What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Sweatlord_STG]

i really wonder how Double Dragon Revive will be like.

[AGermanArtist]

If it's a DD reskinned Dynamite Cop, I'm in.

[it290]

Ninja Gaiden 4's pretty great, so far Platinum's best. It's like a refined MG Rising. The story's a bit daft, but it's Ninja Gaiden.

Platinum's best? Bold claim sir!

[AGermanArtist]

I know. It's pretty great lads. I find myself spamming a lot of moves (I did only around 5 of the training things so far). Being able to pull of Drops isn't the be all of the moveset. There are so many fucking moves and even the ones I'm spamming are pretty decent NG2 moves, but in this that's nothing, there so many other moves as you jump between playstyles - there's standard and Raven, and it has parries (MSX will likely shit). It's a lot to take in, but I guess that's what multiple playthroughs are for. It's all a bit stupid emo and titmaideny, but it's (Platinum's) Ninja Gaiden. Maybe you want that.

[AGermanArtist]

I'm having a million times more fun with this than I've had with a Platinum game in a long time. I'm loving the combos.

[vol.2]

Been playing Return of the Obra Dinn, and another one by the same developer called Hidden Folks.

The first game is a mystery set on a sailboat in the old timey days and you have to solve the murders of everyone on board by getting limited information through "memories" you can access by looking at the bodies.

I like it, but with caveats. The actual mystery part of it is very cool. The writing is excellent, and there's some neat sci-fi horror stuff going on that a lot of people will really dig. The bones of the game are excellent and challenging. The graphic presentation is also very cool. It's supposed to be kind of like ye olde monochrome I guess you could say. There's a number of different color palettes you can choose from that are supposed to reflect the colors of early computer monitors. I think the implication here is that it's almost like playing an early graphic adventure game, or the kind of adventure games they had back on the Apple IIe, especially stuff like Interplay's Mindshadow or Tass Times in Tonetown. It's not static images like those games; it's a full 3D environment, but it's supposed to aesthetically resemble those games.

It's far from perfect though. The system you have to use to interact with the story elements is clunky and buggy and laborious. There are many unskippable sequences that artificially inflate the time it takes to revisit important areas. The mystery part is not entirely intuitive to solve; you must do some guesswork to arrive at many of the correct conclusions. The instructions are actually clear about this, and they also present you with a kind of "cheat" to get around this issue; for every three murders you correctly intuit all aspects of, they will "lock" those in as correct and remove them from your reference materials. This would be entirely unnecessary if it was possible to actually know who was who on the ship by clues that were discoverable. I assume that they decided that if they gave you all of the evidence you needed, it would be too easy. Maybe that's true, but maybe they also just didn't try hard enough, idk. As it is, the discovery system is "fine", but it could be better and I would have found it more satisfying if it was actually possible to figure things out without any guesswork (trial and error).

The second game is a hidden object hunt. It's great. Lots of personality and really fun to play around with all the objects in the scenes. The sound design is really imaginative and the game mechanics are super fun. 10/10 no notes. Go buy it if you ever get into "casual" games. Or even if you're on the fence about them, this one's a winner.

[AGermanArtist]

Bit O gameplay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQmuQMyoUv0

[vol.2]

And I finished Obra Dinn.

My general comments haven't really changed, although the last half of the murder solving went a lot quicker than I anticipated. There are some contextual clues in the documentation that help narrow things down enough to brute force it once you get enough things right. It's still absolutely necessary to brute force a bunch of the solutions, but you can generally do so in small groups at a time, so it's not impossibly time consuming.

One thing I realized was that the voice acting is also important to solving things. You have to listen for accents and filter by nationality. It makes me wonder how difficult it would be in localization. Are you supposed to recognize a Russian accent (or Dutch, or Swedish, or Formosan, etc) speaking English if you live in Korea? Is that even a thing?

[Blinge]

I'm nearing the end of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

The base game is all but done, I've been struggling through the DLC. (which itself feels like a sequel)
It also feels like "Dragon's Dogma Does Darksouls" which is probably why i like it so much.

christ, what a fantastic game. I'm very late to this party but man.. the whole experience is so WEIRD.
In a good way, the jank.. the story beats that happen without me knowing what's really going on, its clumsiness.

Pawn hijinx, and combat that's pretty damn satisfying.

I made the mistake of going mage first, got a few ranks into sorcerer before getting bored and switching to melee for some of the most satisfying SLAMS of greatswords i've ever experienced.
Eventually I managed to figure out how to gear up effectively as a Mystic Knight. Again, very satisfying + versatile spellsword combat.

[Sweatlord_STG]

new double dragon games is fun

[AGermanArtist]

Do a video.

[LordHypnos]

Finally finished Link's Awakening DX. Such a sad ending .

Spoiler

This game is pretty great overall. Notable differences from the Capcom Zelda games include not really having a central mechanical gimmick (makes sense given that this was pretty early in the history of Zelda games, and was the first for a handheld system as far as I am aware), smallest amount of damage you can take is a half heart (later games let you take quarter hearts), simpler inventory of tools, keeps track of how many times you die*, enemy behavior seems easier on certain enemies, though not on all of them (probably outweighed by the lack of quarter-hearts). I think some were harder, and there are certainly some bosses that would be challenging to defeat without taking hits.

I think I also like the OST better overall, as well. Special shout out to the Color Dungeon being a remix of the excellent original LoZ dungeon theme (why did this not get put into more Zelda games?). Also shout out to the Tal Tal Heights music, definitely an 8-bit banger.

I have also started Oracle of Ages. The password from Oracle of Seasons means that I can play it as a virtual linked game, which is nice. Already some excellent music in Nayru's Song.

