@beets Sorry, I meant I may skip [past Zero Mission] to Super (which I have already (on Wii)) if I cannot find [my DS charger]. I appreciate the advice, though. :)
@Funbil I second tomjonjon‘s recommendation to power through, it’s worth finishing. Maridia is certainly the most confusing of Super Metroid‘s areas to navigate, so you don’t need to worry about running into more of whatever friction you experienced there.
I 1cc'd GG Aleste this morning. I finished with 9+ lives.
GG Aleste is much easier than GG Aleste 2.
I have no idea what my final score was.
If you die, it goes to a screen with your score that you have to press a button to leave.
If you win, it flashes your final score for a few seconds in the middle of the ending cutscene and then it's gone.
I'm a little bit disappointed with that, but
I like GG Aleste.
The mechanics are simple.
It doesn't have any system where you can take a hit like some Compile shooters do.
One hit kills you, but extends are plentiful.
It doesn't even have any bombs.
You have one button that shoots both your main and secondary gun.
You can choose your secondary gun by getting the lettered green powerups, and level up both guns a few levels.
That's it!
It is simple and fun.
It had some good surprises.
|| I was delighted when my gun which I had thought was fully upgraded got it's true final upgrade in the second bonus stage. ||
|| It was neat when one boss escaped into the background. ||
I liked the stages, but I didn't like the bosses, they all _felt_ like they were just walls of guns.
The stages had good pacing and some interesting backgrounds.
I like the weapon variety. W and H seem especially fun, but there are lots of good choices.
One boss shoots green bullets that you can cancel. I'm not sure if that was the only place with bullet cancelling or if it was just the only place I noticed it. It was interesting to see that mechanic lightly touched on in this game, since it becomes central to the sequel.
I don't like this anywhere near as much as I like GG Aleste 2 or MUSHA, but I had a good time with it.
Having now 1cc'd GG Aleste and GG Aleste 2, I think I want to try for MUSHA next.
I'm having a lot of fun with Compile's shooters.
Have been able to make good headway on my suikoden II (and series) playthrough. I gotta say it drags a bit more than I remember, a product I think of the school section doldrums and trying to recruit all 108 people. That second issue is of course optional, but I’m noticing the game running at a few different speeds at once (urgent war plot vs hanging out in castle vs recruiting people) and not enjoying the dynamics quite as much as I once did. Find myself really looking forward to III. Might swap II out for III in my bgoat list. Not posting this in the suikoden thread proper where t*pevulture would see this betrayal
@yeso (sirens begin blaring in my bunker)
slowest section for me in the game is the whole two river bit
first I’m chasing the guy who stole my wallet, then I’m stuck at a school for several days, then I have to deal with hix and tengaar being codependent, then I have to go talk to some weirdly rude knights…
@yeso let us chat after you finish. i replayed about a year ago so would like to compare notes.
i plan to play III again eventually. trying to think through the best way to do that
@treefroggy This really resonates with me, because Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon for the N64 was also my introduction to Japanese absurdism, circa 1997 when I was about 12 years old. One of those trajectory-changing media experiences in the pre-always-online age for me & my little friend community. You‘ve reminded me once again that I really need to get to Goemon’s Great Adventure someday.
Also, I‘d like to chime in on all the Picross talk that I’ve been pecking away at Picross 3D for the DS while lying in bed & the mascot character is a little piece of cubist art & you can change the music to rain sounds so I'm pretty happy with it.
And I‘ve been spending some time with the apparently divisive Mario Golf: Super Rush on Switch, too. I think I’m landing on the positive side of that division. The focus on speed golf & cross-country golf (wherein you have a limited amount of strokes to sink a certain number of shots on an open map) – both of which require you to run to where your ball lands rather than taking a turn-based approach – is pretty weird, but it‘s also impressive & Camelot commits to it. It kind of turns the game into miniature open-world golf. I’m reminded of Mario Kart: Double Dash in that this game says, “hey, this is the weird thing we‘re doing for this one, & we’re all-in on it, hope you like it.” Except unlike DD, there's still just a regular-assed Mario Golf game available in there, too.
