@“treefroggy”#p78627 I just played that opening level in 3, it‘s a really weird feeling. He’s not a guy in a power suit?? He‘s just a dude who throws his weight around. All of a sudden he doesn’t know how to pick up baddies? He can‘t even break overhead blocks? It’s extremely videogame-y to shoehorn him into the Metroid structure, and also knowing Captain Syrup will barely be seen for the rest of the series is a major bummer.
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@“treefroggy”#p78589 shadow dragon is ugly as shit
haha yeah, though recently surprised to discover the character portraits were done by Masamune Shirow, wtf
Sounds like it goes without saying but your friend is being a bit fussy about RNG.
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@“treefroggy”#p78589 don’t think I will ever play a modern FE or anything after Sacred Stones
but frog, radiant dawn is after sacred stones :'(
(uglier than the GBA games, certainly, but... but...!)
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
I remember when these were the elusive JP only games I would _maybe_ play through the (still) on-going fan translation but it seemed inconvenient having to wait for new chapters and patch the game every time. Well, I'm glad I waited because these games are absolutely a package and not being able to play the whole thing would be miserable.
The first game is slow and the ending is sort of anticlimactic, but it's to setup the second game and it absolutely pays off. As a package, this is one of the greats for me along with AA3 and AAI2. It's only been out for a year but I'm surprised to not have heard more about it - if you're a fan of the series, this is a must. Also a great starting point for newcomers!
SMB DX is so fun.
It's very pick-up-and-play. and nostalgic, since this was the main version of SMB I had as a kid.
Even though my GBC has a screen that's faded on the edges, it doesn't detract from the experience of SMB at all. So it's the only thing I've been playing on it.
you know the main way the compensated for smaller screen was by making the controls tighter?
I love the SFX they added for mario or luigi's intertial sliding when you change directions. and the fact you can play as luigi through the whole game in singleplayer mode was ahead of it's time.
I beat SMB1 and am on the lost levels. in this version is uses all the same assets (tilesets, physics) of SMB1 so it's playing through the lost levels built out using SMB1 engine. the only things I feel are missing from this experience are the weird tilesets and the ability to boost jump off of enemies. But the fact they removed the jumps that were impossible without luigi is a relief.
I started on the 2nd quest of SMB1 also. And plugging away at challenge mode.
You vs. Boo is HARD.
On my first run of SMB1 I beat every king koopa with fireballs except for world 7. 7-3 is a cheep cheep bridge with constant bombardment of cheep cheeps that are often totally off screen so after like 50 tries I couldn't make it through the stage with fireball power intact......
The game rewards you with gameboy printables for achieving these things. I really miss having a gameboy printer as a kid cause looking at these, especially in the japanese version, really makes me wish I could print out stickers of them. There's some really good ones in this game, like the original japanese nintendo logo from the early 20th century. But I guess anything printed on thermal paper wouldn't last very long anyway.
@“treefroggy”#p78710 SMB DX was the version of SMB I played growing up too! It was very strange playing the original on the NES for the first time and immediately realizing that almost everything I thought I had liked about SMB was unique to SMB DX. For aspiring game developers, it‘s a fantastic case study in adding fun stuff to do in a game that isn’t just playing the actual game.
@“dylanfills”#p32661 Played through it today aaaand well, yeah. Liked the concept, but the story is terrible.
Also, I played Lunacid. I enjoy this game. It's not completed yet, but it feels really nice.
finished the hd version of klonoa 1 last night. real good game. i had the ending spoiled for me in broad strokes but it still took me by surprise at how emotionally brutal it is! thematically it‘s a nice way to round off the gameplay experience - you’ve done your work and interacted with the world as much as you can, so the game sends you off metatextually.
i played it with the pixel filter on, which i thought was extremely beautiful but i wouldn't necessarily recommend - it obscured a lot of collectibles and things like that. i was willing to sacrifice clarity for The Aesthetic but i tend to enjoy making things more difficult for myself. which is also why i tried to 100% the game. (haven't totally done it yet, but i'm pretty close!)
i like how the later levels slowly become less linear. it starts to feel like a bunch of mini zelda dungeons around the midway point, which is pretty impressive - i haven't played another sidescroller that captures that particular sense of space. it really felt like a coherent world instead of a bunch of gamey abstractions.
