What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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XoPachi
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

I'm playing 2000's games I didnt get a chance to fully experience. A lot of bad. A lot of good.

Right now I'm playing something of the former with Sonic Riders Zero Gravity.
This game is truly awful. How do you downgrade an already mediocre racing game? More importantly, how do you make a game this beautiful play this poorly?
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by null1024 »

Riders Zero Gravity is a truly baffling game. I like it somewhat, but it's just... odd. I can't really put it to words.
It also totally plays nothing like the first game.

[edit]
Speaking of Sonic, I fired up Sonic Adventure 2 again, and I'm reminded as to why people give so much of a shit about it.
It's so close to being actually good. So close.

I'm still annoyed at how the series has progressed since this game, too.
In SA2, Sonic's control is turn-on-a-dime precise and feels great [if the camera doesn't just turn around on you lol]. Sonic would be basically perfect if the camera was a bit less bad and they separated the secondary actions instead of combining them to one button [bouncing into the ocean instead of getting a lightdash will never not feel stupid].
Knuckles controls great, possibly even better than Sonic does. The biggest issue with the Knuckles/Rouge levels is locking the radar to detect only one at a time -- I had no issues playing Knuckles' campaign in SA1 where you have all of the emerald indicators at once [and it's more sensitive too!], but having to comb through these increasingly big stages wondering where the hell a single emerald piece is just sucks.
Tails... let's ignore that. His gameplay is boring at best and bad at worst. Not fundamentally bad -- the low-gravity mech stages feel way better [Eggman's Cosmic Wall is by far the best of the mech stages in the entire game, and is full of good shooting and platforming fun], but you're far too heavy and clunky for the entire rest of the game. Also, the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep when firing is the worst.
The scoring system is fun -- you aren't getting an A-rank without actually trying for it in most levels. Also, the extra missions should really let you do them out of order. The hard mode missions are really fun, but they're also the last ones after several way less fun missions.

Some basic iteration on SA2's design, and Sega would have had a winner, but at this point, I'm convinced that Sega cannot do anything right on purpose. :lol: Not in the last 20 years, at least.

I'm also a bit baffled at why people lump it in with the first Sonic Adventure in terms of being a buggy mess. SA2 is a dramatically less glitchy game and the character handling is significantly better. It feels like a real step forward. SA2 has design flaws, but I've never fallen through solid ground in it.
I have fallen through the floor in SA1 at least a dozen times I can remember, and probably more than that in actuality.
Last edited by null1024 on Mon Apr 25, 2022 12:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Marc
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Marc »

I'll tell you what I'm NOT fucking playing - The Last of Us 2. Fuck that game.
I've no patience for things that waste my time, and it commits nearly every sin I despise in AAA gaming, I deleted it after an hour and a half. I'd probably been allowed to play for 40 minutes of that time, and I hit a point where you're chased by dozens of zombies which you're obviously not supposed to fight, yet the chase sequence is full of invisible walls and ledges that can't be climbed because they look a tony bit different that the actual climbable walls. Honestly, it would have been better as a Shenmue-style QTE. The shooting mechanics are shit as well, I presume in order to serve the skill tree, and enemy AI shockingly inconsistent. Off you pop.

I've started God of War, and shockingly, I quite like it so far. Looks absolutely gorgeous on the PS5 as well.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Are Namco's "Pole Position" and "Pole Position II" actually any good? It feels like I can't get a handle on the steering worth a damn (Namco Museum PS2 collection). Perhaps on the original arcade the actual steering wheel worked better since you had more range before you hit the point where your steering turns into skidding? It still feels really damn hard to control compared to numerous later arcade racing games like Hang-On, Outrun, Power Drift, etc.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by null1024 »

Pole Position in the arcade uses a spinner for its wheel, so any emulated releases of it are definitely going to be quite odd to control.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BrianC »

I thought the Namco Museum vol. 1 and 3 ports of Pole Position and II were crap until I discovered the NeGcon. Still not 100% accurate, but they are a blast to play with that controller. Also, that twisty joystick ball on the Jakks Pacific Ms. Pac-Man controller was the best reason to play that version of Pole Position.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

So for about 10 years or so I would repeatedly beat A Link to the Past. Daily. 100%. Not a crazy feat when you know speedrunners exist. But I didn't speedrun it. It was just habitual. There was a day over the Holidays last year where I just finished 9 files (3DS, SNES, GBA) just because. I just think it's peak 2D adventure.

