All stage 3 subsections are done in Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, and now to Stage 4. Fuck that bug lady boss. Once you get the pattern down, she's not too bad, but can be really frustrating even when you know what you're doing.
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Deltarune Ch2, because Ch5 is out now and I haven't played the game since Ch2 came out and I wanted to just remember WTF was going on.
I forgot how weird this game is. Still holds up though
I forgot how weird this game is. Still holds up though
Well, I found the path to success in Elden Ring:
- Summon Tiche
- Bleed damage for the win
And, of course, the final boss was a laundry list of FromSoftware's bullshit: Tracking attacks from afar, swooping across the arena far faster than I can chase, soaring high above so that I either lose track or can't see what's going on, wide sweeping projectiles, from-the-air attacks that can't be seen when you're close to the boss, and only being hittable when the boss feels like it. It's telling that I died just before the boss bled out.
Uninstalled and hidden from the library. This game lied to me, tricked me into thinking FromSoft had actually learned things over the course of seventeen years. They hadn't.
- Summon Tiche
- Bleed damage for the win
And, of course, the final boss was a laundry list of FromSoftware's bullshit: Tracking attacks from afar, swooping across the arena far faster than I can chase, soaring high above so that I either lose track or can't see what's going on, wide sweeping projectiles, from-the-air attacks that can't be seen when you're close to the boss, and only being hittable when the boss feels like it. It's telling that I died just before the boss bled out.
Uninstalled and hidden from the library. This game lied to me, tricked me into thinking FromSoft had actually learned things over the course of seventeen years. They hadn't.
So we finally bought a PS5. Specifically with a disc drive, since we figured those were about to get even rarer. We managed to snag an outlet SKU with two controllers, meaning it was either returned or was a display piece. I lugged the fucking thing home on the train, only to discover it had no power cable (yes, we should have checked at the store). Carried the whole thing back and the customer service guy just so happened to be the person who processed the original return of the unit. He immediately remembered he forgot to put the cable back in the box and got really embarrassed, but at least he apologized. I was hoping we would get some sort of compensation, but I guess that's not really a thing in Sweden.
But now I can play "real" games again! We bought Expedition 33 secondhand, but were able to borrow Spider-man 2 and Split Fiction from the library. Borrowing games from the library, what a concept! Thank you Sony for destroying that experience for future generations.
My thoughts on Spidey 2 and Split Fiction in separate posts.
But now I can play "real" games again! We bought Expedition 33 secondhand, but were able to borrow Spider-man 2 and Split Fiction from the library. Borrowing games from the library, what a concept! Thank you Sony for destroying that experience for future generations.
My thoughts on Spidey 2 and Split Fiction in separate posts.
I have heard a lot on the forums about Spidey 2, and a lot of it wasn't good. My own laundry list of complaints has gotten quite long in a short amount of time. I am sure many of them are dead horses so beaten they are just smears.
- Parrying fucking sucks. Doesn't feel like it belongs at all, and is perhaps the worst feeling mechanic in the game so far.
- I have only seen MJ in a single cutscene so far and I am already tired of her (although maybe that's sentiment left over from the first game).
- The skill trees are just weird and annoying when combined with suit upgrades.
- I hate the wing suit. Just... why.
- Why did they change the landmark mechanics??? It was so fun to just swing around the city and take pictures without setting a foot on the ground. Now they demand you stop and angle the shot perfectly.
- The UI is weirdly slow? Not exactly showing off the power of the PS5 when switching between menus feels slower than using an ATM.
- Peter looks tragically worse. What were the devs smoking when they claimed it was for better facial animations? He genuinely looks awful.
That I have so many gripes with the game is making me quite sad. Spidey PS4 might be one of my top 5 games ever, so I had a really hard time understanding why people were so negative about it online. And I haven't even gotten to the controversial story bits...
- Parrying fucking sucks. Doesn't feel like it belongs at all, and is perhaps the worst feeling mechanic in the game so far.
