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Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

It has its problems, but, unsurprisingly, everyone blew them out of proportion. I think people were more sore about the VAs being changed (despite the fact that the new guys are perfectly fine and you can use the original voices with SH2 if it really disturbs you that much) than anything, but for what it's worth, I've played both games - original and HD - and never found much to complain about.
They screwed up the lighting and fog, utterly ruining the atmosphere. The HD Collection is garbage, don't get it.

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Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:
King's Field series and From Software's adventure games in general own so hard. I'm gonna edit in an effort post I made about them a while ago:
If you have a PS3, it will play PS1 disks so you can easily get the US KF1 and 2. King's Field: The Ancient City is easy to find but only came out on PS2 so you'd either need an emulator, a PS2 or a backwards compatible PS3.

All of the games in the series are long out of print but still very very cheap to get the actual disks of if you want. But at the same time they're all waaaay out of print in the US and not sold anywhere so, you konw.

It's a seriously great series. People are turned off by the pacing, and they do move really slow but it's great to play From's dungeon crawlers in order and see things gradually evolve, split up into a few franchises in the early PS2/XBox days, and then coalesce back into the ultimate games that are Demon's/Dark Souls.

If it makes any difference, in the US:
KF1: Takes place on one huge island, cool music and stuff, is VERY difficult in the beginning but gets much easier as it goes on. Pretty good translation for early PS1. This came out a little less than a year after the first King's Field game in Japan and is a MASSIVE improvement in every way. That original King's Field in Japan by the way? Fully 3D world before Quake AND before Terminator: Future Shock, sorry PC master race. :)

KF2: A bit more linear, but has larger outdoor areas and bleaker story. Has that same feel as the start of Demon's Souls where you really feel like you start out on the edge of regular human civilization and go further off into more and more ancient ruins. This game is great because it has TONS of secret rooms and little alcoves with various weapons and stuff in it. Also I love a game that starts the game play with a song as forlorn as this game does along with that blood red skybox. Also like Demon's/Dark Souls in that stuff you happen to see in the skybox like big castles/etc. are places you actually end up going to and are all places appropriately.

King's Field: The Ancient City: This one is cool because it gives much better feedback to your attacks and finally has tons of flinching animations, different sound effects for all the weapons and so on. Weirdly chill soundtrack given the very bleak nature of the setting but it works. The coolest thing in the game is the central massive underground tower you return to often. It feels like such an accomplishment every time you unlock another chunk of this or get to descend further into another level of the world. Definitely the inspiration of the Nexus in Demon's Souls. There's a great part where as you descend the tower you get closer to the water line. If you fall you drop quite far and if you scramble back out onto part of the tower in time, you realize you just fell into the second half of the game. :aaaaa: You can still backtrack though no worries, both KF2 and Ancient City have a Lord Vessel-esque set of items you get later on in the game.

You might dig these also:

Shadow Tower and Shadow Tower Abyss:
These are probably the closest pre-Demon's Souls games to Demon's Souls. A first person dungeon crawler where you travel around a staircase to entrances to different worlds. You don't technically level up your stats everything's dependent on your gear which you upgrade with demon's souls. Abyss is amazing because it's the same thing but with firearms and dismemberment also. The original Shadow Tower is a late PS1 game, its graphics are sparser than King's Field but actually hold up really well for PS1 and it did get a US release. Abyss has a good fan translation check it out.

Otogi and Otogi 2:
These are pretty unique in gaming. The combat is almost like Dynasty Warriors at times in that you fight gigantic hordes of monsters that are exploding and flying everywhere every time you attack. You're actually very fragile yourself though, you have to master dodging and timing everything right, and all your weapons have very subtle changes on your attack speed, jumping height. Enemies are weak against attacks that are blunt, slashing, fire, etc. The atmosphere though is literally Dark Souls but with Japanese mythology. REALLY cool soundtracks too.