Now I think Tunic is going to become this for me. I love this game. It's a kind of single player game I can usually only dream about these days. I've been playing it almost every day and I think I've beaten this about 13 times now. Pretty sure I've done everything. Don't really think there's any stone really left to overturn. That true final puzzle was a doozey but the payoff was one of the best I've seen in ages.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BrianC »

XoPachi wrote: Right now I'm playing something of the former with Sonic Riders Zero Gravity.
This game is truly awful. How do you downgrade an already mediocre racing game? More importantly, how do you make a game this beautiful play this poorly?
Don't those games use the F-Zero GX engine? How the heck do you mess that up?
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

I'm also a bit baffled at why people lump it in with the first Sonic Adventure in terms of being a buggy mess. SA2 is a dramatically less glitchy game and the character handling is significantly better. It feels like a real step forward. SA2 has design flaws, but I've never fallen through solid ground in it.
I have fallen through the floor in SA1 at least a dozen times I can remember, and probably more than that in actuality.


It has the infamous Eggman glitch

(it's the first one covered in the vid)
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XoPachi
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

BrianC wrote:
Don't those games use the F-Zero GX engine? How the heck do you mess that up?
I dont think so. They were done by Sonic Team. Not Amusement Vision. I dont think anyone at AV worked on these.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BrianC »

XoPachi wrote:
BrianC wrote:
Don't those games use the F-Zero GX engine? How the heck do you mess that up?
I dont think so. They were done by Sonic Team. Not Amusement Vision. I dont think anyone at AV worked on these.
Yeah, it looks like there isn't any shared staff. Looks like AV is mostly working on Yakuza games now.
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XoPachi
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

BrianC wrote:
Yeah, it looks like there isn't any shared staff. Looks like AV is mostly working on Yakuza games now.
Regardless, it's Sega and Sonic. No reason a racing game game by them with an IP about speed and fluidity should be moving this slow. Sonic Riders X is exactly how these games should move and feel and it's not even remotely close to complete.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Everybody's favorite 1999/2000 Z-movie-style Resident Evil clone - no, not Soul of the Samurai, Evil Dead, or Blue Stinger. Countdown: Vampires! Yes, it's obtuse, has a difficult inventory system, and loves to crowd you with swarms of unsophisticated enemies as soon as you enter doors - sometimes I find that the difference between getting hit or not comes down to blindly holding the raise gun + fire combo before the room loads so you shoot immediately. But there's more than that going on here. Here are my 'important findings:'

Why it is the way it is: Aside from an obvious attempt to cash in on the Resident Evil craze with vampires and the millennium, there's clues littered all over that the game was originally meant to be much more than it ended up. Old demo discs hold far-out trailers - specifically Taiken Bandai! vol. 2, released in Japan Feb. 1999, and PlayStation Magazine Demo Disc #25 released in USA October 1999. Shocker - Bandai wanted 6800 yen for this game, 1000 more than Silent Bomber! The Japanese demo movie is structured around footage of some Japanese girl (Yuka Kobayashi, the model for Misato?) visiting Las Vegas in '98 - you can see a banner ad for There's Something About Mary in the background of one scene. She finishes by making her best 'scary' duck face for the camera while her eyes are painted red. The narrator's pronunciation is incredible - "Scheck" sounds like "shit" and that opening phrase hook is really something - is he trying to say "they will be worse than zombies?" I can't tell. The US demo disc, out around the time of the Japanese release, is easier to understand and promises a "five senses system" and "play as human or vampire," plans which certainly were long dead at this point. It does say the game is set in Las Vegas, rather than the final game's not-Vegas and not-Boulder Dam locales. There's also some Terminator 2-like footage of a vampire turning to liquid and dripping off a ceiling, which is sadly nowhere in the final. My guess is they went with the kaiju-style monster designs because they can be plopped down anywhere in the game with no FMV buildup required, and the game already has trouble with AI, slow loads, and spans two discs. Given other clues it seems they originally planned to have two or possibly more hero characters, too. Scraps from their scenarios probably appear in the Special mode.