- I have only seen MJ in a single cutscene so far and I am already tired of her (although maybe that's sentiment left over from the first game).
- The skill trees are just weird and annoying when combined with suit upgrades.
- I hate the wing suit. Just... why.
- Why did they change the landmark mechanics??? It was so fun to just swing around the city and take pictures without setting a foot on the ground. Now they demand you stop and angle the shot perfectly.
- The UI is weirdly slow? Not exactly showing off the power of the PS5 when switching between menus feels slower than using an ATM.
- Peter looks tragically worse. What were the devs smoking when they claimed it was for better facial animations? He genuinely looks awful.
That I have so many gripes with the game is making me quite sad. Spidey PS4 might be one of my top 5 games ever, so I had a really hard time understanding why people were so negative about it online. And I haven't even gotten to the controversial story bits...
I wish I could say that gets better, but I legitimately dropped Spidey 2 because I just got tired of the parrying. It's so counter-intuitive (why is it the HEAVY attacks that I have to parry? Literally every other game has taught me that the big attacks are dodge-only, not parry-only), and it just completely goes against every instinct I have playing a Spider-Man game that teaches me to DODGE attacks.
Finished Abyss Veil (2025)
Abyss Veil is a very low budget, story driven indie first person shooter made, as I understand, almost entirely by a single person. Which, for better or worse, shows. Abyss Veil's models and environments look like they predate Quake, the art in its visual novel style story sequences invoke MS Paint, it's dialogue is filled to the brim with contemporary teenage slang and, not to put too fine a point on it, typos, and its sound mixing is messy at the best of times.
Abyss Veil also brought me a great deal of, thoroughly unironic, joy. Maybe it's because I'm at a point in my life where this sort of thing, a crude, borderline inscrutable passion project that feels like it was made by a single, likely queer, teenage weeb in their mom's basement (if that description is too far off the mark, or hits too close to home, I apologize) is just about the only kind of media that's still relatable to me. But this game is actually extremely fascinating.
So, the story, as far as I could follow it, goes: It's the future and there is a war between Earth, a monarchy and Mars, its former colony, a Republic. Our primary protagonist is a Martian girl named Ivy Emberley, member of an elite military unit called the Whitehounds, carrying out a special mission on an island archipelago on Earth that eventually unfolds into a grand journey that dabbles, with varying degrees of success, in psychological horror, political drama, mecha anime, conspiracy thriller and coming of age story, occasionally switches perspectives to other characters, like Ivy's senior comrade Billy or former childhood friend Issa (Who, you see, is now a member of a mech piloting mercenary outfit hired to track down and eliminate the Whitehounds) and all the way throughout maintains its chuuni anime edgelord look and writing.
Easy as it is to make fun of, there's a surprisingly competent game behind all of this. Abyss Veil is mostly a first person shooter, if one that occasionally plays with genre shifts. Its actual combat loop feels surprisingly similar to a Soldier of Fortune game. Mind, I said "feels", not "looks", it doesn't have the crunchy gore or anything, but gunplay and movement are very reminiscent of it. There's a small but well implemented variety of weapons (An Assault Rifle, a Shotgun, a Sniper Rifle and a Rocket Launcher) and the same can be said for its enemy variety. The design does offer a good bit of visual variety, simplistic and lacking in environmental details as it is and tends to reward exploration. You'll fight your way through tropical cities, jungles, snowy wastelands and a couple rather more abstract spaces.
See, what makes Abyss Veil fascinating is that, beyond its crude presentation and dinergoth ass writing, is a surprisingly ambitious and surprisingly well executed game that doesn't quite feel like anything else in the indie shooter sphere and, honestly, punches way above its weight class. As crude as its prose and visual direction seem at first glance, every once in a while it manages to leverage its angst laden dialogue for a genuinely resonant character moment. Manages to leverage its low poly artstyle for a genuinely painterly, Signalis-esque vista. Manages to get some genuinely visceral imagery out of its amateur webcomic artwork. And manages to provoke some genuine intrigue with its anime fanfiction writing and world building.
