I played some Diablo 2 this weekend. actually a lot of Diablo 2. It’s a pretty good game! My first ever character is a paladin because I wasn’t sure what else to get. Sorta wanted to be a druid after I saw they could transform into a werewolf and also have wolves follow and attack for you.
Whole game is just straight up clickin on stuff. I do like how the keyboard commands work. Quests? that’s the Q button. Inventory? that’s the I button. Character? probably the C button? yep. Dang I made it 10 levels and didn’t know I could put stats into strength or dexterity. I forgot about the abilities tree for a few hours too.
Really just absolute chaos as you run around blasting fools, grabbing gold, and clicking on things for hours. I might try to do a solo playthru just to see what that’s like.
yea i feel this, i recently reorganized my steam library and for first person puzzle games i basically just called it ‘1p explore’. this also applies to ‘metroidvanias’ as they say, basically just exploration games, finding keys for locks etc.
speaking of which finally got around to manifold garden
i admire the amount of ~spaces~ that were constructed for this game, apparently a bunch of which aren’t required for 100% or 0%ing the game - and very cool that you can even 0% the game in the first place. very cool game for exploring, going out of bounds or to distant areas etc
i do feel that the game overstayed its welcome in the final section, the 3d platforming and falling into the void reeeeeally gets old in that section. there were also a couple of puzzles that required unintuitive backtracking (finishing the yellow level) and it sort of traumatized me for the rest of the game re: cube hoarding and looking for unintuitive solutions. i think one of the worse things a puzzle game can do is give you a unique tedious and unintuitive solution for one puzzle and then never return to it. i mean, i guess it’s better than making you do tedious stuff repeatedly - but even once is enough to plant the seed of doubt from then on
and geez that final area has a looot of fiddly platforming if you miss a platform and are then forced to repeat a bunch of stuff to get back where you were.
also jazzpunk - a weird little game in roughly the same genre as gravity bone - i appreciate the quantity of silly jokes but i wish the controls felt better
Played a few more hours of FFVII yesterday. I am struck by how jovial some of the moments and characters are, mostly because my exposure to this game was kids on the playground in the early 2000’s larping as Cloud and Sephiroth, giving me the impression this game as some sorta existential epic duel between the two dudes, on par with the struggle between Anakin and Obi-Wan in the then upcoming Revenge of the Sith.
So I was a little surprised to find that even FFVII had Moogles, Golden Saucer, and Cait Sith. None of those elements bother me, I just always assumed they got left behind when Square made the jump from 2D to 3D.
Which brings me to my final point. This is probably really obvious to anyone who has played the game before but wow, FFVII is such an early 3D graphics game. Like In my head the game sorta looked like Ocarina of Time but turn based, but this feels like a super famicom FF game with 3d models.
I finally figured out the rhythm of materia and limits, and the game got a lot more enjoyable.
I am having a good time but it’s a little odd to play this game after having heard about it for at least 25 years first.
Vanilla DNF is pretty much bad all the way through.
The expansion has some kinda okay writing at the start with the Duke Doppelgangers, perhaps the only actual comedy in the entire game. And then it goes back to being dogshit.
It’s so funny to me that once the old DNF source was leaked people were like “they fucking character assassinated duke nukem. we gotta fix this” and they are now turning it into a fangame. Retvrn except like, to a Duke who isn’t making fun of raped women.
CICADAMATA by flowergarden feels like a fever dream of a team equally obsessed with Bungie shooters and Jumping Flash!, taking obvious influence from Nu Marathon’s inspirations but going off on its own thing with it. there’s no extraction bullshit here, you pilot a very heavy and clanky mecha bunny girl through levels that are less “weird forest pockmarked by primary color plastic tech” and more abstract 3d rave flyer art turned into 32 bit platformer levels organized 3 per visual theme like a sonic game.