Finally, everything can be destroyed, like you can hit a living statue enemy so hard that it flies into a column and collapses a building on you and everything else, an enemy can be behind a three foot thick stone wall and you can just smash through it and destroy them in like two seconds any time. It's incredible for the time it came out. The second Otogi is one of the most :black101: games ever made because it has five playable characters including a living tree, a wolf man who dual wields swords and wrist blades, and a woman with a scythe and pet crows that can basically fly. From Software completely knocked these out of the park. They have that same feel of the Souls games where everything is foreboding and stuff WILL kill you in three or four hits, but you feel like a total badass at all times because every time you take any action stuff is shattered and destroyed on a huge scale. OF COURSE they're only available on the original XBox. :(

Eternal Ring:
This one is much more basic than KF or Demon's Souls, but if you dig stuff like Ultima Underworld or Arx Fatalis I would definitely check it out. It's sort of like babby's first From Software game in some ways, but it has a pretty fun fantasy setting and has a decent amount of towns and NPCs to interact with and stuff in it too. The focus of the game is upgrading/making various rings to give you abilities. Pretty good for a launch game but more of a straight fantasy title. It does however scratch the King's Field itch.

Echo Night: These games are raaaad. I don't want to spoil the stories too much, but I'll focus on Echo Night: Beyond on PS2. Basically it takes place in the near future, you're on a passenger space shuttle to the moon to meet your fiance. The ship crashes and you spend the game fixing stuff and navigating the massive wrecked ship trying to figure out what's up. You do this by learning about and helping out the ghosts of everyone who died in the crash. There's no combat, the danger is from malicious ghosts you have to run away from before your heart rate increases so much that you die. It's almost closer to those games like Stanley Parable or Gone Home but with enough actual gaming that it would still easily avoid those "is it a game or not" arguments that the internet loves today. The original on PS1 and Beyond both came out in the US and are pretty


Speaking of King's Field, maybe some music goon can find more information about this:

“Sound Kid’s Corp.” the group responsible for the music in KF2 and our KF1, also did the sound effects work for the racing game Burnout (2001) as well as the music for the Takashi Miike film Full Metal Yakuza (1997). These are their only credits. This creates a weird intersection. Did celebrated composer Chu Ishikawa (Tetsuo the Iron Man etc.) do music for King’s Field? He was a regular composer of Miike's films at the time. If not then who is Sound Kid’s Corp. and what else did the people who were part of the group work on that would make them only use this name for a game from 1994, a movie from 1997, and a game from 2001?

No seriously, as an example this movie Chu Ishikawa scored is from 1989 but its music is literally 90sdungeoncrawler.wav http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z10AlFDQfY

Listen to this track he did for Tokyo Fist in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAQyFq5Xdo8 , slow it down a bit and it sounds like... King's Field 2 from a year earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDapXvnjAhI

I mean he/his group Der Eisenfrost definitely had an influential sound on Japanese game developers. You can really really clearly hear it in most of SNK's stuff in the late eighties and early nineties as an example as well as a lot of early 90s Japanese horror and cyberpunk games like Shin Megami Tensei, X-GIRL, Clock Tower, and of course Silent Hill 1 itself.

AngryRobotsInc posted:

For lovely looking retro games, I don't really think it was meant to be a horror game, so to speak, but LSD: Dream Emulator for the PSX (Japan only) is one of the most unsettling games I've ever played.

I can't really do that great of a job describing it, but it seriously wigs me the hell out with this sense of suspense and dread whenever I play it.

I'm a big fan of this release myself, I think I even "beat" the game as I got one of those looping FMVs that went on for like five minutes straight. To give the game some context, it was actually not a game in and of itself but rather a companion to a book. I forget the name of the person but basically this guy kept a dream journal for ten years and the book is a compilation of his dreams and what he and others think about them, the game is an abstracted compilation of all of his dream experiences thrown together. You can also control where you go to an extent, there's a pattern to what color the screen fades to when you change dreams and you can game this by learning what stuff to bump into, when to run off a ledge, etc.

