It certainly is unique. However, to quote a certain chaos theorist, "You spend so much time seeing if you could that you didn't stop to wonder if you should."
What are you currently playing?
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I'll grant you its unique... but its not very good.
I could see a cool coop only version with much higher difficulty and both side playing one half of the gameplay, would be thematically appropriate.
- Apr 1, 2009
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Beat the green monster in Lies of P. Fuck that boss, such a pain in the ass. What made it worse is that it didn't seem like it should be that hard, but after checking the forums, yeah, it seems like its one of those hard bosses. The first phase wasn't too bad, second one mixed shit up enough to be super annoying and he hit hard, you had to learn which combos you really didn't want to be around for. Blegh.
Cronos: The New Dawn - Game has been beaten! Still somewhat processing what just happened, but I enjoyed it overall. Could have done without the jump scare screen flashes though. Those got old after a while. And occasional monster bursting open a door really loudly. The final boss is interesting. The way The Warden fights, is basically the first time you fight RE5 Wesker or Stefano from Evil Within 2. He will teleport, has ranged attacks, a few melees, but its get a fuck you energy wave attack. The more damage he takes, the faster he gets. There is also still cool screen glitch effect, as the fight keeps going on, and he gets more desperate I got Ending B and got a Rank B. I did not expect a ranking system in this game.
The story I mostly gets what happens, but you still never actually where the actual infection came from. I do love the unique and subtle twists they do with time travel in this game. Bloober did a great job overall, and this is their magnum opus! I unlocked NG+, but I am done for now. I got other games to catch up on and finish.
The story I mostly gets what happens, but you still never actually where the actual infection came from. I do love the unique and subtle twists they do with time travel in this game. Bloober did a great job overall, and this is their magnum opus! I unlocked NG+, but I am done for now. I got other games to catch up on and finish.
Still playing TWEWY. Just beat the last fight of the first cycle and the game is finally becoming challenging. To beat him on Ultimate difficulty I had to think about what pins to equip and put some gear on Shiki. After that it wasn't too much of a problem. Yeah, I don't really know how you are supposed to play this game well. Blocking with the top character requires precise timing and the bottom character requires precise movement. Kind of wish the game was designed with more of a rhythm to switching between screens and maybe some audio cues of when to block on the top screen. I'm having fun trying to play well, and I can definitely see that there would be some potential to the system if it was improved upon, but it's pretty rough as is. Good thing its an RPG and you can just stat boost yourself out of any difficulty.
Edit: Kind of a funny thought, the story is all about teamwork but the gameplay is all about doing what seemingly requires two people by yourself. I'm controlling both characters, simultaneously, by myself. Screw your teamwork!
Edit: Kind of a funny thought, the story is all about teamwork but the gameplay is all about doing what seemingly requires two people by yourself. I'm controlling both characters, simultaneously, by myself. Screw your teamwork!
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Update: Finished the Crossworlds Grand Prix cups on Sonic Speed (think Mario Kart's 150CC), without using any mulligans since that gives you a different trophy icon. I still don't have a perfect handle on things, but I've at least got the basics down at last. In a much better position to race online with friends and strangers now.
Still got Mirror Mode, 200CC and Time Trials to work on too, plus whatever the hell Race Park is.
Still got Mirror Mode, 200CC and Time Trials to work on too, plus whatever the hell Race Park is.
Not playing anything at the current moment and not really feeling for anything new, but looking to smash some buttons, so I'm re-installing three games and I'll see where my mood takes me:
Dark Souls: Remastered
Jack Packard on Second Wind started a Dark Souls run playing as his favorite style, "ungabunga," that is, strength build with hammer weapon. That approach is how I did a [relatively] quick and much less painless Elden Ring replay, and now I'm curious to try my hand at it in Dark Souls. I think I'll pick the Warrior class, get the reinforced club and see how that goes and for how long I feel like seeing that through.
The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
As always, my go-to comfort game. Might do a combat-skill only run.
