Games you’ve played today: Fourteen by Kazuo Umezz

[captainlove]

Milano’s Odd Job Collection has you take on the role of Milano as her family abandon her for 40 days to go do something over the summer. She is neglected but happy at a chance to live independently.

The game is super cute! The basic loop is that you must do jobs to earn money, spend money on household stuff, and do chores/enjoy household stuff to level up skills to get more job. Each day takes about 10 minutes or less in the game is very flexible with what you choose to do. Despite there being a limited number of days there isn’t really a pressure to perform super well.

The jobs you can do are fun but the balance and appeal of each mini game is quite uneven. All of them have great visuals (one job has you milking floating cows) but you will probably gravitate to 2 or three that you want to do. I became ‘Burger Joint Milano’ since I liked taking customer orders. Super cute details that in order to see a customer’s order you must greet them.

I like that the game flat-out says ‘if you don’t like a minigame, just don’t do it…’. I felt like I had to do all the jobs but ended up just doing the ones I liked and it was great.

You have three stats to upgrade: Mood, Energy, and Skill, but the game is not very forthcoming with how to upgrade skill. Took me ages to figure out (you have to buy a desk to study) which meant that some of the higher difficulties were gated from me early on. You need to do this to earn more money so was a bit frustrating that I couldn’t save up for more expensive items by the end of the game. One thing I never managed to unlock was the music hall job since I didn’t practice enough music to get the attention of the furry lionman talent agent.

The town is populated by different furry creatures which is a fun way to avoid Milano having to problematically interact with real adults as she goes about her business.

I have a grvpe! At the end of the day you can order items, pray, or read. You can’t look at the shop catalogue without committing to a potential purchase/giving up another option at night. Feels like they could maybe have allowed you to back out so that you can just view the catalogue at any time. I frequently forgot how much money I needed to save for certain things but I suppose I should have just made a physical note.

I can see why the game wasn’t translated for a long time. A lot of the text is hard baked into prerendered cut scenes and there are a large number of fonts. They added voice acting and translated the end song as well as cut scene dialogue and they give the audio just the right amount of noise to make it feel like it came from an early PS1 game even though they could presumably make it much crisper. I think if they had it would stand out from the background audio too much.

I think they want you to do themed playthroughs where you specialise in different talents. It seems very difficult to get everything in a single run unless you are absolutely minmaxing with a plan.

I’m not sure if there are actually multiple endings but your family does give you a letter grade when they return. I got a C. It turns out your parents went away to give birth to your baby brother. I’m not sure why they surprise Milano with this but there is a funny undercurrent of Milano almost being prepared to be a parent herself.

The arcade mode lets you just play any of the mini games for fun if you enjoy them and the game is overall very chill. £13 feels just right if you want to check it out. It’s more of a curio than something I want to go back to. The kind of game a kid would return to many times over a summer of carefree memories.

[strangelilfella]

Replayed Monkey Island 1 & 2, I guess due to @daphaknee bringing up that the protagonist in Alien Logic (impressions still forthcoming, I swear…) looks a bit like Guybrush, as well as me obsessing over old adlib/soundblaster music recently. Seemed like the right call to revisit them, I guess!

This time around I played the EGA version of 1, which honestly looks amazing! I love how the limited palette makes for some really striking colour choices. Lots of caustic greens, pinks and blues like the world itself was drenched in Grog™. All the dithering too manages to imply so much added texture. Also, that sunset… I never even knew it existed!

The CD-ROM version that I’m more familiar with almost looks boring in comparison with its more mellow vibe and clean lines. I like how the scanned backgrounds of 2 manage to give that game an interesting character of its own that doesn’t just read as a sleeker take on 1, despite the move to VGA. Even with the general bump in fidelity, there’s still a lot of grime and muddiness to the world that lends it some intrigue. It almost makes me want to experiment myself with digitising some paintings down to a lower resolution…

Last I remember playing these was after the release of the special editions which, at the time, made me question whether they had ever actually been funny or was it just me looking back at them with rose-tinted glasses… but no, it turns out experiencing the writing as text really does make the dry humour sing a lot more than when it’s being hammed up by cartoonish voice actors and made to feel extra stilted by the weird pauses between lines that, otherwise, go unnoticed when reading it for yourself.

