Imagining retirement homes replacing bingo with smash bros random stage all items on in the near future
@“Karasu”#p84548 the beginning of sf4 and especially the lower ranks were just littered with Ken's. Not surprising especially with invincible shoryukens. So I definitely feel your pain here.
Okay, so, EDF6 is doing some weird (for them at least) storytelling and game structure. Going to spoiler it because when it happened my jaw fell open and if anyone is going to play it (and I assume everyone is as EDF games are the best games ever made) I'd hate to spoil it for them.
>!So, you play a few missions in a ruined city and since it is in Japanese, I assume it is a direct continuation of EDF5. But then you get to an overwhelmingly difficult mission that features some kind of angelic god alien ship. Fighting the ship seems to trigger some kind of apocalypse and a screen comes up that says "Earth Defense Forces 6 begins now" and it flashes back to a not ruined city and you do a some more missions. And then it cuts forward to the very first tutorial mission again. I should say now that EDF games are composed of a series of numbered missions that you play through in order. The pacing on these is often (to quote the podcast) virtuosic. So when you go back to the tutorial mission, you do not replay mission 1, it is numbered as a new mission. They cut it short to skip over some of the tutorial. Then you replay a bunch of the earlier missions (again, newly numbered missions) but they are different with new enemies and different enemy placements. And they give way to new missions in the ruined city where you get introduced to a new enemy type that has a very impressive/goofy use of physics animation. And you play a couple of these missions before fighting the angelic god alien ship again. The apocalypse happens again and this time a screen comes up that says "Earth Defense Forces 7 begins now". Using google translate on the other text on this screen, I think you are stuck in some kind of time loop where you are trying to find a way to destroy the god alien ship without triggering the apocalypse. This is all awesome and I love that they're doing something different and weird!<
I have also been playing a debilitating amount of Splatoon 3 and it rules. My win/loss ratio online is Not Good but I'm having fun splatting. I am really enjoying the single player this time after not liking the previous two. I found the first two campaigns were like playing through a design doc. Stand here and shoot this to solve this thing in this way. Often times I found myself in a situation where I could tell what I needed to do but I was having to deal with executing the puzzle solution while enemies shoot at me and the ground which is giving me damage over time and the terrain is changing and good lord. The S3 campaign is much more about fun little challenges. I love it and I love that I'm surprised by how much I love it.
i‘m into the third ||section??|| of Inscryption. i like it a lot, not so much for its vibe and atmosphere (which starts out excellent, then ||moves into a whole other thing i like less and less tbh||), but really just for its constant mixing up of the rules. it’s a bit JRPG i suppose, certain fights will just break the assumed rules of engagement and you have to work around it, and it keeps surprising me with its mechanics.
||wish it were on switch tho||
@“captain”#p84503 yeah seeing Sephiroth show up after being beaten more soundly than any other villain in the series* (like, >!returned the lifestream before Cloud's very eyes!<) it really ruins the finality of that final battle for me.
I mean he dies looking like this:
>![upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/WVUh8zt.jpeg]!<
*[size=9]I might be wrong though??
Hey, I bought a second-hand XBox Series X from a mate I knew for a long while, and while I‘m playing Tunic, this is going to be a elongation of the "I’ve never owned an XBox before". Is there anything on the XBox Series that is worth a while? I guess Halo Infinite may be one of the cases, and I bought the console also because it works as a gigantic emulator, but I'm open to recommendations or even to open a new thread.
Been playing a smattering of 3DS stuff lately
Soul Hackers: I've played this before but revisiting it since 2 came out, it's great. 3DS version has some nice difficulty hacks to make it more breezy to get through. Just a great SMT time.
Beyond the Labyrinth(Labyrinth no Kanata): This is another first person dungeon crawler, developed by tri-Ace. It has a neat set up where you're playing an online game with some people and then it transitions into a mysterious labyrinth and you can't tell if it's real...or still a game!!! The gameplay is a rock-paper-scissors system where you're matching attack types to enemy types and it has a Bravely-like charge mechanic where you can make attacks more powerful at the cost of taking less turns in battle. It has a pretty good visual mood but I can't shake the feeling it'll just be a long, samey slog. This is a fan translation also which is what motivated me to try it.
EX Troopers: I'm having a really good time with this! It's like military academy Lost Planet 1 almost. The gameplay is really fast, and it feels really satisfying to string together good sequences of boosting, shooting, and target switching. An extremely video game feeling video game. This is also a fan translation and it's terrible, the person who did it put a disclaimer at the top that English is both not their first language and they used google translate for all of it. It's okay enough to get the point usually, all of the characters are pretty basic archetypes typical of modern day anime stuff. Really fun though!
Harvest Moon A New Beginning: This is the last one developed by Marvelous before the weird rights issues and the name changed to Story of Seasons in the west. Pretty early but it seems solid, the main hook in this one is that the town you move to is basically empty and you need to build it up so there's a town builder focus to it in addition to the farming. I love town building so that's appealing but I think a side effect of that is that the early game is super option limited, you basically rely on foraging to make money and you can only spend that money on seeds. Also means that character interaction is limited as well because the town only has like 3 old people living in it when you start.
