ryu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 19, 2025 8:28 pm
So... I beat Silent Hill: Homecoming. It's more of a mixed bag than I expected since I had decent fun with the game.
Yeah, it's not a spectacular game, but it would've been a lot better with a few key tweaks to the story. I've ranted about it before. If the story hadn't insisted on trying very hard to cash in on Silent Hill 2 thematically (complete with dragging out Pyramid Head for laughable reasons), didn't constantly have characters seemingly die and vanish then reappear with no explanation, and had actual closure in the endings, you might have a decent experience overall. A lot of it felt really poorly executed, though, an attempt at meshing SH2's "IT'S SYMBOLIC~" inner discovery themes with SH1/3's cult focus that didn't blend because they didn't understand the source works they took inspiration from.
I find it especially odd you can't block while using guns, which means they're very much a full offense kind of option.
My biggest gripe with it these days is the on-rails gameplay of the dungeons. Sure the story sucks, but it's a videogame so it's not an obstacle to enjoying the game part. But it's true there was potential for a decent story in there somewhere.
blog - scores - collection Don't worry about it. You can travel from the Milky Way to Andromeda and back 1500 times before the sun explodes.
Thought I'd drop in with an opinion on the recent ARC Raiders wipe, its Expedition mode. A mode where you feed it loot to fill a meter to open another series of meters for more somewhat rarer loot until you fill 5 pages of meters in total, and for this you receive access to potentially 5 Skill Points based on how much cash you've amassed and loot value at the time of Expedition - where you send your Raider with all the loot and cash he needs to go outside of the Rust Belt, into far-away uncharted lands and stand a chance of survival. And in addition to the 3 skill points I managed to grab, Embark gave me a bonus one + a skin, a hat for Scrappy my black loot cock, a little icon + 12 extra spaces for loot.
I did it and I totally fucking regret it.
I had finally gotten to a place where I felt like a boss in the game with so many A+guns, access to so many mines and grenade type weapons, so many hatch keys (so many fucking hatch keys - I had something like 24) - I had gotten to a place where I wasn't insta-fucked by Hornets and I felt confident enough that if I brought a Hullcracker and a Deadline into a round, I'd be fine and get whatever I needed to get done - done. Like, I went through a phase of grinding all the larger ARC like Rocketeers, Leapers and Bastions to amass cash, for example. I think most people do that? The missions set it up that way.
Right now I hate it. I have literally nothing and won't see the benefit of those 12 extra spaces for some time yet, since I have to amass cash to upgrade it to max.
I'm dying to Hornets a lot because I have no weapons. When I wiped I had about 25 Anvils. I'm not crazy about the base weapons. I used to run an Anvil/Il Torente combo (6 round handcannon/pump shotgun). Going back to Ferros and Stitchers and having to use Extracts, feels like such a step backwards. I'm a mainly friendly player and find that if someone takes a few shots at you, that stripping them of their shield with a one shot from the Anvil and following with a quick pump gets them to back the fuck off mostly ending in a stalemate. I have 250hrs on this thing and only 30 kills, and all but 2 of them shot first, the other 2 tried to rob me. Getting camped at an Extract is starting to melt my head.
I don't think I'm gonna do this again. It just isn't worth it.
With just 2 hours left to go in this year, I finished Tales of Phantasia Cross Edition at exactly 2200, so that's going to be my last game played and cleared this year.
So... I was really curious to see if I still thought this is one of the best games in the series. Cross Edition has some problems, but overall I'm going to say that Phantasia really is that good. I won't bother ranking or grading these, but if I did, Phantasia easily goes in S-tier. This is (still) an excellent game, but I think it's going to be very difficult to go back to any other version after finishing Cross Edition. It's so interesting to replay this game and see all of the cool mechanics and game design choices that got dropped as the series progressed. Rune bottles, Cless and Arche getting ougi/magic through buying them or finding them instead of getting them through level up, the gigantic maze-like dungeons, and all of the other unique stuff from this game that got dropped over time is really cool to see. Having to actually equip the Sorcerer Ring to be able to use it sucks though, glad that's gone. I ended up with like 17500 Grade, but it only takes about 4000 or something like that to buy everything. Uh... yeah, Grade is broken in this. I didn't do everything in the game because I wanted to finish the game this year, so I ended up somewhat rushing through all of act 3 today and yesterday.
