What games are you playing?

[thatguyif]

Call of the Sea is an enjoyable experience so far. More linear than Outer Wilds, but still pretty good. I love the quasi-cartoonish aesthetic. I also like the Lovecraft references peppered about (mentions of Providence, New England, Arkham, Miskatonic, the setting being approximately where Rl'yeh is). There's also this endearing sort of relationship you see with Norah and her husband Harry that's rather delightful. My only major quibbles with the game is that Norah moves extremely slow (even when sprinting), the subtitles and voiceover tend to mismatch a lot more than they should, and I'm not exactly conducive to Norah and Harry's pet name for each other, "Old Pal." Much as I like as a puppo, the nickname just reminds me of Michael Bublé's Lovecraftian Christmas song, "Santa Buddy" (i.e., "Santa Baby" but with "baby" replaced with "buddy" because no homo)

Currently stuck on the main puzzle of Chapter 3. If someone else has played it, maybe a hint?

I have all the information, I think: The frequencies accorded to the notes, the three notes from the levitation machine, the tide level and its related data from Harry's tent, the calendar with the moon chart. But I haven't been able to open the door. It's clear that three tubes must be open, the rest closed. The related data and moon elements are what confuse me the most. The related data implies that X must become what Y is in its current state, i.e. 1 must become what 5 is now, 2 becomes 7, etc. Is that correct? And does the alignment of the moon well related to its chart matter that much, and if so is there a timing element?

That said, I mucked about on accident and may have set the puzzle wrong. I'll be opening an earlier save to see if it was just a mistake on my end after dinner.

UPDATE: I realized I had a hunch I forgot about that ultimately proved correct:

The related data is a cipher, i.e. X=Y, not an X->Y.

[KobaBeach]

Restarted Suikoden, I was grinding a bit on the Great Forest to equip my party (Tir, Gremio, Cleo, Pahn, Kirkis, Viktor) after sharpening all their weapons to Lv5, but it's getting annoying so I might just carry on, the game is mostly easy.

At Chapter 3 of the PSP version of Legend of Heroes III: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch.

Started the PSP version of Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, finishing up Mayor Klaus' Request. I got hooked from the start because I'm a turbonerd instead of like getting bored until the part where it picks up or whatever fucking normies feel like lol. The use of sidequests reminds me a lot of Arc the Lad II, which I appreciate, battle system is also a lot like PoPoLoCrois Monogatari without the stamina bar.

Also beat Arc the Lad again the other day.

[HatKid]

Started the PS3 version of Yakuza 3 the other day. I would wait for the Steam versions of the Remastered Collection but I asked for it for Christmas before the announcement those were coming to Steam. Since I have it, I figure I might as well play it. It was sort of weird going from Kiwami 2 to PS3 Yakuza 3. Most notably, the graphics aren't as good. The actual fighting is similar enough, but without the physics fun that the Dragon Engine brings to Kiwami 2. I have not played terribly far into the game yet, just Chapter 3. I did most of the sub stories that open up in that Chapter and that's when I stopped. Like usual, NO WAY am I getting 100% Completion because I value my time and sanity (usually) especially since you have to use every single heat move in the game for 100% completion along with all the other crap.

And I'm partway through Chapter 5 in Trails in the Sky SC. A

dragon just came and crushed the market in Bose. I wonder if we'll become dragon slayers at some point, hoho

. I've been doing all the sidequests and while I'm making a decent effort to get the chests, if I miss one, I'm not reloading a save. I've noticed some chest messages have repeated, which isn't too surprising considering they weren't programmed with having different messages in mind. Also, if I somehow miss bonus BP for the main quests, I'm not reloading either. I've already missed some anyway. I think after I finish Sky SC I'll wait a bit to play the 3rd and play Tokyo Xanadu.

