Games you’ve played today: Fourteen by Kazuo Umezz

[AutomaticTiger]

Started Emuurom on a whim. It kinda reminds of Derlict Star? Pretty different structure overall but there’s a lot of figuring out the nuances of unstated game mechanics and the obscure qualities of movement and momentum in the environment.

It also reminds me of Wario Land 2, no death of any kind and the ‘fail state’ is just missing some platforms and needing to try again.

I was sold on it because I heard it described as like tunic in it’s metapuzzles but more condensed and this is not a fair comparison because with tunic I kept sighing at Standard Game Mechanics and this one I keep grinning at clever interactions with the numerous critters it is my mission to scan.

Definitely itching to boot this up again later when I get back home tonight.

[username]

Yeah I picked up Emuurom on release and got through an ending and… I realized I have a problem. You know how some people have face blindness? I have a sort of “hidden content” blindness with the current crop of layered/mysterious games. I’ve played on a couple hours beyond what is clearly intended as the initial ending and I just cannot find my way into or towards whatever extra layers are in the game, to put that in clearer terms said ending is about 6 hours into a theoretical 20-30 hour experience but I just have no real clue what said extra layers are even supposed to be.

I have noticed a few odd bits that clearly mean something but I have no real grasp of what, I got to one of the things that feels like it should be important in this way yet after having done so I don’t really see what it’d do in any real way, I’ve basically put a couple more hours into it in terms of doing completionist stuff but in terms of progress or discoveries I am hard stalled out. Add in that I’ve had no game time this week and probably half of next week due to covering literally every hour at work and I don’t know if it’ll be really worth going back to it afterwards with my memory of the world substantially blurred and no real idea what even broad notions I’m supposed to be noticing.

That said I found it a very enjoyable exploratory several hour surface level game and would recommend it as such, but it’s a very odd situation to find oneself being in a “stumbled upon an alpha in a giant bundle, become smitten and evangelize the coming game for six years, then can’t figure out how much of it actually works so just leave its deeper layers utterly untouched” situation.

Then again I look at my recent past and I had the worst luck imaginable with how in Tunic the couple times something didn’t work right was at the most important parts, or how I discovered things in Void Stranger in the most unideal order possible, heck basically my whole time with Outer Wilds and it is clear that I just don’t parse games in a way that works with these kind of experiences. My gut guess is that having started with the earliest video games and playing all these small hobbyist-level games I’m so mentally set to meeting a game world more than halfway and accepting what it is at least superficially trying to achieve that I don’t look to pull on the strings that would unravel said surface experience, and that has short circuited my ability to parse these new kinds of mystery games.

[coldfrog]

Just played through Love Eternal. It was neat. The platforming gimmick (flips like VVVVVV but you also have a jump and it sort of merges them with other basic ideas) was decent if nothing too unique, but I liked the feel of the physics of the movement. It felt like it kind of had Knytt Story vibes in a way that’s kind of hard to explain - I guess more aesthetically than anything else really, but something about that and the way you walk and jump felt like it could have started as an imitation that they made their own. The rest of it had some neat and creepy moments but I don’t know how much it holds up to scrutiny. It felt like it dragged a bit, or at least took a minute to get going. It seems like it’s supposed to be more horror-y and that’s fine. Trying to do story stuff in a platformer can be tricky, we can’t all be Celeste. I don’t know if it fully worked, but it didn’t NOT work. I liked the way they wrote the characters and just the script and text in general. I might have liked a little more freedom or variety in Act 2, and I think the stream schtick in act 3 could have maybe been more responsive to my actions or something, but they’re not deal breakers. It’s trying to be a little experimental and I’m always for that.

It’s got a little charm to it that got me to play through it in a sitting (2.5 hours). It didn’t blow me away but i certainly enjoyed it.

