Once again attempting to break out of Pokémon prison with some good old arcade games. Been playing pop’n music 10, worked up a good sweat actually!
5 Likes
I think eternal jokers and rentals are brilliant, and perishables can be interesting. I only use them when I’m in ante 4 or less or I just happen to have a joker slot open and they’re an extra Econ option.
Gold staked everything and went back to white stake on last time. Got like 400,000,000,000,000 chips in ante 7, smirked and whispered “stupid” and deleted it off my phone.
Cool game, and I recommend everyone give it a spin
3 Likes
my porch is painted that color blue for that reason so i’m for sure going to play this game
1 Like
In a bout of insomnia, I played Orbo’s Odyssey. It’s a little 3D platformer with movement that’s somehow both very precise and extremely out of control. Running and jumping is fast and you can fire yourself like a cannonball at any time, in any direction. It’s very fun, and only a couple hours long.
I’m going to try to sleep now.
7 Likes
After about 5 hours of Blue Prince I finally have discovered something that means that nearly every run isn’t a complete waste of time. And a reason to actually use a notepad and pen.
My last comment on the game and thinking back to the last time this publisher had a critical darling, is that it’s amazing how well a game can be promoted when you actually have to sell them to make money.
Meanwhile:
Promise Mascot Agency is incredible. Finally a game that dares to ask “What if Driver was good and had a cat that was obsessed with pornography?”
11 Likes
Both that dude and Pinky are hilarious.
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Tofu is my Bro-fu. Also Shiori rules.
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Still nursing an ever-improving hand injury (which I think at this point must have been a fractured pinky finger, which has a lot more impact on day-to-day activities than I might have imagined), I’m still largely unable to game since most everything I want to play is controller-centric and I can’t particularly use one
But I’ve also been losing my mind and missing Magic: the Gathering since more or less leaving the game behind following its journey into futures I do not much care to follow
So, last night, I re-installed Hearthstone on my phone. Last I played was a couple years back for a couple of weeks because one of my Magic friends was checking it out again. The mobile UI for this game is still a mess even after over a decade, but I’m committed to only playing the game on my phone because of how I’d lose hours to it playing on desktop during the height of my time with the game seven or eight years ago
It’s…fine, I guess. It’s not really the Magic experience I’m craving, but the general wackiness of Hearthstone sets bothers me far less than the turn into memey nonsense Magic has grown so fond of in the last couple of years (not to mention the cross-over sets which are as anathema to me) since that has always been part of Blizzard’s house style. As is tradition, my preferred class (Mage) doesn’t seem well-positioned in the meta, but I find the game enjoyable enough in and of itself that I’m having fun enough with it for now
And luckily, the game seems more approachable without spending money than it ever has been, with a pretty generous welcome back package, so it’ll be a serviceable getaway while I wait to get back to all the things I’m itching to play (chief among them, Elden Ring and South of Midnight, but probably also Assassin’s Creed: Shadows)
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I just bit the bullet on South of Midnight. Will report back.
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I finally got to Yakuza 6 after my 14 or so years playing through Yakuza 5. Still just a few hours in, but do people not like this one? I’m having a good time so far – seeing my kids and the beach from Yakuza 3 after the magnitude and sheer quantity of everything that happens in Yakuzas 4 and 5 hits really nicely. I like what Kuroda is doing in this one; Kiryu’s always been stoic, but there seems to be a newfound sense of peace here. Maybe the story with Haruka is playing to the emotional cheap seats, but it works for me – these are soap operas, after all
Also just a cool – and very specific to someone who’s playing these sequentially with their most updated versions – change of pace to go from the PS3 engine to the Kiwami 2 engine once again. I like the look of PS3/360 games in super hi-res a lot, but it’s also interesting to see how the team went about ensmoothening everything (they seem mostly interested in more reactivity and menus that feel light and “plinky” rather than heavy and chunky). And having been playing a fair bit of Avowed, a good game with largely bad faces (not sure if the modelers have specifically ever seen a human hairline), both engines are a good reminder that A) Ryu Ga Gotoku make some of the best faces in the medium (a smart initial priority; soaps aren’t gonna work if you can’t stare at faces sitting in chairs talking to other faces for a good portion of your game) and B) a touch of stylization almost always work better for “realism” than an attempt at proportional reality
Anyway, hope I get to go back to Okinawa and dig up my daily worm soon
7 Likes
Rolled credits on Sable. A relaxing and beautiful game. I really enjoyed the use of colour in the game, like how at night colour would be washed out only to have it pop as the sun rose. I ended up choosing the Whale Ship mask. In my mind Sable will use the mask to forge her own path and use the knowledge of how humans reached the planet to either improve their understanding of astronomy and/or history.
