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Just beat Chants of Sennar and Dead Space today. Both great games, could not be more different from one another. Chants was really cool, learning these languages and the respective grammars made me feel pretty good, as well as the story of the tower you're ascending and its people. Neat ending sequence. Wish the languages were more complex though, for the most part it was just replacing words with other words. It makes me want to play Heaven's Vault more, though, since in that game you had to figure out intricacies of symbols and how, when certain symbols were on top of other symbols, it'd change meaning of words in a way that was crucial to understanding. Chants had a smidgen of that, or aspects of languages that, like, would identify differences between verbs, nouns, people etc, but nothing much more than that. Got the plat too, pretty easy to do. I certainly was hoping to get more interrogative indicators. Dead Space is Dead Space. One of the best survival horror games, made better. Still prefer silent, never-takes-off-helmet Isaac, but this one's not bad. Planning on doing NG+.
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Jan 22, 2024 02:28
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I posted this in the gen chat but forgot about this thread so here it is: I picked up The Witcher 1 and 2 during the steam holiday sale for like $15 total and just spent the last two weeks putting like 100 hours into Witcher 1. The game really holds up, great sense of place and even with the relative jank of a 2007 game I still enjoyed the heck out of it. It's pretty amazing that even though my Geralt is decked to the nines and can take out most stuff in a couple of hits the atmosphere and music create such tension that I would feel uneasy running around in swamps and fields and encountering drowners and noonwraiths. Compare the choices you make in this game with a contemporary offering like Mass Effect and it's like night and day. There's no clear good guy and most options have story/gameplay consequences that actually change things up, it's almost enough to get me to start another play through but Witcher 2 is calling. Creepy Dandelion and his glassy eyes will haunt me. I am currently spending too much time messing around with mods before I really start on Witcher 2, but I should be ready to jump in soon and I can't wait.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:53
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I beat Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. Much like it's predecessor, TBRaB is a fun and quick little game. I think I beat it in around 3 hours? And for a "Rogue-like" is crazy short. I still have a few side mission things I can go back and complete. Definitely recommend! Spoiler text below for stuff on this game and the last game: Like the last game, it's very easy... Right up until the last boss in which they decide to make it a lot harder. I put it on God Mode because the last section is dumb and long and I ain't got the time or patience to deal with it.
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Jan 22, 2024 16:49
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I finished Girl Genius: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne. Nothing especially noteworthy, it feels very much like a PS2 tie-in game for a webcomic I was reading around that era, so it has a fun sense of nostalgia despite being released just last September. Now I'm resuming my Yakuza series playthrough with 4!
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Jan 22, 2024 22:17
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last night i played through Slave Zero X: Episode Enyo, which is (deep breath) a new Quake 1 mod released this week, which is a prequel to an upcoming 2.5D side-scrolling character action game called Slave Zero X, which is a prequel to a 1999 third-person mech game for the Dreamcast and PC called Slave Zero completely normal and logical statement. anyways, it's about an hour long, and really fun! it's got a cool cyberpunk-ish ("biopunk" per the branding but ugh) setting that looks pretty awesome in this engine. I've never actually played more than 10 minutes of original Quake 1 so I don't know how many of the guns and enemies are just reskins of Quake guns/enemies. it's got five levels and a boss fight, and I would recommend quicksaving pretty heavily (and conserve your ammo a bit more than you might expect, particularly because the double uzis will absolutely blow through your regular bullet ammo), but it was pretty easy to get through. do wish they'd added actual checkpoints into the levels; they seem a bit too long to really expect players to go back to the start after dying. might be something that's just hard to add to that engine, though, or just hard from a design perspective to make sure players don't get checkpointed in unwinnable situations (I feel like the 2024 solution to this is just to respawn players with max health, but I get why that can make the resource conservation aspect of these sorts of games less compelling) I guess I'll give Slave Zero X a shot (there is a demo on Steam I have been meaning to check out). even if i don't like the game i just hope the soundtrack is half as good because goddamn these are some bangers: https://soundcloud.com/poppyworks/sets/slave-zero-x-episode-enyo-ost/s-oaMB2XcEzXy Morpheus posted:Chants was really cool, learning these languages and the respective grammars made me feel pretty good, as well as the story of the tower you're ascending and its people. Neat ending sequence. Wish the languages were more complex though, for the most part it was just replacing words with other words. It makes me want to play Heaven's Vault more, though, since in that game you had to figure out intricacies of symbols and how, when certain symbols were on top of other symbols, it'd change meaning of words in a way that was crucial to understanding. Chants had a smidgen of that, or aspects of languages that, like, would identify differences between verbs, nouns, people etc, but nothing much more than that. Got the plat too, pretty easy to do. oh drat, this has me thinking i should really check out Heaven's Vault! the idea of doing some more "symbol deciphering" puzzles rather than just context puzzles sounds nice On The Internet posted:I beat Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. Much like it's predecessor, TBRaB is a fun and quick little game. I think I beat it in around 3 hours? And for a "Rogue-like" is crazy short. I still have a few side mission things I can go back and complete. i was really worried about this being a "roguelite" until i read that the levels are set and not procedurally generated, and now i'm wondering why the hell they called it a roguelite at all. just call it "run-based" or something!