Story and endings: The first playthrough is fairly barebones on story - which seems rather fitting, actually. Completing that unlocks Special mode which offers new story elements (including new in-menu emails from an offscreen colleague); in the first disc there's only a few of these additions and they seem unlikely given the pacing of the game, but by the second disc it starts to make more sense and adds some neat stuff to the story. GameSpot's got a list of conditions for the endings but it's not exactly accurate for the US release. In Special mode, unlocked by completing Normal mode, you can approach the final boss as follows: Kill it, or survive the five minutes and then kill the next phase, to get the Normal ending. Dying to the next phrase allows you access to a third phase, which also has two possible outcomes depending on whether you succeed or fail (and it's a tough boss so you probably will see the short bad ending anyway). The "bad ending" is just a short scene before the game gives you the opportunity to retry. The good ending is what's needed to unlock the special Prince of Darkness mode.

Prince of Darkness mode seems tough. To start you get a large pool of health and what's essentially a lunging Resident Evil knife attack to kill unarmed humans, but soon they start packing guns and the boss characters love to roll out of the way of your attacks - too bad this wasn't a feature of the normal game. I think, but I'm not sure, there's a key combo for blocking which seems essential for making it through the many enemies with firearms at the end of this mode given your agility isn't really improved from the base game. Based on your percentage of completion you get up to four infinite ammo weapons. There's also a nice variant of the ending credits over cutscenes, which ends with a fittingly melancholy scene.

The final amusing thing about this title is that this notorious flop, which attempted to blow past Resident Evil 2 and cash in on the millennium, ended up a cut-down mechanical copy of that title and launched too late even to cash in on Y2K fever, and possibly even sunk Bandai's game division...yet developer K2 ends up bought by Capcom and working on real Resident Evil titles, like 5 and Village. I have to feel a little bad that their dreams were cut short, but they ended up doing well when given enough time. As weird as the fiction of Countdown Vampires may be, reality is just as odd.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Everybody's other favorite 2000 Z-movie-style Resident Evil clone - no, not T.R.A.G.: Mission of Mercy. It's Evil Dead: Hail to the King. I didn't hate it, but you'd think a game about a character with a chainsaw for a hand would bother to include some proper melee hit sounds. It is better than Countdown: Vampires as far as variety of camera angles and even having animated backdrops while also being relatively quick to load new areas. Unfortunately, the cost is terrible color depth that makes it quite hard to pick things out, and many items are simply hidden in the environment with no world model at all. Quality of the 3D really varies wildly - some cutscenes and areas look quite decent, but then there's plenty of areas where things have the wrong scale, you can walk over clutter at the edges of the playfield, or it's just not clear what you're looking at. Still, the writing and Bruce Campbell's delivery make it at least somewhat bearable.

There is one odd bit of hidden complexity in the game: In the second disc you start finding crates of "upgrade parts" for your three firearms. For all other items in the game (perhaps excepting combinable puzzle items which I didn't test), it's simple to get in there with a cheat code and manipulate the count. But here the game will forcibly remove these items once used on a weapon - and I also couldn't find addresses for the upgraded weapons to load them in directly, either. Not sure if there's a second byte with attributes I couldn't find with the simplistic Retroarch cheat system, or it's a snippet of CPU code that needs to be disassembled and looked at. The GameShark code listings on the 'net are messy and basically don't work well. Lots of opportunities to soft-lock your game if you poke the wrong byte at the wrong time.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Gamer707b »

After a week away from XenoGears, I went to back to it last night. FF7 has been my favorite Rpg of that era, but this one is challenging that. Also picked up Wild Guns Re-Loaded for Switch. Want an amazing job they did on this. Would like to clear this before I get Pocky and Rocky ReShrined next month.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by ED-057 »

DLsite sale. Plus coupon. Plus the exchange rate is more favorable than it has been in... decades? Time to loot the place.

