What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Gamer707b]

Been playing Astro Boy Omega Factor on the GB PLayer the last few days. Think I'm on level 7. Love the game. I think this is easily a top tier looking and playing game on the GBA.

EDIT: finished stage 7 last night. Now that the game is finished. it's just beginning. I'll definitely go back and do everything at a later time. Loved it!!
Started Pocky and Rocky right after. A lot harder than expected. Beautiful game. Looking forward to digging deep into it.

[guigui]

Currently playing through Tangle Tower, detective game on the Switch, currently on sale less than $5.
https://www.dekudeals.com/items/tangle-tower

This is your typical detective game : solve the murder by exploring locations, gathering clues, talking to people, solve some not-too-hard and not-too-numerous puzzles here and there.
No real novelty here, but I'd say everything is perfectly executed : great voice acting and characters animation (cannot stress that enough, Sally's voice and animation was instant game seller for me), OST, good characters, nice mood for everyone and everything, mystery seems interesting and not easy to decipher so far. Game somehow gives you the illusion that you uncover things.

I'll definitely have a good time with this one.

Demo available if you want to try it out.

[Stevens]

Never did finish DG: Afterlife. Might give it another go at some point but I hit a part where I needed to enter a place and couldn't find anything I needed (yes I used a guide at this point) so I said fuck it.

A generously given gift card saw me pick up Ender Lillies. I slept incredibly hard on this one.

Metroid/Simon's Quest/Blaster Master gameplay, but the presentation on all fronts is really good. Graphics are grim and grey with touches of color that stand out beautifully. The OST is fitting and also very good. Twin Spires theme in particular.

The platforming and movement feels spot on - you get all of your usual movement options here: Walk, run, dash, double jump, wall jump, ground slam. You play as a White Priestess whos job it is to cleanse the world of the blight. Honestly the story has insane Bloodborne vibes to it with a hint of The Thing. Yes that The Thing. The Priestess herself doesn't actual do any of the fighting though - she is protected by the spirits of those she has cleansed of the blight. It is ridiculously satisfying to walk slowly only the have your spirits lash out and kill a hulking knight in armor. These combat spirits are numerous and pretty varied and give you a lot of options as to how you want to proceed. Straight swords and blades? War mage? Mage? Tbh I think going straight mage might be impossible due to certain limitations. Either way combat is awesome.

The boss fights all pretty damned good. Only one instance of a major boss being similar to another - the rest (and there are like eight or nine total) are pretty unique. All fun to fight and while some are challenging they never get close to bullshit. Moves are telegraphed giving you the cue and time needed to respond.

The level design is mostly outstanding. Particularly the

Spoiler

Stockade, Ruined Castle, Twin Spires, and Catacombs

.

So yeah if you dig this type of game it is absolutely worth playing.

[m.sniffles.esq]

In the 'shiny and new' department, my "niece's" Playdate arrived

("niece's" in quotes because while I preordered for her, it's release missed x-mas, then missed her birthday six months later. I guess I could have tucked it away until the upcoming x-mas, but at that point, she would have mentioned it looked cute a year-and-a-half earlier, and probably have no recollection as to what it even was)

It's basically 'twee-indie-big-pixel-retro-aesthetic' the handheld. If you're unfamiliar with it's gimmick, it ships with two games installed, then once a week two more are downloaded (for 12 weeks, giving you a 'season' of 24 games. You can also download user made games, and they make the dev kit available to everyone for free)

Anyway, while it has a nice, solid build quality. The screen is really small, and doesn't have a backlight, making it pretty hard to see. One of the two games it shipped with might as well be called 'Eyestrain: The Game'

The other game fares better. It's a surfing game that has the mechanics of Tony Hawk (you use the crank to turn rather than the d-pad) but instead of a large, open area to speed around, you're limited to about an inch-and-a-half. Needless to say, it gets old pretty quickly.

THAT SAID, I can't really judge the whole she-bang on 1/12th of the content (although, one would think they led with their best stuff...). But I also can't say I see it having 'legs' and becoming something more than a novelty. I would say the biggest problem is that it's a $50 tchotchke they're selling for $200 (while the pre-orders were $150, I noticed they raised the price another $50 for current orders). If it would have reached my niece's paws, I guarantee it would have been retired to the junk drawer already.