I wrapped up two games this weekend: Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age and Yurukill: The Calumination games
I don't have much to add to all the good things that have been said about FFXII lately; they're all true. The scope is astounding and the party is one you want to live with -- one impressive thing is how it takes archetypes that can easily go wrong, like Balthier's cocky rogue or Larsa's idealistic youth, and makes them wholly likeable. Because it's easier to complain, I'll say that the last leg of the game was more than a bit too much; I suppose the intent was to make the final stretch of your journey feel like a massive undertaking, but I didn't find much joy in the obtuse, sprawling, cruel, Phantasy Star-esque final dungeons. So much of the joy of the game was journeying between manageable dungeons and villages, taking in the open spaces between to enjoy all of the hunts and sidequests, and the last 10 hours or so just halts that to stick you in perpetual dungeon hell. I don't think I could have managed finishing the game circa 2006 if I didn't have a real thicc strategy guide, though I did find a unique enjoyment in navigating multiple sources of flawed information (the Eurogamer guide is overall the best, but it flat out gets directions and things wrong sometimes, or tells you to "go back the way you came" in a maze of 1,000 rooms), piecing together maps and charts to find my way. It felt quaint.
Vayne was also a bit of a letdown, as he had such a fascinating start, but then seemed to be largely forgotten till he ends up as Final Fantasy's own Arkham Steroid Joker with his cheeks out. Buff Tom Hiddleston is not very high in the Final Fantasy final boss rankings, though I understand thematically that the game is more about the foibles of human power than it is about killing gods and such. And that's one very strong part of what makes it, overall, an experience that I'm already fond of.
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I've talked a lot about Yurukill, so briefly I will say that it's more of a 6 than a sought-after 7. I will admit that the central gimmick of smashing an STG into a visual novel straight-up carried it for me. The VN itself was pure fast food; it was smoothly written in that the dialogue was polished and goes down real easy, but nutritionally poor in that the actual mechanics of the narrative are pretty bad. It falls victim to a lot of bad Japanese video game and anime writing, with plenty of handwaving "we just said it, therefore it is so" situations and a lot of "_because it's my dream_!" nonsense. Oh, and the puzzles are astoundingly elementary; even so, the characters will often solve them for you. Until the final chapter, in which it commits the most unforgiveable sin imaginable, which is including not one, but _two_ sliding picture puzzles in a single chapter. If you put a sliding picture puzzle in your game, you should go to jail immediately. That said, the style is there, the characters have lots of dumb charm, the voice acting is great, and the G.rev-developed shmup sandwiched in there -- which eventually opens up as a pretty robust 7-stage standalone STG with four unique characters/ships -- is pretty dang good! It's an understandable shame that lots of STG fans won't be able to stomach the VN (or the price) to get there. The strange part is, for all of my recognizing its flaws here, this'll likely be one of the most memorable games of the year for me, down to it just being so conceptually interesting.
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Finally, still working my way through Klonoa 2 in delight. I wake up every morning and my
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@“tokucowboy”#p78773 Vayne was also a bit of a letdown, as he had such a fascinating start, but then seemed to be largely forgotten till he ends up as Final Fantasy’s own Arkham Steroid Joker with his cheeks out.
Maybe a tangent here, but I think my greatest pet peeve/letdown about a lot of RPGs I've played over the years is that, compared with how many of them have one, few RPGs really solidly deliver from a narrative perspective on having an ensemble cast. I definitely also felt this way strongly about _Final Fantasy XII._
I feel like I have played too many RPGs where, as a consequence of, perhaps among many things, the game not being necessarily able to predict which party members the player will carry around with them in the magic pocket inside of the main character, and also due to how the story otherwise sets up inactive party members as being physically apart from where the player character is, the role of party members gets kind of reduced to delivering commentary on what is currently happening but in a way that is inconsequential by design. It can feel like emotional whiplash sometimes when you feel excited in the process of meeting a new party member and seeing how and why they join the party so to speak, but then after that their personality becomes dampened since they can't have too much of an issue with further narrative developments even if it'd be consistent with their character, and their active role in what is going on in the plot seems to take a backseat, 'cause you need them to swing a sword, you don't need them to still exercise agency. In some games you feel lucky getting some kind of sidequest near the end to resolve their individual subplots.
