Also damn Canopus is hot
I‘ve been playing a ton of Dungeon Encounters. My interest in the was piqued by @Privately_Attack posting their write up on it in the forums. I was further enthralled by the goty show a couple weeks ago. Then my TV broke, so I’m mostly relegated to just playing stuff handheld on switch. Then it went on sale.
I was interested by a somewhat minimalistic seeming dungeon-crawler-esque RPG. It seemed like it had a number of aspects that I enjoyed about RPGs, even though I haven't jived with that many of them. However, the abstraction of the map, the pockets of lore that primarily provide context, and the just complex enough battles really vacuumed me up like a collection of dust.
I've recently had to seriously come to terms with how much I've shredded my attention span over the years. It's been standard operating procedure for me to spend most of my leisure time either playing my ds/switch or browsing my phone while the TV is on. I have a pretty hard time resting my attention on one game or thing for too long, which I believe has both magnetized me toward fast paced action games like Dead Cells and Celeste and given me the, admittedly snooty, impression that "I don't get immersed in story in games, just mechanics." Dungeon Encounters has been a pretty good antidote for this. Similarly to how I approach Stardew Valley, I contend with multiple objectives at most times. I truthfully find most of the objectives more meaningful than in Stardew, maybe because I'm 4 or 5 in game years into my farm and make few meaningful changes. I also find it less stressful with the absence of (I just googled it) day cycles shorter than fifteen minutes.
The graph paper dungeon design is just the right amount of obtuse for me to want to pay close attention to it. The coordinates designating everything is something I relish as a person who was "good" at "math" once upon a time. The battles with numbers gating you _just_ out of reach of one or two shotting each new enemy until you upgrade your gear enthralls me. It strikes me as an extremely well balanced game.
The cherry on top for me is the puzzles. I didn't think this game even really had a place for riddles or brain crisp questions. Nothing I've come across so far is otherworldly, but several of them more than enough to stop and chew on for a few minutes, which is perfect for me. Disclaimer is that I played the trash out of Fez and enjoyed learning and trying to memorize the game's alphabet more than most of the rest of that game. Nothing so far has approached that degree of complication. Still, very interesting puzzle design. Additionally, the method for finding wandering party members is delightful.
I think what I realize with this is that I thoroughly enjoy games that present large, open areas with puzzles spread out through them but also with somewhat limited or prescribed interaction. Fez did this well; Dead Cells presented a number of interesting secrets running parallel to the combat; however, I think Dungeon Encounters does it masterfully. The look of a map drawn on paper presents more wonder than fully illustrated and animated environments. Granted, many of the riddles would be much more frustrating to solve without a screenshot button just under my left thumb. Also an extra mind washboard of thinking in hexadecimal is something I really appreciate (though I fully admit I was introduced to it just last year by 999 and would be completely thrown if not for that)
All in all, cool game
@“connrrr”#p64016 I have a headache and either retina is now tinted a different temperature but that was a fun two and half hours of platforming. Very smooth sprite animation, in some places strikingly so (the munchers—hilarious name—in the desert level particularly). Also I stand by what I said about 3D and I'm still sad at the state of VB emulation on 3DS.
I started playing Lost Judgment over the weekend. The only piece of info that I went in with was that it‘s partly set at a school and some people were uncomfortable about beating up school kids. Well, those kids that you beat up are 17/18 aged and are massive arseholes, and I don’t have that problem.
Other than that, it's Yakuza, and real good stuff.
@“connrrr”#p63928 I love this game! The episode system is a bit too underdeveloped for how important it is, but apart from that it's great!
Since finishing Mother 3 late last week, I‘ve been playing Atelier Ryza, which is the first game in the Atelier series I’ve played since Iris back on PS2.
It's neat how the game manages to make crafting an engaging enough loop to keep me coming back to it, when I tend to fully gloss over crafting systems in games. I'm now strongly considering fully diving into the series, though from what I understand, other entries have time limits of some sort, which I'm not sure what to make of without having played one.
