What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Marc]

I attempted to play Matterfall last night. Ugh.
Feels like a very Euro attempt at a run and gun, way too fiddly and convoluted for me to persevere with. Anyone else play it?

I also seem to have drunk purchased Diablo 2 last night for some reason. Thinking about it, I probably meant to buy Baldur's Gate. Oh well, I've got Planescape on my shelf.

[XoPachi]

I decided to try ExciteBots in Dolphin. It's a lot to setup and I still dont have an optimal control scheme. Being fully motion controlled, the game has a few schisms when trying to map certain motions to a standard pad.

When you crashed in ExciteTruck, you had to mash 2 to get back into the race. In ExciteBots, you shake the Wiimote which is MUCH faster and fluid. But I cant seem to find a way to emulate that action without conflicting with the tilt control setup required for steering. So crashing is a BIG problem.

Steering itself is also touchy on a control stick. I can get finer angles but theres extremely low tolerance for it. That doesnt bother me much though since both games have much wider, open tracks than usual which is smart for motion based games.

But man... This really is still my favorite Wii game. What a blast of a racer. Its so hectic and hectic with a great sense of height and really high speed. The tracsk are so much fun and morphing them was such an inventive way to revitalize the Excite series. That whole Wii trilogy was amazing but this was the best. I dont know how they balanced minigames mid race that doesnt kill the flow or line. The devs really just wanted to make an incredibly fun racer. God, I love this game.

[Lander]

Finished up Dead Space - cracking game, and the closest I've played to an RE4 evolutionary successor-in-spirit. The later chapters brush up against the edge of feeling too long, but quickly pick up the pace for a strong finish. Final boss was a bit simple gameplay-wise, but what a spectacle. Quite B-movie in the story department, but executed with flair.

It's nice to look back and actualize having come a long way with horror. What used to be shittening panic is now canny one-to-one dialogue between player and designer (as any good game should be), most scares earning a verbalized 'nice' rather than a vice grip somewhere in the chest area. The most effective ended up being the entryway to the zero-g ball court; throwaway at best in the grander scheme of highly designed spooks like Mining Deck Bro - who got a good laugh and a ripsaw for his trouble - but with timing so coincidentally perfect as to pull the rug and bring back a bit of the old OH FUCK

...So I immediately devoured Dead Space 2, and good gravy what an even more spectacular spectacle. I saw a friend play a good chunk of it at uni so knew it was something special, and it lived up to that memory with aplomb. Perfect pacing, to the point where the ~8 hour playthrough flew past like nothing, with too many smart touches and elements of polish to enumerate. More action-packed and straightforward as expected, this is the Hyper Action Horror title Resident Evil 6 wanted to be before getting tug-of-war'd to death at the design level. More aggessive on all fronts, with money exploding out of the screen at every opportunity. I haven't experienced a sequel of this magnitude since my impressionably weeby teen self bought Kingdom Hearts 2 on launch.

And I think successfully passing the eye machine sequence ended up nastier than failing it, since you don't even get a Whoa Dude That's METAL to take the edge off the ocular torture

Dead Space 2 is mostly fantastic, but the ending gauntlet gets a bit absurd at times if you play on hard, and the final boss is either a cakewalk or an infuriating waste of time depending on which weapons you take. Personally preferred DS1 silent Isaac but the voice actor is pretty good.

I went through on normal, and even there it has a much more survival horror feeling balance than 1 despite the action double-down; you don't have nearly as much margin to game the economy, which turned a couple of post-overextend checkpoints into enjoyable puzzle fights.
And yes - glad I took the Force Gun after passing it up for the Contact Beam in 1. That final encounter plus a few other spots seem like they could be real run-killers on the permadeath setting.

I'm up and down on silent versus VA; his graduation from disturbed inmate to cracked skydiving mad lad in 2 was a thing to behold, but strikes me as the kind of thing you can only pull off once, whereas silence with a dash of AAAUGH *stomp* GAAH *stomp* RRAAHH *stomp* is evergreen.
I was surprised to find out that it's the same dude VAing for the remake, since his early-game persona is such a far cry from action man Isaac, but what I've seen seems well-acted and smartly played re. character agency.

Dead Space 3 is depressing. You can see the bones of what would have been a good game clearly poking out through the horrible multiplayer DLC microtransaction skinsuit.

I've heard as much, something about a mid-game open space section being super good amidst some otherwise questionable choices.
I'll probably give it a go - if I can get through Ninja Gaiden 3, I can handle the entry that killed Dead Space.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I think with Dead Space 3 you missed a chunk of game/story if you didn't play co-op? I don't remember why but I got a few hours into Dead Space 2 and dropped it - on PC too, so can't even go back to it now my machine is dead.

