I also wanna complete Adventure of Link someday but it feels like the most inscrutable mountain. It has that impenetrability allure similar to the organic mystery of the original but times 10
I think a book club thread might motivate me…
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Based off someone’s habits on SB1, I played it on a DS with L Trigger as rewind and set some arbitrary rules for myself. I laughed constantly at all the heart break and death I would suffer, right before I would hold L and return to the start of whatever challenge. It was very enjoyable.
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Zelda 2 fucking rocks and everyone should play through it whether or not they care about using save states cuz it’s fascinating. It’s not that hard either like you can do it. Yes, you
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One thing that might be helpful to know for a Zelda II first-timer is that there’s a huge difficulty spike soon after completing the first palace. The agonized feeling of absolute impasse you’re likely to experience at that point is not really representative of the rest of the game (until it comes back with a vengeance in the final palace, of course).
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I keep meaning to revisit that game, 6 year old Mikey (or whatever age I was) wasn’t really ready for that
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I could never beat that last dungeon. Same with Blaster Master. Two of my favorite games, though.
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I have Polaroids of Kid Bachi beating the last boss but I think I only got there cuz some older kid beat most of the game for me
I celebrated like I’d won the World Series tho
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I have re-entered the demo dimension and I must survive the Next Fest Q2 2026
I played all of this nonsense in a row in what normal people would describe as a fugue state so all opinions are totally pure and valid
The Takeover 2
it is porn: no
okay so this is a beat them up and like a lot of modern beat them ups, the devs really like Streets of Rage 2 (hell same) except they really like SoR2 and several enemy types are straight up lifted from the game. but they also like Final Fight because the content of the demo is seemingly a recreation of the first two stages of that game. but also also, hey the devs like what the team at Guard Crush (buy Absolum) did with SoR4 as the game has the exact same scoring system as 4 did, where you want to build up a huge chain and decide to risk/reward it with letting it lapse and cashing in the score or keeping it up while not getting hit. and they try to do the silly Sengoku 3 juggles too, but they’re less successful there.
oddly, the final product feels more like an amalgam of things the designers like and not a coherent whole. this approach can work and hey, good artists steal, but they never put that twist on it to make it more than the sum of the parts
Lady Death: Demonicron
is it porn: legally, no, spiritually, yes
the second demo I’ve played this fest based on an anime following SiN, this is a Lady Death beat them up (is Lady Death still a thing people care about) from the developers of The Phantom, seemingly built on the same skeleton of that game. except they figured out how to make games now so this game doesn’t have any of the jank or bugginess of that game. except the jank in The Phantom is what gave that game The Juice and so this just feels flat because, with no kind of How to Play or tutorializing in the demo, you’re basically just walking forward and mashing one of your attack buttons. but hey, if you want to be Lady Death and punchfight demon nazis in hell, I guess this is your game
Sprawl Zero
is it porn: no
I feel like this game had a breakthrough moment from the fest so you’ve probably heard about it already but, in short: it’s like Superhot except in real-time and instead of dying in one hit, you instead generate health drops by killing enemies in bullet time in a manner similar to Space Marine or Doom 2016. it plays smooth and never feels hectic while being tense. the shoot/throw/pull loop feels so finely tuned, it’s one of those games where you can tell there was such a pure vision, that nothing was an accident. this was designed and honed and iterated to a razor sharpness. probably going to be the best shootman of the year?
Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?!
is it porn: no
you might have seen this on the socials if you decide that exposing yourself to the socials is a thing you should suffer. so the concept is you accidentally ran over some woman who’s an anime freak and she gets isekai’d per idiotic tropes (tropes, mind you, that are going on 10+ years of being lampooned in actual anime) and she holds you, the delivery driver what ran her over, as responsible for getting her out of the fantasy world she reincarnated in. you do this by playing Crazy Taxi except instead making crazy money, you run people over and destroy property to send her monsters to kill to level up and energy to kill with. even though it sounds like you’re managing two games at once, and you even get a little 2D window of her killing monsters with pixel art, you’re pretty much just running shit over and doing randomized tasks to get more time or get stars.