>
@“Syzygy”#p64052 Yeah, hang in there
Are you meaning to insinuate that the game where you, the player, are given a choice of whether or not to ||participate in a false flag operation planned in secret by the loyalist counterrevolutionary faction of the resistance movement, in which you would have to butcher thousands of your own countrymen whom you just liberated from prison labor camps||, may not have a rosy outcome for all of its main characters??
@“captain”#p64002 It wasn‘t! I’m sure he‘d be on the show but I don’t know if it would be hilarious enough lol
Ape Out
The levels are short, and playing it one level at a time is quite pleasant.
The gaming equivalent of eating a chocolate.
>
I don’t know if it would be hilarious enough
this reminds me, around 2012 1UP ran a bunch of features on Metal Gear celebrating its 25th anniversary, and for this Parish made a delicious, stupid, funny (in that order) video, in which he reportmantized "transfarring" to be about jelly doughnuts instead of save data:
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/WmCAmxx.png]
this is a screenshot from the archived page on 1UP, I can't figure out how to play the video through the wayback machine even with a flash emulator
if anyone has this video downloaded for some reason (you weirdo) please send it to me, I think it's very funny (I'm a bigger weirdo)
@“Syzygy”#p64089 I'm excited to navigate through my own first play through, and then either look up what the differences end up being, or depending on how I feel, play out myself!
And, yes, of course I did not take the choice, however I am intrigued to know that about how they approached the remake.
@“Granola”#p64062 you know what, I could play more games like it. I had a lot of fun following all those character arcs.
Ive been watching Jeremy parish’s YouTube series I like them. I like the archival/educational vibe it’s nice
@“captain”#p64124 After a little bit of digging I've found it is still online and you can just get to the mp4 video without needing the flash player it used to be embedded within.
Enjoy your delicious jelly doughnut!
@“rejj”#p64134 [size=30] THANK YOU
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/M7wN9xv.png]
[/size] i saved it
@“chazumaru”#p63983
So I finally finished the game. I chose the Black Eagles - Crimson Flower (Edelgard) route even though I read it was the shortest, since I liked the character designs the best.
After reading some lore about the endings of other routes, I feel like... this ending didn't explain anything!
I have to play again! But it took so long... I can't do it...
@“BluntForceMama”#p64211 i hear you. i finished Three Houses for the first time… several years ago (?), went Blue Lions and thought, that probably wasn‘t the best route. i should try another. well, it hasn’t happened yet. maybe someday?
I played Kirby‘s Dream Land today. I am attempting to get into Kirby. I loved how rough and scrappy the gameplay was. I tried the extra game afterward but it was frankly too hard and I stopped having fun!! I wish I’d held left + B to get the monochrome GBC palette, because sometimes those prescribed palettes that Nintendo assigned their pre-GBC games break when background elements are animated using sprites, and it looks like shit. That was the case with Dream Land.
I think I've finished about a dozen games in the last three months, I'll try to recall them all:
I'm still doing this thing where I look up a game on howlongtobeat.com and only play it if it comes in at or under 10 hours (obviously made an exception for FF1 so that I could then also make an exception for Stranger of Paradise). It's great. I'm playing games I worried I'd never get around to checking out. I used to recklessly dive into a game without knowing about how long it was going to take me and end up with a 40-60hr+ investment on my hands that would take me months, sometimes years to finish (in Platinum's case, two) mostly because I'd have almost a half dozen of them bunched up at once. Those days are over!!
Thanks for finding this @rejj! Any snippets of the 1Up Show are always appreciated.
@"captain"#p64124 I love this bit with Jeremy Parish singing a little West Side Story parody for Mario.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MTkLc9WMZk
@“safety_light”#p64316 My favorite is when they got Yoshinori Ono to reenact the “it was Tuesday” scene from the Street Fighter movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ad2-Mlcis