So many other things on my plate and thought I’d need a break but
Immediately jumping into La Mulana 2 teeth grit against help, has enormous maso-appeal.
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that’s an odd dialect for “distilled perfection”
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I played through the undead burg in Dark Souls Remastered up to the taurus demon, who wiped the floor with me 3 times. It is one of my favorite 30 minutes in video games, it’s so wonderful. The undead burg and then getting my ass handed to me by surprise skeletons was what sustained 40 hours of Dark Souls to me. No other moments really got me quite like those two.
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I mean, one of those people is me. Now I need to figure out which of your other follows I need to adopt.
For me, it works out that my partner and I went through both quests of NES Zelda and she was looking for more Zelda (not big into video games) so I dug out my GameCube to give this a shot (Wind Waker didn’t turn out as well).
I do think seeing the Switch remake hype and release made me want to revisit the game. But it really made me hungry for the original game rather than playing its new iteration. So, actually, yes, your read is probably right.
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Yes I guess I really mean nobody has gotten into my ear about a Man being entitled to the sweat of his brow, etc. etc.
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I’m finally nearing the end of Tales of Vesperia, which I started half a year ago. It is kinda amazing to me how this game tries so hard to build narrative momentum and then completely fucks with it by making the player do what feels like irrelevant busywork. Was supposed to go save someone as if it were the most urgent thing in the world and every second counted only to be tasked with a borderline-nonsense task to re-explore a big castle from the beginning of the game to touch 4 angel statues in a particular order. That one actually made me laugh.
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I finished Xanadu Next a couple of days ago, but I’ve been waiting until I had time to do a big writeup and screenshot dump.
It’s a really neat game! I’ve never played anything quite like it - a mix of a JRPG and a Diablo-esque dungeon crawler. It’s not very similar to Diablo at all, but it’s the best comparison I can think of.
The most distancing thing from Diablo is the fact that loot, while randomly dropped, is not random loot. Weapons, armor, etc. are all unique, and there’s no grinding for the perfect version of a weapon. Random drops are very, very generous so I think I might have missed 5 weapons in the whole game.
The basic gameplay eventually consists of trying to get behind enemies and stabbing them in the back and/or sides, or at least that is what I personally found most effective. There’s a very neat system of skills and magic though! Skills are learned by using a weapon for a long time - each weapon has a unique skill, and if you get enough proficiency you’ll gain the skill permanently, even if you unequip the weapon. Magic is learned by reading books, many of which can’t be bought.
But both magic and skills are limited in the number of uses in exactly the same way. This ranges between 20 uses for basic skills/spells, all the way down to 7 for powerful skills and spells. Without using items (or a special bracelet), these won’t recharge until you get back to a save point, which will recharge them entirely. It’s estus flask-like. Switching skills in the middle of battle is quite cumbersome and unrealistic, so it’s a pretty hard limitation in the middle of combat.
In the end, I didn’t find that this was tremendously impactful on the game, but I enjoyed it, especially in the midgame.
The other dark-soulsy thing this does is have one giant landscape connected by multiple methods of shortcuts. There are direct paths from within town to deep in the various “dungeons”, shortcuts that open within dungeons, and teleporters. The biggest thing this did for me was force me to make a mental map of the entire area, especially the final dungeon.
And speaking of, the final dungeon might be one of my favorite dungeons ever. It’s this sprawling, multi-level castle with multiple internal shortcuts. There IS a quick map in this game, but this dungeon renders it mostly useless because it’s one of the only ones with multi-level rooms - the map is flat, so these are rendered all on one layer, making it practically pointless halfway through exploring the castle. This last area is probably 20% of the game as a whole. It’s confusing, but not so much as to be totally frustrating, and shortcuts are regularly opened up. If I had quit the game for more than 3 or 4 days though, I would have been totally lost.
Another neat system in this game is the Guardian system. There are 12 guardians, which are basically off-brand tarot cards, that you can find in the levels. Each of these has its own level to be raised, and its own special effect. You can only switch these in town, so it becomes a matter of deciding which guardian you want to level vs. what effect you want.
In practice it’s less exciting, or at least was for me. At the end of the day, I used it mostly to speed up grinding, and this system was really good for that. I ended up spending most of my time using the one that gave more XP per kill, but there’s also one that increases proficiency gains on weapons (by an incredible amount), so I would pull that out every time I got a new weapon and spend 10 minutes getting to 100% proficiency. There’s also a guardian that reduces the cost of items in town by 2% per level, and another that increases item drops though in practice I never used that one.
I missed 3 of the guardians. One of them, as @Tulpa told me, makes it so that each level up is 50% more valuable in terms of stat points gained, which is fucking wild. It makes the “Level Down” option in the church make sense though. In practice, the game was easy enough that I never felt underpowered enough to want to exploit mechanics in that way anyway.
The hardest section were the bosses, primarily because these were all Donkey Kong 64-style pattern memorization bosses. Except for the very last boss which is basically a bullet hell, that one is fucking wild. The hardest boss, by far, was about halfway through the game. This big fire fucker who raised and lowered lava and shot these tracking balls and, yeah, it sucked. But other than that I actually enjoyed most of the bosses.
