(shouting)

What games are you playing?

do you like them video games? what about those there romhacks? well pop on in here and talk about them then! what are you waiting for?!
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Whimsical Calamari
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Whimsical Calamari »

Bean wrote: 5 years ago Encore Mode
ah dang it that was part of the reason i got Plus (and a Switch at all) and i still haven't touched it. worth it for Ray tho

also Kirby Star Allies' Soul Melter Arena is killing me slowly
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Alice
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Re: What games are you playing?

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Alice wrote: 5 years agoI honestly prefer Hell Temple to Icefire Treetops. At least I'm to the point where the stupid poison lava isn't quite instant death. Though with everything in the lower part being seemingly designed to get you knocked into the lava, that kinda quickly adds up.
I take this back. Early game Icefire Treetop is relaxing compared to the

Eternal Prison

. That place is an utter nightmare to navigate. I'm kinda impressed they managed to include not just one but two entire areas that are worse than Hell Temple.

I'm kinda stuck at the moment though. I can do some stuff in the aforementioned area still but most of it requires a key fairy. I don't have the software to guarantee a given fairy and while someone has explained how the fairies work in this one, I still get healing fairies far too often. (It'll net me either the bombs or another mantra I think but I'm not actually certain which since both seem to be on the same screen.)

The other place I can do stuff is the Hall of Malice but I'm too annoyed by where I'm stuck there. Phaia is an utter garbage boss. No matter what I do I come out with less than 50hp left after that fight and usually take so many hits that my revive software combo kicks in. I've done everything else in the area though that I can currently reach. I know I can buy the

Angel Shield

once I beat this set of bosses though. I forgot about the shop on that side of the field until after I'd already activated the field and that blocks off the Corridor of Blood entrance infuriatingly enough.

I'm just hoping the guardian of this field doesn't end up as bullshit as the field itself.

The stuff I've read so far makes it pretty clear it's going to be styled after Tiamat in the first game who was one of my favorite guardians there but was still the hardest. But this game tends to be such an insufferable asshole to the player that I actually dread how much worse Echidna's going to be. Hopefully it'll be a difficult but fun fight like Tiamat and most of the other guardians, sans Jormungandr, instead of what I fear will be the case.

After that I just have

Surtr (who I still need to figure out where to get the light scythe for, I know it's Eternal Prison but I have no idea where yet)

and then whatever the final guardian will be.

I'm assuming that one will probably be in the Eternal Prison but I'm not actually certain.

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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Crow »

Echidna is... weird but not that bad with subweapons. Surtr can eat two and a half dicks.



Also regarding the riddles (if you've found them):

I don't know if this was fixed yet but there was a mistranslation on one of them that made the riddle almost impossible to figure out, the one about "incanted silence" should also be mentioning a wheel



agree that the

eternal prison

is a pain to navigate but I mean

it's literally hell, so



I finished a few weeks back btw :V like the game more than the first overall but it still has issues

Right now been playing The King's Bird, cool and fluid precision platformer, a lot of influence from dustforce especially
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Alice »

Parama wrote: 5 years agoAlso regarding the riddles (if you've found them):

I don't know if this was fixed yet but there was a mistranslation on one of them that made the riddle almost impossible to figure out, the one about "incanted silence" should also be mentioning a wheel

I did find them, though I've yet to figure them out. Mulbruk was fairly helpful in at least specifying they're all in Hell though. The first one had me thinking they could be anywhere since I hadn't seen any ice in the Underworld. Though I do have two ideas. Styx is icy water and the room two to the right is, I believe, Sakit's grave which would give that room a tenuous connection to ice.

As for the third riddle, I'd actually read it hasn't been fixed yet, though I avoided spoilers on actually solving the riddles. So it mentioning a wheel may help out without spoiling everything. I just wonder if I have the right idea on what it means for "incanting silence". I was thinking thse using the Djed Pillar without any mantras might count but I'm uncertain. Mentioning a wheel gives me an idea where to try as well. There's the Yuga Ring just inside the entrance, a room to the right of Hraesvelgr.