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Jan 22, 2024 23:58
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I finished Strider (2014) on PC Great metroidvania-lite game that unfortunately is hampered by poor map design. It is certainly designed to be a metroidvania, but the game just doesn't know how to make the map work like a metroidvania should. Played on the Hard difficulty which felt like the true intended difficulty as there wasn't too much cheapness to make it feel like bullshit. Really fun traversal and combat (if a bit mashy, but it's a feel good mashy). The game gives you upgrades at a steady enough drip where it always feels like the next big upgrade is around the corner. It starts you off quite weak but the core weapon upgrades give you quite a bit of power without needing to resort to cheap and overdone "RPG" upgrades to damage numbers etc. Enemies are usually stationary shooter men but their bullets feel predictable and dodge-able. The game also does the great Dark Souls-y thing where you beat a boss and then you start to see it show up as a normal enemy which makes you feel intimidated at first but then you realize how much of a chump they were over time (and how much of a chump you were to be afraid of them). Eventually you realize through playing that most enemies can just be dodged or ran past as your traverse the city. There's no XP or currencies and you'll only get HP and energy from defeated enemies. The map is laid out in a metroidvania like way with interconnected pathways and doors locked by weapon specific locks that you eventually can open. This works at a very basic level as the game's interconnected-ness is confusing and difficult to navigate. There's no fast travel and no clear indications where each individual door will lead when moving between maps. There are also some maps that have different "planes" you can access (a la Paper Mario) which adds to the confusion when trying to see where to go to grab upgrades you may have missed and want to come back for. Throughout most of the game you are guided from place to place with a navigation arrow that really helps mitigate this issue, but also highlights how poor the map design/game direction is to require such a thing. The difficulty in traversal knocks my opinion for this down due to these map issues. It's a great game to run around in and play through if you're not dead set on collecting everything, but becomes a huge chore and timewaster when you head back to find what you've missed. I wanted to 100% this game but was eventually discouraged from doing so after discovering how difficult and painful the collect-a-thon really was. Overall, great gameplay and a very fun and fluid experience up until the end. I'd recommend this game to any fans of 2d action, but be prepared for frustration with the map.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:01
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Just finished Home Safety Hotline. A simple but creative game about identifying the various causes of homeowner distress and sending back information to help deal with them. Gets strange and fun, but there is definitely not a lot to it. If you want a short, fun, weird game you could do worse. Also finished Loddlenaut. It's a cutesy game where you laboriously clean up trash underwater. Not really my thing but it kept me engaged to the end.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:15
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I don't know if I should continue playing Super Mario RPG SNES now that I beat Culex with a level 20 party. I haven't met Valentina or got the Super Suit. Sticking to magic boosts really made that run.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:44
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abraham linksys posted:
Hah! Yeah it's different but I gotta say I'm a fan. It was really refreshing to have it be much more simple and run-based over the randomized everything that usually exists in the genre. Anywho, I just beat Remnant 2. I forget what the subtitle/tagine for it is. It was a lot of fun! Didn't play the first and skipped through a lot of cut scenes. Co-op worked really well. Good levels (for the most part) and a lot of customization options for weapons and items. Really is Dark Souls with Guns in a lot of ways. If you ain't tried it and have Gamepass I'd recommend it.
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Jan 23, 2024 04:27
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Just beat Deliver Us Mars. This one had been on my list for a while, since Deliver Us the Moon was a surprise hit with me a year or two ago. I enjoyed the sequel well enough, but I was really struck by just how different the two games are. There's plenty of connective tissue there - both games involve piecing together the story of what happened in an abandoned place through environmental clues and hologram recordings - but the presentation is vastly different. While Moon had you silently moving through the facility relying entirely on the holograms to fill in the gaps and provide a narrative, Mars is a much more traditional game with plenty of dialogue and cutscenes. The holograms almost feel like an afterthought, and the focus is much more on the actual characters interacting with each other. I think on the whole I preferred Moon, just because it was something different than my usual fare and Mars felt like a solid if unspectacular iteration on a game I've played many times. Still, I did enjoy my time with it.
