Grandpa Gamin' thread 👴

[Grandpa]

I beat Final Fantasy Adventure and…I loved it? It’s awful in a lot of ways that are less to do with it being outright bad and more just…relying on prayer for certain puzzle conditions to work (look, I know you want me to freeze the two black knights, trim the hedges, kill the two mages, and push the frozen knights onto those pressure plates behind the foliage to open a stairwell. OK. Got it. Now, please, let the stars and planets align so that the knights are positioned just right that I can actually make this all happen. Ah nuts, killed everyone in the room. Now I gotta leave the floor to get them to respawn. It’s cruel!)

The story is such a huge bummer, too. I do find it funny that most of the wikis out there point out that your character vows to avenge Willy, the guy who dies at the very start, when fighting the Dark Lord, but in the US version he never mentions him again. RIP, Willy. I’ll remember reading “Willy passed away” and snort-laughing.

Moved on from that to…Secret of Mana! And I don’t think I care for it! I’m kinda getting the hang of it, though. God, your AI buddies are glass cannons though. I am Choosing Pain and grinding a bit in this witch’s castle, taking on these two werewolves in this hallway over and over again until I feel good about where I’m at. I also need money to keep buying those revival cups because the girl is pretty much constantly dead (and the cat is is horrible price gouger).

Also fired up Final Fantasy Mystic Quest “as a joke,” and am now…bizarrely intrigued. It’s almost offensively Baby’s First RPG, but I am…I am pretty new to the genre. Maybe I am the baby. Maybe this is the Final Fantasy for me…

Just feels like the sickest burn that it was released in Japan as “Final Fantasy USA.”

[Grandpa]

Secret of Mana progress report:

THAT'S THE WALL, BROTHER

[Grandpa]

Secret of Mana spoilers…

Summary

Anyway: didn’t like it as much as I did Final Fantasy Adventure!

I mean, it’s fine. If I engaged with it how I should have (recognizing it’s an RPG obfuscated by the illusion of action mechanics), and not how I played it (none of my hits are landing, this shit sucks, I’m going to run through all these dungeons and not bother to level up magic), I probably would have liked it more, maybe?

So much time at the end of the game just casting spells on my crew to level up the magic needed to take down the final boss. This was after I hit the point of no return grossly underleveled, and had to roll back to an older save.

I’ll play Trials of Mana eventually, but for now I’m all mana’d out.

[Grandpa]

Decided I needed a palate cleanser after finishing two long ass action RPGs back to back and played The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe (never played the original, think my laptop was too crummy to run it).

I liked it! I don’t think I’m gonna chase down every ending, but I think that, given the game’s attitude to collectibles/achievements/etc., you’re probably not really supposed to.

Edit: I lied, I went back to get a few more endings. Turns out the Collectibles one is maybe the best one of the bunch.

[Grandpa]

Beat Ghost Trick, finally, after ??? years of owning it (granted via the newer Switch version than my old DS copy, but still!).

What a great fucking game.

[Grandpa]

Updated my little blog about the stuff I’ve finished of late. Pretty much what I’ve said here already, but if you want to read Stuff I’ve Said Here Already: Gaiden…

Games I've Finished in 2023 VII Remake Integrade

I gotta start putting an image at the top of these to “drive engagement”…

[Grandpa]

Been lost since finishing Ghost Trick…I downloaded Brotato because I heard it was pretty good (it rules), then started Detention (very good so far, though I’m a coward and am terrified).

But then they put Vampire Survivors out on the goddamn Switch, and here I am, again. Again with these surviving vampires.

[Grandpa]

I think I might be close to done with Vampire Survivors. Maybe? God I don’t know. What a weird game. I might be done just on a sensory overload level, though. Game just gets to be a lot once you make it around 25 minutes in.

I imported some copies of the EDF games for Switch. The appeal of blasting bugs in bed…just couldn’t deny it.

Playing EDF2 (which I played a little bit of on Vita, but it cramped my hands a bit too much), which I guess is more or less the first proper EDF game. It’s fun! Quaint origins!