My last play session was actually a fair bit surprising. Normally anymore I end my play sessions feeling exhausted and frustrated. This time, despite spending about 90% of my time in either

the activated Hall of Malice and the Underworld

I actually ended off my session feeling pretty alright for once. Also since that last post I did complete the Hall of Malice but

I still need to buy the angel shield because I spaced it in my rush to heal and save after Phaia and Viy Jr. as well as actually fight Echidna which I only realized I can fight after I'd quit for the night. There's a tablet somewhere in the Hall of Malice that talks about creaming to make your wishes be heard which I'd misinterpreted, according to Komus, and lead me to believe that that's how I'd make Echidna's ankh appear but beating Orthrus, which I did, accomplishes that task.



And if I can complete those riddles then I should be able to finish up one more guardian leaving me with just some loose ends to tie up in the main ruins (obtaining Miracle Witch, for example. I know its approximate location but don't yet know exactly how to actually get it just yet. After that is just the music expansion for software) and then focusing on the final guardian.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

BobisOnlyBob wrote: 5 years ago I'm thinking of playing though The Darkness and The Darkness II back-to-back after that as part of my long-standing console backlog.
I did this! They were surprisingly good! Neither were fantastic, but they're memorable and oddball little console shooters.

Then I knocked off The Magic Circle, Aaero, and Killing Time at Lightspeed. I'm using HowLongToBeat to work through my backlog from shortest to longer games!

The Magic Circle actually really sucked me in. I ended up 100%ing it on a second pass around, clocking in at 10 hours instead of the 4-5 I expected. Gave me plenty to think about in game design, beyond just laughing at the Richard Garriott pastiche.

Aaero is not Rez, but it's trying. Beat it on normal, shoved it onto the "replayable" pile for a rainy day.

Killing Time at Lightspeed is basically a visual novel, except it's almost text-only and done in the style of two separate Facebook and reddit feeds. Every time you reload the page, a year passes on earth. Clever stuff, but familiar territory for my tastes.
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Bean
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Bean »

Watching raocow play Battle Network recently has made me think about starting up the original MMBN game on the GBA. Haven't had any time for games to start the month though, but yeah. I'm thinking that will be next.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Alice »

I ended up giving up on La-Mulana 2. I was in the final area and had 100% completion other than a single glossary entry which I was locked out of (I only learned about it after it was too late) but the devs decided to be complete assholes. They brought back the stupid ass spike room from Hell Temple (the single shittiest room in the entirety of the first game and what caused me to abandon all but one of my Hell Temple runs, which also got abandoned due to Windows being trash and eating my save) except it's required and it's far worse than it was in that game. There's a bigger gap between the spikes so it's not quite as Kaizo-esque but if you hit one spike then due to the changes in invincibility frames you will hit every other spike underneath it on your way down even with the increased i-frames software combo. Then you have to refight a miniboss which isn't exactly trivial and can instakill you if you screw up or are simply unlucky.

In my case I finally got to the bottom of the spike room and the grapple claw simply stopped working for me. So I fell into the miniboss room. It's a boss where you have to attack it to get it to open its mouth so you can actually harm it. As it was closing its mouth I got hit and stuck in its mouth. And crushed to death.

It's like the devs took the most frustrating parts of the first game and decided that those parts were what everyone loved about it or something and decided to focus on that and double down on those things while improving the base mechanics in some ways and making them worse in others. (Ie: Bombable walls not making a sound when attacked for some inexplicable reason, the book of the dead being made worse, the scalesphere and ice cape being made completely moot by poison lava and ice water which were used almost exclusively in the parts of the game that happened after you obtained those items thus making them completely useless.) Though judging by the fact it somehow has nearly a 90% positive rating that seems to be the case unfortunately. Because impossible to play games that shit all over the player every chance they get are totally fun.

