ryu wrote:Been playing Alliance Alive, the new RPG from the devs of Legend of Legacy.
It's a good game, just kinda bland. Reminds me of 4 Heroes of Light which had a similar vibe to it.
Legend of Legacy developers... I heard those were some of the guys on the SaGa series team?
It's a spiritual sequel, so that might very well the case.
I noticed in the opening credits of Alliance Alive that an entirely different studio is credited for development. Looking at Furyu's website, it doesn't seem to be a videogame company. Seems like they're more of a production company that outsources everything. Weird.
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.
Does the Shovel Knight thing of trying to look and sound like it's running on NES hardware even though it's pulling off things the NES could never be capable of.
While the general flow of the game is the same as the original, the combat mechanics are much deeper and closer to Double Dragon. It's very choppy and moves commit you for far longer than a Capcom-style brawler. The characters all play very differently.
Unfortunately it has a huge non-optional platforming section in its awkward 2.5D that's put me off the game for the time being.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.
An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.
Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
Megaman X8 [PS2].
You know how Megaman X7 is kind of fucking terrible, right from the get-go with sluggish control, an awful camera, and annoying mechanics [like how Axl's lock on system is actually painful to use]? Yeah, X8 is pretty damn cool out right the gate. Haven't played long enough to judge the stage design, but the game seems. Visuals are okay, it's much, much faster and smoother than X7, the voice acting isn't as bad as usual for the MMX series, and ultimately, it's not an off-putting game at all.
I think I tried this game once years ago, and didn't play past the intro stage. It's been forever.
[edit]
Okay, played a bit more. This game would be pretty damn great, but it's so fucking gimmicky.
also, the spike block room in Gravity Antonion's stage is pissing me off so much, it's so dumb and you need to do a longish but easy section before you can try again and it's just annoying
Almost beat Dark Mantis's stage, but I died one shot before I'd have won, blah. The stage is weird, but pretty easy if you just take your time. I got the upgrade capsule in it too [the fact that they don't just pop open when X gets remotely near is weird, you have to walk up to it for it to open].
On another note, I'm playing Megaman X1 in the PS2 Megaman X Collection.
It's pretty good. The music is really cool, too. I'm on Sigma Stage 2. The game is surprisingly easy, even when done out of order and without really going after the upgrades [although the game actually seems to really, really, really want you do Chill Penguin's first [so you get the boots], which was probably the second easiest boss in the all of Megaman when done buster only, Flash Man might be easier].
Went back to get all of the upgrades, including the Hadouken [sadly, X doesn't say "Hadouken!" in this release].
Storm Eagle's weapon is ridiculously too good.
Come check out my website, I guess. Random stuff I've worked on over the last two decades.
I really should give the Crash games another try. I remember really hating them, but recently I've been starting to hear people speak about them in more positive terms. Usually I'd credit that to the fact that people who grew up with those games are now old enough to consider them nostalgic (which in turn makes me feel horribly old), but now I'm really curious if I missed out on something due to a wrong approach to the games.
Donkey Kong Country Returns for Wii isn't 3D, but it does play a bit similar (original Crash games owe quite a bit to the original SNES DKC games) and provides the challenging platforming fix. While they play a bit different, the Super Mario Galaxy games are well made and have some challenging 3D platforming stages. I didn't find Crash 2 and 3 to be hard, though.
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze is like Returns but way better, and with an insanely incredible soundtrack that's worked well into the stage design as well. It definitely feels like a "western platformer", but god damn is it a blast to play through.
Sumez wrote:Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze is like Returns but way better, and with an insanely incredible soundtrack that's worked well into the stage design as well. It definitely feels like a "western platformer", but god damn is it a blast to play through.
The only reason I didn't mention it is because WiiU wasn't one of the systems listed.
Wow... I'm hit by a YUGE wave of nostalgia right now.
Just checked the newest Digital Foundry vid and they're talking about Legacy Of Kain : Soul Reaver
I played this in college, in a time where I wasn't playing modern games anymore(still had my NES though), so it was kind of an exception.
I remember being compelled by Raziel's undead design(still do) and the impalement kills you could inflict with spears and halberd you found on the walls.
There's also a "parallel world where things are slightly different and you gotta use that to solve puzzles" thing if I remember well. Not unlike Zelda : A Link To The Past, but in a 3D environment.
Overall my memories were of a good action platformer with puzzles(some extremely hard) and a really cool doom-laden atmosphere.
My question is : did the game hold up well? Have anyone here played it recently? my memories of it are hazy, so I'd appreciate some input before I decide to pick it up again, or not.
EDIT : it might have been Soul Reaver 2, I can't remember. My roomate had a PS2 so that's plausible.
