I AM STILL EXPERIENCING ELDEN RING WITHDRAWAL – LET’S TALK ABOUT THE GAMES I’VE PLAYED WHILE TRYING TO COPE – !
330. CHINATOWN DETECTIVE AGENCY
This is a point and click adventure game set in a near future where every single person you converse with shares their concerns about all the troubles in the world. That is not something I have ever done with a stranger, personally. If I’m ever stuck talking to someone I don’t know it usually doesn’t go beyond “Nice dog” or “Oh snap, I didn’t notice it was unzipped, I’m gonna fucking die, fuck.” You may notice that the player character’s hair is parted on different sides in her portrait and her sprite. To me this is a grave oversight, if I were in charge of this detective agency I’d go “maybe just give her bangs”, but perhaps there’s an explanation for this later, perhaps I’m not giving this game enough credit, perhaps that’s “cyberpunk” or some shit, I don’t know, I hate that crap…!
You may also have noticed a WEB button in that screenshot. Clicking it will tab you out of the game and launch your computer’s web browser so you can so you can look up all these factoids that function as the game’s puzzles. The second time I used this feature the top hit was a Chinatown Detective Agency walkthrough. This kinda spoiled the whole Carmen Sandiego vibe I assume they were going for. That kinda makes me think maybe they shoulda made actual puzzles.
You cannot manually save in Chinatown Detective Agency. Instead the game autosaves at the start of every chapter. I read the chapters tend to be around 30 minutes long. You can fail them, and then you will have to replay them from the beginning. This is perverse, this is sick, I almost admire it, I salute everyone who worked on this game, sorry for being so unfair, if you let me save anywhere I probably woulda played this long enough to develop some real low level Stockholm Syndrome, the kind where I go “Well, I didn’t think it was very good, but I did finish it for some reason.”
329. NINJA GAIDEN
This was my favorite game when I was a kid, I loved Ryu, maybe I followed his example too closely for too long, maybe if I hadn’t played this every day for years I would have opened my heart up to love sooner. Or maybe if I’d managed to beat the game – I think he smooches Irene then, even though she shot him once (with a gun). I still can’t beat this game today, it’s some fucking bullshit, I thought the birds were bad and they are but it’s actually the boss checkpoints that are cursed. If you die on the final boss it boots you back to the start of the level! But if you die elsewhere in the level? It’s fine, you just go back a few screens, no big deal. It punishes you for succeeding! It’s fucking bullshit, it’s just like TAXES, that’s how this game made me feel, like I’m a ninja who was too dumb to get out of paying taxes!!
328. TOKIMEKI MEMORIAL ENGLISH TRANSLATION
I am not calling it by the name the fan translator gave it, fuck that, it’s a dumb name.
I played this game in Japanese with Rudie last year. It was magical. I spent the first two years of school aiming to become Japan’s #1 teenage baseball player but one day I got kicked off the team cuz I forgot to go to practice. I then spent my senior year crippled by depressions and I never got a girlfriend. This is probably the ideal ending for a game like Tokimeki Memorial. I quit the English translation as soon as I saw this screen. Felt ashamed seeing some dumb teenager’s words attached to my birth name. Felt unseemly. I should have never gone back. It was all so innocent once…
327. LEGEND OF THE MYSTICAL NINJA
Everyone is saying this about me, nowadays. This game is pretty bad ass even though it’s got some real Gradius shit going on. Like, you can cruise through it if you do a good job at gambling and buy up all the strong items. But if you make any mistakes, and die? You are fucked, you become a pee-wee ninja, you may as well reset and spend a few minutes typing in your password, which might look like this:
It’ll be easier and more fun than trying to beat any of the bosses using Goemon’s itty bitty nub.
Also I’m not sure if the passwords actually restore all your money and power, I did not actually bother typing one in, it’s 2022 and I have a computer, I just used save states. But I used them honorably, just like Goemon would.
326. WRESTLING EMPIRE
Turns out I didn’t know Rey Misterio as well as I’d thought.
325. YAKZUA 5
I’m glad I played this before I started hiring folks to work on DDD, boy I woulda been in a lotta trouble – boy…!!
The ideal way of playing Yakuza 5 is one hour every 3 weeks. Just drive around in your taxi, picking up fares, eating some grub, maybe when payday comes along you can send all those orphans you abandoned a little spending money. Don’t think that’s mandatory though. Pretty sure you can role play as a deadbeat for as long as you want. This is wish fulfillment gaming, for me.
324. PLANET LAIKA
This is a collaboration between Quintet (makers of 452nd Game of All Times Actraiser and 440th Game of All Times Illusion of Gaia) and Zeque (makers of 127th Game of All Times Kowloon’s Gate.) It is about humans with dog faces who go to Mars and get Space Madness. If you asked me to sum up its “gameplay” I would say “it is a walking sim with Pong elements” and hope you don’t have any follow up questions cuz I don’t really wanna talk about this (or any) game very much anymore. All those urges are gone now. I’m cured! I’m free.