i beat smt strange journey. i thought the writing was v uneven tho, esp in the first half. i don’t enjoy being talked at by the boring computer. i’m also a little disappointed how little time you actually spend in antarctic caves. i think i wld have wanted a more lowkey horror experience at least for a couple sectors, till you get deeper.
i had a good time tho. i like this pig a lot (it’s an early-midgame area spoiler ig).
I think Simon’s Quest had to be the more popular game at the time cuz it was released when the Nintendo’s* popularity was beginning to peak. It was also on the cover of the second issue of Nintendo Power which was probably the most powerful form of marketing a third party game could get back then. I can’t recall any of them having sustained TV ad campaigns. I guess there were ads in comics but I didn’t know many other kids who read comics back then. You look at list of Nintendo Power covers from the NES era and it’s a good chunk of the old “Western NES canon” or whatever. All the shit these dorks spent decades going gaga for. And Metal Storm. For some reason seemingly no one bought Metal Storm. Maybe that’s Irem’s fault.
*We are pretending it is still the 20th century, when everyone called it “Nintendo”. Why would anyone outside of an advertisement call it an NES or, even worse, “Ness”?? There was only one Nintendo…!!
Yeah as good as Castlevania was there was probably considerable hype for a sequel.
Today in Deus Ex I found a way to vent poison gas into the lower floor where most of the enemy guards were. I hurried away from the gas via the air ducts and went to see the horror I wrought… and the gas despite clipping through several walls and floors was dropping into a single area in a larger room, killing a single enemy soldier while the rest sit around like nothing is wrong. I got their attention and had them chase after me via walking through the poison gas cloud, which also didn’t kill them. I went back to the place that gave me the option to vent poison gas and made the guards chase me through it again, after four or so of these cat and mouse games they finally walked through the gas enough times to drop dead. It turns out afterwards that they weren’t guarding anything important and they could have lived, but they were dumb enough to keep sitting around in a room with a poison gas leak so they likely had it coming. One of the greatest games ever made apparently!
you have a gift
I don’t know what you’re talking about, that sounds like greatest game of all time material to me
I had a moment of weakness during quarantine and ordered the original PS2 version of Kingdom Hearts which I have never played before. I am 1h45m into the game, just got to Traverse Town, and initial impressions are that the platforming and the camera are so wack. I have a feeling it’ll get better once I unlock magic…?
Oh, you might think that, but that would not be a great thing to think. The camera and platforming never get better.
played The Mysterious Murasame Castle for the first time today after catching a bit of it on a GCCX (unoffical) Twitch stream yesterday. i like it! it’s pretty challenging and actiony, which feels very un-Nintendo, and it makes me wonder why they never really did more with it. cool artifact, feels like a part of history i didn’t get to experience in my childhood.
i imagine they never released it in the West because of how Japanese it is, but honestly, i think kids would have dug it?
bedat all the individual story modes for soul calibur 6. zalsalamel’s is just cutscenes. Cassandra is really fun? anbd super different from Sophitia for once??? weird
Started playing Zelda 2 solely cuz I wanna adventure as the only Link who canonically lays pipe
I started playing Return of the Obra Dinn and its giving me such joy to recognize the creative heights somebody is able to reach when their art gets love and attention like Papers Please did for Lucas Pope. Everything about this game’s music, visual presentation and design of its structure feels so fully realized. I love the music, the way you’re hard-cut thrown into these violent and beautifully posed still-life images, the production of the VA and accompanying audio. I’m just wowed. It reminds me of watching Berry Jenkins’ earliest movie, Medicine for Melancholy, and seeing how much of that production budget was offset by sponsoring businesses and artists in his local area at the time. Then after his success with Moonlight, when If Beale Street Could Talk released, he gets to do amazing crane shots over Puerto Rico with Regin King acting in lead… Just makes me so happy to see people get these opportunities.
And has anyone played a game called Betrayer? I feel like Return of the Obra Dinn is really similar to that game in a lot of ways, which would be an interesting source of inspiration since no one seemed to care about Betrayer.
Betrayer is some ex-Monolith folks:
I don’t think it particularly succeeds at what it wants to do, it felt a lot like AAA devs stepping back but unable to challenge a lot of their baked-in-assumptions about what a game needs and should look like.
Yes, I think of it as an admirable failure in some ways. My biggest issue was playing it after they had implemented a patch that introduced a lot of hints and handholdy features that weren’t in the game at first, which felt like a concession against their vision of a truly inscrutable and scary exploration game. But I am curious what triple-A assumptions you think it holds onto?
The help you mentioned, and the combat and upgrade focus really felt like they fought against what the game was really about.
It makes sense from people who made F.E.A.R. and then didn’t rethink how they did the scare parts for F.E.A.R. 2, though.
I see what you mean. My favorite memory of playing betrayer supports your point. The game never peaked above the emotional high point when I first encountered one of those fast moving fire enemies with inadequate gear at the start of the second area, because after that I just learned to get a better bow and every upgrade I could.
I’ve basically been playing through a season a night in Stardew Valley. I finally have a chicken coop. No chickens yet, though. Soon.
Bravely Default II demo version is pretty tough.
I currently have four white mage monks. Bare knuckle brawler doubles my attack power, while angel’s grace raises my defense when I have negative BP, so my current strategy is just go spam 16 normal attacks at the beginning of the round and hope it kills everything. Upon doing this, white mage’s special ability gives me MP back per damage (for casting heal/protect), while monk’s special ability boosts my crit chance per brave.
This strategy worked really well in the original BD as well, until I quit playing in boredom. Seemed obvious to me that if they introduce this battle mechanic, then they need to be a boss-only JRPG or carry over the payback for braving to future battles somehow. I guess the game was popular anyway so they learned nothing.