[hellojed]

Its very funny that the final mission of Kane and Lynch has your daughter as an NPC squaddie and actually shoots enemy NPCs. Take your daughter to work day. Even Lynch is like “this is a bad idea…”

[Tulpa]

The combat system in FF16 is frictionless slop, more like Kingdom Hearts than DMC

[problyfine]

I on the other hand have been greatly enjoying the relatively challengeless classic easy mode in the new king james version of the video game urtext, Rebirth of Final Fantasy VII.

[aislesgrises]

i can’t believe alice would lie about me not solving the murders like that. i am way more upset about that than anything else. how dare you. well, ok, i’m also upset about the stealth segment, the mayan temple simulation, the hunt, and at least slightly annoyed at sewer puzzles.

devil’s daughter feels compromised to me. severely. mostly by making these things feel like annoying distractions. is it really relevant to the murder that you figure out tomb raider puzzles in your head holmes?

also barely any watson screentime. maybe even less than crimes & punishments.

[VastleCania]

@VastleCania

And also playing Kitaria Fables…it’s fine, I have no problem with it.

The game remains fine but it’s also increasingly weird. The aesthetics are cute, the story is nothing so far, but the mechanics remind me, strangely, of Falcom games. Specifically, there are these big jumps in power where you go from really struggling to do anything, and then suddenly destroying everything.

An example: you don’t level up in this game, but you can buy new spells. Our best spell was something that throws three fireballs - not bad, definitely useful in dealing out damage but not a boss killer by any means. We kept running into enemies (and worse, groups of enemies) that were kicking our asses.

Then we bought two new spells. One of them is, I shit you not, a hurricane of fire. It fills up the whole screen and burns entire groups of enemies to dust.

The second spell is…basically a circular saw made of swords that blasts in a straight line, knocking back enemies and continually damaging them even more than the fucking fire hurricane. Bosses that used to take 3 minutes for us to slowly grind down lose half their health or more to this thing if we line it up just right. Just gotta knock ‘em across the map with the whirling dervish of earth swords.

We also got our first set of armor like 6 hours into the game, and it doubled my housemate’s health. It’s just like, fucking wild.

Also which resources are available vs. which are hard to find are kind of deranged. You gotta chop down trees and smash rocks to get logs and stone respectively, but they are extremely rare and only respawn every few (in-game) days. Also there is farming, but you can’t grow cotton; instead, you have to go to a specific screen to find a specific enemy, which is only there at night. This is documented nowhere in the game.

I don’t think any of this is bad! It gives the game desperately needed texture and makes it compelling to try and reach the next level of power. It’s a great co-op experience. I would still not want to play this solo though

[Tulpa]

FF16 is so intensely misogynist

[wourme]

When did Donkey Kong Country become so difficult? What an unforgiving save system.

I beat the game as a kid but I was playing with a friend this weekend and finding it much harder than I’d remembered.

I think I must have repeated earlier levels to build up lives way back then.

[bib]

you can cheat stop & go station if you need to

[jsnlv]

I think I always used the B A R R A L code on the launch screen to get bonus lives.

[GherkinForce]

Recently finished a playthrough of a game called Heroine Anthem Zero 2: Scalescar’s Oath.

Waffling

It’s kind of a Ys 3 / Astlibra-like sidescrolling ARPG made by a Taiwanese studio (although the voice acting is all Japanese), set in a Norse-inspired fantasy world. It seems like this series goes back to the early 2000s, with the original games seeming to be RPGs about mermaids.
It also has a very Vanillaware-influenced artstyle, which (mostly) looks pretty good IMO, but if you don’t like paper cutout style animation you’ll probably hate this.

I say ‘mostly’ looks good, because I played this on the Switch, and it seems like this is another one where that version is best avoided. It seems like the way they handled optimising the game was just to reduce the resolution of certain graphic assets, so a lot of the time the game just looks like a bunch of blurry JPEGs. It’s especially bad when talking to certain merchants where the big animated character portrait is just a barely legible blur, and certain market stalls in the main town are blurred to the point you can’t tell what’s in the baskets out front (except at night for some reason, where they look fine).

the blurriness was distracting enough that I considered re-buying it on PS5 and starting over, but for some reason that version is around 3X as expensive?

