What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[JBC]

Having a Dreamcast night & focusing on what I consider an unofficial trilogy - the 3rd person arena shooters Outtrigger, Spawn: In The Demon's Hand, & Heavy Metal: Geomatrix.

They all play very similarly & vary in terms of quality, but I have a soft spot for each. Outtrigger is without a doubt the best of the bunch & I consider Spawn a close second.

Reviews didn't really treat the Capcom developed titles very kindly, but I've always felt they deserved a little more credit. These games were released in a day & age where the stigma surrounding licensed titles was still in full effect.

[Blinge]

Few of us stayed at a mates place recently and a friend who's very into smash bros came over. We live too far away to practice together, and he's more into it than me, I hadn't played melee for several months.

We were pretty equal at melee last time we met, so he was eager to show me how much he's improved (read: kick my arse). Unpleasant experience to say the least! Could barely hit the fucker and I was so rusty the controller didn't make sense to my hands. But even at my best he'd have still won most games. *grumble* I should start practicing again, but most UK players irritate me to no end.

Managed to win at skullgirls though, realised I can easily link into Valentine's crouching hardpunch launcher and follow them into the air and button mash. Abused that for the entire session haha.

[Leandro]

Jet Set Radio, and I still can't pass the Fight or Flight level. 9 hours of playtime already

[dink]

Finished Rocket Knight Adventures today, only to be reminded that I need to play it on hard mode to get the good ending.

[BrianC]

Finished Rocket Knight Adventures today, only to be reminded that I need to play it on hard mode to get the good ending.

The US version tells you to play it on easy mode to get the good ending. lol. (the difficulties are actually the same, just re-labeled)

[Ruldra]

Finished Rocket Knight Adventures today, only to be reminded that I need to play it on hard mode to get the good ending.

The US version tells you to play it on easy mode to get the good ending. lol. (the difficulties are actually the same, just re-labeled)

It's good to be familiar with the difficulty levels across versions.



Do NOT play on Crazy Hard difficulty, everything will one-shot you.

[Leandro]

Finally passed the Fight or Flight level on Jet Set Radio... The two subsequent levels were a breeze in comparison

[BIL]

Been playing Gimmick or Shinrei Jusatsushi Yumetaromaru today.

Spoiler

Currently at stage 5, with 1 through 4's treasures found. Loving the hell out of this!

[soprano1]

Been playing Gimmick or Shinrei Jusatsushi Yumetaromaru today.

Spoiler

Currently at stage 5, with 1 through 4's treasures found. Loving the hell out of this!

Nice gif, BIL. The physics in Gimmick! are very cool for a NES/FC game.

[Leandro]

FinaLLy finished Jet Set Radio HD. What a great game, I miss Sega. Almost shed a tear when Beat was spraypainting thank you for playing. RIP SEGA

[FRO]

Trying to finish Paper Mario on the N64, because I'll be a guest on the RF Generation Community Playthrough podcast discussing the game, since it was this month's retro game to play through together.

[null1024]

man, I need to finish Jet Set Radio myself

Been playing Gimmick or Shinrei Jusatsushi Yumetaromaru today.

Spoiler

Currently at stage 5, with 1 through 4's treasures found. Loving the hell out of this!

man, I wish I understood this game

It's actually really fun, but I can't get to grips with the star's handling at all. I can barely get through stage 2, and I haven't went after the treasures in earnest.

[Ed Oscuro]

Been playing Gimmick or Shinrei Jusatsushi Yumetaromaru today.

Spoiler

The Green Bomber

[BIL]

Nice gif, BIL. The physics in Gimmick! are very cool for a NES/FC game.

Ta, Instagiffer pwns!

I didn't appreciate until now how apropros the game's logo is. Be like Strider with all the battling up and down sharp inclines.

man, I wish I understood this game

It's actually really fun, but I can't get to grips with the star's handling at all. I can barely get through stage 2, and I haven't went after the treasures in earnest.

I'm very new to it myself - for now, bouncing it off a surface you're facing and hitching a ride on the rebound seems a sufficient basic principle. Of course distance from the rebounding surface and the angle of your throw allows for a lot of variation. In that gif, I just wanged it pointblank off the overhang, landing on the rebound. There's a room later on where you need to spike it hard (from your jump peak) for a sharp bounce, letting it rebound off the far wall and come vaulting back so you can hitch a ride to the top of the room.