Streets of Rage 4
I've known that this game is like the template for the nostalgia beat-'em-up revival but having seen so many come out these past couple years and seeing reviews and trying a couple games that have been compared to it, it just kinda makes me want to play it. I guess similar to Witcher 3 and Dark Souls- I'm in the mood where I'm less interested in things "inspired by" and just want the original.
Probably the same reason I've been listening to Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and the Beatles more than the millions of artists influenced by them. A true original is the best.
Dark Souls: Remastered
Jack Packard on Second Wind started a Dark Souls run playing as his favorite style, "ungabunga," that is, strength build with hammer weapon. That approach is how I did a [relatively] quick and much less painless Elden Ring replay, and now I'm curious to try my hand at it in Dark Souls. I think I'll pick the Warrior class, get the reinforced club and see how that goes and for how long I feel like seeing that through.
The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
As always, my go-to comfort game. Might do a combat-skill only run.
Streets of Rage 4
I've known that this game is like the template for the nostalgia beat-'em-up revival but having seen so many come out these past couple years and seeing reviews and trying a couple games that have been compared to it, it just kinda makes me want to play it. I guess similar to Witcher 3 and Dark Souls- I'm in the mood where I'm less interested in things "inspired by" and just want the original.
Probably the same reason I've been listening to Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and the Beatles more than the millions of artists influenced by them. A true original is the best.
Damn straight.
I haven't played much else after finishing Cronos. I plan on getting Absolum, but i'm debating between digital or physical. There's currently a sale on digital, but I definitely want a physical version of this game. The same people who did SOR4, made this game.
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I'll have this find out for myself. Max Dood loves this game. I will keep your words in mind though. Most reviews i've seen either love or adore this game.
- Apr 1, 2009
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Its still a good game, but its not Streets of Rage 4. I think the roguelike nature kinda hurts it since I play those games weird. I kinda self sabotage in them since they always start out feeling really easy so I'm worried I'll beat it too quick.
Finished The World Ends with You. Bear in mind that this review is coming from a person who has been wearing a red skull pin on his hat for the past 15 years (as an ironic representation of my part as a mindless consumer in a capitalist system).
This was one of my favourite games ever when I was 17, but replaying it now, honestly I can't say it really holds up. It has style, I can give it that. It has so much style it oozes from every part of the game. Beyond style, though, it doesn't have a lot. It has a little story about a loner finding friendship and expanding his world that's kind of cliche, but its so short that it doesn't really get a chance to do much with any of its characters or with its premise. Like, Shiki is Neku's emotional drive for 2/3 of the game, but their entire interaction basically consists of arguing over the value of friendship and like one conversation about insecurities. I like the characters (including the minor side character you see throughout the game), they're fun, but they have no depth.
The same goes for the rest of the story. Like a game where dead people compete to earn another chance at life is cool, but in execution it makes no sense. What characteristics is this game trying to evaluate in determining whether a person is worthy of another chance at life? In the first day a ton of people seem to be wiped out by noise before they even get a chance to form a pact and fight back, what does that prove? Is it only people who are skilled in spiritual combat that deserve another chance? A few of the missions tend towards helping people, but a lot of them are just 'defeat the noise' or 'defeat the game master'. The rules of the game are so nebulous and loosely defined that it really doesn't make sense in retrospect. A reaper's goal is to eliminate players, their power and life span is determined by how many players they erase, the game is weighted heavily against players and traps and tricks are allowed, and the game master (always made out to be a highly valuable and extremely skilled individual) themselves must be killed for the players to win. All this together makes me wonder why the game even exists, because everybody running the game really doesn't want anybody to win. Like, our little group of protagonists learning their life lessons and getting a second chance is completely incidental to the way the game is structured or the goals of any of the major players in the larger plot. Also, how does someone coming back to life even work? Everybody has been dead for 3 weeks, wouldn't their sudden resurrection be kind of a big deal? "Hey Shiki, didn't you die three weeks ago?" "I got better!"
The twists and overarching reveals in the ending are also extremely muddy. Again they are cool, but don't make a ton of sense when you consider all of the game events together. Also my man Sho gets totally dunked on off screen in the ending, and that's enough to raise legitimate concerns about the competence of the writers on its own. Speaking of Sho, and the first game master, but what was with their obsession with math and cooking respectively? I wonder if that was a localisation thing, because it doesn't actually seem to have any basis in their designs, actions, or really anything.
