@“saddleblasters”#p117752 Everyone in Magician‘s Quest is talking about romance and boyfriends/girlfriends constantly, which made me remember this is a Konami game, so my immediate thought was that there must be some Tokimeki Memorial people who worked on this, but analyzing its mobygames page, that turned out to be wrong. Though it does turn out Millenium Kitchen worked on this, which I didn’t realize before. So Magician's Quest might be the answer to “What if the people who made Boku no Natsuyasumi made an Animal Crossing game?”
That being said, the more I play it the less like Animal Crossing it feels. I'd compare it more to Chulip, but with certain "innovations" from Animal Crossing integrated into the game, e.g. the real time clock or npcs having lots of dialogue rather than the typical RPG contrivance of everyone saying the same thing over and over. The game seems to be a lot more about the interactions amongst different NPCs than all of their lives revolving entirely around you like in Animal Crossing. There are also actual quests and story and different environments! I've only played about two hours though, so we'll see how things go.
I bought and have played about the first 4 levels of WH40K: Boltgun, which is a reasonable enough attempt at the sort of game we used to call “Doom clones” before the more generic “shooter” took hold. Playing this made me remember WH40K: Space Marine, which I hadn’t played since it first came out on the 360 and was recently on sale on Steam.
It shows its age in a few ways, but dang it is still rather fun to just stomp about as a Space Marine and shoot/slice a bunch of Orks.
The other night, not knowing what else to do with my time, I forced myself to get past a wall I‘d hit in Fallen Order. It was the big bat boss, which gave me trouble for some reason the last time I picked up the game a few weeks ago. This time though, I managed to suss out her pattern and the fight went from frustratingly hard to frustratingly drawn out. A lot of waiting for that bat to do the right attacks. I enjoy the lightsaber battles way more. >!The bat’s all right, I hope we can still be friends even after cutting her face up.!<
Something else I don't like even as someone who is not a Star Warrior or whatever those nerds call themselves, and am thus not steeped or invested in the lore, but I got a little sick early on of playing a Jedi who is just constantly culling the local fauna of every planet he sets foot on. I thought Jedi were supposed to be peaceful and only use their cool laser swords for good, or was that just a matter of propaganda?
I think it would be impressive to see an action game that made you practice deescalation techniques when faced with hostile animals, to shoo them away more often than harm them. It would make the fights with imperials and bounty hunters stand out.
I have a coworker who heard I play video games. He told me he is a big fan of Super Mario 3D from 1996. “I remember you could walk away from the TV and he'll fall asleep! Hilarious!” I asked him if he has a Switch, and he told me the only game systems he owns is an NES Classic and an SNES Classic. He grew out of video games a long time ago and those systems have all the games he needs to get his fix.
“There must be a stealthier way in,” and I've been murdering darth mauls ever since.
The ponchos in this game are all ass!! I will never wear them. Just design and write a character who is appealing from the start and make me live with his canon lightsaber and canon crop-vest. No need to graft absolutely every AAA video game convention onto your AAA star wars game.
I do like the cutscenes though, and I like the leaning into Cal as a sullen trauma survivor and BD-1 as his emotional support animal. I just wish those scenes weren't followed up by ganking, sluggish controls and glitchy jank.
Picked up where I left off in Shining Force. Im in the penultimate chapter. I didn’t know you could egress and keep EXP, so a lot of my characters are super under leveled and I’m gonna have to grind for a while. This awoke something within me and now I’m enjoying video games again. Needed to knock my dopamine receptors clean or something. Because now I’m playing Mario maker 2 and I feel like if I hit TotK (with my plan to knock out shrines and find armor) I’m gonna be cool with it again.
Something Tim said on the podcast this week stuck with me. It’s not anything deep or whatever, but he mentioned that he starts enjoying video games after about an hour of play. For me that was long enough for my spoiled, instant-gratification-craving dopamine circuits to get over themselves.
beat okami. i started a file a few years ago and got really into it, but i moved apartments right in the middle of my playthrough and fell off the game as a result. i'd played up through the end of the first arc, and i was excited to get back into the game and see what was after that.
i had a good time with the game, but i definitely think it gets a little wonky towards the midway point. i loved discovering new parts of the world, because, like, it was always nice to see more of the graphics. and i like the game's approach to the _ocarina of time_ structure; it's less explore-town-dungeon-repeat, more explore-town-explore-minidungeon-dungeon-town..... etc. it's obviously cribbing from that era of _zelda_ but it felt less rigid.
as a played experience, though, i felt like it was just......... fine? enjoyable, with lots of good bits, but never that interesting. the celestial brush felt both overdetermined and undercooked. a lot of the basic actions are the same - draw a line from this to that - and it's obvious that the game will give you a certain power, so it's less of a feeling of discovery and more like, well, i guess the game has decided that i am now worthy to use this power that i was clearly always going to be able to use. there's no real surprise, and no sense of having earned it. i don't usually feel frustrated at linearity in games, but i really chafed on this one because the brush mechanic feels like it _should_ allow for a lot of creativity and expression that isn't really there.
combat is fine, sort of unremarkable, but i like how deep it can go with various upgrades and brush techniques. i hate how much it repeats boss fights, but the ninetails fight is pretty fun. the story starts to feel rushed around the third act, which sucks because that part of the game has a lot of interesting character beats that are underdeveloped. the game's strengths are its production value and atmosphere, and i almost loved it based on those things alone. i guess i had a good time? i really powered through it, so something about it was working for me.
i beat deus ex! i picked the >!merge with helios!< ending because it was 1) easier and 2) the other options seemed to be more about satisfying other peoples‘ choices rather than what i thought was best. all 3 endings are kinda bad in a way (and are also all canonical in the sequel) so in my view it was about picking the least bad one. i won’t uninstall the game but rather i'll revisit the revision mod at a later time, that looks like it changes plenty of stuff from the original.
next up might be the system shock remake but idk yet!
