I love the little song the pikmin sing while marching and I love how they sometimes individually trip and fall down seemingly at random. They‘re so cute. Pikmin are good. [color=grey]It’s a shame then that so many must[/color] [color=tomato]perish[/color][color=grey].[/color]
I just tried The Legend of Alon D'ar for PS2 because someone on reddit said it was “like Quest 64” and I like Quest 64. I always just knew this game as “the one with the awful box art” and never gave it a second thought.
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So far I'm enjoying the graphics and the surprisingly good voice acting. Everyone just sounds really natural. Other than that I am on the fence. NPCs talk a lot. They just go on and on and on about everything. The battle system is simple yet cryptic. I got game over pretty early. I might try again tomorrow.
@“xhekros”#p126494
Also +1 for Fata Morgana, it is really one of the best visual novels of all time. It may not fit the brief to a tee of being like Paranormasight but it is wonderful when you are in the mood. Classic gothic horror vibes but also with some plot directions and twists I legitimately did not expect.
13 sentinels is good anime bullshit, but depends on if you want a pure VN experience. If you’re ok with some (mostly easy) gameplay it’s worth a look. You get to piece together the story playing as each character in chunks but you have flexibility in the order you approach them.
Gnosia gets overlooked a lot and plays quite differently, because it’s basically Warewolf/Mafia in space. I found it quite addictive and the “rounds” are usually quite short so it’s great for playing on the fly. There is an overarching plot connecting it all together that is revealed as you play, but it’s definitely about the journey not the destination.
Raging Loop also has a warewolf/mafia aspect to it but is a more structured and linear story. I really liked it.
If you want more spooks, the Spirit Hunter NG/Death mark games are decent. Maybe more adventure games with heavy VN elements.
You and Me and Her does the meta thing very well, but it’s a very slow burn type of horror and probably better for people who have played a number of VNs. It legitimately creeped me out but hard to recommend (also has NSFW content which is actually important to the plot but worth noting).
If you want to puzzle out some more mysteries it’s absolutely worth looking at the detective club games but might also be worth trying the Zero Escape games if you want VNs that are broken up with puzzles. Or maybe the Danganronpa games. They are goofy but a bit of fun.
I don’t have any real thoughts on it yet but I started Private Eye Dol today which looks pretty cute
@“Lunar”#p127343 I played 13 Sentinels already and I liked it a lot, but you offered me a lot. I think I‘ll go for You and Me and Her and The House in Fata Morgana. I want to get to the Zero Escape games but I think the two games I mentioned are the ones I’m mostly interested.
@“xhekros”#p127364
I’m curious to hear your thoughts!
You and Me and Her is censored on the steam version but you can buy the standard version on JAST USA. It was extremely uncomfortable in those scenes to play and I pretty much just spammed through them, but it’s meant to be unsettling. Good to know so you can make an informed decision about which to pick up.
Fata Morgana is just so good and is the best pick from my list for sure. Has horror themes but is more mysterious than unsettling, at least for me.
The entire time Baldur's Gate 3 was in early access, I was on the fence about getting it, telling myself I really should get back to Divinity Original Sin 2 or Pillars of Eternity before starting another CRPG that I will probably drop after 12 hours again. But the friend I played DOS2 with convinced me I needed to get this one. So I fired up the single player campaign and it‘s great. It has one of the smoothest tutorials I’ve seen for such a complex game. The game is built for the player to get lost for hundreds of hours if they want to with a very generous amount of stuff to do.
The game set kind of a bad first impression with me with the amount of gross-out stuff at the very beginning (the first choice you have is to pull a brain out of a skull or not), and it's handled quite graphically. There was another point later on where the game made me kick a squirrel which was similarly way too graphic and kinda lost me. The tone of these games is a little all over the place, it certainly feels like it's speaking to many different audiences. I'm enjoying the fantasy adventure elements and lighthearted relationships with characters a lot more than the mind-flaying parasites and devil stuff happening. (Maybe I just need to check out Planetscape Torment?) It's certainly quite nice to have the characters feel like they have relationships among each other with the party chat. I think you could compare this writing to Bioware games and not be too far off, but it feels much more interesting than a Dragon Age game. I do consistently wish I could kick my own created player out of the party because compared to your companions, they are kind of boring... even though I spent 2 hours in the character creator.