So far I've had a look at Shin Koihime Musou Otome Taisen 真・恋姫†夢想 〜乙女対戦★三国志演義〜 which is a 1v1 fighter. Like Queen of Battlers but higher budget, I guess. Nice attract mode. Lots of kanji everywhere. It works on Windows 2000 but the resolution only goes up to 1280x720 which is not great on my monitor. I'll have to see if I can hack in 1600x900 somehow.

I also played some Blue Blaster, which is supposed to be an RTS but seems more like a VN. The amazing thing about it is that it has FMVs in 800x600. That's 4:3 video at higher than DVD quality. Never seen this before in a game. It's like a glimpse into an alternate timeline where the cursed 16:9 plague never came along and ruined everything.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

A couple more games that fellow Shmuppers have a higher-than-zero-percent probability of playing. They're Above Average, in more or less the way that the kids from Lake Wobegon are. Can I make the hard sell on why you should or shouldn't continue to totally ignore these titles?

Here's the basic facts on Shadow Man: 2econd Coming and Ruff Trigger: The Vanocore Conspiracy.

Shadow Man, roughly a third-person 3D Zelda-like action adventure game, was one of my most anticipated games to get floating point fixes from the entire PCSX2 library (PCSX2 has had most everything playable for a long time now). Can't beat PCSX2 for convenience, and now the game looks more or less like it should, rather than checkerboard-textured landscapes and exploded character models. Unfortunately Shadow Man inhabits a world of mostly dark, low-contrast textures, and a 30 fps framerate. It's not muddy - there's a lot of decent work in here with lots of nice model details, fully animated ingame cutscenes some of which are even entertaining ("that's the problem with you people"), and some inspiring area designs. Unfortunately, the well-designed arenas are few and far between and there's some truly horrendous maze designs padding out the runtime to the desired ~20 hour completion. The home hub area, New Orleans, has a few neat environmental puzzles but can be unraveled too quickly. The story has a few good moments but most of it is surprisingly uneventful and mostly revolves around a very minor-feeling fetch quest before unexpectedly leaping to the final act. But the biggest problem is the gameplay: With too damn many specialized tools and system and a system that makes them more cumbersome to wield than it should, you spend a lot of time in the menu, all for the payoff of some awkward platforming, blowing up certain kinds of stones with trinkets, and a combat system that feels outright clumsy and limited. This was Acclaim's last trip to the comics synergy trough mashing up Voodoo fiction with Xtian millennialist apocalypse doom, from the year that was the beginning of the end for Acclaim despite having releases for most of its standout franchises like Turok. Gonna pour out a forty to Shadow Man - you were one-of-a-kind, Mike, at least until Shadows of the Damned. Thank goodness for walkthroughs and cheat engine...I'm not sure I'd have tolerated this otherwise.

Ruff Trigger is part of the very last wave of PS2 games and has learned some tricks - glow effects on lava and lights, normal maps for metal surfaces, and some highly detailed areas all while playing at 60fps. However, it's also got a very obvious and distracted kitbash-constructed level geometry, and at the same time asks you to go poking your nose around every corner looking for hidden areas, which only reveals yet more of the kitbash jank that I really didn't want to see. It's offputting to keep seeing areas that you should be able to traverse, while knowing you're not meant to. Just give me something basic like a sheer cliff wall that I know I can't scale, for goodness' sake; Croc 2 got that right years earlier. The core gameplay feels worse than Shadow Man, since you're not drawn by environmental puzzle solving - the core loop is an extremely basic combat smashing up small handfuls of boring enemies at a time, which the game uses to break up the tedium of its real core gameplay loop, a neverending hunt for environmental flotsam to break to add to that not-necessarily-important Destruction Rate tally at the end of the stage for minigames. Completing stage 2 (with 100% destruction?) treats you to a motorbike racing stage, which is not the worst thing I can imagine, so maybe there's some surprises. But it definitely feels like a poor version of games I haven't even bothered checking out yet, like the original Jak and Daxter games. Like Shadow Man, there's clearly good work here and there - throwing a Piglot under your arm while in werewolf form never gets old due to the charming animation, and the music is well-produced for the time. Not really so sure about those anthropomorphic character models...on the whole, I rate this more painful than retrying minigames in Beyond Good & Evil. I've only got a few hours in it but I feel like I've aged much more than I did while playing Shadow Man.

