(Archived 2022) The thread in which we talk about games we are currently playing

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/K8XeGrW.jpg]

My guy got out his very first proper Ace Attorney Pointing Pose. Made me smile.

@ā€œrejjā€#p39033 INSANE timing on this.

I was just going to make a post about, "hey has anyone picked up the Great Ace Attorney?"

I own both of the original games for 3DS, and enjoyed them a great deal many years ago. I'm somewhat interested in checking out the English localization, but apart from language stuff, and DLC being included, would anyone suggest this remaster being worth double-dipping for?

[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/zSWAVvI.jpeg]

:’)

@ā€œsabertoothalexā€#p39107 A friend of mine once offhandedly mentioned some sort of club he may have heard about who clandestinely go to movies in theatre, and upon hearing any dialogue where the name of the movie is spoken aloud, they break out into applause, and then leave the theatre.

I don't know if he was making this up or if he'd actually heard about it from somewhere or if that exists, but that offhand comment has been haunting me for years. I want to _be_ in that club if it exists.

I was thinking about starting a ā€œVacation Gamesā€ thread, but Iā€˜m too lazy at the moment, so I’ll post mini-impressions of the games Iā€˜m trying out on my Japanese DSi R4 card from my riverfront Airbnb on a two-week Southern vacation. I feel like sampling video games while travelling is just a whole different trip for some reason, one of which might be the relaxed sense of strange obligation we feel to complete or ā€œlogā€ games when in our home spaces. But anyway, here are some things I’ve tried:

**The Adventures of Star Saver (Taito, 1991, Game Boy)**
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/apGAd7I.png]
Known as Rubble Saver in Japan and a semi-sequel to Miracle Ropitt on the Famicom (both of which are much better names), this is a charming little thing. The pixel art is really nice for the Game Boy (though the white outlines probably worked better on the original hardware), & the gameplay is pretty breezy & forgiving when you're in your little mech suit, but a total bummer when you are not (despite your character being a cutey). It has that sense of a modernity that you might see in a current "Game Boy-like" thrown onto the Switch eShop for cheap.

**OverRide (Data East/Sting, 1991, PC Engine)**
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/C5xhCq7.png]
This was later self-published by Sting as Last Battalion on the X68000, & I don't have much to say about it other than it's good & I like it. It feels like the quintessential PC Engine shmup, except it's not really known as quintessential. It's real fast, it feels manageable, the overload of powerups offers a constant dopamine drip, & the clean driving bops might as well be the PC Engine's theme music.

**Infinite Space (Sega/Platinum Games, 2010, Nintendo DS)**
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/knVXzHQ.png]
So I've been trying to settle on "the" vacation game, & this was the first go but it didn't stick. It's a massive game for the DS, which I appreciate, & I much enjoy its low-poly aesthetic, Star Trek-ian space battles, character art, & sensible touch controls. But boy, "grueling difficulty" is a tough sell for me these days. I really want to love it, but I'm not sure I'm cut out for returning to a game where I lost a very early (& exceptionally slow) battle three times in a row for reasons that the game doesn't feel the need to explain to me.

**SNK vs. Capcom Card Fighters DS (SNK, 2007, Nintendo DS)**
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/L9oFymv.png]
While Infinite Space was a "not for me at this particular moment in my brain," SNK vs. Capcom Card Fighters -- my next attempt at The Vacation Game(TM) -- was a genuine disappointment. After my consciousness was briefly sparked by a reminder of the SNK Playmore days, everything kinda went downhill. The framing of the card battles is edutainment game levels of childish, & the localization & writing is really poor. Inside that framing, you've got a card battle system that is obtuse, poorly explained, complex for the sake of it & overly reliant on chance. What little pleasure you get from seeing the SNK & Capcom characters isn't really worth it, especially since you basically don't even see your tiny-assed lil cards during gameplay (_come on_). Probably not helped by the fact that I picked up Slay the Spire again just before vacation, but I still didn't have a good time with it even in its own context.

After a couple of months without playing anything I revisited Pikmin 3 Deluxe’s Story mode on its hardest difficulty - taking it slow and playing in small bits each evening throughout the week. I’m still such a huge fan of the central concept of this game, exploring an uncharted planet and enlisting the help of a tiny army to get off the planet safely, documenting fauna and fruit throughout the expedition. This difficulty setting was probably my favorite so far, too.