What if @esper made up a cut of an episode of the podcast but with the Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon live studio audience track added? Who else thinks they would be powerless against it. I fear I've been pavlovian conditioned to find something funny if I hear that laugh track
I hear this music and I'm just ready to laugh
https://youtu.be/CfUsxyP6sfU
This is my main mode of playing Picross, btw.
It is a shame that we never got another Picross 3D. The feeling of holding down the stylus to drill through a whole row of cubes is just so satisfying.
@rejj There's a sequel on the 3DS.
I quite liked picross 3D but its definitely the most stressful picross game for me because of the timed levels. I really liked messing around with the puzzle creator though.
@Gaagaagiins this isn‘t super relevant to the conversation but why not post it here: I always think about doing goofy fun stuff like that! the things standing in the way are: i don’t want to interrupt the flow of the show too much, which I describe as “extremely hangoutable” and also, I only have about one day to actually sit down and edit the whole darn thing. the family feud bit in the last episode is probably as involved as anything would get. maybe for a patreon bonus someday, though!!
@esper I know it's been said before but I always get a laugh out of hearing your tangible presence on the show when you find a place to sneak some editorial voice foley work in. Whether you find more places to do that or not this listener trusts your judgement.
Oh by the way, before I forget to mention again, remember… that thing… we once talked about? Well… the eagle has left the nest… communique over and out metalgearsolid_gameover.wav
||For anyone else reading this, and I bet a lot of you heard it too, there used to be this weird squeaking sound that ended up in between Alex speaking for a while, esper did some excellent audio engineering detective work and fixed it||
I put universal paperclips in my top ten list, and then I wondered, is it REALLY as good as I remember? specifically I worried that the game is too academic or is interested in advancing a thesis instead of being played. But I just replayed it and I can confirm it is not out of place sharing a list with dmc v and outrun.
first of all, I think a clicker/idle game probably does belong on any videogame top ten list. at least one videogame-quality-yardstick that you can find at the gamer lowe's is how good is the experience of playing the game? another one is how much agency does the game afford the player, and of what kind? while playing a clicker you can do literally anything you want. You can make a quiche, you can go to the beach, you can meet someone visiting from another country. This clearly maxes out both yardsticks.
also, mashing a button is fun! I experimented a bit to find just the right ways of holding my laptop to maximize, respectively, my absolute peak clicks per second or my ability to click for a sustained period of time. (are you nuking the mouse or laying down suppressing fire?) This game makes me think about my posture the way fighting games do. if the mobile port of this game were any good I bet I could noticeably improve my posture just by playing this game while standing in line at the grocery store.
the whole shtick of universal paperclips is piling on resources of increasing abstraction that limit or drive the growth of your other resources. so, for example, you can run tournaments of 2x2 matrix form games for yomi in order to improve your investment strategies for $$ in order to buy the most expensive projects in order to improve your paperclip factories. each of these subsystems is designed such that you can leave it idling when your attention is somewhere else (irl or just on another part of the game) but you can also play it as a little minigame when you want to squeeze some extra pulp into your juice: for example, there's a project that lets you automatically run the tournaments, but you can get more yomi/tournament if you look at the payoff matrix and back the strategy that is likely to win that particular game (if you've played you'll know what I mean). When yomi is the place where your machine is bottlenecking, it's worth it to start paying attention to that! Over the course of a game, the location of this high-pressure bottleneck will move all around your system, lingering on each subsystem long enough to show you where the minigame is at and how to beat it.
at the end of the game I remembered there was a secret limerick project that unlocks when your Creativity is high enough. I had spent almost all my Creativity, and my engine was about to || convert the entire universe into paperclips ||, triggering the endgame. The thing I could do to generate Creativity more quickly was to buy more processors with the gifts from my swarm. each processor increases the rate of Creativity production. my swarm was at this point so huge and multiplying so quickly that I was receiving gifts faster than I could use them to buy processors, so the limiting factor here was how quickly I could click "+1 processor". here at the endgame, after I had fully automated my paperclip production, Universal Paperclips threw an optional hidden boss at me that required me to return to the verb I began the game with, namely clicking as fast as I can (only this time on one of the resources highest in abstraction from actual paperclip production). that's videogames as hell.
