come on now
7 Likes
Mainly that Martial Masters is obviously trying to be SFIII (hm okay mixed with Last Blade–not to mention bits swiped from Garou and MvC) and Knights of Valour is clearly Tenshi wo Kurau.
I might have somewhat foolishly kept the collection for Master Huang and Drunk Master in Martial Masters, they’re pretty fun, and the backgrounds are nice, but the flashing and flickering FX weren’t the type of thing my eyeballs seem to like putting up with for long these days.
(That isn’t helped by the games running at 30 fps instead of 60; not sure they’re all 60 in the arcade but Martial Masters was, to judge from videos on YouTube anyway. So that was pretty disappointing–and surprising, really; off the top of my head I can’t think of other arcade collections I’ve played that actually cut the framerate in half–not any recent-ish PC ones, anyway.)
1 Like
whoa, let’s not say things we can’t take back now
KoV, The Gladiator and the not-on-this-collection Oriental Legend 2 are video games made by madmen that ask you to set up increasingly dank juggles to maximize XP gain, know ROT3K and Journey to the West lore to use items at the right time and recreate situations and also IGS kept making them/is still making them so they’ve only gotten more insane as they sit in the corner masturbating to their own design ideas
also, and I cannot stress this enough: The Gladiator has the girl with the swag walk
anyway, now that you gave ISG a few bucks, you should exercise your legal license to these games in perpetuity and illegally download their roms and play them in Mame or you should find the one Chinese service where people play KoV online nonstop and there’s hundreds of lobbies
7 Likes
It’s crazy to me that, from the sounds of things, that IGS Collection came out worse on Steam years after the Switch version, which wasn’t great!
The games are cool but the emulation and just general package are pretty piss poor. After some badgering they added a 4:3 mode to the Switch version, but the kinda nasty filtering and input lag remained.
I’d hoped better for this release and I guess they bungled it all over again 
3 Likes
It doesn’t feel particularly input laggy, I suppose. Probably isn’t great, but it’s at least not horrible in THAT regard.
1 Like
To be fair, I haven’t touched the PC version…maybe they did fix it a bit! It was pretty rough and palpable on the Switch though. Not like, Metal Slug Collection on PS2 bad, but not great.
I’m all in on the “games really don’t need to cost a fortune and imperil studios” train, but I gotta admit - I fired up MGS Ground Zeroes on PC the other night, and apart from some slightly rubbery skin textures here and there, that game still looks really damn good 11 (I guess 12, for GZ) years later.
I haven’t touched that game in as many years so I fucked up real bad right from the jump and got spotted and killed pretty quickly.
I can’t wait for videos to hit of MGS4 running on the Switch 1…it struggled a bit with 2 and 3, I can’t imagine how it’ll go on there…
2 Likes
I sometimes feel old because I still think xbox 360 games look great. Like I can’t believe they have rereleased gears of war 1 twice.
8 Likes
my cut-off point for “games that look modern” is the level of fidelity in hitman 2: silent assassin (2002)
forgot what thread this was; i did not play this game today
i should get back to hitman: contracts
12 Likes
I come to you hate in hand to say, Screamer is really really good. The digital foundry video didn’t sell me on it. It all kind of looks like anime-gacha m-lite without the fan service. The generous demo changed all that. The right stick lets you drift and after about 20 minutes of story you are let loose on 3 courses to try and master it. I am garbage at it but the kinects on this dang game, WOW.
Edit: you know I meant “hat” but being me on this forum? “Hate” works.
10 Likes
Finished disc 2 of D2, for the Dreamcast
8 Likes
how are you finding it so far?
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It’s very xenofeminist/transhumanist compatible. It feels like an upscaled Phillips CD-I game, but it’s perfectly playable and I like media with ideas regardless of production value. I’m looking forward to finishing it.
9 Likes
started playing Esoteric Ebb
it’s fun, i like how you can tell it took a lot of ideas from Disco Elysium while very much its own setting and idea, like it’s clearly someone who played DE and thought it was a great game rather than someone trying to ride the coattails of DE. I’m f inding the fantasy worldbuilding and setting really interesting so far, and the devblogs about the development of the character traits (“Chimes”)'s personalities are interesting… it is trying to do a lot of interesting things with the actual mechanics of CRPGs, on top of which is this very fleshed out TTRPG DnD setting, and a political angle which is sort of a loving parody of DE imo.
i am not very far, i’m mostly just punching my way through various obstacles that i’m supposed to be ignoring for now and completely thumbing my nose at the game world.
devblogs:
ability scores
thought cabinet / quest tree
writing
dialogue design
… etc, there are a couple more, these are the ones i thought were interesting.
quotes
The CLERIC’s ability scores are (currently) defined as this:
- Strength is the search for meaning, religion, and masculinity.
- Dexterity is avoiding consequences, self-interest, and freedom.
- Constitution is your gut feeling, bodily truth, and stubbornness.
- Intelligence is the search for power, ego, and memorization.
- Wisdom is your esoteric understanding, empathy, and femininity.
- Charisma is social manipulation, force of personality, and the desperate need for love.
Beyond these general themes, I’m also trying to build each ability score into a real character. Each of which is of course a partial truth of the Cleric’s own sense of self. It’s an interesting way of writing interactive dialogs.
