Oh hey this did rule.
BOTW has some really wonderful hidden places and moments but its not any of the main line elements or planned activities.
I got Deception 4 for PS3 and its an absolute gas!
Its exploitative, Its pulp, it has clear fetishes, its aware of all that and it is fully in love with itself. The gothy cartoon sadism is just endlessly delightful to me.
Its not hard so far but it offers the things I love.
Unfettered player choices creating level design out of intentional opportunity spaces.
Fully optional but rewarding extra challenges available during normal play.
Interactive physical systems.
Opportunity for creativity.
A sense of humor about itself.
Commitment to an aesthetic.
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probably gonna play through 4 on the PSTV, hopefully it’s not too downgraded
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Warning, long post about Mega Drive games below
I started a little exercise where I’m playing the Japanese Mega Drive library in a somewhat chronological fashion. I mean, I don’t intend on playing through every game nor am I playing them all sequentially, but I’ve given each like a five minute shake of the hand.
I’ve mostly gotten my fill of 1989 and I’m really taken with how different the overall aesthetic is from the post-Sonic years. It’s all about blood, bullets, and bio-mechanical monsters. That element never went away but at this point, it’s not really contrasted by cute, wholesome titles. I’m realizing that there was a definite point in the Mega Drive lifespan where more big-name developers became interested in it. In the early years, companies like Toaplan, Technosoft, Compile, and NCS created the most notable third-party titles. I noticed in credits that these companies often worked together on some titles. I like to imagine that they were buddies and having a good time, but I’m pretty sure game development is hell. Where did these companies go? I guess Toaplan became Cave, mostly and Compile was sort of absorbed into Sega. hmm…
I’ve sunk the most time into Herzog Zwei, Super Hang-On, Mystic Defender, and Phantasy Star II. Before I go into detail, I just want to say that Rieko Kodama is very cool.
For some reason, I also took this moment to try to immerse myself in a JRPG in Japanese, equipped with only my meager understanding of the grammatical structure and Hiragana. I’m making flashcards in Memrise and giving myself little tasks like “learn how to save” and “buy a weapon for Nei.” Maybe the grind of learning specific vocabulary will triumph over the grind of the game’s dungeons. We’ll see!
Mystic Defender is kind of awesome and I’m mad that I overlooked it when I played through the Shinobi games years ago. The art is so grotesque and detailed. It is peak Mega Drive aesthetic. Your magic powers have these minute tactical differences that feel good to experiment with. I actually didn’t mind starting over since the game is so short. I love when games feel like music albums.
Herzog Zwei is really impressive and I wish I had a human friend who was willing to learn how to git gud. Instead I have a robot enemy whose brain is full of holes. At first, I struggled to finish a match in under an hour, but now I can beat the computer in twenty minutes. I think this is a better proto-RTS than Populous.
I have spent more time with Super Hang-On than I expected. It is very relaxing to drive well on a course but I hate the filling of smacking into a sign or another cyclist. This might be the best that a sprite-scaler racer can be. The way you can see your cyclist lean and measure the sharpness of curves make it feel almost like a more modern racer. There’s a story mode where you can get new sponsors and rivals and the manual goes into great detail on all of them.
It’s so good. Someone in these forums once called Outrun melancholic and, let me tell you, I put on “Arabesque” from Lily Chou Chou while playing this and I nearly cried. But I didn’t cry so that’s why it only gets four out of five stars.
13 Likes
dynasty/samurai warriors - you play through the story of the three knigdoms/warring states era
dynasty/samurai warriors empires - you gradually conquer china/japan region-by-region by winning musou battles
dynasty/samurai warriors xtreme legends - it’s been eons since i played one of these, but i think they’re like compilations of weird side stories and different gameplay modes and stuff?
in the modern era, they’ve also made a spin-off samurai warriors game focussing on the story of the sanada family, i think? and dynasty warriors 9 is open world and i have no idea how that works, but i guess i’ll find out when i get through my current backlog, since disc copies are cheap
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in case you don’t know, it’s the sequel to a master system game called spellcaster, which is pretty similar. also they’re both based on an anime called kujaku-oh/spirit warrior
also if you have a 3ds, you should definitely get 3d ages super hang on, it’s so good
4 Likes
Sega Ages are such good releases. I just got the Phantasy Star release for the Switch and I’m having a breezy fun time.
I saw Spellcaster also had Kodama working on it as well as Naoto Ohshima(!) so I’m definitely going to try that out soon.
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I never played the Empires/XL games much but I think the most simple way to explain them is:
- Vanilla Dynasty Warriors gives you the romance of the three kingdoms re-telling story mode for each faction
- Empires games will take the characters and mechanics of a DW game and make a strategy game out of it, with empire management and territory building. Still has musou battles, but they’re an element of the overall strategy game.
- Xtreme Legends is about creating your own character and leveling them up through some sort of campaign.