Sunsoft's sound team really liked that "wowww..." frog ribbit, this is the third game of theirs (after Meta Fight and Raf World) I've heard it in. ^__^

I almost wonder if this game's seemingly superhuman developer effort is why Dynamite Batman turned out so horribly by Sunsoft's typical FC standard.

[Ed Oscuro]

Dynamite's problem seems to be just that the sprites are too big for the gameplay and they couldn't back off that decision. The slide is also useless in almost all cases. Beyond that, it has great production values otherwise - with great use of rendering tricks (foreground scenery, realistic water surfaces) to go along.

[BrianC]

Dynamite's problem seems to be just that the sprites are too big for the gameplay and they couldn't back off that decision.

I noticed some of Sunsoft's GB games and the unreleased Sunman also suffer from the same issue

Sunsoft's sound team really liked that "wowww..." frog ribbit, this is the third game of theirs (after Meta Fight and Raf World) I've heard it in. ^__^

And someone on the localization team for Blaster Master liked frogs a little too much...

[BIL]

Although they're not ideal for a Rockmanesque, I think Dynamite's big sprites are more a victim of the stage and enemy design than the reverse. It's a habitually cheap game, right from that unseen instant ceiling trap that starts 1-1 and the first boss's undodgeable machinegun (which you can just tank through anyway). I usually make it to 3-1 and its near-instant mortars before deciding that memorising each individual one so I can heave a laggy jump out of its path isn't worth it.

Sunsoft/Tokai's best stuff can sometimes be a bit cheap (Gimmick and Raf World both have stuff you're probably not going to dodge the first time), but this is just sloppy. I was gonna say that maybe something less inherently claustrophobic like Rolling Thunder shooting or The Ninja Warriors Again brawling might've worked better, but the real issue is the lack of fine tuning. TNWA has fast mortars too. You can't memorise them! But you can dodge them.

[Pretas]

FinaLLy finished Jet Set Radio HD. What a great game, I miss Sega. Almost shed a tear when Beat was spraypainting thank you for playing. RIP SEGA

There's a sequel, though.

[Leandro]

Playing Skyrim for free. I'm liking it, I think I'll buy it... Never have played this kind of RPG, I wish the caracter had a bicycle or something, this world is huge

[Marc]

FinaLLy finished Jet Set Radio HD. What a great game, I miss Sega. Almost shed a tear when Beat was spraypainting thank you for playing. RIP SEGA

Never finished it on DC. Gave it another spin when it came out on 360,but that fucking camera....

Downloaded Pinball Arcade on PS4. Thought I'd find it a bit boring with the tables all being real and somewhat old, ended up spending a good hour on the one free table. Much prefer it to Zen Pinball, physical copy ordered. It's also made me realise how much I'd love to own just one real table *sigh*.

[broken harbour]

Playing Skyrim for free. I'm liking it, I think I'll buy it... Never have played this kind of RPG, I wish the caracter had a bicycle or something, this world is huge

Funny enough, I did the same thing last night too, owned it for about a year but only now just fired it up.

I'm on the fence as to weather or not I want to play it with a guide.. there's this crazy, 1000 page Prima guide or something out there that I'm tempted to have... I wonder if the game is better played without one though? When I played through Fallout 3 I played with a guide, at least at the beginning, I felt it made the experience better if your more pressed for time, like I am.

[iconoclast]

Infamous: Second Son
Rented this from gamefly and platinumed it. This is the first Infamous game I've played and I thought it was okay, but totally forgettable. Combat is mediocre, the boss fights are crap, all of the powers feel samey, and traversing the city is dull until you unlock infinite sprint and/or the flying ability. It's still not engaging at that point, but at least you can get where you need to be pretty quickly. On the upside, it has great graphics and I thought the story and characters were decent enough, but overall I didn't think the game was half as good as Sunset Overdrive (which I also went back to and completed 100% recently). There's just nothing interesting at all about the gameplay, aside from using the environment to swap abilities. That's a neat mechanic.


Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair
Played through this twice so far with the Wing Diver on Hard & Hardest. It's a pretty nice upgrade over the original:

+ Enemy configurations change slightly on Hardest and Inferno. You'll start to see enemies that only appeared in EDF4's DLC missions, like golden ants, silver spiders, red dragons, red bees, purple ants (a higher class of red ants), and even a giant golden queen ant.
+ The Japanese wiki says that around half of the missions were remixed. I'll take their word for it.
+ NPC allies appear more frequently, and they have more varied weapons. Sometimes they even appear in tanks. This helps make some of the missions feel like an all-out war rather than you and your little squadron vs. the universe.
+ There are far more enemies and NPC allies in general.
+ New lighting - Explosions and lightning illuminate the field now. It looks really nice imo.
+ New enemies - The most notable being a giant Godzilla-sized enemy (who appears in four new missions). I think he's more interesting to fight than the monsters from the older games because he's got a larger moveset and more mobility (he can dash sideways and leap forward). Red bees and purple ants are also new.
+ New weapons & vehicles - The Air Raider got the Depth Crawler, which I guess is for the underground missions, and a giant mech to punch Godzilla with. The Wing Diver got a new lightning gun, and the Ranger got a new grenade launcher, shotgun, and a new cascade missle launcher, I think. The Fencer didn't get anything lol.
+ A bunch of small balance changes and improvements: you can quickly recover after getting ragdolled, your allies now have health bars, the Shield Bearer's movement speed was greatly increased, the Retiarius can no longer shoot its web through buildings, and you can free yourself from the constraint if you damage its body enough, Rangers & Fencers can roll/dash through small obstacles (like guardrails), you can use the chat commands in single player, etc
+ Tech improvements - 1080p, fast load times, higher framerate (it can still get choppy when shit hits the fan, but that's EDF), etc
- Cave missions are pitch black now. You have to rely on a flashlight and whatever light the explosions and lightning gives off to see more than 15 feet in front of you. This is the only change I don't like. It makes these missions even more of a turtle fest, since rushing into the darkness might get you instantly killed by a spider or ant that you couldn't see.

So yeah, it's a really great game. Definitely the best one on the PS4.

[null1024]

Been on a Genesis kick as of late.
too much to list, so let me just put the highlights reel

Oh, and on a side note, anyone know how to stop Retroarch from flashing the screen every time the Genesis changes from 320x224 width to 256x224? It's really apparent when starting Mega Turrican up, and it's annoying.

Streets of Rage.
You know something? I don't think I've ever played the first game before.
It's actually pretty good. KILLER soundtrack.

Golden Axe.
I want to like it, but the hit detection seems completely fucked.

E-SWAT.
Haven't been playing too long, but it's pretty good really. Need to figure out how to do the first boss without getting hit so much. Second boss is actually really easy [crouch and just shoot the other guy's bullets to stop them -- I love this feature so much]. Haven't seen much of the third level yet.
[edit] okay, why do you fucking lose the ability to duck under shots as E-SWAT, that's driving me nuts, you're such a big target and there's so much shit coming at you, fucking hell

Blades of Vengeance.
I haven't played much of this, but it seems like an okay game.
but is it me, or am I doing something wrong? there seem to be places where you HAVE to take fall damage
and some things just feel a little sloppy

Kawasaki Superbike Challenge.
the most impressive thing I've seen on the Genesis
Sure, it cheats a bit graphically [pretty sure there's no almost rotational math involved at all, so you couldn't look backwards on the track]. That doesn't change the fact that most of the scenery is fully polygonal and still looks decent at its worst.
Go into the settings and configure it to Turbo mode. It adjusts the view so it doesn't have to fill as many pixels, but now the framerate SCREAMS [if you and the track are the only things on screen]. Even without this, the framerate is stable and playable.

I haven't gotten the hang of the handling yet though.
But damn, what a game. LOADS of tracks, too.

Comix Zone.
The Game Center CX episode made me want to play this again. I didn't like it the first time.
But on second inspection, it's actually a pretty great game. The whole "one extra life per episode, start with one" thing is a bit nasty though.
the game really punishes the shit out of you for not having the right items at the right time, hot damn

oh, and I played Smash TV, but it's not that good on Genesis, the control kind of sucks

[Obiwanshinobi]

Finally getting the hang of driving Monster Truck in Excite Truck. It's like Supercar of Burnout 2 - something of the game's ultimate vehicle.
Quite a shame the replays can't be saved on SD card (even though mp3 music tracks can be loaded off one). Then again, much like the first Burnout, Excite Truck is half about the spectacle (action movie in the former's case, vehicular stunt show in the latter's) so maybe if it could be recorded too easily that would take away some of their charm.