Also for outdated retro games, I'm surprised at the vibe Shin Megami Tensei 1 still has today. There's an English iOS port of the Japan only GBA port that has a few minor quality of life improvements but the game really is rad and it holds up pretty well. It's also worth playing if you played SMT4/Soul Hackers/Nocturne since, while SMT1 wasn't the first game in the franchise it was definitely the one that set the tone for the series from then on.


Kaboom Dragoon posted:

It has its problems, but, unsurprisingly, everyone blew them out of proportion. I think people were more sore about the VAs being changed (despite the fact that the new guys are perfectly fine and you can use the original voices with SH2 if it really disturbs you that much) than anything, but for what it's worth, I've played both games - original and HD - and never found much to complain about.

The SH2 voices weren't that good though, they were too, uh, meta? Like every line was super weighted to get the ~~~true fans~~~ to nod sagely with each line. SH2's acting is actually pretty good for its intentional awkwardness and offness. The new voice acting tries too hard to be "serious" and just comes off as mediocre to me. That 360 release really was shameful though, that was not blown out of proportion. The back of the game box has shots from the PC version of the game, the initial 360 release literally did not have textures for water and for a lot of the ground tiles as well as tons of sound glitches, it was very very poorly done.

If you played it on PS3, it was much better on there (and all the textures were intact) and they also released a patch a few weeks after it was released that fixed almost all of the issues making it a good release. That 360 version on launch though was abominable and its reputation is not overblown at all. I mean large chunks of SH3 on the 360 had no fog. Remember Konami allowed anyone who bought it to mail them their copy and get any other Konami game they still had in print/in stock rather than even bother spending money to patch it at first. Its status as a trash port is well deserved.

I think they did eventually patch it but it was total garbage for some time and was so bad it made both the 360 AND PS3 versions flop. This was also not far away from Downpour's extremely glitchy PS3 release which, again, while patched like two months later, was almost unplayable in its initial release for many PS3 owners. Not "it locks up now and then" but straight up entire rooms don't load up, you walked through a wall by mistake levels of how was this even released bad.

tldr; If you want to get the HD re-releases get the PS3 version.

Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Jul 13, 2014

Periodiko
Jan 30, 2005
Uh.

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

I played SH2 long after the game had been discussed to death, so I don't really have the same love for it as others. On the other hand, I played SH3 not long after release, and it's somehow become my favourite of the series. I don't know how true that is for everyone, but I can imagine it being the case for a lot of people who have come to the game late.

I love SH3, it's definitely my favorite in the series, and I also came to the games late. The thing about SH3 is it looks incredible, even today, the art design and execution of that design is immaculate. The protagonist is really well realized, she's sympathetic and human and one of the best protagonists in any horror game. She's also a really great throwback to tough "last girl" protagonists in horror games, and weird violent pregnancy imagery associated with the game gives it a really unique feel. 1 and 2 are like spooky, abstract ghost stories, but SH3 has a real grungy, desperate, nasty feel to it that's pretty unique. Stuff like the wall distortions in the otherworld hospital and church are incredible, the game is just amazing to look at.

I think SH3 is also far and away the best playing Silent Hill game. It basically controls and feels like a 3D zelda game with fixed camera angles.

I just adore that game, searching youtube for clips fills me with nostalgia. "Some parts of this game may be considered violent or cruel."

Periodiko fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jul 13, 2014

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Kaboom Dragoon posted:

It has its problems, but, unsurprisingly, everyone blew them out of proportion. I think people were more sore about the VAs being changed (despite the fact that the new guys are perfectly fine and you can use the original voices with SH2 if it really disturbs you that much) than anything, but for what it's worth, I've played both games - original and HD - and never found much to complain about.

There's a pretty in-depth youtube video that goes over how much was really changed. Even if the game was perfectly playable, bottom line is that the sound design was messed up (sound effects were being played on the wrong objects) or textures were swapped around for no reason. Compared to the blowout work that was done for Metal Gear, Ratchet and Clank, Ico, and so on the Silent Hill collection was like one of those turn-of-the-century DVDs where it looks like a VHS master copy was recolored and slapped on a disc with a static menu.

