whatchu playing now

LTTP is great but i tried to replay it about a decade ago, the endgame is kind of a slog
actually, i quit FFV for similar reasons (my party was under-leveled for the final boss, never beat it)

lttp i found less enjoyable in the overworld reveal and dungeon design than i did links awakening. or than i did my memory of links awakening, anyway, which i guess makes it harder to compete with. the hitting things with your sword aspects probably have a little more depth to them but i don't really play zelda for that i guess. also of the five times i got stuck one was an actual puzzle and the rest were variations on 'hit the wall with the sword'.

ffiv i had much much lower expectations of and i guess enjoyed more as a result. it helped that i was playing the gba version, which is i. prettier ii. faster iii. really broken.

I don't feel that grindy RPGs have aged well. My recent attempts at playing Final Fantasys I loved in my youth have all been underwhelming.

v little grinding in this edition of iv

but i got nba 2k16. reason: i want to understand basketball, and don't, and thought this might help

Hilarious because I did the same thing with Madden. Except that I can at least kinda follow what's happening in basketball but I have zero clue wtf is happening in football. I'll have to return to that project somedeay.

Playing the OG Ratchet and Clank just now. It's pretty fun, but the thing where it's super breezy and like beginner-level easy for a long time and then suddenly out of nowhere SUPER HARD is kinda knocking me for a loop. I finally won the hoverboard race after 800 attempts and now I'm stuck on some underwater tunnel where I've drowned 800 times already.

interesting, if i had more time i'd thinking about trying this for basketball too. for football the latest madden is a kinda bad/frustrating game but the one thing that i did like is that the tutorial mode actually goes surprisingly deep on what is happening on a given play so that you understand what a particular offensive or defensive play is trying to accomplish. i don't know how useful a madden game would be for learning the basics but for the level of understanding beyond that and getting to know the players i could see the new one being valuable. also the game i am sure would be less annoying if you are more nooby and have different expectations.

im also in the "lttp is kinda ovverrated" camp fwiw but i have a bit of a chip on my shoulder abt every selda game i've played becase IDGI

like if people laud your puzzles where the solution is "use yr new toy" i just can't get on board

I find Zelda games kind of frustrating.

- Precise platforming where dying is more punitive than instructive
- Puzzles that sometimes rely on sharply observing details in low-res graphical environments
- Getting stuck on a puzzle often leaves you with nothing to do
- Bosses that create absurd difficulty spikes that can't be prepared for, death means a tedious slog back to the boss
- Every game is the same

And yet I've played most of them and Ocarina of Time is in my top three (only one I've ever finished, loved it to buts every minute)

Err, that should have read "loved it to bits"

- Getting stuck on a puzzle often leaves you with nothing to do

so this was sort of and sort of not how i felt about lttp. like, i realised that playing it with every solution an alt-tab away is not what the game requires, or is designed for. the idea is you will get stuck and go and wander around the game world and kill some time, i think, and come back stronger, but also having explored and soaked up atmosphere. particularly for the last few dungeons, and getting to the last boss, which require random shit one finds in odd corners of the dark world.

link's awakening, which is way better, has that ultimate puzzle of this sort, where there's this shaggy-dog eternal item-swapping fetch quest that seems like a total joke and you can't progress without having done it like eight times. and yet i want to defend this as a high-risk piece of game design. well.

(it also has better dungeons.)

so i've more or less come around to the idea that crypt of the necrodancer sucks, anyone else play it? not sucks exactly. just every half hour of play you get to some gtfo design idea. particularly the bosses, particularly the last boss sequence, where you fight an apparent boss who has a very non-transparent solution, followed by an actual final boss who requires you to do smth mechanically different to the entire rest of the game, and then in his second phase requires you to kill him with a weapon you can't have picked up to practice before this point which is mechanically different from the entire rest of the game, while also doing the other thing which is mechanically different from the rest of the game

also the system where it adjusts the 'beat' you have to hit so it can fall on not-the-actual-beat is really annoying and stupid and wrong, because if you go 'oh shit i'm way off, i'm going to stop and listen for the beat' you are totally fucked

i've still played it for eight hours

the internet seems to indicate that it took most people way longer than eight hours to get to the stupid last boss which mb explains why they're not as frustrated at it (because they're dumb) -- this game seems to have some v devoted fans. maybe all games do once you google them, i don't know.