I recently downsized my full size ATX PC to mATX. With the significantly smaller footprint I hooked up my desktop to my living room TV and played the game with that setup. I’m impressed with it so far. My Ryzen 5 3600 and RX6600 are definitely on the lower end of midrange but the handful of games I have tested can easily run at native 4K. Halo 3 via the Master Chief Collection runs at a almost rock solid 4K 60fps. I did see the frames drop to around 55 during one moment in Tsavo Highway with three Wraiths all trying to kill me at once, but that was it. My Bazzite (modified Fedora Silverblue) setup even survived the motherboard swap, which is something I could not say about Windows back in 2021 when I swapped to the motherboard I just left.
My Steam Deck has been officially retired from being docked to my TV and now is just for portable gameplay. I would love to copy the emulation setup I have on my Deck to my desktop, which is easy if it is literally copying files, but there is no easy way to automatically backup and load emulation save files to both systems without manual intervention. I may be able to figure it out with something like Syncthing but I will probably just need to manually copy saves over to my server and then copy them again on my desktop.
I should probably really focus on finally finishing Kingdom Come Deliverance now.
2 Likes
Dang, discovered the hard way that legend of dragoon has a freezing problem on the ps2 slim. It froze last night and in thought it was a fluke again a freeze, or rather it so l tried to load after a cut scene and doesn’t load the next segment.
2 Likes
I’ve set aside this weekend to focus my attention solely on playing Dark Savior for the first time. One of those games I kept hearing the name of but without any elaboration so it was finally time to check it out. Perhaps one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Excellent game to get lost in without any distractions. Not fully completed yet (iykyk) but hoping to be by the end of tomorrow. Don’t have much to report aside from that this is definitely one of the best games of all time. Saturn never disappoints.
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And here I was, led to believe that was the Saturn’s entire thing.
3 Likes
If you primarily want to just play Legend of Dragoon you could try the Severed Chains PC port.
2 Likes
Nowadays the strong Mage deck is Protoss and is more of a combo one.
1 Like
I’ve continued to play Xenoblade Chronicles X. I’ve hit on a certain armor combination for my main character that complements well the current choice for Elma.
I’m through chapter 6 and about to get a Skell. The exploration continues to be top-notch. I like the sense of barely skating by when I’m dodging higher-level enemies. I also like being on a completely other continent and having the realization that I can tank through it, or suddenly noticing that another side quest objective is right there. While the two games are otherwise not much alike, I last had this experience of kismet in exploration with Dragon Quest III.
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Thank you. I’ll probably go that route. The loading times were crazy.
I played two games: finished one (Disco Elysium) and started one with some issues (Promise Mascot Agency).
Disco Elysium is a great game. Not like one of the best, but I can understand why some people regard this game as one of their favorites of all time. The way the game uses intrusive thoughts and the concepts of the brain as a thought plant and incorporate that into a classic cRPG, then base everything into a premise that is entirely political and into a holistic background (so much that it goes way overboard, which works in this case). There are plenty of things that are really great -specially since the beginning-, but I also think that there are other situations that weren’t as great. But, to be honest, it is pretty amazing to have all this setting and have so many broken characters, how the ironic distance keeps fading itself into more and more pain… At least that was my case, but to me it’s neck and neck between this and Alan Wake 2 for the best game I’ve played this year.
As for Promise… First, let’s address the issue: my computer gets turned off every now and then when I played, which is more of a laptop issue than anything else. As for the game, I’ve been having a lot of fun moving through the down and doing a lot of quests, finding your spots, but the game forces you to take a look at your money, because your money are your debts. This is essentially “Drive: How to pay an astronomic debt. Unhinged Japanese town edition”, and it does wonders at that. I’d had just hoped the game would have gone even more bonkers and not stop sometimes at point where your characters demand more (Shiori is a good example). In any case, it’s a really good game, although I’ve been hampered down by my PC.
9 Likes
i’ve been playing Keep Driving on and off this week. It’s not perfect and I’ll have more to say when i finish a run, but I’m impressed and heartwarmed by how emotionally textured and thoughtful it is. I don’t usually see rogueish games as conducive to, like… Writing? but there’s a lot of it here and it’s understated and very good. It helps that it doesn’t feel particularly challenging, i don’t feel pushed to optimize. If richard linklater would ever love a game, this is probably the one.
Music’s pretty good too. Kind of odd to witness a swedish take on the mid aughts’ midwest emo vibe but they’re doin it
girls are cool…
9 Likes