wow i am truly envious of the line up of games you have going on right now. all great titles i wish i could play for the first time. except dq3, haven’t played that.
I haven’t played DQ3 either, for some reason. I’ve played the og, IV, V, and VIII. I’ll fill in the rest someday. I don’t have the DQ3 remake, although I’m interested in it, I think I’ll play the sfc release on my Super NT this winter.
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i haven’t! honestly i haven’t even investigated crossover. back in the day (10 years ago) the way i got games running on my mac was using wine, but i had less success getting it working on my newer laptop
There’s probably much better longterm solutions, but Crossover’s great for ease of use and its performance. It’s a subscription model tho, so I tend to just make use of the free trial whenever I’ve got something in particular that I really want to play.
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Images are having trouble uploading from my phone, so instead of my gameplay, here’s something sick:
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DUUUUUUUDE THIS IS AMAZING, is it a strategy guide??
yeah. dai pa kids will create a nidoking version, not knowing tthis cover art already exists.
I believe there was a series of guides which all used custom cover art such as this.
satoshi tajiri’s custom slowbro version (done with a hand drawn sticker) had me think about looking for one for nidorino, and I found this.
You can even see the way the guide book was designed with a paper cut out of nidoking.
the cutscene with the guy eating bread in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 lmao what was that
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I’ve been playing Balatro, it definitely earns the praise it’s been getting. Not that I’ve been seeking it out, but it’s nice to have something that scratches a similar itch to Slay the Spire. It’s a good mix of stuff I enjoy: poker, rpgs and rogue likes.
I’ve kept myself in the dark as much as possible when it comes to Balatro, so anything I have to say is based off of my (possibly very wrong) random observations. As much as I enjoy the game I have a few hang ups with it that I feel make it a very good, but not great game and they all have to do with the balancing, because the presentation and ease of use of the game is pretty impeccable.
I wish different types of hands were more viable and the game didn’t pigeon hole you into trying for the same types of hands constantly. It feels like unless you have a godly array of joker cards, playing a mix of different kinds of hands puts you on a quick path to getting outscaled by the blinds and losing, so I’m generally seeking out one kind of hand ad nauseam every match. The most valuable hand types seem like they’re basically unplayable most all the time. I’d be nice to play four-of-a-kinds, but by the time I have a setup that would accomodate that I’m already so invested in another hand type that it’d be a major downgrade to switch. Also, it feels sorta absurd that high card has been the most viable and flexible hand type for me. I’d think something so basic would require an elaborate setup to make work, but no, the simplest way to play also seems to be easiest.
I think the celestial upgrade system is what’s driving the lack of variety in play style. The rapidity in which blinds scale means you generally have to specialize in one hand type to keep pace. It feels like the game would just be better without the upgrade system or if they modified it so that hand types improve their superior types of the same lineage. Like if I upgrade flush, it’d be nice if it’d also give a minor boost to straight flush - then I would have more variety in hands I can use and it makes transitioning to more valuable hand types more viable. It feels really dumb to me that I’ve had to make sure I play flushes that do not form straights, because it was worth significantly less points.
Random interaction I hope I get to see:
I got the Perkeo card one match, which creates a copy of an item and it doesn’t take up space, once after every store visit. I had to sell it to get a scoring card so I could keep up. One or two shop visits later I ran into the voucher that multiplies the hand type of any card item by 1.5. That left me wondering if you have the two together could you get an infinite stack of 1.5x going for some impossibly high score?
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Been having some trouble with sitting down with a single game lately.
Black Ops 6 continues to be my “brain off” game when I don’t feel like I have time for a story heavy game.
When I do have time for a story game, I’ve been slowly getting through Metaphor Re: Fantazio. Man, what a slick Atlus RPG. It really feels like they’ve learned all of their lessons when making this game. I don’t recall the total play time but I’m in the ocean city for the first time, planning on infiltrating Louis’ Gauntlet Runner before the soiree. I’m excited to see where this story goes!