I think the game mostly feels fine to actually play. It has the usual fast messy combat with too many visual flashy effects, and a whole lot of superfluous systems like cooking and crafting and a Pidgeon Friend who can fly off to fetch random items at the press of a button. It’s all kinda loose and janky.
The main issue is the almost complete lack of challenge. I was playing on Nightmare mode, but the general lack of balance means the game gets easier as it goes, which is made even easier thanks to how many ‘Guardian Owls’ the game gives you. These are basically extra continues, so you can just credit feed your way through every boss encounter (except the last boss which is actually kind of hard because the owls become irrelevant). It feels like these were added as a kind of bandaid fix to cover up a bunch of compounding design issues.

This game is very plot focused. A lot of online comments suggested that it’s basically “a VN with occasional game bits” but this is kind of overexaggerated. You will however have to sit through some extremely long cutscenes with a lot of waffling dialogue (the eShop page proudly boasts something like 400,000 words in the script). The plot though is kinda all over the place and feels like it’s not really going anywhere, just introducing new plotlines and suddenly dropping them for something else, until the last few hours where it tries to resolve everything in a mad jumble. Some weird tonal whiplash as well where it will go from showing some fairly heavy tragic/traumatic flashback and then jump into wacky anime trope stuff.

Also this game is super horny. I guess at least this game is upfront about it from the jump unlike Astlibra which takes many hours before it can’t restrain itself any longer.
The main character is a kawai cat girl with the least convincing ‘disguised as a boy’ costume ever as her massive boobage is always threatening to spill out everywhere in all the cutscenes. Most of the women are strutting around in the tiniest panties and the game loves slowly panning across butts in all the sad emotional scenes. No idea how this got a PG rating over here. There’s also a sex scene and a few ‘choose the right dialogue options and you might see a lewd image’ bits. Some of those get uncomfortably rapey.

---

I also played the previous game afterwards, to see whether it cleared up any of the jumbled-ness of the ending. I think I can see why people recommend skipping this one, as the combat is extremely rough and overly simplistic. There’s no Guardian Owls so this one is actually quite a bit harder so I switched it to easy so I could just blaze through it. Lucky it’s only about 6 hours long. Interestingly it didn’t have any of the blurry graphics issues, everything was nice and crisp, except for when the camera did a zoom in or something. Way less lewd from what I saw, despite getting an MA15+ rating for ‘high level nudity’. Feels like they got those the wrong way around

[hellojed]

Sprawl Zero Demo

I hit the F key to turn on bullet time, I throw my weapon, I run towards 3 enemies. My fist slowly winds up and then punches, all three enemies explode into blood while the sickest fucking DnB is blasting. “Holy Shit”

A game going after the trappings of early 2000’s FPSes but doing a better job and arguably doing a much better job at FPSes than AAA ever could. “Better than Valve at their peak” keeps echoing through my head. Immaculate vibes.

[lasa]

finally got around to axiom verge a decade after the fact. i remember it generally being critically praised and viewed as “the kind of metroid sequel nintendo should be making” in a (at the time) dread-less world. i feel like even a decade ago, we were already trapped in the marshes of indie metoridvania. i’m not sure what made this so distinctive other than being a ‘one guy made a game by himself’ game and being so slavishly nes metroid with its aesthetic. kind of an annoying game in how it’s almost great in nearly every respect, but does one annoying thing in all those areas that makes it fall short. the one thing i can definitively give it credit for is that it does neatly integrate the idea of video game glitches into its design in some very neat ways that are both blatant and subtle. truly abysmal writing and player character design though. looking forward to playing the sequel which seems to be a divisive take on the blaster master/solar jetman vehicular platformer genre.

[Rudie]

Playstation Plus Month is in its last week and I got my money’s worth. Enotria was good right to the credits. If one of you Dark Souls Loving Sickos picks it up at my insistence, high five.