I'm playing on Balanced mode and have I found myself tempted to save-scum, even despite telling myself I want to live with the consequences of what I'm doing. The battles are kind of long and punishing, so there's a pragmatic reason for wanting to avoid or win them the first time. The turn based tactics are pretty good so far, though the creator Larian Studios does seem to pull out a lot of the same tricks from Divinity Original Sin, hiding barrels full of oil everywhere and rocks dangling from a rope above the battelfield. But I'm cool with it.
Maybe this is my own inexperience with the genre talking... but everything feels similar to DOS2. I don't know how much of that game was based on the original Baldur's gate, but it's very samey. Aside from a few different races, classes, and lore stuff, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the games. After the tutorial area and then getting washed up on the beach of similar-looking environment only to have similar feeling battle systems, exploration, inventory system, and quest structures. It's not broken I guess they don't need to fix it, but I don't think this game has a real identity on its own for me yet. Maybe that will change when I get to Baldur's Gate.
On a side note, in some ways this game solidifies my gripes with Tears of the Kingdom. While there are tons of NPCs and side quests and one conversation can lead to 3 things getting added to your mini-map, I don't feel as sidetracked in this game. I can do a lot of the side questing on the way to the next objective, sometimes multiple quest lines come together, and there's no collecting things just for the sake of it (unless I get deep into the game's crafting mechanics I guess).
The game also makes my PC chug like crazy. I need to upgrade it, because while I can deal with the occasional aliased/bad looking textures, the game had trouble loading the overworld at times and shows characters t-posing and sometimes things like walking animations glitch out. Part of my issue could be that i'm playing it off of a mechanical hard drive because the file size is a whopping 120+ gb . Also it sucks that even after early access there's a giant "v.4.1.1.3622274" on screen at all times. Why? This and Michaelsoft Flight Sim 2020 are the only games that have really pushed my PC to its limits and I can feel it.
Overall I like this game a lot more than I expected to, and it's been a very pleasant surprise for me this weekend. I will easily pass the 12-15 hours I usually put into game in this genre.
@“Tradegood”#p127424 How's the writing?
@“deepspacefine”#p127429 I have no idea how it compares to the old school CRPGs from back in the day, but I‘m enjoying the writing. The character writing is great, I think all of them are very well formed personalities who bounce off of each other well, and I love learning more about them. The writing and world building at large has a lot of surprises and tricks up its sleeve. It’s not always clear who you should trust or which side of a conflict you should be on, so a lot of the writing has to do with investigating things and figuring out the right way to talk to people, and for that it really succeeds well. The writing also does a very good job of placing you in the world, where you‘re not just a random person and you’re not treated like an infallible hero - instead you‘re given a reason to be there and interact with people. It also doesn’t overwhelm you with lore or background world building, instead that stuff just comes up naturally in conversations.
was there a high score thread or did I dream that? at any rate, all my hard work has finally payed off!
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Having a strange experience in that I am really vibing with Outer Wilds, despite the fact that so much of the game is so frustrating to me.
I've never cursed at my TV the way I did trying to land on that Sun Station (only took 5 hours :') ). And plenty of other things - navigating Brittle Hollow, trying to fill out my logs on Ember Twin, sneaking pass the Anglerfish - have been irritating if not completely frustrating.
Yet, I end every play session feeling extremely satisfied, and my thoughts on the game are very positive overall. I've experienced the opposite so many times - games that feel nice to play while you're playing them but feel extremely hollow once you turn the TV off - but never had this opposite experience before
Dropping a combined 160 hours or so on Tears of the Kingdom and Final Fantasy XVI has me kinda burnt out on big new games so I've been having fun playing old games on the MiSTer from back in the old days when they respected your time, dagnabbit.
I mentioned a bit ago that I was playing **Snatcher** and I finished that. The ending was very Kojima. That dude really always was fascinated with the Cold War and the Soviet Union, wasn't he? Is this game considered canon in the Metal Gear timeline? I knew about Metal Gear Mk. II and always figured that was just a goofy reference, but I had not been aware that the villain was the son of Dr Madnar from Metal Gear, and MGS4 did establish that he was still alive after Metal Gear 2...
After that I played through **Clock Tower** 3 times and got 3 endings, or actually 2 endings with variations on one since apparently it doesn't matter which of your friends survive as far as the game is concerned. I looove how short it turned out to be, you can blaze through it in like half an hour once you know where everything is. Even though it's... very... very... slow... I wouldn't say no to some tweaks to movement in Wayforward's new port.
