Pikmin is one of my favorite games. none of the sequels come even close despite being just fine on their own. sort of.
But the first game is almost literally perfect
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bingo! thank you for articulating something I’ve always struggled to. I sometimes wonder if it’s symptomatic of the game being rushed out in time for the gamecube release window but the levels have a very blank, prototype-ish quality to them that I think ends up really complimenting the setting and offsets the pressure of the time limit a bit too by actually giving you room to breathe and think…
2 loses this in favour of procedurally generated corridors stuffed with enemy encounters, 3 tries to get back to it but ends up funnelling you down a critical path too often imo, and 4 is just post breath of the wild nintendo open world design where every five seconds there’s a new carrot on a stick waved in front of you.
I think you are probably right although I find 2 sorta fascinating from the perspective of the devs seemingly protesting its own existence inside the game itself by making it a slog to play and having the plot framing basically be “sorry, your boss is making you do it all again for profit!!” I also think Louie is kinda a wonderful invention as this like completely checked out worker who is more interested in bugs and cooking/eating delicious meals… I feel like they really do him dirty in the sequels by casting him as a more explicit villain… Also 2 has the best subversive use of product placement as like “environmental storytelling” indicating why society might have fallen… Actually, maybe you should play 2?
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As I resurrected a long dead thread, I’ve been playing Mystic Ark. this is also thanks to me reading the first gypt today and seeing @sleepysmiles praising it. As I am two sessions in and still on the first world I don’t know how much more I will play past the 3rd session. Playing Yojimbo to a bunch of pirate cats on a desolate desert is great and all, not sure I want to do it for 4 hours. And does that mean each of the worlds are going to be 4 hours? The mister doesn’t have fast forward. I gotta climb a death-trap tower to meet a mad scientist making special medicine. I am not sure how the pirate cat war and the tower are related, even mechancially. I was going back and forth and it kind of stalled out. And then the walkthrough said time to go to to the tower.
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that’s exactly why i stalled out on it lol. though i do mean to finish it and 7th Saga one day, there’s too much Absolutely My Shit going on in both to just drop em forever
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like.
i can sit there losing until my hands give out if i feel like i’m having an honest conversation—and it’s not hard to tell when they hold that baseline of respect, you know? as opposed to using their opponent to make a number go up for them.
because none of this is about winning; it’s about Playing.
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if anyone remembers the old Flash game Dice Wars they may be inteested in a spiritual sequel set on globes instead of flat maps. It’s kinda unbalanced right now but Raff is working on it a lot.
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All the Ace Combat 8 talk made me go “oh right 7” so I finally launched that.
I somehow failed the first mission back when I played it on PS4 (think I got got by enemy missiles), but that wasn’t an issue this go around.
Playing the first mission probably isn’t enough to make an impression, but I did think the post mission little…radar wireframe? playback was cool. Could definitely see when I took some wild and sloppy evasive maneuvers.
I like the way the camera beads up with condensation when you go through clouds…that’s pretty cool.
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at the time of release, I did find it pretty silly that Aerosmith, of all bands, were supposed to represent the pinnacle of youth culture, hence their kindapping by a repressive empire
fun game, though
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Found out after the fact that RE Revelations 2 has as its sole condition for the bad ending a QTE 3/4ths of the way through the game which in the moment would never occur to anybody to treat as a matter of significant choice, so I replayed the entirety of chapter 3 again by myself instead of co-op in order to get the good ending. When this shit goes from a fun party game to a single-player experience every flaw is magnified 100x. It is horrifying to think anybody ever experienced RE6 this way.
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I played Cloverpit for a few hours, it’s another game in the mold of Balatro, with the setup being you have to play a slot machine to avoid dying in a Saw movie trap. It didn’t have enough to compel me to keep playing past those first few hours.
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Saw something for a “incremental narrative game” about stamping papers and when I saw the “pick one of three” dialog I instantly lost interest.
Tried playing some Gran Turismo 3 last night. This game is such a technical marvel, still. Like the swirling heat that comes off the track surface, the way the light shines on the pavement, the headlight lensflare. Still has slowdowns in emulation on some tracks though.
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It just crashed to a black screen when I finally got to the top of the tower. Vampires that love to recover all their health when they are one hit from re-death can get bent.
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less than five mins into the sin remaster and im reminded of how badass this games death animations are, and it looks WAY better than it did when they announced it and it basically had a different art style for no good reason.
i was going crazy shooting everything in the intro because a lot more shit is destructible than you would expect for the quake 2 engine and it made robert patrick fly through the air on a motorcycle
ALLYBAR…THE TASTE COULD SAVE YOU…
also probably the first time since 2004 the hud’s been readable in this game. lol.
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I remember playing the game years ago and being blown away by the first level but then most of the rest of the game failed to live up to it, would you say that’s the case?
The only other thing I remember is seeing the villainess masturbate in a hot tub
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I love uneven ambitious late 90s fps games to a fault so I don’t think I could say anything that would convince anyone who thinks sin sucks to play more of it. Like, yes, it sucks, but it’s awesome. It’s like a more crass Daikatana.
You have to noclip to see her jerking off in the hot tub. I always loved that the elexis x blade is supposed to be like aeon flux but it comes across incredibly juvenile instead because it’s the quake 2 engine.
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Finished Co Op: Resident Evil Revelations 2 with @Gimelrey . It has body horror and explores concepts of identity, particularly if clones have continuity of being (a question I emphatically take the “no” position on, the game being slightly more obnoxious with “I dunno!!”)
Core of the game is about gun accidents and how guns are for adults, I guess? And family trauma and how families are good.
In the end I liked the division of responsibilities but would not like that to be generalized to future games. Scariest enemies were the invisible ones.
Randomly there were a male and female Wesker although only female is seen. Post credits stinger was bad.
This felt obliquely about trans issues in the same way Revelations 1 was about Saudi Arabia, but all body horror seems like it’s about trans issues, I’m sure I’m oversensitive.
Unlike the first game, would not play again. Not even on 3DS.
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Beat Sleeping Dogs…installed it on the Steam Deck and wrapped up the main game laying in bed, since I didn’t wanna wake the dogs and make them go wild playing it on the TV downstairs.
Fuck I didn’t mean to make an actual sleeping dogs thing there…it’s true though…
Guess I’ll knock out the DLCs. I did pretty good this go around! Collected a lot of junk. Didn’t max out my Triad experience, which seems impossible to do playing the game normally?
I…probably played the faux Enter the Dragon DLC back when. Pretty sure I finished the jiangshi one. And I remember bailing on the cultist bomber one, mostly because you play that whole (?) thing with Wei in a little beat cop uniform…that’s not the slick suit I had him slamming guys into car doors in…
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Resident Evil Orphaned Girls with Special Powers Supergroup Game featuring Sherry, Natalia, and Rose. Capcom get in touch
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After we got Sherry Birkin: Special Agent in RE6 I thought they might actually want to do something fun with her but nope.
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Some folks went and randomly made Daggerfall Online for the 30th anniversary of the game
Please excuse the accidentally totally appropriate music, there’s a random world boss every few hours and decided to record it on a whim when I ran out there to participate in my first
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