UPDATE: After I was done typing this, I looked over at the Playdate to see a bright pink light flashing. Two new games had downloaded. One is a piano-roll sequencer that plays a little song you can alter. Above it are cartoon animals you can swap in and out, and assign different dance moves to. The GUI is SUPER crowded and on that tiny screen with no backlight... again: eyestrain incarnate. The other is a stick figure that must avoid different obstacles. It's very whatever.

EDIT: Got my facts straight

[it290]

Currently playing in the Neo Turf Masters 2022 Summer Open. It's almost unbelievable how much replayability this game has, I come back to it year after year and playing with competition is even better. How the Italians manage to be so consistently good I have no idea. But always worth playing. Current top score for the week on the Australia course with the Australian golfer is -9.

[drauch]

Whoa, holy shit, didn't realize that game had a community. That rules. Such a fun golf game.

[Durandal]

I forgot to post my writings here, even though I am not cranking them out as fast as I used to. Here goes one about Black Mesa:

Black Mesa keeps shifting between different modes of gameplay–or so-called “pillars”. Black Mesa’s main pillars here would be: puzzling, platforming, shooting, and being a walking simulator, following Half-Life 1’s original tag-line of “Run. Think. Shoot. Live.”. In the narrative context of Black Mesa, this pillar approach does make sense. You are not playing as Mario or Master Chief; you’re a “highly trained professional” scientist caught in a FUBAR situation between aliens and the military. That would be a hard sell if the gameplay focused on either platforming or shooting or puzzling. But what nags me the most is that these pillars all tend to happen in completely separate realities; you’re not doing much platforming or puzzling while shooting, or much puzzling while platforming.

A knock-on effect of keeping these pillars all separate is that it limits what you can do with them individually, since a game can only be so long. A given pillar can never reach its full potential if the game has to distribute its total length between several pillars; time spent on one means there’s less time to spend on the others. We already see the unforeseen consequences of this in Black Mesa: many puzzle or platforming segments being rather toothless, potential enemy compositions never even being tried, and many puzzle types being one-and-done once you move to the next chapter. Sneaking past highly-lethal enemies is only a thing with the tentacles in Blast Pit. Active turrets, tripwire mines or Barnacles rarely appear in major Marine encounters. The more mobile Alien Grunt variants in Xen only appear for about three or four minor encounters. You never get to use the long-jump module in combat against the Marines. The shielded Controllers only appear around five or six times near the very end of the game. Gargantuas are only used for scripted sequences and never as an enemy in regular combat. Bullsquids and Houndeyes rarely appear with the rest of the Xenians. Marine Snipers never appear in regular combat as well. Portals are almost never used within combat encounters. Headcrab Zombies are only used in minor encounters but rarely ever in any major ones. Tanks, helicopters and APCs are rarely utilized as a serious enemy type. Long-jumping in combat is never really tested outside of one boss fight where you use it to circlestrafe faster. The Assassins only appear for a whopping TWO encounters in the whole game.

This gets worse when Black Mesa continues to introduce new elements within each of these pillars, up until the very end of the game. When introducing something new, you generally want to slow the game down a bit to show/tell what the new thing is and/or does. So a security guard tells you the Tentacles in Blast Pit locate you by sound, the Marines are shown in a scripted sequence to be hostile against scientists like you, and you get an antepiece to practice your Long Jump in. Else you risk the player having no clue what they’re supposed to do with the new thing and die several times in confusion, which is rather demotivating. To its credit, Black Mesa is incredibly thorough with making sure that the player knows what it is they’re supposed to do and how something new works. The only issue here is that Black Mesa keeps introducing too much new stuff. If you keep slowing down the game to teach the player something new, there won’t be much room left to test the player’s mastery over most pre-existing elements, which leaves the game feeling like wasted potential. Black Mesa already has the tools to craft interesting combat scenarios or platforming sections or puzzles or combination thereof, but it instead chooses to dazzle you with its quantity and variety rather than the quality of its individual challenges. (At the very least it’s not Half-Life 2 where its gameplay elements and modes of gameplay are so disparate that you couldn’t combine them even if you tried)

Had the core gameplay combined these pillars into one, it could get more mileage out of each one. If your platforming/movement skills would get implicitly tested during combat segments (f.e. because you got the Long Jump Module much earlier on and/or because the combat arenas already involve a lot of platforming), then the platforming-only sections can afford to be more complex and engaging because the player is more familiar with the game’s movement already. If your fourteen weapons also had uses for puzzling and platforming, then the game wouldn’t have to spend as much time slowing down to teach you something new. Then puzzles could be used to teach you new ways to use those weapons in combat, and vice versa. For example, the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2 isn’t only a puzzle tool, but a useful combat tool as well. The TMD in Singularity and time powers in TimeShift both worked in a way that enabled both interesting combat and puzzle scenarios. Admittedly, Black Mesa’s arsenal doesn’t lend itself that well to puzzles or platforming (perhaps it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that), but the presence of alien weapons and experimental lab weapons in the setting should’ve been a free ticket to do something more interesting in that regard, like Half Life: Opposing Force's Barnacle grappling hook weapon. And hey, it’s not like people were using the Hivehand much for anything else.

