@“MichaelDMcGrath”#p41027 Wait, is this turn based or twin stick?
@“dylanfills”#p41037 it's completely turn based. It just looks like a twin stick shooter in action.
I’ll give this a try was curious about it so appreciate the rec
@“MichaelDMcGrath”#p41039 I‘m sold. I love gameplay styles that seem familiar but aren’t
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Really enjoying this new Quake expansion using gyro controls
I went out on a whim and bought @“robinhoodie”#120‘s turbografx, knowing very little about the system or its library, and what sounded interesting at my local game store: ninja spirit, veigues, bonk’s adventure, and blazing lazers. I slotted these into my console not knowing what I was going to play, which is one among many features of 90s gaming that I paid a premium to recover…
Happily all these games rule. Ninja spirit has a very generous checkpoint distribution and continue system that meant I could get deep into the game in my first session with it. I didn't realize that select could change weapons, so I played up to the boss of the penultimate level with just the sword, getting real good at spacing and relying on the shadows when I needed to attack from a safe distance. The lvl2 boss, who chases you up and down some tree branches, was a blast to fight with these tools: trying to stay ahead of his instakill attack while keeping him close enough on your tail that your shadows can attack. It was cool to play through the game a second time just obliterating bosses with powered-up shurikens and bombs, but I think that was a one-time satisfaction and the game is actually more fun to play with just the sword.
Veigues controls clunky in a way that sells the fantasy of piloting a big mech dude. You have to press down to change the direction you are facing/shooting, which is a slow animation that grants iframes during your backstep. Sidestepping an enemy missile by perfectly timing one of these looks and feels very dope. Like you're half ninja and half Apollo astronaut. You have a gun (I), a fist (II), and a chest-mounted pea shooter (I+II) which is your only way of hitting enemies not on your parallel. While shooting the chest gun, up and down control the angle of your cannon instead of altitude. Controlling this correctly while maneuvering in the air is stickshifty and fun, though I wonder if it wouldn't be more fun on a modern two-stick controller. I don't know how other people pronounce the name of this game in English but homophonous-with-Vegas is the coolest pronunciation.
Bonk climbs walls by mashing II, which is done a lot faster and easier using turbo, but keeping the turbo on prevents you from jumping to a full height, so on vertical levels I've had to use a half-claw grip to quickly click the turbo on and off, which is neat. Are there other games that make use of the built-in turbo in an interesting way?
In conclusion, the turbografx has made a strong first impression on me! excited to grab more games for it and eventually a cd player or pc engine duo
@“baftaboo”#p41296 Yeah there's something unique about exploring a library you know nothing about and have no nostalgia for but that is also stuck in 30 year old design sense. If you see Bloody Wolf out there on Hu Card I strongly recommend it.
Right now I am struggling through La-Mulana 2! It is something else. It is a game harder and far more obtuse than Dark Souls.
I'm trying very hard to only use a guide when I get too stuck or when I feel I must be missing something totally obvious. I'm often encountering moments where I seemingly knew the answer to a puzzle or I knew a secret was somewhere, but whatever sort of experimentation I was trying to solve/reveal it wasn't working, so I just move on. Only to be skimming a guide looking for what I'm missing and see that I had to try Plan F after I'd already tried Plan A, B, C, D, and E. Or then other moments where some mysterious item I'd shoved into my inventory like 5 hours ago need to be used in the right way in right spot. Like, sure, I know there's text hints for this sort of stuff, but of course, they're mixed in with piles and piles of flavor text, it feels next to impossible to determine what is a cryptic hint to be able to solve a puzzle in that room and what is just flavor text. I think there is that, too, but I'm too dumb to figure it out.
If there was anything I wish this sort of game had it'd be some sort of consistent communication around the idea that there is definitely a way to solve the puzzle I'm poking at, some more clear feedback that my intuition was correct and something is there but I'm not using the right approach. Often it feels like I exhaust my options, then assume that I must just have to come back later with a different tool, only to later find out I just didn't figure out exactly what the game was vaguely prompting me to do.
It probably doesn't help that whenever I play a Metroid-like it seems like I do things wildly out of order and end up in areas way sooner than I should be, and _La-Mulana 2_ makes it a point of pride to both let you do that and also not care about giving you the illusion of progress while you flail about having missed the important progress critical upgrade hours and hours ago. For instance recently I realized how soon I could have gotten the double jump vs. when I actually did, and it made this one enormously frustrating section climbing a tower make so much more sense. It was probably assuming I had the double jump by then lol.