I could probably go on for 10k words and analyse every part of the story, but nobody wants to read that so I'll cut it here and talk about the gameplay. Again on a surface level, it's cool. You get all these neat little pins with different abilities and you can mix and match, and level them up and evolve them in different ways. Then there's all the different equipment, and food mechanics, and different partner abilities, and it's all irrelevant window dressing because the gameplay is hot garbage! All that stuff is there to mask how terrible the game is to play if you actually want to be challenged and engage with its battle system. For starters the RPG mechanics cause their usual problems with the difficulty curve and make it almost impossible to find an appropriate level of challenge. I played on Ultimate difficulty (NG+) with the partner set to manual and no equipment and I didn't have to think until the GM fight, and then it was so hard I eventually had to put equipment on Shiki. Then the entire second game went back to pretty easy, and in the third game with Beat it was so trivial again that I took off all his gear and breezed through until I got to the doubles fight with Lollipop and Pinky. This was the hardest fight of the game for me and took me over an hour of retries.
This is a good time to talk about the partner mechanics. It's so bad, I have no idea what they were thinking. It's as if the designers independantly came up with two gameplay systems and mashed them together without any thought of how they would work together. First problem is that the timing for your partner to block is very precise. You need to hit the block button when the opponent's attack connects or you are going to get hit. Sometimes the opponent will fire a barrage at you and you will get hit anyway since your block only lasts a second. Sometimes you can jump and avoid damage, but a lot of attacks home in on you. You also cannot block while you are attacking or jumping. You need to break off the attack and then block. It requires constant focus for your partner to not take damage. Second problem is that each partner has a unique mechanic that requires attention in order to build up combo points and be able to use special team attacks. This isn't a huge deal, but it requires more focus to actually do than I was able to give it, and most of the time I just mashed right or left and took whatever I got. Shiki's also requires pure guesses and just sucks in general even if you are trying to do well at it. The worst part is how the combos are integrated. You need to hit right or left a number of times and then up or down to select either the top, bottom, or middle branch of the combo. This would be difficult enough if the branches were always the same, but it's different every time you attack. Sometimes you need to hit right twice then up then right five times, other times you need to hit right six times, then up, then right twice. In other words, it requires attention and exact button presses.
Now if you haven't played this game, you might be thinking "well that all sounds fairly simple, what's the issue?" Well the issue is that you can't give all your focus to the top screen because you also need to focus on the entirely different set of mechanics on the bottom screen. And you need to avoid damage on the top screen! During the Lollipop/Pinky fight they get the partner mechanic where they swap an aura back and forth after landing hits and do double damage whenever they had this aura. This was so much that Pinky could do a one hit kill on Beat with the wrong attack. But if I just focused on blocking with Beat, I wasn't doing any damage with either character and would Neku would get killed. Eventually the way I won was by focusing Neku on stunlocking the character on the bottom screen, mashing attack and trying to block when I could with Beat, and just praying that everything went well. If Pinky ever got the aura, that was game over.
The rest of the game after that was fairly easy because I gave Beat a bit of equipment that boosted our HP, which was fine until I faced the final boss as Neku only. Now, you may be thinking, as I was that the game may have been a lot more fun if you didn't have to focus on two screens at once and just played as Neku on the bottom. Wrong! The touch screen controls are often fiddly, slow, and your hand ends up blocking part of the screen. When you are trying to dodge through a bullet hell, this is not a lot of fun. This fight took me a long time too, and I did so little damage that it was over 5 minutes before Shiki would wake up and start giving me an attack boost. And I'd often get trapped in a bubble, and be unable to break it with the pins I had equipped in time before I got a OHK from the boss. I can't tell you how many times I'd get hit because I was in the middle of an attack and be unable to get the game to register that I was trying to drag Neku to dodge rather than to continue to attack. It's just kind of bad.