When I’m sitting on my couch playing my Switch, then I’m playing an IGA Castlevania or I’m playing Donkey Kong Land (and now Donkey Kong Land 2). Just some games I’m familiar with and can passively play while something is on TV.
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been having a hard time narrowing down what game(s) i want to play. generally i go through a period where i want to play so many games at once that i end up playing none. so i did what every other gamer who has an unusually large library does: make it overly complicated.
i made a list of games i thought would suck if i didn’t beat/play before i died (i’m 33 lol), and used a random number generator for the column and the row.
so here are my next four games.
honestly, solid line up! good job, RNG. started with yakuza kiwami because last thing i remember doing is being addicted to slot racing.
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The RNG gods smiled down on you!
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In Metaphor ReFantazio, I am nearing the mid-August deadline. After exhausting the other things to do, I have spent a couple of days fighting in the coliseum. A few notes:
- The “do in three turns or less” battles are enjoyable. They seem tough but possible when I’m rolling in with strong, non-optimized archetypes. They are also quick.
- In contrast, the “do 30 battles, stop at any time” is too much of a grind. The resource management to do it all at once is somewhat interesting (after battle 12 or so, I couldn’t nuke with magic anymore and had to use what I had left more smartly), but no individual fight was particularly difficult. So it turned into 45 minutes with a not-overwhelming reward.
I’m wondering if the coliseum gets better. (Note to self: might make topic on coliseum/tournaments in games if people are interested.) It has me thinking about Legend of Legaia, where its coliseum equivalent has difficult solo fights and rewards powerful combos and accessory use, or Final Fantasy VII, where you could end up with absurd completion conditions by using a slot mechanic. Either of those seem preferable to me than just dumping a large number of fights on someone, but maybe there is something to come around to in Metaphor’s case.
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I’ve been having fun with Stalker 2 for about 30 hours but the bugs and lack of the A-Life system they advertised is kind of ruining it. I’m going to wait before I dive back in and finish the thing.
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Great selection of games. As a relatively evening-time-rich person those would collectively take me at the very least a couple of months if I wasn’t blasting through the main game only. Godspeed if you’re not as time fortunate.
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My cheeks are clinched for Trails, the rest I think I can manage. Steam Deck helps for chipping away when I can’t be at my main rig.
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Wooof. It sucks when you have too much or you’re not in a good place and end up not playing anything at all.
Yakuza Kiwami is a good choice. Didn’t like it as much as other titles, but it was fun as hell regardless.
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doing some gaming.
i was on a plane recently and decided for some reason i would finally beat mario wonder. i had gotten to some sort of sixth world and put the game down since the month it released. the game has a sort of dreamlike quality to it, in that i can’t remember any of the fifteen or so levels i played a week or whatever ago. i wake up in the middle of the night grasping at some sort of bullet bill puzzle.
i appreciate that this game has some forreal difficult moments, but the wonder seeds kind of are an uninteresting level design to me, why not make the level really good the first time? why not make the choice to do the seed or not more meaningful, you’re clearly supposed to take the thing, and there was never really a moment where i felt like i had to go out of my way to get to it. i don’t know, nitpicking mario is like nitpicking mac and cheese.
dragon quest three hd 2d remake. great game so far - i maybe did not realize just how far reaching this specific game is. every single time i play a different dragon quest, you discover another thing stolen by satoshi tajiri and the villains game freak. the personalities thing here was the thing that left me pointing at my screen. i wish i had a bit more control over it, because it leaves me wondering if my guys are too weak all the time, and this game is kinda hard! or at least the orochi boss was - maybe i just hit a spike.
i do think that in giving me so much room to tinker, you have the tradeoff of losing some of the lovely narrative stuff of dragon quest v, with its’ characters, or dragon quest vi and it’s big weird ghost stuff, or dragon quest vii, where every city feels a bit more than the cities here. however it is so lovingly rendered and i could see myself doing a gadabout gauntlet or something on another playthrough.
it’s cool, it’s like customizing a toyota 86 for street racing but about your RPG party, but super on rails so i can never fuck myself over too bad.
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