What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Leandro]

Just finished Order of Ecclesia... Wow, what a game... Loved the difficulty of everything and when Tower of Dolls music started playing I got x68k feelings

[Stevens]

Super Turbo and V

[Ed Oscuro]

Screwed around with Mini Ninjas - decent discounts on Thief and RotTR, but not quite enough for me. Thankfully, MN was just $2.50 and so I got to satiate my curiosity. I played a Mini Ninjas demo a long while ago, and was kinda taken by the pleasant enough graphics and searching out stuff. Can't say I'm into it now, though. It's full of big and mostly featureless places. Also, obnoxious fake "wise old chinese man" accents and Cantonese-style music / drums: What the fuck is this doing in a game about ninja? :/ Many Japanese ninja games seem pretty loose with the mythology but IO is hardly playing it straight. As for the rest, there's a few gameplay ideas, which fit into the categories "out of place" or "not really critical." Maybe more variety in stuff will show some hidden brilliance in attacks, and maybe the tutorial level is extra obnoxious, but the entire game design seems completely paint-by-numbers here. That's what I was expecting, but big stretches of running around through same-y grass and canyons on a pointless collectathon hammers it in.

I'm also screwing around a bit with PAL Ghosthunter via PCSX2; I want to test to see which aspect ratio gives the best detail. I know how to set the aspect ratios up in the emulator, but does anybody have hints for in-game? It seems like quitting out of the game and changing the resolution type to 4:3 doesn't do anything; on loading a game nothing changes, and when I get back to the menu it's back to 16:9. I might just stick with 16:9 for the sake of extended FOV but I think that it might be hor- style, i.e., top and bottom cut off, 4:3 stretched.

[IrishNinja]

Yakuza 5, and loving the balls off it, like usual. i took some time off after 0 got delayed, back in it now!

after this its either Dragon Force or Shining Force III, not sure which yet

[Blinge]

So I tried the much hyped fangame - Pokemon Uranium. It's.. alright, I guess. There's been no time for story to develop yet because it's a pokemon game, but I was hoping this would be where it differs from the usual pokey production line. There's been hints of things happening due to radiation leaks n stuff.
I thought I was done with pokeymen having only played Blue and HeartGold, but I grabbed this because 'lol get it while you can! nintendo police on their way!'
But there's abysmal framedrop and all sorts of annoying shit like the window size resetting every time I run the thing; on my PC that runs Skyrim smoothly on max settings. None of the 'fixes' on their forum work so, I guess we're done here.

Otherwise:
Castlevania Bloodlines yeyy

Monster Hunter P3rd - 7* quests, aiming for a high rank lightning sword and evasion gear to challenge Deviljho. There's also a monster called Diablos... what next, Akumarex??

King's Field III
Slower start than the others but it's starting to pick up.

[Squire Grooktook]

Dungeon Fighter Online

I gave this one a shot nearly...8 years ago when it was new. I enjoyed it, but other games sidetracked me. Now that I have a new appreciation for beat em ups, and now that its recently surfaced on Steam, I thought I'd look into it some more.

So far its pretty fun. I like the idea of having customizable fighting game style inputs all the moves you unlock. What really makes the game for me, however, is the combination of cooldowns and the huge aresenal of specials you eventually gain. Normally, I despise cooldowns. But here, it gives the game a unique rythum and gives you an excuse to put your whole toybox of flashy kung fu powers to work (even the lesser ones, which in any other game would simply not be used) using dexterous fighting game inputs. Of course, I ultimately prefer a smaller arsenal of swiss army tools in my combat engines, but this is a really nice change of pace.

Challenge seems to be ramping up a bit better (though still slow) compared to some other online action games I've played (I love PSO2 but daaaayuuuuum). Hopefully it'll continue rising.


Furi

Feels like watching a killer sci-fantasy acid trip cyber-ninja anime-movie fused to an explosive Treasure-style hack and slash bullet hell hybrid boss rush extravaganza. It's fucking great.

The biggest complaint I'd offer about the game is that the combat is very "on rails". I mostly mean this in terms of enemy vulnerability: the game won't let you hit them until it decides its time for you to hit them, and they'll arbitrarily block/evade every single attack until its time to parry and counter. If it was me, I'd make the combat a little more organic and freeform. You do have some options in terms of speeding along the rails faster via charge attacks, careful aim, and speedy counters.