I came into this wanting to like the game, that's why I stuck with it for so long despite ending nearly every play session feeling frustrated and exhausted, but in the end I couldn't even keep that up because the devs seemed dead set on destroying what little enjoyment I could actually take from it.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Crow »

I never once got past that room in the original game but didn't have much trouble with it here, you can just skip most of it by jumping through the middle and then double jumping anyways

Fenrir is absolute garbage though I don't know why they brought him back



Also if it helps there's a midpoint in the last area a few screens before that one (you have to intentionally fall down from one of the screens)

And any boss you kill there will stay dead too so if you're close to dying you can just warp out anyways, it's relatively easy for a final area I felt
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Alice »

Parama wrote: 5 years agoI never once got past that room in the original game but didn't have much trouble with it here, you can just skip most of it by jumping through the middle and then double jumping anyways
I got past it a number of times in the original but the next shortcut is several screens past it so I quickly got tired of having to repeat it in basically all of my Hell Temple attempts. (My very first time passing it I basically instantly ragequit on the next screen because there's like one tile of floor through the door and then a drop. So you come jumping through the door and you're basically guaranteed to throw yourself into a pit your first time for making the stupid assumption that an area transfer won't immediately put you into an unviable situation.)

They at the least did space the spikes farther apart which is an improvement. But hitting every spike on your way down because of retarded i-frame mechanics then having to fight an obnoxious miniboss every time you fail makes those good changes pretty much irrelevant.
Also if it helps there's a midpoint in the last area a few screens before that one (you have to intentionally fall down from one of the screens)
Yup, found that one. The entire field is really underwhelming though. It's largely just overly tanky resprites of old enemies and old minibosses coming back. And the minibosses seem to be the exact ones I hated fighting the most the first time around to boot.
And any boss you kill there will stay dead too so if you're close to dying you can just warp out anyways, it's relatively easy for a final area I felt
I think this may have been changed in the last update then. They were respawning for me so I had to kill Fenrir every single time I screwed up that fall. If it just stayed dead after the first time then I wouldn't have gotten so frustrated with it as quickly as I did. My first time I tried to jump between the spikes but was off so I hit the top left one then every spike on the way down and had to fight Fenrir. That left me fairly low on health so when I screwed up my second attempt I was nearly dead when I landed back in Fenrir's room and immediately warped out to refill my health. Then on my third attempt I basically had it when the grapple claw just randomly stopped function and I fell back into Fenrir's room again and got crushed when he closed his mouth because he hit me with a projectile just as he started closing it and knocked me back further into his mouth. At that point I was basically done with tolerating it. I remember spending like an hour and a half getting through the original my first try and that's not something I'm willing to tolerate repeating.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Crow »

fair, you basically beat the game/did all the puzzle/explory stuff anyways so
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Bean »

All right. I did start up Battle Network yesterday. It's about what I expected other than a pretty significant difficulty spike after the first two bosses went down. My big gripe are the labyrinth dungeons that almost always want you to take the long way around, and that's while you're fending off random encounters. I mean, it's okay, but it's not really hooking me in.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

Nidhogg, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, Cylne, NightSky, MGSV: Ground Zeroes, ICEY, Hiveswap, Jamestown, Astebreed, Finding Paradise...

I've been busy playing and/or completing a lot of short games! I'll write up more about these later, but I needed to get their order written down and off my brain meats first. But what I will say is that Finding Paradise emotionally devastated me.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Crow »

been replaying hollow knight ahead of raocow (well, i started like a week after he did but i'm way ahead now so w/e)
i still haven't come across any of the DLC yet except maybe a pin I don't remember existing in the original game? but i'm not sure
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

BobisOnlyBob wrote: 5 years ago I'm using HowLongToBeat to work through my backlog from shortest to longer games!
I have been playing Short Games, clearing out my 100+ backlog using a delightful little app called My Game Collection and its ability to hook up to Steam, scan barcodes, and download metadata from review sites and How Long To Beat to prioritize short titles that I want to play but have kept putting off in favour of another 100 hour RPG or 50 hour Metroidvania. I've been doing this for a little before now, but here's the past 10 days or so...

