the top down view and square button for shooting ones are the best metal gears
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I loved the Metal Gear AC!D games for their nonsense CCG mechanics, but I blocked out the stories for how bad they were, and one of 'em had a 3D model viewer using 3D lenses bundled into the instruction manual that was unpleasantly male-gaze-y.
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I feel this so hard, this is exactly how I play Smash games.
River City Girls:
first playthourgh: “this game is kinda cute but it’s jumbled and this one boss is bullshit and it needs a balance pass”
second playthrough: “oh, so if I press this button, bosses just fucking melt? GOOD GAME”
also I’m thinking know that I know the path that it’s probably a 60-90 minute game and I dig that
Team Sonic Racing: this seems okay, I guess. what’s this skim challen-
I LOVE THIS
edit: I should note that RCG is not the fabled bi-annual Good WayForward Game
i really wanted to play river city girls but i cant handle how horny wayforward is. i love river city ransom though. the gamer’s dilemma
RCG is pretty not-horny. p sure the horniest thing in the game is the female yakuza mooks, who, in parity with their male counterparts, are barechested but with bindings on
I think it’s less WF is horny and more Shantae games are horny
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youre a braver man than I notbov
I like the Shantae games as games
the horny is just a bonus
to be honest, the vocal track in Half-Genie Hero was more “I hope no one sees me with this” than any of the seedy stuff in that game (which was pretty much the mermaid thing)
Ryu Ga Gotoku 7 and Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon demo impressions.
Our new guy does very little to make an impression. He creates a mind palace for the RPG fights but thinks he’s going crazy because no one else sees it. Haha???
Yokohama looks like the bad towns of Yakuza 5. It looks like a PS3 game all over actually. Especially coming off the more recent games.
There is not a lot to look at in the city the spaces maybe feel the more real but the famitsu spreads mention multiple brothel areas where men can relax 
.
The one female character is a Bar Mama and makes gravure idol poses all over as her attacks.
The battle system is fine. Twice characters got hung on geometry and then missed their attacks. Then once an enemy ran in place for 10 seconds then teleported to attack me.
I bought a hitachi wand that did less damage but paralyzed any enemy I hit with it which was pretty OP.
There were at least three side quests I could try out. The two I did just reminded me the writing was really good in Zero.
Seeing the new guy make the exact same poses and expressions as Kazuma does not inspire me that this is a new guy.
Also we seem to be back to 60% text 40% voice for cutscenes. The very first cutscene (the demo is from Chapter 4) being text also did not inspire me.
There is a minigame where you go watch a movie (not at the Maiku Hama theater come the fuck on Sega.) you play whackamole with sheepmen. It takes like 5 minutes and I was bored half way in.
Content warning: sex work
The ending cutscene is about getting a job in a brothel and the boss just yells at and complains his girls are lazy. The party members say this job isn’t worth it and then our hero enthusasistic asks for a job.
Seems like this one is going to dive pretty head first into The Sex Industry in Japan is Great and gloss over all the exploitation, unfair working conditions, that it is illegal so any workers problems are without legal recourse. It’s a super fun thing for men and the women are there to please.
Prostitution should absolutely be legal. But the normal exploitation and the real sex slavery that goes on in Japan buzzed through my mind during the whole demo.
I was shocked Judge Eyes came to The West and this seems to double down on that.
Kept thinking about Yakuza 5. There’s a “joke” where a woman got herself into debt and Is forced to work at a blowjob club to pay it off. She complains her mouth is sore haha great joke.
Maybe this was a PS3 games there is a shitty dingy arcade (2020!) with just Fantasy Zone, Outrun, and Virtua Fighter 2. Not even a Sega Arcade. Everything about it feels like they had less of a budget for everything.
Oh yeah the gocart physics suck.
6 Likes
On Isezakicho and sex work (not graphic, just sad): I have only spent about 90 minutes in Kabukicho so maybe I’m completely off base here, but Kabukicho has always felt to me like more of an adult entertainment district with a classier facade hiding its more distasteful bits, whereas Isezakicho feels a lot more “visibly exploitative” and is almost unshamed about presenting itself as what it is. It’s not immediately apparent in the main Isezaki Mall shopping area, but walk to the edge of it and you’ll quickly find yourself on a long strip with nothing but hole-in-the-wall restaurants and brothel/soapland type businesses. There are women in the streets propositioning men in Isezakicho (even off of the strip) and you can feel the desperation in their voice. I feel like the issues are a lot harder to ignore in this particular context, and maybe that somehow will lead them down the right path for approaching the issues in the game.
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Shantae is gross. I miss my copy of RCG i never got to really play it
While i am debating if I should keep playing Act 3 of Dragon quest 11, a full Spanish translation has come out for the Japan-only PS1 cult game, “Mizzurna Falls”. Does anyone know it?
I have already loaded it on my Vita, I can keep you updated with some impressions if you wish 
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it struck me at like 5am this morning after one of the cats woke me up and I was trying to fall back asleep that both Dreams and Wattam’s approach to discarding your little 3D platformer avatar and picking up another one seem to be derived from Cappy
I’m always fascinated by just how many developers still seem to take inspiration from Nintendo when they haven’t really been industry defining for such a long time. It’s almost like how Apple’s design decisions always seem to prefigure wider PC industry trends, good or bad, even when they appear to be way out in left field. And the results are still consistently interesting in this case!
I had not played Rondo yet and was going to question how it was considerably different than other classic Castlevanias, but no, you’re absolutely right.
I’m extremely impressed how they managed to give you nuanced tweaks to the controls and expansions of the movement while still keeping the rigid/high commitment feel of the earlier games. The skill cap feels really high! This game is very good!
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PSA you can hit forward when Richter’s whip is fully extended to get an extra link’s worth of distance on it
I thought this was obvious but my friend did not know this. It’s really cool.
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That mechanic in Wattam reminded me of Everything. And, of course, the Oddworld games before that. I wonder what game first let you jump between characters in that way.
The earliest examples I can think of are not quite the same thing (games that let you switch between a handful of protagonists as you progress).
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Paradroid?
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Abobo is a boss in River City Girls
Abobo will let himself be hit by a full attack string once or twice during the fight, after which he will block and counter after a random hit but 99% of the time happens after the third hit
the only thing that can defeat jank is jank
deploy counterjank measures
pretty sure there were 4 or 5 credited testers
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