But even if Black Mesa had a less scatterbrained design philosophy, it wouldn’t be of much help if it kept the same horrible pacing issues. There are many many parts in Black Mesa well into the mid/late-game that consist of banal filler encounters where you’ll be shooting only one to three Headcrabs/Headcrab Zombies/Houndeyes, even though your arsenal is only getting more imposing over time. Sometimes you’re doing rather rudimentary ‘connect the wire’ puzzles. Other times there’s straight up nothing happening, where you’re walking down empty corridors or slowly crawling down a pipe or vent that serves no compelling narrative or atmospheric purpose (hello, Office Complex). Residue Processing at least has the big industrial vibes of getting caught in the massive underbelly of Black Mesa, even if its swimming and platforming puzzles are milquetoast. The ‘walking simulator’ parts in Anomalous Materials and Questionable Ethics at least serve a narrative purpose (which you can simply sprint past if you’re not interested, unlike some other games or moments in this game that like to lock you in a room until they’re done dumping the story), or if they happen right after a major setpiece where some downtime is well-deserved. The problem here is that Black Mesa completely overdoes this downtime.

Xen is by far the worst offender here. The first chapter is neat for about the first 15 minutes where you gaze at the pretty vistas and explore the Black Mesa forwards base (a pretty cool addition), but then it goes on, and on, and on, with nothing but Houndeyes and simplistic platforming/connect-the-wire puzzles to bide your time with. The second half of Gonarch's Lair is supposed to be this tense cat 'n mouse chase between you and a giant ballsack monster... which gets completely interrupted two times so you can spend a few minutes doing environmental puzzles in a relatively non-threatening environment. The climax to all of this is in the penultimate Interloper chapter, where, echoing the supercharged Gravity Gun section in HL2, your Gluon Gun becomes supercharged to have infinite ammo. Except this feels wholly undeserved, both because the preceding encounters were too milquetoast to warrant such a sudden increase of your power level (ironically because of how powerful the Gluon Gun already was and how much ammo they already tossed your way for it), and because the post-supercharge encounters are only a mild step up in intensity that INFINITE GLUON GUN AMMO seems rather unwarranted. Besides, it's also less engaging than fighting enemies with your entire arsenal as opposed to the giant hitscan death ray that deletes everything in a second. The Gluon Gun was already OP without the supercharge, yet instead of balancing out that power in some way (such as by reducing your movement speed when firing, as most minigun-like weapons in FPS games tend to function) they decided to completely double down on its superiority. At least grabbing and punting fools with the supercharged Gravity Gun was more viscerally satisfying.

Now, Black Mesa does manage to improve on some of the original setpieces, the Marine fights in particular. The launch pad climax at the end of On A Rail is no longer a small flat square, but a thoughtful arena with islands of cover and health/battery items placed in such a way to encourage aggressive maneuvering instead of camping a corner. The dam battle and Forget About Freeman’s topside fight cleverly use points of no return and liberal item placement to encourage the player to act proactively rather than passively. The lobby battle is also a wonderful addition both gameplay-wise and narrative-wise (with the scientists responding in awe and fear to you killing a whole squad of Marines by yourself, something the original game didn’t acknowledge as well). It’s the usage of item placement in BM’s encounters that’s a definite improvement over the original. HL1 was rather stingy with its supplies (on top of them yielding less depending on the difficulty setting), which meant that in the long-term it usually paid off to play boring and safe. BM is much more liberal with supplies within and outside combat encounters, which means you can afford to play more aggressively as long as you move towards wherever the items are.