Also the difficulty of a boss seems to correlate way way too closely with how hard their hitboxes are to catch with the, shall we say, intimate range of your standard weapons. That's got to be my absolute least favourite part of the game. Combined with a jump that you can't adjust the direction of in air that much, and bosses mostly just feel like flailing about praying you will catch their hotbox with your 10 pixel whip while also not getting hit by their contact damage hitbox, get knocked back, get wombo comboed, all for chip damage.
ALL THAT GRIPING aside, though, I'm complaining about it because it's frustrating to play sometimes but mostly pretty rewarding. The game world feels massive and just filled to the brim with secrets. It seems like it's going to be a long one, too. I've played about 20 hours and it still feels like there's a ton of content left. Maybe that's partly because I'm doing things so out of order that eventually the areas will just kind of unravel, but maybe not. We'll see.
I finished Arrest of a Stone Buddha. It‘s a Jean Pierre Melville, John woo styled hitman game. It is kinda silly, but it knows what it’s trying to do and goes in hard. There's a lot to admire here with the cinematic gameplay storytelling.
https://youtu.be/N15qv01njIs
I looked up the team behind the game [and their page says the lead dev asked their mom to ask their dad to do character art](http://team.by-yeo.ru/)
game dev tips n tricks: have your unemployed dad do kunio style art for your game
@“dylanfills”#p40976
How did I buy this for only 2$??? (technically free with some leftover nintendo gold points actually)
Just finished Ico last night! I get the feeling people tend to play this game mostly for its ending segments… It also might be more manageable in consecutive playthroughs, but that game really managed to make 5 hours feel like 30. Much more of a slog than I was expecting, or that I had heard about. Directionless “puzzles” that mostly amount to finding the right ledge or ladder tucked away and blended into a dark corner of a room, awkward AI that needs you to stand in the exact right spot to know you want it to go up a ladder rather than walk in circles around it, inconsistent detection for when you try to interact with something so the game never really knows if you mean to pick up a bomb or light it with a stick that‘s seconds away from losing its flame… I’m all for games being “unfun” for artistic purposes, which this game absolutely does do deliberately at times and I do appreciate, but I also get the sense these complaints I have weren‘t intended to be as clunky as they are. Incredible ending sequence though, really! In the end I am glad I picked it up, and I am glad I had the experience of playing something like this as close to blind as possible, but idk… Like I said, maybe it’ll get better with more playthroughs! Could definitely see this being the kind of game you pick up every now and then just to bathe in the atmosphere and aesthetic, once you know the solutions to all the puzzles.
@“Funbil”#p41341 It might be (might be) because you're playing the US version of the game: https://tcrf.net/ICO#Regional_Differences
My first contact with Ico was the PAL version, which includes a plethora of fixes to many of your issues.
As for me, I'm currently playing "Yes let's take another screenshot of a door because every door in Vagrant Story is a work of art"
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@“Kimimi”#p41342 Ah! I was in fact playing the US version - that's a lot of regional differences!! I can easily imagine those non-US versions of the game being the no-caveat masterpieces people tend to talk about it as. Might need to pick up a JP copy for myself.
I finished Code Vein yesterday, and I have some rather mixed feelings on it. I generally enjoyed its take on the Soulsborne games but I sure found that as the game went on I was skipping every cutscene and memory segment. I‘ll happily sit through cutscenes but the game became so densely filled with them that I just couldn’t care. As a result I only really have a faint idea of the second half of the story.
In terms of the difficulty, I felt it was generally fair and lenient save for the final dungeon where enemies would occasionally pop up out of nowhere. Some of the level design was enormously obtuse too and I felt it a bit annoying not knowing whether or not I was going where I wanted to be going.
I can't say that I'll ever revisit it, and for my next game I'm looking to cleanse my palette, as it were. If anyone has suggestions for something playful then that would be *great*.
@“Kimimi”#p41342 and @“Funbil”#p41343 I haven‘t played ICO for 20 years since I got it near launch. I remember learning that the Japanese version had some additional features, but had forgotten that they tuned difficulty and didn’t know about the hand holding thing. It does make me wonder how I would feel about understanding Yorda's dialog though. I feel like not undemanding it is one of the main points of the game and adds much to the atmosphere.