The first Soul Reaver on the PS1 really was a perfect example of generations transitional production, whether it's the technique or the gameplay it was showing all that was coming in terms of polygonal 3D, animation, gameplay novelties for action games, even the attemps at building more narrated/scripted runs.
No surprise it fit on the DC later, even though it was already looking a bit simplistic for the system.
Awesome game, but it was full of tedious backtracking and just flat out boring parts (just gothic some will say), I remember getting lost and forgetting about the next step several times.
Yet the overall atmosphere, many innovations and visual 'wow' were enough to pardon those, imho.
You played the second game Xyga? curious to see what you thought of that one.
I remember getting stuck(lost) in the game I played back then.
Seeing the DF video, it appears that Soul Reaver was the first game on the Playstation to use real time data streaming, to constantly load 3 areas of the map : the one you're in, the one you came from and the next one. And once you reach that next one(which is already loaded, thus eliminating loading times), the area fartest back in the chain is dropped and a new one is loaded, keeping the 3 area cycle rolling. They made sure that areas were long enough to traverse to give that room-after-the-next-room time to load.
This is quite interesting. This is now common practice but back then this must have been revolutionnary stuff. Looks like this is one of the games that has pushed the PS1 the farthest.
They also talk about how the game uses the Psy-Q engine, which was created by Psygnosis (when Sony bought Psygnosis, they were apparently so impressed by Psy-Q that they dropped development of their own to-be in-house engine and adopted Psy-Q instead).
Never played the DC version but it looks beautiful, with a locked 60fps. If I end up picking up the game, it'll be the DC version for sure.
If you can ignore the incomprehensibility of the greater plot in LoK, it can be charming to hear Shakespearean actors wax faux-philosophical over the nature of free will while delivering cheesy one liners at eachother.
RegalSin wrote:Japan an almost perfect society always threatened by outsiders....................
Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
@FB: Nope I haven't played the second more than a couple of hours maybe, didn't have a DC when the game was a thing.
But yes the first one introduced many new things, pushing the PS1 to its limits and announcing the future standards.
Like with Tomb Raider IV I wasn't interested in the DC port because it wasn't really designed for it to begin and some texture smoothing and fps boost wouldn't really change anything to the game in the end.
Played on a rgb crt proper there wasn't anything else needed to appreciate the refinement of the late 32bit polygon works in their intended form.
Those raw 240p textures were the shit, I'm the minority though, I know. ^^
Soul Reaver looks and feels so much better on a Dreamcast. I played it on PC originally, which still looked better than the messy PS1 graphics, but there's just something clean about the DC's graphics. Or maybe the DC is just better than the PC I had at the time.
Sumez wrote:Soul Reaver looks and feels so much better on a Dreamcast. I played it on PC originally, which still looked better than the messy PS1 graphics, but there's just something clean about the DC's graphics. Or maybe the DC is just better than the PC I had at the time.
From the DF video, it appears that the PC port was done pretty quickly and by reusing most assets. Kind of a budget re-release.
Whereas the Dreamcast port was made with a lot of care and decent amount of time and resources put into it.
So that might explain why, while the PC port is a visual upgrade, the DC looks even better
@Xyga to each their own. I prefer the higher resolutions textures, higher poly count models and locked 60fps of the DC port(Playstation is 30 fps)
But as you said, the Playstation release looked amazing at the time.
Last edited by FinalBaton on Sun Jul 16, 2017 11:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Squire Grooktook wrote:If you can ignore the incomprehensibility of the greater plot in LoK, it can be charming to hear Shakespearean actors wax faux-philosophical over the nature of free will while delivering cheesy one liners at eachother.
Yeah the dialogues in the original Lok seem pretty fun, lol
Well since we're talking Soul Reaver trivia, did you know the original game had intended a completely different ending and they recorded the dialogue for it and everything? Spoiler
Raziel has an additional brother, a battle with a human priestess in the citadel who serves Kain, and finally a battle where he kills Kain and swallows his soul. Then he returns to the giant organ cathedral with the ultimate reaver, fights past an army of desperate mutant vampires, and opens the sounding pipes, letting out a hymn that destroys the vampire race once and for all.
Alas it was cut because they were running out of time so it ended on an unsatisfying cliffhanger and then the series disappeared into the rabbit hole of neverending plot twists.
Mischief Maker wrote:Well since we're talking Soul Reaver trivia, did you know the original game had intended a completely different ending and they recorded the dialogue for it and everything? Spoiler
Raziel has an additional brother, a battle with a human priestess in the citadel who serves Kain, and finally a battle where he kills Kain and swallows his soul. Then he returns to the giant organ cathedral with the ultimate reaver, fights past an army of desperate mutant vampires, and opens the sounding pipes, letting out a hymn that destroys the vampire race once and for all.
