What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[it290]

The Oracles games are some of the best in the franchise, IMO. The data-sharing feature between games was very cool too.

[LordHypnos]

The Oracles games are some of the best in the franchise, IMO. The data-sharing feature between games was very cool too.

Sadly I don't have anyone to do data sharing with

I actually do have one friend who I might be able to convince to, but it would probably be complicated since neither of us has a GBC, and I don't think a 3DS VC inject would support linking. Could technically do it on emulator on PC, but that would be harder to convince my friend to do, since they prefer playing on a handheld (I do to, but I am tech savvy enough to move save files around).

In any case, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only person who was impressed by OoS.

EDIT: OoS not OaS

[it290]

Ah yeah, you can share rings with other users, but what I was referring to was the ability to transfer them between games!

[Sweatlord_STG]

I made a video to spark someone's interest in Doom, because this WAD I found is so damn cool. Might as well leave it here:

https://youtu.be/9PmhREeqLdY

[Axelay]

Thanks for that rundown, v2. I dunno about Xanadu Next, but your post definitely reminded me that I've got to get back to Faxanadu at the next earliest opportunity: I remember enjoying my brief rental of it back as a wee waitress, but it absolutely flummoxed kid me and I want to see if I can appreciate it better three decades later.


As for me, I've been spending a silly amount of time with ballisticNG lately.

I got a hold of a PSX sometime around the death of the Dreamcast, so way late; and while I never spent a long time on the OG Wipeouts, Messij is branded right on my brain as the quintessential EDM/techno/whatever (because I'm garbage when it comes to musical taxonomy). However it's classified, it and Wipeout's aesthetics are what come to mind whenever anyone mentions the 32-bit era. Postcard perfect, "this is how rad this period in time was". So... may as well be starting bng afresh, despite having already formed both an image and an affection for its spiritual predecessors.

There are a bewildering amount of variables at play in this game, and while that definitely makes it difficult to acclimate to initially, it is 100% the game's greatest strength. Right from the outset, you have your vehicle and track selection, like every other racing game in existence. As your knowledge of each track improves, you'll obviously be in a better position to exploit the strengths or account for the weaknesses of your ship (higher acceleration, less responsive cornering, etc., etc.) and the relative differences of your opponents.

There's also a significant risk/reward system whereby your afterburner (turbo) is also tied to your shield/ship health - you *can* squeeze every last drop out of it, but that leaves you vulnerable to a race-ending crash if you smash into the trackside walls, or to be picked off by the rival crafts' weapons. The weapons, from my limited knowledge, appear to be a kitchen sink of everything that appeared in the OG PSX Wipeouts: rapid-fire cannons that deal chip damage and can slightly slow enemy craft; targeted missiles with nearby lock-on capabilities that can be frustrating to make use of through twisting chicanes at 700kmph; and "blue shell" drones that jump to the front of the queue and ruin the leader's day, among others.

Compounding all that, however, is the "pitch" or vertical handling: almost all tracks will have some subtle (and not so subtle) elevation changes that can drastically slow you down if you don't angle the nose of your craft up or down accordingly. Sometimes it'll be a series of motorcross-style humps; sometimes it'll be the grade of a downward-sloping curve that stretches across a significant portion of the circuit; sometimes it'll straight up be a futuristic, anti-gravity pothole, because fuck you.

And that's just the foundational stuff - tying it together is the events themselves. Every tournament starts with a nice, shallow two lap introduction to the course at the lowest class (think Mario Kart's 50cc/100cc/150cc progression). But then the next event might have you performing a time trial with a mandated ship; or an elimination race where last place in each lap spontaneously combusts; or a combat scenario where dealing damage is the only priority and your afterburner is replaced by a hilariously improbable instant 180-degree turn. Or perhaps it'll be the logical endpoint of time trials, Survival: a mode where your ship accelerates exponentially and you simply complete laps until your meatbrain can't keep up with the necessary reaction times required to make formerly basic turns (also, all textures have been turned off to give the track/backdrop a wireframe look, and all billboards have been replaced by graphic equalisers to accentuate the banging choons). Or maybe it'll be a variation on Survival where the goal is to hit turbo chevrons dotted around the circuit, and convert the accumulated engine power to turbo boosts that simultaneously drop an energy-draining barrier on track.