Harold Halibut is truly dismal and a waste of art. I don’t need to play pretend that I live in an oppressive bureaucracy, where my abilty to live is at the whims of an uncaring machine that is only vaguely under the guise of an evil mega-corp. Not matter what you’re a fucking moron for not knowing the correct thing to do.

If I wanted that I could just stop playing the game and remember what I did right before playing and what I need to do afterwards. Miserable, just scrawl a longplay.

Venba however was a little 90 minute delight about cooking Tamil food in Canada. I learned about food I did not know. I had child and parent feelings. And disapora feelings. And worried I won’t be able to connect with my kid, with me being an immigrant. Maybe the family can go down to the one Real South Indian restaurant in Yokohama.

And Exit 8 was as good and as small as its reputation. Game Rocked.

[iguferon]

Not many people played it but the first sprawl was awesome and the main character is a lady who dresses exactly like the guy who makes his micro uzi barrel explode with high velocity rounds in ghost in the shell

[VastleCania]

@lasa

looking forward to playing the sequel

Don’t take my word for it, but expect

@lasa

almost great in nearly every respect, but does one annoying thing in all those areas that makes it fall short

It makes some absolutely fascinating decisions but it’s hard to recommend to anyone because of this.

[Wizball]

@ronk

i’m going to say that the “peak of Rare 3D platformers” should probably just remain in the past.

Rare from that era had a great enthusiasm for the games they made, which was apparent in their best work, but they really needed some amount of friction to prevent them from fully executing on their ideas. Banjo Kazooie I think does a good job of tapping into the essential fun of exploring 3D spaces but then after that they start getting too Rare for their own good

[Sykel]

CAVEMAZE 3D

A barely playable Pie in the Sky game full of visual bugs, incomprehensible level design, and stolen assets (especially from Doom).

It’s interesting to play for a little while because it kinda feels like outsider art, but the baffling level design combined with visual errors (or were they deliberate?) made me jump ship pretty quickly.

GUN GODZ

SHORT VERSION: A short, janky, mediocre 0-Y-Axis FPS with the nerdiest “gansta rap” soundtrack. Has some fun enemy designs but that’s about it.

LONG VERSION: I’ll start with some things I liked… first, this is an impressive 3D game for GameMaker, which is notoriously difficult for this kind of thing. I also liked some of the enemy designs!

The unlockable bonus levels are interesting in that they are built around specific challenges rather than being generic FPS levels. They aren’t GREAT but they are interesting. So this game has something in common with Corridor 7 in that regard.

Apparently there is a character in here that’s popular in Nuclear Throne, and people seem to like that, but it meant nothing to me since I’m yet to play that game.

Now everything I didn’t like, which was most of the game.

For one, it just doesn’t feel good to play. It improved a little after I turned off screenshake, a trend I hate that Vlambeer popularised. The controls feel off, and the guns don’t feel good to use, partly due to the lack of knock-back on enemies.

Levels are boring… there are no keys, so it’s just moving forward through a collection of rooms and tight corridors. They at least give you cover, but all the rooms end up feeling the same.

The game is full of hit-scan enemies that give no warning or indication before they shoot, so fighting them feels chaotic and random. The melee and projectile enemies later are better, except they tend to not give you much space to move around, and it’s the hitscan enemies you’ll be mostly fighting.

Enemies also tend to just hover around in the same location, making luring out tactics not viable, and you can’t try to flank them since they’re always facing your direction and like to shoot you on sight.

Aside from the final set of levels set in a hotel, most of the game is in boring, ugly environments like a grey prison, a generic brown dungeon, and a green sewer.

The soundtrack is “gangsta rap” sung in a made up Venusian language (i.e. gibberish), with music featuring chip tune sounds. Not only is it bad, it’s also the whitest, nerdiest shit ever. Yes, I know one of the dev team is an Arab Muslim, this is still white as hell.

Some may call me out because I like The Residents who also do albums with fake languages and what have you, but at least their music sounds interesting most of the time, plus they understand the concepts of irony and satire.

