Continuing Cuphead, finished all but one of the bosses in world 2. It’s a surprisingly breezy game compared to its reputation for being hard as nails. it’s possible I’m just familiar enough with its inspirations (particularly Super Contra 3) that I’m not having to learn a bunch of new skills though. I suspect that the appeal of the art style brought it to a much wider audience than a normal run and gun would have, so that might explain it.
But it’s much slower than its retro inspirations, the patterns are rarely random and when they are they’re even more slow presumably for that very reason, and the boss fights aren’t ever longer than two minutes, at least so far. it’s not easy but it’s much easier than, say, Mina the Hollower which I’m finding increasingly punishing and grueling for basically no reason.
it might get way harder in the back half though so what do I know.
Anyway, the art is delightful, though it does little work to separate itself from some of the more yucky tropes of the era it’s imitating. they avoid the worst of it for sure but then the evil dice guy is very clearly styled after black fashion of the era, and there’s the genie who’s also a mummy and…so. yeah. still it’s fucking gorgeous and I love how much fun it has with the animations.
the run n gun stages are lesser than the boss fights for sure but I appreciate the variety they bring. and it’s nice to do a bit of platforming, though occasionally it feels underbaked.
Overall having a great time with it and hope to finish it sometime this week.
Wrapped up getting full mastery in the last of the Hitman 2 levels (the final level, the two DLC levels, and the weird freebie they wedged into the story well after Hitman 3 was out).
It always feels cheap to, uh, “challenge farm.” Making a save, killing a guy one way, reloading, killing him another, reloading, etc. etc., but it’s a hell of a lot faster than doing the whole mission every time. Plus, even with all these years I’ve played the game, there are more than a few challenge kills that like…I can do them, yes. Can I finish the level having done it? Oh no. Luckily just completing a task flags it as done from there on out, so you can save scum through, or even keep a save before a level exit and rack up XP.
Kinda burned out so I guess I’ll get to the Hitman 3 levels later. Half the fun of getting full mastery in the levels is unlocking unique weapons and gear, but since each entry has to assume it’s a player’s first, there’s a lot of overlap, a lot of unlocking bottles of various poisons and whatnot. Hitman 3 has some, for sure, but most of the good stuff is back in the first two games.
Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to do the side story missions. Some of 'em are pretty goddamn hard.
I finally have Hackmon in Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. A number of other favorites too (Veedramon, Kyubimon, GeoGraymon, Starmon). Weirdly because the evolve paths are non linear it’s sometimes easier to get a digimon by de evolution than by evolution.
got to nearky the end of fez, looked online and one of the things that’s left took years of brute forcing to solve the puzzles, so i decided to just look up the ending cutscene and there was nothing. wow. i guess i’m done here
I was gonna say that I hope that wasn’t the stage with the possible typo that was driving people some people nuts, but apparently that got fixed in the last update. I had a moment playing it earlier where I went that it feels like the game was ramping up to something and it struck me that I’m basically just past the 1/3 point so my concerns about the length of it are slowly returning. It sucks as due to the nature of the game I don’t think I can really take any sort of break from the game without losing the mental map of all these terms, the odd grammar and such so I’m pretty pot committed no matter what happens or how I feel.
Played a bit more long distance Roottrees with my sis, it was rough as for the first chunk of time we were making no progress and it was feeling a bit grim but towards the back half we got a bit of a breakthrough and have probably half of the family tree fully confirmed. On Tuesday we are gonna have to try and figure out how to crack the left side of it as it is mostly blank.
I forgot to say the shmup stages are great but so easy compared to the bullshit I’ve played in my life that it’s almost funny. the cuckoo clock boss’s final phase was tough but only because it was at the *bottom* of the screen and therefore hard to get hits on. once I figured out I could use the super shot though it wasn’t too bad.
1% story and 99% grind but sometimes you just want to have the pure experience. My dumpling gang is cruising the Skara Brae sewers which are lousy with hostile barbarians who would rather wade the night soil instead of treading the jeweled thrones of earth.
I saw this on the Steam new release not too long ago and saw someone wishlist it so I decided to give the demo for DAWN CAR a try and was stunned that it is basically a new take on Bump ‘n’ Jump.
This is Bump ‘n’ Jump, a Colecovision favorite of mine where you gotta bump other traffic off the road, manage your speed (can only jump when going over 100), jump when the symbol pops up to avoid breaks in the road ahead of you, and seemingly in the NES version pick up gas so that you don’t run out.
This is DAWN CAR, where you gotta bump other cars off the road, manage your speed and fuel, jump when a symbol pops up to let you know that breaks in the road are upcoming. This one also has boss battles and knocking cars off the road lets you regain some fuel. You also can only die by running out of fuel while in Bump ‘n’ Jump you generally died in a fiery wreck.
No one has made a game like this in 40ish years, I am so glad someone took the basic idea of one of the old pre-NES games I played when tiny and took their own spin on it. We need this to happen more often, who will make a new take on Venture!
have you played capcom’s arcade game mad gear? it’s futuristic bump n jump with 16 bit graphics
(there’s also a bunch of games in this genre that don’t have jumping, the best of which is probably toaplan’s dash yarou)(and yes, it is a shame that it’s an almost completely dead genre, and i’m glad to hear of a new one of them)
I indulged with the Resident Evil 8 Village DLC which I have stared at for a long time. Should I buy the whole thing again to play on PSN?