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Jan 23, 2024 06:31
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Beat Nobody Saves the World last night. I didn't even know the game existed until it was included in a Humble monthly, reviews were enthusiastic, it was made by the Guacamelee people, and I love Guacamelee, so gave it a go. The game is some kind of Zelda-like, as in top down view action combat, overworld, some buildings/caves, and some dungeons. It also has stats that increase with leveling and from merchant upgrades. Merchants also sell some passive skills, of which 4 at most can be slotted at the same time, in addition to up to 4 active skills. How many you get to slot of each depends on your general level (passives) and current form expertise (actives). Yes, current form. Because the whole thing of the game is that you start at the titular Nobody, a white featureless humanoid thing, but soon enough find a magic wand which you then proceed to use to shapeshift extensively. It starts with turning into a rat, but before you know it, you can become a guard, a ranger, a slug, a magician, a bodybuilder, a mermaid, an egg, a robot...  The Bodybuilder, flexing and pumping aoe iron on baddies. Also a Ranger as P2 because yes, the game has coop multiplayer. There are a lot of shapes to play with, and each one has its own stats adjustment, its own "signature ability", which is the first active skill that is exclusive to that form, which regenerates mana and can't be unequipped, and a bunch of passive/active skills which you're free to use with any other form afterwards. This makes a ton of builds possible, and many dungeons have special modifiers which incentivise or force you to adapt and devise a dedicated build for it, such as for example the dungeon where all damage is multiplied by 9999 meaning any hit is a one-shot. Enemies can also have "wards", which make them invincible until they take some damage from the ward type (there are 4 damage types: blunt, sharp, light and dark). This becomes part of the build design as while you can change form at will, that's cumbersome and it feels better to build a form to have access to all the damage types you need for the dungeon.  They didn't expect that horse to be an archery champion. The upgrade system works in that each skill can be upgraded only based on how much expertise you have in the form it comes from, from F-tier to S-tier. Upgrading a form is done through auto-received quests for each form that ask you to do something special with a specific skill, from "use this skill on baddies 50 times" to "have 20 minions at once", "kill 12 enemies in a single rocket barrage", or "inflict poison on X enemies using that skill from that other form". These "quests" are well tuned and relatively quick to complete, meaning that they don't overstay their welcome. They do however get you to use a little of everything, and push you to experiment with a bunch of cross-form synergies. That's a neat gimmick, and it kinda forces some welcome diversity in the otherwise repetitive dungeon-clearing, to the point that I rarely cleared a dungeon just for the sake of it. I always had a form here or there which I could tune to cross a few quests at the same time. Main story dungeons however lock quest progress, which I presume is the devs way of telling players that they should just minmax their build for these and not handicap themselves just to tick an extra quest.  Guacamelee-tier humour. I lol'ed, but YMMV. The story and characters are the dumb stuff you'd expect from the Guacamelee crowd, so I enjoyed it too. Clocked in just under 22h which didn't feel like that much at all. I did a few of the DLC puzzles, but I didn't have the arsenal of shapes/skills to complete it then, and didn't go back when I reached the end. The game also has NG+ which adds some insane dungeon modifiers if you're so inclined. I might have been if that was the only game I had to play at the moment, but the curse of the backlog is calling out to me, and Yakuza 8 is about to drop, so I guess there won't be anybody to save the world a second time.
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Jan 23, 2024 08:57
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Literal years ago I got a bundle of Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Old Blood. I played the first and loved it. I started the second and loved it, until I got to Wolfburg. For some reason it felt like a huge difficulty spike, getting spotted in stealth really easily and getting overwhelmed almost immediately afterwards. It's the back half of the game and I thought it was intentional, and was so infuriated I dropped it and forgot about it. I picked it back up and it was... fine? Was it a bug? Did I just suck at shooters for a while? Who knows. I killed a lot of Nazis and beat Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.
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Jan 23, 2024 18:06
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I finished Sable, unfortunately I didn't really enjoy it. As the titular Sable, a young girl from a nomadic tribe on a desert planet, you set out into the world as part of a coming-of-age ritual known as the "Gliding". As you roam the open world, explore ruins, and complete a variety of side-quests, you'll earn badges. Three badges of one type can be handed in for a mask of that type, and once you've collected a certain number of masks, you're given a quest to choose which mask you want to wear as an adult — essentially giving you an "end game" button that you can press whenever you want. There's no greater plot, no planet-wide threat to take care of, no enemies to fight, and barely any conflict in general — despite being a barren wasteland inhabited by primitive tribes, the world of Sable is mostly safe and pleasant, and you just sort of run around in this neat little sandbox until you've had your fill. Which is fine — not every game needs a capital-P plot, and not every planet needs saving — but Sable doesn't really offer much to make up for the lack of narrative. This is first and foremost what the kids would call a "vibe game", and while the vibes are indeed immaculate (the game looks amazing, the music's great, and the writing is consistently charming), there's very little to it otherwise. The moment-to-moment gameplay is shallow and not particularly fun, there's no satisfying gameplay loop to keep you hooked, puzzles are few and far between and all extremely easy, and the lore and worldbuilding, while ambitious and underpinned by strong visual design, end up feeling irrelevant due to the lack of a real plot. For the first few hours I kept waiting for it to introduce something more, something beyond just riding around on my hover-bike doing inconsequential little side quests, but it never did. Movement also isn't nearly as fun as it should be in a game about exploration. Arguably the main selling feature is that you get to ride around on an awesome hover-bike, and while this does indeed look cool — again, vibes remain immaculate — it's surprisingly dull as a gameplay mechanic. There's no vehicle damage, no fuel meter, no environmental hazards to avoid, and most of the world is made up of