The game is free now (though apparently the Steam release is buggy), and originally it was released as a reward for people who backed Venus Patrol, a website/event organsier that no one remembers now.

Well, I remember because I went to one or two of the events. That sure was a more exciting time for indie games, where there was actually weird interesting stuff going on getting attention instead of every indie game being a cozy Souls inspired Metroidvania with deckbuilding or some shit, and all the “indie” companies have million dollar budgets now.

And devs could get money for making games for a website! What a time to be alive.

I’m not completely wearing rose tinted glasses, though… the indie scene also tended to be a hipster-ish elitist boy club a lot of the times, the latter becoming very clear when the founder of Venus Patrol, Brandon Boyer, was outed as a sex pest.

Maybe I just miss my younger days when I partied more, but I don’t know, the indie gaming scene is so fucking bland and business-like now.

BUT MAYBE I’M JUST OLD.

Anyway, this game isn’t very good, just play Wolfenstein or something instead.

YOSHI AND THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK

SHORT VERSION: Basically a collection of toys to play with in (mostly) safe playgrounds, this takes a while to get going but is a lot of fun and joyous once it does… but then the game ends.

LONG VERSION: A collection of playgrounds, each built around different mechanics which you have to explore/experiment with to unlock all the discoveries/challenges. So, a bit like a puzzle game.

The big problem with the game is that some mechanics are vastly more interesting and enjoyable than others, with the best ones being in the second half… the first half had trouble grabbing us. But when this game works, it’s fantastic fun!

Some of the mechanics could definitely be made into a full game (especially by indie devs around 10 years ago…) and I wish we got to play with some of them more… but it’s very much a “do this once and never again” situation, but it at least feels like they explore the possibilities of the mechanics pretty well.

We also felt some of the challenges to be very obtuse, like old adventure games… 100%ing this without any clues with drive me nuts, I think.

So yeah, a mixed bag. The highs are very high, but there aren’t enough of them, and too much of the game is just okay or pretty good.

DONKEY KONG 64

Instead of having pre-marital sex as a teen like I should have, or at least studying to make the lack of sex worth something, I spent my time as a teen 100%ing this shitty piece of shit game.

Played it again with my partner recently (I eventually managed to have sex) on NSO with rewind, and it was fun shit talking it with them, but if it wasn’t for rewind I would never touch it again. We also tried the swap-anywhere hack on an Everdrive previously, but that glitched at some point.

Even with swapping anywhere AND with save states/rewind, this game still sucks and has no respect for your time with constant backtracking, repetitive minigames, far too many dull and unimaginative (and sometimes cruel) challenges, and generic environments.

At least it gave us the DK rap.

Oh, and it has Jetpac! Jetpac rules! Just play Jetpac instead.

GREY'S ANATOMY: THE VIDEO GAME

Ridiculous, funny as hell game. Imagine shitty Trauma Center crossed with a shitty dating sim that somehow has impressive production values.

Put a metal plate in someone’s head and then try to bang one of the other doctors via nonsensical minigames! This is such a bizarro game, it rules.

I mean, I’m never going to BEAT it (probably), but it’s a great laugh with friends for a few hours.

EXTREME G

SHORT VERSION: Still a blast if you can deal with the short draw distance, this game looks dope, feels dope, and above all else, sounds dope. The hardest difficulty is a bit too chaotic to be fun, but everything before that is a good time.

LONG VERSION: Loved this game back in the day, and it’s still a good time! Love the bike design, love the grungy sci-fi post-apocalyptic aesthetic (and how each track looks different), love the track design (and how each has their own memorable set piece), loovvveee the techno soundtrack, and love how fast the game is (even if it’s only because the fog is 3 feet in front of you).

I also like how hitting a wall doesn’t slow you down too much unlike Wipeout which just brings you to a complete stop. It’s a much more forgiving game. At least at first…

The first difficulty is far too easy, though, and I found it odd how the different cups just added new tracks into the rotation with ones you already played, rather than being a selection of unique tracks.

