Thank you, Tom. It is good to be back.
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I got the boat in DQ3 HD-2D. Getting the boat in a DQ is such a great feeling where suddenly there’s all this adventure out there waiting to be found. And they’ve also littered the world with treats that are fun to find.
I think the treasure spots they’ve put in the world are such a great idea. Usually when I play a DQ, part of the experience is stopping every so often to do a money grind. The treasure spots have given me enough that I haven’t felt like I needed to do that.
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I’m enjoying Stalker 2 quite a lot! It’s exactly the game I hoped for.
I looted a dude and he had body armor that was bugged to be a loaf of bread? I’m gonna wear this bread armor the rest of the game.
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I can’t post much on depth about this because I’m on my phone, but I’ve just discovered and started playing Driftwood:
Stumbled by checking for deals on Lonely Mountains: Downhill DLC, and discovering I’d owned two games already in a pack that Driftwood was also in.
It’s like Lonely Mountains, but you’re a longboarding sloth:
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gave S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 a try and yeah will echo that it seems legit pretty impressive that they came through with it good work GSC
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I’m almost 15 hours into Yakuza: Like a Dragon and losing steam fast. The encounters in the world have gotten annoying while the story has been meandering for some time. The writing has slowly gotten worse ever since you wake up in the homeless encampment and start the game proper. Not that that’s surprising, of course, but I expected a higher density of The Good Stuff this late in the series coming off of Kiwami.
I’m sure it’ll pick up again. These sorts of games always do, but I’ll probably drop it and come back to it when my tolerance restores. I have Symphony of The Night, Mass Effect and Zenless Zone Zero all keeping me entertained when I want a different flavour of game.
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I’m at the end of Persona 3 Reload - Episode Aigis -, or, as known by it’s original title: The Answer. I really enjoyed my time with the main story of Persona 3 Reload but came away from it a little bit cold. I got about 90% of the way there to truly loving the game but it just felt slightly off. I had a great chat about it on the Megaten thread with a few veterans of the OG/FES versions of Persona 3. There are a few things that are just bad and were bad in the OG (a lot of the social links don’t compare to their P4/P5 counterparts), but I think more of what I was missing was what other described as the “lo-fi charms” of the original. Comparing the cutscenes from the two versions side by side, the FES version had a little je ne sais quois that the cleaner, newer, shinier version is missing.
I didn’t really have many expectations for - Episode Aigis -. I have heard for years that The Answer is awful and a huge slog that culminates in some plot contrivances …but I kinda loved it! The gameplay is a little overkill on the dungeon crawling but they made a few minor changes (increased the difficulty, introduced gauntlet fights via the re-worked Monad doors, new party member skills) that made the Abyss of Time go down a bit easier for me than Tartarus did.
The story is a slow burn but I really liked a lot of the scenes and character moments. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Aigis in the main story until I did her social link (…that opens up 90% of the way through the game) and eventually came around to her, so it’s nice to see her in the spotlight and the game expanding on her character growth that won me over. I liked the different portrayals of grief via the different party members; it felt real and earned for me. Ultimately, I think the biggest triumph of the story is that it sold me on the Persona 3 cast as a cohesive group. In the main scenario, there’s these cliques-within-the-clique (e.g. the second years vs the third years) which makes for some interesting tension in the early/midgame but I don’t think the group ever feels super cohesive even by the end. Seeing how they’re all brought together here by the ending of the main story is heartening.
Also maybe I’m losing it but… somber, existential meditation on grief where you’re stuck inside with no end in sight? Kinda hits different after COVID
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It is November, but I’m still snacking on roasted pumpkin seeds with Paranormasight.
Just about to reach the second (final?) night and am having a great time with it.
Once the prologue fires, it really bolts out of the gate at an exciting clip. Rules for the supernatural, characters, and questions all unfurl much faster than I expected as you are dropped into a Jojo’s Deathnote Deathmatch server. After the prologue, it gets cooking again no matter the chapter selected as each immediately establishes a premise, a gimmick, and a duo.
I’m enjoying each character duo! There’s some heightened and some silly alongside the intrigue, but set to a good temperature. The game is thankfully sparse with pixel hunting prompts. Most state a mood and move on keeping everything quick. Avoiding the allure of repetitive joke beats and tangents which are (we’ll just say) well explored in anime investigation read-em-ups.
With all of the mechanical scaffolding erected so quickly, it shifts to mostly real interpersonal, murder mystery crime time drama. It’s good to have the grounding so its more character driven than it is magic nonsense. I feel just a little too much drift away from the hooks of the prologue. I have all of these rules and who-owns-what in my brain RAM, but I’m not yet feeling a payoff in applying those concepts to the ongoing mystery. The prompts have been pretty matter-of-fact person stating and aren’t really driving my attention toward big revelations. The interjections by the Storyteller I could take or leave. I’m ready for it all to be made good on (or made chaff of) in the thrilling finale!
