@“GigaSlime”#p148506 I played a decent amount of Granblue years ago and always hoped they’d make something like this, was so excited when it was announced…a long time ago lol.
It sounds cool but definitely a wait for a price drop game for me
@“seasons”#p148516 I‘m on a bit of an FMV kick at the moment too and played Tender Loving Care last year. My girlfriend and I still talk about how weird that game is and how much of a good time it is if you don’t take it too seriously.
I picked up a copy of Psychic Detective just a couple of days ago too - looking forward to going through that!
>
@“LeFish”#p148539 an FMV kick
have had my eye on this looks interesting I think
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121510/Tenebris_Somnia/
@“LeFish”#p148539 I watched the trailer for Tender Loving Care and will be adding it to the list
@"yeso"#p148555 Yee got my eye on this one too
@“leah”#p148364 I think I understand what you mean. To me, a 7/10 is a game with flaws, but it‘s enjoyable. It’s memorable.
A 3.5/5 is this case is a beautiful, pristine game... that I've either fallen asleep while playing, or can't remember anything about it other than it was a beautiful, pristine game.
@“sabertoothalex”#p148387 So I had already been eyeing this game very hard, despite having no experience at all with any of the Fate franchise before. Your post had me very intrigued.
And then, less than 24 hours later, a demo of the game was released on the Switch eshop, to celebrate the release of the DLC, apparently?
Anyway you can play the first few chapters, and progress carries over to the full game.
So thanks, sabertoothalex, for whatever strange Fate magic you apparently have! Can't wait to check this demo out when it finishes downloading.
I've been on a weird puzzle game kick lately (see where I played a bunch of Klax over the holidays??) and I played a ton of Lumines over the weekend. Game rules. I am not “good” at puzzle games, but I really enjoy the vibe of that one.
The dearth of quality Mega Man Legends 2 retrospective content combined with my complicated feelings on the game is an unusual feeling. There‘s so much to say about this game and it feels like no one is saying it. There’s just the surface level ill-informed and juvenile fan consensus and wikipedia-readers, plot-regurgitating let‘s plays disguised as retrospectives. The complaints I’m hearing are inappropriate.
This game has so much going on, and yet so little capitalization on these features. I would compare it to something like MGSV: The Phantom Pain. In fact, it feels modern in the way that it's achingly incomplete in content, yet the assets and movement mechanics that *are* there are deliciously high quality and polished respectively. Mega Man Legends beat the 1998 heavy hitters *Ocarina of Time* and *Metal Gear Solid* to the punch, then two years later *kept doing it's own thing with flourish* only to run out of steam three quarters of the way there. I could imagine it's like if we got a Mother 3 release on 64DD in the year 2000. I'm glad we did.
I want to just write my dang piece on it already instead of filtering bits out into other threads, but this last dungeon is a doozy and requires me to grind massive quantities of zenny.
Sadly, there really doesn't seem to be half as much end-game sidequest content as the first game had, which makes things a lot less enjoyable. There's even some seemingly incomplete sidequests along the way that have rewarded me with *nothing*....
Don't get it twisted. I said my feelings on the game are complicated. I love Mega Man Legends II. I played it for hours when I was seven years old and never left the first town because I was scared. Back then I preferred it to the first game because of the analog controls. So it's a very strange feeling now realizing that the first game in the series was *perfect*, and the second one is... complicated.
@“antillese”#p148639 I still spend a lot of time just listening to the music. I'd buy a new one! Feels ideal for mobile, even.
@“antillese”#p148639 Lumines is so good. The PSP is the way to go but Lumines Supernova on PS3 is the best console version.
I'm glad that its the '90s again and therefore time for **Klax**.
Two weeks into the year and I‘ve been playing basically just two games: Baldur’s Gate 3 and Snake Farm.
BG3 needs no introduction, Snake Farm is a wonderfully fun little hubris machine/score attack game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2491640/SNAKE_FARM/
Buy snakes. Kill those snakes to buy more snakes and some weapons. Think "I can definitely buy seven more snakes for my farm with this one damage upgrade I got" and then lose horribly. Also, ten days as a fixed timer is great for this! Keeps the runs snappy.
@“Tradegood”#p148054 heck yeah! I had a great experience last year where I came across the joy of Pu·Li·Ru·La just pulling up random ROMs like I do, and then not three days later, they had an actual Pu·Li·Ru·La arcade cabinet at Free Play in Denton, Texas, so I got to play through the whole thing as god
@“tomjonjon”#p148667 It's the 20s and we roar for Klax.
i‘ve almost completed the snes mario’s picross game (i have just a handful of real tough Special Level puzzles left) so i started that zelda: the minish cap on my switch for… some reason? i like the art style and the big/small zones makes for come cool set designs but so far it sure is a regular ol‘ zelda game, for good and bad. i like a good ol’ zelda a lot and for some reason never got to this one. hopefully there will actually be some sort of mechanics/puzzles that make cool and not-tedious use of changing size, instead of just locking areas away behind differently-sized doors. i beat the first dungeon (the rotating barrel is some cool gba tech) and am in the mountain on the way to dungeon 2. unique map system in this one too, sectioning out certain zones that you can zoom in on.
I‘ve been goblin chugging Forspoken and loving every minute of it. I haven’t resonated with an open world or action game in a long time, but this one is actually great. The character movement is awesome, it‘s like they put Sonic the Hedgehog in Horizon Zero Dawn’s world but gave you Banjo Kazooie‘s objectives in a story co-written by Elden Ring’s scenario writer and dialogue by Joss Whedon. It‘s adds up to more than its component parts. Also it’s the only game that talks honestly about the school to prison pipeline and the benefits of non-carceral solutions to America‘s criminal justice system. I don’t think any one person had a vision for this game and yet… it kinda works. At the very least it will make you question the necessity of intentionality when it comes to art!