One of the funniest things in this game that went away in later games is the way the main story works. In most games, it goes like this:
Jade: "We need to go to (specific place) to do (specific thing)."
Luke: "Okay, let's go there and do what we need to do."
but in Phantasia it's more like
Klarth: "We need to figure out a way to fix Yggdrasil."
Cless: "Okay. Where do we go and what do we do when we get there?"
Klarth: "lol I don't fuckin' know dude let's just wander around literally the entire world talking to every single NPC we find until we get lucky enough to find someone who has some vague idea of what we should do."
lol. Game's like that a lot. It's kind of cool in a way, but it must have been a massive pain in the ass for people who didn't have internet access when it first released. It's light on story (but what is there is good) and heavy on dungeon crawling, and it's very quickly paced; I ran around doing various sidequests (of which there are thankfully not many!) for a while, but if you don't do that, it's very possible to finish the game in under 20 hours; this game is very short.
I gotta complain about Thor, though. Fuck Thor. This is one of the most annoying things I've ever seen. I must have intentionally tried to forget about it because HOLY FUCK do I hate that place. So basically you go in this room. It's got 8 doors and 8 chests. 7 of the chests are empty and 7 of the doors won't open. One randomly chosen chest has the key to the randomly chosen door, so you have to run around checking chests until you find the key, then you have to run around checking doors until you find the one that opens. Once it opens, the contents are random: you get the exit, a storage room with a single chest in it, or the computer room. Obviously, you only have a 1 in 3 chance of getting what you want, so you have to spend who knows how long running back and forth hoping you get the correct room. If not, fuck you, do it again and hope it's what you want, and have fun finding the correct chest and door because their positions are randomized. This room also is one of the only rooms in the game that has both random encounters and symbol encounters, so it's literally almost as annoying as they possibly could have made it. Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? The enemies are weak as hell, too, so it's not even hard, it's just impossibly annoying for no reason.
Dhaos is still one of the coolest dudes in the entire series. He probably literally has 5 minutes of screen time in total, but when he's there, it really counts. Rody... I know a lot of people complained about her and said she damages the game's story, but she's barely in the game and doesn't do anything noteworthy. I think the only reason she's even here is to justify her presence in Narikiri Dungeon X. Rody doesn't really make Phantasia worse, but she doesn't make it better. Worthless character.
I also remembered why I stopped using my PSP Go: there is a line across the horizontal axis. It got better since the last time I used it and wasn't there, but then it came back, so I played about 60% of the game on my PC monitor with a PS3 controller. It was cool to play it that way, but I still gotta get a new Go screen before they become expensive and/or impossible to obtain.
There are more things that I can and want to say about Phantasia in general and Cross Edition in particular, but I'll stop here. I bought Japanese PS4 Zestiria (along with Gravity Daze 2 limited edition) a few weeks ago and already played the first few hours of it, so now its time to continue Zestiria and finish that before Berseria's questionable rerelease in February.
AGermanArtist wrote: ↑Tue Dec 30, 2025 3:58 pm
Thought I'd drop in with an opinion on the recent ARC Raiders wipe, its Expedition mode. A mode where you feed it loot to fill a meter to open another series of meters for more somewhat rarer loot until you fill 5 pages of meters in total, and for this you receive access to potentially 5 Skill Points based on how much cash you've amassed and loot value at the time of Expedition - where you send your Raider with all the loot and cash he needs to go outside of the Rust Belt, into far-away uncharted lands and stand a chance of survival. And in addition to the 3 skill points I managed to grab, Embark gave me a bonus one + a skin, a hat for Scrappy my black loot cock, a little icon + 12 extra spaces for loot.
I did it and I totally fucking regret it.
I had finally gotten to a place where I felt like a boss in the game with so many A+guns, access to so many mines and grenade type weapons, so many hatch keys (so many fucking hatch keys - I had something like 24) - I had gotten to a place where I wasn't insta-fucked by Hornets and I felt confident enough that if I brought a Hullcracker and a Deadline into a round, I'd be fine and get whatever I needed to get done - done. Like, I went through a phase of grinding all the larger ARC like Rocketeers, Leapers and Bastions to amass cash, for example. I think most people do that? The missions set it up that way.