The remake seems to be well received so I think that'll be my trip back into it. Dead Space Extraction was cool too, no idea how you bring that back outside of VR though.

[XoPachi]

S ranked all of ExciteBots.

I can't succinctly explain why this game is so much fun. Monster Games really delivered something unique and extraordinarily fun and I'm very sad it did so poorly.
I enjoyed this more than I already did when I was in high school. Original hardware or emulated, this is gonna always be my favorite Wii title and 2nd favorite racer.

What a humble, weird, wonderful game. c:

[Mischief Maker]

I am loving every minute of Spellforce: Conquest of Eo.

It's like an amalgamation of every good idea from every fantasy 4X/RPG hybrid. The story quests from Thea, the crafting from Sorcerer King, the beautiful hand-crafted map with semi-random enemy placement and pickup distribution of King's Bounty, all on top of a solid Age of Wonders 3 clone engine with beautiful music and solid visuals.

The main thing this game seems to strive for is to keep the fun exploration-heavy earlygame of 4Xs from start to finish. You don't build colonies, instead you have a mobile tower that spreads domain wherever it lands to harvest from nearby mines. When resources run out or when the story demands, you pull up stakes and float your tower to a new spot. This avoids the micromanagement hell from the late game of, say, Master of Magic once the entire map has been painted with colonies.

Advertisements indicate that there are only 3 classes of wizard, but that's misleading. There are 3 classes, which determine your crafting method (alchemists turn ingredients into spell-like consumables, necromancers turn captured souls and ingredients into undead minions, artificers create magic equipment and permanent unit upgrades), but you also choose 1-2 seperate magic schools to research in addition to your class spells.

I tend to play fantasy 4Xs like Age of Wonders "wrong," but my wrong style of play is perfect for this game. At $24 it's a steal!

[vol.2]

Faxanadu

This was one of my childhood favorites, one of the few NES carts I kept all the back from way back. I started replaying it a few years ago and then got busy and forgot. Picked it up this morning from like a 1/3 of the way in and finished it off.

Thoughts after revisiting it are that it's way shorter than I remember it, and that I forgot how easy it is to soft-lock yourself in certain areas. The endless red potion dungeon is a particular pain in the ass as there's that one spot you can get stuck between impassible enemies (because of the way they appear on the screen when you enter). There's also a shitty spot in the second to last dungeon where you can fall in and it's impossible to get out without a winged boot. It's annoying that stuff like that is the main challenge in the game; the bosses are almost all pretty easy to spam, and they give you the option of using invisibility before fighting the final boss. Or you can just unleash the best magic on both the last two bosses over and over and they go down pretty quick. I forgot how grueling the password system is and how far back it sets you sometimes. Also the fact that leveling up actually hurts you because it removes time from your winged boots. I can't remember if that was a bug in the code or not, but I did remember reading about the pendant having the reverse effect it's supposed to have and not picking it up this time.

Anyway, I think I'm done with Faxanadu. I still like it, but the rose colored glasses are slightly shattered; what seemed mysterious to me as a kid now seems kinda broken.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

I played Faxanadu for the first time myself last year. Definitely a rough game, but I enjoyed it a lot. Its enemy placement is frequently awkward and obnoxious, but I felt the game's action and resource management were forgiving enough for a handful of cheap hits to not really matter. It's certainly no Zelda 2 (which I had beaten a few times in the past but really got into last year, also); its action is way less refined, but I think its dungeon diving and exploration is strong enough to distinguish it.

[vol.2]

IIts enemy placement is frequently awkward and obnoxious

Yep. There are many places in the game where you are forced to take damage, and that's where the main source of difficulty comes from. Lots of places where you walk up a staircase into an enemy. The worst incarnation of this is the drum enemies that suck your HP constantly until you get to them and kill them. Luckily they aren't used a whole lot.

but I felt the game's action and resource management were forgiving enough for a handful of cheap hits to not really matter

Yeah, the difficulty is super uneven. Once you get the enemy patterns, the only danger to you comes from the cheap hits, and there aren't that many. Even those mini boss things that you fight a few times can't hurt you if you stand in the arc underneath of them; they just pass over you and then you can just spam them with your sword.

I think its dungeon diving and exploration is strong enough to distinguish it.