[rena]

Started the PS3 version of Yakuza 3 the other day. I would wait for the Steam versions of the Remastered Collection but I asked for it for Christmas before the announcement those were coming to Steam. Since I have it, I figure I might as well play it. It was sort of weird going from Kiwami 2 to PS3 Yakuza 3. Most notably, the graphics aren't as good. The actual fighting is similar enough, but without the physics fun that the Dragon Engine brings to Kiwami 2. I have not played terribly far into the game yet, just Chapter 3. I did most of the sub stories that open up in that Chapter and that's when I stopped. Like usual, NO WAY am I getting 100% Completion because I value my time and sanity (usually) especially since you have to use every single heat move in the game for 100% completion along with all the other crap.

And I'm partway through Chapter 5 in Trails in the Sky SC. A

dragon just came and crushed the market in Bose. I wonder if we'll become dragon slayers at some point, hoho

. I've been doing all the sidequests and while I'm making a decent effort to get the chests, if I miss one, I'm not reloading a save. I've noticed some chest messages have repeated, which isn't too surprising considering they weren't programmed with having different messages in mind. Also, if I somehow miss bonus BP for the main quests, I'm not reloading either. I've already missed some anyway. I think after I finish Sky SC I'll wait a bit to play the 3rd and play Tokyo Xanadu.

yesss

i'm about 80 hours into yakuza 0 and still probably about half way through the story lol. i'm enjoying it a lot and just bought kiwami 1 and 2 in the steam sale

[HatKid]

yesss

i'm about 80 hours into yakuza 0 and still probably about half way through the story lol. i'm enjoying it a lot and just bought kiwami 1 and 2 in the steam sale

Hey, nice! I haven't played 0 yet (I plan to after Yakuza 5) but I have heard a ton about it. Glad you're liking it though! I haven't spent nearly that much time on any of them but from what I understand it has a ton of content; some of which takes a long time to do.

[thatguyif]

Finished and cleared all achievements for Call of the Sea. I really liked this game. It's a very beautiful game, though very short. It also does really well with not only working within the context of the Cthulhu Mythos, but also subverting/rejecting a lot of the things that Lovecraft stood for. The game is very good in terms of its story, being both about the growth

and transformation

of the main character and the relationship between this woman and her husband. Plus, they made achievements very easy to do with Chapter Selection. Also really enjoyed the musical connections.

I still had quibbles though. A lot of script errors. The PC version seems to have a bug where the letter cutscenes didn't actually show what they were supposed to. Some rather amateurish mistakes in terms of bugs.

In addition, to start the year off, I finished off Stinkoman 20X6 before the Flash shutdown. Granted, it was New Mode as opposed to Classic, but it was still satisfying to first-try the Level 9 boss, which was a brick wall to me. Plus Level 10 was pretty all right, the music was actually good. Was it worth the 15-year wait? Definitely not. But hey, it was pretty okay

[Bean]

I finally started up Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 right on the last day of the year. It's pretty much more of the same which is either going to be met with a smile or indifference on any of you all that played the first one.

[Jongseok]

I finished SNES version of Final Fantasy 4 Japanese version(why not?), 5(T-Eng 1.1), and STEAM version of Final Fantasy IX last week.
I'm currently playing Final Fantasy III (USA).smc a.k.a Final Fantasy 6 SNES.
The world was collapsed..(WoR) and I got 'the' Falcon which is good. Let's watch HCBailly's video for walkthrough. His comment is really neat.
The next game I'll play is STEAM version of Final Fantasy 10!! Wanna get a new VGA Card. C'mon!

[PSI Ninja]

I started off the new year by playing through TMNT IV: Turtles in Time shortly after midnight with my cousin, an annual tradition we've been keeping up for at least 16 years. My cousin was Leonardo and I was Donatello, and we played on Normal so we didn't have to deal with all the blocking Foot Soldiers that show up on Hard in the first Shredder fight. It's always so satisfying to throw the Foot Soldiers towards the screen - we did that for pretty much every single one of them we encountered. The final time was 30.01 minutes according to the in-game timer, but we were playing pretty casually.

It's wild that Neon Night-Riders, the futuristic level that's reminiscent of an F-Zero track, was supposed to have taken place last year. 2020 seemed so far away in the 90s.