Nidhogg! The pixel fencing game with sacrifices. I did the whole Single Player "Campaign", which is just a linear sequence of fights. AI was moderately challenging an occasionally dumb; it very much felt like a training mode for multiplayer, but it didn't leave me wanting to play against a human opponent. A very pure and arcadey experience, probably best for couch co-op with its reasonably quick matches. Aesthetically distinct from all other games despite its simple graphics. Reminded me of MTV cartoons with its minimal-but-gross style. Also reminded me a little of classic Prince of Persia's swordfighting, but naturally way faster. Not massively my cup of tea, but it's good.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon! I finished the standard ending with all four (anti)heroes, and started a solo kill-'em-all run. Great classic Castlevania experience. Not too sure about the lives system - if just one of your characters died, especially during a boss, you'd be sent back to a checkpoint without "a life" lost, but now you'd have fewer HP and abilities with which to kill the now rejuvenated boss. It made me want to just throw the survivors off a cliff until I lost a singular life to bring them all back and continue on actually fighting. And there's no easy way to restart at a checkpoint, only at the beginning of the level! But other than that nitpick, it's a bloody great little time. Final level is just close enough to bullshit without actually being NES-era bullshit to be great. The solo campaign though? Oof. I got ninja gaiden'd a few too many times, and put it into my second-tier backlog ("Replayable" games). I should mention I got this for free on PC because I'm a backer of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night...

Cylne! Awful esoteric abstract walking simulator which makes no fucking sense and is very amateurishly put together. A regrettable purchase. Pretty at times at best. Music isn't bad. Best part was I couldn't even tell if I got a good ending or a bad ending, but I did get to destroy things representing the earlier levels, which was cathartic given how bad they were. Rubbish.

NightSky! A simple physics platformer, made by Nifflas, the guy who did Knytt Underground and all those. Apparently the original concept was by Daisuke Amaya, aka Pixel, the creator of Cave Story! It's a fun little platformer, but not very deep. If you're looking for something soothing and simple, I recommend it.

MGSV: Ground Zeroes! So having not played Peace Walker, I knew I was in for a rough time, so I spent half an hour listening to all the cassettes in advance. Just as well - Chico and Paz are critical characters in this short prelude to The Phantom Pain, and without their tapes the whole thing is a contextless mess. The actual sneaking and shooting and stealthing though? Top notch, although I did notice some weirdness with bodies I'd tranq'd and hidden vanishing when an alert started. I look forward to playing TPP proper some day, but not today. I didn't try any of the many "side missions" - I think I'll do those as a warm-up for Phantom Pain when I get around to that.

ICEY! I think something was lost in translation from Chinese. The hack-and-slash 2D combat is fine, but the Stanley Parable style narration is... weak at best, patronizing (deliberately so, but without the charm of TSP), and many of the "meta" goals in the game simply require finding dead ends and visiting them and waiting until the narrator gets mad at you. So many of them just require waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And the true ending requires all achievements, which means all of these meta goals. I was unimpressed. The main plot, the one the narrator wants to push you along, doesn't have enough meat on it to be satisfying, nor does the combo-heavy combat, and the esoteric plot (which hints at lovecraftian themes but totally fails to develop them) is overshadowed by goofy fourth-wall breaks with unfinished areas, prototype games, developer arguments, funding issues... The Magic Circle did all of that better. It's probably the laziest Meta Bullshit Game I've played, and I've played a lot of them now. Amusingly one particular prototype example they showed featured ICEY copying powers from enemies, Copy Kitty style, which would've been a better game. Their stated reason for not doing it? Cost. Hah! Thankfully I got this game, and a Steam Link, for next to nothing during a very strange "fire sale" of Steam Links.