Honestly, I still think a game that divides your attention has potential, but the designers really need to focus on that aspect to make it work. There needs to be a rhythm to it, and distinct audio tells that can help you react defensively even when your vision is directed towards the other screen. Really, the game is fine as is if you are playing on normal with the partner set to auto. The RPG mechanics cover up all the flaws in the gameplay by letting you just power through the game with stats. It's only when you are looking for the game to really challenge you that the flaws become apparent.
Overall, I still like TWEWY. It's always going to have a special place in my heart, but from a critical perspective, it's a bit shoddy. Like a massive artistically designed heap of garbage.
This was one of my favourite games ever when I was 17, but replaying it now, honestly I can't say it really holds up. It has style, I can give it that. It has so much style it oozes from every part of the game. Beyond style, though, it doesn't have a lot. It has a little story about a loner finding friendship and expanding his world that's kind of cliche, but its so short that it doesn't really get a chance to do much with any of its characters or with its premise. Like, Shiki is Neku's emotional drive for 2/3 of the game, but their entire interaction basically consists of arguing over the value of friendship and like one conversation about insecurities. I like the characters (including the minor side character you see throughout the game), they're fun, but they have no depth.
The same goes for the rest of the story. Like a game where dead people compete to earn another chance at life is cool, but in execution it makes no sense. What characteristics is this game trying to evaluate in determining whether a person is worthy of another chance at life? In the first day a ton of people seem to be wiped out by noise before they even get a chance to form a pact and fight back, what does that prove? Is it only people who are skilled in spiritual combat that deserve another chance? A few of the missions tend towards helping people, but a lot of them are just 'defeat the noise' or 'defeat the game master'. The rules of the game are so nebulous and loosely defined that it really doesn't make sense in retrospect. A reaper's goal is to eliminate players, their power and life span is determined by how many players they erase, the game is weighted heavily against players and traps and tricks are allowed, and the game master (always made out to be a highly valuable and extremely skilled individual) themselves must be killed for the players to win. All this together makes me wonder why the game even exists, because everybody running the game really doesn't want anybody to win. Like, our little group of protagonists learning their life lessons and getting a second chance is completely incidental to the way the game is structured or the goals of any of the major players in the larger plot. Also, how does someone coming back to life even work? Everybody has been dead for 3 weeks, wouldn't their sudden resurrection be kind of a big deal? "Hey Shiki, didn't you die three weeks ago?" "I got better!"
The twists and overarching reveals in the ending are also extremely muddy. Again they are cool, but don't make a ton of sense when you consider all of the game events together. Also my man Sho gets totally dunked on off screen in the ending, and that's enough to raise legitimate concerns about the competence of the writers on its own. Speaking of Sho, and the first game master, but what was with their obsession with math and cooking respectively? I wonder if that was a localisation thing, because it doesn't actually seem to have any basis in their designs, actions, or really anything.
I could probably go on for 10k words and analyse every part of the story, but nobody wants to read that so I'll cut it here and talk about the gameplay. Again on a surface level, it's cool. You get all these neat little pins with different abilities and you can mix and match, and level them up and evolve them in different ways. Then there's all the different equipment, and food mechanics, and different partner abilities, and it's all irrelevant window dressing because the gameplay is hot garbage! All that stuff is there to mask how terrible the game is to play if you actually want to be challenged and engage with its battle system. For starters the RPG mechanics cause their usual problems with the difficulty curve and make it almost impossible to find an appropriate level of challenge. I played on Ultimate difficulty (NG+) with the partner set to manual and no equipment and I didn't have to think until the GM fight, and then it was so hard I eventually had to put equipment on Shiki. Then the entire second game went back to pretty easy, and in the third game with Beat it was so trivial again that I took off all his gear and breezed through until I got to the doubles fight with Lollipop and Pinky. This was the hardest fight of the game for me and took me over an hour of retries.