I’m in awe of this last stage I played, just in how They Made It Look Like This, and the fun end of level gimmick (they make it look like one bug is atop that huge tower in the back - naturally, you gun the tower down, and it turns out that, nope, it’s about 20+ furious ants beelining your location after they tumble down).

I don’t know if pitting you against a bunch of grey-black ants on a nearly pitch black level is great from an accessibility standpoint, but as an astigmatism-haver…thank you for the representation, EDF2.

[LaurelSoup]

I love how Final Fantasy Adventure takes you on this giant trip screen by screen. It’s not Zelda where you’re sort of doing wider and wider loops around the same area. You actually feel like you’ve gone far. It’s sort of the same trick Earthbound does with its lack of a world map.

And Mystic Quest is alright. I was all in on RPGs back when, and getting this weird budget bite-sized one was very welcome. Plus the battle theme is just a straight ripoff of Crazy Train.

[Grandpa]

The 'Best of the Rest Awards' of 2023

I’ve neglected this poor thread for ages, but here’s some quick hits of stuff I played that was alright.

Top ten…coming whenever I get around to it…

Edit: Hell, may as well take a minute to write about my Demo Dabblin’ yesterday.

Chants of Sennaar: oh hell yes, this is extremely my kinda shit. Not only is the game gorgeous, but the whole linguistic component and the way it’s used (after encountering glyphs and seeing them in loose context, you’re given the option to take a guess as to their translation using the system keyboard - from then on, any writing or dialogue you encounter will display correct definitions in bold and your guesses in lighter font weight, increasingly fleshing your understanding of what is said and written around you). Fascinating game, gonna have to jump on it eventually.

Brok the InvestiGator: Really interesting mishmash of point and click adventure and brawler. The game goes as hard as it can on its world building, hitting you with a ton of jargon that you’re sort of left to interpret. It’s not daunting or anything, just, “damn I guess they went for it” kinda stuff. A little clunky in the two genres it straddles. Also I’m pretty sure every single line of dialogue is voiced.

Born of Bread: Really cute Super Mario RPG-alike (or Paper Mario? One of the two) about a literal dough boy, his dad (a baker who accidentally brought him to life), and a, uh, frazzled raccoon. At least as far as the demo goes. Great look to it, even on Switch, with really nice cartoony 3D environments and flat characters. Combat attack timing can be kinda brutal, and I lost all control of the demo after reading a sign. But other than that, not bad!

Dredge: Definitely gotta get around to this one. Only did a few days of fishing, but the loop (catch as many fish as you can before the insanity-inducing fog rolls in, upgrade your gear as best you can, take on fishing requests, etc.) seems extremely good.

Polyroll: y’all ever play that Sonic the Hedgehog? Pretty much like that, but with a bug.

Death Trick: Double Blind: This looked pretty cool on the Indie Showcase, and it seems alright. Been bailing early on these story-heavy demos, but this wasn’t bad. Writing is maybe a little meandering, didn’t really play long enough to hit the investigative stuff. I do kinda dig the sort of “painting in motion” thing the character art has going for it.

A Space for the Unbound: Seems pretty good, also seems like a game probably designed to have Moments To Make You Cry and/or Feel Bad. Really dig the whole look of it. Gorgeous color palette going on.

The Diofield Chronicle: I think I have ordered and cancelled said order on this game like four times now, so rather than commit sight unseen, why not actually try it? And - ehhh I’ll live without it. Neat look, gameplay is OK, but it feels slow as molasses, English dub seems bad, and the plot just ain’t that intriguing. I did see you can have a dragon rider on your team at some point, though, and it was pretty cool when you got to summon Bahamut…but I think I’ll be OK.

[Grandpa]

The Best Dang Games I Played in 2023

I should go back and try to add screenshots to this, but I already published it! Dang!

Anyway, here’s my top ten of the year, until I had a realization and an entirely-predictable dark-horse candidate swoops in at the last minute for the crown.

[Grandpa]

My Playstation wrap-up is so damn depressing. I think I used it more for watching Blurays than anything else this year.

(The second game was my briefly trying the Saints Row DLC)

[Grandpa]

With Detention finished (it was good, I was dragging my feet because I was worried it would be scary, and, eh, a little), I’m now “between games,” waffling around before I decide to do what I should do, and just fire up that Atelier Marie remake.