Neo Rasa posted:

Fully 3D world before Quake AND before Terminator: Future Shock, sorry PC master race. :)

It's okay, King's Field owes a lot to Ultima Underworld :smug:

Which actually got a Japanese exclusive PS1 release with fully 3D models.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jul 13, 2014

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

al-azad posted:

Which actually got a Japanese exclusive PS1 release with fully 3D models.

It also got yet another remix of the soundtrack too, pleasant surprise when that one arrived in the mail. Weirdly late port though, not actually coming out til 1997. Japanese audiences lucked out with those ports of all the classic Wizardry games, Ultima installments, they got so much cool stuff there we didn't. I think partly because of how much more gaming was already a major computer thing there in general. So when consoles got really big in the early nineties PC gaming dropped big time there instead of going in a different direction like in the US. All these PC98 devs jumped on them ASAP.

I mean like the PC Engine CD there was especially unprecedented. I mean its library was the equivalent of if say Dragon Age 1/2 came out on the PS4 in Japan only on one disk but with completely redrawn art/everything and a new soundtrack instead of how ports like that are done now. It was also cool to import because a lot of them had some basic English menus or an English language choice like Sorcerianor the Wizardry 3/4 compilation.

I really miss like, 1992 through 1997 of RPG development because the genre hadn't quite homogenized its controls and aesthetics so you got so many crazy settings, systems and soundtracks from both the US and Japan.

I love Underworld and Arx Fatalis, King's Field etc. so much. Shin Megami Tensei too even if that one is grid movement/turn based, I think those are three of the most atmospheric first person series ever made. Like I hate "FPS" usually but I love a focused, well done first person game.

Anyways getting back to horror, I wish there were more moody first person games with that level of atmosphere of KF and such coming out today.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Jimbo Jaggins posted:

Nah it's wank mate. The games not hard.
True. Being able to quit whenever you want without ever having to track back to a save point is worth it all by itself, though. gently caress I hate save points.

Brackhar
Aug 26, 2006

I'll give you a definite maybe.

oriongates posted:

I reeally hated Shattered Memories. After playing through Homecoming and Origins, Shattered Memories is what convinced me to stop buying any more Silent Hill games (at least not until I start hearing some really good reviews or Team Silent gets back together).

Enough people seem to like it thought that I must admit that I may lack objectivity here. I had really high hopes going into Shattered Memories and I was hoping that it would be the game that would revive the series for me. I was really interested to hear about the supposed psychological profiling and the lack of any form of combat. These made the game sound super-appealing and it very quickly became clear that it was nothing at all like what I hoped it would be. Perhaps if it was a standalone horror game or if I had gone into it with a better understanding of what sort of game it actually was I might feel more charitably towards it. As it is the entire experience was just a big, rage-inducing disappointment. The game basically stripped away all the elements that I enjoyed most about Silent Hill and the supposed "this game plays you" aspect was basically non-existent.

I like Shattered Memories, but I do agree that it struggles to maintain the suspension of disbelief for the player. All the profiling stuff was really cool and I liked a lot for subtle touches like the way doors opened and the unreliability of the narrator, but once you process that being threatened in the game is really binary it loses a bunch of its charm.

On another note...



Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 are currently on sale on PSN for $1. Basically they were Capcom's attempt to take the Resident Evil 3 formula and apply them to a game where the environments are full 3D as opposed to painted. They're.. not that good in my opinion, but if you are really jonsing for a RE 1-3 style experience you might find value here.

Brackhar fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jul 13, 2014

Jimbo Jaggins
Jul 19, 2013
I've only played Dino Crisis once. At the time I played it though I was loving stoned as poo poo, I mean, totally out my tree. But, it seemed really short. Now it might not be ridiculously short, but thats how it seemed at the time.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



I felt Dino Crisis was stronger conceptually than Resident Evil. Aside from the hunters, enemies in Resident Evil are more or less pushovers and if you play as Jill (or Claire in the sequel) they give you devastating weapons to just mow the poo poo out of any monster that comes your way.