the idea is sound but the structure is suspect. CT is an arcade game so it’s about chasing high scores. with this, you’re doing repeated runs to build towards milestones to advance the story so the idea that you have time-limited runs is weird because it’s not like roguelite situation where you start with no time or power and slowly work your way up until you get a big amount of time to do the whole journey in one go, you’re working up to it 90-300 seconds at a time. if they can get past that, they’re probably good because the actual moment-to-moment of driving around is good and fun and feels good
Twilight Requiem
is it porn: no
an action-RPG thing that has PS2 flavor and the energy and jankiness of a mid-aughts swing by a couple of guys going “hey let’s make a game”. I like the vibes but it doesn’t feel great to play but you get the idea and I wish the best for them
The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival
is it porn: no
from the makers of The Karate Kid beat them up (there was a The Karate Kid beat them up, and no, don’t confuse it with the Cobra Kai beat them ups), it’s a slow-paced, grounded punchfight game based on the hit 2026 IP The Walking Dead. it’s kind of free roaming, it kind of has adventure elements, it’s plodding and how the hell do you have boss fights if the only things that exist are a regular dude or a zombie (they have a boss fight… against a fat zombie!). I kinda like the survival-esque element of hey, nearly all of the weapons are disposable but this gets filed under “why is beat them up the genre everyone wants to slot licenses into all of a sudden”
Garuda Emblem
is it porn: no
it’s River City Ransom, though the presence of some light juggling and the general glossiness of production means it’s closer to River City Girls. it’s alright. also they stole the “alert” voice sample from Shock Troopers 2nd Squad, which I approve of
DekaDuck
is it porn: no
okay so you see this and the controls and how it plays and you’re instantly like “oh, this is Mega Man X” and, yeah, the duck man has a charge shot and a dash and he can’t du-crouch.
but! they gave him a grappling arm grab so even though the structure still feels MMX-ish, there’s actually this kind of Treasure flavor to the proceedings because you can grab and toss enemies and they start putting in grapple points in the level, so they’ve clearly given some though on to how to make it feel fresh and unique. it plays nice and smooth and has a fun look. I dig it
Luminous Gate
is it porn: no, but it feels like something you would find on DLSite
this feels like a student project or amateur’s first game made in Unity and it has the energy of like, just putting a simple concept together with a tried genre (it’s kind of a loose musou-esque dungeon crawler/arena fighter). instead of having your power being dictated by a pick-3 system, instead enemies drop weapon/skill orbs when they die and you can hold upto 3 orbs at once and the combo of orbs is what your weapon skill or powered-up state is. the demo itself is very short and proof of concept-y but there’s a good foundation here and it’s executed with way more confidence than my first statement would imply
Hyper Bun Buster: Rocket Hammer Action
is it porn: no
hey this game whips. it’s like, what if you took the concept of bump combat from Ys and then shoved it into a Snow Bros. gameplay loop. so you’re a bunny girl with a mallet and you bump into enemies once to put them into a hittable state then bump them again to launch them forward, where they kill any other enemy they hit and explode when the collide against a wall. an arcade-ass arcade game, multipliers, chaining (full chain bonuses), good, simple concept that’s built on really well. if you’ve ever gone “man I wish companies would make Bubble Bobble-likes again” you should shut the fuck up and immediately play this
Succubus Successor: Delilah’s Juicy Journey
is it porn: YES
this is a metroidvania search action except the demo is so short that you don’t really get the search action part, it’s more of a fuck action game. the combat loop is you attack enemies until your horn them up enough and then charge with your dash to fuck them, kind of like a nuDoom execute except it’s fucking (I mean, if we want to be real, it’s sexual assault but this feels like a weird thing to interrogate so I won’t). it feels fine to play and the pixel art is pretty sick (not like, Sinisistar sick but still good) and you get the horny payoff from winning and not losing so I give it credit for that. ultimately, there’s not enough in the demo to say if it’s going to end up good but it feels like it’s in a good place if the quality level stays consistent
Marsupilami 2 - Salsa Palombia
is it porn: no
holy fuck this game is sick? a licensed Marsupilami 2D platformer is sick as fuck? you think it’s going to be a Donkey Kong Country-like and it kinda is except for the part where it’s good but it has that kineticism of a lot of more modern platforms have where the level designs puts you into a flow state and you just move through the levels so naturally and it’s not like there isn’t friction, but it feels so good. it actually has, through the dual-character dynamic, a lot in common with Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams, though that handled the switching better than this does (admittedly, in Twisted Dreams, you’re playing one character with these two moves and the move you’re doing dictates how you in the world looks so it’s not a true dual character setup, whereas in this each of the three have different double jump abilities and there’s a few bits where it feels like they’re encouraging you to chain them together by switching in midair). this is good enough that it’s kind of embarrassing that bigger companies can’t (or won’t) make platformers that measure up to this