I do enjoy the combat immensely though. I'd say the heart of it is the constant flux of exchanging bullets and slashes as you quickly move in and out of range of the enemies. This is where you have the most options and where the game flows and feels the best. The actual melee only duels during the battle are still fun if thoughtless, however. Best thought of as short reflex/rhythm minigames to give some variety and drama to the proceedings. And on that note I think they work wonderfully.

I wasn't really expecting myself to enjoy the story and cutscenes as much as I am. I find them as much fun as the game itself. Some minor flaws aside, I think this is a game I'll be revisiting throughout the years as part of my favorites library. This is basically the game I've wanted to play since I was 10. Even the way the exaggerated (as consequence of the birds eye camera) melee animations and the way they instantly zip player and enemy alike across the screen remind me of 10 year old me's dramatic lego-men duels, heh. woosh, kaching, pew pew

[atheistgod1999]

I was taking a break from Demon's Souls and playing more Crazy Taxi in arcade mode with maxed difficulty and minimized time settings. I was rapidly crazy dashing which amplified every issue with the physics: bouncing up to ~10 feet in the air, doing a sharp 180 without losing momentum after hitting a truck from behind, taking a sharp 90 degree turn straight into a wall or the ocean for no apparent reason, "grinding" between the ground and a wall, etc.

[Obscura]

Giving the GC version of Twilight Princess a spin.

Good god, up to this point (just finished the forest temple), TP is unbelievably dull. Total "Ocarina by numbers".

[Mortificator]

Various Warhammer fantasy and 40K video games. In the past two years, there've been a ridiculous 15 games made, most of them garbage.

[Durandal]

I just finished playing Aria of Sorrow, and it was pretty cool

Spoiler

I personally consider Aria to be the best out of the GBA IGAvania games, though I don't know whether I should call it one of the best GBA games. After defeating Chaos I was left with a feeling of 'that was pretty cool', though not a feeling as if I just finished playing a one-in-a-lifetime masterpiece. Out of all the GBAvanias, Aria is certainly the most refined game in terms of controls, graphics, gameplay, sound, and almost everything. While it unfortunately doesn't have the more classic level layouts that CotM had, or the potential in variation and replay value of CotM, or the big-ass toybox of SotN, it does manage to strike a neat balance between them. In the end I don't think that Aria manages to really excel at one of those things, but the overall well-rounded package and execution is very good, even if Aria doesn't do anything outrageously new. It doesn't borrow the best of the rest, but not the worst either. Sort of like Thunder Force IV, I suppose.

From a graphical standpoint, Aria is a step up from HoD technically and direction-wise. The animations look smooth without being overdone, the color palette is actually coherent now, and the backgrounds manage to look good without assaulting my eyes. The castle is actually dark as one would expect from an evil overlord's castle, but there is still sufficient variety to be found from kung-fu maids to floating towers. The music doesn't sound completely offensive this time around, though aside from a few themes and the MMX-sounding guitar samples, still manages to be forgettable. But the sound design is fucking ace, everything sounds satisfying as it should.

The room layouts still have a ton of boring monster hallways while lacking the cooler enemy types from CotM, but unlike HoD there was an actual attempt made to make some rooms challenging, through the use of hazards or actual decent enemy placement for once. It certainly comes close to CotM. The progression this time around is still streamlined so you don't get lost easily, and (as a result) less reliant on required ability blocks. It's not as open as HoD was, but I think a more streamlined approach allowed the developers to place more effort into the design of individual rooms rather than having to waste tons of placeholder rooms for the sake of easy backtracking. The secrets in Aria are less reliant on whipping all walls until they break or HoD's hints, and require exploration (as it should). Though some can only be obtained with certain souls, which may necessitate further grinding to get that soul if you want that secret.

The controls are smoooooooooth and refreshing from Juiced's shitty air control. You don't have any whips to begin with (whip sword doesn't count) so you can slice and dice 'em SotN-style without having to worry about the Belmont rigidity. You can now control your character when attacking mid-air, and jumping in general feels good. Rather than Juste's universal dashing, you now have your classic SotN backstepping. This time around you can cancel an attack into a backstep, but you can't backstepspam as a means of going fast anymore. Sliding and jump attacks are present, but unfortunately they don't stack with your attack power. You can now Long Jump an infinite amount of times, which seems kind of redundant as you get the ability shortly after the Giant Bat soul which lets you fly anywhere. There's still no CotM jumping secrets, either.