Every enemies in Dino Crisis is formidable and they give you environmental objects to defeat them. I also like the branching path story which Capcom used a few months later in Resident Evil 3. But the 3D graphics were muddy, everything was real dark, and I don't know who their character designer was but they're designs are horrible. Why does Regina, a special forces soldier, wear a black leotard over underarmor?

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:
Dino Crisis 1 is rad as hell. I like 2 but it's more of a straight action game (though oddly the original has fully 3D environments while the sequel uses pre-rendered backgrounds).

I have to second PC88/98 horror games. That's a huge goldmine of stuff that no one in this hemisphere has really played extensively yet. Though I understand the hesitation. There's a thin line on that system between "game where you see a boob for one screen like 2/3 in" and "game that literally becomes porn from 2/3 of the way in to the end" so it's easy to waste time. I have a complete dump of stuff and been going through them bit by bit and there is definitely some crazy stuff in there. Once you get past the infinite softporn and Ys ripoffs there's a lot of unusually structured quality. It's also made difficult since in the wake of Armitage/Cyber City/Ghost in the Shell there were a ton of cyberpunk games with titles that would make you think they were total trash but are not. Like I still can't believe a game with a title as stupid as "Heart Heat Girls" and such lame character designs is a legit awesome cyberpunk detective game that approaches Snatcher.

One cool one I'm too stupid to recall the name one was a serial killer mystery game where all the crime scenes and victims were digitized photos of people they set up for it instead of the PC98's regular graphics. It was subtly unnerving just based on all the graphics being just a bit higher quality than what's on the back of a milk carton.

Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Jul 13, 2014

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

al-azad posted:

Why does Regina, a special forces soldier, wear a black leotard over underarmor?

Same reason Jill Valentine wore a miniskirt and tube top - because sex appeal. At least they eventually updated her design.

Number Two Stunna
Nov 8, 2009

FUCK
I played through Quake 1 single player recently, and the later episodes are like playing through some terrifying nightmare. The abstractness and malevolence of the level design and aesthetics make the game really unsettling.

Hakkesshu
Nov 4, 2009


Number Two Stunna posted:

I played through Quake 1 single player recently, and the later episodes are like playing through some terrifying nightmare. The abstractness and malevolence of the level design and aesthetics make the game really unsettling.

Yeah, if they ever revisit Quake, I hope they'll try this aesthetic again instead of the Strogg bullshit. Many of those early 3D games don't hold up, but stuff like Quake and Thief totally do on the strength of their weird, abstract atmospheres and excellent sound design.

I actually just picked up a copy of King's Field 2 (US 1). I love the Souls games and I've played a bunch of KF4, but I always thought the early KF games looked way too primitive to be effective. I checked out an LP and found that this totally is not the case, so I'm looking forward to playing that.

Brackhar
Aug 26, 2006

I'll give you a definite maybe.

Hakkesshu posted:


I actually just picked up a copy of King's Field 2 (US 1). I love the Souls games and I've played a bunch of KF4, but I always thought the early KF games looked way too primitive to be effective. I checked out an LP and found that this totally is not the case, so I'm looking forward to playing that.

Where did you find your copy? I was looking online for a good seller just last night.

Mindblast
Jun 28, 2006

Moving at the speed of death.


Hakkesshu posted:

Yeah, if they ever revisit Quake, I hope they'll try this aesthetic again instead of the Strogg bullshit. Many of those early 3D games don't hold up, but stuff like Quake and Thief totally do on the strength of their weird, abstract atmospheres and excellent sound design.

Doom 3's Hell section comes to mind as well. It was way too short in my opinion.

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord

Mindblast posted:

Doom 3's Hell section comes to mind as well. It was way too short in my opinion.
Doom 64 also really has a stronger horror atmosphere than the other games in the series too.