Right now I hate it. I have literally nothing and won't see the benefit of those 12 extra spaces for some time yet, since I have to amass cash to upgrade it to max.
I'm dying to Hornets a lot because I have no weapons. When I wiped I had about 25 Anvils. I'm not crazy about the base weapons. I used to run an Anvil/Il Torente combo (6 round handcannon/pump shotgun). Going back to Ferros and Stitchers and having to use Extracts, feels like such a step backwards. I'm a mainly friendly player and find that if someone takes a few shots at you, that stripping them of their shield with a one shot from the Anvil and following with a quick pump gets them to back the fuck off mostly ending in a stalemate. I have 250hrs on this thing and only 30 kills, and all but 2 of them shot first, the other 2 tried to rob me. Getting camped at an Extract is starting to melt my head.
I don't think I'm gonna do this again. It just isn't worth it.
Ah. The Anvil, what a great gun. Nothing says fuck off like an Anvil.
I'm playing roguelikes. I found a cool one called Shadowed that I'm messing with right now. It's a ninja roguelike! You pick your flavor of ninjer and you go. Enemies are yokai, spirits, zombie ashigaru, that kind of thing. The game also has some fun neutral/non-hostile encounters that create a little bit of rpg/adventure game atmosphere. Like, you can hold onto your pickled vegetables and give them to Kappa for some free items.
The game has surprisingly good controller support for Steam Deck, although I THINK a couple of functions are unmapped that I'll need to find and map. This strikes me as the kind of game BIL would like, as it's NINJA SCROLL X SAIGO NO NINDO X ROGUELIKE. It doesn't have a lot of hard action, but you can still murder demons with your katana.
The game is so Japanese that it actually booted in japanese for me with kanji everywhere and almost no English. The second time I booted it, it was in English suddenly with no explanation. I didn't see any region option anywhere so I guess the game just detects how much of a BAKA GAIJIN you are when you start it up.
The barrier to entry on systems and gameplay here is probably higher than Shiren but it services a similar niche imo. I didn't even mention how the "ninja" theme isn't skin-deep. You have actual stealth mechanics in this game and different classes are better or worse at stealth. Shinobi (class) is a good mix of stealthy + cutting fools up when they backtalk. But there are other classes like Iga Ninja and Kunoichi that specialize into other aspects of the game. You can take Ronin if you've had enough of sneaking and only want to kill everything.
Steven wrote: ↑Wed Dec 31, 2025 2:00 pm
[...] Tales of [...]
I briefly considered playing Vesperia again since my PS3 is set up right now. But I really don't have the time for it unfortunately.
Just finished Shadow Generations. This game is just wtf. Unbelievable how janky it plays. Guess it's a game you have to commit and play a lot to get the most out of, otherwise it's barely even mediocre.
blog - scores - collection Don't worry about it. You can travel from the Milky Way to Andromeda and back 1500 times before the sun explodes.
Steven wrote: ↑Wed Dec 31, 2025 2:00 pm
[...] Tales of [...]
I briefly considered playing Vesperia again since my PS3 is set up right now. But I really don't have the time for it unfortunately.
Oh boy, Vesperia. Don't play it on hard because all it really does is bloat enemy stats and make the game more annoying to play than it already is. Enemies don't get any cool new moves as far as I know, and on hard the enemies tend to all attack the player simultaneously, so you spend a lot of time running in circles to not die while the rest of your party takes care of everything. Works on bosses too! Yeah, don't play it on hard unless you like being annoyed by the game.
Played Zestiria a bit today... holy fuck this game is impossibly boring. Now I remember why I dropped it after about 2 hours the last time I played it. Every time I play it, the only thing I think about is how much I REALLY don't want to play it. There is literally nothing interesting here, and it feels really sluggish and bad to play because of the 30 FPS cap. ~36 hours later edit: I have a new opinion of this game. Not only is it boring, it's shit. Don't play this garbage. I will slog through it just for Berseria and then probably never play this crap again. I can't believe that Udo made such a shitty game after blessing the world with the radiant glory of the Tales of Destiny remake.