Magical Thief Silky
is it porn: well, no, this demo is all-ages, but the developer has a Ci-en page, so
I did not go into my demo binge thinking this was going to be the Mega Man game over DekaDuck but here we are. it’s a Mega Man inspired platformer with really nice (albeit tiny) pixel art where you play as a pair of lesbian magical phantom thieves out to save these fish-alien things that from the villain. it takes place in Fapitol City and
wait, come back
it’s a cute little game and also even this chaste, legal in America version is incredibly, unrepentantly horny (if one character loses all their health, the other can rescue them by kissing them) and you constantly have a screen-sized side portrait of the controlled character taking up the left side of the screen so you can see battle damage or them bouncing their tits. also the bits that are very clearly and obviously missing are the fact that surprise it’s a ryona game and if you eat shit against a boss, you, from what I’ve gathered, die a hilariously gruesome and gory death in sprite art form. so that’s probably worth 1500-2200y
Granblue Fantasy Relink - Endless Ragnarok
is it porn: no
this isn’t actually part of the Next Fest, I’m just telling you to go play the demo on behalf of my regent, Lord Cygames
11 Likes
i feel like a hater but i played it because other people were raving about it really didn’t like this game very much. probably didn’t help that it chugged at various points on my computer in spite of it supposedly being good enough specs to run it fine. but beyond that i think i’m just really not ready for the late 00’s meathead fps revival. i had fun enough with the action but it just felt like so many other games that have already existed re-digested and there was nothing else there to really compel or interest me. and the story/world was so aggressively stupid in not even a particularly fun ironic way for me. i like plenty of retro FPSes but i guess not this particular era - maybe i’m just at the point in my life where i want something to stimulate me beyond this kind of meathead shooter.
3 Likes
If we gonna have to live through HD Era revivals they should at least add some fucking color to the shooters this time
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The Japanese fps where you play as the hacker viewing their force femmed big boobs mercenary comrade/potential lover through their eyes will save the genre . I believe!! I believe!!!
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I’m still waiting on an official remake of arcade half life with all the arrows telling you where to go constantly in bright colors. it’ll happen, someday..
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PROTIP! related to this: you can and should invest your exp in attack power first (by choosing CANCEL when you’re prompted to level health, then doing the same for magic)
AND when you complete a dungeon (by touching the statue after the boss) your exp automatically fills to the nearest stat
e.g. if you need 2000 more to increase your attack, you’ll get 2000; if you only need 50 more to increase health (which really increases defense, not HP cuz thats still heart containers) then you’ll only get 50!!
Careful leveling and use of the statue bonus can get you to at least attack level 4 by the second palace!! Ganbare, gamerz!!!
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playing strike fighters 2 and every single unit I’ve been assigned to in the f15 or f16 has been dog related. the lucky puppies, the wolfhounds, the puppydogs. the air force was a lot freakierrr than I thought during the cold war lol
Jimmy Carter misgendered me in my silver star citation. that’s what you get for nine confirmed air to air kills apparently. you think I could hop into one of these jets and fly it away. I’d love to just fly the hell over the Berlin Wall into enemy air defense. I had such a good life. My life was great
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battlefield has a mode with npc bots that fill out the ranks and your kdr, I think this is thought of as a lesser mode but it’s actually more realistic because the bots better simulate the intelligence and behavior of the average soldier
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Prison of Husks, Sprawl Zero, and Hyper Bun Buster Rocket Hammer all rock. Thanks Steam Demos.
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I need to know who at Capcom Production Studio 3 made the call to have This Is Halloween (vocal version) loop for every battle in the PS2 Nightmare before Christmas beat em up
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Been thinking about how minit could be better than Mina the hollower….
And maybe for me it is? I think I like demons over Elden ring. So. Yeah.
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It’s not official but you can just play Half-Life 2: Survivor on PC.
1 Like
yeah that’s specifically why i said official
I want them to waste valve budget on it. they could even call it half life 3 I’m sure no one would mind
3 Likes