This time around, you get souls, and you can equip three souls of three different categories at a time. You get a Bullet soul which acts like your subweapons, a Guardian soul which acts like a Familiar, and an Enchanted soul which provides some kind of passive bonus. There's also your usual Ability souls which are always active (unless toggled) and act as Relics from previous games. Each enemy in the game has a soul which can be dropped randomly upon death. This can range from HP leech of Succubi, to summoning a Fleaman to your side from Fleaman souls. You don't have any subweapons this time around, and using souls depends on your MP rather than hearts. Hearts in this game only function as bonus mana pickups, much as it should've been in HoD. MP on its own regenerates not too fast, so whipping candles for hearts is still necessary if you use your souls often. There's a great variety in useable souls, and plot-necessary souls are given to you through breaking certain lanterns. It's not as varied as DSS, but not as limited as Spellbooks.
Souls of weaker enemy types do not stack in power with your level as spells did in HoD, and I think this is a good thing. Rather than sticking to one useful soul for the rest of your playthrough, you'll have to mix things up a little. You can collect more than one of the same soul, but this doesn't really do anything. Apparently souls become stronger only in Dawn of Sorrow if you stack multiple souls of the same name. Coincidentally, this also makes palette swap-enemies more useful, as their souls are usually a stronger variation of the original, with a higher MP cost of course. So you can still hope coming across a better version of that same soul you liked so much (or if you grind hard). Though this also depends on how often you'll be seeing that one enemy type. Whether the drop rate has been adjusted for that, I do not know.

One thing about the Tactical Soul System is that some souls could have just as well been integrated in Soma's general moveset or Ability Souls, rather than having to switch certain kinds of souls all the time. For example, there are Enchanted Souls which let you deflect attacks or recover a bit of your lost health if you jump when hit, but I don't see any reason why these couldn't have been bonus Ability souls, as flat stat bonuses tend to be more useful than situational abilities. The constant soul switching also becomes painful when swimming, as you need to switch between Undine and Skula all the time to walk underwater or walk ON water. If you could create your own sets of souls and switch between them real-time, this wouldn't have been as much of a problem. Additionally, around half of the souls are just plain useless compared to the rest. I'm not talking about the non-existent damage scaling, but the uses of said souls. Flying Armor is just there for some jumping puzzles, throwing skeleton bones is fairly useless, and throwing a basic fireball.

The idea for Aria's replay value is getting to (possibly) play around with new souls on each playthrough based on their random drop chance, which holds true to some extent, though I don't like the idea of obtaining souls through RNG. Some souls like Legion's soul can only be obtained if you destroy all of its parts. Rather than praying to RNGesus, I was hoping to see more ways of obtaining abilities through performing certain feats or challenges, like killing an enemy in a certain way. Or alternatively, fusing souls you don't need into more powerful souls SMT-style. That may result in being able to obtain all souls in one playthrough, but I'd say a completionist walkthrough would be much more preferable than having to grind. There is a ring which increases the chance for soul drops, but it's so ridiculously expensive that I have no idea where you'd get the money for it in one playthrough without further excessive grinding. Gear drops don't rely on RNG for the most part, and the best are usually hidden in all kinds of places (why did MY sword have to be relegated to a Giant Skeleton drop?!). You can use your money to buy some better gear from Hammer's shop, but the best stuff is still found through exploration as it should be.

You have your swinging weapons, you have your stabbing weapons, you have spears, you have gloves, and so on. There's even pistols. Swinging weapons hit everything in a 45 degree angle in front of you. Stabbing weapons are fast and have decent reach. Spears are slower, but have long reach. However, because of the jumping trick with stabbing weapons, (landing when attacking mid-air immediately resets you to a neutral stance and allows you to attack again by bypassing the recovery frames) it will mostly feel like stabbing weapons are the most effective ones. Unfortunately, most of the weapons you encounter are either a swinging or stabbing weapon, so other categories feel kind of left out. There's also elemental damage involved, but thankfully not to the extent of HoD.

The bosses in this game are okay. Most of them are fairly inventive, though most of them are also fairly easy. Chaos just looks cool. I feel most of them tend to be more bulletspongy than necessary, and end up turning the fight into an endurance match rather than a test of skill and wit. The entire game is still somewhat easy. Not as BORING as HoD, but not quite challenging as CotM either.