grim fandango. i can't work out if i like it or not.

i mean if i don't like it i think that just means i don't like the classical adventure game, i can't see how it could be done better w/o actually doing smth else

you're probably right

adventure games as storytelling device are really weird. like it seems totally historically contingent that at one point we had this big-deal genre based on the idea of a plot which we're meant to care about which is arbitrarily held up while we're working out recherche object combinations, they only happened because the text adventure was a thing and the text adventure only happened because it was easy to code

the puzzles in grim are pretty ok. i like the design of the getting-hold-of-the-photo puzzle in rubacava, how it repays you for looking at everything and talking to everyone but not in a mechanical fashion. the bits of the chain i cheated one i immediately kicked myself for having forgotten about. i really hated and immediately cheated on the two anchor puzzle at the start of part three, that one sucked.

i think you could argue that the internet, with the instant gratification of an answer to any simple question, has rendered the adventure game as valid as your self-control lets it be

lol yes. well it's another aspect of what i was trying to get at in the zelda thread, to what extent is being stuck and wandering around a part of the uh diegesis of these games

that first laura bow game really pointed to a way forward that no one ever took up, didn't it? man, that was an adventure game that was also .. a game, what a thought

when i was fourteen and knew no better it more or less WAS the game but as they say, game done changed

i remember thinking over puzzles in games like Secret of Monkey Island while away from the game. yeah being stumped was a huge part of gaming.

nowadays people are very goal-oriented for lack of a better term. just being in the world, just playing, is not enough. they need to see that Completion counter work its way up to 100%. they need to get those Achievements. the temptation to look up a walkthrough is too great. gaming is more like work.

kind of sad that the days where you could be stuck and have no one to turn to and just work things out yourself are over.

bought Rainbow Six Siege today, Rainbow Six Vegas was one of my favorite shooters (it rewarded moving strategically more than running and gunning) but I'm a little worried about the complete lack of single player in this one

finished grimfam. pretty fun. last few puzzles easy enough for me to solve, hooray. did spend a lot of time going 'i wonder if this is the one i need the liquid nitrogen for.' enjoyed the fire extinguisher payoff.

oh man you can't really play it with the director's commentary on w/o stopping and waiting for people to shut up, that's annoying

xp thomp - i only played the second Laura Bow game, btu what do you mean?

errr so. it's a murder mystery where everyone's trapped in the grounds of a mansion and getting killed off one by one. the interesting bit is that you can play it completely missing every important conversation and literally every puzzle, and at the end you just come across two people fighting over a pistol and have no idea whose side to intervene on

after you finish it tells you you suck, start again, look harder. so the next time you start you will find the secret passages that let you spy on conversations, etc., and start working out what's actually going on

it's not actually a very good game but i like that idea a lot, also that your knowledge from former playthroughs affects what you do

... and that that affects what you do

i just got episode one of 'life is strange' in which i am hoping the time rewinding has a similar effect on the gameplay, kinda doubt it though

hey guys rn i just finished super mario 64 a week or two ago and rn i'm playin:

undertale (just started)
fallout 3 (just started)
kami

oh ok. Dagger of Amon Ra continued with those things, and I agree, the ideas were really cool, if incredibly frustrating in a lot of ways

The Last Express played with this idea too, but was much more forgiving and linear (no alternate endings)

errr so. it's a murder mystery where everyone's trapped in the grounds of a mansion and getting killed off one by one. the interesting bit is that you can play it completely missing every important conversation and literally every puzzle, and at the end you just come across two people fighting over a pistol and have no idea whose side to intervene on

this was essentially the premise of deadline iirc. varicella is kinda the final word on this kind of adventure game (w/ puzzles occurring dynamically over time). gab knight 3 tried to do something similar but i really did not enjoy it. when done well this style (which i don't know if there's a good name to describe, 'time-impacted adventure game,') is really dazzling.

i think the last express did something similar tho i've never played it myself. for years i've felt like i should get around to it.