Anyways I just bought it on Steam and played it at 4% volume with headphones because my laptops audio drivers are fucked up and I cannot find anyone else with this problem. And so my family didn’t hear a woman being devoured while trying to sleep.
I was intrigued by RE8 but trippy dream remixes. And it is not that. You run through the first castle again and then through the PT part but not as scary. Then a boss fight. There’s more stuff about parent-child relations, and I wished I could be a better parent but will have no lingering feelings about the 9 bucks I spent.
Donkey Kong Bananza: having more trouble getting back into this than i’d expected. dunno whether i’m just not in the mood r/n or if i’m still Kong’ed out from the first time, but i was feeling the need for a break immediately after the first big cutscene (wherein the Meteor-looking mining machine (?) pushes the island into the earth like a kid pressing a Mighty Max playset down into a sandbox)
And IMO it has to have jumping, possibly with a flashing signal warning you of danger ahead. Bumping is fun and all but you need the impossible jumping car, the sprite getting larger as it elevates, that’s what makes it sing.
Cracked 300 in Message From Deep Space and it’s giving the real info now.
According to this it was almost 180,000 years for the meteor(ite) to reach earth. That’s fun! Whew!
One thing that’s interesting about this is that while I almost always avoid hints in games, I’m oddly immersed in this that I read them every time just to hear the other team members give me a little suggestion. It just feels right to listen to them every time, even when I know exactly what I’m doing!
Outward! The game of kings. I played a ton of it several years back on Tulpa’s recommendation and it totally ruled, but I fell off of it at some point before finishing it. I just got the bug to dip back in. Since I last played it, they’ve come out with a Definitive Edition that runs on newer consoles, incorporates both DLCs more comprehensively than before, and makes some balance and minor “quality of life” changes.
Turned out all I needed to upgrade to Definitive was buy the Three Brothers DLC, which was heavily discounted on the playstation store, so I was in business for like 2 bucks.
Because of my tendonitis, my partner is playing while I watch. She didn’t grow up playing video games, so it takes her a little longer to get proficient when playing an action game. The combat is proving particularly difficult in this game, thanks to the janky controls. She’s definitely improving though. We’ve been butting our heads against the first dungeon, a cave full of spear wielding trogs. They’re weak, but they gang up on you.
We’re thinking about trying to go for a real easy mode kind of build, but it remains to be seen what that’s gonna be. Maybe just a big heavily armored sword guy or something. Or a pistol guy, that could be fun.
Nothing does exploration quite as well as this game… And the worldbuilding is so cool. It’s one of the only video games I’ve played that really relishes exploring alternate political/economic systems in a fantasy world. Having just read The Dawn of Everything, the starting village resonated as a simple but compelling communal society with its own idiosyncratic traditions and rules. It also resonated to see an unjustly burdened villager decide to simply walk away and travel to another society that runs itself differently. That’s what we’re missing in this day and age; the freedom to hit da bricks and move somewhere with completely different ways of organizing social relations. This stuff is all pretty lightly sketched, but it’s sketched by interesting people who know what they’re doing.
Actually, now that I look at it, the whole game is super on sale on multiple platforms. You can get the whole definitive edition for $4.79 on Steam right now! This game’s a real buried treasure, give it a try. One of the first monsters you encounter is a giant mantis shrimp wandering around the beach. There are surprises like that every corner you turn.
I didn’t read The Dawn of Everything until after playing Outward but yeah that’s one of the best things about it! It really feels like the societies are not the kinds we typically see in fantasy media, they actually exist outside of the stereotyped dichotomies of ‘modern capitalism vs primitive feudalism’ which infects the rest of the genre
I don’t check their ideas every time but as opposed to most other games I am very fine listening to the hints in this one as they very clearly establish that you are part of a team, never listening to them would feel… wrong?
I stopped at message 400 earlier today, I definitely hit a “we peaked here, now let’s ramp down a bit” stretch and I am kinda curious how they sorta justify it. One of the team members said more or less the same thing in their weekly diary so they clearly are aware of it, but when you go from “okay here is basically a star map of where we are from here in the same galaxy as you” to “okay let’s learn about adjectives and prepositions” it is too dramatic a shift to just handwave away.
So the first third of the game is basically establishing what, where and from when this beacon came to earth and the rest of the game is answering why they sent the messages. Answering ‘why?’ is much harder than the other questions so they need to communicate abstract concepts and thus need to establish how to communicate those concepts from ground truths
A switch from STEM to Linguistics does unavoidable things to the pacing but I took it as a welcome reprieve from being tested on my high school education
I picked up Lovish because I really enjoyed Astalon and was unaware that retro means precision platforming now. It starts off charming and super cute, but before long I just feel like I don’t want anything it has to offer, much in the way games built for speedrunners feel to me
cuphead: the cat that eats the mouse boss and then summons mice ghost from its jail cell mouth is so god damned creative, it’s the first thing that made me feel like I was seeing something new from the era rather than a bit of a rehash
