Lol the payday devs will never not be stuck with a fucked up publisher no matter how hard they try
6 Likes
6 Likes
I like the look of this one
7 Likes
i am always up for some ball-based gaming
5 Likes
That ball mode looks a lot like a protogen
(this is a protogen)
Honestly the non ball mode has protogen like traits but the ball mode really looks like one.
5 Likes
Gameplay is stored in the balls, after all
2 Likes
They did a profile on Emily Short:
They didn’t talk about her major contributions to Inform 7 in any detail, which, fine, interactive fiction is pretty niche and the creation of the Versu platform might seem more impressive to the layperson. But it is wild to me that they’d mention games she wrote but wouldn’t include Counterfeit Monkey, arguably her best (and best-loved) game by a recognizable margin. It might have been deliberate, though? Let people curious about her work have a treasure to discover on their own, at the risk of possibly overlooking one of the most amazing wordplay games of all time?
10 Likes
Counterfeit Monkey beat me for the Best Puzzles award at the 2012 XYZZY awards! The fact that I was even running against it (and a game from Andrew Plotkin, who made a game I loved as a kid) sure confused the hell out of me (my game was very mediocre in my opinion but for some reason people liked it)
7 Likes
How do you think Galatea compares? I feel like I think about that game once a quarter.
Galatea is terrifying in the “Tony Stark made this in a cave” sense. It is astonishing. It feels as much like a museum piece as its subject matter, though: the artist is showing off to demonstrate what’s possible, but until somebody discovers a need for this level of fidelity of characterization, who is going to go to these lengths? A lot of Emily’s earliest games were attacks of the long-standing “problems” in interactive fiction, like simulation of liquids or powders or rope, or (in this case) realistic NPCs. It’s still fascinating, but Galatea herself doesn’t quite have enough of an internal arc for me to remain fascinated with the game.
Counterfeit Monkey goes further and does more. It doesn’t quite contain the singular depth of Galatea, so there are people who are still going to prefer the latter; you might well be one of them. CM feels like a complete work, though; it’s more playful. It’s still very much a demonstration of things people might not have considered possible based on what was then the state of the art, but that seemed like the purpose of Galatea, while here it’s just a bonus.
5 Likes
2 Likes
whoa, i just realized from reading this that they must have remastered the super famicom game for PS4… right? that’s the first Star Ocean, and Second Story was the PS1 sequel, right?
the SNES game is wild… voices and stuff, crazy detail
did anyone play the remaster? is it any good?
yeah they remade star ocean on psp/ps4/switch as “first departure”
i hated 3 so much ive never touched any of the others
2 Likes
I played 2 a lot back when. really kept wanting to like it more than it deserved. probably the sprites on top prerendered look was a big reason. also had the crafting thing where the more you used the skill the more it went up
1 Like
I posted about it a while back
Star Ocean 2 is very much the same (even uses the same engine as SO1R) but bigger
1 Like
Steam got some big update and now you can do cutting edge shit like open pages in new tabs
7 Likes
It honestly feels a lot more responsive than it used to. So far I am a fan. It also has a note taking feature in the overlay.
2 Likes
Yeah… has anyone poked around to see if it’s a Qt app now instead of some custom WebKit wrapper like it used to be? It feels a lot more responsive on my jank ass 10-year old office PC, and I can’t imagine they moved to Electron if that’s the case
1 Like
I played for 20 hours and didn’t like it. The battle system just feels messy, you’re either just button mash stunlocking enemies into submission with no trouble, or you get massacred in seconds by wolves that are programmed to flank and thus you get stunlocked instead.
The skill system seems interesting at first, but it relies way too much on RNG and feels like you gain very little from it, while also feels like if you don’t focus on the right skills then you’ll be hamstrung later on.
Like there’s a skill for writing books about other skills that a character has maxed out, so that other characters can read them and learn the skill. That sounds kind of cool, but in practice, the skill has a high chance to fail (so the book doesn’t get created), the quills you use to write them are consumable, and the end result is the other character gets like a couple points toward that skill. Every other skill is the same, and is worse when you consider that you need to craft most of your weapons this way unless you want to be using mostly starter equipment for the whole game.
I think I heard they rebalanced the game for this version to make it harder, so I assume the original super famicom game is much better
The preorders for the Sharp 68000Z are up on amazon. Including a bespoke one with a 4:3 screen for 800 dollars.
I think they confirmed this is running on the same chip as the PS1 Mini so lol for full speed.
The 68000 Core on the Mister works pretty good once it is working and probably more accurate than this and…well let’s be honest about the same price now.
5 Likes