Wooooo, exciting!!!
I'M GONNA DOUBLE DIP
I want to know just what the heck is going on in the weird story this one has
Wrote a little piece on the most Simple-esque game I‘ve played in a minute—imagine one of the ’00s-era Simple devs tried to make a 3D Bangai-O using publicly-sourced assets, and then sold it for One Dollar: https://indietsushin.net/posts/2023-10-26-Slugger-Yamada.html
I saw this game the other day and thought it looked cool. Reading your write up and buying it RIGHT NOW
HEY SHUT UP AND STOP TALKING
A demo for Custom Mech Wars is up on PlayStation. Maybe it is the best game ever made? That revelation will have to wait for tomorrow because it is bed time. Goodnight.
You know when freaks say a modern game looks like a PS2 game to disparage it? This is Custom Mech Wars on the PS5:
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This game is Simple Series as hell
Let's eschew the “Modern” part of the thread title once again.
I played through Simple 1500 Series Vol 56 The Sniper.
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This came out when D3 had a red logo.
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You play as Not Leon S. Kennedy and must put a bullet in the head-brains of numerous mafia type scumbags.
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When you start a mission, you get a briefing with the target and information about where he will be. You then pick the time of day to do The Death Job and which sniper point to brain-explode the target from. This selection screen is GOOD.
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You are confined to a small vantage point area and must find and life-end the target within a small time limit and with only one bullet. Miss and you restart. Some later levels involve hitting a moving target while adjusting your aim in a budget PS1 title with a dpad. You should use an emulator and save state this game.
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Most stages can be completed in under 30 seconds so this is probably a part of an evening game from start to finish.
The real draw of the game is the style. It is very 90s jazz thriller. You can really feel that the devs had cinematic aspirations and they went for it as much as they could within the Simple Series budget and schedule. Each mission starts with intro credits and ends with a unique next mission screen.
Intro:
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Next mission screens:
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The game over and pause screens are a delight as well.
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The game is very import friendly as Google Translate does a really good job of the briefing screens. While the game is nowhere near the brilliance of the Hitman sniper mission mini games, it is a top tier Simple Series game. Well made, breezy and the devs went for something. I definitely recommend using save states as the moving target missions are frustrating but otherwise, this is excellent.
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Okay, I‘ve become more educated on the series. I’m on a Playstation 1 kick so I've been looking at the many SS games on playstation 1. Little did I know I already was familiar with one: 1 on 1.
Anyways there's one called *Bicycle Race* that got me excited, but it's just motorcross.
I'd design a modern simple series game like this:
Simple Series 1500 Vol. 069 - The Bicycle Commuter
Which takes into account lifelong experience of cycling in the united states and my sensibility of what subconsciously goes on in motorists unthinking brain. Basically you only get points by taking up a lane and it's a constant battle with motorists who at any moment have two choices: a two second delay, or vehicular manslaughter-- and if you allow them they will *always choose* vehicular manslaughter. Just like in real life!
**Published by AGETEC, developed by FROM SOFTWARE Circa 1999.**
Modern Simple Series:
This is published by D3. It is a mini game collection based off those stupid mobile game ads which are CG videos that don't look like the actual game and are designed to make you think "I can do better than that!" so you download them. This game accurately captures the vibe and after a few levels is dull as heck. Much like a phone game.
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Old Simple Series:
I played The Tairyou Jigoku. I'd been looking forward to this for a while because it is three of my favourite things: made in Japan, set in Japan, survival horror. I bought a copy in Surugaya, so excited to have this Absolute, Definite Hidden Gem in my collection.
You creep through levels avoiding swarms of bees, frogs and moths. You can walk, run, crouch walk, or do some kind of weird tip toing walk. You run until you see a swarm of bugs and then you crouch to avoid them. This works 75% of the time but for the other swarms you use one of the other locomotion methods or blast them with handily positioned bug spray. The first boss is a huge moth that flies around depositing smaller moths. The goal is to damage it by hitting it with the smaller moths. I got a golf club and Happy Gilmored the moths off a cliff on to their parent. As mentioned on the podcast, @SnowyAria brought to people's attention that it has unlockable dialects.
https://twitter.com/SnowyAria/status/1738326327881765204
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Not Simple Series but could be:
...Iru! Is a PS1 first person Lovecraft horror set in a Japanese school. Parts of it are really cool! You search a dark school and uncover the secret rituals taking place to summon dreadful Star Vampires. You defeat a Shoggoth! Visually it is very Simple Series. The game got a fan translation by Aria as well. She also wrote a guide for it which I'd consider essential. The game lets you wander quite a lot of the school and you need to enter certain rooms to trigger story beats. Often the game gives you zero direction for where to go so you just blunder about. I wouldn't have persevered without the guide. Cool game, should have been THE ...Iru!
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Here's a Simple-adjacent game that just came out in Japan: Suspect Room: ~ Keishichou Monzen-sho Torishirabe Han ~, a forensic investigation ADV by Orange, a fairly reputable ADV dev with several originals under their belt, as well as contract work on recent Jake Hunter/Tantei Jinguuji Saburo games—more specifically, this is a successor of sorts to THE Kanshikikan, a very similar series that originated as part of the Simple line but eventually blossomed into a series with a shared universe that virtually eclipsed the branding, with a scenario by the same writer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRtC75jE8Kc
important development: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1179890/Pull_Stay/
pull stay has finally launched in early access!