of open desert, so riding to a new destination usually just consists of pointing your bike and the right direction and holding R2 for a couple of minutes. Similarly, the climbing mechanic, which allows Sable to scale almost any vertical surface, in practice boils down to pushing up on the left thumbstick until you either reach the top or run out of stamina. Even gliding, a magical ability that allows you to slow your fall, ends up feeling disappointingly mundane and unengaging. Movement in this game is purely functional at the best of times (i.e. when it's not glitching out), but never fun. As a somewhat nit-picky aside, I found exploration and puzzles to be so simple that they ended up undermining the otherwise decent world-building. Right next to the first town area you'll likely come across after leaving the tutorial area, four huge rings are conspicuously sticking out of the sand. The first thought any player will have is to drive through all four rings as quickly as possible, and when you do so — beating an extremely generous timer — an ancient tomb rises from the sands, and you're free to loot the reward inside. The game genuinely acts as though you're the first person ever to do so, even though these rings have supposedly been sitting in clear view of the town for centuries. I fully realize that this is standard video game fare, but the sheer ease with which you discover supposedly long-lost secrets in this game actually devalues those discoveries, and makes it feel like the designers simply didn't put that much thought into their world. Finally, performance, because oof. I want to be lenient here since it's obviously an indie effort, but yeah, this game runs like absolute poo poo on a PS5. Those impressive visuals are a lot less impressive when they're scrolling by at single-digit FPS rates. The game's also riddled with bugs and other QA issues, from horrendous pop-in to camera issues to geometry clipping to widely inconsistent sound volumes. There's a fishing minigame (which is truly one of the most phoned-in implementations of an already stale mechanic I've ever seen) that sometimes just straight up stop working on PS5, as in it stops responding to all inputs, and apparently this has been a known issue for months? Again, I want to give them a pass because it's a small studio doing something ambitious, but over two years after launch, the technical state of this game is still terrible. Overall, I probably wouldn't rate this above a 6/10 even if it had been flawless on a technical level, and with the myriad of glitches and horrible performance that rating drops down to something like a 4/10. Not recommended.
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Jan 23, 2024 20:17
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Beat RE7, game is real shaky during boss fights and in the back half. I'm running out of RE's to play, hopefully Village is good.
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Jan 24, 2024 09:51
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Gaius Marius posted:Beat RE7, game is real shaky during boss fights and in the back half. I'm running out of RE's to play, hopefully Village is good. The village rules. Definitely in top 5 RE's imo.
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Jan 25, 2024 06:28
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Village probably has the most entertaining villains in the series crammed into one game.
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Jan 25, 2024 06:50
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I posted about hi-fi rush when I beat it a few weeks ago. but I'm posting about it again now that I've just platted it. play this loving game. it's so god drat good. an absolute joy.
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Jan 26, 2024 03:28
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Unreal Tournament [GOTY] (1999) I'd left it on the backburner since July last year, but I remembered to get back into things and finish up the SP Tournament mode for the first time since... aw Christ, 2001? 2002?    Surprisingly easy to get to the end of this one, even on Masterful difficulty. The Deathmatch Ladder is just stupidly easy to win, all the way through, so I don't have much to say about that other than "gun go bang". The three Teamgame Ladders aren't so straightforward, but are still simple enough if you tell your team of bots to be aggressive and go for the objectives as soon as the match starts; they'll either succeed whilst you lay waste to the enemy bots, or provide enough of a distraction for you to do things yourself -- just don't have them following you around, because they're pretty poo poo at engaging/disengaging in any way that would make sense. Especially on Assault. Can't say for sure that it's really a thing, but the matches here involving the Skaarj teams certainly seemed more difficult (the Skaarj bots consistently felt like they were more accurate and reacting faster to whatever the hell I was doing compared to the standard assortment of guys and gals) but I could have just been having a few off moments along the way. The 'Challenge' Ladder, featuring all these shiny cyborg-types, was a bit of a wake-up call. Not because of the faster gamespeed, but the much shorter fraglimit (15). You have to be constantly hunting or one of the bots will invariably start dominating with grenade spam or some other poo poo (lmao when it backfires and they eat their own grenades). Other than that, pretty straightforward and the increased speed soon feels normal. Cyborg or not, these bots are just as susceptible to being shredded by flak shells and minigun fire as everything else has been. And then there's the final match, a 1-on-1 against Xan. Hoooooo boy, this garbage again. Xan, as usual, was a horrible, needlessly facehugging, insultingly-accurate piece of poo poo with a fetish for insta-dodging projectiles that aren't flak-based. I think I got pretty loving lucky to one-shot the finale so quickly, I'll admit that much, and I'm just going to say it; Hyperblast is an absolutely awful choice for a 1-on-1 battle. You spend more time racing around looking for the robot bastard than you do actually fighting him, though chances are he's going to head straight for the Shield Belt the moment it respawns. Combine this with the constant risk of  Motherfucker was just delaying the inevitable, and things would have been closer if he wasn't such a relentlessly greedy dickhead. I  In any case, it's amazing not just how well the game holds up almost 25 years after release, but how surprisingly good and enjoyable the single-player portion actually is. Sure it's ultimately a load of glorified fake-multiplayer stuff at its core, but it's presented in such a way that actually feels like a reasonably coherent campaign with some meat to it, mixing up the difficulties, bot teams and behaviours with a pretty drat good assortment of modes to fight through, rather than just being a series of random matches against random assholes, slapped in as some afterthought for Billy-no-Mates or the few 28k modem users left in the world. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Quake III. What a ride though. God I loving love Assault mode.