So, yeah. I had a good time, but Aria kind of left me confused. It doesn't have the potential of CotM, nor is it as boring as HoD was. Yet it manages to outclass both of them purely because of how refined it is. So I guess execution is the most important element of a game. Yet I don't see why anyone would put this game in their Top 10 GBA list, as a whole it just lacks that special edge, or ironically, a soul. Overall it's good, but not memorably good, if that makes sense. I can't really think of a defining factor which one would use to convince others to play Aria. Everything about Aria is solid, moreso than its predecessors, but Aria lacks something which makes it stand out from the rest. SotN has fucktons of content and weird shit even if it isn't balanced in the slightest. CotM attempted to merge Classicvania and IGAvania stage design. HoD was a tech demo. Aria is... good? Though I guess that's a byproduct of being part of a franchise with seven identical IGAvanias.

[null1024]

grinding" between the ground and a wall, etc.

if there's one thing I wish wouldn't happen, it's this
You get a massive tip bonus, which makes me wonder if it's an actual feature [it's present in every port], but breaking out of it is murder on the clock.

Who are you driving with? Gus helps out a fair bit with traffic collisions [other than the biggest trucks/busses, he plows through everyone], but he amplifies a lot of the weirdness [which is consistent, but it's consistently weird] since he goes faster and holds onto his momentum more than the others.

also, setting traffic to max sounds like a nightmare

[atheistgod1999]

Who are you driving with?

I was playing as Axel. I just got a Class B license with him on those settings. Getting better at it.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Have you completed "driving lessons", or whatever they're called? I'm not done with them (prevents me from getting into Arcade, as I don't like it when my grip on the game's inherent techniques is not firm).

[trap15]

That is Crazy Box.

[rugdoctor]

Silent Dragon, god it sucks but the characters are quite colourful.

[atheistgod1999]

Yes, I did the Crazy Box missions.

[atheistgod1999]

Back to Demon's Souls. I hope the game gets better after the second part of the mine level. That is the most tedious fucking thing I've ever played due to those giant bug things that take ~500 hits to kill.

[Blinge]

You only have to kill one of them to progress.

use poison, or the baby's nail you might've picked up from 3-1

I assume you didn't beat the boss cause you'd be splurging about it.

[Immryr]

which one do you have to kill? i don't remember any that you can't just run past.


i'm quite surprised to say that the only game i've been playing is puzzle and dragons. shits addictive. the whole team building side of it has really drawn me in, although it does feel pretty grindy. trying to skill up your cards in particular is frustrating.

[Blinge]

I'm pretty sure one's fat ass stops you getting through the tunnels before the end. I can't remember if you can bypass it by going through the lava room tho.
Not the one you can misdirect and run through the adjacent tunnel

[Immryr]

you could well be right. my memory is a little shakey.

[Shoryukev]

Streets of Rage 3 - Genesis

I always played #2 as a kid, I missed out on #3 when it first came out. I had a friend in college that had #3, and we played beat-em-ups when there was no parties going on and made drinking games out of them. Usually it was drink when you die or use a special move, and take a shot after each boss LOL. My head hurts less in the morning playing these games as a (tiny bit more) mature adult.

[Durandal]

Playing the original Metroid for the NES

this one has a brutal difficulty curve, considering whenever you die you only start with 30 EN. I'm not a huge fan of having to kill everything for EN as there are no save rooms, though once you get a few energy tanks and some missiles it becomes fairly possible to sustain yourself.
There is a distinct pattern for each kind of room, like a vertical climb that goes on for too long or having to constantly jump between one-block wide platforms hovering above lava. Sometimes the layouts get mixed up with some unique obstacles, though those are few and far between. All enemy types in the game feeling like a palette swap in each new area doesn't help either. The Morph Ball itself is strangely underutilized, being used mostly for bombing passages.

