I’m crossing my fingers for a Game Boy Advance collection addition, so that I can play the original Metroid games. Mostly so I can play Metroid Dread. They aren’t needed, but I feel like some part of me would resent the originals’ gameplay style, lack of QoL improvements for the time, or graphics, if I ended up playing them after the most modern entry. So I’m holding off on even thinking about trying out Dread before I can touch the classics.
Though the expectation with that is that it would be restricted to Online Expansion Pack subscribers given how lucrative it would be. But I still have no intention of upgrading to that ridiculously expensive tier.
i highly recommend ocarina of time on a new 3ds system, the 3d unironically really helps that game feel fresh and more immersive. and the 3d models used for towns and structures in the background make the game look incredible.
i however cannot recommend the majoras mask remake because they made some very poor decisions when it came to difficulty, the saving system, mask abilities, bosses and the myriad of glitches and bugs i encountered while playing it.
Finished watching a playthrough (sorta) of Prey: Mooncrash, the roguelike expansion to 2017 Prey.
It was Markiplier’s original Prey series that I watched and greatly enjoyed, though I have to say I didn’t really like his video on Mooncrash. Probably because it was an archived livestream, not a standalone edited video.
It showed off a few interesting elements from the DLC and what makes it a unique roguelike. A pretty massive open space to explore, different methods of escape and different characters/classes that can use different skills.
Unfortunately, because it was a live-stream, it was long, unedited, and at times dull. One long run in particular had Mark slowly dragging a corpse he called “Bob” across the entire station, just for laughs. I get he has to entertain Live and all that, but wasn’t really fun to watch after-the-fact. He looked more distracted by that and the chat than interested in uncovering Lore from the game that he loved doing in his original playthrough. Plus it was just one video here, he didn’t “finish it”
So, I’ll have to find out the lore and extra story details of Mooncrash on my own from someone else, unfortunately.
I did check out a few reviews of the DLC and it’s surprisingly in-depth for a roguelike crossed with an Immersive Sim. This one was especially informative.
Not saying IOI is gonna revolutionize roguelikes, but AAA ones aren’t all that common, this makes me even more interested in what Hitman’s going to bring to the table.
I’ve been happily playing a nerdy little puzzle game, IQ: Intelligent Qube. It’s a PS1 game and 25 years ago I had one of those demo discs with the first couple of levels on it. I played the absolute hell out of it, but I could never find a copy of the actual game until they put it on PS Plus and the store a couple of months ago.
It’s super crusty, but some of the QoL features–rewind, save whenever you want–are really helpful. It’s a lot of fun, but having to do 9 levels, each with 4 parts, in one sitting would be a bit much.
And I’ve started in on a tiny indie game called Grand Theft Auto V. You’ve probably never heard of it.
The PS5 upgrade is pretty cool. They make good use of the DualSense (I love being able to feel rain through the controller ), the loading times are a lot better and 60fps is so much easier on the eyes.
The only thing that annoyed me was that it doesn’t load straight into the game, it takes you to a title screen, then a menu where you choose between Online and Story Mode…but then I remembered that you can boot the game through Activity Cards.
After trying and failing repeatedly to get into RDR2, I’ve been avoiding replaying GTA, thinking that maybe I’d gotten over Rockstar games, but I forgot that, unlike RDR2, GTA5 is actually fun. And they’ve added a shit-ton of music since the PS3 days.
Since I spend the days on the sofa anyway while being sick, I played Mass Effect 2. I got the trilogy edition on xbox and I never played them before, so I go in fresh.
I really like the first two, the roleplay, the side activities, I really missed out on this series! I will keep the third game unplayed for the next time I am sick.
Been really enjoying (and getting frustrated by) Sifu this past week.
Oh man it’s so great. The kung-fu, the mastery you need to develop, the thumping music, the style of the bosses – it’s so fun. Yet equally frustrating especially because It’s all about learning attack patterns and having super-fast reflexes.
It’s a rogue-like, so you’ll be dying a lot, pretty easily, until you develop the skills to beat levels, and slowly unlock skills in subsequent runs. (There’s a neat system where you have to unlock a Skill 5 times before it’s permanently unlocked. Meaning you can make a little bit of progress in your skill even if you suck.)
However, there’s also stuff I really hate about how the devs have handled and offered practically no easy way to learn the game’s mechanics that aren’t told to you in an explicit way. Apparently it’s been out for half a year now but they’ve done little to improve or help players learn the systems needed to beat Level 2. (There’s a 30% difference in people who finish Level 1 (fairly easy) vs. Level 2 (mastery of the Dodge system required, unforgiving large battles))
There’s difficulty modes, but the Easy mode removes nearly all the challenge and the entire main gimmick of the game – the death system. Each death increases your death counter by one, ages you by that X number, until you reach your 70s and die for good. You start at 20 and it can quickly rise if you’re reckless or unskilled but can be reset to Zero at shrines. Easy mode greatly increases your health bar, your power level against enemies, and your defense. Perfect! But, it only lets you age up by 1 point, every time you die. Meaning you can die a total 50 times before a Game Over. But you can also Regain 5 Years with a special option in the Shrines, completely invalidating your deaths. It’s like baby mode, and it felt wrong to use, even when the main game frustrated me a lot.
