Oops, I misinterpreted @connrrr's suggestion!
I think doing it as soon as it becomes available is too soon as well. That would also make it hard as nails too.
Last night I started playing Disaster Report 4. Going in I didnāt really have much of an expectation at all; the only thing I had really heard is that it doesnāt run very well, which yeah, it sure doesnāt! I happen to be playing on the Switch, but Iāve heard itās not much better other places anyways. Though despite this, Disaster Report 4 has managed to really impress me so far. I donāt know much of the other Disaster Report games, only ever playing the first few hours of Raw Danger, so Iām really surprised at the mood of this game. The writing is incredibly honest and humble; there is no pretense of anybody being particularly important or significant in any way, these are just 100% normal people getting swept up in something devastatingly larger than themselves. It really makes you feel small and helpless, which is something I donāt see in games a lot. When your character dies, itās in some non-ceremonious way where you can imagine your body just becoming one number that adds to some total shown in a news report in a couple days. The characters you meet are similar; strikingly normal people who have full, complete lives that they gently allude to only when the situation naturally calls for it; no dramatic expositions of back story, just people honestly responding to the circumstances around them based directly on the kind of perspective they have as a person with their own history. Itās a really beautiful thing! Are all the Disaster Report games like this??
@āconnrrrā#p65008 Thatās what Iāll be doing. Iām managing well in the first area but Iām burnt out, so I'll stop some time to finish a thing or two and then jump into the DLC.
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@āFunbilā#p65098 Are all the Disaster Report games like this??
yes but they are also extraordinarily goofy
Iām giving Chrono Trigger a real playthrough for the first time. Iāve farted around in the beginning a few times before but never made it that far.
Wow, that trial scene! Extremely good fun there to see your video game behaviors being called out. I liked it because it didn't feel like a gotcha or anything, it was just a really fun flip.
Also pretty up there for my favorite looking 16 bit games. The detail in everything is astounding. I love that everyone has their own unique sleep-in-bed sprite haha.
iām playing tunic, itās great. kind of reflecting on what was mentioned on the podcast this week, about new games being better than old games, due to their incorporating all of the lessons learned from the design failures of the past. i guess i end up feeling pretty conflicted about these hyper-polished indies because, as i say, tunic is great, likely due in large part to the creatorsā meticulous study of the canonically āgreatā games, and their very thoughtful cribbing of only the good parts. and i donāt want to in any way overlook what a challenge that must have been, especially considering it seems to largely have been the work of one person.
at the same time, there are so many games available these days with this level of polish that i take it for granted and overlook it anyway, and i end up lasering in on certain design decisions that i feel say a lot about the soul of the game, or even, perhaps insultingly, the intentions of the creators. so with tunic it's so pleasant to play on a moment-to-moment basis, but i wonder how it's all meant to hang together: why did they choose "IDM" for the soundtrack, or lift souls' [health management system](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1425-ep-230-this-podcast-is-my-penance/31), or even make the awesome in-game strategy guide/companion manual, which teaches you how to play the game and is the work of a sensitive and talented artist.
like all the stuff is great and it all works so well, but then i end up feeling like it's all a big grab bag, that on the one hand is very carefully curated so that it adds up to a breezy moment-to-moment experience, but on the other, is thematically incoherent, and whose contents are included in the game merely because the designer happened to like that stuff. for example: the strategy guide advises me, the player, directly, acknowledges that i am playing a game, but the physical pages of the guide are distributed throughout the game world, are found by my fox avatar dude, who turns its head in their direction and stoops to pick them up. they glow to suggest some diegetic power, as the save statues do. but the save statues are presented as relics of some ancient civilization, that the ultimate evil could not fully eradicate, while the pages i find are plainly an homage to 90s nintendo power strategy guides....
in summary why am i a cute fox?? i would feel better if the game was made by toby fox and there was even one reason for me to have been a cute fox....
Iāve also started Tunic, but Iāve only played about 30-45 minutes so far. Those minutes were fun, at least!
I intend to go back to it, however my games playing time currently is dedicated to a combination of mostly Elden Ring, some Picross S7 for a grid or two to wind down, and a little bit of the new Kirby.
replaced some parts on my busted old PS3 so I can play the Armored Core quadrilogy. Wondering if one of them will make my 2023 GOAT listā¦ I also ebayed that Reelect JFK game I posted in the wife worried thread, so Iām going to be playing that in the next week or so. I think Iāll be able to get it running
I wrapped up playing Atelier Ryza yesterday, which was thoroughly enjoyable. Somehow the game manages to make a bunch of systems I usually don't enjoy fun to interact with! Figuring out optimal crafting loops was a fun puzzle to solve and I never really tired of it.
I think this is a series I'll be digging into a lot more. I'd last tried Atelier Iris back on PS2 and didn't really get into it.
With that finished, I've been able to play some more Elden Ring and gosh that game is pretty. I've been playing it at a far more relaxed pace than I usually do with FromSoft games and it's been nice.
Also been playing through Kirby and the Forgotten land and that's just plain fun.
I wanted to play Fuga: Melodies of Steel and hear me out:
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As for the game, not very fond of how the scenes are made, but the story is okay and I love the VN versus the combat settings. It's fun, easy to understand (it might be even more fun to play on a portable console imo) and hey, for some reason it works really. I'm interested in seeing where this game is going to develop narratively.