Unfortunately, most Marine encounters (particularly those in We’ve Got Hostiles) are rather poor at pulling you into the fight. One reason for that is that you often don't get a good glimpse of a combat space and its layout before the fighting starts. This means that you won’t know what lies ahead or what your options are, which in turn means you’re more likely to play it safe than charge into the unknown. The other reason is that a lot of arenas only have a single entrance, whereupon entering you’re immediately fired at from every angle. When there’s too much suppressive fire ahead and you don’t know what exactly lies ahead, you’re of course going to retreat and take cover unless you want to take tons of damage. But when you end up camping the sole entrance, the enemy has no routes to encircle you and thus invalidate your camping position, nor can they flush you out with grenades (because at an arena entrance you usually have more than enough space to backpedal from incoming grenades). You could solve this by making arenas more circular and adding more entrances, and having enemies only move into an arena when you’re already deep inside. One-way entrances or cul-de-sacs with enemies coming from behind also help with preventing the player from approaching each fight with the same choke point and corner camping strategy. Some arenas do make use of these, but it's not applied as consistently as it should’ve been.

The way that the Marine Grunts are balanced also discourages playing proactively. The Marine Grunts’ hitscan fire is incredibly accurate, which turns most encounters into a damage race or a game of peekaboo. Marines also do not understand the concept of pain or flinching or self-preservation in response to being shot. It’s not uncommon for you and a grunt to dump mags into each other, waiting to see which one’s the first to die. It also used to be in HL1 that if you threw a grenade at grunts, that they wouldn’t even bother firing at you; they would instead run for their lives, letting you pick them off or reposition safely. In Black Mesa this behavior is nowhere as pronounced. They might call out the grenade, but all the AI does is try and shuffle away a bit while continuing to shoot at you. Without ways to mitigate hitscan damage, you shouldn't be surprised when the player decides to play it safe and boring.

As for the alien encounters, they only resemble something decent in Lambda Core. There the game actually leverages alien enemies being able to teleport in (when you’re already deep inside an arena!) at several positions and different vantage points. Then you gotta simultaneously take care of Alien Grunts on the ground, Vortigaunts sniping you from vantage points, Headcrabs/Houndeyes bothering you from below, and Barnacles acting as static obstacles. It’s promising stuff! It helps that compared to HL1 the alien enemies have been rebalanced for the better: the Alien Grunts’ ranged attack no longer has obscene homing properties, Bullsquids fire a spread of harder-to-dodge arced projectiles rather than a single linear projectile, and Vortigaunts/Houndeyes generally seem to not run around aimlessly after getting shot as they did in HL1. Unfortunately, most prior chapters only use alien enemies in the most basic ways possible, and Lambda Complex ends before it can meaningfully build on these interactions. It also doesn’t help that you get the Gluon Gun in Lambda Core, which is stupidly powerful and lets you trivialize a good part of most enemy encounters there.

In conclusion, Black Mesa could have gotten much more out of itself if it intertwined its pillars rather than keeping them separate. With some tweaking it already has a good foundation, it just needs to stop trying to change the gameplay every half an hour. Admittedly it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that considering BM’s limited scope as a remake, but since the BM developers bloated Xen for no good reason other than what I assume is making their art portfolio look more impressive, it shouldn’t have been that impossible.

I also want to take a quick detour to talk about the final boss. The revamped Nihilanth fight comes as a part of a new wave of FPS bosses that I like to call “movement bosses”. Whereas before most FPS bosses had you either circlestrafing them to death (much like the Gonarch in HL1 or BM) or doing some inane puzzle that didn’t rely on testing what you’ve used so far (like Nihilanth in HL1, the Icon of Sin in Doom 2, and most Ugh-Zan fights in the Serious Sam franchise), nowadays developers seem to have somewhat realized that abstract puzzles or circlestrafing don’t make much of an interesting boss fight in an FPS. Now we get bosses with elaborate attack patterns reminiscent of 90’s console action games that you can’t just circlestrafe through (like the Cyberdemon in Doom (2016), General Brand in Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem, and Nihilanth here, ironically all bosses from franchises that suffered from the former). These fare much better because they're challenging you on something that you’ve been doing throughout the entire game (i.e. moving). But while this new wave of FPS bosses has made it more interesting to avoid damage from the boss, they all fail to do so for dealing damage to the boss.