Next up, switching gears to the GameCube. Can I survive Billy Hatcher's unsettling demon grin? Or will the bad games win out with another trip to Sunnydale with Buffy and the gang? Who knows.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Marc »

God of War in the bin. Fun, but the gameplay loop got old real fast. Hard Reset Redux in the bin - I don't like arena shooters so not even sure why I bought it, as I'd previously bounced off Shadow Warriors. It's quite liberating tearing through the backlog, realising the money has been spent and I ain't getting it back, and that actually, my time is the most precious thing now.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by it290 »

Getting back in on the Demon's Tilt action. This game is way, way better on PS4 or PC vs. the Switch version... you wouldn't think it would make a huge difference for a 2D pinball game like this, but it does. Rocking my way up the leaderboards—I don't think I'll be claiming the throne anytime soon (or at all), but I'm up to a respectable 2+ billion which puts me circa 75th place. Really nice how this one continues to open up more and more as you play it, although a couple of the objectives (I'm looking at you, Hermit Tablets) can be downright obnoxious to achieve sometimes.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by guigui »

Marc wrote:... I don't like arena shooters ...
Is this about the same as twin-stick shooters ? If yes, definitely recommend Assault Android Cactus.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Hard Reset (which I like quite a bit) is more of a Duke Nukemish game, except it tends to lock you into rooms with hordes of lil' robots that you have to slaughter to progress. It felt to me like it got a bit more open and less focused on start-stop gameplay as the game went on. Definitely a matter of taste though, not gonna throw any stones for disliking it as it is a bit divisive. Crazy storyline as well.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

it290 wrote:Getting back in on the Demon's Tilt action. This game is way, way better on PS4 or PC vs. the Switch version... you wouldn't think it would make a huge difference for a 2D pinball game like this, but it does.
How so?
I have the Switch version with nothing to compare to. That said, I don't really have any complaints with the way it runs.

While I like Demon's Tilt, and think it's a great Devil's Crush/Dragon's Fury 'tribute'. I find it very, very strange how it doesn't use like 75% on the screen. Initially, I thought it was because it was a mobile port (or something like that)--but no--it's actually designed that way.

Also, it's one of those games I basically stopped playing due to hitting a scoring wall (Zen also a couple tables that are like this for me). I can't remember where it is exactly (100 million maybe?), but besides perhaps eking an extra million here and there, I can never best it. Also, it has that odd feature where your score percentage is broken down by ball. And the vast majority of my score is always earned on the last ball. Always. It makes it feel like I shouldn't even bother playing ball one and two and just go directly to three...
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

m.sniffles.esq wrote:Also, it has that odd feature where your score percentage is broken down by ball. And the vast majority of my score is always earned on the last ball. Always. It makes it feel like I shouldn't even bother playing ball one and two and just go directly to three...
Correlation is not necessarily causation. Just because it feels like you're earning most of your score on the last one doesn't mean the previous ones are less important. It's possible the last ball always earns the most if there's a score multiplier involved where previous balls crank up the multiplier, so you'd expect the final boss to earn the most as it's later in the game. It's also possible a rank system is in effect where the last ball is the easiest and therefore the last ball can rack up scores a bit more easily. No idea, but it doesn't devalue the earlier balls.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:
Correlation is not necessarily causation. Just because it feels like you're earning most of your score on the last one doesn't mean the previous ones are less important. It's possible the last ball always earns the most if there's a score multiplier involved where previous balls crank up the multiplier, so you'd expect the final boss to earn the most as it's later in the game. It's also possible a rank system is in effect where the last ball is the easiest and therefore the last ball can rack up scores a bit more easily. No idea, but it doesn't devalue the earlier balls.
Actually, a number of things actually cause it. But, it feels how haters describe pro basketball "Just give each team 100 points and put two minutes on the clock"

Here's the basic facts on Shadow Man: 2econd Coming

It's a really boring and generic sequel to a really good game
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

m.sniffles.esq wrote:Here's the basic facts on Shadow Man: 2econd Coming
It's a really boring and generic sequel to a really good game
Quite so. Just a splash of blood at the beginning and then you get into "find the foozle" gameplay for 20 hours. Although, I would go as far to say that the original was mostly good for its ambience. Good, maybe even "quite" good, but I wouldn't go so far as to say "really" good. :)
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