This is just a sample of the kind of events you'll face, and the best thing about ballisticNG is that it not just encourages you to engage with it, but mandates it through the campaign mode. These different types of races/challenges are not shunted off to a submenu at the title screen - they're each part of mastering as much of one vehicle, or as many vehicles as you possibly can. Some ships are going to excel at the combat side of gameplay, and can happily sit at the back of the pack and just pick opponents off; but come "pure" races with no weapon pick-up pads, they just might be shit out of luck. Do you switch to another ship and become a jack of all trades, or try and brute force it with your favourite-looking craft?

There is a colossal amount of moving parts here, and while the racing can be very pinball-like initially (careening off of walls until you explode), that just means there is a huge amount of system mastery to acclimatise to: something that does indeed feel very zen when it all clicks. Until you reach the higher classes, which require genuine fighter pilot reaction speeds - fucking nightmare fuel bad game 2/10 kill yourselves devs.

I haven't even touched on the 5 hours of original dnb/EDM produced for the soundtrack, nor the loving homages/rip-offs of the aesthetics and physics models from across Wipeout's history, nor the fact that the game and its DLC are dirt cheap and it's still receiving significant updates many years after release.

Wipeout may not be everyone's bag - they might prefer the racer-based personalities of F-Zero, or they might not like the floaty feel of anti-grav racers in general. But there's so much to unpack with ballisticNG that it's hard not to recommend to people that like going fast in general.

Reading about your experience is like receiving a postcard from a thrilling adventure—each detail paints a vivid snapshot of the game, from the intense races to the music and track design. Just like a postcard captures a moment to remember, mastering each track in ballisticNG lets you collect these moments of speed and skill to revisit again and again.

[Lemnear]

Playing Phantom Spark. It's basically Trackmania but with a very zen focus and better art style. Granted, not something meant for mods, but that's never been a thing that bothered me for a game. I've been in a mood for navigating circuits following all this Mario Kart buzz so I grabbed this. Seems to have been a great purchase. Having a lot of fun. I like the consistent theme of ardent self improvement the demigod characters push on you.

I tried Splitgate 2, the gunplay is really Bungie-like, the design is nice too (Warframe x Wipeout) ...but the main mechanic of the game, the portals, is totally superfluous, there is no real way to use them if not as a sort of teleport (and it wouldn't even be a novelty), the jumps you can do through portals are few, the fact that you can't shoot them everywhere like in Portal is absolutely limiting...too bad, I'll try it again but I thought it had "something more"...

I disagree with this highly. You can use portals to get jumps on people in a lot of crafty ways and they can be used to maintain speed. But you really have to learn maps intensely. Requiring a surface is limiting but in a good way that makes you pick battles smarter and keeps the game from feeling totally random and impossible.
If you could just place portals literally anywhere, it'd be a complete nightmare as you can't exactly account for someone just placing them in some wildly obscure position and just sniping you in a manner you legit could never anticipate or know how to be wary of in the future. They'd have to put some other bullshit limit on the portals that would just kill the pacing I feel. That or the maps would have to be constrained in really unfun ways. I think having clearly defined surfaces in specific locations is the smarter compromise for this sort of game. I'd rather the game also not overemphasize them as the only way to outsmart opponents but something supplementary to expand your skill and map knowledge.

I tried Splitgate 2 again and... no, I stand by my impressions. It feels like the entire portal mechanic is an extra layer slapped onto Halo and not a fully integrated mechanic into the gameplay/gunplay. It needs a good single-player campaign to let the core mechanics shine (and it could very well have one, and be stellar).
The Finals is currently the best modern FPS I've played since Titanfall 2, where every game mechanic is integral to the gameplay and not an extra, and it has all the tactical depth of a Battlefield (after all, they're Ex-Dice).
Now if only Epic Games had completed UT4 instead of focusing on the store and Fortnite, maybe...it's also true that the list of FPS games I've played competitively is very bizarre... UT, UT3, TF2, Lost Planet 2 which was really underrated, Crysis 2, BF3, BFBC, BF1943 which in its simplicity was exceptional, the first Destiny, then the void... up to Titanfall 2 and then The Finals.