The third (hardest) difficulty is also incredibly unforgiving, and it feels random due to how chaotic it is with all the weapons. There is just crap going on all the time, and it often felt I couldn’t deliberately dodge attacks. The weapons are also very unbalanced, I feel… but they all sure look cool as hell!

Also, the battle mode sucks.

So yeah, it’s a good time on easy and medium (and just racing for multiplayer), but it starts to show its warts in the last third of the game.

SUPER MARIO LAND

Janky, off-brand Super Mario Bros. for the Game Boy where everything feels off.

Here Mario fights winged Moai heads, Chinese vampires, aliens, and narrowly avoids getting fisted.

I love how weird this game is, Super feels so bland in comparison. The music also rules (though I could do without that oriental riff), and I love how varied the environments and enemies are.

There are two obvious problems with the game, the first being the length. The game is about 20-30 minutes long and is pretty easy… that felt appropriate for portable games back in the day but may put people off these days (though short length is a boon in my opinion), but I played through it all the time just because it was fun!

Well, fun except that the controls feel incredibly stiff and the momentum of Mario feels very unnatural. This sadly holds the game back quite a bit because, for me, Mario is all about the joy of movement as you make your way through the levels. It just feels too darn janky here! You do get used to it, but it still could feel much better.

But overall, a weird, short, fun time.

MACHINARIUM

SHORT VERSION: A beautiful looking and sounding adventure game set in a robot world, this has a real mish mash of puzzles, both of varying quality and sense of place in the world, but is overall a solid game.

LONG VERSION: Not as good as I remember, but still very good!

The artwork and soundtrack are still what I love most about this game… I still have songs off the soundtrack in my “chill” playlist to this day, it’s fantastic stuff.

And that hand drawn artwork! So full of life (despite all the robots) and character. Exploring the city and meeting the characters living in it is a joy, and I love how you see how the city all connects together as you progress through the game, making it feel like a real place.

The story is pretty simple (a gang has been terrorising the city), but told in a great way, with you being dumped outside the city with no idea what’s going on at the start and it slowly being revealed while playing. There is no dialogue in the game, aside from some tutorials, which I also really liked.

Also appreciated the cursor changing over stuff that’s actually useful, though I wish stuff highlighted. If you can interact with something here, it means it’s for a puzzle… so no flavour text for random things around the place, making this a bit of a minimalist adventure but I was fine with that.

The puzzles i.e. the actual game is where it’s more of a mixed bag. I don’t think there are any bad puzzles, but they are definitely uneven.

Half the puzzles are the environment and inventory manipulation variety, so more traditional adventure game stuff. These were mostly fun and interesting enough, though sometimes a bit trial and error-ish, and did a good job of feeling like a part of the world.

The other half are more abstract puzzles, like stuff you’d find in a puzzle book but more physical, like moving beads around tracks to get certain ones in a certain spot. I enjoyed these a lot, even if not all felt original, and they also felt out of place in the world… I guess a place made by robots could have all these abstract systems controlling the place, though?

The biggest sin is having a freakin’ slide puzzle. It’s not as bad as it could have been, but still… that’s the most unoriginal kind of puzzle you can have!

Oh, there are also some simple arcade minigames that feel like filler.

But over all, I loved the art, loved the music, loved exploring, had enjoyed most of the puzzles. Definitely still worth playing again all these years later.

Oh, there is a hint system and walkthrough built-in, too, but I never had to use them.

DEATH RAY MANTA

Minimalist arcade design with maximalist visuals. One point for beating a level! One extra point if you grab a gem in each level before it disappears! Kill stuff to move onto the next level! Die once and it’s game over!

Great twin-stick controls, great level and enemy behavior design! Hard from the get go, which is just the way I like it… love diving in for a quick few games.

A lot of people will be put off by the Jeff Minter style visuals which I totally get, but I love them. I guess I’ve played enough of this style to be able to parse everything, because when I do I always feel it’s because I messed up, not because I didn’t see something.

Oh, I also like how every level has a silly name like in old Spectrum games.

But yeah, I love this game.