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Jan 26, 2024 16:02
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Agents of Mayhem (2017) - Played on PC for about 20 hours I tried and hated this game when I first got it years ago, but got a weird hankering to run and jump and shoot in the weird little world that this game is built around. Uninspired. Half baked. Poorly designed. Kinda fun, but not really? This is a game that feels like it changed direction at least once during it's development and couldn't recover or reset it's course in time for it to actually become a good game. It's set up to be a hero shooter with 3 person teams going into an open world with exploration, quests, loot crates, level ups, crafting, random encounters etc. to keep you busy until the content dries up or you drop out. It ends up being a (fairly limited) hero shooter with 3 person teams (NO CO-OP) going into a (small) open world with (collect-a-thon) exploration, (repetitive) quests, (pointless) loot crates, (meaningless) level ups, (meaningless) crafting, (wandering goon) random encounters, (really not much more than that) etc. to keep you busy until the content dries up or you drop out. It just barely offers the bare minimum of what you'd expect a game like this to offer, but without the co-op that would likely give this game at least some fun with friends aspect. They certainly put a lot of effort into the presentation. Overall it's going for a "GI Joe, but M-Rated in Seoul" vibe. It feels like a Saturday Morning Cartoon and it leans into that with animated cutscenes, megalomaniac villains and the playable characters are stereotype caricatures from around the world. Alongside this, the game seems to be pretty much fully voiced by each and every character that you can choose to play with. By this I mean that you could play through every mission in the game and each character would have their own responses to the many in game conversations that happen as you shoot through the missions. Wow! There's just a decent coat of polish over this whole thing. It's not the best looking game, but the art direction is consistent and the sounds are nice. The writing sucks, though. As for gameplay, it's got some decent to good shooting and traversal options. The game gives you some limited skill build choices for customizing how you want to play with each character. But oddly only one gun for each character you can choose from. Sometimes the skills you equip can change how it operates a little, but this kind of game seems built for some amount of Looter Shooter stuff (here it's just skins in the loot crates). But even this aspect of the game that I do enjoy has it's share of weird and terrible design decisions. Namely the way that shooting and traversal intersect. The game gives you a Triple Jump as your main way of moving around the open world and the many, many copy/paste villain lairs that you'll run through. The triple jump feels good and is animated well for each of the characters. There's also even an air dash (on about 2/3 of the cast)! The problem is that your shooting gets interrupted by your jumps. This issue fluctuates from being mildly annoying on some characters to actual frustration with others. For example, Rama, the archer, can't charge her Bow shot without it needing to restart it's pullback every time you jump. Even if you had a shot fully charged up on the ground, jumping would cause that shot to need to charge up again. There's also a character with a minigun that needs to spool up before it can shoot... It's just a wild decision to make in a game seemingly designed specifically for jumping and shooting. The next wild decision was about how this works as a team based game. Before you drop into the open world to tackle a mission, you choose 3 heroes that you'd like to play with. Each of these heroes will be shown jumping into the city from the floating base that is the MAYHEM HQ. Then they sort of dissolve into digital fog and you hit a loading screen. Once you've loaded in, you're just controlling one of them. The other two exist inside that hero like Russian nesting dolls, ready to swap in whenever you want to use their skills or if your current action figure is dying. It honestly feels pretty good while playing in the single-player only world of AOM, but certainly can't be how they intended this game to be played. For instance, you could drop into Seoul with the freeezy Ice Man, Army Lady with an Airstrike and Scary Yakuza Kyodai thinking that you'd be able to use their special abilities in concert with each other. Ice Man makes a huge AOE freeze that locks perps in their place so Army Lady can call down her Airstrike leaving Kyodai to clean up the stragglers. Unfortunately, you'd only sort of get that to work. You just can't really use the combos in the way that you want them to since none of those characters can be out alongside the others. This just leaves the experience feeling kind of empty, effectively only offering you the benefit of not needing to return to base in order to play as another character. There's also some driving around, but it's so lifeless and underutilized that it kind of only exists as a way to move to the next quest indicator. None of the cars feel good, and they all look Bad. It is kind of cute that they gave each hero their own Car Skin. But you can only find those in random loot crates...which are just (rarely) skins, money and crafting resources. Honestly you can just largely ignore money and crafting, no need to get into that other than to say they're both mostly pointless. Despite all of the, I kinda liked the game. I liked it enough to see it through to the end and then uninstall it immediately, anyway. I kept coming back to it for an hour or two at a time over the course of this month and was able to tackle a mission or two each night as I wound down the day. It's thankfully got a pretty light amount of content and you can see pretty much everything you'd want to in about 20 hours. Ultimately, I think my real fascination with this game is similar to a fascination you might feel while watching Waterworld. Just an unfinished and mismanaged mess, but also still kinda fun if you like how it looks and plays.