Hidden blocks are found by shooting and bombing every block until something disappears. Sometimes this is made obvious by rooms that seemingly go nowhere or sudden huge walls, sometimes not so much (FAKE LAVA?!?!). I wish someone also told me beforehand that beams do not stack. The Ice Beam does feel as if it only does half damage because of the freeze effect, but it lends itself much more to exploration than the Wave Beam does, thanks to the brilliant idea of freezing enemies to use them as stepping stones. Maybe that was an intentional decision, to have one beam upgrade be more suitable for the explorers and the other for shooters, but with games as old as these you can never tell what went on in the developer's head behind certain design choices. Why do you need to shoot five missiles instead of one to open a red door? We will never know. (Interestingly enough, I only found that out in my first attempt of playing Super Metroid by just shooting all my missiles in a fit of rage at a red door)

The music is also damn good, going for such an atmospheric soundtrack in a NES game must've been revolutionary at the time. Kraid's Lair <3

[ZacharyB]

I think the repeating, long rooms in Metroid have to do with the way it's coded. Being such an early title, I don't think they had a lot of cart space to work with, so a room "block" was often reused to make the room longer. This space-saving can also be found in Metroid II, where reusing room data with different tile data ended up allowing for the accidental, sensational "Secret Worlds".

[atheistgod1999]

You only have to kill one of them to progress.

use poison, or the baby's nail you might've picked up from 3-1

I assume you didn't beat the boss cause you'd be splurging about it.

Where do I get poison? Should I get the poison cloud, or are spells bought with demon's souls only one-time uses?

[BrianC]

I think the repeating, long rooms in Metroid have to do with the way it's coded. Being such an early title, I don't think they had a lot of cart space to work with, so a room "block" was often reused to make the room longer.

Probably still the same issue, but keep in mind that Metroid was originally a disk game. Some of the music is better on FDS, as well.

[Ed Oscuro]

Metroid is originally a disk game. The lower amount of detail allows things to fit in RAM, and the doors allow the next area to be loaded in during the famous door transitions (except when you trick the game, and then you get zero world type stuff).

[null1024]

I think the repeating, long rooms in Metroid have to do with the way it's coded. Being such an early title, I don't think they had a lot of cart space to work with, so a room "block" was often reused to make the room longer. This space-saving can also be found in Metroid II, where reusing room data with different tile data ended up allowing for the accidental, sensational "Secret Worlds".

That's exactly how Metroid 1's rooms are laid out. It's a big-ass grid made up of "room tiles", which allowed the game to have a relatively large map while not taking up that much space.

here's the map[spoilers, obviously], there's only a handful of unique "room tiles", most of the rest are liberally reused, often just repeated right next to themselves

[WelshMegalodon]

This is probably well-known, but it's generally recommended that you skip the Wave Beam. It's useless against bosses, and your bombs compensate for your inability to shoot downwards. My guess that it was intended as a novelty item for completionists.

The morph ball is quite useful when used in conjunction with the bomb jump, as it allows Samus to take the shorter route out of Kraid's room after defeating him. You can also jump immediately after unmorphing in midair to gain some extra height, or to make long jumps easier. (This is especially useful for reaching Kraid quickly or collecting that one tank in Ridley's Lair - you all know which one).

The reason for requiring five missiles per door is simple - the game wants you to explore and find as many more as possible. This is made clear from the very beginning - the first red door forces you to spend all of the missiles obtained from your first expansion, leaving you to either farm for missiles or look around for more expansions. And even with the bonus you get from taking out Kraid and Ridley, you'll want at least three or four expansions' worth to avoid relying on exceptional luck with missile drops. Looking back, it's a rather clever way of encouraging exploration.

There are eight energy tanks in the game and most of them are reasonably close to an elevator or a boss (the obvious exception being the single tank in Norfair). Some recommend learning the locations of the tanks beforehand and only collecting them after a respawn. In any case, save sparingly - it's clear that the game lends itself to longer play sessions.

You might have a better time with the game's difficulty curve if you opt to collect the Varia Suit early. Glitch abuse is the fastest and easiest way to do this, but you probably already knew that.

[gameoverDude]

New Zero Team- A beat-em-up from someone you'd be least likely to think of in the genre, Seibu. Surprisingly holds its own against Konami's entries in the genre and even some of Capcom's. You don't really find melee weapons, but there are some good throwables and rocket launchers out there.

Dishonored- Finished it with Low Chaos, and then the Knife of Dunwall DLC in Low Chaos also. Not a bad stealth game, and I'm watching for the sequel.

Final Fight 2 on SNES is definitely better than the SNES FF1, but I'd like to see Capcom give M2 a shot at making a CPS-ified version with arcade difficulty (around 8 enemies at once on screen instead of 3). At least it's good that they had 3 playable characters and brought Rolento back for this one.