I also finally went to check out my Gravity Daze 2 LE and... it's factory sealed WTF? This was clearly labeled "Used" at Book Off and once I removed the plastic wrap that Book Off put on it, I found the rest of it is factory sealed. It looked to be in excellent condition, which is why I bought it, but to get a new copy is quite unexpected. People are asking for 7500 yen for this new on Amazon, but I got it for 2000. Hell yeah.
I am finally getting around to playing Ion Fury Aftershock.
Just cracking the surface, and so far I like. The difficulty is definitely following on from the end of the game proper. You face the most difficult enemies from Capital Offense during the course of the first level, and it doesn't give you a moment to catch your breath.
It gives me flashbacks to the first time I played Blood in a good way. Recommended if you like a challenge and not a lot of fluff.
I've been diving back into Street Fighter 6. I'm considering switching from arcade stick to a 8-Bitdo Sega Genesis six button pad. I've got years of practice on stick, but honestly I think some of my movement is still better on a Sega style D-Pad. I was playing some online matches with it, and was picking up on it pretty quick. It'll take a bit of re-training for some of the muscle memory on the buttons, but the D-Pad movement is quite crisp. I was pulling standing 360's as easily as I was on arcade stick, but also finding the double tap motions easier with a D-Pad, and I think the dragon punches are slightly faster as well since there's less physical movement.
If you are into playing with pad give the Betop C3 controller a look. It's honestly the best I've ever used for fighting games.
We here shall not rest until we have made a drawing-room of your shaft, and if you do not all finally go down to your doom in patent-leather shoes, then you shall not go at all.
Yo I hit platnum rank with Terry in Street Fighter 6. The mental stack in this game is so crazy, there's so much to be aware of and focus on during a match. But I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. The game doesn't feel like it moves quite as fast anymore. Terry is the first rushdown/combo character I've ever really tried to play in any fighting game (I always play wrestlers, zoners, or gimmick characters). It feels damn good having good pokes and not being so damn slow.
Playing Ghost Trick. So far I love it. Makes me wish that Shu Takumi took more chances with game development rather than just milking the Phoenix games. Don't get me wrong, I think that the world of gaming is better for his law driven visual novel adventures, but I don't really need like 10 of them.
Yikes. I love Minter’s games, but they seem to be getting increasingly worse at explaining themselves. Having gotten my head around it, there’s a strong core here, but this may be the closest yet to complete overload. The fixed camera means the rear of the play area can be a bit indistinct and obscured, but the chief annoyance is the colour strobing – when the entirety of the game as based on colouring in the stages, it’s not great design to constantly cycle colours, making it incredibly difficult to see where I have and haven’t covered. I’m also not sure that I’m keen on the tunnel levels – fun as they are, it’s been done before, comes across as Space Giraffe-lite, and I’d have preferred the focus to remain on the main game, or maybe throw these in every five levels. Still, I managed to sit there for a full 90 minutes in between other games several times this week, so it’s doing something right. Currently clearing the first ten levels on one credit.
Sega Rally (PS3)
Simply one of the greatest rally games of all-time IMO. Every track feels like it could have come straight from the original coin-ops, with enough memorable landmarks and corners to be almost instantly recognisable. The handling is weightier than the originals, but still snappy enough that is plays pretty much as a pure arcade game rather than leaning toward the sim side. The bumper cam is incredible, the feedback through the controller, deformable surfaces, and some incredible SFX make the racing feel really visceral, and the CPU opponents are no pushover. The AI can be frustrating – I’ve had some races where first place fires of from the start never to be seen ever after a perfect run, but they jostle between themselves and mess up enough to keep every race interesting start to finish. It’s bloody great and if you’ve never played it, you really should.