Cream-of-Plenty
Apr 21, 2010

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."
Quake definitely captured an uncomfortable, sinister feeling, thanks in part to its dark, abstract environments and its fantastic ambient music. To this day, when I think of Quake, I picture the long, dark, windowless hallways somewhere deep underground, illuminated by faint, cold blue lights and glowing pools of lava. A glob of living crap lurches around in the shadows while a pudgy ogre drags a bloody chainsaw behind it. A nailgun pickup serves as a trap for a hulking yeti-thing with a huge, toothy grin where its eyes should be. Meanwhile, the music sounds like distant heartbeats and power drills.

Everything about the game is filthy and strange. The enemies are comprised of a whole zoo of bizarre creatures, and a number of the weapons feel like they have more in common with industrial equipment than actual firearms.

It's like "rusty ancient unspeakable monolith (with dried blood): the game".

Lets! Get! Weird!
Aug 18, 2012

Black King Bazinga
Doom 3's hell is far less nightmarish and atmospheric than the hell in the original games.

RightClickSaveAs
Mar 1, 2001

Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...


Doom 3 works better as a horror game than as an FPS, there are definitely a lot of good horror moments. The problem is it gets too tedious, and the scares start to be telegraphed.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

Brackhar posted:

Where did you find your copy? I was looking online for a good seller just last night.

It will be around $35 if you want to get the game complete off Amazon in good shape. It's also available on the Japanese PSN if you can read it/don't mind using a faq. The original Japanese King's Field IS too primitive for most to enjoy now (I still love it because I'm a From Software addict hehee) but KF and KF2 both have that awesome abstract surreal quality shared with DOOM and Quake I. If you just want the disk itself it's much cheaper.

The Ancient City is just awesome, it actually has really nice texture work. They could have made the character models/enemies more detailed by they opted for excellent scenery instead which I think was the right choice. It also has some incredible moments like when you first enter this really beautiful forest area on one side of a mountain after journeying through some really deep dank stuff infested with xenomorphs.

Doom 64 is great but man Quake I caught lightning in a bottle. That game really is sinister in all ways. I love Doom 64's soundtrack though, it's a major part of why the game is so good. Also each track in the game is like seven minutes long which is crazy for game music.

Y'all fans need to get the soundtracks for Quake 64 and Quake II on the N64. They both have completely different soundtracks with a much larger number of songs...done in the same style as Doom 64!!!!!!!

There's very little Chu Ishikawa/Akira Yamaoka styled game music outside of the early nineties so it's a must listen. Quake 64 is a pretty good port in general honestly for the technology and the time, it was impressive.


Doom 3's problem is that there's too many points where you're trapped in a single not big space to fight stuff so it gets old fast. Also they made some VERY good "horror game" type enemies like the cherubs and those short dudes with the long arms and claws that teleport short distances but barely used them. It's interesting when you look at the unused monsters and some of the ones exclusive to Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil I guess they were sort of going for a bird demon motif for everything but then changed their minds to spidery stuff (the redesigned imps and various spider bosses) but then they didn't use arachnids or anything from Doom/Doom 2 even though they at least did concept renders of them.

Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Jul 15, 2014

Hakkesshu
Nov 4, 2009


Brackhar posted:

Where did you find your copy? I was looking online for a good seller just last night.

I was actually lucky that a local retro shop had it in stock for about $20 (I don't know if the PAL version is cheaper, though). I'll have to wait and see if it's in good shape, though.

see you tomorrow
Jun 27, 2009

al-azad posted:

I wish people would put to rest all the Japanese SNES games and start translating some PC-98 stuff because it's a gold mine of untapped potential.

I know Corpse Party and Tokyo Twilight Busters might qualify though I never got far enough to be sure. Any other examples?