In Esoteric Ebb I’m trying to make the Cleric a protagonist that is conflicted in six different directions at once. The ability scores you choose to be higher at the start of the game are simply the dominant voices - but each dialog option is something the Cleric could do or say, if things were only slightly different. Each ability score should give both a unique narrative tone and a different mechanical experience. Here’s a few examples I’m trying to hit:
- High DEX will let you steal important quest items.
- Low INT will let you debate confidently on topics you have no clue about.
- High CHA will let you say completely out-of-character things just to ‘win’ an argument.
- High WIS will let you attune to more magic items.
- Low STR will let you say the most insecure shit.
- High CON will spoil every secret in the game for you in a way you won’t understand. (Like a slightly less wacky Malkavian.)
i think this is really interesting and look forward to seeing more of it in the game. i find it sort of fuzzifies what in DE was a very clear political alignment question – less ideological-politics in EE, more libidinal-politics. “what void in your soul are you trying to fill with your political beliefs?” (I guess DE also dealt with the topic in these terms, but much more explicitly so – with the whole ex-wife and recovering alcoholic thing. it’s made extremely clear in DE from jump that your character is a huge fuckup loser. in the earlygame of EE it’s definitely hinted at that our character is a fuckup but it seems soft-pedaled, the game is less misanthropic, i guess, and so the ‘personalities’ of your inner voices become less about fixing your demons and more about defining and following through on the urges that will turn you into a particular kind of person.)
My definition of Agency is this: it’s the feeling you get when you receive feedback on your choices. If there is no feedback, or if the feedback goes unnoticed, then there is no Agency. Additionally, you receive Negative Agency when that feedback is not what you expected - and Positive Agency if it is. My goal in Ebb is to always maximize Agency by this definition.
(this is a very TTRPG-contextual way of describing what ‘agency’ is)
In the demo you can see characters’ alignments on their sheets, by using the Behold feature. Beholding is a silly mechanic, that essentially allows you to take a peek on the DM notes. It feels a bit like a 4th wall break initially, but you can imagine it as an esoteric vibe that the cleric taps into. You get a bunch of info when Beholding, including tips on how to deal with the character, some backstory hints, ability score distribution, level/backstory, and of course, their alignment. But when you discover the alignment of a character, it doesn’t really mean anything other than where this character lands on the matrix - a matrix used in this fantasy world of JOR. A matrix determined by some mad wizard a couple of thousand years ago, unlike the usual divine judgement. So how can you learn more about the definition of good and evil in Esoteric Ebb? Do you have to go on some deep, internal journey? Maybe seek spiritual enlightenment?
No. You go talk to a scholar, obviously! Ebb is set during an age that comes right after a, more or less, technological revolution. There’s been a ton of research on esoteric events and effects around the Coast, and in-game you can learn more about the practical functions and philosophical implications of alignments by finding an expert on the subject. As per usual in Ebb, you get to hold a very strange conversation and ask wildly inappropriate questions.
beholding is an extremely cool mechanic and i really love this sort of 4th-wall overlap between video game world, the world in universe, and TTRPG world. also the dedication to writing an entire material history of the game world is something that I think shows a very strong connection between DE and EE, although it’s as much the case that both games independently evolved this “materialist history” approach by just taking their universes seriously enough.
i will say i’m not like… properly invested yet, i haven’t reached the “volta” as they say, nowhere near. it’s not really a game about politics, it’s properly a CRPG, and it’s sort of mostly a game about really enjoying TTRPGs, and i only kinda enjoy TTRPGs, heck I only kinda enjoy video games in the first place.
8 Likes
Beat Sabrina in Pokemon Heart Gold. Pretty sure that’s the last serious obstacle.
Edit: Beat Misty, using only water type pokemon or water moves from non water type pokemon.
All that’s left is brock, blaine, and I think maybe gary? I dont know
Edit: beat Brock and Blaine. Just Blue left.
2 Likes
Feel welcome to join the few Souls
screaming into the void how good this game is!
4 Likes
Glad to see more people being wooed by Screamer (2026). It’s good y’all!
3 Likes
Splatoon + numbers go up is pretty dangerous for me.
4 Likes
Silly Little Bullcrap Game Central
Horse Magnifier
This is a game where you slide various magnifying glasses over horses to make their picture look like the goal picture. It’s very stupid and very silly. There is a horse button to make the horse sound. It is absolutely a joke game. It’s like 2 dollars right now. It might strike you as funny or it might not. I can’t say. But I am playing it.
Boil Cabbage Make Soup
This is an idle game where an onion makes soup for various gremlins and weirdos who want to come by and buy it. It’s basically nothing - you turn it on and let it sit, and when you accumulate money/soup/whatever you can use it to buy upgrades to make more soup/money/etc, as well as furniture and other decorations. It kind of sits on top of your desktop too, in an open kind of borderless window, which you can like or dislike as your preference. It was inspired by Ropuka’s Idle Island but it clearly suffers for the comparison. The graphics and feel of Ropuka are simply much more charming and interesting to look at. Everything about it is just a clear improvement, the interface, sounds, collections, are all superior and clearly thought out. I don’t begrudge this creator their desire to do a thing, but it really feels like a poor imitation, only with the creator’s own silly ideas.
11 Likes
thoguht I was in the random game names thread for a sec
9 Likes