shmups.system11.org

Lots of other great stuff to go for on GBA, though Minish Cap, Advance Wars, Metroid, Klonoa, Ninja Five-O, Golden Sun, Astro Boy, Mario & Luigi, or the Final Fantasy ports are all cool at the top of my head.

Yeah I loved Advance Wars and SRW on there. I have Golden Sun but it has a bum battery now. Metroid might be a nice option.

The original Rhythm Tengoku and the Wario Ware games are also good stuff. The original Wario Ware also has nice unlockables with ports of Dr. Mario (Dr. Wario), the Mario Paint Fly Swatter game, and the 70s arcade game Sheriff.

Panel de Pon got ported to GBA (released with Dr. Mario on one cart, as Puzzle League outside of Japan). Works a treat played in tate as well. Game & Watch Gallery Advance (aka 4) and Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced (US title) also keep me coming back to each (all the while Fire Emblem cart have laid fallow for months - just not my sort of experience at the moment).
Not that I'd exactly beaten any of the above.

Oh yes, Moto Racer Advance and F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, yay.

Panel de Pon looks appealing. Nice and short too.

Fire Emblem is totally my jam but I understand that srpgs are super niche and don't appeal to everyone. I'm really happy that Awakening saved the series basically, even if I wasn't a huge fan of that particular title.

In fact, Advance Wars (which I beat) was the first Japanese turn-based tactics game I took seriously*; it's just that I got Fire Emblem when I wasn't really doing this kind of gaming anymore (same with FTT Advance). I know those technically can be played in very brief sessions... only I'm not willing to start another such involved a game.
Almost as if duisgusing only the most rudimentary arcade experience as "involved", Catherine way, was the last route left for me to follow a video game story. Am I fed up with those things acting smart.

*) I used to hope Valkyria Chronicles will do the same for me, but when handheld titles don't, what a chance PS3 one has?

Back to my Etrian Odyssey V save, kinda forgot what I had to do lol. Still, very fun dungeon crawler.

Speaking of Advance Wars, Into the Breach, which just came out on PC, is excellent. Easily worth the $15.

The closest gameplay analogy I can make for this game is those chess puzzles they used to publish in newspapers where you had pre-arranged pieces and had one move to avoid checkmate, or find the fork, or pin white's queen, etc. It takes place on an 8x8 board, all attacks are deterministic with no RNG success rolls, but the constantly spawning random enemy swarms keep providing your three mechs with increasingly complicated positional puzzles to solve.

Production values are a tiny step forward from FTL.

Today [well, yesterday], I remembered that PPSSPP existed, so I could still go play all those PSP games I hadn't played since my PSP had gone on the fritz.
Mostly ended up playing Ridge Racer 2, deciding to do all the tours one-by-one instead of heading straight into time attack like I did before, and then fired up Project Diva Extend which feels like it has slight timing issues, but not remotely as bad as when I tried playing it in PPSSPP years ago. Really wish my PSP worked [alternatively, I wish I had a gigantic memory card for the Vita] so I could plop PSP games on it.

really, PSP emulation is shockingly smooth and impressive, although Outrun 2006 still has issues [missing water, glitchy shit appearing] -- but I should really look into getting the actual PC version of that
other than somewhat blurry text, games work really well

Any good compared to others?
As much as Etrian 1 ground me down, i do wanna try II. Ideal for lunch-break gaming I guess.
Monster hunter sure ain't!

monster hunter seems like it would be perfect lunch time material to me (having only really spent a decent amount of time with world). hunts take from 15-40 mins at the most and other than item load outs and eating there isn't much messing about you need to do before a mission.

Sorry Blinge, I'm hardly the person to ask, having only played a bit of II and III. If anything, you can choose to not draw the map's outlines, only special spots, doors and stairs. I know the charm of the game is drawing it, but I'm not that old to enjoy doing that for hours.

Yes, pretty much. If you can get your hands on a DS3 or 4, or even a DS2 with a USB adapter like me, you are set for some gaming goodness.

Honestly, of all the Etrian Odyssey games I've played (only the first 3 though), I found the first one to be vastly superior. The sequels try to do all this extra stuff which feels like objective improvements, but a lot of the appeal of the first game was exactly its simplistic straight forward nature.

I was jamming some Last Gladiators on Saturn. It had been a bit since I have been going to Necronomicon for my pinball fix for awhile now. LG is still fun but playing it reminded me of why I generally just play Necronomicon.

Also ran through RayStorm again last night a couple times. Bitchin'.

My full review of Into the Breach just went up at Caltrops, if you're interested.

Nice review. I'll definitely be getting that at some point. I like turn based strategy games and removing the randomness is an interesting idea.

Other than monster hunter I've been playing prey on ps4. I really suck at first person games and usually end up dropping them at some point, but so far I'm having fun with it. I'm mostly being a total wuss and dragging a turret around with me and trying to climb stuff with the goo gun.

I also recently got pilot wings on the super famicom which, believe it or not, I've never played before. It's quite surprising to me that a game which is basically just "oooh, look at the mode 7" would be fun. I had to look up wtf I was supposed to be doing on the hang glider levels but everything else so far has been pretty straight forward without the English.