I am playing Hollow Knight…hoo boy gonna be tough for me to get through it but I am committed to doing it. Dying 10-15 times against Hornet had me pining for Hyper Light Drifterā€˜s instant boss restarts upon death. The heaviness of moving the knight is pretty cool but the controls require this like…level of deliberate input from the player that’s very unforgiving. When fighting a boss the window permitted for healing is already very small, and itā€˜s made even smaller because there’s this like millisecond cooldown between, say, landing from a jump and when you're allowed to start healing. Definitely a game that has its own particular, strict rules around movement and timing…I wish other aspects of the game were friendlier as compensation. Right now can only enjoy playing for around an hour at a time but maybe it opens up

Also finally playing FFVII Remake B-)

@ā€œtapevultureā€#p39979 I similarly had a rocky start with Hollow Knight, and in fact had issues in the exact place as you with that Hornet fight. Enough to put it down for about a year, actually! But when I came back to it, somehow the game felt a lot more natural and easy to control and I beat that boss first try, no exaggeration. Talking with some of my friends, Iā€˜m not the only one with that experience, either. I’m not sure what it is, but if it does wind up frustrating you too much, donā€˜t be afraid to put it down and come back later!! If I had tried to truck through while I was in that original mindset I almost certainly would have hated that game, but now it’s one of my favorite platformers of all time (and the reasons itā€˜s my favorite used to be the reasons I hated it)! Once you approach the game on its own terms and start sensing the rhythm it’s trying to get you to play in, it's incredibly fun, but also historically (anecdotally…) a little tough to get into the first go-around.

last i posted here i was playing the longing. iā€˜ve since finished it. it’s got a cool vibe and it was promising at first, but the puzzles mostly suck. i had picked up yakuza kiwami 2 again, but as i tend to do iā€˜ve interrupted myself to start moon, which i don’t understand yet but i just feel glad to be there.

Well, quite a time since Iā€˜ve wanted to post something, so here we go, a list of games I’ve been playing for a while:

Koudelka: Been replaying it. The game has an incredibly unique atmosphere and the script is wonderful so far, specially the dialogue parts. The chess board combat grid style is a nice addition and forms a beautiful contrast that makes you feel that the characters move like in theatre scenarios, while the cinematics and the beautiful dubbing makes it all. Iā€˜m quite surprised at how wild they were writing scenes, but I also was wondering how the game would be if a remake was made following the idea of an ā€œimmersive simā€ with the tools we have today. It’s a solid game overall (and much better if you play it with an emulator) but it also has a lot of issues that donā€˜t work as intended because of their inherent contradictions between the JRPG and the immersive sim/Resident Evil survival ideas style.

Judgment: Loving the detective approach into a Yakuza oriented structure, but I feel like I want to be into the story and some side cases and few more instead of completing everything. I feel like they have too much things and that’s fine for people who want to dig into every corner of the Ryu ga Gotoku universe, but I end up feeling bored by how much content there is. Just my opinion, though. Luckily, I feel like several bad things about the Yakuza games have been reworked and are less tedious than before, although there are some issues that I didnā€˜t want to see (the thing that makes me cringe the most is being a 30 to 40 year old detective and all your dates are 27 or younger). Dudes, how difficult is to let me date the poker player?

NieR Replicant: Been playing the remake, but so far I’m digging up the game and loving it. Once I finish up the game Iā€˜ll tell more.

Virtua Fighter 5: Been playing the remake because of the PS Plus offer and well, it’s a very nice game! I play this occasionally and I end up coming back for more because of this easy to play but makes me want to dig up more combos and characters, even if the control feels somtimes irky to me. I donā€˜t know how the online mode will fare, but this have been a very fun experience to have with friends and my partner.

Haven: The co-op made by the team that made Furi had a lot of interesting ideas but the execution was lacking in general. I think the ideas meshing here are nice (the exploration in general is really compelling, but it ends up being boring to me since I feel there wasn’t that much experimentation). I would have preferred the combo between the exploration and the flyship (although the conversations weren't the best), as I feel the RPG is terrible in general and ruins partly the experience.

Been playing several games (Panzer Dragoon Saga, Xanadu Next, ICO, Umurangi and 428 Shibuya Scramble) and I hope I can finish at least several of them).