As I'm typing this, Wii TrackMania rears its ugly head on the shelf, reassuring me that not having bought Crazy Taxi 2 lately was the right thing to do. One must slow down somewhere...

[broken harbour]

Went through a few games recently, just trying them out until I found one that hooked me a bit...

South Park: The Stick of Truth - PS3
Other than a few weird performance issues (like having to force my PS3 to output only in stereo) it's fantastic. Great presentation, great writing, good pacing, absolutely hysterically wrong... I love it so far, I've heard its kind of short but really does anyone need a 80 South Park game?

Portal 2 - PS3
I played through it on PC at launch, but I wanted to go through it again, such a great experience, the puzzles make you feel smart when you solve them, and some of them are real head scratchers. I also love how the plot gets turned on its head twice. No spoilers. Great sense of humour in this one as well.

[VanillaLucia]

At the moment, I've been playing:

Xbox 360: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
- While I have this on the Playstation 3 as well, there was a friend of mine who insisted I pick it up on the Xbox to help him alongside having someone to play with, though I'm playing here simply for the fun of it.

Playstation 3: Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown
- The character customization in this game is amusing and I've been toying with it alongside some siblings as well, but I'm actually not very good at this game.

Windows: NullpoMino
- Because there isn't a Tetris: The Grandmaster that's accessible for me to set up and to play through at the moment, this is the closest I can get.

[BulletMagnet]

Just finished Yakuza 4 on the PS3, the first in the series I've tried - a good deal of rough edges, but no game I've played dares to merge gritty (if sometimes nonsensical) crime drama and the uniquely Japanese brand of unapologetically goofy humor quite like it does. No way in heck I'm going to attempt 100% completion, but I mostly enjoyed what I played, and am glad to see 5 being localized, albeit digitally.

[iconoclast]

^ You should check out Yakuza 2. 4 has better/more refined gameplay, but I still think that 2 is easily the best in the series from a story standpoint. Ryuji Goda is the only antagonist that has ever felt like a true rival for Kiryu to me. I haven't played Kenzan, Ishin, or the PSP games, though.

[Ed Oscuro]

Although they're not ideal for a Rockmanesque, I think Dynamite's big sprites are more a victim of the stage and enemy design than the reverse.

Been thinking about this post a bit on and off a bit. Short response...I don't think you're wrong.

Longer response...I finally decided to get the lead out and look at it more systematically. A couple poor quality videos for reference: this one and this one.

- Thinking in terms of ratios, Dynamite Batman's game viewport only displays about 2/3 the height and width, in "world units," (i.e., 2/3 the amount of feet / meters) seen in a game using more "normal" sized characters (1). This leads to about 44% the gameplay area available (for movement and maneuvers especially).
- Using the same measurements in "world units" (i.e. normal movement and projectile speeds for something in the game world) at this larger sprite size leads to things getting across the screen in 2/3 of the time required if drawn smaller, while still moving at the same pace in relation to its size in "world units." Assuming the same distances in pixels, this gives you just 2/3 the normal amount of time to react - I think that works out to things moving 1/3 faster. So what worked at a smaller sprite size, while still "looking correct," suddenly is tougher. To make things more manageable means making them look too slow in many cases.

Another problem comes in the ability to create interesting enemy placement and ways to deal with them. The famous Axe + owl combo from Castlevania III's Mad Forest means (OG) little Rarfu's screen reach is maybe 2/3 of the screen vertically - jumps cover a bit less than 1/3 of the normal screen playfield (in terms of the very top of his head only, so realistically more like 1/4 to maybe even 1/5 of the screen can be reached, especially if just using the whip). Dynamite's decision to give Bats an upward attack is significant in this example, though I'm not sure it could be considered a good or bad thing. It does however potentially defuse many situations with overheads enemies, and that again probably leads to a reduced number of potential enemy formations.

Dynamite has a lot of things that fit in previous platformers, trying to operate within a world 2/3 smaller (from their perspective) - some enemies jump back and forth like enemies in Secret Ties, and CV1 Jumping Skeleton levels of refinement would probably be especially daunting (let alone tossing a Red Areemer in there).