I'll say it, Abyss Veil's awesome. It's a game that has no right being as compelling as it is, but this game is doing its own thing, even if its resources are limited, and commits to it hard enough to make it work. This is an absolutely special kind of indie sleeper hit, made entirely because one person had an overly specific vision and wanted to realize it, goddamnit. Because someone came up with that world and these characters and that story and wanted to share them with the world. It's just a delightfully earnest project that somehow actually comes together as an enjoyable game. Would also make for a great double feature with Studio System: Guardian Angel, for whatever that's worth. Long story short, this was really a positive surprise for me.
Abyss Veil is a very low budget, story driven indie first person shooter made, as I understand, almost entirely by a single person. Which, for better or worse, shows. Abyss Veil's models and environments look like they predate Quake, the art in its visual novel style story sequences invoke MS Paint, it's dialogue is filled to the brim with contemporary teenage slang and, not to put too fine a point on it, typos, and its sound mixing is messy at the best of times.
Abyss Veil also brought me a great deal of, thoroughly unironic, joy. Maybe it's because I'm at a point in my life where this sort of thing, a crude, borderline inscrutable passion project that feels like it was made by a single, likely queer, teenage weeb in their mom's basement (if that description is too far off the mark, or hits too close to home, I apologize) is just about the only kind of media that's still relatable to me. But this game is actually extremely fascinating.
So, the story, as far as I could follow it, goes: It's the future and there is a war between Earth, a monarchy and Mars, its former colony, a Republic. Our primary protagonist is a Martian girl named Ivy Emberley, member of an elite military unit called the Whitehounds, carrying out a special mission on an island archipelago on Earth that eventually unfolds into a grand journey that dabbles, with varying degrees of success, in psychological horror, political drama, mecha anime, conspiracy thriller and coming of age story, occasionally switches perspectives to other characters, like Ivy's senior comrade Billy or former childhood friend Issa (Who, you see, is now a member of a mech piloting mercenary outfit hired to track down and eliminate the Whitehounds) and all the way throughout maintains its chuuni anime edgelord look and writing.
Easy as it is to make fun of, there's a surprisingly competent game behind all of this. Abyss Veil is mostly a first person shooter, if one that occasionally plays with genre shifts. Its actual combat loop feels surprisingly similar to a Soldier of Fortune game. Mind, I said "feels", not "looks", it doesn't have the crunchy gore or anything, but gunplay and movement are very reminiscent of it. There's a small but well implemented variety of weapons (An Assault Rifle, a Shotgun, a Sniper Rifle and a Rocket Launcher) and the same can be said for its enemy variety. The design does offer a good bit of visual variety, simplistic and lacking in environmental details as it is and tends to reward exploration. You'll fight your way through tropical cities, jungles, snowy wastelands and a couple rather more abstract spaces.
See, what makes Abyss Veil fascinating is that, beyond its crude presentation and dinergoth ass writing, is a surprisingly ambitious and surprisingly well executed game that doesn't quite feel like anything else in the indie shooter sphere and, honestly, punches way above its weight class. As crude as its prose and visual direction seem at first glance, every once in a while it manages to leverage its angst laden dialogue for a genuinely resonant character moment. Manages to leverage its low poly artstyle for a genuinely painterly, Signalis-esque vista. Manages to get some genuinely visceral imagery out of its amateur webcomic artwork. And manages to provoke some genuine intrigue with its anime fanfiction writing and world building.
I'll say it, Abyss Veil's awesome. It's a game that has no right being as compelling as it is, but this game is doing its own thing, even if its resources are limited, and commits to it hard enough to make it work. This is an absolutely special kind of indie sleeper hit, made entirely because one person had an overly specific vision and wanted to realize it, goddamnit. Because someone came up with that world and these characters and that story and wanted to share them with the world. It's just a delightfully earnest project that somehow actually comes together as an enjoyable game. Would also make for a great double feature with Studio System: Guardian Angel, for whatever that's worth. Long story short, this was really a positive surprise for me.