It still bugs me that the versions of these games most readily available to the general public feel like such a compromise. It was especially nice hearing the original soundtrack in all its dinky, squelchy glory (the MT-32 and remastered versions just don’t have that same funk to them, y’know?):

Was surprised how many of the solutions I remembered for 1. Some of those puzzles in 2 are painful though, I kinda regretted not playing it on easy mode but I guess I was just too curious to remind myself how bad it truly got. I heard it actually changes entire puzzles too, which sounds like it could be neat to check out at some point in the future… I’m probably overselling the difficulty a bit, honestly.

Despite some of the occasional expected moon logic, both of these still feel relatively breezy when compared to later lucasarts stuff. Thinking of some of the utterly deranged puzzle design in Grim Fandango in particular. Happy to say that at no point are you required to rip a boat in half via a complex series of pulleys and levers just to get to the next plot point… There’s much more of a willingness here to cut to the chase, which I appreciated. Especially when it’s often done in service to some joke, which feels extra rewarding!

I was surprised by how clunky the insult swordfighting in 1 felt given that it’s probably the most heavily referenced thing from the series overall. It felt the closest the game got to like… grinding for xp in an rpg or something… only here you’re running all these jokes into the ground by repeating the same openers again and again while fishing for a new punchline. Funnier on paper than in practice, I guess…

I’m a bit curious about trying Return, even if it looks like it probably shares a lot of qualities with the later entries that I don’t like as much. Maybe that’s just a superficial reading on my part though… Anyone here played it? Seeing Spy Fox a few posts up made me realise I never did properly check out Gilbert’s Humongous stuff (uh…) so maybe that should be my next port of call (hehe…)

[alfred]

I also played this recently and liked it a lot! I thought it was the kind of game you’re supposed to play in short bursts, but it was a lot more engrossing to play the whole thing in one sitting. As far as I know you don’t need to master an instrument, just max out all your stats and go to the park to unlock the music hall. When I realized I wasn’t going to get it the first time, I restarted the game and felt like I got a perfect run, but I still only got a B rank! The achievement system spoils a lot of things you can do in the game.

[AutomaticTiger]

I think some of the humongous stuff is an absolute triumph of Aesthetics, there’s a lot of spooky nautical from Monkey Island in Freddy Fish 1+2 for example, Pajama Sam one channels a bit of that super saturated night energy too.

Put putt games often feel more like jangling keys in front of a toddler but it’s still aesthetically well done. You can tell they’re based on the CEO’s oc more so than the other games which feel much more like passion projects of Lucasarts weirdos initially,

Spyfox is doing it’s own thing aesthetically and is neat in general but I’m a furry so I’m susceptible to it’s charms.

[strangelilfella]

Whoa… You’ve convinced me to check em all out at some point. Honestly kinda excited to be treated like a toddler too!

[explosion]

oh hell yeah humungous entertainment stuff is great. that stuff was probably some of the first games i ever played

[Rudie]

I can feel every cutscene of Sonic Unleashed making me stupider. It’s worse than a cartoon for 7 dollars at super market check out.

Sonic’s nighttime jump suckkkssss. If I wanted to slowly move boxes around I’d play Soul Reaver.

The NPCs the game desperately wants me to talk to look like a commercial for Allergy Medicine.

The levels themself are filled to the brim with trinkets and bobbles to collect behind every piece of geometry.

It’s kind of impressive to make a game I hate this much when it has Sonic the Werehog in it.

and it’s racist. Because it’s an Xbox 360 game. Sonic inexplicably goes to an African village(I guess) and then has the village leader go “What’s a Professor? Is it delicious?” See we are trying to find Professor Pickle.

[Tony]

I never played Blood fps, and I am evaluating to get Blood: Refreshed Supply on the Switch.

How does the game hold up? Can I expect something that is still great to play nowadays , such as Quake Remastered? Can I expect something on par with Dusk? Or should I give it a miss?

[azurelore]

… i think i found my evil sister

[Mikey]

@Tony

I never played Blood fps, and I am evaluating to get Blood: Refreshed Supply on the Switch.

How does the game hold up? Can I expect something that is still great to play nowadays , such as Quake Remastered? Can I expect something on par with Dusk? Or should I give it a miss?

It’s more like Duke Nukem 3D in both tone and mechanics – if you’ve played that you’ll have an idea of what it’s like. I think it’s a pretty good game. It isn’t as timeless as Quake if you ask me.