What makes the game click is that everything is super fast. You can get to the opposite side of a gigantic zone in like 2 minutes, You can clear out a fort or get through a dungeon and get to a totally different feeling area in less than 10 minutes. It's actually tons of fun to explore and platform around or do timed challenges and races. The way that Frey uses her magic feels weird for the first 2 hours, but once you get used to the control it feels really good to run circles around a horde of enemies while dodging or platforming. Projectiles feel great, and I just got to a part where I unlocked a sword which feels totally different. If you're someone who feels the need to collect every single thing you find, avoid the game, but if you are just chill with hanging out then I can't recommend it enough. You gotta get on this game's level, and maybe I developed stockholm syndrome, but the gameplay is truly its own reward.
There's also a lot in it that doesn't work, the stealth sections are rough, a lot of the sidequests are pointless or bad, the crafting system kinda baffles me, and Frey has a real potty mouth. It's fucking weird how much swearing is in this game. The less said about the writing the better but in broad strokes its no more offensive than what you'd get from a God of War or Spiderman and the voice direction did this game a major disservice. I also appreciate the fact the "dark lore rpg" elements of the game are played 100% straight and our protagonist is a smartass about it, so sort of reads as a "fuck you" to a certain type of Sony 3rd Person Action/Adventure gamer who want to read games as _serious_ and _important_.
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Meanwhile for a more low-key game I've been chewing on, Birushana is a great otome and total opposite vibe. It's very cohesive and lovingly presented. I really enjoy the main character. So many otomes have passive or generic MCs, but Shanao really charts her own path. She still has a lot of inner conflict and self doubt but it doesn't manifest in weakness, but instead in strength and compassion. Her motivations are actually quite nuanced. I'm doing the Noritsune route, and he too has quite a journey of character development, though in some ways I think he's changing a lot chapter to chapter in a way that's a little rushed. It's all very high drama and he goes hotheaded freak begging for a rival that will kill him, to abandoning his lineage and being chivalrous and defending commoners, to >!coming back from the edge of death to fight a war he doesn't believe in and kill the woman who risked everything to save him.!< The character development is so extreme that I wish it conveyed the passage of time a bit better. But I'm really enjoying it.
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Been playing the Crisis Core FF7 remaster/remake while teetering on the fence about whether I will commit to FF7R Part II. I hated the game on PSP but approaching this version with lowered expectations I have to admit the remakaster improves it substantially, mainly by upgrading the combat system from “insulting” to “kinda fun”.
There’s now some actual thought and skill involved in customizing your equipment loadout and timing your blocks, dodges, abilities, etc. and the infamous roulette wheel system feels like it provides variance (“I got this bonus, so I’ll adapt my tactics this way”) rather than yanking control out of the player’s hands to make you randomly win quicker by mashing the yay button. The writing is not _as_ bad as I remembered either, taking as a given that no piece of media derived from FF7 has ever or will ever reproduce the tone and (comparative) restraint of the original game. (Genesis, a.k.a. Gackt is still a terrible character though.)
No, turns out the _actual_ worst thing about the game, which has been reproduced all too faithfully, is the fact that substantial content is locked away behind 300 (!!!!!) virtually identical combat missions selected from a checklist on a menu, all of which involve traipsing around a small featureless 3D level and grinding semi-random encounters with groups of 2-4 enemies until you win. These aren’t really calibrated to the rate at which you level up, so you will have to do many, many mindless enclounters with low-level enemies if you’re after certain upgrade paths or unlocks (which the game doesn’t necessarily telegraph to you at all). _**Three hundred.**_ Selected off a menu. And you can kiss about half the upgrades and all of the sidequests and subplots in the game goodbye if you don’t seriously commit. Yessir, that’s the sense of discovery, wonder and rich worldbuilding I play RPGs for!
Looking forward to replaying _Last of Us II_ when the PS5 upgrade hits on Friday. I won’t pretend my personal interest in replaying Naughty Dog’s catalog has nothing to do with Neil Druckmann’s national origin, but I’ve found that knowing about the background actually adds very little to the games, which are mostly collections of timeworn American pop culture tropes populated with nuanced-by-video-game-standards characters; meanwhile I’ve seen some [profoundly asinine](https://x.com/xoxogossipgita/status/1747333254284214755?s=20) essentializing takes on this topic from people who clearly don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about and would not dare say the same things if Druckmann were, say, Russian-American or Chinese-American.
I do think Naughty Dog’s addition of a horde mode to the game they tried so hard to present as a Serious Meditation on Violence is kind of a hilarious admission of the contradictions that were always inherent in trying to take that route while still producing a blockbuster AAA action game. That said, replaying the first game has mostly made me realize that the combat is in fact deeper and more thoughtfully designed than I gave it credit for, so I’m looking forward to playing this! I need more video game killathons that are both mechanically satisfying and aesthetically committed to making the violence as horrible and unpleasant as possible. That’s a kind of scouring catharsis you just don’t get from _Halo_.
agree that that The Last of Us is dumb as hell, and also agree the generalization and insinuation you linked to is weird, but “profoundly asinine essentializing takes” from “people who clearly don‘t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about” have been offered in enormous abundance about Russian and Chinese cultural products, I mean come on
look this is what we‘re all going to do: whenever we see or hear a “take” we stop what we’re doing and right then and there do a tight set of push ups. Thats how were all going to approach this shit going forward
@“yeso”#p148788 This approach would possibly lead to fewer “takes” in general.
"Takes" are a big reason I moved away from social media.