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That was a joke, hence the /j. Ah well. Admittedly not my best work.
It doesn't help that the parry pretty much gives you no real advantage. It locks you into a relatively lengthy animation, obscures your vision with annoying effects, and honestly just looks really ugly compared to pulling off a perfect dodge.
Split Fiction, just more of the same? Not that its a problem, I loved It Takes Two. The only real complaint I have is that playing two identically shaped characters makes segments without the split screen really confusing. Am I the slender woman with two pixels of pink paint, or the one with three pixels of green paint?
Also I can already tell that the story and characters will be incredibly annoying, but that's fine. I am willing to put up with that for a splitscreen multiplayer experience with the gf.
Also I can already tell that the story and characters will be incredibly annoying, but that's fine. I am willing to put up with that for a splitscreen multiplayer experience with the gf.
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Imagine having to play the final boss without Torrent! They patched it in when the dlc released lol.
Finished Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Honestly, it kind of sucked. The environments looked good, the music was nice, and there were fun bits like the fact that you can use the 'pick up' command on captain Kate like 30 times to use a bunch of cheesy pick up lines, but overall I didn't enjoy it as much as Monkey Island 1. The puzzles were more obscure and I needed to look up hints a lot more than in the first game. A lot of stuff I just don't understand how you are supposed to figure out, like selling the plaque you get for winning the spitting contest for a ridiculous amount of money. I didn't even realize that the shopkeeper was even interested in buying anything, and even then it's an item that Guybrush describes as "a plaque with an old looking gob of something on it." Nothing about it ever even hinted 'valuable' to me.
The ending was really, really bad as well, then it tells you to shut off your computer and go do something productive. You get the sense that there was a lot of bitterness about the development of the game.
The ending was really, really bad as well, then it tells you to shut off your computer and go do something productive. You get the sense that there was a lot of bitterness about the development of the game.
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So i tried the new Aincrad demo. And it was passable ... for a 20€ Indie title. Not a bad game per se but the main game is absurdly overpriced.
But we have steam summer event and so i bought the FF7 remakes for cheap. And started the first one and it is so much better than the 4 years newer Aincrad game that it is not even funny. And they share enough similarities that a direct comparison can be made. Better ennvironment, better combat, reactive minor NPCs, way better pacing and better cut scenes, more varied enemies and it even looks better.
But we have steam summer event and so i bought the FF7 remakes for cheap. And started the first one and it is so much better than the 4 years newer Aincrad game that it is not even funny. And they share enough similarities that a direct comparison can be made. Better ennvironment, better combat, reactive minor NPCs, way better pacing and better cut scenes, more varied enemies and it even looks better.
I decided to pick it up again today. Since it had been quite a while, my plan was to start over from the start and use a guide to get to the endings in the order recommended by the guide, using the skip feature along the way. I however encountered a bit of a problem: relatively early on in the story there is a point of divergence that occurs if you have finished the first two endings, and this point of divergence makes it impossible to get the first two endings again. Or at least I think so, because the guide I'm using is barebones, and from I could tell no matter how I handle the introduced point of divergence I get locked into a particular choice that I think makes the first two endings impossible to reach. And I don't know how to handle this; are you supposed to delete all your local files or something? I want to go back to the earlier endings.
If you're curious about the point of divergence, the story is that you play as Takeshi, a guy that gets locked with an ensemble of characters in an underwater facility that is being flooded and the story is what problems you encounter as you try to figure out a way to escape your predicament. How the story ends depends on what choices you make and therefore what Character Ending you get. After two endings have been unlocked and you reload, there is a point introduced where afterwards the protagonist changes. Instead of Takeshi the viewpoint character is instead an amnesiac known as Kid who was part of the aforementioned ensemble, and there are two Character Endings you can unlock with him as the protagonist. It is in essence watching the same events from another character's perspective.