Much more minor: I’m not against a good off-the-wall-break solution. I’ve put a music box into sleep mode, dove into somniums, and am a certified Nonary Public. However, I found the two so far to be cute… but also a little forced/hokey.
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money grinding in Dragon Quest I has been making me sleepy, so I played through Ristar this week. what a funky game! I had a great time until the sixth world—absolute nightmare—but adored the art and music throughout.
back to Dragon Quest I suppose!
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What was your gripe with the sixth world?
Just a very sharp difficulty spike for me honestly! The first five worlds were all very manageable, challenging in the right ways…and then the sixth world just ramps it up too much, too fast. Very specifically 6-1 though; I think the funky teleporter “maze” was totally fine and in some ways quite innovative (environment destruction!).
1 Like
I started playing Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven tonight and I’m pretty early in it still but I gotta say: don’t sleep on this one. I know a lot of people are once-bitten-twice-shy on Square Enix’s more low budget remasters/remakes, but this one is really a cut above the rest imo. Runs at (mostly) 90 FPS on my Steam Deck OLED, combat is nice and snappy, there’s a nice variety of knobs to fiddle with in the settings, the translation is great… none of the usual issues that plague Square Enix’s releases in this category.
I really dig it. The progression system is really slick. It’s usage-based, so the more you use skills/weapons in combat the better your attacks/spells get. There’s a system called glimmering where you get a certain chance to unlock a new skill when using certain moves, which imo is kind of a genius way to keep grinding engaging. I know this series has a reputation for obtuse and dense systems, but they’ve introduced some nice (but not intrusive or annoying) tutorials for them here.
A bit early in still but I’m surprised at how little this game gets talked about. It’s a Square Enix game with Steam reviews that are Overwhelmingly Positive. That’s basically newsworthy all on its own.
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This one is next up for me, came out when I was in the middle of a couple other games. Feels like most people who have played it really like it.
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Just started a new season in NFL 2k5 last night. Still boggles my mind how good this game was, and still is! Still my favorite graphics and presentation of any football game ever. Also had fun messing around with First Person mode for a lil bit haha.
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I think the overall most important thing about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is that the core flying stuff is sound and when the tech works like it should it’s a big upgrade over 2020. So it does the job for instance of simulating oppressive winter weather in the upper midwest on a little airfield out in the sticks + gives you this little 152 in ugly ass mustard and brown livery
Then the lighting, weather effects, and draw distance are all much improved and more varied, and you can feel the transition from flat, cloud-shaded sunlight into the brightness between the cloud cover. And it feels good to be chilling up in your little cabin when you’ve got things trimmed and leveled out
and you get to hang out and look at things like rainbows bending toward nuclear power plant cooling towers
and depressing gray/brown highway interchanges (nothing stopping me from flying a photogenic aircraft over Copacabana Beach or anything but I appreciate the overall verisimilitude)
Was impressed that the game captured the experience of having the sun behind me and illuminating the pilot-facing side of the propeller, which made it hard to pick out the runway and get lined up on the approach here. A realistic frustration that I havent encountered in a flight sim before which was neat.
So this is all great, but the Career Mode is sort of a let down. I think it works fine as a way to better structure the game, especially for console players - and to be clear it’s probably pretty rewarding to that end. but it’s just not realistic or detailed enough. Like this is the result of that contract I completed (ferrying the 152 from one airfield to another)
It’s just a bunch of videogame nonsense numbers next to a weird guy. And after just a handful of flights I’m getting contract offers to do search and rescue in Madagascar and drop off skydivers in Switzerland. Doesnt make sense. The licensing also is nonsensical and doesnt seem to have had the appropriate care put into it. For example, to get your high performance rating the game tests you by dumping you into a Corvalis and has you taxi, take off, then fly a pattern around the airfield and then land. But it doesnt provide any info on like landing speed or flap speed for this plane so I’m trying to educated guess what these would be while following the licensing-mandated flight path which unavoidably leads you to 1600 ft at the point you enter final ~ 1 mile from the runway and you’re going 130 knots (I was even trying to minimize my airspeed anticipating this would happen, would have been absolutely screaming if I kept the throttle in the green throughout the pattern). So there’s no way to safely reduce your airspeed, unless you’re supposed to land a corvalis flaps up and going that fast (?) and if you are, the game never tells you. Does anyone know if I should do this. So idk, the career mode isnt going to be replacing good old Air Hauler 2 which isnt a surprise tbh.
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one of the GOAT games yeah. Have you tried 2K24 mod?
1 Like
Kind of. I remember downloading it last year when I first put 2k5 on my Deck, but all I did was update the rosters with it. And this year I’ve been playing with the original old rosters because I know those players better (don’t really watch NFL anymore), so I didn’t bother this time around. I should check it out again though just to see what else was added to the mods since I plan on playing it a good amount this winter.
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memories. presentation in that game was outta this world
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you’d think football games would have improved in the ensuing 20 years
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they would have without the licensing being in EA jail.
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