Monster Viator: Mentioned this in the other thread, but this Kemco RPG is OK. Battle theme kinda kicks ass, lotta guitar buttock stuff going on. The music theme for the desert towns, however, is an extremely short loop that is driving me nuts. Out of nowhere the game has gotten absurdly difficult - I guess the real strategy is to get a feel for what monster types you’re up against, and switch your party out accordingly. You can also get new job types for your human characters, but they’re generally so underpowered when you do acquire them that it feels like you’re better off sticking with the starter set. I dunno if I’m just playing it poorly (could be!), or if these things are balanced to entice you to drop a few bucks on XP boosts or whatever. Kinda at the point with it where… it’s fine, but life and time are short, could spend it on better things.

G-Darius: Been playing this a few different ways, via the Playstation version on my RG35XX, and this “almost entirely in English except the mode descriptions which are in Chinese” Switch copy. Holy shit this is great. Am I good at it? Absolutely not. But I’m obsessed with these giant robot fish. Perhaps 2024 will be my “year of the shooter”…

Cotton (various): 100%, Panorama, Fantasy, the Saturn ones, emulating that one for the NGPC, you name it, I eat shit immediately in all of them (well, I’m better at Panorama, at least). Gotta get a feel for these things, but I kinda dig it? Probably won’t dethrone Parodius as my goofy shooter of choice.

Judgement Silversword: Holy moly how did they do this on the Wonderswan.

Rocket Racing: I will do whatever it takes (besides pay for levels) to get Peter Griffin in Fortnite, and it turns out doing the dailies for Rocket Racing is a lot faster than Battle Royale for getting XP. It’s not a bad racing mode. Some of the music kinda sucks, and I think the tracks that rely heavily on “platforming,” or jumping over obstacles…not my thing. But it’s pretty fun! Maybe way too intense for longer sessions, but now that I’ve made it to Gold Tier 1…I might keep going. This new set of tracks are brutal, though.

UnderMine: Still a really good roguelike! I’m so tired of fighting rats, I should venture into the next area and reap the higher gold yields to power up, but yeah…it’s good.

LOVE 3: I keep trying to play this with the limited lives mode. I could do unlimited, but I may as well make a genuine challenge out of it. Great music in this game, too.

Sonic the Hedgehog: I could finish Super Stars, I could get back to Frontiers, but sometimes…ya just gotta go with what feels familiar…

Trials of Mana (SNES): I didn’t like Secret of Mana but I’m hoping this will be better. Might step away from this now that I’ve done Hawkeye’s opening, just so I don’t get in too deep. Got that Atelier to play, after all.

[Grandpa]

Crawling back into my posting hole to gush a bit about Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and say - goddamn, it really is that good.

I just finished making my way back out of what the game calls The Catacombs, and what I’ll call “The Gurgling Butthole Zone,” since the whole thing looks coated in shit and pustules, has toothy sphincter doors that pucker and shoot little shit balls you, and has a constant gurgling noise going on. It’s nasty! It ain’t what I’d expect from Prince of Persia!

The story so far is kinda whatever. It is fun to run into different NPCs who are all experiencing this cursed city that’s lost in time differently. Guys who showed up two days earlier feeling like they’ve been there for 30 years, guys who’ve been there 30 years insane from perceived millennia. A lot of side quests with grim ends or backstabbing quest givers. Just some real freaks in here.

Mostly though, this thing controls damn near perfectly. A lot of the trap gauntlets are pretty daunting but all incredibly manageable since this thing just turns on a dime. I can’t think of the last time I played one of these sorts of games (search action, Metroidvania, whatever) that felt this good to move around in. There’s been a lot of times where experimenting with the movement techniques I have so far have been a real “wait, will this work” sort of thing and…yeah, sometimes, probably not in the way they were intended to!

It hasn’t benefitted me in a huge way yet, but there’s something very satisfying about abusing the hell out the air dash along with the jump button to scale vertical walls, or climb back up what’s supposed to be a slippery slope. I dunno, I’m bad at explaining it, but everything about the way this game controls feels right.