Absolutely. I'm glad I (re)played it. I love the weird Japanese take on early "ye olde" fantasy stuff; they have such a particular vibe. The game is a really interesting take on what an action RPG could be, but it wasn't fleshed out well enough. If anything, this time around I felt like it had a lot of unrealized potential. If they had added some more in-depth RPG features and tightened up the map a little bit it would have been elevated to a classic. For example, there's a lot of optional areas (some of them quite large) that don't give you anything good for going there, or even a story reason for it. It often felt like a game they had a lot of ambition for, but ran out of time and had to send it.

[Marc]

Sega Ages 2500 OutRun. On my series X, at 1080 and 60fps via XBSX2. What a time to be alive. Solid and often overlooked update, with visuals that I find really charming.

Sega Rally '95. Finally. I think I may explode with happiness.

Just drawing up a list of PS2 stuff to throw on my HD, don't just want to fill it up with a torrent full of shit. Gradus 5, R-Type Final, God Hand currently queued.

[m.sniffles.esq]

via XBSX2.

I still have like 30 Saturn and PS1 games to get through via Retroarch.
While the Xbox certainly has me playing the most emulation probably since the Dreamcast. The process still lacks the 'magic' the DC had. In that, I could buy someone a used DC for twenty dollars, burn them a couple emu discs, and give it to them as a x-mas gift.

"How do I make this work?"
"put the disc in and pick what game you want to play"

You would always see the look on their face that said 'It can't be that simple"

[Leandro]

I just played the demo of the new Inti Creates game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081 ... mon_Purge/

Really good

[guigui]

I just played the demo of the new Inti Creates game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081 ... mon_Purge/

Really good

Looks really good indeed. Will this give me Order of Ecclesia vibes to fullfill my nostalgia ?

[XoPachi]

This Prime Remaster is really bloody good. $40 for this? What a bargain!

I just played the demo of the new Inti Creates game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081 ... mon_Purge/

Really good

The character designs put me off so incredibly hard. If the gameplay looked any less enjoyable, I would not hesitate to skip this for the characters alone. But DAMN that game looked fun when it was revealed. I'll have to give the demo a spin. Exceptions can be made.

[Leandro]

This Prime Remaster is really bloody good. $40 for this? What a bargain!

I just played the demo of the new Inti Creates game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081 ... mon_Purge/

Really good

The character designs put me off so incredibly hard. If the gameplay looked any less enjoyable, I would not hesitate to skip this for the characters alone. But DAMN that game looked fun when it was revealed. I'll have to give the demo a spin. Exceptions can be made.

I see. I actually don't like modern anime, which Inti Creates loves to design, like the Gunvolt games and that cringey singing girl. But gameplay so good and snappy in this one I ignore the character designs and story and start pretending the plot and voice acting is pure comedy. Like all the different voice bits the sisters here have, even for the tiniest actions like crawling through a tiny passage - the melee chick says something unique. It's all funny Japan stuff to me.

Oh I play with japanese voices. It's better to me when I don't understand the silliness.

Will this give me Order of Ecclesia vibes to fullfill my nostalgia ?

Atmosphere is really different. Ecclesia had a kind of a serious and cool vibe. This one seems more like anime action comedy.

[mycophobia]

This Prime Remaster is really bloody good. $40 for this? What a bargain!

its fantastic, the new lighting and textures look great

[Sumez]

The character designs put me off so incredibly hard. If the gameplay looked any less enjoyable, I would not hesitate to skip this for the characters alone. But DAMN that game looked fun when it was revealed. I'll have to give the demo a spin. Exceptions can be made.

The character designs are awful because the game is a GalGun spinoff.

[XoPachi]

The character designs are awful because the game is a GalGun spinoff.

Should I even look that up?
Also, I see in 2023, we have a game that doesnt let you adjust voice volume. Immediately got rid of the demo upon seeing that. I'm not listening to incessant, bad waifu voice acting.

[Lander]

Should I even look that up?
Also, I see in 2023, we have a game that doesnt let you adjust voice volume. Immediately got rid of the demo upon seeing that. I'm not listening to incessant, bad waifu voice acting.

Only if you want your faith in humanity to be further eroded by modern moetrash

It's a shame that Inti have gone in hard on the squeaky waifu noises. The gameplay chops are top, but I draw a hard line at vocaloids and FIYAAA FIYAAA PSYCHOBOLL.