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Jan 27, 2024 06:26
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30XX  Always feels good to win at this, especially so convincingly, because when it goes wrong it goes really wrong. Was playing co-op with a mate, and for the second time in a row the RNG was well in our favour; by the end of the game we were just brokenly OP with the most ridiculous Aug & Core combinations (lmao I was completely no-effort just Juggernaut-dashing around while also equipped with passive shields, leaving me safe enough to just ignore hazards and smash enemies to bits on contact). Final boss didn't know what loving hit him! He'd do his usual 'move fast across the screen throwing poo poo around' stuff when the fight started, but that's no good when there's a nigh-invulnerable player also rushing around and tearing his hp to loving shreds on contact -- never mind the other dude blasting him into mulch for 400dmg a hit. Ten seconds! It was over before the music even had a chance to get going!
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Jan 27, 2024 22:53
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Finished Brutal Legend past weekend. I finished it in within a day on release(ignoring most of the sidequests), and any replay I tried afterwards always stalled around the time you got into the jungle. I guess I was in the right state of mind. Did a lot of the side quests, got a large number of upgrades, and overall, just had a really good time with it. The main thing that the game has got going is just character. The gameplay is adequate, driving around the large plains feels very good, and I do like the large battle mechanics. But it's its utter love for Heavy Metal and Jack Black that just carries the whole game. I'm not quite into that era of metal(aside from Motorhead), but I easily just get swept away with the sheer enthusiasm that's on display throughout the entire game. All the cameos are generally just a delight and just the sheer outrageousness of the setting that pulled me in. The story definitely throws a lot of references at you that you might not get without doing a number of side quests, and it's especially distracting when Eddie(the main character) starts talking about references where I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about or where he got it from. It definitely feels as if some cutscenes were just rearranged. But none of that really matters, because the game is just really charming in its own way. I was also wondering if anyone has any recommendations for similar games with RTS elements in it, but you can also participate in it? I liked those parts more than I remembered from last time.
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Jan 28, 2024 13:21
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Just finished The Case of the Golden Idol (including both DLCs). It's a mystery-solving game, where each case shows you the scene immediately after a person dies and challenges you to determine the identities of everyone involved as well as the sequence of events that led to the victim's death. The cases can be solved separately from each other, but they are connected by some recurring characters and by the mysterious and valuable golden idol that plays a role in several characters' motivations. For the eleventh and final case, the game sets up a larger mystery whose solution requires you to look over all the previous cases to understand the significance and history of the golden idol, and it pulls it off perfectly. Absolutely incredible finale. There's a sequel coming out this year and I'm buying it on release day.
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Jan 28, 2024 15:33
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Lil Guardsman Take the bureaucracy of Papers Please, combine it with some adventure game style segments indebted to LucasArts classic catalogue, and you get this. The story is the point with this one. None of the puzzles are too terribly difficult, there's a plot derived way to rewind if you screw up, every citizen that you process at the guard shack is fully voice acted, the writing kinda waffles between very insightful and funny, and thinking it is more insightful and funny than it actually is. It's a very corny game. None of the emotional portions of the story really hit for me, but I was highly entertained all the way through it. It does the same thing that Papers Please did, where the orders of your superiors grow increasingly Byzantine and burdensome to complete, but it also gives you tools to use during the screening process that more or less trivialize it. Much like it's adventure game ancestors, it wants some very specific things from you to succeed. Unlike those ancestors, there are a lot of less satisfactory fail States that still let you continue the story. It is, and I mean this as a neutral statement, very much a product of our current political environment, and is a fascinating piece of work, because it very much couldn't have come out any time but now and in any other form than this. I'd recommend it. It's really fascinating. Dunno if I'm going to go back and try to four star all the levels and find all the branches, but I might, and that's more than I can say for most games like this one.