@ā€œtapevultureā€#p39979 I too am finally getting around to the FF VII Remake!

This is my first real go around with FF VII in general though. I once tried to play the original in college, made it through the first reactor bombing and then promptly put it down for eternity. I didn't really "get" JRPGs with turn based combat at the time and didn't appreciate the old art style. Thankfully, this was over ten years ago and I've made quite the 180.

I am now EATING up the remake. After spending the last year revisiting JRPGs and learning to appreciate them, it's finally clicked for me. The visuals and modern gameplay definitely have eased me into this experience, but the aesthetic, characters and story have sucked me in. I'm just getting into Ch. 8, but I kind of can't wait to finish this first part and then start playing the original again.

@ā€œfetus8ā€#p40044 heck yeah i JUST got to chapter 8 as well. yeah itā€˜s good. i’ve played the original gobs of times so iā€˜m constantly checking my impressions against that experience. combat is really frantic and hard. i feel like they missed the point with a lot of the music…like on the mako reactor tune it’s just generic hollywood tense string type stuff, no synth vibes that uematsu used to imbue the original with a sense of artificiality. at the same time i've spent so much time listening to that OST that probably nothing was going to satisfy me. i play and replay those games for the music. the original music they made for FF7R is just a whole lot of nothing to me

but the characters feel so much more like real people, especially now that i've trained myself to not look at the mouth animations, which were really off-putting at first :) having a blast with it overall

Is the combat better than XV? Or rather does it have more of a turn based feel?

@ā€œyesoā€#p40050 I bounced off XV pretty hard and didn't really like the combat a whole lot.

VIIR feels like a really nice mix between the modern action combat of XV with a sprinkle of turn based mixed it. I think it works and feels a lot better myself.

@"tapevulture"#p40049 THE MOUTH ANIMATIONS really really off putting, still. lol

thx that’s reassuring

VIIR benefits from having direct control of party members that have their own mechanics. It lets you really play around with the systems. I would also say the kinda nebulous ā€œfeelā€ of the combat is light years ahead of XV. Hits feel good, shots feel good, watching the enemies react to being hit feels good, magic casts feel good. Enemy encounters are also largely much better. XV felt like you were playing oiled up silly putty and you just slid around on enemies and they took damage until they died and the entire thing felt empty.

There’s still lots of room for improvement in VIIR but imo the gap between them is cavernous lol

@ā€œsabertoothalexā€#p40053 Yup. XV felt terrible when you tried to kill enemies because the only thing you see are numbers. I think VIIR tweaked a lot of things that didnā€˜t sit right with XV and I have to say that the combat is precisely the most neat combat system to me, and the difference between weapons also helps - although there’s some work to be done there.

EDIT: Gotten more into Judgment and several of the side quests clicked onto me, so I expect this to be the first Ryu Ga Gotoku game that I might at least get invested into. I don't know how Lost Judgment will unfold, but hey, I didn't expect this to click me even better than Yakuza: Like a Dragon tried to do before.

On a whim yesterday, I turned on Parasite Eve (PlayStation, 1997/8) for the first time in 23 years. Before I got to the first save point, I had glocked a parrot.

5/5.

I kind of fell off logging my vacation games since Iā€˜m on, ya know, vacation, but the game I finally settled on should have been right in front of my face the whole time: Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen for the Nintendo DS. My goodness, that is just a very fine game. It’s so smooth, so polished, so charming, so relaxing, so perfectly tuned for playing in…chapters. And I'm gonna say this right now: JRPGs with 2D pixel-rendered characters in 3D low-poly environments are just the absolute best thing.

@"antillese"#59 I adore Parasite Eve. Mixing up the tones of pre-J-horror renaissance (like, early 2000s J-horror), quasi-hard science bestseller, peak PlayStation-era SquareSoft baller energy & an American action-horror movie is just an atmosphere that I haven't seen before or since. And, yeah, around the same place as the Glock'd parrot, I probably shouldn't have been interacting with spontaneously combusted corpses at age 12 or 13, but here we are.

>

@ā€œtokucowboyā€#p40295 I probably shouldn’t have been interacting with spontaneously combusted corpses at age 12 or 13, but here we are.

You wound up here; you turned out fine.