[BIL]

Ah man. Inti SOTNesque sounds like a lovely time, with their gorgeous 2D handling chops - but I do miss OOE's elegant nosgothian cybernetique. Thought Bloodstained ROTN was serviceable, but nowhere in the same orbit of eldritch cool and raw POWER IN THE DARKNESS. Shanoa legit hawt and credibly hard as nails too. Great memories of equipping Dominus Agony - or was it Hatred, or Anger? - and a pair of Trench Daggers, any rate, then smashing Blackmore's fuckin face in as our HPs plunged into the red, and my DPS skyrocketed into orbit.

It's killing me! But I'll kill you first, mother fucker



Fuck me I got wood M2 finish what you started and gimme that fuckin DS trilogy pack stat!

I should probably finish Dragon Marked For Death tbh. Despite the unnervingly JARPIGGEH setup, it was delivering first-rate R2RKMF funnins.

[XoPachi]

BIL is *k i l l i n g* me, bro. Oh my Christ.

[BIL]

[Lander]

Dead Space (Again)
Decided to come back for hard mode, and it seems hindsight is pretty broken in this game. I've been rolling with a hard rule of "no new guns until upgrades are maxed" - effectively turning it into a Plasma Cutter run for the first 2/3rds - and it's been smooth sailing throughout.
Stasis capacity adds tons of safety and item economy, on top of Isaac being ridiculously tanky with all 8 bars of health, and much more ammo-efficient with a high-damage weapon. If anything, it feels like multiple low-upgrade guns are a bill.
The biggest challenge so far has been getting through the Valor without crashing it only happened twice on my first run, but this time has been a regular cavalcade of sweaty dashes between save stations.

Coming back, I like how heavy the first game feels on pad - the way movement favours cardinal directions, camera motion between aiming and not feels substantially different, and the subtle view roll when turning quickly.
It's got a real tuned-for-purpose thing going on compared to 2's more regular shooter feel, which I don't say in the negative - each does a fine job in its given domain.

Though it's borderline criminal that we never got any form of Dead Space: The Mercenaries. Both 1 and 2 easily have enough combat depth, variance, and potential alt characters to support some short form no-holds-barred arcade action.

I think with Dead Space 3 you missed a chunk of game/story if you didn't play co-op? I don't remember why but I got a few hours into Dead Space 2 and dropped it - on PC too, so can't even go back to it now my machine is dead.

From what I've watched of it previously, there are some cool asynchoronous insanity effects where one player will start hallucinating and have to explain it to the other who's just seeing a regular room, kind of like the Isaac / Stross relationship from 2.
I think it might even extend to player-specific enemy spawns, so you end up fighting imagined necromorphs and making yourself look like a crazy person. Shame that it had to go in on the co-op trend, but it seems like they tried to make the best of it.

Ah man. Inti SOTNesque sounds like a lovely time, with their gorgeous 2D handling chops - but I do miss OOE's elegant nosgothian cybernetique. Thought Bloodstained ROTN was serviceable, but nowhere in the same orbit of eldritch cool and raw POWER IN THE DARKNESS. Shanoa legit hawt and credibly hard as nails too. Great memories of equipping Dominus Agony - or was it Hatred, or Anger? - and a pair of Trench Daggers, any rate, then smashing Blackmore's fuckin face in as our HPs plunged into the red, and my DPS skyrocketed into orbit.

Ooh, sounds like I need to finish OOE. Absolutely smashed through the GBA / DS 'vania cycle back in the day, but my heart wasn't in it after PoR's middle-of-the-road semitraditional antics.

And ah, the honoured tradition of Ravenous Weapon. I live in hope that Shinobi PS2 will get dredged up by the remake cycle one of these days and bring back the olde 'themed action game' style for a minute, if perhaps with less death pits.
Though while Hotsuma may have doubled down the hardest, I think genre-distant Caleb said it best:

I'm here to donate some blood...
[darkly comedic pause]
Someone else's

It's killing me! But I'll kill you first, mother fucker

not_me_fookin_eyes.tga

Weird how they changed that to "I'll kill you first, mother father" in the director's cut

[BIL]

Ooh, sounds like I need to finish OOE.

You may be in for quite a treat depending on where you left off - without wanting to spoil too much, they kept the by-then dog-tired nonlinear castle for the endgame, after you've gotten all of the expected movement techs and badass weapons, then stocked it chock-full of big bad fuckers and hostile terrain. I was over the moon, it's genuinely a challenge just to forge ahead at times, a feeling I'd wanted ever since SOTN- and there's still a very nice exploration element too, both integral (find the magic doohickies) and optional (some genuinely surprising shit lurking off the track). It just pressure-washes away all the boring "Whoa, a crouch-height gap! If only I could slide!" Now it's "Faaack, just killed five midboss-sized fuckers with one obscenely beefy hit o' me choppa!"