As it is now, dealing damage to a boss is a simple matter of equipping the strongest gun (or the next-strongest gun if you run out of ammo), and then holding down LMB on the boss. In Siberian Mayhem that is your Rocket Launcher, in Doom 2016 it is weapon swapping between multiple guns (which amounts to the same thing since you’re swapping between them for the sake of DPS and not their other properties), and in BM it’s the Gluon Gun. Most of these bosses weakly try to address this by attacking you once in a blue moon with some form of homing projectiles that you can only avoid by diverting your aim and shooting those down, but if you are already using a continuous hitscan beam weapon like the Gluon Gun, then these are only brief one-second diversions from lasering the big fetus. There isn’t much of a reason to use your grenades, your Snarks, your mines, your satchel charges, your revolver, your shotgun, your pistol, your crossbow, or your crowbar against Nihilanth, whereas in regular enemy encounters most of them can be of use depending on the situation. If your arsenal is designed around dealing with a large variety of ever-changing situations, then a boss fight should reflect that variety and unpredictability, such as by throwing multiple obstacles of different types at you at once. Designing an FPS boss fight that challenges both avoiding damage and dealing damage would need a shift in paradigm design, which I’ve written about in extensive detail elsewhere.

[Rastan78]

Holy shit, a new patch just dropped for Into the Breach. I play this on a daily basis as my quiet relaxation game if I'm not playing arcade stuff.

Such a nice surprise to boot up this masterpiece and after all these years suddenly get new mech squads, pilots, enemy types, objectives etc. Totally didn't see that one coming.

[Mischief Maker]

Holy shit, a new patch just dropped for Into the Breach. I play this on a daily basis as my quiet relaxation game if I'm not playing arcade stuff.

Such a nice surprise to boot up this masterpiece and after all these years suddenly get new mech squads, pilots, enemy types, objectives etc. Totally didn't see that one coming.

Bah! Beat me to it.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

I forgot to post my writings here, even though I am not cranking them out as fast as I used to. Here goes one about Black Mesa:

How would you say your central criticism of the game, it not having the space to fully develop any of its disparate ideas, applies to the original Half-Life? Do you think it was similarly flawed, or executed better or worse in some way?

When I have the inclination to, I definitely want to do a replay of HL1 and a playthrough of Black Mesa (which I haven't touched) back-to-back sometime. I've always had the impression that Black Mesa's hitscan enemies were rebalanced in such a way that it harms combat, though, kind of like in Brutal Doom, so I haven't had the urge to sit down with both yet.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I think I'm discovering that a game I rather enjoyed has an extremely annoying fatal flaw that's... rather soured me on it now. Triangle Wizard's a neat top-down freeware roguelike with a massive selection of races, classes, deities to worship, tons of spells... basically a lot of options. But it's also very complex and very difficult. Makes for an interesting game, and many combinations are very clearly much weaker than others.

But there's one area that's extremely simplistic and has resulted in multiple ruined games. There's traps. Specifically, there's wall mounted traps, floor mounted traps, and traps you have absolutely no way of detecting unless you send your summoned monsters slowly over every tile of the map to trigger them in advance. This last one is a problem, given the invisible ones can trigger nearly as soon as you step on them, and one with Glass Spray is enough to easily deal over twice your max HP in damage even if you have like 50%+ resistance to physical damage. I've gameovered multiple times stepping on invisible Glass Spray traps (once by walking, once by trying to Teleport out of a fight to an empty tile). There's literally no race, class, or deity that can detect traps. None of your spells detect traps, aside from casting summon spells and manually ordering your summons to walk over tiles which is often exasperatingly slow compared to how fast you can move around yourself. This is an extremely boring, slow process to do given levels can be gigantic.

I've played other roguelikes with fairly hazardous traps, and there's generally much easier ways provided to trigger them such as detection spells, or summon spells where the monsters move very fast and therefore it isn't a slog to locate stuff that could potentially kill you if you step on it.

You could turn off permadeath which is on by default I guess. But it goes against the whole roguelike feel and it's rather annoying me that something basic like this is handled so poorly. The traps you can see are dangerous enough as it is! I don't understand why in the massive spell list there isn't a single one that can't be learned to detect traps aside from using summons to manually spring them. It's a damn shame because my opinion of the game's rather spoiled now that I realize how much it can screw you over late in the game if you're on a really good run, and you suddenly die instantly to something you had limited ways to detect.

I hate the sensation of feeling like a game I enjoyed kinda sucks and I'm not keen on playing it any more.

[Air Master Burst]

How would you say your central criticism of the game, it not having the space to fully develop any of its disparate ideas, applies to the original Half-Life? Do you think it was similarly flawed, or executed better or worse in some way?

Can't speak for Durandal, but having played both versions extensively, I agree with many of their critiques, and I would answer this with an "it depends on which part."