Each of these thirds of any particular Dynasty Warriors release contains its own specific content and campaigns unique from the others, so it’s not like they’re building on each other like expansions or anything. You can just play the type of game you’d like or play them all.
As far as where to start with a musou, the franchise has so many different flavors it’s hard to point to a particular one. But if you want a “normal” musou game with a story mode, try vanilla DW7 or 8. DW9 is an open world game and wasn’t well received on release; I’m not sure if it’s improved since then. You can also try vanilla Samurai Warriors 4 (SW4-II doesn’t have a big DW-style story mode like vanilla, with instead a few smaller scope story modes for a few characters). eat_it_vid_boi says the Warriors Orochis are fun. I like the One Piece Pirate Warriors games. I’ve also enjoyed Zelda Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors, and Fist of the North Ken’s Rage (only the first one). The Dynasty Warriors Gundam games were alright, though some people really loved them.
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DW9 is a huge disaster that doesn’t understand why combat in musou games is fun but I’ve posted in here about how much I love it before.
Xtreme Legends is always an expansion pack and is usually just an updated version of the game with more content in recent times. I always wait for these or the equivalent version of Warriors Orochi to come out before playing a new one. there used to be weird disc swapping involved with these so keep that in mind if it’s a ps2 or ps3 game especially.
the most recent warriors games are Orochi 4 Ultimate, Dynasty Warriors 9 Complete, the yukimura sanada focused Samurai Warriors, and I think a new one piece game just came out. At least half of them are good too!
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Do the recent XLs really have the vanila DW story modes? I have 7XL and I remember feeling like I was missing content still.
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Yes. 7XL requires you to the original game disc to play story mode. 8XL Complete on PS4 just lets you play it. They usually don’t restrict access to the original game’s content, in most of the PS2 ones having an original disc just gets you bonuses or unlocks stuff early.
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is the ultimate upgrade worth it for WO4? $40 is kinda steep
I never played the original, Koei’s ridiculous dlc stuff is why I always wait
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There’s a Sega Ages Switch release of this coming this year, so hopefully you’ll at least be able to play online with real humans in the near future. I’ve never played it before so I’m looking forward to gitting gud myself
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I did not know this
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Been playing SNK Anniversary Collection (and Katamari) and thinking about how much I appreciate a certain shamelessness some games have about wasting your time.
Especially in early arcade games, that sort of joyful carnival era hucksterism is something I really miss from modern games.
People draw parallels between that and stuff like In-App-Purchases, and, to be fair, It’s not hard to argue that Ed Boon is an example of someone keeping the ‘Midway spirit’ alive with Mortal Kombat’s endless iterations on the idea.
But that stuff feels so mediated, both in form and reward by all the mechanisms implemented to trick our brains into falling for it. The way those older games shout at you in a very direct way, or have this sort of “Come on, just do it to see what this thing can do!”-element built into the game itself feels much more human to me
Rather than a 0.13% chance of what you most desire out of THE MYSTERY BOX
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So I failed again to beat the one last mainline bonus puzzle in Baba is You yet again today (it is called Floatiest Platforms if anyone played that far and is curious) and I beat the first four or so puzzles in the extra section while trying to jog my mind for more options because I’m sick in the head like that.
But I don’t want to talk about that anymore, I wanted to say that I did start up Deus Ex and made it through the first mission that apparently scares a bunch of new players off the game without too much struggle (only saving the one captured agent caused me much trouble) so hopefully this means that I won’t bounce off the game again and will get to finally see what the big deal about it is.
…I hope I get my pistol back from the guy I lent it to 
I radically changed my party composition around a single character in Warriors Orochi 4 because the game gave me a 14 year old girl wielding a fucking lacrosse stick as a party member
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Playing Half-Life 2 for the first time (I had played the first one over 20 years ago).
It’s incredibly modern, fast paced, IA is cool (better than other similar and more recent games). I like it a lot. Level design is very good for now (I am starting the dune buggy section).
It really feels like it’s just come out.
Graphically, it’s a bit older, but very tolerable, because the graphic designed have cured the environments a lot. Interiors and exteriors are varied.
I liked the horror level a lot (Ravenholm).
It’s really cool to play a game like this, 16 years after it came out, and discover that it feels so modern.
6 Likes
ugh i just found out about this, it looks like i’ll have to do some seriously annoying shit and burn some dvds if i get to this point! i guess the idea is you can play all of the original content in XL if you do the disc swap first? so there’s still a lot of bespoke content in XL? do… do saves carry over or matter at all? or is it exclusively a disc-swap thing. i’m using a ps2 hdd which totally doesn’t support that, i’d have to burn DVDs
anyway CURRENTLY i’m really just looking all the PS2 warriors games, so
dynasty 2-6 & samurai 1-2, plus warriors orochi 1-2 and some sengoku basara stuff that wasn’t translated. i guess there’s capcom’s devil kings as well? that seems like a musou of some sort too