[COINTELBRO]

it’s a weird uneven experience that takes some big swings, it’s worth playing just for the experience of becoming effective with dynamite (the weapon you start the game with) and not necessarily worth paying $30 for when it’s so easy to play it for free on dosbox. it has appeal as a historical curiosity especially for anyone who was ever into call of cthulhu, it has roughly the same weapon loadout as a typical 80s coc game

[OneSecondBefore]

@L

Queen of treasure isle on Steam

I picked this game up on the strength of the videos L’s been posting, and it’s amazing. Beautiful presentation, so generous with its illustrations. Every time you get a new item, you get a funny drawing of the main character trying to use it. The exploration is really compelling. There are secrets everywhere that lead to wild stuff. You never know what you’re going to run into. It has some of that Atlantis No Nazo mystery DNA but less frustrating. I’m still at the very beginning, but this has the juice.

[cask]

After explaining to a friend how i’ve been struggling to connect with any games lately due to my schedule (maybe 30 minutes at the beginning of the day and 30 minutes at the end of the day if I’m not too tired), he recommended to me that f2p gacha games might be a good fit. Despite my first instinct to say “how DARE you sir!!” I heard him out, and his logic made sense: short, immediate gameplay loops; constant, easily measurable forward progression; start-to-actually-doing-something times in the matter of seconds; small, digestible story beats that are easy to pick up and put down; extensive gameplay loop optimization puzzles. So I thought what the hell and tried them out. @notbov and @Drem both helped me out with some information on how to get started, so away I went.

Wuthering Waves AKA Gathering Wives AKA WuWa

I started off with this one based on his recommendation and I understand that this is heavily influenced by the ur-game of the genre, Genshin Impact. It was OK. Explained pretty accurately by @notbov as BotW except 95% of the game is collecting korok seeds. My buddy said that I would enjoy the high skill ceiling combat, and this was true! I randomly unlocked a character named Danjin who exchanges hp for damage so a lot of players run her at 1hp and try to basically no-hit every fight. It was fun, sort of a mix of frenetic DMC style combat, but combined with limited movesets (basic attack, special attack, super, plus some sort of unique meta function).

Unfortunately, despite being warned that the beginning of the game was rough, I still was unprepared for how amateurish I found the storytelling. Also, I found the way the game mixed the extremely serious tone of the story with the silliness of the waifu gathering to be a bit too much whiplash… also none of the characters I met really had a personality/look that was grabbing me. Supposedly the newest 3.0 expansion, which sends your team to a boarding school and features a character that is Jess-Mariano-except-female-and-also-an-assassin would be something that is up my alley, but getting there was going to be too much of an effort so I stepped away after a few weeks.

Time Played: ~26 hours

Money Spent: $5 (one purchase of the 30 days subscription that gives you a certain amount of the currency for pulls/day)

How much shit does my wife give me while playing? : 9/10 (I need to wear headphones and close the door)

Major pull:

Shorekeeper (jellyfish coded 5 star god-tier support character, who I pulled because she is built into a lot of meta teams but who’s obsession with the main character I find off-putting… you gotta find your own interests that don’t involve me hun)

Zenless Zone Zero aka ZZZ (the zzz stands for ENERGIZING)

Now THIS is more like it. Made by Hoyoverse (the same studio that makes Genshin), this is sort of a f2p version of Persona 4, down to: mid-2000’s bold flash animation style coloring/shapes, heavy in yellows and blacks and oranges; a 90’s technology motif that heavily feature staticy CRT TVs and chunky laptops; a small town hub world that is navigated mainly by menus; the actual action taking place in a liminal cyberspace; a lighter, tighter focus on character storytelling. The action gameplay is crisp and propulsive (if a bit easy so far). The tone is light enough and the characters silly enough that the waifu aspect doesn’t feel quite as incongruous. Overall I’m finding it to be a really breezy, fun experience, and I’m glad I dipped my toes in.

Of course, being a f2p gacha game, gathering currency for pulls for character collection is still a major aspect. And I’ve found zzz to feel a little bit more predatory than WuWa (which I understand is famously generous within the genre) , though not by much. In both games, I was able to pull a time-limited 5star/S Rank character pretty easily without real money investment and without any feeling of grinding my time away just for currency.