Liberation Maiden: The set up for this is hilarious and I love the style but these 3DS control schemes where you hold the system with one hand to operate the stick while using the stylus in the other hand, like Kid Icarus Uprising, just instantly make my hand cramp so I'm not sure if it's physically possible for me to continue playing this one.
Aero Porter: Yoot Saito's Guild01 game. It's an airport luggage puzzle/twitch management game. I like the idea but I find it kinda tough and dry.
@“connrrr”#p84661 It‘s not the idea of his persisting (via the Lifestream, spiritually, which he already does in-game (as well as through Hojo’s experiments)) that bothered me, just the specific way they chose to show it. Like you said, yeah, ||he got absolutely wasted at the end of the game! So why does it seem not only like nothing happened, but that he‘s even less of a transformed weirdo than before? Then again, maybe what bothers me is the movie’s making literal of what within the game was necessarily more abstract: swinging swords at Safer Sephiroth in order to defeat him, all in more tangibly animated detail, would probably seem wrong to me too.||
@“sabertoothalex”#p84756 EX Troopers rules! I played the PS3 version and it is super fun!
@“xhekros”#p84748 dang this is almost worth a thread on its own — with backwards compatibility you have access to some great stuff from the 360.
I’ll just get it out of the way and be the one to suggest: Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon.
@“xhekros”#p84748 Metal Gear Rising plays really well in back compat. Stranger of Paradise plays best on one X among consoles, but the series X still ran all right I thought. Also, you got: Control Ultimate, DMC5 SE.
Yeah, Splatoon 3 is siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiccccck. Carrying on the senior citizen theme, another thing that makes me feel old about it is that so much of the gamer discourse seems to be “this should have been a DLC/update.” Like, what's wrong with you? There's so much stuff in this game! Is this what you expect for every DLC or update? Do you just want developers to die?
Whatever. It's a special thing, I think, largely because it marries that uber-refined iterate-on-a-concept-to-its-absolute-max thing that Nintendo's internal teams do so well while pairing it with an aesthetic package that is so absolutely loud and fresh and confidently, authentically cool (I was looking at Splatoon 1 footage expecting it to be dated; it's not). You can tell the pop art/hype beast/streetwear/throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-make-it-art method (recently seen stages that are just decorated with solid color neon price tags, like you see at a convenience store, it's great) comes from a real place. It's easy to say "Sega vibes," but even that I think is a disservice at the level at which we're operating here. So much of what keeps me coming back is the abundance of customizable stuff to collect (clothes, stickers, cards, locker decor, stamps and so on); it's extra appealing to collect stuff when that stuff is curated by a group of people who clearly have incredibly interesting taste in stuff. The single-player is visually strange and unique in a way that I had hoped more video games would be before so many studios got into Sad Dads, and the vestiges of the Miiverse among the immaculate busy vibes of the plaza and the tabletop card game are also highlights
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/2PLWC8g.jpeg]
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I love to look at this thing. I'm also not very good, but it's one of the few online games I can hold my own in because I've been playing since Splatoon 1 and we're at the very beginning of a big new competitive game here (also, outside of ranked, the design is such that you can always contribute, which is nice). If I take an extended break (which I will), I will be absolute toast when I come back
@“sabertoothalex”#p84756 i love all the games you mentioned here (except the Harvest Moon, which i haven't played), but i love Aero Porter the most. it is tough, and dry, but it gets me into a real flow state.
anyway, always nice to see some 3DS appreciation around here.
i'm still playing shining force 2. i just removed taya from my party and put in elric because i wanna see what the little forest dude with a bow looks like shooting the Great Shot weapon which makes a giant blue explosion
update it made several small orange explosions. still looked cool
@“tapevulture”#p84805
>
i wanna see what the little forest dude with a bow looks like shooting the Great Shot weapon which makes a giant blue explosion
i don't know much about Shining Force 2, but this sentence reads to me like an exciting piece of poetry. i read it several times, and enjoyed it more each time.
>
could it be that i‘m a poet
and didn’t know it
snappin my fingers over here
@“rejj”#p84780 Both recs were the first I marked as “to buy”.
Glad to see a nice fellow with good taste, sir.
Recently finished up Eastward and I‘ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Perfectly executed visual style. There’s so much gorgeous pixel art in that game. Tons of expressive little animations. It's wonderful. Music is great as well.
Have seen a lot of the more negative reviews out there focusing on the story, but I found it really moving. Saw a lot of complaints about it "not explaining things" but there's a lot of stuff that's missable. You're really encouraged to explore and man there's just so much to see when you do. Loved it.
I checked out the Half Life 2 VR Mod today and hoo boy is it a mixed bag. I have a shitload of nostalgia for this game, so there‘s a remembrance palpatation in my chest every time I look at those skyboxes baby. but it sure is a doozy to float around at Gordon Freeman’s super sonic running speed. I consider myself to have my VR legs- I could play Boneworks for thirty whole minutes before getting a headache. but MAN, it‘s just a weird feeling that really disrupts your vestibular situation.
I don’t know if I'll do a complete run through this way, but the highs are so rad that it makes me want to power through the discomfort. really highlights what lengths Valve went to to remove any and all major sources of discomfort in Half Life Alyx (and even that game can be overwhelming for a lot of folks)
but hey, at the end of the day it's still half life 2 baby