Hiveswap: Act 1! If you're a fan of Homestuck, you either already own this and have played it, fell out of the Homestuck fandom and never bothered, or this game will hold almost no interest to you. A classic simple point-and-click with the aesthetics of and references to Homestuck, but set in 1994 (long before April 13th 2009, the key date of Homestuck). It contains a lot of cultural references to '94 as well, in particular X-Files and The Lone Gunmen (which is a bit anachronistic, since they'd only been in two episodes in that year...), which will probably fly right over Homestuck's younger fanbase. The actual events are pretty short, linear, and clearly come to an abrupt conclusion. It's clear that this unfortunate game suffered for the events surrounding its creation. I've not been following Friendsim and the attempted hype of Act 2, so I'm kinda let down but it's also pretty much what I was expecting. Was nice to return to that world for a bit.

Jamestown! Didn't play this for long. Got a few chapters in, and then it told me to unlock the next chapter I had to beat all the previous chapters on the next difficulty up. Nope. Done with you. Space-Westerns have been done better anyway. It's a classic vertical scrolling shooter, with a shield and combo mechanic, not a danmaku title, set on British Colonial Mars fighting against tentacled mechanised horrors working together with gasp The Spaniards. Not my cup of tea at all. Next!

Astebreed! Here we go, much more my comfort zone for shooters - anime bullshit. A story about twin girls, a machine AI armada, and eleventybillion bullets all on the screen at once. An actual story summary, with spoilers, can be read here if you really wanna know, and you'll probably need it because the whole game is voiced in Japanese and it's almost impossible to focus on the absolute storm of bullets and the subtitles at the same time. Six solid chapters of mecha scrolling madness. Multi-directional, too - it'll switch from vertical, to sidescrolling, to chase cam to rear-view at a moment's notice with dramatic camera sweeps. It has a crazy-ass lockon system, a sword that can slash certain bullets to absorb them Ikaruga-style, and surprisingly a rather generous health system, making it more like infamous Euroshmups than anything normally this Japanese. I enjoyed it far more than I expected to all the same, even if I did very badly in terms of keeping up combos and not taking damage.

Finding Paradise! The sequel to To The Moon, a beautiful little adventure game made under the limitations of RPG Maker XP's engine. Finding Paradise picks up with the same premise as the first game, but a new case. It's end-of-life memory therapy/revision, delivered by two quirky scientists, Eva and Neil, as they attempt to patch together the life of their subject and revise it to satisfy his wishes, while also understanding the actual cause of his desire to revise them... I'll be honest. This game made me physically cry, fully sobbing, tears streaming, absolute mess. To The Moon choked me up, but Finding Paradise emotionally devastated me to my core. The reasons for that are so intensely personal to me, and connect directly to the major twist of the game, so I won't spoil them, but I also can't say whether or not it'll impact anyone else the same. And even if I did say why it affected me without context, that alone would be enough to work it out. It's powerful nonetheless, so long as you have a measure of empathy.

Luftrausers! A rapid die-and-retry game about flying a plane in an endlessly looping battlefield filled with many planes and ships all looking to shoot you down. Minimalist pixel-art WWII sepia aesthetic and grungy war soundtrack, 125 possible combinations of 3 plane parts, a handful of enemy types but a lot of replayability, considering the average Raus lasts only a minute or so. I expected to get a few hours of it, but ended up spending closer to 10 in my mad determination to kill Blimps and Submarines and unlock the even more berserk mode that follows the main game. Damn fun, ended up surprising me. Has some problems with the "missions" for each part being a bit unbalanced at times, especially towards the end with the Laser Aces only having a 3% chance of showing on any given run you successfully get to the Aces phase. I didn't finish every mission, but I did try all 125 possible planes and got all the other achievements.

Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy! I'm in the pit. Again. I tried again and again until my wrist hurt. I want to respect the idea behind this game but my mouse and my body aren't up to the task, after two hours of hammer-swinging and ascending past the Chimney repeatedly. Another one for the backburner.

Tacoma! Great "walking sim" sci-fi story in space. Great fun piecing together the story of the station Tacoma and its crew. Loved it. Great payoff. It has a cat in it too, which always helps. Genuinely don't want to spoil too much of it, but it's a strong recommendation from me even at its meagre 3 hour runtime.