Modern Simple contender Wanted: Dead got an update recently.
They said once upon a time that they were working on a big update to address criticism. If this is the big update, it is a definition of big I was not previously familiar with.
They’ve made easy mode available from the start rather than being unlockable/cheat code, they’ve made bosses drop health packs, the first mid boss is easier and the cover system is now manual.
That this really needs is every melee combat animation having the end cut off to make combat really fluid but that hasn’t happened. I still think this is worth seeing if you can find it cheap but it doesn’t seem like it is going to get the really attention it needs.
1 Like
I SPOKE TOO SOON. Your friends and mine at 110 Industries have released a big combat patch for Wanted: Dead.
Details: Wanted: Dead - Wanted: Dead - Combat Overhaul Update 1.13 - Steam News
Just from reading, seems like a good set of changes and I’m really interested to see if they do more.
1 Like
I can’t help but notice that no one is talking about EDF6 even though IT HAS JUST COME OUT IN ENGLISH
Is anyone playing it?
I am and guess what? It rocks ass. I already knew that but whatevs.
If you are thinking about playing EDF, please do! EDF is video games: the game. 1000 giant ants and frog men aliens must die! You can be a flying lady. You can dual wield gatling guns. You can summon tanks and drive straight into the mouth of alien hell. You can fire 22 rockets from the Cascade launcher. You can pilot mech suits. You MUST shoot down enemy flying saucers that are vomiting alien bastards into Japan.
If you want to play coop on PlayStation, let your pal Chopemon know. Using the in game communication system, we can sing the EDF anthem in rounds while we send crazy androids back to where they came from: SPACE.
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I’ve been trying to determine whether the Japanese physical release has English on it - surprisingly this is difficult to discover!! But I do want to get it real soon
I don’t believe it does. I have the Japanese digital and it doesn’t have an English option as it was released so much earlier than the English version. However, there is a multi language Asian version that has English. I got the Asian version of 5 and that had full English text and voices.
And related to a criticism you have voiced of post EDF 3 games about how long it takes to unlock the Cascade Launcher, I unlocked it in the first few missions of 6. I think 6 has too many missions but the pace of unlocking The Fun Stuff is much better than 5.
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Hold on, they’re doing it, and are on #4 already.
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Apparently, this is a collection of remasters of the THE Misshitsu kara no Dasshutsu (“THE Escape the Room”) series? I kind of love that. Yes, give me remasters of PS2-era budget shovelware (it’s a golden shovel, okay). Yes, give me a trailer that excitedly tells you to “USE ITEMS AND GIMMICKS TO ESCAPE!” And yes, give me a game in 2025 that uses colored silhouettes to represent characters in the footsteps of Kamaitachi no Yoru.
It makes it a bit less ambitious-feeling that it’s a collection of remasters as opposed to something new – more an attempt to dust off their laurels than a true-blue revival for the Simple Series – but you won’t see me complaining.
I did a wee bit of research to see what’s being remade – apparently, it’s four of the 3DS games! (Out of 41 games, what!) Wonder how that choice was made – they’re some of the most recent games in the series, so perhaps they were easiest to port? The games in question are:
- THE Misshitsu kara no Dasshutsu: Fushigi no Kuma Donalburger-hen (THE Escape the Room: The Mysterious Bear Donalburger). 2011, 3DS. The first 3DS entry in the series.
- THE Misshitsu kara no Dasshutsu: Gakkō no Kyūkōsha-hen (THE Escape the Room: The Abandoned School Building). 2011, 3DS. The second 3DS entry.
- THE Misshitsu kara no Dasshutsu: Nangoku no Resort-hen (THE Escape the Room: The Southern Resort). 2012, 3DS. The fourth 3DS entry.
- THE Misshitsu kara no Dasshutsu: Terebi-kyoku Micchaku 24-ji-hen (THE Escape the Room: Constant Surveillance at Midnight at the TV Station). 2013, 3DS. The ninth 3DS entry. The somewhat odd title of this episode takes some cultural explanation – I should come back when I’m not preparing to go out shopping for tights and talk about it…
4 Likes
It’s worth noting that these remasters are also:
- getting individual standalone digital releases from next week
- being released simultaneously worldwide (as “The Escape Room Chronicles”)
- coming to Steam (and their website listing has them categorised under a new “Simple Steam” category, so this is clearly just the beginning, not that my expectations are high)
This series is another one that was able to shed the SIMPLE branding after a while (it went back and forth once or twice, actually)—my vague recollection is that the other SIMPLE-adjacent escape/ADV series running alongside this one were more interesting, but this ain’t my genre and watching the SIMPLE line turn near-exclusively to these kinds of games was not a fun time.
This particular series was made by a studio called Intense, and it definitely pigeonholed them for a while: they went and made another budget escape series and some fuller-fat one-offs for Arcsys, they helped out on 999, they tried their hand at miscellaneous self-published games (including off-brand Zero Escape, if memory serves), etc. I think I mentioned Orange somewhere up-thread—they were in a very similar boat, and I think they did better work both with and post-SIMPLE, but y’all tell me.
(Intense also made the picross dungeon crawler Picdun, which caught peoples’ imaginations on DSiWare for all of five minutes.)
This game got a sequel, icymi:
…and they just imagined a third, branded game: a collab with the recent surprise hit Corocoro property Puniru wa Kawaii Slime:
3 Likes
Ah, shoot, but now what I want is picdun!!