Now I'm ready for something a little longer so I'm playing **Wild Arms** for the first time. There's a lot less cowboy in this game than I thought there'd be!!! Not a very much hee-haw at all!!
@“Andy B”#p127340 oh man. i played this game back in the day on my cousin‘s ps2 - our families were vacationing together and he brought a bunch of games that i got to try out, and which permanently altered my life trajectory. (like, i played chrono cross, legend of dragoon, valkyrie profile, legend of mana, and lunar silver star story all on this trip. obviously i didn’t get very far in any of them)
i remember it being very generic feeling, though i didn't quite have words for that at the time and also i didn't care because i loved generic fantasy. is that memory accurate?
>
@“deepspacefine”#p127429 How’s the writing?
it's written in the competent nerd style. Not a great thing, but could be worse (and usually is)!
I've put a couple hours into the game myself. The structure they've built wrt to interface, combat, decisionmaking, etc is all real good and snappy (there are already mods to shorten or eliminate the dice roll animations for those that find that a bit too slow), so it feels good to play and isn't unwieldy or fiddly. This is going to sound mean, but I think Larian has always had somewhat poor taste when it comes to the aesthetics. BG3 is less offensively over-designed than the Divinity games, but it's still not great to look at in places (design wise, not technically). Like _Jagged Alliance 3_ I'm both enjoying playing it for what it is, and also anticipating mods/expansions like 1.14 or _Mask of the Betrayer_ down the road
@“Reverse Kaiser”#p127433 https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/2670-h-i-g-h-s-c-o-r-e-h-a-n-g-o-u-t/30
@“Lunar”#p127346 Played this back when the translation first came out and I thought it was really fun! It feels like the “RPG maker adventure game” but with more artistry and more budget.
In case you didn't know, the readme that comes with the translation patch has a few good tips for common places where people get stuck. Also, if you get stuck, feel free to tag me! There's not a lot of info on the game out there and a few places in the game can be real jerky.
I recently picked up the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters on Switch and just finished playing through FF1 last night. I played through FF1 on NES when I was a kid and haven‘t touched it since and I gotta say the Pixel remaster version is not the same game as the original, and for me thats a good thing. I don’t know if its that the original hasn‘t aged well or if I’m the one who hasn‘t aged well, but mid-30’s me was very glad to have all the quality of life improvements that streamlined the original experience. I was surprised at how much I remembered progressing through the game, but also at times somewhat confused as to what to do next, which makes me question how kid-me ever finished this (probably Game Genie).
I don't think me getting occasionally stuck is a fault of the remaster but more of the source material they had to work with being somewhat vague to begin with. I really don't think its a fault at all to be honest. How DO you update a title without altering it to the point of feeling like a completely different game while also maintaining the spirit of the original? I personally liked that I got stuck a bit here and there as I remember that being part of the experience of the NES version. Don't know what to do next? Go somewhere else! There weren't online resources to turn to then, only game guides, magazine articles and the usually untrustworthy advice of the playground, so getting a little turned around at times almost felt like a return to that sense of curious exploration I experienced as a kid.
Now as far as quality of life features go, my favorite addition has to be the dungeon map. Getting lost in the dungeons in the original was often a death sentence, so having that map right there to reference very quickly made things so much more enjoyable. It even updated which doors you've entered so you wouldn't end up accidentally backtracking. My goldfish-like short-term memory was immensely grateful for this.
All in all I had a very good time during my roughly 15-hour run and look forward to playing through the rest of the remasters as I've never touched FF2 or FF3 so I'm going in completely blind on those. I'm probably gonna take lots of notes. Wish me luck!
@“GigaSlime”#p127460 Wild Arms is an extremely solid and holistic 10/10 for me. Once you get your 3(+1) dudes they‘re your best friends for the rest of the game and your party is always in balance. Make sure you buy 99 small flowers at the festival as soon as you get the chance 
I’ll also tell you that unwinnable fights are not unwinnable in this game, you can get exp!
~(Wild Arms 3 is decidedly the entry with the most hee-haw. It even has horsies~)
@“Reverse Kaiser”#p127487 Oh sweet, I'm still at the festival. I was using the chicken dash game to farm and sell tons of Potion flowers
@“GigaSlime”#p127491 catch-a-mole is the one that gives you stat items if you get real good at it, but I tend to just grab a bunch of bullet clips and magic carrots before I move on rather than make everyone really strong right away