oh wow and apparently it's on steam. next time it goes on sale i'll give it a try

oh yeah Shadow of Destiny did this too and was pretty obtuse about it (better be outside that mansion on Day 3 to save that kid's life or OH WELL), but at least it had the array of multiple endings and time-looping built into the plot/game structure

yeah has anyone looked at the board game 'tragedy looper'? that seems like an experiment in a similar sort of narrative

varicella is one of the adam cadres i have not played. and deadline sounds p good! i am really not good at text adventures though so i suspect i would be very, very frustrated very quickly w both

Got in on the DOOM Alpha and it is super, super fun. Not doing anything spectacularly new, but one map, 6 guns, 6 on 6 team death match basically ruined our going out plans.

played 'life is strange' for a minute, but it doesn't like my gamepad and i had the feeling 'yeah, that guy's gonna be the killer' like, before the game even informed me there was going to be a killer. i liked a lot about it but i just don't know if i can deal with those two things

Varicella is excellent but it's super-hard. I think I had fun about five different times playing with it and failing hard, and then finally went to a walkthrough to see what actually happens. I'm sure there are way more text adventures with this style but I can't really think. Oh, maybe Make It Good by Jon Ingold, for another detective one? Similar-ish, anyway.

R6:Siege may be way too difficult for my casual gaming ass. I can't do shit even in the training 'situations' that pass for single player.

Played some Kickbeat this evening. For those unfamiliar it's a rhythm game with a kung-fu theme and you're some guy on a quest to retrieve the source of all music from an evil music executive, or something. Production and gameplay are decent, but it's hard to love it because, well, the music is not really my cup of tea. So I get to the boss stage and

CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES, THIS IS MY LAST RESORT

and i sigh

Speaking of kung-fu, has anyone played the Bruce Lee 2 game, playable on a Commodore 64 emulator?

It's pretty nifty,here's a link to the programmers page about it:
http://kollektivet.nu/brucelee2/

Back in 1984, Datasoft Inc released a game based on the Bruce Lee character featured in motion pictures.

starting to play some games that might end up filling out my year end ballto on steam... dropsy, undertale, gods iwll be watching, life is strange... a very nice coutnerpoint to the emotional tundra of post-apocalyptic boston & environs

gods will be watching was 2014. life is strange i've still gotta get to.

basically been playing fallout 4 + binding of isaac: afterbirth exclusively

in that case i shall replace it with jotun (my friend wrote for this!), beginner's guide, her story, cibele, and republique remastered.

i haven't played it yet but Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist is a new 15 minute free game on steam by William Pugh who worked on Stanley Parable w/ Wreden

Xenoblade X - I think this is the first time I've played a game and thought "this is too big". For the first five or so hours it felt like drowning, too much of everything - constant on screen messages in tiny fonts, systems upon systems that are barely if at all explained, absolutely massive maps teeming with gnomic symbols. On a purely technical level it's a big achievement, it really feels like you are exploring a massive alien planet with minimal to no loading times, although I doubt I'll get anywhere close to the end before monotony sets in. Funny coming to this from Fallout 4 which now feels like it took place on the back of a postage stamp.

Watching some footage of Xenoblade was the precise moment I realized japanese RPG gaming is finished, and will largely be regarded as a historical curio that engaged in a conversation with the west for a couple of decades about stat blocks and leveling and character classes. It's done. Japan is history, and this game is deeply, deeply trashy and stupid.

To the great surprise of absolutely nobody I like Undertale a ton, although I haven't quite finished my first playthrough as of this moment. It's like Earthbound but with Wario Ware as the combat engine.

I have also been refining my Puff in Smash during train trips back and forth between SF and LA so be warned. I also finally beat the story mode on the 3ds Kirby game, which is actually quite great (forget if I mentioned this already) as well as Mii Force and Find Mii II.

I've been playing the original and first Final Fantasy. Surprised both by how long and how difficult it is. Not that it's been objectively super long or super difficult, just that I figured the earliest RPGs would be relatively breezy. I dig the stripped-down vibe and mechanics, though. Very meditative, in a way. I played a shitload of Sword of Vermilion back in the day so it nicely scratches that itch (since one is basically a carbon copy of the other). Also started playing the original and first Phantasy Star. Not as into it, but it's all right. It feels much more like a game of its era.