Time Played: ~45 hours

Money Spent: $8 (one purchase of the $5 monthly subscription that gives you a certain amount of the currency for pulls/day, one purchase of the $3 “new player” bonus which gives you a handfull of pulls at way below market rate

How much shit does my wife give me while playing? : 4/10 (gotta avoid selecting certain characters (corin, you are OUT) but overall the tone is goofy enough to avoid severe humiliation

Major Pull: Paris Gellar coded rude rich girl Alice who is both my type of character as well as very fun to play (I haven’t met her in the story yet, this is just based on her character barks)

Also rude rich girl turned biker gang leader Lucy; her main support skill involves summoning a bunch of little warthog dudes to run around and beat on enemies

[ArOne]

The sole saving grace of Sonic Unleashed was Rooftop Run level and music. When ever I sat down to play Unleashed for a bit I would always finish with running that level just to have some good vibes on the way out.

[Tulpa]

I don’t know if the new release adjusts the difficulty settings but the base game’s difficulty options were fucked. Easiest setting was about on par with other shooters on their medium difficulty, but medium setting was harder than doom on UV, and it only went up from there. They balanced the difficulty around people playing in coop for some reason and the game had too many hitscan enemies which made the game harder in an unsatisfying way.

The previous nightdive release, fresh supply, allowed you to tweak every parameter of difficulty and I found it worked best by using medium difficulty as a base and dropping the accuracy and speed of hitscan enemies to the easiest level.

It’s worth it for the gorgeous, expansive maps, the creative weapons, and the overall atmosphere but blood is definitely a flawed gem. Still my favorite of the build engine games but that may just be because it is the only one that isn’t explicitly racist or sexist

[daphaknee]

see you in infinity Nikki!!

[Grandpa]

Had a pretty rough weekend emotionally, so tonight I sat down, booted up the RG Cube XX and decided to play some Dragon Warrior VII.

My only prior experience with the game is, well, the recent Reimagined demo, and it’s almost shocking to compare these two.

Sure, the original can be a bit aimless until you talk to the right person or try to do the right thing, but it feels like a mystery! You’re really just going all out trying to solve these puzzles and riddles and whatnot! It’s a little clumsy (as controls and lining things up in 3D goes), the script is maybe a bit limited, but it really does feel like an adventure.

The demo for the new version, on the other hand, feels…incredibly slight. It’s wild how the two versions almost line up, one for one, right up until you attempt to get entry to the ruins.

I suppose, if you had played the million hour original, the sort of CliffNotes approach of Reimagined would be a nice, brisk refresher, but I can’t stop thinking about how much has been cut back from just the opening.

I almost wonder if the 3DS version would be sort of the Goldilocks just-right of the three - modernized to a point but not mercilessly pared away?

Life is too short for me to play three versions of the same game (I should have gotten on this twenty years ago, if I wanted to really go for it), but I may keep at Dragon Warrior VII for a while.

I mean, once I finish I & II HD-2D…and play 4, 5 and 6…

[Rudie]

DQVII should absolutely not be looked at as a game to finish. It is a ritual/habit/game you play a few times a week for years.

That said finding the tablet fragments does require OCD kleptomania towards every pot and bush in the game and that’s awful. And is directly counter to playing 30 minute sessions 2-4 times a week.

[boojiboy7]

Having the strategy guide around has been nice for 7 because when I haven’t been able to find a shard, it tells me generally where/when they are. That and the occasional looking up of “who the fuck do I have to talk to?” have been really useful.

I am currently sitting just before the last dungeon, which I treid a little of and got my party’s collective shit rocked, so I am working on levelling some jobs for everyone. My Hero is way overlevelled, job wise, and has already mastered GodHand and is now onto Hero, so that’s something. Nobody has ever been a Ranger.

I played the demo for the new one, and I know I will pick it up, but yeah, it feels so light compared to the original. And it really feels like the current localization team is going to drop the ball on how serious the game’s plot is about the existence of God and religion and such. I noticed the Reimagining already went back to the Not-A- Cross for the churches, which does not inspire confidence.

[GherkinForce]

@Grandpa

I almost wonder if the 3DS version would be sort of the Goldilocks just-right of the three - modernized to a point but not mercilessly pared away?

I’ve only played the 3DS version of VII, and I feel like it was my least favourite game in the series. Most likely because the battles were so easy for about the first 30 hours that it made things feel like a bit of a drag, just running from plot point to plot point and hammering the A button to kill all monsters. I didn’t mind how long it took to get into the first battle, just the monotony that came after that dragged it down for me.

---

Come to think of it, when it comes to the mainline DQ games, I reckon I’ve only ever played remakes. 1,2 and 3 in the HD2D versions, 4 and 5 on DS, 7 & 8 on 3DS, and I think technically 11 on PS4 / Switch is a remake of the 3DS version?
Haven’t played 6,9 or 10.