This is a good time to talk about the partner mechanics. It's so bad, I have no idea what they were thinking. It's as if the designers independantly came up with two gameplay systems and mashed them together without any thought of how they would work together. First problem is that the timing for your partner to block is very precise. You need to hit the block button when the opponent's attack connects or you are going to get hit. Sometimes the opponent will fire a barrage at you and you will get hit anyway since your block only lasts a second. Sometimes you can jump and avoid damage, but a lot of attacks home in on you. You also cannot block while you are attacking or jumping. You need to break off the attack and then block. It requires constant focus for your partner to not take damage. Second problem is that each partner has a unique mechanic that requires attention in order to build up combo points and be able to use special team attacks. This isn't a huge deal, but it requires more focus to actually do than I was able to give it, and most of the time I just mashed right or left and took whatever I got. Shiki's also requires pure guesses and just sucks in general even if you are trying to do well at it. The worst part is how the combos are integrated. You need to hit right or left a number of times and then up or down to select either the top, bottom, or middle branch of the combo. This would be difficult enough if the branches were always the same, but it's different every time you attack. Sometimes you need to hit right twice then up then right five times, other times you need to hit right six times, then up, then right twice. In other words, it requires attention and exact button presses.
Now if you haven't played this game, you might be thinking "well that all sounds fairly simple, what's the issue?" Well the issue is that you can't give all your focus to the top screen because you also need to focus on the entirely different set of mechanics on the bottom screen. And you need to avoid damage on the top screen! During the Lollipop/Pinky fight they get the partner mechanic where they swap an aura back and forth after landing hits and do double damage whenever they had this aura. This was so much that Pinky could do a one hit kill on Beat with the wrong attack. But if I just focused on blocking with Beat, I wasn't doing any damage with either character and would Neku would get killed. Eventually the way I won was by focusing Neku on stunlocking the character on the bottom screen, mashing attack and trying to block when I could with Beat, and just praying that everything went well. If Pinky ever got the aura, that was game over.
The rest of the game after that was fairly easy because I gave Beat a bit of equipment that boosted our HP, which was fine until I faced the final boss as Neku only. Now, you may be thinking, as I was that the game may have been a lot more fun if you didn't have to focus on two screens at once and just played as Neku on the bottom. Wrong! The touch screen controls are often fiddly, slow, and your hand ends up blocking part of the screen. When you are trying to dodge through a bullet hell, this is not a lot of fun. This fight took me a long time too, and I did so little damage that it was over 5 minutes before Shiki would wake up and start giving me an attack boost. And I'd often get trapped in a bubble, and be unable to break it with the pins I had equipped in time before I got a OHK from the boss. I can't tell you how many times I'd get hit because I was in the middle of an attack and be unable to get the game to register that I was trying to drag Neku to dodge rather than to continue to attack. It's just kind of bad.
Honestly, I still think a game that divides your attention has potential, but the designers really need to focus on that aspect to make it work. There needs to be a rhythm to it, and distinct audio tells that can help you react defensively even when your vision is directed towards the other screen. Really, the game is fine as is if you are playing on normal with the partner set to auto. The RPG mechanics cover up all the flaws in the gameplay by letting you just power through the game with stats. It's only when you are looking for the game to really challenge you that the flaws become apparent.
Overall, I still like TWEWY. It's always going to have a special place in my heart, but from a critical perspective, it's a bit shoddy. Like a massive artistically designed heap of garbage.
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So I haven't replayed it since it launched, but that pretty much follow what I remember. The aspect I liked the most was that it played in modern day Japan, which was a really cool unique setting (this was before persona 3) and all the attention to style/clothing. But beyond that, nothing really clicked and I ended up forcing myself to finish the game just because I payed money for it when it was pretty limited. (this is kinda like ghostwire: Tokyo now that I think about it, where the only really notable thing is that it takes place in Tokyo, but the rest of it is pretty uninteresting).
I never played on higher difficulty, so I never really had to "learn" the combat system, spent most of the game just mashing key and scribbling non sense and that worked well enough. But neither combat system on its own was really interesting enough to make me engage and the gimmick of split gameplay didn't work because in practice it just means doing one thing at a time and switching you're attention. Like, they wanted to use the DS gimmick, but really, you could play that on one screen with a button to switch the screen and it wouldn't change much.