Played Pentiment in a frenzy over the past two days.
Was looking into it because I wanted a detective game to play. It's not exactly that, but I have no complaints whatsoever as to what it actually is, which is, well, more of a visual novel than anything else. The "gameplay" really consists more of choosing what to see in the narrative, and how to characterize Mr. Point-of-View Character in their conversations, than it does to explore an overly dense network of branching paths. Like, it's not _totally_ linear like, say, _Gyakuten Saiban,_ as your choices do have _some_ impact on the narrative, but it's more like you get different flavours of the same overall narrative (at least I think so based on what I've found online after the fact).
Even without knowing that in advance, and at least sort of being able to intuit that's what I was in for after a certain point, I feel that it was an absolutely excellent game. Easily one of last year's best games. Really thoughtfully arranged and lovingly researched. You feel engaged in the conversations and want to pick good choices even after you kinda figure out that there's only so little you can change the narrative, just because it's all written and fleshed out so well.
I'll say it, even if it might be a bit dumb--this is the closest I feel I've experienced to something that could be called _interactive literature._
Anyone know of any Genesis emulator that can read & write SRAM saves? I‘ve tested three and it seems like they all combine the SRAM into the rom file or something.
I’m just trying to generate a savestate to use in a Shining Force save editor, loading my .srm/.sav from a flashcart/mister.
I'm on one of the last battles in chapter 7 of _Shining Force_, it's my first playthrough, and I didn't realize you can promote your classes until a couple battles ago so all my units that can traverse the forest are level 1 or 2. Grinding using the egress method is barely possible because they all get 1-shotted and only gain 1exp from battles, and all my units that can damage the enemy forces literally one-shot them, so there's no room to weaken the enemy and have my level 1's deal the final blow for EXP.
So to save myself a lot of tedious and fruitless attempts at leveling, I just want to cheat and increase their levels....
I also went the entire game without realizing you can egress and keep your EXP, so I replayed each battle 2-10 times, gaining tons of EXP, but when I gave up the battle, I just hit reset lol. So that'a s a ton of levels I could have gained throughought the campain
While I feel this year has been putting some interesting releases, I feel the resurgence of the best videogames poll had me considering that I got too much FOMO and I didn‘t enjoy novelties as much. I’ve been fiddling with Fuga for a second time (I feel I got all the cogs and seen the ending, so you know, gameplay must be that good and I got more invested into the second installment rather than the first one) and I enjoyed it, but I also got a backlog of games I‘ve been playing in little spurts. Thing is, I installed the PS2 emulator on here and I wanted to try and play several things, so here they are:
Dead Space is one I’ve been playing from time to time, and revisiting has been an experience. I think the immersive quality that the game has is possibly for all those narrative elements spawning all over the place, and while I feel this was somewhat ingenious at the time, it got somewhat old fast. I feel the in situ scare elements work really well, but the audio notes and scripts could be used more creatively at the time (and it was shown specially due to the sound design, where you could really edit your narrative by making contrast or complement things between what you hear and what you see). Sadly, it does this only at times, while at others you have the “being the messenger” trope, a thing that doesn‘t work here since you’re a key piece and not a grunt or someone on a mission. Also, maybe it‘s my intuition or such, but I feel the levels aren’t… good.
Also, I tried two games from the PS2 that were in the InsertCredit PS2cular. One of them two is God Hand. I feel the controls are really tanky and chaotic at the time, so the game got somewhat old, but it‘s coherent with what they’re proposing: it‘s like a 3D beat em up that is more mobile than what it seems, and it’s due to the dodges. I think positioning and full profit of your basic techniques is what makes the cake, because damn if it‘s fun. I think Mikami said this was the game where he was allowed to do what he wanted and IT SHOWS. It is possibly the silliest game I have ever been played. I mean, this is amazing (please, don’t spoil me, since I feel it gets even sillier from here):
Also, I got really into it. I love how short the levels are and how difficult some battles are, as well as the surpirse battles. I mean, I died a lot of times because I know I get too head on onto things (=deaths), but everything put into the game is really cohesive regarding gameplay and this is possibly one of the most fun I‘ve got into a game (I feel the best has been Katamari Damacy, but God Hand is still one of the most enjoyable and silly experiences I’ve got so far).
Also, I‘ve started to play also Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter for a while. I feel there’s too much to tackle and it‘s going to be a really long experience. Not that it’s bad, but while I love the cell shading and how everything is being presented so far, I need to get into business and know what I'm doing with baits and traps to fully enjoy the experience.
Gosh, Etrian Odyssey is always so addicting. Third times the charm: I feel like I have garnered the skills necessary to progress further than ever before!
Meanwhile trying to rally motivation to put together a retroarch or duckstation or whatever emulation overhead, because those are the only way to access genesis emulators that can work with .srm/.sav SRAM files, so I can edit my Shining Force save and finally finish the game.
I‘m way late, but as a massive Psycho Soldier liker, I love to see anyone talking about the OG arcade game. With a few folks up there enjoying the theme song, I gotta mention this slept-on thing that happened a few years back: when Terry Bogard came to Smash Bros. Ultimate, his DLC pack included a new recording of the Psycho Soldier theme arranged by none other than Yuzo Koshiro, in both Japanese and English. The “Overseas” version is the first time it’s been officially recorded in English since the mysterious English track from the international arcade release. Both versions rip.
