Oh no! It’s so bad!
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there is absolutely a map!! a useful one that shows you where stuff is. you played without the map???
dang. raw as hell to draw up your own maps though, very cool.
crow country is one of the few games i beat this year, loved it. played the whole thing on No Enemies Mode and didn’t feel like i was missing anything. wouldn’t even have gotten past the first hallway otherwise
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I might do a no enemies run at some point, really dug the vibes of that game and
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based on the ending I guess no enemies mode must be canon? They had that reveal about them not being violent and I was just like “… what did I do to piss them off?”
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Where the heck is this?! I couldn’t find it in the inventory menu
The no enemy route is super legit. The enemies are super bullet spongy, so I haven’t been killing them anyway.
You know, the typical RE way to deal with most enemies.
I just finished it and found that writing down all of my puzzle-reckoning on a sheet of notebook paper with a little sketch of whatever object I was nearby/thematic doodle (looking at you, mushroom baby) next to each entry made for a very fun time.
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Talked a bit about Astro Bot, Shadow Of The Colossus, and 13 Sentinels Astro Bot, The Culture, And What It Means To Always Celebrate Something | by Privately Attack Nobuo Uematsu With Questions | Oct, 2024 | Medium
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I did it! for the first time, without any cheats or exploit of glitches, I caught em all in Red & Blue version!.. and I’m just about 4 guys away from a living dex, too
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Started playing through Penny’s Big Breakaway again and that game is just such a delight. Aesthetically on absolute fire. Having so much fun just rolling around doing weird tricks and averting the penguin cops, racking up the combo meter and getting sick scores. It’s like Treasure never even left. Easily game of the year.
It even has lesbiabs!
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Haven’t played Marvel vs Capcom 2 in a while. And even though I know I love this game, I forgot how much I love this game.
In addition, I’ve found that being able to easily take screenshots on my Deck has added another level of enjoyment to my video game playing.
It reminds me of how I ride my bike around the city. My main purpose is to ride my bike, but it’s also nice being able to look out for cool pics as a side mission.
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In all seriousness…
Where the hell is this map? Is it an item to you pick up? I just got the shotgun last night and I still have no idea how to pull up a map. I’m kind of having fun drawing my own map, so it’s not a huge deal or anything, but it would streamline a few things.
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Each themed area has a map that you have to pick up yeah. They’re generally on walls and corkboards if I remember right
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I’ve taken a break from Octopath Traveler II this week but I’ve been enjoying it more and more. I’ve been struggling with the higher level fights but had an idea of how I could switch up my party’s secondary jobs to make things go smoother and it worked super well! A glorious feeling. Two of my party members were dealing very little damage and I was struggling to keep the party healed through the boss fights but with a change of strategy and job composition my party is now a seemingly unstoppable force. I’ve also stumbled upon two optional late game bosses that I keep thinking about. They’ll surely show me if my party is as unstoppable as it currently seems.
After now having finished two of the character’s stories I think the most glaring issue I have with the games is its pacing. I guess they’re going for a buffet style “take what you want in which order you want” experience but that doesn’t really work for me. Because each story chapter is gated behind a significant level gap, you’re forced to basically assemble your party of 4, do each character’s current story chapter, go into a dungeon with the appropriate level (if you can find one) or grind a little bit to repeat the process with the next tier of story chapters.
This leads to leads to very unnatural breaks in the flow of the character’s individual stories. Partitio’s story for example is pretty laid back the whole time. Sure he has a goal but it’s not like it cannot wait a couple of weeks. While Ochette and Castti are facing much more high-stakes and time-sensitive quests. So it just feels weird to take a break from Ochette’s quest to save her homeland from an apocalyptic event just to make sure Partitio can do his comparatively benign thing.
The story chapters themselves actually are quite fun and short little arcs and the party banter during quests also gives you the feeling that the party is getting to know each other. But while the game certainly aims for that feeling of a ragtag party helping each other out on their quests I personally really miss the structure of an overarching plot that justifies the group sticking together other than by pure convenience. It just all holds together really loosely. I hope they take those fun gameplay systems and honor them with a more coherent story one day.
That being said I do still look forward to playing the game more.
I’ve also been keeping a close eye on the PC Gaming Thread and I know that thread will cost me a lot of money. For now though, it inspired me to revisit Symphony of War. A game I already own and enjoyed very much. I never finished the game the first time around because I had a lot going on at the time and got distracted but this time I intend to finish it. And what can I say? I just really love it. I’m a simple creature. Give me a tactics/strategy game where I can level and class change my units and I’m happy. I just really enjoy the flow of tactics battles interspersed with a more planning and optimizing focused session at camp.