This has also been maybe the first one of these since maybe Symphony (sorry, probably gotta play Hollow Knight one of these days to update my frame of reference) where abilities and movement techniques you acquire feel more important to getting to new areas than weapon unlocks or whatever. The ability that lets you slap down a shadow, and then teleport to it, has been huge so far, setting up things like teleporting to the top of moving elevators (rather than inside them), getting past traps, or that one disgusting monster that completely fills the halls of the underground sewer area (this is a poison sewer, not to be mistaken for the Gurgling Butthole Zone).

Main knocks, outside of the story, are…hmm. Switch was apparently the lead platform, but some areas definitely bog down a little. And there’s that one side character with a shitty text-to-speech placeholder voice that’s incredibly distracting (how that got through, I have no idea, though I guess they’re going to patch it - thankfully they only have a handful of lines).

I dunno! I’m excited to play the shit out of this one. The area I’m currently in has you dashing and sliding and desperately running past invincible, enchanted enemies, trying to rush to wherever the enchantress is hidden and landing a one hit blow to make everyone vulnerable again. It’s super intense and goddamn I love it. Unless shit goes south from here, I think the effusive critical praise is well deserved.

[Grandpa]

Bear with my terrible playing/Switch shitty capture quality here, but aw yeah this is the shit I eat up.

Edit: video isn’t showin’ in Firefox mobile at least, but maybe I can link it instead?

Edit 2: Keep forgetting to use my…I forget what they’re called. Snapshots? Memories? Whatever it is I have 17 of. It lets you place an exact screenshot on where you’re at on the map, so if there’s a treasure or locked door or some little niche you want to recall and come back to, you can just scroll to the icon on the map and view that screenshot to see it. Very clever addition that I can never remember to use for the life of me.

[anothergod]

Did not expect this much glowing praise for PoP here or otherwise. Neat

[Grandpa]

There are some insanely clever puzzles in one part of the game that involve setting up different platforms by triggering switches in multiple “runs,” using the actions of your previous run to get a little further.

The final one drove me nuts, and had me trying to pull off a split-second teleport into an airdash to try to pass through a gate on a platform before it fully materialized. No dice! The far, far, far simpler solution that came only after ten minutes of beating my head against it was to airdash with my first phase to where I needed to be in my final phase, plant a shadow at that point, and use the first phase to trigger the first switch, using the second shadow to use the platform the first phase set up to trigger another platform, then waiting a second or two with the third phase, teleporting to the shadow from the first phase, and easily hopping to the thing I needed to collect.

Game rules, y’all.

[Grandpa]

Damn, this game ain’t just the Metroid of Vanias, it’s also the

(Not really, but enemies do respawn when you use save points)

This section of the game in particular has been pretty cool, involving breaking yet another series of seals (had to break two to get to this area in the first place) to get to this boss. The left path involved hopping up and down waterfalls of sand, navigating a maze of crystals that kill you if you make contact with them, as giant centipedes worm their way through (you die if you touch them, too). The right path involved some trap pillars that fly out to crush you, and figuring out which to avoid, and which to ride or use as a jumping point to continue through another crystal spike maze. Just a lot of tight timing platforming! Good stuff!!

The game has also pretty liberally cribbed from Symphony by having you occasionally fight doppelgangers (usually solo, but at least in one case two at once). They do this really well by having your doppelganger have the same abilities as you, able to parry and dodge your attacks, and in at least one “oh no no no!” case, throw down a healing field.

Actually wonder if you can really do all the moves the doppelgangers do…probably not, some of their attacks are pretty slick.

[Tulpa]

@Grandpa

The game has also pretty liberally cribbed from Symphony by having you occasionally fight doppelgangers

I don’t think that’s cribbing from symphony

[Grandpa]

I really gotta play the original Prince of Persia one of these days.

Currently attempting an insanely long gauntlet that requires memorizing future trap patterns and setting up teleports well ahead of time. I looked at a video to see what making it to the end nets you - an alternate skin that makes the blue sash around your waist lilac instead.

Pointless. I’ll never use it. But I’m gonna get it, goddamnit.