Huhu, the sarcasm in that review's opener is fantastic!

I heard about the game but didn't really care about it, however the chess aspect seems very appealing. I recall you reviewing Knights in the Nighmare and also enjoying its chess-inspired aspects. If I really like KitN, will I enjoy Into The Breach?

...maybe? I mean ItB is pure turn-based strategy, there's no bullet-dodging. This animated gif pretty much gives a clear indication of the gameplay:

Yes, you should. It's never been rare/expensive (humble twelve years old PC game such as this), but is not to be reprinted nowadays, or published any other way. So I can see them disks getting rare at some point (when the last one of them finds its way to an owner who'd rather not let it go).

Finished all the "flower" levels in Mario 3D World, and decided to end it there; I was half-tempted to try to grab more stars/stamps/etc. to see if anything else unlocked, but the gameplay niggles would have undoubtedly driven me nuts, so I figured it'd be best to move along on a high-ish note. In terms of "content" or "structure" this is one of my favorite Marios, a shame the basics are gimped.

Also finally knuckled down and finished off Iconoclasts, which made two things clear: 1) This was very much a passion project, and 2) Yeah, its development cycle was VERY troubled. I can sort of get what he was going for, especially in terms of plot and themes, but it's obvious that he wasn't able to take it anywhere near as far as he wanted to; as you watch the cast list scroll by during the credits literally more than half of them are completely undeveloped "wait, where did I see that guy again?" characters who only appear once or twice. In similar fashion, the mixing in of "serious" story stuff comes off as a jarring Evangelion-esque "wow, that got dark" shift partway through rather than the smooth transition it was presumably intended to be. Gameplay-wise it's pretty solid overall, and I like how most tucked-away goodies can be found via creative application of abilities you have rather than backtracking once you've found a new one, but combat contains too many hard-to-read attacks to make the harder difficulties appeal to me much. Again, worth playing as it is, but it's tough not to wonder what could have been.

As of right now I've picked Tokyo Xanadu back up, and am clicking with it a bit better this time around, but yeah, its basic flow is VERY similar to Cold Steel's, as you'd better be willing to go to every single area and talk to every single person after every single plot point or else risk missing a bunch of stuff. It might be my imagination but the pace seems a little quicker here, and combat is somewhat rote but enjoyable once you get the hang of it, but GOD FUCKING DAMMIT when a large enemy (or, worse, a group of them) wreaks havoc with the camera or your incredibly vital lock-on decides to just randomly disappear despite having all of the "don't drop the damn lock-on, EVER" options in the menu switched ON, man can this thing turn frustrating quick. Nothing completely game-breaking yet, but it took awhile for Cold Steel to give me the final middle finger that broke the camel's back, so I guess we'll wait and see...

Cold Steel is a JRPG I actually finished. I'm pretty random with them though, so it really just depends on my mood. I'm in no hurry to play Cold Steel II and I might just wait for the PS4 "remaster". Otoh I need a PS3 game to play this year and I've already beat everything I really want to beat on that console. *checks price* Oh it's back up to $30 and I hadn't been biting at $20, meh.

I'm going to start Final Fantasy 4 on SNES today, I wonder if I will actually finish it.

Mischief Maker : Got it! While KitN's hybrid system is very fun, pure turn-based strategy is also fine with me, and the small map size seems to help you get straight to the point instead of wasting time moving all over the map to reach enemies.

About halfway through Yoshi's Island. This still has to be one of the most beautiful games Ninty ever put their name to, the character and incidental detail is mind-boggling. The soundtrack in insanely catch as well. Play wise the platforming itself is solid, well above every other example of the genre from that time, and up there with any Mario, but I'm still not sure about the collection aspect of it. Bums me out a realise I'm about to finish a level with one flower or coin missing, and a lot of the time there's no option of retracing your steps through the entirety of the level. I guess it would have boosted re-playability back in the day, but I can't see myself attempting to 100% the entire thing. It also makes me sad the Nintendo never explored this visual style again.

I believe Shigeru Miyamoto got pissed off that DKC was popular everywhere, but it was made by a bunch of filthy gaijins, so he decided to go against the tide and made Yoshi's Island.

The way I heard it (but this was back in the days when the game was just released, so a lot of information in video game magazines was probably bogus) was that Yoshi's Island was essentially completed, but when Donkey Kong Country came out Nintendo were so impressed with how good it looked that they felt Yoshi's Island would look extremely dated in comparison with its distinct 2D look, so they intentionally delayed the release to avoid direct competition with DKC.

The truth is, of course, that Yoshi's Island is one of the best looking games on the platform.

It does look fantastic.

I was going to start FFIV last night but I just played Mario 3 and Yoshi's Island instead.

Haha. Funny thing is only one of those games looks dated now, and it isn't Yoshi's Island.

Agreed.
I wonder if anyone else at the time thought about how 3D would evolve over time, and thus making older stuff look like shit, and how 2D would never be affected as much.

Yeah, prerendered 3D really doesn't look too nice at a low resolution, but everything considered, I think DKC pulled it off nicely, moreso DKC2 though, I think that game still looks pretty good.

Killer Instinct for SNES though...