There’s a training dojo area you can use to fight enemies you’ve already defeated – it’s especially useful to train against bosses and learn their patterns. But you can only fight one type of enemy at a time, and it’s very open-ended. There should be mini-tutorials on how to perform combos, how the Throw/Stun system works, the usefulness of the Sweep move that I had to learn from the Internet…
There’s also a Goals/Challenges system that give you specific objectives to give you currency to unlock Modifiers that can make the game easier/harder/sillier (More damage, Unbreakable Weapons, Low Gravity, etc.)
This could have been a great option as well to force players to learn specific moves while in-game (do 75 Counters, or Perform a X Combo) but this system apparently only unlocks after you beat the game!! And at that, it’s very few challenges, usually based around "Complete X Boss without getting hit/dying/etc.) I haven’t unlocked it yet so I’ll probably mention how that works out when I do
Also, this isn’t my complaint since I haven’t used it, but I do get where they’re coming from – as part of the most recent update, apparently the devs enabled Permanent Skills being unlocked across all available save files, mentioned as a feature in the patch notes. So hardcore players can’t keep more than one save if they want to try a hardcore, no skills reset run. They have to delete everything to be able to challenge themselves with a New Game. It’s insane.
There’ll be a few more updates this year so I do hope they can bring this game to the standards the fans have been asking for, especially with regards to accessibility & challenge in the game.
Anyway, it’s still good fun. A great 45$ spent so far. Here’s a few screenshots.
I love how the game’s prologue opens with the “You play a small segment, but it turns out YOU were playing as the bad guy the whole time!” and then it kicks off the game/main conflict for real. Cool!
sifu has firmly become one of my favourite games and one of the few i’ve bothered to get the platinum. i keep going back because the combat system is just so robust and fun to experiment with. some of the goals are evil though!
you’re absolutely right about the game not teaching players everything. it does itself no favours. there is some super important tech and concepts that really opened the game up for me once i discovered them. a few examples:
while you should primarily learn to parry opponents more often than not (even sean!), the game never tells you that - unless you’re neo - you need to mix in dodges to manage your stagger. a successful parry will never break your bar even when it’s red, but that’s easier said than done. every successful dodge actually reduces your stagger, so it’s important to mix it up, especially because…
…after a successful parry (or series of parries), you can immediately throw your opponent. the game doesn’t tell you that, after a successful dodge and a light punch, you can do the same. this is important because…
…throwing is incredibly powerful, which the game never gets across. throwing people into walls absolutely obliterates their stagger meter. throwing people opens them up to the chasing trip move which is also ridiculously powerful. throwing mooks into each other also puts everyone they touch into a stun state, giving you breathing room. speaking of crowd control…
…it’s never clearly explained that you can break up combos between opponents. rather than focusing on one person in a crowd, you can direct each hit of a combo at an individual mook to keep them at bay.
there’s loads more little bits like that (dodges resetting your combo, sweeps on downed opponents, etc.) which i wish the game had explained or reinforced. once i learned those (and completely remapped my controller), it really clicked. at the same time, the fact the game opens itself up to you more naturally by letting us discover these things through play is - at least in part - responsible for why it keeps me interested. swings and roundabouts, i guess.
can’t wait for the arenas update at the end of the year.
Said to be a Dark Souls type of game set in an alternate-history version of the French Revolution where King Louis unleashes an army of automatons that slaughters the bulk of the resistance and force Paris into lockdown. Anyone caught outside their homes is killed by the patrolling robots. You play as a automaton bodyguard of Queen Marie Antoinette, and is basically sent on a quest to save the day.
I’m not very far into the game but I’m having a blast with it. Never played any Dark Souls games but I’m drawn to the setting of this one. Combat is fast-paced with four different classes to pick from, but you’re not tied down. You can later acquire weapons and abilities of other classes. Very cool looking weapons I gotta say too.
I grabbed Horizon Zero Dawn for Steam two days ago. It looks nice and the setting is very interesting. I have no good feeling for the story yet because I don’t want to rush through it and learn the mechanics in side quests first. So I don’t feel very involved yet but that might change.
What is kind of poor is the facial animations and it seems like the localization did not work well with the lip sync. It is not too bad for me because I can just switch to English though.