Lumino City! Oof. I wanted to like this so much. The art is so pretty and the world is so well-designed, you can tell they had a real-world architect on staff to make this absurd cliffside papercraft cartoon world. The whole experience is marred by technical issues - bad UI for objects, unclear navigation, 25fps, and most damningly of all _three crashes_, all resulting in lost progress or glitched saves missing key items, in the span of four hours. I'd call it a rough gem, but I literally had to use a startup code in Steam to get to Chapter 13, as Chapter 12 contained the worst puzzle in the game (Morse Code Lighthouse) and I had to do it twice - the first time resulting in a lockup where my character couldn't move, and when I reloaded I was stuck back on the lighthouse _minus_ the coathanger needed to zipline off it, and the second time I performed the complicated second morse code input and then the cutscene in which the kid sends you a rope locked up and never played, meaning there was no zipline. Absolutely unfortunate. If you like charming, relaxing puzzle games this should be an easy recommendation, but I had an unpleasant experience owing to these technical issues.
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Bean
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Bean »

BobisOnlyBob wrote: 5 years agoPost.
That is a post... and I read it all! Good stuff.

Slowly getting my way through Mega Man Battle Network still. Just took down Elec Man and a certain scrub in a surprise fight right after that. The dungeon design in this does almost nothing for me as it looks a little too similar at times, and that makes me get lost more than I should. The invisible platforms in this area were a mess for me. MMBN seems to also do the thing with a lot of backtracking at times to make things go on longer than they should.

It's not all been bad though. The one place that I actually liked roaming the internet maps was the Den Town area. The red and blue switching gimmick was easy enough to understand, and because of rotating the colors around, it was easy to figure my way around. Because of its straightforwardness, this took no time at all compared to Elec or Ice Man's areas. Go figure! Also, a lot of the fights are pretty fun, even though you're still relying on certain chips showing up.

Kind of a mixed bag game. Definitely won't be grinding the post-game stuff out when that happens. I'm just going for the win, maybe a little bit of the extra stuff, and I'll have had my fill with this initial entry then.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Ashan »

Been playing the new Spider-Man game for PS4. Really liking it so far! I was a huge fan of the Spider-Man 2 game for Gamecube, and when this new game was announced I was really hoping they'd take some inspiration from the free roaming of that game and cross it with some better game mechanics like from the Batman Arkham series, and it seems like they did just that! It's almost an unabashed Arkham clone in some ways, but I mean the Arkham games found a pretty good formula and I think it works pretty well here! I really love just swinging around the city, it actually takes some time to learn the swinging mechanics but once you get it down you can really throw some fun variation in there and it's just a whole lot of fun to get around. Flying around as Batman got pretty mindless cause it was the same repeating motion of grapple launching and then soaring, but there's a good variety of ways Spidey can move around fast, and even upgrades to make sure you never lose your momentum like would so often happen in Spider-Man 2.
Bean wrote: 5 years agoMega Man Battle Network
It's sounding like this is your first time with the BN series?
Just push through BN1. It's not bad by any means, but it's... expectedly bland for the first of its kind. They really start streamlining the formula starting in the next game, and they make the different internet areas look more differentiated than BN1 where everywhere basically looked the same.

Fun fact: Elec Man's area was my blocking point when I was playing this when I was little. I could not figure out the puzzles in that area
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Bean »

I used maps and even Roahm's vids when that didn't click. At least I know I'm not the only one that can't stand that place. And yeah, outside of maybe ten minutes when the game first came out before we realized there was just one save file, this is my first time playing a standard MMBN title.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Crow »

finding paradise (and to the moon) are both really damn good yeahhh

alongside replaying hollow knight i'm also replay ace attorney 3 because apparently i refuse to play new games atm
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Bean »

Beat Mega Man Battle Network the other day. I'm doing some of the post-game stuff after all. Took down Pharaoh Man and got all three of his chips very quickly, but I think I'm just about at my limit now. Kind of want to try out the second game while I'm still in the mood.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