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Jan 28, 2024 17:46
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Curse of the Sea Rats: I had kickstarted this game (because I'm a sucker), and it was fine. It's a competent metroidvania from a small indie studio. The artwork is hand-drawn and beautiful, and there are several, well-done animated cutscenes. However, the gameplay itself is mediocre. The controls felt clunky at times, and the animations would sometimes take too long or start up at the wrong time. There isn't a lot of variety in the enemies, and most of the bosses are easily cheesed (or their patterns are super easy to learn). My biggest gripe is that they turn fast travel off during the end game, so to wrap up any side quests or finish optional bosses, you have to trudge through the entirety of the map to get where you want to go. And they don't really warn you this is going to happen, so I was caught off-guard. I enjoyed it, and if you're looking for another metroidvania to play and have played all the others, this will certainly scratch that itch. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it over the many other stellar examples of the genre. Good-Natured Filth fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jan 28, 2024 |
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Jan 28, 2024 17:51
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unattended spaghetti posted:Lil Guardsman I saw that one come up in the new releases thread and wishlisted it based on the style. Sounds worthwhile overall, good to know.
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Jan 28, 2024 17:57
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Captain Hygiene posted:I saw that one come up in the new releases thread and wishlisted it based on the style. Sounds worthwhile overall, good to know. Yeah just to be clear I'm most critical of stuff I really like. I think it's a great game one other thing though that I forgot to mention, there's no flowchart system for it, and I think that really sucks because it appears that there are a lot of alternate solutions to things and a lot of ways to divert the story. You can't really tell on a first play how significant those branches are so I can't speak to that, but for a game that makes you sit through long conversations, not having that quality of life that I've seen in other visual novel kinda things is a big oversight. Small team though, so eh. It does have level select though so that helps.
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Jan 28, 2024 18:13
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Finally finished Baldurs Gate 3, final save is 102h. Steam says 132.7 hours total. I had to turn the difficulty to story mode because I was loving sick of the combat. I found it just tedious as poo poo. That and the camera were the parts that irritated me most by the end. At various times while playing I thought what it'd be like playing as a diff class, but I doubt I'll do a replay.
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Jan 29, 2024 00:26
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Finished Blood West, which plays a lot like system shock and feels like an indie singleplayer version of hunt showdown in style and setting. lots of stealthing behind swamp monsters with an axe or blasting them in the head with a sharps rifle and shouting BEGONE FROM THIS LAND. it's quite good overall, but the inventory management is a big chore and I think I would have preferred more sparse encounters with fewer resources. After the first few hours you can get away with shooting most enemies without running low on resources, and there's a whole lot of them throughout each chapter, so it kinda loses the tension that made it feel special at the start. I would definitely be interested in a sequel to this.  
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Jan 29, 2024 02:52
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phosdex posted:Finally finished Baldurs Gate 3, final save is 102h. Steam says 132.7 hours total. I had to turn the difficulty to story mode because I was loving sick of the combat. I found it just tedious as poo poo. That and the camera were the parts that irritated me most by the end. At various times while playing I thought what it'd be like playing as a diff class, but I doubt I'll do a replay. That's a shame since you can respec yourself and anyone in your party at almost any point during the game. I still haven't quite finished my first playthrough but I've tried 3 different classes. It helps that you can just spec up to whatever level you're currently at then take advantage of any gear you've put aside in the camp chest, as well as change appearance in the magic mirror. It is the next best thing to starting over again since I don't think you can change anything about your character background.
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Jan 29, 2024 08:44
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Finished Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown I've been a big Prince of Persia fan since the beginning, played pretty much every game in the series outside of some of the more obscure entires like the Wii version of The Forgotten Sands, so it was a bummer that the series pretty much died for nearly 15 years. Ubisoft has had an extremely rough couple of years, so it was a nice surprise when they finally announced a new entry in the series, evidently made by the same team that made Rayman Origins and Legends, and that it actually looked good. And thankfully it IS good! I've seen people hold it up as an early GOTY contender, and while I don't think it is quite that high quality, it is certainly a welcome return for the series, but I think it has a few core issues that keep it from being great. The good:
The bad:
It sounds like I have more complaints than compliments, but I think the core of the game is solid enough to overpower most of its faults. These are just issues that keep the game from being great and instead just being very good. This is the definition of a good 8/10 game for me where a sequel could iron out most of the bigger issues and actually take it to the next level. I'm very happy this game exists, and I mostly really enjoyed it in spite of its issues, and it's definitely one of the better metroidvanias I've played over the past few years. I'm really happy they didn't leave Prince of Persia to die, and this game makes me really want to replay playing Sands of Time, so I hope that remake finally comes out this year despite everything.