Marc wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 12:49 pm
Sega Rally (PS3)
Simply one of the greatest rally games of all-time IMO. Every track feels like it could have come straight from the original coin-ops, with enough memorable landmarks and corners to be almost instantly recognisable. The handling is weightier than the originals, but still snappy enough that is plays pretty much as a pure arcade game rather than leaning toward the sim side. The bumper cam is incredible, the feedback through the controller, deformable surfaces, and some incredible SFX make the racing feel really visceral, and the CPU opponents are no pushover. The AI can be frustrating – I’ve had some races where first place fires of from the start never to be seen ever after a perfect run, but they jostle between themselves and mess up enough to keep every race interesting start to finish. It’s bloody great and if you’ve never played it, you really should.
Do you mean Sega Rally Revo, or Sega Rally Online Arcade?
The rear gate is closed down
The way out is cut off
Marc wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 12:49 pm
Sega Rally (PS3)
Simply one of the greatest rally games of all-time IMO. Every track feels like it could have come straight from the original coin-ops, with enough memorable landmarks and corners to be almost instantly recognisable. The handling is weightier than the originals, but still snappy enough that is plays pretty much as a pure arcade game rather than leaning toward the sim side. The bumper cam is incredible, the feedback through the controller, deformable surfaces, and some incredible SFX make the racing feel really visceral, and the CPU opponents are no pushover. The AI can be frustrating – I’ve had some races where first place fires of from the start never to be seen ever after a perfect run, but they jostle between themselves and mess up enough to keep every race interesting start to finish. It’s bloody great and if you’ve never played it, you really should.
Do you mean Sega Rally Revo, or Sega Rally Online Arcade?
Revo, though the OA is also great,band actually has the original desert track.
I bought Tales of Arise on January 2... last year. Finally decided to play it after waffling for a few days since finishing Zestiria and... eh. This is a generic mainstream modern action game that happened to be shoved into the Tales series for some reason. Apparently this game literally started as a new IP or something and then they stuck the Tales name on it later and it really shows because it doesn't play like a Tales game at all. Where the fuck is my LMBS? Where the fuck is Udo? You know, the reasons that these games are good and fun and why I actually play them? They are not here. It is about how racism is bad, though, just like 60~70% of the rest of the series.
Game's acceptable as a generic action game, I guess. Graphics are weird and there are a lot of LOD oddities and pop-in due to ridiculously short draw distances. It kind of looks like they tried to do Valkyria Chronicles graphics but didn't know how and fucked it up but shipped it anyway. After a while I went into the options menu to turn the graphics up because I thought I messed up someplace and didn't have it at max settings, but it's at max settings and there is nothing that can be done to make it look not weird. Needs to be installed on your SSD to avoid audio stutter. I had it on my HDD and the audio stutter went away when I moved it to my SSD. Not the first time I've seen this happen, but it sucks because this game takes up almost 1/5 of my SSD's max capacity.
I was very tempted to play Berseria on PS4 so I didn't have to wait nearly 2 months to play it on PC, so I did play that again for an hour, but... nah.
Marc wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 12:49 pm
Sega Rally (PS3)
Simply one of the greatest rally games of all-time IMO. Every track feels like it could have come straight from the original coin-ops, with enough memorable landmarks and corners to be almost instantly recognisable. The handling is weightier than the originals, but still snappy enough that is plays pretty much as a pure arcade game rather than leaning toward the sim side. The bumper cam is incredible, the feedback through the controller, deformable surfaces, and some incredible SFX make the racing feel really visceral, and the CPU opponents are no pushover. The AI can be frustrating – I’ve had some races where first place fires of from the start never to be seen ever after a perfect run, but they jostle between themselves and mess up enough to keep every race interesting start to finish. It’s bloody great and if you’ve never played it, you really should.
Do you mean Sega Rally Revo, or Sega Rally Online Arcade?
Revo, though the OA is also great,band actually has the original desert track.
Big fan of Revo. The Sega Racing team were absorbed by Codemasters and you can see their work in Dirt 5. It has the same surface degradation mechanic.
There's a great 'unpack' version of Revo available for PC and it runs on integrated GPUs. I can PM a link if anyone wants to get it.
I-Robot (PS5)
Yikes. I love Minter’s games, but they seem to be getting increasingly worse at explaining themselves.