Alas it was cut because they were running out of time so it ended on an unsatisfying cliffhanger and then the series disappeared into the rabbit hole of neverending plot twists.
That would've been a much better ending... I loved the game but never had interest in playing the other ones, they should have concluded the storyline right there.
The series has a LOT of stuff like this. Soul Reaver 1 in general feels like it should have been a much better game than the somewhat barren mess it ended up as. Some of the ditched areas feel like they would have added some well needed variation. I still like the game though.
And I'm glad they DIDN'T go with the original ending, because then we wouldn't have had SR2 which in my opinion is the best game in the series by far. Also, the plot isn't incomprehensible. In fact I like it for being pretty clear cut despite how cryptic they seem to make it. There's a thought behind all the things going on, but on the other hand it ends up making everything happening in the game feel kind of pointless, since everyone is justified and there's no real bad guy.
Squire Grooktook wrote:If you can ignore the incomprehensibility of the greater plot in LoK
I felt they managed to make it fit together quite neatly, to be honest. Much better than it deserves. The only thing that I thought was stupid was the sudden "Janos needs to live because that's what I just figured caused a chain of events that's entirely unmentioned and is entirely contained in a completely different game that no one wants to play because it's terrible" part of the SR2 ending.
Man, the Soul Reaver series is one of my favorites. I've played through Soul Reaver 1 several times and have fun with it each time.
Sumez wrote:...we wouldn't have had SR2 which in my opinion is the best game in the series by far.
I found SR2 to be one of the worst in the series, at least as far as the gameplay goes. One of my game design pet peeves is having magical barriers suddenly show up and you have to kill every enemy so they'll disappear and you can proceed. I just think that's utterly lazy design, and SR2 is filled with those. Story-wise it's great, it has some very cool moments Spoiler
(Raziel meeting and killing his original self, getting partially absorbed by the Blood Reaver, etc)
as well as some of the more memorable cheesy one-liners.
Also, in the first game there was at least the illusion of the game being totally open for you to explore, in SR2 it feels very railroaded. Go from A to B in this mostly narrow path. Meh...
I do agree with your assessment of the plot, it's only when the Hylden show up that things get a bit weird, but other that then it's a fairly clear time travel/paradox thing.
No matter how good a game is, somebody will always hate it. No matter how bad a game is, somebody will always love it.
You guys are looking at plot details, I'm looking at theme. The themes of Blood Omen and SR1 (with the original ending) form a nice mirror image.
In Blood Omen Kain is a minor noble who falls victim to a band of hired murderers and has vampirism forced upon him. The theme of the game is Kain trying to resist the evil of his vampiric nature (personified by Vorador) and fighting to save the world in hopes of regaining his humanity. But in the end he learns how ironic his battle cry of "Vae Victus" really was and gives in to the evil, destroying the world he was trying to save. (And looking almost exactly like Vorador in SR1.)
In Soul Reaver 1 the most loyal and prideful of Kain's vampire lieutenants is humiliated and executed and like Kain before has new life forced upon him. The theme of the game is a monster rejecting redemption in favor of selfish vengeance but discovering over time his true nature as an avenging hero, first by witnessing the destruction of the world wrought by the very vampire empire he helped create, then by the human resistance worshiping him, and finally by his discovery of his own past. Having this monster end the game by restoring a cathedral and cleansing the world with a hymnal would have been a perfect thematic capper. (And I like the idea of a good god nevertheless looking like a mind-warping Lovecraftian tentacled horror).
I never thought any of the Legacy of Kain games had great gameplay, but they were high water marks in terms of plot and voice acting for the time.
SR2 was one of my most hotly anticipated games since Jedi Knight, but when I finally got my hands on it the theme, like the Matrix sequels, was just "keep the plot going." That made SR2 one of the biggest letdowns in gaming history for me and the weaker gameplay was just adding insult to injury.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.
An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.
Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
Soul Reaver 1 pulled the exact same thing on Blood Omen that SR2 did along with the "last minute" change of the SR1 ending, though. Blood Omen 1 is a perfectly self contained story, and Soul Reaver basically changed the idea behind it entirely.
But I get what you're getting at - SR2 definitely took it even further, and completely retconned all the events of Blood Omen to a much bigger extent than the first SR did, but I do appreciate how they were able to do it pretty seamlessly fitting it into all the events that were already established. Additionally, I much prefer the idea of the Pillars basically being the home of some awesome Eldricht Horror (voiced by the late Tony Jay <3) who used some bullshit mythology to deceive the characters into believing they were all part of some kind of destined plan, rather than the original idea of them just being a magical macguffin. Sure, the writing isn't great, but I really like how it subverts genre tropes, and if the Elder God had remained what he originally was in Soul Reaver 1, he would have been a completely pointless character.