Still playing Dave the Diver. I find it's best to just ignore the story for large chunks of time in order to focus on the daily grind. Otherwise it starts feeling like you're driving past the game.
I remember thinking early on that the game had a faint air of F2P nonsense what with the whole game being geared around your phone and all the mechanics competing for your attention and daily checkups. And sure enough the devs are primarily known for making this shit. Figures. South Korea is like the number one consumer of this garbage. The devs, Nexon, have even been fined a whole bunch of times by the local fair trade commission for being scumbags and lying about the probably rates of their loot boxes and generally providing false information on microtransactions.
I remember thinking early on that the game had a faint air of F2P nonsense what with the whole game being geared around your phone and all the mechanics competing for your attention and daily checkups. And sure enough the devs are primarily known for making this shit. Figures. South Korea is like the number one consumer of this garbage. The devs, Nexon, have even been fined a whole bunch of times by the local fair trade commission for being scumbags and lying about the probably rates of their loot boxes and generally providing false information on microtransactions.
The thing that's struck me the most about Mouse PI is that it's helped me figure out something I haven't really been able to put into words before. For boomer shooters, I prefer the guns to have clear separate uses and niches rather than simply being different flavors of damage output. It's why I never cared for the original Doom and Doom 2; the chaingun is literally just a better pistol, the shotgun doesn't see much use once you have a chaingun unless you run out of bullets, the plasma rifle is just a chaingun that uses energy, etc. With military shooters aiming for semi-realistic gun performance and games where you carry two weapons and swap with what's on the ground, it's a bit different, but for this subgenre I'd rather a game like Doom Eternal where the guns are potentially a little too locked into their niche than one where the only meaningful decision about which gun to use is what you have ammo remaining for.
The story and visual style have still got me hooked, but I don't think I'll be returning for a second playthrough of this one. AFAIK I think I'm about halfway through it now, though the missions being very slightly open-ended in their order makes it difficult to tell for sure.
The story and visual style have still got me hooked, but I don't think I'll be returning for a second playthrough of this one. AFAIK I think I'm about halfway through it now, though the missions being very slightly open-ended in their order makes it difficult to tell for sure.
Having beaten Vice City three weeks ago, I just started replaying San Andreas. In terms of presentation and story, the beginning is more impressive than I remember. But it's a Rockstar game, and I won't excuse the heavy tutorials and restrictive design.
It's nice to be able to vault now. At first I centered the camera with L1 like in Vice City. Then I tilted the right stick and was pleased to remember that full camera control was added in San Andreas.
That price can't be right.
Reflections!
I might actually keep myself from making much progress until we have a place and can bring our belongings from the other state, including my pressure sensitive RetroFighters Defender. I want proper throttling with the face button. I don't care that people find it hard to press buttons only slightly; all modern controllers should have this feature. Controllers have too few buttons as it is.
When I did my second or third full playthrough in 2010, I chose the PC version for the better draw distance and other graphical enhancements. Sixteen years later, I don't care anymore. Just more work to set up than the PS2 emulator that I'm already using for other games.
It's nice to be able to vault now. At first I centered the camera with L1 like in Vice City. Then I tilted the right stick and was pleased to remember that full camera control was added in San Andreas.
That price can't be right.
Reflections!
I might actually keep myself from making much progress until we have a place and can bring our belongings from the other state, including my pressure sensitive RetroFighters Defender. I want proper throttling with the face button. I don't care that people find it hard to press buttons only slightly; all modern controllers should have this feature. Controllers have too few buttons as it is.
When I did my second or third full playthrough in 2010, I chose the PC version for the better draw distance and other graphical enhancements. Sixteen years later, I don't care anymore. Just more work to set up than the PS2 emulator that I'm already using for other games.
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