[Bean]

Got through the first three worlds in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. The HP battles are interesting, but the game is odd with its scoring system. I either get one star in most timed battles, three stars in Tetris score ones, and one or three stars in the Puyo score battles. Two stars is very hard to get. I think I've done it once just by winning under a second before the time limit would've dropped it to one.

[raekuul]

I've got A Super Mario Thing and what the hell on my 3DS now through VC Injection.

I am officially up to 13 Demos in ASMT (sram says 8 12 but I don't think the "Demo Counter ignores save states" trick works without zsnes, so I need to do another fake demo when I find an easier hard save point than Water Water Everywhere), and still in World 1 - Water, Water Everywhere is surprisingly difficult. Especially when you're rusty at SMW in general and don't trust spin jump physics. At least I'm at a hard save now and can disable suspend points.

I'm not disabling suspend points for wth though - I would much rather still have a working 3DS by December, and I don't see Stateless wth being conducive to that.

(I am officially so desperate to not play through Disgaea DS that I'm playing a Kaizo SMW hack. Wow. Especially considering that Disgaea DS is actually perfect for me as a time sink game, but the stuff that makes it a time sink game are exactly why I don't want to play it - grinding doesn't feel like story progression, and unlike the FFT games I can't really do sidequests to get stronger)

[KobaBeach]

my two braincells knowing im almost done with lunar and getting ready to produce that sweet sweet dopamine (grimzol's cave)

[thatguyif]

So, I finally went back into Starlink for a little while and realized I actually don't want to play this game. The big issue is controls: For one thing, you can't change them. For another, it's poorly mapped for a controller, especially Switch controller. Key to this: They place the Boost and Jump on face buttons, which on its own seems kind of weird, but the game expects you to move with the analog sticks (which I'll get to in a moment), and to boost or jump means to give up pitch+roll control/aiming on the right stick. They could have placed these abilities on the bumpers, but those were given to Fly/Ground Mode (which I kind of get, I guess?) and...the pilot's special move, which I used maybe once in the 4 or 5 hours of play I've done. So DUMB.

On top of all this, the sticks never felt right. They were like quasi-FPS stick controls, which never made sense to me for a space combat game. Yaw control was extremely confusing at best because of it, since they decide to make the yaw more like strafing. If you're going to use a two-stick setup, it should be yaw and engine on one stick, pitch and roll on the other. If you need a strafe function, have a target-lock feature or something.

Finally, the writing just...sucked. I get that this was meant to be a game that also sold toys, but the characters were so grating, in particular the lead (Mason) and some skater dude. I just wanted them to shut up. The Star Fox characters were...somewhat better? But not really.

So I'm shelving this for good. And with it, the block that's prevented me from tackling my Nintendo backlog the last 4 months is gone. I'm undecided on what to play next between Bully and Hyrule Warriors. Probably leaning toward the former, if only because I'm now going to for real start Hollow Knight again, and I'd rather not play two hack-and-slash style games.

On the OTHER side of the fun spectrum, What The Golf? is really goofy and fun. My friend and I played several rounds of party mode, and then played some single-player campaigns together, which was fun. Will be playing more of that over the coming weeks.

[KobaBeach]

me after beating lunar the silver star for the sega mega cd released in 1992, localized in english in 1993 by working designs

[Alice]

A friend randomly decided to pick up Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet and then randomly decided to get me the game thinking I'd like it despite not having watched SA:O. Wasn't a bad choice. I've only played a few hours but I enjoyed what I've played. Biggest complaints are just that the controls are a bit unintuitive (though I think that's actually pretty unavoidable) and that the camera is WAY too sensitive. Or rather I think camera settings might be broken or something. I have them set at the minimum possible value and it seems to be no different than default. Which unfortunately makes the aim button borderline useless because it's too squirrelly to control but it doesn't seem to be too important at least.

[raekuul]

I had 21 demos registered in ASMT when I beat "I Need to Breathe". Most of those were from Water, Water Everywhere.