I love this game but otherwise haven't played many cookie clicker clones. what are the other good/interesting/joyful ones?
candy box, and if you liked that one, the sequel is bigger and better.
You‘re making me wish I’d put A Dark Room on my list.
Prestige Tree is one of the better ones despite being obtusely abstracted right from the very beginning.
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/z9IslbA.png]
Well, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin (天穂のサクナヒメ) was on sale on the Switch e-shop, which I‘d never seen before, and I’ve been hemming and hawing long enough (more than long enough) – plus my sister put it in my mind that I might want to have a fun new video game lined up for post-Covid vaccine delirium – so I decided to finally give it a go.
Sakuna is a wonderful experience, and a delightfully competent game! The combat mechanics are simple, but tight and rewarding, and you can easily execute as many air combos as you like. I wish the multi-hit combos felt a little more smooth and generous, but messing around with Sakuna's raiment provides good compensation.
The rice farming simulation is unexpectedly in-depth, requiring you to meticulously plan and monitor every aspect of the experience, from actually planting the seeds in the ground individually (you're graded on how far apart they're placed, and getting them in a straight line is harder than you might expect) to keeping an eye on the level of the water (it should go up to your ankles) to plucking away pests like snails and spiders.
What's most surprising for me is that the characters and story are so charming and endearing, and the opening moments of the game are presented with an impressive cinematic flair.
Also, if you're me, this will be appealing (and I am, so it is): I lived in the mountains of Kochi prefecture for three years, in a rice-farming town with fewer than 3,000 people. So for about half the year, I fell asleep to the sound of millions of little frogs chirruping. Sakuna captures that gorgeous experience and combines it with rainfall that sounds real, and misty mountains in the distance. It simultaneously captures the feeling of living somewhere that remote and breathtakingly beautiful, _and_ reminds me of how fortunate I was to have had that opportunity.
@baftaboo Universal Paperclips is my fav clicker. I even bought a silent mouse for it! It was on my top ten list at first but got bumped regrettably. Game mechanic is very surprising with tons of twists. I love how it has like 5 clickers worth of mechanics. Endless clickers gets so dreadfully tedious and pointless but these clickers with endings are so satisfying when the numbers fly exponentially towards the end.
Have you tried playing with mouse and keyboard like speedrunners? You can mash on mouse while holding enter key on keyboard to see numbers really fly! I like to just click and hold on a button and hold enter key for more chill time. Super satisfying for Quantum Computing.
I only played prototype version of Spaceplan but it's pretty fun.
@KennyL oh man, I didn't know that could be done! gotta remember that for my next playthrough…
I recently nabbed Densha De Go!! Hashirou Yamanote-sen and I get it now. I get why this game is so good. It's such a chill game to sit with once you get into the groove of managing your speed limits and learning how to coast into a station while attempting to smooth break. I wish the station jingles were there, but everything else is making me yearn for another trip to Japan with the automated arrival announcements and beeping for the doors closing.
Because of Hashirou Yamanote-sen, I started lightly looking into the earlier games in the series and it was such a significantly rougher experience. Not surprising, but the first two games definitely don't hold your hand as much as this one. Really interested in seeing what 3 and Final are like on the PS2. I'm definitely getting the controller that was just announced for Hashirou Yamanote-sen.
Also started playing Alex Kidd DX and got some mixed thoughts. On the one hand, the extra follow through animations for Alex make things easier for me to judge movement-wise, but some of the updated art actually makes it harder to see enemies or enemy attacks. Parts of some levels also blend too much into the background making some things a little confusing.
I also see what they're going with on the music, very Dragon's Trap remake feeling. It's not bad, and it worked for Dragon's Trap, but definitely lost a lot of punch with its liberal use of soft strings. The combo of it and the updated SFX kind give it an early Mobile Game feel and it really bugs me. Nice to be able to swap back and forth on the fly, though!