Plus you find stuff in there that opens up the earlier town & country areas. And it packs a few optional XTREME areas too, which I always meant to get back to. Goddamnit, I really do hope M2 come through. I want that game on a big screen with big fookin speakers. Was magnificent just on the piddly little 2DS. Could always emulate these days ofc. Or back then, come to think of it!

Weird how they changed that to "I'll kill you first, mother father" in the director's cut

Yeah 3; I'd have forgiven it if they'd overdubbed Tyrell's scream with a dejected yelp of that filename though

"nao m8, not me fookin eyes m8! m8m8m8 - faaaack m88888!"

[XoPachi]

I wonder why they changed the animation when Samus gets the Phazon suit in Prime Remastered and Prime Trilogy.

[cfx]

This Prime Remaster is really bloody good. $40 for this? What a bargain!

I just played the demo of the new Inti Creates game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081 ... mon_Purge/

Really good

The character designs put me off so incredibly hard. If the gameplay looked any less enjoyable, I would not hesitate to skip this for the characters alone. But DAMN that game looked fun when it was revealed. I'll have to give the demo a spin. Exceptions can be made.

This is no surprise given that I find your avatars to be consistently repulsive.

[BEAMLORD]

Sega Ages OutRun.

Son of a bitch.

What a fucking vibe this game is. It's like being on holiday. Sun, surf, the crazy driving of the locals, lax traffic measures...

The BGM is absolutely irresistible. The kind of easy listening future funk that could only have come outta Japan in the 80s and 90s. The visuals, those Sega-blue skies, horizons stretching out interminably, the undulating road beneath you, are a joy to behold.

Very late to the party, of course. Being born in '83, it's a game that's been in my peripherals for a long time, one of those titles you have an instinctive gamer's awareness of even if you never got round to it. Shouldn't have took me this long.

As an aside, seems the Sega Ages line isn't available on PSN? Shame. Really would have preferred to get it for my PS5, but enjoying it on Switch either way.

[XoPachi]

This is no surprise given that I find your avatars to be consistently repulsive.

Thanks! I make em myself!

[Lander]

You may be in for quite a treat depending on where you left off - without wanting to spoil too much, they kept the by-then dog-tired nonlinear castle for the endgame, after you've gotten all of the expected movement techs and badass weapons, then stocked it chock-full of big bad fuckers and hostile terrain. I was over the moon, it's genuinely a challenge just to forge ahead at times, a feeling I'd wanted ever since SOTN- and there's still a very nice exploration element too, both integral (find the magic doohickies) and optional (some genuinely surprising shit lurking off the track). It just pressure-washes away all the boring "Whoa, a crouch-height gap! If only I could slide!" Now it's "Faaack, just killed five midboss-sized fuckers with one obscenely beefy hit o' me choppa!"

Plus you find stuff in there that opens up the earlier town & country areas. And it packs a few optional XTREME areas too, which I always meant to get back to. Goddamnit, I really do hope M2 come through. I want that game on a big screen with big fookin speakers. Was magnificent just on the piddly little 2DS. Could always emulate these days ofc. Or back then, come to think of it!

Pretty early, I think - I remember the falling block room in the monastery, and the village, but everything beyond that seemed fresh after booting it up the other day.

I played up to the Skeleton Cave, and I'm digging the early game LineaRPG thing it has going on; the reduced scope makes the stats 'n' gear framing much more interesting, since it encodes real distinct options (ex. dual stabbin' vs projectiles vs elemental magery) and encourages the player to experiment with them since there's little margin for facefucking through everything if playing no-grind.
Wasn't expecting to get nailed to the wall so early by Crabby Tower, since the series hasn't hit me with that degree of boss memo since Aria of Sorrow's battle against Death. The touch of SOTN style ruthlessness is refreshing, and bloody hell what a finisher!

The comparison to ROTN is curious; I'm surprised at how many of its elements seem to derive from OOE beyond the expected Igavania formula.
Goth wife MC, fusing magic to skin as a channeling mechanic, the associated emotional blunting, turncoat bestie, early game Big Boat, etc. I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting.
So far I think I like this more; ROTN was enjoyable, but didn't grip me enough to play past the difficulty spike that happens after Edgeboo Solid Snake's late-game boss encounter.

[BrianC]

As an aside, seems the Sega Ages line isn't available on PSN? Shame. Really would have preferred to get it for my PS5, but enjoying it on Switch either way.

No, but Yakuza 0 is. Not sure how the emulation of OutRun is in that, though.