Really stellar indie platforming game. It’s got tons of difficulty, lots of side-content/extra stages/collectibles to find. And an awesome story about a young woman trying to work through her depression.
The sprite work is also really great. Plus each chapter ends with a fun art piece, took screenshots of each of them, because they were cool
It’s a 3rd person cover shooter from Platinum Games, famous for Bayonetta.
It was a decent experience, but I feel like cult fans of it might have some nostalgia blinding them. Or they’re somehow just really good at it.
You play as Sam Gideon, a member of DARPA recruited by the army to take down a Russian group who has taken control of a super-weapon/space colony satelite orbiting above Earth.
You also pilot an advanced combat suit, letting you rocket around the battlefield, engage slow-motion, and packs a devastating punch.
It’s your typical Japanese fetishisation of american politics and militarism you’ve seen before like with Metal Gear Solid. Though this one is sci-fi and less detailed
The game is cool. The slo-mo effects are cool.
Shooting enemies is fairly easy to pull off, there’s plenty of weapons to choose from with different qualities/damage (though I can’t say what the difference between the Heavy/Boost/Basic Assault Rifle was)
Enemy variety keeps increasing over the course of the game. Good.
The world is very bland though. It’s got a very gray and blue-ish colour pallette. You’re constantly in war-torn, destroyed town plazas, subways, monorails, streets. It all blurs together in the end.
You don’t learn much about the characters or the colony you’re fighting for.
There are a few pieces of text lore during loading screens that could help, but they’ve optimised the load times so well for this remaster you can barely read one full sentence before it’s gone? That’s… good? I guess? Suffering from Success
The suit’s cool features feel held back by stupid restrictions though.
Your power meter that controls your slo-mo, boost, and melee drains way too fast. Once your slo-mo is gone after leaping out of cover, you have to frantically roll to a new one as it recharges.
Melee-ing enemies isn’t worth it. It completely drains your suit even with one punch, leaving you slow and defenseless. It usually insta-kills the grunt enemies, but anyone above that can withstand at least one of your singular punches. And it’s not that useful anyway, given how many enemies you’re usually up against at once.
It would have been nice to have some sort of suit upgrade system over the course of the game, because while cool and slightly powerful, I still felt so limited for nearly the entire game.
The difficulty – even on normal – could have been easier. Maybe I’m bad, but I was going into a critical health state every couple of minutes. This also drains your suit’s energy which you can’t stop and that frustrated me even more.
There are tons of inexplicable insta-kill moves enemies can do, and can very easily catch you off-guard in the chaos of battle, especially if they choose to snipe you from afar with it. It never felt fair. Why was this a thing…
Even though you have a super suit, enemies can insta-kill melee you, which sucks too. Sometimes they only bring you down to critical, but they also have a 2-combo melee move to remedy that. You, somehow, only get one over the course of the game.
And I finished Thomas Was Alone, too.
Summary
It’s the debut game from UK game designer Mike Bithell, and is a platformer-puzzler uses minimalist design to great effect.
You play as various quadrilateral shapes of various colours, traversing various levels filled with jumps to make, spikes to avoid, and buttons to push. They also each have various names and personalities, relayed to you through a snappy narrator who details each one you come across.
What makes some of the platforming great is how each square or rectangle plays. Some have tiny jumps, some have very large ones. Some have superpowers like being able to float on water or double-jump.
And what makes the puzzle-platformer so fun to complete is figuring out how to get each shape to their goal, usually by stacking them on top of each other to help each other out.
It’s a cute, short game, with a bit of a fun story if you like puzzle-platformers.
@TheChicken - i knocked together some recent footage from sifu. boy is disciple, girl is master. it ain’t perfect; just shows a few things i was talking about earlier.
Wow that was very nice! Your parry game is fantastic, you got that mid-boss in the club so easily!!
Haven’t played Sifu for about a week since the final boss scared me off.
I think I’ve reached the level at a decent age, but this guy is a whole other beast compared to the others.
Yang is the ultimate mirror match, literally. He has all the moves you do, is super fast, is super skilled at counters and dodges, and is immune to focus moves Yikes
Worst of all, he has the same kind of stagger meter you do, where it depletes the more he’s left alone. You can’t take your time like with the other bosses which is the scariest part for me.
I think I just have to figure out his attack patterns and lay as many blows as I can if I can block him.
thanks, man! i made parrying ten times easier for myself by remapping it to x (ps4). the shoulder buttons just aren’t reactive enough for me. i did the same with sekiro. it took awhile to get used to using avoid that way though
the trick with the final boss for me was also parrying. you want to focus his stagger meter. bring the bo staff from outside, which will help initially, and make sure you have the three parry master upgrades from the idol. then, like you said. it’s just a case of getting used to his moveset. .
), the loading times are a lot better and 60fps is so much easier on the eyes.