...Hm, although, usually I'm the complete opposite about this kind of thing, but right now all I feel I can really think of are counterexamples of games I love because of how colorfully characterized but still thoroughly integrated each playable character is into the narrative. Speaking of _Final Fantasy,_ this is a huge reason why I love _Final Fantasy X_ so much for instance, which is maybe part of why I felt so let down by _FFXII_. I feel that the entire cast in _FFX_ is actively engaged in the central narrative, and they all have their own personal and unique relationships, struggles, and resolutions with the central narrative. Especially with regards to individual agency of the central cast, I feel _FFX_ does a wonderful job of continually letting each individual character communicate why they are choosing to do what they do, and gives each of them a meaningful role in the narrative too. As such, even when they individually represent a significant challenge to something that's going on in the central narrative, their conflict and resolution with what happened makes their continual involvement in the narrative feel fully realized.
Arggggfhhhhh I’m at a baseball game and switched ROMs on my gbc and it didn’t rewrite my SMBDX save so I lost all progress from this week which was like 3 games of content plus challenges. It’s probably my SD card but the frequency that this happens to me across different flash carts is terrible lol.
I was close to 100%’ing I guess so I’ll just download a 100% save and finish playing the stages I didn’t do yet. 
once I see the credits it’s done.
But damn y’all, all that aside, SMB DX is a killer app for a stock gameboy color. Instant gratification, always having some sort of a challenge waiting for you.
Physics and control feeling in this version is so beautiful. It’s gonna be trippy to play the original 4:3 version and see the whole screen lol.
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@“tokucowboy”#p78773 I’ve talked a lot about Yurukill, so briefly I will say that it’s more of a 6 than a sought-after 7.
That's slightly sad to hear, but I still plan on checking it out for myself soon-ish. I'd intended to grab it upon launch after trying the demo, but I've opened the bag on a few games currently and I really should eat them up before they go stale (as is far too often the case for me).
I used MiSTer‘s cheat menu to do the 100 Super Jumps challenge in Mario RPG and I’m not ashamed
For my hubris I now have a monstrously overpowered Mario who can deal about half a typical late game boss's HP with one basic attack and is immune to all elemental damage. I am become Mario
@“treefroggy”#p78787 physics and handling are definitely better in DX, but I do find the crazy amount of momentum Mario has in the original kind of endearing! It's very strange coming to it from the later much tighter 2D Marios
I beat Triangle Strategy last week and, man, that game is certainly a game. I guess it‘s okay?
It simplifies things in a productive way, but I think the story is mostly a bit too thin on characterization and the combat is not really more interesting than the 25 year old game it’s clearly meant to remind you of. Also, hit an absurd difficulty spike at the very end, which I found incredibly annoying.
Started playing Final Fantasy Tactics for the first time in decades last week but my dad had a stroke and I seem to have made some wildly bad choices in the first five hours that I honestly can‘t account for (feels like I was playing while asleep or something), so I’m starting it over again tonight.
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@“Funbil”#p63984 If a new Pocky and Rocky wasn’t coming out
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@“edward”#p78799 hope your dad's okay
@“saddleblasters”#p78795 Since smb dx became the default smb in my brain as a child I’m now realizing, it is kind of painful not having the momentum slide SFX when you change directions in vanilla version. It’s just so adorable.
It’s like smeeep, swoooce, slooop, yaknow?
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the stuff SMB DX does could only have been done on a portable in 1999. The printer and text input features are so “palm pilot” like look at me USING THE ACTUAL CALENDAR in this game. They wouldn’t do that on a console version necessarily.
But they still do stuff like this, like the game & watch that plays Mario and Zelda… only the ports have way less work put into them, rofl
@“whatsarobot”#p78829
Seems to be doing as well as he can be, all things considered. No paralysis or disability, but his life is very much changed by the stroke.
@“edward”#p78871 I‘m sorry to hear this has happened. I feel as though clicking “like” on a post doesn’t really convey an accurate descriptor.
I‘m glad to hear that he’s doing well @“edward”#p78871. Events like that are truly life changing but it sounds like he has a good support network to help him move onwards.