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Speaking of Quake, I remember a while ago playing it in some sort of pod; I had never played Quake before, and this was, I think, in the late 90s. Basically this 'pod' had you sit down in a large seat, with movement and action buttons build into the armrests, completely soundproof with surround sound and a screen that basically eclipsed your vision. Fun thing is that this was during a quiet period of the day at the arcade where it was set up, and I guess the attendant didn't care, so my 15 minutes of play eventually turned into an hour or so without any interruption. Pretty freaky. Would loving love that setup with something modern.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

Morpheus posted:

Speaking of Quake, I remember a while ago playing it in some sort of pod; I had never played Quake before, and this was, I think, in the late 90s. Basically this 'pod' had you sit down in a large seat, with movement and action buttons build into the armrests, completely soundproof with surround sound and a screen that basically eclipsed your vision. Fun thing is that this was during a quiet period of the day at the arcade where it was set up, and I guess the attendant didn't care, so my 15 minutes of play eventually turned into an hour or so without any interruption. Pretty freaky. Would loving love that setup with something modern.

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9188 Sounds like one of these things but set up in one of the old Battletech Center cabinets. :D They were designed to be linked together for massive tournaments and such. There was a Quake III and Half-Life 2 ones also. It wasn't in a full pod but I wish a game as :black101: as T-Mek could exist again in such a state.

blackguy32
Oct 1, 2005

Say, do you know how to do the walk?
drat it, I wish Kings Field Ancient City was a PS2 classic. I own it on PS2 and lost the ability to play it once my BC PS3 broke.

Genocyber
Jun 4, 2012

blackguy32 posted:

drat it, I wish Kings Field Ancient City was a PS2 classic. I own it on PS2 and lost the ability to play it once my BC PS3 broke.

If you have a remotely decent computer you can emulate it with PCSX2.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



straight jerkers posted:

I know Corpse Party and Tokyo Twilight Busters might qualify though I never got far enough to be sure. Any other examples?

As I mentioned before there's Cosmology of Kyoto which has dual language settings. There's this Russian website which covers a few of them.

I have a complete NEC-PC, MSX, and Sharp rom set and I'm going through all the games. It's a chore, there's sooooo much porn.

Brackhar
Aug 26, 2006

I'll give you a definite maybe.
Trip report!



I just finished Scratches: The Director's Cut and... I honestly don't get the appeal. The music was pretty nice for setting the mood, but I found the story extremely predictable - so much so I predicted the remaining story beats after 1/3 of the game. The puzzles aren't super well designed either - some of them are intuitive, but others very much fall into the trap of "the designer wants you to solve this puzzle in this explicit way." Worse though, the game does what I generally feel is a big sin in adventure games, where certain interactions will not work simply because it isn't time for them to happen yet. So you'll occasionally find yourself doing exactly the right thing you need to to progress, but when it fails without reinforcement that something *should* happen later you write off the entire interaction.

I like what it's trying to do by using a single consistent setting through the entire game, and maybe that makes it worthwhile for some people, but I can't recommend it as either a horror game or an adventure game.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Really, you predicted the whole thing? That the mask and Robin in the basement are two separate things that aren't connected and the mystery of the house is just a media sensation driven by a mistaken scandal?

I really can't remember much about the puzzles, other than messing around in the greenhouse, just that I didn't find the game particularly difficult because your journal and Arthate's internal monologue make it pretty clear what he wants to be doing at a certain time. I certainly agree with the layout of the puzzles and how frustrating it is to know an object is relevant but not until you're made aware of it but this is a concession the game has to make for its setting. Sometimes it gets tiresome playing the Monkey Island style games where you're kleptomaniac who snatches anything shiny which always comes to use an hour later.

I'd love to see more experimentation with the genre as everyone is still stuck in the Myst days. Amnesia is the big poster child but conflict in any form is kind of antithetical to the adventure game formula. Maybe something like Gone Home but less guided.

Brackhar
Aug 26, 2006

I'll give you a definite maybe.

al-azad posted:

Really, you predicted the whole thing? That the mask and Robin in the basement are two separate things that aren't connected and the mystery of the house is just a media sensation driven by a mistaken scandal?