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Jan 29, 2024 10:27
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Hakkesshu posted:Finished Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown I just finished it this morning as well, and while it was mostly good the places where it fell short are things I personally find deeply unsatisfying, so it's difficult to give a balanced overview. I think I agree with what you said though. The plot actively drops some answers to questions it made a point of raising (hardly uncommon, but if you're going to treat a bit of information as a big twist reveal maybe follow it up later?), and the difficulty curve is all over the place. Some sections/enemies were punishing in ways that I was worried what they were expecting of me in the future, and those turned out to be peaks only halfway through the game. But not in a way that it felt like mastery, more like "the people who designed this section and the other sections did not have the same idea of the game". One thing I want to shout out: at one point in the game there's a flashback and the game remembers what skin you were wearing at the time. Whoever thought of that, I want them to know it was noticed and appreciated.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:13
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I feel like this barely counts, but I played Final Fantasy VII Remake: Episode INTERmission, which has to be one of the dumbest names for a DLC I've ever seen, and also unfortunately wasn't a very good DLC. I played Remake during the lockdown and enjoyed it quite a bit, but I didn't get a PS5 until recently, so especially with Rebirth coming out next month this seemed like a good time to catch up on what Yuffie was up to. Unfortunately, I honestly feel like I could have just watched the cutscenes on youtube and gotten most of what was good out of it, and one of the top moments in the game was already part of the trailer anyway. I don't remember this being an issue with Remake, but some of the movement stuff in Chapter 1 in particular made me a little motion sick, but the biggest problem is that there just isn't really much there. Overall I'd probably only give this a 5 or a 6 out of 10, both because it's bad value and because it felt a bit like paying for a commercial for the better game I hope Rebirth will be.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:23
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I really want to play Lost Crown after enjoying the demo, but I've been holding off because $50 feels a bit steep for a 2D metroidvania-ish game. It'll be easier to wait a bit if it's solid but has some notable flaws.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:31
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Just finished playing Swordcraft Story II, an old GBA game. Wasn't too bad, fairly repetitive in its mechanics but with a bit more nuance to them than the first Swordcraft Story. The story was pretty goofy, coming off more at times like children fighting than anything of world-ending significance, at multiple points the villain shows up all smug while you're doing stuff and the protag will just be like "Hey go away!" and he'll just leave in a huff. The end of the game picks up a bit more in that regard, but for the most part you're just sort of wandering around getting the game's sword mcguffins, same as the first game more or less (but with way more focus). Quite liked the art of this game, very vibrant and details (except for character portraits), and so far is the only game I've seen that allow you to adjust the tint/brightness based on if you're playing it on a GBA or GBA SP. Just found out there's a Swordcraft Story III, but alas it is stuck in translation limbo.
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Jan 29, 2024 18:30
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Just got the third (of three) endings for The Talos Principle, so I think I can safely say that I've completed the game. I enjoyed the puzzle solving a lot and didn't find it particularly challenging, but by the time I started working on getting the stars in each level I was ready to move on to another game, so I cheated and used a walkthrough to find them. Not particularly interested in hunting down the easter eggs or the remaining trophies, so I think I can call it a wrap. Not really sure what I'm going to play next; I've made some headway into Disco Elysium and played the first mission of Strangers in Paradise: FF Origins, but I want another game I can put podcasts on while I play. Unfortunately DE requires my full attention and SiP won't let me use the PS Spotify app while playing, which is an active turnoff for me. Maybe I'll start another puzzle game next
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Jan 30, 2024 04:46
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Shinji2015 posted:Just got the third (of three) endings for The Talos Principle, so I think I can safely say that I've completed the game. I enjoyed the puzzle solving a lot and didn't find it particularly challenging, but by the time I started working on getting the stars in each level I was ready to move on to another game, so I cheated and used a walkthrough to find them. Not particularly interested in hunting down the easter eggs or the remaining trophies, so I think I can call it a wrap. ...three endings? I didn't ascend, then I did - is the third ending for collecting all the stars? Now I come to think of it, I do remember sealing myself in a stone coffin for one ending, is that the third?
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Jan 30, 2024 12:09
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Desdinova posted:...three endings? It's been a while, but iirc: - ascending without all the stars ("try again"/bad ending) - ascending with all the stars (awakening/good ending) - not ascending and instead going down the basement to become Elohim's little helper (guide/mentor/secret ending) edit: I misremembered, see post below FishMcCool fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 12:34
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FishMcCool posted:It's been a while, but iirc: Minor correction: The stars aren't required for the first two endings; you have the first ending correct, but you get the second ending after climbing to the top of the tower and completing the final segment of puzzles. No need to collect all the stars, but you do have to collect all of the tetrominoes to proceed through the tower. The stars are required for the third ending, however
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Jan 30, 2024 16:45
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Going to playthrough it again for the third ending, refresh my memory while waiting to upgrade my rig to be able to run the sequel. Cheers!
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Jan 31, 2024 11:51
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Desdinova posted:Going to playthrough it again for the third ending, refresh my memory while waiting to upgrade my rig to be able to run the sequel. Cheers! The Road to Gehenna DLC is very good too if you haven't played it before. It has at least one recorder puzzle early on, which is one too many, but otherwise it's a cool set of new puzzles and a funny side story which I assume they connected to the sequel (I haven't played 2 yet).
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Jan 31, 2024 12:05
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