The game actually gives you quite a bit of systems to play with which makes it really fun to play around. All your units have traits, affinities, attributes and a base class which all influence each other. The base class can’t be changed (except for the main character which can actually be either a healer, a rogue or a tank/melee class) but everything else is quite malleable due to items you can buy to give characters new traits or affinities. Combine that with a bit of resource management required for higher level classes as well as squad compositions and squad artifacts and you have a lot to tinker with.
I really like that they allow you to basically change all your units classes back and forth without any cost which allows for experimentation and prevents you from overspecializing yourself into a corner that’s not favorable against the enemy units you meet in the campaign.
I’m playing on normal difficulty and find it very enjoyable. The game gives you a main objective and optional objectives as well as optional win conditions. For example you could win a siege mission simply by surviving for 15 turns but you can get extra renown (which unlock points for technology research) if you defeat the enemy siege leader and seize their base of operations. Going for these optional objectives is a fun challenge it gets quite tricky around the mid-point of the game, where I’m at right now.
Your army can get quite big with currently up to 15 squads with up to 9 units in each squad. That makes the later missions take a bit of time to complete. So far that hasn’t been an issue for me but I have to say if there’s one thing I really liked about Fire Emblem: Engage it’s that they kept the missions short and breezy without making them trivial.
Given that I really like those sort of games I’ve actually haven’t played too many of them. Off the top of my head I can think of the Fire Emblems I played (Awakening, Three Houses, Engage), a few scenarios in Battle for Wesnoth as well as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM2. I also enjoyed my time with the stories of Disgaea 1, 2 and 5 though I never really got into the absurd late game number inflation-y stuff. Among those, the squad mechanic from Symphony of War is somewhat unique. I know it’s lifted from or at least inspired by Ogre Battle but I don’t actually know any other games with such a system.
I have to take a deeper look into the genre at some point. Given how much I enjoy these games it’s been a bit of sore spot for me that I never played the older Fire Emblems so they’re definitely on the list. So is Final Fantasy Tactics, which I never played. If anybody has more recommendations or opinions on where to start with the older Fire Emblems feel free to let me know!
Edit: Oh also Symphony of War is made in RPG Maker which just shows how far you can take that engine if you really want to. Also it reinforces my thoughts on revisiting Vampire’s Dawn. There’s just a certain charm to RPG Maker games, a certain homeliness to seeing the same assets across games for - at this point - decades.
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Been really loving Victory Heat Rally. It’s sort of a fusion of Sega racers like Outrun 2 and Sega Rally but with Mario Kart’s drift boost. It has a big single player campaign with a world map containing a range of challenges from normal races to more specialized challenges, many obviously inspired by Outrun 2 (pass cars, hit obstacles, avoid obstacles, cut the lines). I just moved from the first tour to the second one and there’s been a big increase in difficulty, starting with an “avoid hitting obstacles” course that I replayed like twenty times to get the gold before letting myself go to bed.
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Just rolled credits on Penny’s Big Breakaway. Collected all the splangos and broke the score meter on every level just for the sheer fun of it.
What a juicy game! I think this is going to be a big favorite of mine for a long time. Definite 3D platformer pantheon, maybe even the best, but I might have to sit on it more before I come to such conclusions.
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I still need to finish Penny, I really like it but I kind of wished it didn’t have collectibles and side objectives in all the levels, or at least that they didn’t unlock challenge levels I’d like to play. I love the game when I’m speeding through the levels trying to figure out how to use my abilities to maintain my momentum at all times, I don’t like it as much when it turns into an annoying scavenger hunt which invariably leads me to all of the places where I can accidentally clip through the floor. It’s probably a lot better if you let yourself just ignore all that stuff on your first playthrough but I can’t make my brain do that
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The platforming is sometimes janky in a way that’s probably not intentional, but I absolutely love the combo system in that game. It feels like the levels were mostly designed to let you complete the whole thing without dropping your combo.
Mooncat is GOTY.
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UFO 50 has been taking up most of my gaming brain space, and I have a feeling that over time, I’ll be playing less of that and instead be bouncing around between a bunch of old games.
I played a little bit of the early LucasArts game Loom last night and might dive a little deeper into it tonight. It’s a very cool game to think about, if nothing else.
And this afternoon, I played Qix Neo for PlayStation for a while. It’s basically a repackaged version of Volfied, the arcade sequel to Qix. I grew up loving the spatial problem solving of Qix, and it translates very well to having a sci-fi coat of paint.
I loved playing it with my kids watching and rooting for the little spaceship to defeat the baddies through the power of making shapes out of lines.
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I’ve been playing Echoes of Wisdom and I love it, but I also grabbed some DS games from the various DS recommendations I received here + the DS thread. I’ve poked around a couple of them but they often seem too substantial for my current situation, so my first big win is Retro Game Challenge. A true pick up and play with just enough story context to keep you going, and the writing is cute and funny. I’m on the third game, Rally King, and so far each one has been more fun than the last
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