I don't think I've talked about this much in this thread, but I've been spending some time with _Capcom vs. SNK 2_. This is relevant to the above _ICO_ chat because _CvS2_ is what I bought my PS2 for in the fall of 2001, along with a used copy of _ICO_. As far as it goes as a fighting game, for non-fighting aficionados, it's impenetrable. I believed this in 2001 when the game came out and I believe it now. Before you get to hear "Round One: Fight!" you need to:
OK, "Round One: **Fight!**"
So it's a game for fighting game experts which has tons of fun mechanics, cameos, and characters. I love it, but would never recommend it. I played it with some of my college friends every week for a year+ until we discovered _Guilty Gear X_ and _X2_. That's when I mostly moved over to _Guilty Gear_ and ArcSys games. But I've got to say, I haven't heard the announcer introduce the final match by saying "This is what the world is watching!" for a very long time. At the risk of expressing human emotion on the internet, it did make me tear up a bit.
In conclusion, _CvS2_ is great and terrible. My 7-year-old twins have discovered that K-Groove Haohmaru is an absolute monster because all you need to do is connect with heavy punch to swing his katana once or twice to KO dad (when I've got my health handicapped to 30%). Sounds like I should probably get good.
*Ratio is the "canonical" way to play the game, and if you're going to go lose to BAS in one of his CvS2 events, you'll be playing Ratio. But my friends group gravitated to "3-on-3" mode which is more like _King of Fighters_ when you just take three characters. This also added some character diversity to our play group.
@“Funbil”#p41343 I don't know where you are in the world or if this suggestion goes against everything we stand for here at Insert “Original Hardware Only” Credit, but if it interests you the North American PS3 version of Ico is based on the international version.
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@“captain”#p41389 North American PS3 version of Ico
BRB. Looking this up...
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@“captain”#p41389 everything we stand for here at Insert “Original Hardware Only” Credit
I totally understand that this is a joke, and it landed as such. I also fundamentally reject this attitude.
As part of my home consolized/emulation PC arcade cabinet* I started following a few arcade and arcade adjacent twitter users. Several of them are super cool and fun and have given me either some neat ideas or great pictures of cats napping on arcade cabinets. One of them seems to re-tweet some person who summarizes his streams as "Here's what I'm playing on the Candy Cab tonight, such and such old SHMUP on the Mister and **never** any emulation!"
That attitude makes me itch both philosophically and technologically.
It's like, my dude, the binary is the binary. And if you're running the binary in software emulation or in hardware simulation on an FPGA, you're already abstracting the execution environment. So it's either an elitist thing that you've got access to the original arcade boards (which can be extremely neat - I'm genuinely not knocking it!) or an ignorant thing where you are mistaken that hardware simulation is somehow different than software emulation rather them both being a means to an end. I have used both of these technologies extensively in my 20 year career in high tech and if I came into a design review with that attitude, I'd be laughed out of the room.
Pick the games delivery technology that lets you interface with the art form in the way that is the most usable and accessible in a way that enables you to get the most value and fun out of your precious game hobby time. Thank you all for letting me vent.
*I'll post pics once it's done. The custom control panel I designed is out being routed/lasered.
I finished Mother 3 (the fan translation) about a month and a half ago, and I‘ve been meaning to talk about it here, so here goes:
|| It was amazing! I’m still thinking about it. On one hand, I think it‘s an excellently balanced RPG. The early game structure, where you swap between characters allows the player to come to grips with mechanics of the game while engaging in encounters designed with the players relatively limited move set in mind. The late game then opens up and gives the player the freedom to take on encounters with a broader move set. Moreover, because I was able to get the rhythm combat down, I didn’t have to spend much time grinding, which is great. Several of the boss encounters were nail biters that ended with me desperately slinging my most powerful attacks at the enemy while my health slowly ticked to zero. I don't know if I just got lucky every time, but it just astounds me how frequently that happened. ||
|| What I think stuck with me most was the game's narrative, particularly its ending. This is a game about how people can respond to trauma by withdrawing and isolating, and this becomes more clear as the game progresses. At the end of the game we witness the destruction of the world, certainly not a happy ending. We as the players then make the decision to reject this ending by literally moving the 'END' text (off-screen, as I did). We are left stumbling in the dark, with the game's cast telling us what we want to hear. With this, we make the same mistake that the people of Tazmilly did, creating a fantasy for ourselves to escape the pain that comes with being alive. Powerful stuff. ||
@“connierad”#p41340 It's a good time. Cannot wait for the opportunity to coerce somebody to play it with me