Vanguard wrote:Majuu Ou human-only no miss
good job!! i gave this one a shot and then gave up really quickly after a single attempt left my thumb sore for a couple of days. i finished, but i think i died once or twice. i gotta know, didja use autofire? doesn't look like it. my thumb's base is tensing up just thinking about how fast you gotta mash for reasonable DPS T_T
i can't think of another instance of a gun working like this in a non-dojin game, honestly. no visible projectile and seems to check if you hit almost like doom would. the rapid-fire is pretty interesting, too, you can really go nuts.
our
good ending nomiss plays have nearly identical run-times and are both fairy keepers - i linger a tiny bit little longer before starting and cutting the end theme, though. glad to see someone else playing this after i gave it some time and posted a bunch about it months back, i feel like it's a pretty solid game and deserves a spot as something other than collector's bait.
- - - - - - - - - -
i have hardly been playing
anything the last few months. been either extremely depressed or getting into MAGIC THE GATHERING (egad, i have sunk so low) with my partner. it's something i can actually play with her, so a lot of video games have taken kind of a side-seat for the time being until i build some motivation back up. i'm not "out" by a long shot and still adore classic gaming above all other hobbies, i'm just in a bad funk and hardly able to do anything that doesn't involve someone else, lately.
i'll likely come back to posting again whenever i'm over this, which could conceivably take a while.
if you'll spare me one more moment to mention mtg - a weird number of topics hit on by mark rosewater in his
gdc presentation here are ones i find appealing in classic gaming and helped make a lot of sense on why i was able to get into it so much. a couple of the lessons are "restrictions breed creativity" and "be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them," which i feel modern video gaming has completely forgotten and things i've preached to my friends ad nauseum about advantages of classic gaming over modern stuff. not trying to convert anyone here over, but i feel you might find the presentation interesting. i feel it's ironic that mtg essentially set the groundwork for gacha gaming and lootboxes but is now one of few existing games that retains many classic sensibilities i'd thought were almost lost to the hobby.
speaking of modern stuff, tho~
finally cleared up the "very hard" difficulty of bleed on arcade mode! god, i had left this hanging for *weeks* since starting it. right after clearing hard on arcade i hit a sinus infection that lasted more than two weeks and couldn't focus on anything. would do a couple of half-hearted runs every third day and then not play anything else. if you're not familiar with this one (i believe our good squire posted about it quite some time ago - i ran across an old steam forum post by him when searching about the game), it's a twinstick action-platformer with a bullet time twist that was originally released on xbox live indie games some time after i had stopped paying much attention to the service. believe it or not, i had a phase where i played nearly every new thing on xblig.
it relatively recently got both a sequel and then a physical release (thanks to playasia) bundling the two games together on ps4, which is where i picked it up and finally gave it a shot. completely inundated with dreadful metroidvanias and roguelites and whatever other portmanteaus you can think of, this took me right out of sullen inebriation as a great pick-me-up. though it's by no means perfect, this is a pretty solidly sensible and arcade-esque title hiding underneath its ugly-but-charming newgrounds aesthetic.
although the phrase "bullet time" might initially seem like a warning that this is anything but arcade-worthy - and i'm sure you're likely dead tired of twinstick shooters by now - this is at its core a challenging action-platformer that is very much worth giving a shot to. forget the story mode and its shop, that's essentially just a practice mode for the real meat of the game: arcade mode. one life, no continues, play through the entire game in one sitting. it's even paced very much as a classic should be with 7 stages and a roughly 20 to 30 minute runtime for a play.
story mode is well worth playing through, first, as i feel some bosses (and even normal enemies) have tells that can be really hard to get a handle on, and the game's hyper-precise controls can demand some serious getting used to. once you're over the humps, though, bleed is a pretty pleasant and surprisingly difficult jaunt.
my only really big complaint is that i feel like the game sometimes pushes its difficulty in poor directions that don't accentuate its strengths. arcade mode gives you not just one life but
one continuous lifebar, and this can make it so that early and innocuous hits from smallfries compound into a threat that can prevent you from finishing an otherwise really good run. each difficulty stacks damage onto how much each individual hit does on top of complicating and speeding up both hazards and bosses, with very hard culminating in a highly stressful run that lacks the comfort of cooling down in sections that are frankly pretty easy.
normal is a tad too easy while hard is a pretty big leap, and i feel like a lot of pressure would have been eased if the game would just restore a small amount of health between stages, ala something like SoR2. when a zako hits you for something like a 6th or 7th of your health in a game with that many stages, even mastering the game's great boss fights won't necessarily secure a victory when you have a concentration lapse during what is surely intended to be the downtime of a run.
i kept with the game's starting pistol throughout the entire game and only gave a toss about my secondary when i grabbed the final unlock, which ties its strength and usability to your DMC-esque style meter. the better you're doing and the more continuously you're doing well, the higher a rank you'll receive. though the starting pistols are still probably the best and most versatile weapon, when you're hitting S-rank and close enough to an enemy you can do some obscene damage dumping by slowing time and pumping them with the final weapon.
sorry for no video! my capture card is only SD and hooked up to one of my CRT's. i did use the ps4's record feature to nab a
single boss fight, though.
reflects her murderous yet unmistakably pouty walk cycle 
)
Ta GSK. He's the name I've associated most with Natsume's FC/SFC golden era. Clearly only improving with age.
TBH, it's just about time for R2RKMF (that's run to the right killing motherfuckers) Part III: DR BIRUFORD IN PRISON, but I've been dreadfully lazy this summer. Nicely done on the 1CC, that was quick!
ah, it feels so nice to have a shred of enthusiasm.