HL1's biggest issue was not knowing what to do with itself once you reach the Lambda Core. "Go to the alien world to kill the boss" is a clear enough goal, but most of Xen as it originally exists feels like a random mishmash of unfinished ideas. It also doesn't help that the alien enemies never had AI that was engaging the way the earlier human enemies did, and so the only real challenge comes from the sudden change into a janky platformer with radically different physics than what you were used to.

Black Mesa at least tried to make Xen more engaging, and at least for the first chapter or two, they knocked it out of the park! That said, almost everything after the initial research outpost is a bit of a slog that works way too hard to needlessly justify HL2 plot retcons. They did vastly improve the Gonarch encounter, though, and I did like the Gargantua chase scene, but the final boss was still a dud. The way Black Mesa didn't even try to have decent AI for the human enemies and just gave them perfect accuracy ruins a large part of what made the original HL so memorable, and the alien AI isn't improved nearly enough to make up for it.

The walking simulator segments have been an integral part of the Half-Life feel since the very beginning, for better or for worse. I tend to enjoy them, but it's not for everyone. Black Mesa certainly does overindulge in this a bit, especially in Xen, but I thought they did a really good job of making the Black Mesa facility itself seem both bigger, more lived-in, and more devastated by the incident than the original did.

If you liked the atmosphere of the original HL1 you should give Black Mesa a spin, it's clearly a labor of love and there's a lot to enjoy. It just doesn't have nearly the replay value of the original because the actual shooting part is a shadow of the original's.

ETA: Black Mesa's other big problem was that it added a lot of Half-Life style puzzles, but it didn't bother to make them any more challenging or engaging. Most people playing Black Mesa already know the basic variations of "put this plug into this hole," but at no point did they realize this and actually make the player THINK about what plug goes in what hole and why. HL1 could get away with this because it's a more intense, fast-paced shooter (made for an audience that hadn't already spent 2-3 decades doing those exact same kind of basic puzzles); but Black Mesa using the slow-ass Source engine means that the respite of solving basic-ass puzzles isn't the relief it was in HL1.

ETA2:

Designing an FPS boss fight that challenges both avoiding damage and dealing damage would need a shift in paradigm design, which I’ve written about in extensive detail elsewhere.

I actually thought they did a pretty good job with the three human boss fights in Human Revolution, and if they had appeared in a more traditional FPS series they would have been pretty well-received (although I thought adding easy ways to cheese them all in the original vanilla version was peak Deus Ex, even if the delightful 1HKO on Nammir was actually just a bug). Take away the cheesy Deus Ex mechanics and all three are legit fun, intense duels.

[Blackfielding]

Ordered some more stuff at https://www.buyanabolic.com/ for my first preparation for a bodybuilding contest taking place in New York in November. Wish me good luck guys I am gonna face the hardest competition ever in my life.

[Durandal]

I forgot to post my writings here, even though I am not cranking them out as fast as I used to. Here goes one about Black Mesa:

How would you say your central criticism of the game, it not having the space to fully develop any of its disparate ideas, applies to the original Half-Life? Do you think it was similarly flawed, or executed better or worse in some way?

When I have the inclination to, I definitely want to do a replay of HL1 and a playthrough of Black Mesa (which I haven't touched) back-to-back sometime. I've always had the impression that Black Mesa's hitscan enemies were rebalanced in such a way that it harms combat, though, kind of like in Brutal Doom, so I haven't had the urge to sit down with both yet.

Funny that you mention that. After I wrote down my first draft, I went back to replay HL1 and OpFor after not having done so for several years, to confirm to myself whether the design philosophy of BM was one more influenced by HL2 than its prequels like what I initially thought. Turns out... most of what I criticized BM for is easily applicable to HL1 and OpFor both, especially where "using new ideas only for 30 minutes tops and then throwing them away forever" is concerned. I do think Black Mesa has overall better HECU encounters, but those are rather undermined by the AI being, as you said, Brutal Doom-ified. And as AMB said, BM does feel slower and padded out with all the Source Engine-style puzzles, whereas HL1 had the advantage of putting more of a focus on just shooting and letting you move more quickly from setpiece to setpiece while having puzzles take relatively less time to solve. Quite literally too, I might mention. Being able to bunnyhop in HL1 makes the simple act of moving from A to B a lot more fun and faster to do. Of all the omissions in BM, that one stings the most.

