I like talking about movies and books here so much I forget this is a gaming forum at times.
Mostly been still chipping away at *UFO 50 and wow what a beautiful project. Such a delight and as I said before, one of the few retro games that actual feels like something from that era, instead having modern design sensibilities with pixel art.
I also finished *Azerrete: The Jewel of Faramore
and what a lovely love letter to the CDI games. I had a lot of fun with it, and it’s kinda sick to see what a “good” zelda cdi game would be like.
I was also thinking today about how much I love games that to an untrained eye, are indistinguishable from malware. I.e. before I knew how rancid his politics were, I was a big “fan” of MDicke. I would play wrestling empire on the apartment TV via my steam deck, my oold room mate called it “maleware wrestling”
I hate Revelations 2’s credit stinger because I don’t think we’ve seen Natalia, Claire, Moira, or Barry since? But I can wish it away as a precocious girl reading literature ‘above her age group’ and that’s sinister to normies. It’s been over a decade. She lived happily ever after.
I haven’t been brave enough to watch the CG animated movies. This might be the thing that gets me to take the plunge alongside playing Shattered Memories because of @VastleCania
(Finally) just finished The Incident at Galley House, myself! And yeah, I’d played TYPE HELP previously, and apparently the (warning: spoilers) voluminous notes that I took back then are effectively a walkthrough/synopsis for both games. However, a lot of the present-day framing details are different, since TYPE HELP is a text-only interface. Instead of having periodic power outages, all the file names you’re entering fall into a deliberate “act structure” that your predecessor had organized the events into as a way of making sense of the details he was uncovering.
In The Incident at Galley House, the framing story is significantly expanded in a very “Roottreemania!” final-chapter sense. I liked these additions a ton.
I’ve hardly played an exhaustive survey of the database games, but this feels a lot more akin to Obra Dinn than your Idols Golden or your Roottrees Dead. You can track down a lot of unnecessary detail if you really want to be thorough.
The creator of The Roottrees are Dead is a fan of the adventure game LP crew “Mostly Walking”, and he hid a number of easter eggs in Roottrees specifically for them to find while playing that game. I understand he did something similar via an external website for this game, so I am eager to finally watch the LP that they just finished and see what that’s all about.
Gave Ratchet and Clank: Ranger Rumble a spin. Am surprised that I sorta like it as far as this kinda mobile spin-off goes. The music is pretty decent remixes of older OSTs and it works as a stripped back adaptation of RnC gameplay. You use a virtual analog stick overlay for movement and aiming and there’s an auto-lock/fire when you hover cursor over someone which feels suitably chunky – like you’re doing something impressive. You get MOBA-esque cooldowns and ultimates which I’m not as big a fan of since it swings things toward hoarding and popping ults. The cooldown ability stuff that makes it so that it’s not totally a game of who can point at the other person the best. Another gripe is that the aiming is done in the same space as the ult button so I frequently activate it just by trying to turn.
The established series characters are just there to cheerlead us through the various battlepasses. Afaict there’s only a couple alternate lombaxes other than the first character and I think the game missed a trick letting us make our own lombax. Insomniac continues to be terrified of the furries who enjoy its licence. Characters = loadouts rather than us getting to make a character and equip different things. The actual game is an arena shooter with mostly flat levels and some cover. Game modes tend towards fairly short match lengths like an elimination mode and tiny shrinking battle royale circle to force people together. Even team stuff is usually over in 3 minutes.
I genuinely can’t tell if I’m playing humans or bots. Most players I encounter suck so its not clear if there is multiplayer or if its simulated or if fake screen names are given to everyone. I suspect many people I encounter are bots but the game is strangely hesitant to confirm who is who. I suspect it’s mainly to avoid having to moderate in-game bm but the game ends up feeling like a single player game to me. You also straight up upgrade your characters which can be done with resources so it is sort of a soft pay-to-win system.