Story... I just remember the non stop friendship speech add nausea, I never really liked that type of storytelling (it killed the story of tale of graces F for me, which I powered trough cause the gameplay was really good) because its a generic positive message that never really mean anything. Otherwise, iirc, the dead game was one that wasn't supposed to be won, like MC keep winning and it just reset on him every time.
I honestly can't even remember if I played the sequel, I think so, but I have 0 recollection of actually playing it now that I think about it.
I think I'm going to restart my run of Paper Mario. Last time I played the game I did a low level run and beat the game at level 8. However, I didn't make use of fright jars to avoid XP before getting Bow to scare away enemies. This could possibly change the lowest level possible by one or two levels. This time I just felt like playing the game and didn't really think about doing a challenge right away, but avoiding enemies is just more fun so I ended up doing a low level run anyway. Now I'm going up against Huff 'n Puff and nearly done with the game. I'm pretty much on track to beat the game at level 8 again, and I'm really regretting not using fright jars early on. The Lava Piranha fight was pretty tough, and I wonder if I'll even be able to do it with 3-6 fewer BP
In a bloody kind of mood lately so I made a new character in Bloodborne and started her with the Threaded Cane. Taking a while to get in the swing of things. Feels much less forgiving than Elden Ring, but I fucking Platinum’d the game way back when so it’ll click again sooner or later.
Also, continuing on in Bloodstained: RotN. Almost 30% of the map cleared but still haven’t found the double jump. Fuck. Starting to feel more FROM-ish in design than a FROM game as I can’t really tell where I might be missing something. Even looking it up leads to a string of bread crumbs that suggests going to the tower based on what I have, but I’ve scoured the available paths AFAIK and have yet to encounter the boss there.
Also, continuing on in Bloodstained: RotN. Almost 30% of the map cleared but still haven’t found the double jump. Fuck. Starting to feel more FROM-ish in design than a FROM game as I can’t really tell where I might be missing something. Even looking it up leads to a string of bread crumbs that suggests going to the tower based on what I have, but I’ve scoured the available paths AFAIK and have yet to encounter the boss there.
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Still playing 8Doors. The game is much more amenable once you expand Arum's suite of moves and abilities, which is typical enough of the genre, but I don't think a game should exclusively depend on "it's cool once you unlock everything " either.
Restarted Paper Mario and made it back to Huff 'n Puff one level lower, definitely worth it. There were quite a lot of mandatory fights in the first 2 chapters that could be completed with 0 xp using fright jars, and I learned that the stone chomps can actually be dealt with using Parakarry's Air Lift move.
I also learned you can murder Whacka! On Mt. Rugged there's a cute little mole thing that pops out of the ground and talks about how wonderful everything is. If you hit it with your hammer a bump falls off it and it's a powerful healing item that sells for a lot of money. For some reason I always thought you could only get 3 bumps and that's it. I wanted to buy another damage dodge badge from Rowf and I was getting sick of losing gambling with jump attack so I thought I would poach Whacka for it's bumps. After hitting it 4 times I noticed that its dialogue changed and after a few more times it changed again, talking about how forgetful it was getting. A couple more times and it stopped coherent speech entirely and just made noises. A few more times and it just died, then a toad by the station mentioned how she was worried because she never saw the Whacka anymore. And everybody thinks that Mario is this wonderful hero. Just think of what the Toad Times would do to get their hands on this juicy little nugget!
I also learned you can murder Whacka! On Mt. Rugged there's a cute little mole thing that pops out of the ground and talks about how wonderful everything is. If you hit it with your hammer a bump falls off it and it's a powerful healing item that sells for a lot of money. For some reason I always thought you could only get 3 bumps and that's it. I wanted to buy another damage dodge badge from Rowf and I was getting sick of losing gambling with jump attack so I thought I would poach Whacka for it's bumps. After hitting it 4 times I noticed that its dialogue changed and after a few more times it changed again, talking about how forgetful it was getting. A couple more times and it stopped coherent speech entirely and just made noises. A few more times and it just died, then a toad by the station mentioned how she was worried because she never saw the Whacka anymore. And everybody thinks that Mario is this wonderful hero. Just think of what the Toad Times would do to get their hands on this juicy little nugget!