[Stevens]

Back to Rain Word in anticipation of the dlc that is so close after four years.

Basically almost doubles the size of the game.

[m.sniffles.esq]

I'm very rarely with the zeitgeist, but I could not resist Cat game

I jumped on a prime day gpu deal because I figured the 'recommended' specs were bullshit (they are, surprise surprise) but I had to get new power supply too and that ended up being faulty. So... cat game on the old hardware (which is double the minimum and plays at about 20fps with everything at 'medium'. I hate PC gaming...)

And... It's an auto-platformer. If you remember Submerged it reminds me A LOT of that. In that, it's more about exploring the world than any sort of challenge. Oh, and you're a cat.

But like most day one releases nowadays, glitches and crashes aplenty. I mean--as I stated above--it's not terribly challenging and the checkpoints are many. But if it starts to get tougher, having to redo things due to it glitching out will get real old real quick.

[it290]

'Auto-platformer?' Isn't that just an adventure game?

[m.sniffles.esq]

'Auto-platformer?' Isn't that just an adventure game?

I guess. Of the 'point and click' variety.

[Gamer707b]

Been playing Bangai-o on Dreamcast for the last couple days. I'm on level 38. So I don't have much to get the completion.

EDIT: Just finished this last night. Took me most of the day to get that last level 44 boss. The level itself wasn't so bad, it was the cheap boss.

[SeeNoWeevil]

Metal Slug XX - what on earth were they thinking with the difficulty in this game. It feels downright broken.

[To Far Away Times]

If I remember right, my experience with Metal Slug XX was on the very first level there were sections where enemies would spawn at all four corners at once.

This only happens a couple times on like the last level of Metal Slug 1.

I saw what that game was going to be and I noped right the fuck out.

[Gamer707b]

Been playing Star Fox Zero. Highly underappreciated game if you ask me. Once you get the gist of the controls, the game becomes magical, if you ask me.

[Air Master Burst]

Metal Slug XX - what on earth were they thinking with the difficulty in this game. It feels downright broken.

It was terrible already on PSP and the Steam port is literally adding insult to injury.

[SeeNoWeevil]

If I remember right, my experience with Metal Slug XX was on the very first level there were sections where enemies would spawn at all four corners at once.

This only happens a couple times on like the last level of Metal Slug 1.

I saw what that game was going to be and I noped right the fuck out.

Yeah, you only have to play for about 5mins before the nonsense starts. Later on there are constantly 3+ sources of attacks coming at you at any one point. There's a section a bit later with the giant plants, I had to go to youtube to see how other people were doing this section and people are just sat at the edge of the screen slowly chipping the enemies down or finding very specific spots to cheese the encounter. What a strange game.

[vol.2]

I have been playing Hebereke for the NES. 7/10

It's a fun little Mario Bros. type side scroller with endearing characters and some fun choices.

The Bad: The controls are a bit janky, and the level design is somewhat sparse, and there's no real innovation here, it's mostly propelled by it's own cuteness.

When you want to attack someone, you have to jump and then press down while jumping on their head. Hit detection isn't terrible, but it's also not perfect, and having to press down to attack is annoying when your used to Mario style head jumps. You also have the ability to pick up the heads of vanquished enemies and throw them as projectiles, but this option isn't great as it doesn't give you item drops when you do this, and that's the best way to get health (which is not even full at the start of the game).

The Good: It's cute! It's also not punishingly difficult or unfair. The challenge here is real, but it's not off the charts, and it's balanced really well. And there are some interesting levels to go through, especially for it's time. There is a cool mine cart level that is effectively a maze you have to find your way through. The mine carts make you invulnerable to enemies in the level, but they also will deposit you to certain doom if you don't bail out in time.

I really like this game. It's a lot of fun, even though it's pretty simple, and it was cool to find an old NES game that I don't know which doesn't suck. To be fair, I have had it laying around for about 4 years, but this is the first time I've actually tried to play it for real.

[BIL]

I couldn't deal with Metal Slug XX's nasty input lag on PS4. I'd also heard similar of the Steam version... I get the feeling that the best way to play it is via PSP, or Vita, or whatever it originally released on.

I liked the first two stages' design from a more consolised standpoint, with each as more of a mini-dungeon packed full of enemies and secrets, meant for gradual mapping-out, rather than part of a single tight credit. Appreciated the generous slate of Combat School missions too, some look pretty wild, going by expert replays I've seen.