@āSyzygyā#p65454 I guess itās both production values and how the solution was found. Itās something that I know rubs me the wrong way. Just only my opinion, that's all.
EDIT: Played a litle more while. First, damned if this isn't a portable game. It is addictive in its simplicity regarding combat, and the VN is also very easy to deal with, but Cyberconnect decided to add several things as time comes. It is a kind of an strategy gringing RPG in the sense that you need to defeat hordes of enemy tanks and such, and so the deal is knowing when to switch and how to organize the kids in the tank, since they go in pairs and there are certain things like combined attacks. Scraping the barrel in any mechanic in order to defeat your enemy is essential, and the Cannon soul mechanic adds some really nice tension. So far the combat feels balanced and the VN parts (as also the chibi aesthetics) is enticing.
Finished āThe Frog For Whom The Bell Tollsā which is the first game I've āfinishedā in 2022
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It was good! Probably a little too simplistic for A Gamer, but I liked that it presented basically zero challenge to progressing except for figuring things out or platforming stuff. It had really funny writing. The game's levels felt really sprawling too. It's a whole game. 10/10. GOTY 1992
This House of the Dead remake is a real let down. People were already a little pessimistic about bot having a sensory peripheral or even a gun sleeve for the joycon experience but given how good Splatoon, the RE ports, and even Panzer Dragon remake (with caveats on this one) all feel, this seems like nothing to worry about.
I was wrong. The gyro proved very problematic for this team and there are no update in the design of the levels to accommodate for the limitation they seem to have found.
Post-cutscene ambushes are rampant in these games but that is offset by you essentially being to aim at any point of the screen even during the cutscene. Your cursor disappears during cutscenes and reappears in the middle of the screen when they are done; completely screwing up the tracking and thereby your response time to your first incoming enemy.
UI is an absolutely nightmare. Everything is like 40% opacity when not highlight with the default text being already very bad for long words. I don't think there are any options to change the text to something like in the subtitles.
You can't use Gyroscope to navigate any menus, which slows down the experience a lot when tweeking for better feeling response.
The music isn't the same as the original- that's a point in favor of the eventual PC port. You will be able to switch out that soundtrack yourself. The music feels too royalty free- not in that it is cheap, but in it wasn't made specifically for the purpose of the game.
You have to reload with a button, which you can even do while actively shooting. Turning on auto reload and not hitting the button actually is more like the Arcade experience than manual reload lol
@āGaagaagiinsā#p64027 Nice, I was playing the SNES version to bide the time until elden ring release. great game!
@āmarlfuchs2ā#p65525 congrats, love your review, agreed. the game has one of the coolest pause menus.
@āconnrrrā#p64248 I have a lot of nostalgia for kirbyās dream land 1 and the GBC palette shenanigans caused in that game. Hard mode in that game is the hardest any kirby game ever got bar none. Itās also one of the hardest platforming challenges I've ever completed. I remember sitting on the school bus playing it on my PSP with an emulator that had the rewind function too, and it was hard even then! But still really cool.
@"exodus"#p64092 Old Jer-bear!! We already know his answer to every question if he was on the show: **_Heiankyo Alien_**
i got a hundred bucks worth of nintendo gift cards for house-sitting (and dog-sitting) this past week. i used them to get dragon quest xi and some other games, and iāve really been enjoying it! i watched my dad play through blue dragon and i canāt help but be reminded of that, haha. it's prettier though, for sure.
God the original Xenoblade has so much empty, stupid shit designed specifically to waste your time, its writing is so horribly lifeless and bland and amateurish, its battle system is such a mind-numbing morass of smokescreen complexity in place of depth. It barely even qualifies as a good RPG, let alone a āmodern classicā. I have played something like 200 hours of it.
https://twitter.com/terrycavanagh/status/1512168384615620619
I just tried this out, and it is pretty cool!
Very impressive work for just 72 hours, the game is a submission for Ludum Dare 50. The dev has said that they are going to continue working on it and make a "proper" release - I'll be keeping an eye on that. Worth a try.
https://punkcake.itch.io/shotgun-king
@ārejjā#p65628 I also just played this the other day, it's pretty damn cool!
Terry's Free game of the week blog is fantastic for discovering small cool stuff
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@ā2501ā#p65573 It barely even qualifies as a good RPG, let alone a āmodern classicā. I have played something like 200 hours of it.
I now ā to the dismay of my own mortality ā have multiple good friends with kids reaching the 9ć10 years old mark, and Xenoblade Definitive Edition has become my go-to gift to get them into RPGs and nerdy shit like robots and anime. So far (three attempts already), uncle Chazās Christmas present / Birthday gift has always been a banger, especially with kids suddenly getting stuck at home unexpectedly due to COVID scares at school, and I am now the coolest adult in their lives. So I am rather super positive about Xenoblade being a pretty great game!
ā¦ I just have to lie and pretend Xenoblade 2 doesnāt exist yet because their mothers will kill me if they see some of the character designs. Iāll let them kids find it out by themselves, like the birds and the bees.
@āchazumaruā#p65635 It honestly makes me happy how much people love this game. It keeps convincing me that I must like it too yet every time I actually play it if I think about it too hard I just end up going āwhat the fuck is thisā