I guessed that the baby wasn't actually dead and was trapped somewhere below the house after I discovered the walled off nursery. The mask seemed like somewhat like a weird thing anyway that didn't feel connected to the main plot by that point, and it turns out it wasn't? Part of the problem was that the plot of the game shares a lot of similarities to horror movies I've seen before, so it was easy to guess what was going on. The Orphanage in particular struck me as pretty similar. Maybe I was able to guess the film because I saw that recently?

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Hey, fans of Fatal Frame have a new game to look forward to on the Wii U:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1rv4GAZoho

Meowywitch
Jan 14, 2010

Morpheus posted:

Hey, fans of Fatal Frame have a new game to look forward to on the Wii U:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1rv4GAZoho

Will this one also not be localized? :(

Hakkesshu
Nov 4, 2009


Volt Catfish posted:

Will this one also not be localized? :(

I don't think Nintendo can afford to not localize something people are actually interested in on the Wii U, but who the gently caress knows it's Nintendo so maybe it won't come out in Europe or some horseshit like that.

discworld is all I read
Apr 7, 2009

DAIJOUBU!! ... Daijoubu ?? ?

Hakkesshu posted:

I don't think Nintendo can afford to not localize something people are actually interested in on the Wii U, but who the gently caress knows it's Nintendo so maybe it won't come out in Europe or some horseshit like that.
The problem with 4 was not so much that it was too costly to localize, it was more that Tecmo wasn't willing to fix the massive problems with the game. Easy to get crashes, doors loading solid walls instead of rooms blocking progression, and the inability to complete the ghost list were some of the more noticeable issues with the game. Which is a shame cause there is plenty of enjoyment to get out of Fatal Frame 4, but I really don't see Nintendo or Tecmo having too great of a motivation to release FF 5 outside of Japan. Hell, I'm not even sure why Fatal Frame 2 for the Wii got released in PAL but not NTSC markets.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
I really hope it's localized. I played FF4 using that softpatch, or whatever it was, and I get the feeling there's nothing like that for the Wii U.

That said, the game was a bit of a disappointment...the final boss, especially. I never encountered any of the bugs, except for some random slowdown, though.

JordanKai
Aug 19, 2011

Get high and think of me.


Niggurath posted:

doors loading solid walls instead of rooms blocking progression

I'd play a video game adaptation of Grave Encounters.

discworld is all I read
Apr 7, 2009

DAIJOUBU!! ... Daijoubu ?? ?

JordanKai posted:

I'd play a video game adaptation of Grave Encounters.
That does seriously seem like an insanity effect in Eternal Darkness but sadly in Fatal Frame 4 it was just a room not loading properly. Really the only game breaking thing I ran into with the game was if you got into a particular optional ghost fight when you went to continue on with the main story the next in-game cinematic would just lock up, but it could easily be solved by not doing the optional fight. Still a bit annoying though.

Also if it feels like it may at least fit into the horror/thriller genre, but I'm really looking forward to Gods will be watching. It looks like it might have plenty of elements of human horror without just outright being a horror game but that might just be me.

oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


Just finished Machine for Pigs. A fairly strong start but it definitely got a little bit too far up it's own butt storytelling-wise and I think they got a bit too focused on showing off their neat steampunk machines and victoriana and didn't focus enough on making the game anywhere near as scary as the original.

Also, really short.

Mindblast
Jun 28, 2006

Moving at the speed of death.


Yeah it wasn't made by the original developers. It was done by the folks who made Dear Esther.

I've got good hopes for Soma though.

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Brackhar
Aug 26, 2006

I'll give you a definite maybe.
I really liked the story of Machine For Pigs by the end, especially the core conceit. If it was 1899 and you learned about World War 1 from dark magic, what would you do to try and stop it? That being said, it wasn't a great gameplay follow-on to Dark Descent, as they ended up ditching most of the mechanics that made the fear work (inability to stare at monsters, sanity drops in darkness, etc.) While I like the game I think I and most others would have ended up with a much better opinion of the game had it not been in the Amnesia series.

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