I have 55 demos registered now in ASMT and I'm still at The Worm's Cave (the very next level). Kinda makes me glad that future projects placed levels in the worlds by difficulty instead of being pre-claimed map slots, the difficulty curve in ASMT is more like a difficulty ASMTote

[KobaBeach]

ugh going to liukan's island in suikoden and im gay and on fire. 46 recruited, still have to get sheena, gaspar and lorelai, need to grind kirkis to get rubi.

I have 55 demos registered now in ASMT and I'm still at The Worm's Cave (the very next level). Kinda makes me glad that future projects placed levels in the worlds by difficulty instead of being pre-claimed map slots, the difficulty curve in ASMT is more like a difficulty ASMTote

lowkey why i don't like asmt as much as the jp collabs or the jump team quinceañeras, even vip2. still like it more than smwcp

i still need to play kochobo dourado and the sequel once that gets complete, im not very interested in a lot of the smwc stuff other than that smw dlc thing but that's more or less deader than dead iirc (or it got released? i forget), vldc compilations are nice but sturgeon's law so playing through them 100% doesn't feel good for me

[raekuul]

suikoden

I've only seen this game but what I've seen of it I've loved it

I have 55 demos registered now in ASMT and I'm still at The Worm's Cave (the very next level). Kinda makes me glad that future projects placed levels in the worlds by difficulty instead of being pre-claimed map slots, the difficulty curve in ASMT is more like a difficulty ASMTote

lowkey why i don't like asmt as much as the jp collabs or the jump team quinceañeras, even vip2. still like it more than smwcp

120 demos now and I'm still at this stage. I think I may break down and use save states - bridge building over lava when you have a smaller platform than the bridge you're making is generally not world 1 difficulty, and that's before having to dodge blaargs yellow submarines giant worms. It does not help that somehow 3ds vc feels more prone to drop inputs than I'm used to (seriously a full quarter of my deaths in The Worms' Cave is just from 'the jump didn't jump')

i still need to play kochobo dourado and the sequel once that gets complete, im not very interested in a lot of the smwc stuff other than that smw dlc thing but that's more or less deader than dead iirc (or it got released? i forget), vldc compilations are nice but sturgeon's law so playing through them 100% doesn't feel good for me

not gonna lie, I'm not a big fan of smw in general. smbx/thextech is where it's at for me (and not just because I have an easier time grokking the editor)

[Kleetus]

Recently played Night in the Woods.
There's a lot I like about the game. The dialogue's great and sometimes thought provoking. It has lovely atmosphere. The music's pretty good, I especially like the main menu theme. I really like the way the characters move.
However the ending through me off. The conclusion feels more like a second part climax rather than the conclusion to a story. The player does not see enough of the fall out of the story's final act. There are arcs that feel as though they weren't complete.
There were details that felt like they should have been going some where but didn't, and while some of that works with the story, other time it doesn't, for instance

Pumpkin head guy works well being a one off weird thing, the weird teens don't really need an explanation, but the tattoo on the disembodied arm seems like it should go somewhere, especially since the game makes a deal out of it.

[Kleetus]

Recently, I finished warpless runs of Super Mario Bros 2 and 3 (SNES).
My lukewarm take is that while SMB3 has the world map, more power ups and in general more stuff going on, the level design in SMB2 holds up a lot more.
Even with more defined world themes, SMB3 levels feel like 50 second affairs' with half a gimmick; some of the later levels (especially the second half of world 7) feel like early SMW rom hacks.
SMB2 has longer levels with more going on in them, and some even have unique and memorable set pieces.

[Crow]

6-7 hard is ridiculous (tbh 6-7 normal is ridiculous too just, not as much) omg...

good game tho. i have gripes with it but the overall experience was enjoyment

[Nast]

I recently got done with Yume 2kki, having acquired every single effect and seen all but one of the 4 endings. Unfortunately, even though I managed to get 31 of 35 effects on my own, the month-long playthrough left me kinda fatigued and I ended up looking up the last four so I could get the game over with. Like, this game's really, really big! I tried to take notes of where I'd been and which places I might have to return to, and that kept me from getting lost and frustrated which helped me immensely. Still, I was afraid of the possibility that I might have to keep searching for another month, so I chose to cut it there while my opinion of the game was still high rather than continue and get seriously burnt out. Maybe I'll get back to it in the future if there's ever a finalised version.

