being given the actual solution… and it was literally something I did last night that for whatever reason didn’t “pop”. Apparently it was an issue near release that required a patch but I guess it still is out there :\
So to sum up, the first major “extra” revelation I figured out during the actual playthrough but didn’t work (my best guess is that I did it with the analog stick while if using a controller it has to be done with the d-pad; don’t believe this is enforced if playing on a keyboard), I needed some tips to get on the track of the other major extra one but the final payoff/showoff bit legit bugged out when I had an idea about it and checked. What a cursed playthrough this was, have every “a-ha!” moment undercut as viciously as possible.
9 Likes
Crystalis with a patch that increases exp/gold and another that makes the player character a girl/green. and the sword gets a crystal on the end making it a staff. i dont normally support boys getting swords and girls getting staves (let girls have swords), but as the hack creator/hacker? says you are shooting magic at your foes way more often than you’re physically striking them
it’s ok? it’s aesthetically cool and moves at a sharp clip and its excuse plot has some surprising little details. but it’s really repetitive and every dungeon looks the same, and you have to switch swords/staffs constantly. ive played a bunch of games recently that abused elemental resistance, i want to believe that can be a good game mechanic but it’s easy to overdo and become an artificial, fiddly pain in the ass
Legacy of the Wizard!! i think i love this game but don’t enjoy playing it! i took my most recent shot at it with a guide and a map of its beautiful underworld to annotate, and spent a lot of time as Xemn the Dad doing complex 2D platforming sokoban. i am not strictly opposed to sokoban but i do have a strict sokoban limit and complicating how i interact with 1 of my 2 available planes of movement exceeds my capacity a little. i guess this is mostly Dad’s portion of the game so maybe i’ll keep at it, it’s neat to experience, but i always feel cheap leaning on a guide to get thru games like this that are designed to be worked at slowly (allowing that the design is also inherently dated). Like old PC adventure and RPG games frequently make me feel like this. it’s what’s always scared me off La Mulana
17 Likes