Parama wrote: 5 years ago finding paradise (and to the moon) are both really damn good yeahhh
God, aren't they? I was sobbing through the end of Finding Paradise, and that's... that's extremely unlike me. I haven't cried like that in close to a decade.
BobisOnlyBob wrote: 5 years ago I have been playing Short Games, clearing out my 100+ backlog
There Came An Echo! Weird sequel to weird game Sequence, now known as Before the Echo thanks to a lawsuit from a mediocre board game company. Sequence/BtE was a rhythm-action RPG battle game with a strange plot about a modern-day everyman ascending a tower full of strange monsters and bizarre people. There Came An Echo is a strategy came, a la XCOM, only it's in real-time and controlled entirely using your microphone. Or gestures. Or, well, you can actually use the mouse, but it's less fun if you do that. I played with Mic only, even for the menu options, and it was surprisingly good! "Corrin. Move to alpha six. Corrin. Fire on Target three. Miranda. Switch to Charge. Everybody. Move to Beta one on my mark. Syll. Recharge. Syll. Switch to Railgun. Mark." Plot was even weirder and full of strangely aggressive personalities all clashing, and a high-profile voice cast (Wil Wheaton, Ashley Burch, and Yuri Lowenthal to name the obvious stand-outs) delivering excellent performances for it. It is on the easy side for a strategy game, and it's not long as I finished it in about five hours, and that's going back to pick up a few extra achievements. Would recommend for the novelty of the experience, but the plot won't make much sense unless you play Sequence Before the Echo first, which requires a very different set of skills, has a very different aesthetic and art style and is a completely unrelated genre. Uh. Yeah. Iridium Games are quite strange. Still, novelty is its own reward!

Child of Eden! Unimpressed by a game starring a character named Lumi (Lumino City), I decided to play a game starring a character named... Lumi... which I've been putting off forever, and I remembered why shortly after starting it. This game was explicitly made with motion controls in mind, likely the Kinect first and the Move second, and playing with a controller is just... so much less satisfying. Despite being mechanically almost identical to one of my favourite games of all time, Rez, the ambient music, organic enemy shapes and lack of an avatar really leave me kinda cool on it, despite loving Genki Rocket's Heavenly Star ever since I saw it in No More Heroes, which is used here as a theme tune. The same music video as in NMH is even included! Anyway, I played the first two of the five tracks, each taking about 11 minutes, and then realised I was still locked out of track three. Going back to Track 1 to play it again, I couldn't improve on my score/ranking with a controller, and was told I still needed another 2 stars (ie. replay either Track 1 or Track 2 again with a mediocre score) in order to unlock the third. I just... Rez wasn't like that, it just required shooting down stuff in the levels to progress, and the levels were nice and logically separated into layered chunks which is mostly absent here. The dual weapons of Lockon and Tracer could potentially be interesting, but again, controller. Putting this one on hold until it's inevitably remade for the PlayStation 5 VR platform.

Overgrowth! A little series about strangely humanoid but realistic-animal-head ninja rabbits, consisting of Lugaru and Overgrowth, the latter of which had its development famously chronicled across hundreds of video updates on YouTube. Unfortunately, the game's amazing tech was eclipsed by the passage of time, and now it looks like an early PS3 game rather than the technical miracle it once seemed like. The fantastic team that gave us the entire Humble Bundle platform and a huge cavalcade of incredibly cheap indie games were sadly only able to get short 3-hour-if-that campaign out of their engine, and a port of Lugaru into Overgrowth's much better engine. I'm sure there are many mods and that on high difficulty the combat really shines if you master it, but I'll tell you what I played: a very rough combat game and a mediocre 3D platformer with much-needed checkpoints every two jumps because it's so easy to fall during wallruns or comically overshoot thanks to the Meat Boy like jumps these bunnies are capable of. The plot isn't anything to write home about either, which isn't surprising, but the combat's sheer brutality and swiftness encourages cowardly tactics like running circles around an unarmed opponent slashing them with a knife, or repeatedly leaping into the air and punting people with your powerful legs instead of actually using the complex sword and dodging mechanics. It's all too easy to clear the game just mashing shift and left click to slash, punch, trip and roll like a knife-wielding maniac who's played too much Dark Souls 2. Ah well.