I'm a couple hours into Wonder Boy in Monster World. I've had some exposure to the series as a kid via some of the Master System games (the brazillian Mônica versions anyway) but this is my first serious playthrough. It's really simplistic, maybe too much so when some of the levels are linear corridors with the same enemies on repeat. But it plays well and is really cute, which is all you really need sometimes. I'm really enjoying it as a breezy romp. Not that it doesn't get challenging, too.

Speaking of challenging I finally beat Castle of Illusion on Hard mode. I appreciate there being a bit of substance to it as it adds more enemies, takes away some powerups and increases boss health, rather than just reducing your lives and calling it a day. But it still does reduce your starting health and takes away all continues, which is really what made it take so long to accomplish. That and bats, lol

And I started Super Mario RPG a few days go. Never beat it before, and I'm using the chance to play it in Japanese for practice. I'm too early in to comment on the game but I will say, why the fuck is the word ゴッチンコ completely absent from dictionaries, took me all afternoon to figure that one out

[raekuul]

I'm coming up on Totem Wishiwashi in Pokemon Ultra Sun. I was putting this playthrough off for several months (at least partly out of burnout from playing basically all my pokemon games in sequence over the past year) but then I got a switch and now I want to finish catching Alolan pokemon before getting Pokemon Shield.

I'm also up to Catfish's Maw in Link's Awakening HD. It's too bad they didn't name it Link's Awakening NX, the word "Lanx" is fun to say. Lanx lanx lanx. (I'm ashamed to admit that I had to look up how to get to the ghost's grave - I remembered that there's an access grave in the graveyard but forgot that there's a liftable rock over by the witch's hut)

I also just rescued Yukiko in Persona 4 Golden. Holy hell is this game a lot easier to play compared to the PS2 version, even if I'm drowning in options now.

Taking a short break from ASMT and what the hell for a bit. Probably going to ditch my "no suspend points" rule in ASMT just for my sanity's sake - the save points aren't after hard levels, but before - getting a game over in the world 2 ghost house is not fun when I have to beat my head against "The Cave Where The Crystals Are" again and again just to get one shot at the following stage. (At least with what the hell I know what I signed up for. In ASMT it's just ridiculous.)

[thatguyif]

I'm also up to Catfish's Maw in Link's Awakening HD. It's too bad they didn't name it Link's Awakening NX, the word "Lanx" is fun to say. Lanx lanx lanx. (I'm ashamed to admit that I had to look up how to get to the ghost's grave - I remembered that there's an access grave in the graveyard but forgot that there's a liftable rock over by the witch's hut)

I wouldn't even call it "HD" because, even though it plays very similarly, it's quite a different game from the original. We're talking five console/handheld generations apart. At least with WW and TP, the HD makes sense because it's about 1-2 generations apart and was mostly a minor graphics update?

Anyway...Started Bully after sitting on it for several months. It's an interesting take on the GTA formula so far. Playing the Wii version is kind of interesting in that Rockstar actually did an okay job implementing motion controls (which, given Rockstar's relationship with Nintendo, is rather impressive). Having grown up in New England, I have some faint vibes of school life from that time (though I never went to private/boarding school. I knew kids growing up who did though). Haven't delved too deep yet, kind of juggling multiple games at the moment.

Similarly, started Hypnospace Outlaw after finding out it was on Game Pass, though I haven't completed my first case yet. I'm liking the late 1990s vibes, but also this sort of weird idea that feels like it came from a local art scene in Baltimore, Athens, or Providence in the same time period.

Finally, halfway through the What The Golf? main campaign. It's such a fun weird game, and the tributes are great (especially Superhot). That said, I'm grateful I can easily switch between mouse and controller, because some levels really benefit from one over the other.

[KobaBeach]

Beat Suikoden again at like 7 AM. Sadly did not get all 108 characters due to recruiting Sonya too late (

forgot to talk to her in the prison as soon as I left Shasarazade

).

Currently doing PSX FF1, at Marsh Cave.