To be fair, I think this was a case of being a little too beholden to the original, which was infamously bad at explaining things. In fact, if I have a complaint, I kinda wish Minter would had taken the core concepts and just went completely nuts with everything (i.e. just go full-on Polybius with the tube shooter sections, instead of just a gussied-up version of the original), rather than chaining the entire thing to the '83 version
After playing 3 or 4 3D platformers back-to-back, I scratched that itch. Now I'm in the wrestling game mood. Been playing WCW/NWO Revenge, Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 and WWF No Mercy. Almost forgot about Persona 3 Re-Load. Put some time into it on my days off I had.
Prey is the closest analogue to a System Shock 3 we will ever get.
Bioshock was heavily consolized and lacking much of the depth of the SS2 character building, which Prey largely added back in. Other shit, like enemies being actually dangerous/scary and resources having to be managed, are present in Prey but not Bioshock.
Prey was also the last good Arkane game imo.
If you enjoy roguelite modes, Mooncrash is interesting. It's Prey 2017 gameplay but with randomization and diablo loot progression iirc.
Mixed feelings about it. While I enjoyed the story and the puzzle aspects, I felt like the rules of interaction were contrived.
What you can and cannot interact with in the environment is so heavily prescribed that it really took me out of the game. The main problem was a huge amount of inconsistency in what you can do. There are even items in the game that you can interact with for puzzle reasons, and then the ability to interact with them just disappears when it becomes convenient for the developer to do so. This creates a fairly frustrating experience when you never know if you can plan on making a move to advance in a puzzle or not.
Luckily (if you can say that), it's not that difficult of a game to solve, so getting through the basically unfair puzzles isn't too much of an issue. There's very few times in the game where you will actually be asked to think too much about how to proceed. If you have any experience at all playing puzzle games, the most difficulty you will have are with puzzles that simply ask you to do something especially tedius.
Regardless, it's a charming game, and it would be interesting if they made another one like it. Hopefully they learn a little bit from their first go round.
Hadn't played through Turtles in Time on SNES in a couple of years, so did that today (again, via bootleg, the original costs an arm and a leg nowadays). Final boss Shredder can fuck off.
Also, got a Packapunch RGB scart cables from Packapunch, and while I still cringe when I remember how much I spent on it (fucking German customs...), games look amazing on my CRT now.
BIL wrote: ↑Sun Jun 02, 2024 11:01 pm
Imagine a spilled cup of coffee totalling your dick and balls in one shot, sounds like the setup to a Death Wish sequel.
Obiwanshinobi wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 10:09 pm
Do you mean Sega Rally Revo, or Sega Rally Online Arcade?
Revo, though the OA is also great,band actually has the original desert track.
Big fan of Revo. The Sega Racing team were absorbed by Codemasters and you can see their work in Dirt 5. It has the same surface degradation mechanic.
There's a great 'unpack' version of Revo available for PC and it runs on integrated GPUs. I can PM a link if anyone wants to get it.
For AGermanArtist,
Please do provide a link to the "unpack" version of Sega Rally Revo PC version as I'd like to try it out.
Revo, though the OA is also great,band actually has the original desert track.
Big fan of Revo. The Sega Racing team were absorbed by Codemasters and you can see their work in Dirt 5. It has the same surface degradation mechanic.
There's a great 'unpack' version of Revo available for PC and it runs on integrated GPUs. I can PM a link if anyone wants to get it.
For AGermanArtist,
Please do provide a link to the "unpack" version of Sega Rally Revo PC version as I'd like to try it out.
Sima Tuna wrote: ↑Sat Jan 17, 2026 12:37 am
Prey is the closest analogue to a System Shock 3 we will ever get.
Bioshock was heavily consolized and lacking much of the depth of the SS2 character building, which Prey largely added back in. Other shit, like enemies being actually dangerous/scary and resources having to be managed, are present in Prey but not Bioshock.
Prey was also the last good Arkane game imo.
If you enjoy roguelite modes, Mooncrash is interesting. It's Prey 2017 gameplay but with randomization and diablo loot progression iirc.
Really felt like Mooncrash does not respect your time.
This strikes me as the kind of game BIL would like, as it's NINJA SCROLL X SAIGO NO NINDO X ROGUELIKE. It doesn't have a lot of hard action, but you can still murder demons with your katana. 