My primary backlog is now down to 103 games, and that's having added to it on Monday by buying Satellite Reign!

Next up: Gunpoint, Skullgirls, Oxenfree, Pac-Man CE2, Valley, Doorkickers, and more.
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Bean
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Bean »

I can safely say that Mega Man Battle Network 2 is proving to be more fun to roam around on the internet than it was in the first game. The maps are a lot more easier on the eyes so far, and I do like the change in the battle system to where you aren't fully healed after every battle for the time being. Can't wait for those grenade enemies to show up later on in the game and prove me wrong, but whatever!
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Bean
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Re: What games are you playing?

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Still on MMBN2, and we're starting to get to those areas that are longer. There isn't as much pointless backtracking, but it still pops up from time to time to artificially inflate the game's length. Boss battles are more engaging for the most part, but I'm also liking the new chips. I know I read there was some system for Mega Man that determines his attack style. I think I'm getting close to that point now that Lan's dad just called him when I stopped.
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Re: What games are you playing?

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BobisOnlyBob wrote: 5 years ago Next up: Gunpoint, Skullgirls, Oxenfree, Pac-Man CE2, Valley, Doorkickers, and more.
Gunpoint! Hopping about buildings in Hypertrousers™ and rewiring light-switches to doors and electrical sockets to people's guns. It's a silly little stealth-and-theft game with a short and sweet plot that's amusingly but not too convoluted, with you stealing things to re-steal them and avoid incriminating yourself so you can incriminate... oh, it's silly alright. Especially the dialogue options. Fun and simple. Blatantly inspired by TRILBY: The Art of Theft, which is also good but clunkier than Gunpoint. Gunpoint also has a lot more creativity and alternative approaches to any given situation. I recommend it, but it's only a few hours long like everything I've been playing lately.

PAC-MAN Championship Edition 2! It's not as satisfying as CE, but the music is so much better. Boss fights are an amusing novelty, but only in Adventure mode which has to be unlocked, like normal boards, by playing boring single-train levels first. Annoying! Good if you're bored of CE and want to try something else, or don't appreciate CE's small resolution and stuck-in-2007 look.

Valley! A lovely little first-person running-and-jumping game with slip-slidey inertial movement. Feels a bit Sonic-meets-Bioshock in places, contrasting nature imagery and World War 2 era structures. Feels a bit underdeveloped, but largely smooth. Rapid progression through movement and health upgrades. Interesting health management mechanic, with your "energy" being both your personal health and your mana system, used for restoring trees, powering generators, using abilities like double-jump and grapple to navigate, pacifying hostile things... the real "heath" is actually the titular valley's health, which can be restored by reinvigorating trees and plants and wildlife, and is lost due to dying (falling in water, usually, or running out of energy due to attacks) or plot events. I liked it, but it's nothing to write home about. Charming at best.
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Re: What games are you playing?

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Valley is alright but it does feel really shallow and feels like it compromised its gameplay for the sake of the story
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: What games are you playing?

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With raocow's recent playthrough of Vip4 ending I was in the SMW hack mood so I hooked up my SNES for the first time in a while, loaded up my Super Everdrive with the ASMT console-working patch, and started a playthrough today. So far managed to clear out all the exits up to world 5 (just have to do the world 4 castle which I haven't attempted yet)

Since I have access to zero savestates I made sure to try and scope out some easy save levels and life farms, and the best I've found so far are using Yoshi's Were-house for saving (very easy to grab a cape from the first level of world 3 and then fly to the end of the puzzle in the right pipe and get the secret exit), and Chillout for life farming (after activating the silver P in the cave there's like a ton of enemies that turn into silver coins and net you like 15+ lives or something?)

It took a few minutes to get back into the swing of SMW after having not played it in such a long time, but I think I managed to adapt pretty fast. I was impressed with myself that I completed the secret exit to Raw Horse Power on my second attempt at getting to the actual area where you have to do the baby Yoshi/shell juggling.
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