All in all, it’s one of my favorite gaming experiences recently. It’s a very pleasant game, but it goes some weird places occasionally. The last boss is pleasingly bizarre and the ending cut scene is like 10 minutes of exposition, it’s a lot. I’d say I spent about 12-15 hours playing it, so it’s not short but it’s not long either. I only had to consult a guide once, though I did rank very badly at the end.
So yeah. It’s a good game! I might try some more Falcom stuff later, I’m actually feeling a little lost without this game.
Anyway, here are the rest of the good screenshots I took that didn’t really fit in the above:
(i dubbed the above N-Gage Mode, it’s just running the game with a ridiculously low frame buffer. like, 128x128 or something)
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this writeup rules
hugely underrated game
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So I’ve probably said this here before, but I am incredibly stubborn when it comes to video games. If I find a game potentially interesting enough to pick up then I will almost always see it through to the end. It also explains some of my gaming… misadventures where I will be doing something wrong and will continue doing it wrong for absurd stretches of time as I am still grinding out progress.
Tomb Raider II has bested me, and pushed beyond even my ability to rationalize reasons to continue. For the last stage I played (the fourth one) I figured that since the combat is awful and I only really care about the level design I used the code that gave me every weapon in the game with max ammo and fifty of each healing item as my own “easy mode”. The good news is that this trivialized combat to being the minor annoyance it probably should have been. The bad news is that it lays bare how every stage I’ve seen is just a poorly designed slog that takes ages to get through.
The last few stages have felt labyrinthine in that you can go to a few different areas in whatever order you want, but also because the game is just plain bad at signaling which is of interest or what is even available. This game introduced flares as an item, and what this means is that large stretches of each stage is too dark to see shit in. I literally had a passage open up next to me after I used a key that I didn’t see because that area of the wall was just that poorly lit.
It has taken my about two hours to beat each of the last few stages. I looked it up and there are fourteen stages left and I just… can’t. I checked my backloggery page to see the last time I started a game, played it beyond an initial “okay, I’m not gonna drop this immediately” stage and then quit it and I think this is the first time I’ve done it since 2015. That’s my review for Tomb Raider II: The most soul crushing gaming grind I’ve come across in at least five years.
Anyways per my own rules the next game up is the newer Tomb Raider II, Rise of the Tomb Raider. The point of this was to see what has changed and what has stayed the same and I can’t believe I’m saying this but I hope it changed just about everything.
…Also I’m still playing through Baba is You and I think it may just be downright brilliant.
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a friend and I def. spent most of a sleepover night trying diligently to execute an esoteric series of precise maneuvers in the swimming pool area of the Tomb Raider 2 for Playstation demo that supposedly would cause Lara Croft’s clothing to disappear
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i lost ot this fucking spider in bloodborne like 20 times so i’ve given up and started a new game of fire promoter.
last year, it took 5 years to get to #1 on easy mode, so now i’m playing normal mode~
only a year in and i’m already turning a profit every month. either this isn’t a very realistic depiction of running a wrestling promotion, or i’m much smarter than like 95% of real life wrestling promoters
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i feel like basically 95% of wrestling promotions have been run like shitty criminal fiefdoms so this checks out
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thank you for this post, xanadu has been on my list for ages and i think now is the time
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It was also a great Discord streaming game, I probably played 50% of it with @stavekoff on the line
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Finished Fallout and went right over to 2 (sorry, huge backlog of games I’ve bought in the past year).
It’s reputation as a rushed, unfinished game might be deserved (hello, Sulik!) but there’s still so much to love. Replaying it made me remember a much more psychopathic play-through I did over a decade ago in which I pretty much killed everybody, children included.
Why would I do that?
What kind of a monster was I 
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The only time I’ve ever killed children in Fallout 2 is in The Den (iirc?) where you have to deal with the kids constantly pickpocketing you. What I ended up doing was emptying my pockets, arming a brick of C4 with a long timer, walking past them, and then watching them fucking explode before they could try and sell it to a shopkeeper. Incredibly normal response.
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Fallout 2 is way too “game written by young men in the '90s who think they’re clever” for me and it laid the groundwork for the inescapably awful referential humor in later games but at least the power armor is fucking cool.
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Glad I’m not the only fallout 2 disliker
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that’s precisely what I don’t like about it. It went way too gonzo
There were good things in Fallout 2 but it is way more of a mixed bag. It’s still way better than any of the 3d games besides NV
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I’ve kind of hardened on New Vegas in recent years because as much as I enjoyed it when I did my playthrough and Did Everything it’s still a Bethesda game at its core and it really fucking brings down what is otherwise a well-written, great RPG. There’s way too much shooting and it all feels like shit.
I guess that’s partially on me because I have the brain of a 30 year old lesbian now and hate playing anything that isn’t a JRPG which wasn’t the case 10 years ago.
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