(also the early game looks like garbage, literally, it's set in a garbage dump - not great lads >_< just set it in a generic temple/pyramid or some shit, like later areas do anyway)

Couldn't settle down and enjoy with that laggy handling, though - switching to the ACA Slugs immediately after feels like ditching a weighted training vest. It wouldn't surprise me, at all, if it's possible to better response from XX by emulating the portable version on a computer... maybe I should just pick up that one instead.

There's a section a bit later with the giant plants, I had to go to youtube to see how other people were doing this section and people are just sat at the edge of the screen slowly chipping the enemies down or finding very specific spots to cheese the encounter.

TBH I see that a lot with Neo Slug replays too Difference being, there's always a way to surpass molasses-slow creep n' chip play (just for aesthetic pleasure, not even talking speedrunning) - and also, those games control beautifully



(Gradually learn how to) BLAST AWAY AND GO GO GO

unlike PS4 XX, which makes me want to just play them instead.

I have been playing Hebereke for the NES. 7/10

Super solid game, though Dragon Slayer IV eats its labyrinth-running lunch, and Sunsoft's real cutesy killer is Gimmick, which packs in a fair bit of secret-hunting of its own despite its arcade-tight 1CC format. I think they should've bumped the bosses up a notch... the later Cat Knight is probably the game's most intense, with his modestly impressive spear rain, but it's barely even entry-level compared to any number of first-rate FC sidescrollers. Certainly a much stronger Search Action effort than their earlier Metafight, which is really more of a linear action game, fragmented.

Standout features are ultimately aesthetic - it's one odd little bugger - and that immortally gratifying, bubblewrap-satisfying stomp, which genuinely helps given the longer-than-usual single sitting runtime. One of the sickest Game Over fonts ever too.

[copy-paster]

Been sickgrabbing these non-arcadey/shmups lately as I'm too tired grinding Raiden II everytime, also have Ace Combat Zero in another folder.

Looking forward to Stray, Fallen Order, and Ace Combat 7 but I ran out of space right now.

[BIL]

Bloodstained is a fine time (and definitely a good chillout pick after facing down an absolute monster like Raiden II!). Map is enormous and varied, yet notably low on filler, with a nice True End treasure hunt. There's lots of entertainingly outsized and hard-hitting weapons, and big meaty enemies to shred them with. Advanced movement is wild, collision is super-tight, controls are sharp - basically it gets most of the modern Dracula formula right, including the dynamite Yamane OST.

The katana fetishism in particular is off the charts

Minor lategame enemy/area spoiler

Spoiler

Main shortcoming imo is a lack of really intense endgame stages, enemies and bosses - Ecclesia outclasses it there, without even getting into its optional areas, as does COTM - but even easygoing AOS and harmless SOTN have peppier advanced enemies. You'll still be seeing the same lukewarm 3x fire column "HELL DEMONZ" to the 11th hour, copy/pasted directly from COTM's third area - get some Fallen Angels and Wind Demons in there ffs! Feels like they got to about 60%, then backed off for fear of scaring noobs. Also lots of bosses that should be rare dangerous enemies, like my #1 oniwaifu Umbrella-chan. She so cute :3 "I want more blood!"



To be fair, a curious glimpse at Reddit did reveal a lot of whiny bitches aghast at having to go more than two screens without a savepoint. We're probably fortunate it manages the agreeable pressure it does. Also the cooking minigame is good silly fun, I couldn't believe how compulsive and relaxing it was chasing down varmints to make various unpronounceable gallic treats and down-home favourites. You can feel the culinary affection.

There's been a huge set of DLC characters, stages and modes (including a very neat randomiser) released since, and IIRC you get 'em all FO FREE, which was especially nice. Far from the be-all end-all it might've been with these mechanics, but it's a worthy pickup for sure.



I forgot there's guns, pretty nice ones too!

[Air Master Burst]

Curse of the Moon is even better than the main Bloodstained game! It also has a sequel I've yet to try but is probably also dope as hell.

ETA: Unsure if COTM in your post was referring to Circle or Curse.

[vol.2]

Curse of the Moon is even better than the main Bloodstained game! It also has a sequel I've yet to try but is probably also dope as hell.

Different animals. COTM is good fun, but very short and simple. 2 is longer, but they force you to replay many of the levels to reach the end which is kinda tedious.

Personally I like Bloodstained better; I found the combat to be satisfying and deep. The items and magic is a bit convoluted, but it's addictive and entertaining in it's own way.