I've already spent way too many pixels on my love of Shadow Man in this thread. But, in case you missed it:
Spoiler
It's the closest the Dreamcast got to a Zelda game. Zelda with serial killers... It's such a kooky mismatch of late '90s... stuff. It's got the gameplay and mechanics of a 3D Zelda title, with twin-handgun John Woo/Laura Croft combat, slap on a horror-show-nightmare-world skin, and throw in serial killer bosses. They only forgot a two-player split-screen death match mode... Oh, almost forgot, it was put out by Acclaim. The only thing that's off, is while it's analog synth tinged John Carpenter score seems real hip now, I'm sure at the time they probably wanted a few more techno beats to liven things up.

Basically, it has no right working as well as it does.
So, I was weirdly looking forward to the sequel (even though I knew since the first was Acclaim, any quality it may have possessed was purely an accident)
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

I just found out I actually have Shadowman on PS1 already and have probably had it for years (it was added to my collection tracker in 2003, but that's when the site I'm using first got the tracking feature, so I must have gotten it even earlier, possibly bundled along with my first PlayStation).
But now that I have the Switch version coming in, I'll just wait to play it until I have that one. :)
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by sunnshiner »

Streets of Rage 4 with the DLC, it's really good fun :D
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Excellent comments. The Shadow Man...awakens!

A break in honor of Alexander Grothendieck: Holocaust survivor, groundbreaking mathematician, dodger of the Algerian War, survivor of an attempt to live solely on dandelion soup. RIP to one of the greats.

Been trolling through the old PCE/TG16 library for gems and finding a surprising number of not-quite-above-average titles. You be the judge, I thought it best not to inflict this on BIL's 2D action thread:

Ankoku Densetsu / Legendary Axe II: Neat, with a lot of absolutely wonderful sprite work and some clever sequences. My main letdown here is that the areas feel fairly simple and formulaic but maybe it's not realistic to expect more detailed environments when the enemies are this animated. Favorite so far is the little guy who swings his ball around. He deserves his own game, and his ball one too, but maybe that's been done with Odama.

Ghost Manor: Only $249.99 on the Internet, this classic from ICOM (of MacVenture fame) has a strangely charming lead character who thinks he's in a chipmunk musical group, and charismatic goofy landscapes. Together these conspire to throw out all the platforming conventions, especially the good time-tested ones: Being able to tell where your character's actually facing, having a stock of attacks sufficient to defeat the enemies in a map, having a clear path through the level in favor of a pinball-like field setup, etc. It feels a bit like Monster Bash with lovingly-rendered screamy skulls, bounce pads, and some awkward platforming, random giant green hands, and more vertical gameplay of the kind all the PC developers loved back in the day. See also Dangerous Dave II (which is of course the far superior title). Annoying to play, but I actually don't hate it. Gotta respect all the unique animations for the main character being toasted alive, falling from a great height, cratering his face in a wall, wavering at the edge of a stair before falling down, or just standing there with a smug look on his face as he taunts you by deliberately not looking in the direction he's facing.

Samurai Ghost / Genpei Toumaden: They bothered to keep the fluidity of the awkward sword slash animations in here, but it still seems a bit more straightforward in being consolized with some of the scale differences and other oddities of the arcade original sanded down. It's still awkward to play, though, and straight away you'll be surrounded by enemy formations seeking to capitalize on the awkwardness of your attack options. I'll try and give it a bit more time and see if it makes more sense later on.

Night Creatures: Manley & Associates' very transparent, very late and primitive-looking attempt at copying Castlevania 2 is strangely compelling to me for some reason. There's some awkward changes to the CV2 formula: You can jump fast on stairs, there's a pause menu for changing weapons, and enemies drop health pickups regularly, which is good because you can very quickly be killed by a couple enemies catching you at the wrong time. But mostly I'm just obsessed with the fact that the first friendly character ingame appears to be a Mammy caricature, which is still 100% more Black representation than the average TG16 title. I guess Night Creatures had to crawl before Shadow Man could run, or something.