The first stage bombardment is actually telegraphed - check out the video above, it's nearly as much time as that Returns strongman had to realize he was ticking away! - though it can be harder to deal with them due to the regular enemies. The things that are most difficult in Dynamite mostly fail due to being close in, and obviously they had to compensate for an enemy appearing very nearly at what would normally be just about an axe toss or even a whip strike away. A lot of things just weren't corrected in speed so that enemies had the chance to keep players at bay - so difficult things in this game include simple knife enemies, but also especially a lot of very fast-reacting traps and enemies - the snow stage's snownado wizards are one of the outstanding examples of this, using an attack that reaches across the screen very quickly to make up for the fact that they're otherwise really fragile.

I do agree it's cheap, but I'm not sure minor fixes would be enough to fix this kind of game. I think a complete rethink would be needed, and unfortunately the NES hardware limitations - which I haven't really talked about - seem to be just as daunting a challenge as the game design ones, and Dynamite Bats seems to compensate by limiting scrolling directions and map size severely (most maps are really just a collection of a handful - sometimes a small handful - of traps and enemies). All this definitely interferes with making such a game feel more acrobatic and natural at the level provided by the more traditional NES platformer, in large part because the very character's size means that he can move past scenery much faster, once again. Of course even the typical NES platformer is just as much a product of technical specifications - character movements, including the very high jumps seen in many games (even before thinking about Demon Sword / Fudo Myoo Den), are themselves notably influenced by the screen resolutions and size ratios of smaller characters made out of 8x16 or 8x8 sprites). I don't think it's impossible at all, but it would not be straightforward.

(1) Batman's sprite is about 48 pixels tall (maybe always a bit shorter), which means he's probably made out of 8x16 sprites three deep. That's at least six, and possibly as many as nine sprites out of the 64 available on the NES just to render one character's body (compared to Castlevania Simon, who's less than 32 pixels tall, so probably requires between 3-5 sprites). Then there's all the sprites used on the weapon effects. Of course, Dynamite's levels tend to be fully painted from top to bottom, where Castlevania and many other games often have big blank areas without any gameplay in them. Another game on my mind is the terrible Terminator game on NES - its sprites seem to be about halfway between classic Castlevania and Bats Dyna-bites, but I haven't counted pixels there. Its jumping size seems about right - in part the game doesn't hide a lot of the screen under a status bar. Of course, in classic Castlevania, the status bar is technically still part of the playfield, though it's not being used as such normally.

48 pixels tall is nearly a quarter of the "90% safe area" for NES graphics - about 216/224 pixels, after which information from the NES signal isn't visible.

SuperBigHuge Batman Kills Germans in '69 image courtesy of this thread.

[ACSeraph]

Game store was doing a half off sale so I picked up a rather large stack of new stuff to play. At the moment I'm playing:

Shin Hokuto Musou: Infinitely better than the first one, and I'm kind of amazed to play a Musou game that doesn't feel completely halfassed. Story is well done and very true to the source material instead of the rushed telling of things from the original. Really enjoying it so far, but probably wouldn't be as exciting for non-Hokuto fans.

Drag-on Dragoon 3: Never played the originals because I heard they were terrible, but the $5 price tag and pretty girl in a white dress covered from head to toe in blood was enough bait for me to bite. It's a serviceable game, I'm enjoying the simple story and dialogue, and all the violence. The combat itself is just decent though, like the average KT Musou game more or less. My only real complaint with it is that the graphics are really really rough for a Square game. Looks more like a Vita title than a PS3 one.

Diablo III - In highschool I lived for Diablo so I expected this to be totally life consuming. However, it would appear my tastes have changed since then and I'm finding it utterly mind numbing. There's enough fan service to tug at my nostalgia strings, but the atmosphere seems much weaker than the originals and the combat is somehow less interested. 15 years of hardcore action games has dulled my appreciation of this style greatly. I think this day in age, I want a more personal Diablo game, something more like Elder Scrolls in Diablo's violent disturbing world. They could actually produce a pretty scary game if they really tried.

Those are the 3 I've had time to try so far, but there's a lot more in the stack, including Umihara Kawase, Sayonara Kawase, Shinobi 3D, and some others. Looking forward to trying it all out.