Imagining a knockoff Samus with an Allan key instead of a cannon
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there’s a morph ball puzzle with a uterus
i dunno if that answers your question
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oh i was absolutely just gonna change rudie’s title but then i fell asleep. this is probably nicer
a comparison to Jak 2 might be apt. everyone who’s played Jak 3 calls the desert vehicle sim the highlight of the game, but Jak 2’s city is a tedious, drab pace breaker wedged between all the real levels (it at least provides logical context for some: the pumping station, the stadium, the sewers)
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Yeah Jak 2’s City owns. It sucks so bad.
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I tried Vitality for like the 4th time tonight. I am deep into the 2nd or 3rd area. Trying to push forward and retreat to save is a death trap. While the tile-mapping is Incredible I am so lost and feel like I missed every “obvious” path.
I think a lot about how the creator insisted their girlfriend completed the game to prove it was possible for normals and think about the passive backseating that had to happen.
Every time the game went “yeah not right now” to an obvious path I got more and more defeated. I don’t got no upgrades!
Maybe it is time to admit defeat and stop trying to play this.
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Yeah. As I’ve seen more people play Vitality over the years, my opinion on it as something to easily recommend has gone down.
While it technically plays fine in terms of platforming and combat (though it’s teetering on an edge there), the “real game” is deciphering the overdone tilework in these massive rooms, and that part is definitely sicko-level. And if you aren’t finding energy tanks then the game balance itself quickly tanks.
kinda curious how this forum would react to kaleidoscope in comparison
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I had not found a single energy tank. I want to look up where they are but also once I look something up the game is definitely Over.
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coming back to this, i think the bigger factor in why fusion seems more tactile is that when you grab a ledge the graphics show samus hanging by both arms before either pulling herself up or climbing with one foot when you hold the direction away, while in zero mission she has a static hanging pose where you only change the direction of her arm cannon (fusion uses this behaviour for ladders).
also, i love that she always leans to the right because obviously she can’t pull herself up with her gun arm
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I am now playing X-Fusion. It sure loves to try and kill you instantly a lot. I am leaning that this was made with Save States in mind. Maybe this is the game to get me to try the Mister SNES Save States beta.
I’m with you the writing could be a little more. But I’ve been playing a lot of different romhacks lately and just wanting the writing to be more.
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Version 1.3 of X-Fusion should be released pretty soon (the author just dropped a release candidate). The changelog is rather extensive, but I’m not sure how much of it helps with the early portions of the game.
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Think I am going to try and pry myself away from X-Fusion it has too many kaizo “try again” moments. I’ve played it almost every night because Metroid Romhack is a comfortable “My Own Music” game, but just feel so beaten down each time. I grabbed the ips’s of a few other hacks and mean to play Kalediscope with the sound on.
X-Fusion at least taught me I like when Metroid has a bit of power-fantasy, and this game shuts you down as soon as you get another ability.
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1.3 is out, but i haven’t played it enough to vouch for it’s difficulty
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I’m still thinking about Prime 4, and is big portion of my conspiracy-corkboard that they Stole My Bit includes “bizarre mormon semiotics”
feeling like i’m going insane
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It’s ok, like 3% of my brain is locked in an insane death spiral thinking about how someone on that team definitely consciously tried to recreate the Xena/Joxer dynamic from Xena: Warrior Princess in Prime 4. There’s something about that game that inspires infinitesimally small but long-lasting mental illness, imo.
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Most of my accusations of them Stealing My Bit are just me having fun pointing out common tropes that could be entirely coincidental. My game Samantha Arantes 4 - Awful Dates Done Quick and Prime 4 both have intro segments foreshadowing the final encounter, protagonists getting isekai’d to another world where they’re saddled with some dork, moments where you restore some derelict infrastructure, quests to get a Big Gun in order to fight the final boss that’s atop a tower, and tearful partings as the protagonists leave behind the friends they’ve made along the way. I don’t earnestly think there’s any real connection here, but it’s enough for me to make a clickbaity youtube video if I was into that form of self-abnegation.
Now, as for the mormon subtext in Prime 4, it feels to me like it was probably an intentional part of the intial draft for the whole Lamorn plot, but it also feels like nobody else on the team was on the same page there. (I can only guess who was responsible and what they were thinking.)
When Samus arrives on Viewros she’s given a magical seeing stone that allows her to understand their language, and she is commissioned by the long-departed last member of this ancient civilization to bring forth a record of their society (in the form of the Memory Fruit). I’m willing to accept that this could be a case of monkeys on typewriters cranking out Lost Civilization narratives, but as is it feels like an incredibly on-the-nose allegory for the Book of Mormon.
The history of the Lamorn themselves doesn’t have any major parallels, other than them going extinct after a utopian age because they’re idiots (many such cases).
What really pushes me over the edge is how they handled the Gal Fed sniper Reger Tokabi, who’s clearly intended to be a space-age Native American of some sort (he shows you his arrowhead necklace and explains its religious significance to him, just in case you miss The Point). I can’t speak for how well he works as indigenous representation (seems kinda awkward tbh), but personally I’m fond of him. Human characters who are devoutly and conscientiously religious are rather uncommon in popular sci-fi.
At the very end of the game, Tokabi tosses Samus his necklace right before she teleports out of the place. After she plants the memory fruit she hangs the necklace on the new tree, which feels like the game is drawing a direct thematic equivalence to the Lamorn and Tokabi’s ancestral religion (though the arrowhead is also clearly meant to stand in for Samus’s memories of the blorbos as a group), and at this point the subtext here feels so on the nose that my nose has been caved in to the other side of my cranium.
(i’m not crazy — the game is crazy)
anyhow, this all is to say why i feel how they handled the grievers is insanely problematic
also this adds an additional layer of hilarity to the fact that nearly everything in this game looks like female gentalia
truly, this is Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Belief
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replaying the 1st Prime for the 1st time since i was like 16. i am enjoying it a lot but there’s no way in hell i will ever care about phazon as much as this game wants me to. i enjoy scanning plants and animals and the puzzles involving scanning are neat, but like the lore scans are either fake science jargon (why are the guys called space pirates also amoral scientists?? i guess it tracks with them having a Mother Brain (the mechanical life vein)) or precursor race nature worship mumbojumbo and either way the takeaway always seems to be “whoaaa we irradiated ourselves lolol”. if i were Samus i’d be rolling my eyes at every other logbook note. also it must be awkward for her the first time she scans a Chozo thing and it calls her out by name and refers to her as “the Hatchling”
i also replayed Fusion the other day and also had a very good time but the Adam stuff completely enraged me, like way way worse than i remembered (Samus somehow fails the Bechdel test literally by herself it sucks). so at least Prime’s story stuff isn’t that bad. it was the first time i remembered to stop and do the shinespark puzzle rooms right before the endgame, which i still think is a weird unsatisfying way to place them but they were some damn fine shinespark puzzles
Does anyone else have to stop and make sure they didn’t write “spineshark” every single time
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