in each one you drop in, grab 4 glowing yellow doodads fancy style by shooting, stomping, and dash kicking around, then find the exit. you have a massive triple jump and using your shadow to make sure you’re lining up landings is essential. the movement physics are very floaty and you accelerate and decelerate less like a person than a vehicle, reinforcing the feeling your body is Something Other Than Human but not necessarily superhuman in the way of a quake shooter protagonist. you do not stop on a dime and you have to figure out how to build momentum by grinding off inclines to get to many places. imo this nails the unsettling vibes of being a brain shoved into a mechanical shell better than Marathon ‘26 where any kind of control friction would bump up against the competitive sweat game thing.
i guess this gets compared to Neon White a lot? i haven’t played that but from looking at a few videos i think some folks believe Neon White invented bright colors, jumping, and drum & bass. i don’t really see anything in common here beyond that. there’s no card bullshit or talking heads and speedrunning seems less important to the scoring mechanic (which i don’t totally understand yet tbh) than racking up style points on enemies by comboing dash, stomp, and gun attacks and staying in ““ZONE TIME”” for multipliers. there are time bonuses but finishing a level fast as possible will not max out your score. i am looking forward to figuring this out more once i finish my first playthrough.
i am loving the look (see my spamming of the screenshots thread) and the extremely over the top visual effects. it’s hard to tell without watching a video but you are constantly barraged with digital distortion, pixelation, text scrolls of both combo score and mindfulness aphorisms, damage effects that glitch your visuals, etc. i’m particularly fond of the flashing red & white “I AM OK. THE AIR IS JUST HEAVY TODAY.” when you are near death.
a game that really commits to what i would call a confrontational or at least very overstimulating vibe is a thing i love falling in love with (i keep thinking “oh this kinda thing is why i used to adore Grasshopper in the aughts” while playing this.)
all this and it’s like $10! and this dev’s first game?? so excited to see where flowergarden goes from here.
I tried the CICADAMATA demo twice as it seemed like something I’d love but… well it really isn’t like Neon White at all and unfortunately the game part of that (only the game part) is much more my speed. Love running through a space as fast as I can manage, less like wandering around a space trying to find the X number of things I need to get to open the exit while under time pressure. Also naturally skeptical of any game that attracts that much of a gooner fanbase (also why I am deeply skeptical of Motorslice).
FFVII update/question: Was Vincent Valentine more novel in 1997? Cause this guy is corny as hell, did he just hit different in 1997 before Hellsing and Death Note were invented? Or were we all just young.
I have been playing Shining the Holy Ark for the first time, one of several Shining games on the Saturn. This is the first-person dungeon rpg one, like Shining in the Darkness for the Mega Drive, a game that I have a lot of respect for. Both games have that same effect as the early Dragon Quest games, where they walk a fine line of being fun & accessible for first timers while also being kind of tough and having a high encounter rate.
I think the prerendered graphics mixed with hand-drawn sprites and polygons look wonderful with a nice consumer CRT filter over it. The animations are really good. Magic effects are really over the top and cause the screen to shake and some slowdown. If you kill an enemy with magic, for some reason the “did 15 damage! skeleton was exhausted” text box appears before the magic animation is finished, and the console slows down even more, and it feels awesome.
There is a cutscene right at the beginning where you talk to aliens inside of a giant polygonal eyeball (or they are small aliens inside of a normal eyeball?) which had me like . A lot of the enemies are creepy too, and with the extremely smooth battle transitions and multiple walkout animations per enemy, they almost work like jump scares sometimes. I’m excited to see where this one goes.
The music is by Motoi Sakuraba and the sound effects are by TREASURE. I’m in 32 bit audiophile heaven.
Still chugging along through God of War and I’m kinda…surprised how much is new to me in this thing? Like, yes, it’s been eight years, and yeah I played this thing at peak “I work nights and I’m depressed and I drink too much boo hoo,” but I think I just…mainlined this game or something. Lotta side areas totally foreign to me.
Anyway, it continues to be alright! Popped into Niflheim (toxic fog maze you gotta do runs into and out of before you die for resources) and Muspelheim (fiery challenge area). I remember both, and saying “nah not right now” and just, uh, never doing them. I’ll give it a whirl now…
without having played it, and guessing, i’m picturing something where you donate items and/or money you bring back from dungeons to some kind of public works project.