Disney Afternoon titles: DuckTales and DarkWing Duck seem intended to check the usual boxes, both offering some metagame elements like a map screen for plot purposes. Some good animation doesn't overcome my snap judgement that they don't come close enough to mastering the basics of platforming gameplay.

Bravoman, Cadash, Veigues: Tactical Gladiator, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, The Ninja Warriors - a solid "meh" to all of these. Cadash has its good points but overstays its welcome (and lol @ the typical Worked Designs silliness like name-dropping Carl Sagan to see who's awake). Bravoman and Keith Courage are more in the arena of "generic thing where we are running and jumping at the enemy, we are gaming." Veigues firmly in "what is even going on" territory with a turning mechanic much more awkward than the original arcade release of Atomic Runner, and also I seem to be invincible through the first stage. The Ninja Warriors - what's playable in the arcade version sadly seems difficult and unrewarding here. The HUcard version doesn't even have the benefit of the excellent redbook audio.

Cross Wiber - Cyber Combat Police: You can play this fairly forgiving title in Spartan-X mode as just a guy who punches things, or you can make use of transformations to get various weapon. Some neat scenarios and a good soundtrack, but also a good deal of linear design and filler. Check out those familiar-looking Raiden-like sphere-in-square icons at the title screen; the game's by FACE (makers of Raiden hack Sand Scorpion and later Nostradamus).scropion

Madou King Granzort: A SuperGrafx title. Some more solid graphics, and a few good ideas. A bit too straightforward with the platforming, aside from the mazes that inevitably show up later on, and the combat routine seems boring once again. Has a neat jetpack mechanic as well. Stylistically seems slightly close kin to Cross Wiber owing to the whole early '90s tokusatsu / kaijin thing.

There are far more PC-Engine platformers and I know many are excellent, but it was a bit depressing to see how many titles whose names caught my fancy turned out as they did. I mean we have Bravoman and Cyber Wombat...what's not to hope for?
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BIL
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BIL »

Ed Oscuro wrote:Been trolling through the old PCE/TG16 library for gems and finding a surprising number of not-quite-above-average titles. You be the judge, I thought it best not to inflict this on BIL's 2D action thread:
Daww! :oops: Was just adding your Master of Darkness review to the fabled index update. :wink:
Samurai Ghost / Genpei Toumaden: They bothered to keep the fluidity of the awkward sword slash animations in here, but it still seems a bit more straightforward in being consolized with some of the scale differences and other oddities of the arcade original sanded down. It's still awkward to play, though, and straight away you'll be surrounded by enemy formations seeking to capitalize on the awkwardness of your attack options. I'll try and give it a bit more time and see if it makes more sense later on.
You're very likely aware, but it's worth noting the JP version is subtitled Ka No Ni or "Second Volume," it being a PCE-original sequel to the AC game. I was flabbergasted to discover a few years back that there's actually a (very close, albeit warts-n-all) HuCard port of the arcade game, too - never left Japan, like most things related to Genpei. ala MD Daimakaimura or the PCE's own Saigo no Nindou, it's the kind of thing that would've blown console-bound AC fans' minds at the time, though of course it's not technically 1:1.

Main issue is the slightly smaller resolution giving you much less view of Kagekiyo's back during Big Mode, which lets Tigers jump his ass like bail. Repeatedly! You can see 'em sneaking up on AC. Moonwalking would at first seem to mitigate this, until you realise it just inverts the POV so now it's varmints up front punking you from offscreen. :[

Kinda spoils the groove of striding along to those bangin choons while twatting famous varmints of 11th century Nippon (Theme of Yoshitsune fukken rawks, and so does its Ridge Racer V arrangement Image). Still, hard not to be charmed by such a generally robust compression of the ostentatious PCB onto a tiny card. Has a cute DIP-styled config menu, with the difficulty settings referred to as (IIRC) "Leisurely Path" "Thorny Path" and "Torturous Path" or something. :lol: Also, all the dev caricatures in the interlude stages were redrawn, a notable detail with how 1:1 the art assets generally are.

Speaking of Japan-only oddities, here's the doujin fighting game sequel (foot of post). Cute! Might've assumed it was a pro release, at a glance.
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