at a meetup during the trivia game show qing of posters one of the questions was something like ‘is selectbutton a videogame forum’ or ‘what kind of forum is selectbutton’ and the arguments were glorious
barry can have revelations 2 cause his part is about rescuing his one surviving kid but he should not actually be in any more resident evil games as a playable character because he is a poster, not a shooter. sure, he has the hookup with kendo, he gets everyone their special little customized guns, he carries a big ass magnum in 1 which is the 90s way of showing he’s the old gun guy on the team, of course he only reads gun magazines, in rev2 he’s the only person whose ever showed up to a resident evil appropriately armed, but you look at the trophy case? All Redfield. Barry hasn’t shown up in anymore resident evils cause he’s been busy posting “builds” on reddit, fawning over gear on instagram and getting into arguments on arfcom about how “targets don’t shoot back” and he doesn’t actually need to compete, because he is instead developing “warrior mentality,” which will be much more important. he’s been coasting on what little trigger time he got in the mansion incident, despite being a low intensity conflict in which he was safely on the oppostions side the entire time until the last minute. meanwhile redfield probably mandates daily dry fire regimen and regular competition attendance when not in the field for hound wolf squad. umbrella security service was hoping to be long gone from the ARK before the hounds showed up, you think they’re worried about barry? he’s nothing but a loot drop to them.
After deciding to take a break from UFO 50 I decided to resume my long delayed playthrough of FFVII.
I have to say despite not having grown up with the game, it’s really grown on me, especially now having played the previous 6 games. I do like how there’s no big introduction of summons, you just find one on the cargo ship and boom! You can summon an evil genie.
I like the sarcastic cat. In my head he sounds like Tony Jay
Made it to Kol. Killing Scorpions and Magidrakees with ease (but dang, the skeletons are still rough). I’ve kept a little notebook, including what items do and a general grouping of enemy difficulties. I think when I get the next armor tier I’m going to splorp around in some poison a little. Probably make sure I have like 4 herbs or more. or at least one wings, now that I know what they’re for.
Slimes feel like a cultural touchstone but I kinda love the drakees. They’re so happy to try to hassle you!
Me casting Hurt: 5 or 6! 8 if you’re lucky!
Enemies casting Hurt: 10 every time! Deal with it!
One time a magidrakee cast hurt for 3 and I just felt bad for it.
Also, I’m kind of impressed even though I sort of know how memory works (I studied computer science, once, before I became a programmer) that when I started the game up, there was still a saved game on there. They don’t use battery backup and it uses the reset/power trick, but I was still surprised to see something waiting for me (I deleted it, but it was only a level 5 guy named Gandalf so I didn’t feel bad)
Gal Guardians: Demon Purge may be the closest Inti Creates have gotten to perfecting the game they’ve been attempting to make since Mega Man Zero, while somehow still feeling like a game by people who’ve never made videogames before. Everything that’s annoying about the game was annoying when they did Mega Man ZX, and yet here they are, still creating maps that do nothing except taunt the player, and levels that have no reason to be connected–and yet, here we are–because that’s what you do in a Metroidvania, right?
Additionaly, one might think that a game with two major things to collect would think of providing the player with something to let them know how much they’ve progressed, or how much is left to go, or which areas they no longer need to explore. Nope! You know you’re done when you’re done. I’d respect it more, if I weren’t stuck finding that one (one?) missing girl.
And yet, the actual game is really fun, especially in the hardest difficulty mode (unfortunately only available after beating the game once). This is damning with faint praise, but the levels feel actually designed, instead of feeling like unedited Mega Man maker draft levels like their Zero/ZX games often felt. The game even does the thing where you have to play through stages twice, but there’s enough alternate paths that the game manages to feel larger, and the exploration more rewarding, than in some actual Igavanias. I’ve heard that it’s actually most like Rondo of Blood, which feels right; I’ve never played Rondo of Blood.
As for the presentation… You can get through the first half not realizing that, oh, this is a ecchi series spinoff–and in fact, some familiarity with those games is expected. After the turning point, though, the game won’t let you forget. And yet, this is bearable in a way can’t imagine the original Gal*Gun being. That it’s the actual girls who are the people responding to the–horny, I guess?-- ridiculousness goes a long way, I feel.