*while in theory this is a nice thing to have, I don't think there's usually any incentive to continue rather than just resetting, so pretty much just a superficial inclusion. I guess compared to the oracle games, saving can only be "save and quit" not "save and continue," so you can't save without having to restart from a checkpoint so that's something. Still doesn't matter most of the time.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

*while in theory this is a nice thing to have, I don't think there's usually any incentive to continue rather than just resetting [after dying]

Link's Awakening is the only game in the series I know of that has a secret scene at the end (one that's different in the original vs the DX version!) if you beat the game with 000 deaths. It's a great game; OST's top notch too. My only quibble would be it's fairly easy in terms of difficulty relative to the NES games (especially if you get the Color Dungeon reward, I'd recommend skipping the reward after you beat it as either choice totally trivializes the remainder of the game) but that's understandable given the GB market and the fact that it's probably a correction against how difficult the NES games were.

[Sima Tuna]

*while in theory this is a nice thing to have, I don't think there's usually any incentive to continue rather than just resetting [after dying]

Link's Awakening is the only game in the series I know of that has a secret scene at the end (one that's different in the original vs the DX version!) if you beat the game with 000 deaths. It's a great game; OST's top notch too. My only quibble would be it's fairly easy in terms of difficulty relative to the NES games (especially if you get the Color Dungeon reward, I'd recommend skipping the reward after you beat it as either choice totally trivializes the remainder of the game) but that's understandable given the GB market and the fact that it's probably a correction against how difficult the NES games were.

To be fair, "easy difficulty" is a criticism one can level at every Zelda game post-NES, and so I don't really consider it a knock against the games. Link's Awakening has a fantastic, trippy story in a lovely world, with extremely fun and engaging gameplay. If you want a similar thing but harder, you can go with Link to the Past or the Oracle games, although again, they are still not as hard as NES Zelda.

"Too easy" is really a blanket issue with almost all zelda games. Link to the Past is easier than NES Zelda, but GB/GBC Zelda is possibly easier than Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time is definitely easier than GB/GBC/SNES Zelda.

About the only Zelda game that's not easier than the one that came before it is Majora.

Link's Awakening may be my favorite game boy game of all time. I just can't think of anything wrong with it. It's endlessly replayable too, thanks to relatively short length and fast progression.

[LordHypnos]

*while in theory this is a nice thing to have, I don't think there's usually any incentive to continue rather than just resetting [after dying]

Link's Awakening is the only game in the series I know of that has a secret scene at the end (one that's different in the original vs the DX version!) if you beat the game with 000 deaths.

Ooh, nice! That's such a cool addition! That might be a good reason for me to replay it again. Maybe even try to finish out the retro-achievements. It's a shame that you can cheese the 0 deaths thing so easily by just resetting instead of continuing, though.

It's a great game; OST's top notch too. My only quibble would be it's fairly easy in terms of difficulty relative to the NES games (especially if you get the Color Dungeon reward, I'd recommend skipping the reward after you beat it as either choice totally trivializes the remainder of the game) but that's understandable given the GB market and the fact that it's probably a correction against how difficult the NES games were.

Vis a vis the difficulty, it's largely down to how much HP you get, which allows you to brute force a lot of the difficult parts. This is kind of an issue with all of the Zelda games that I've played (which is mostly the 2D handheld ones) That allows for some pretty obvious self-imposed challenges like defeating all the bosses without taking damage, or maybe even beating the whole game without taking hits, or not upgrading your HP for the entire game, or something like that. I don't know that I would have the patience for that, personally, but I think I'd rather do it in Link's Awakening than the Oracle games or Minish Cap.

I guess the puzzles are also probably a bit more straightforward in LA than the Capcom games, though I got stuck on the Rooster thing for a bit, as I remember being BITD as well (in retrospect this was pretty obvious though).

That all being said, I think I found the difficulty to be sufficient to be enjoyable.

As a slight aside, I never got very far into the original NES TLoZ, though I played it quite a few times BITD, and I do want to get to that eventually. I did play a bit into Bram: Bloodmoon (Pico-8), recently, which is heavily inspired by it, and it is hard AF (I would say much harder than I remember TLoZ being), and quite cryptic. Still can't find the second dungeon (the first is hinted at in the manual). Might be worth checking out for anyone who is interested in a really hard zeldalike.

[Blinge]

Yeah you need to remember TloZ isn't made for sweaty nerds like us anymore and probably wasn't ever since Link t the Past

( i think link to the past is pretty challenging lol. last time i played it i was getting nowhere until i got the sword forged earlier )

[Sumez]

Been playing Return of the Obra Dinn
(...)
I like it, but with caveats. The actual mystery part of it is very cool. The writing is excellent, and there's some neat sci-fi horror stuff going on that a lot of people will really dig. The bones of the game are excellent and challenging.

All of these are cool, but I think what really sets Obra Dinn apart is that mechanically it's a game unlike any other I've ever played or heard of.
It's a genuine detective game, relying entirely on reasoning and deduction. I've played a lot of game that passes themselves off as a detective game, but this is the only one I have ever played which feels like one.

for every three murders you correctly intuit all aspects of, they will "lock" those in as correct and remove them from your reference materials. This would be entirely unnecessary if it was possible to actually know who was who on the ship by clues that were discoverable.
(...)
It's still absolutely necessary to brute force a bunch of the solutions, but you can generally do so in small groups at a time, so it's not impossibly time consuming.

This is not true at all. I'll admit, playing the game I also felt that there were some I really had to brute-force. This was specifically some of the asian workers, and some of the people which

Spoiler

survived by fleeing to a nearby island

, where telling which of those were which had seemingly no reliable clues.

But after finishing the entire game, I looked up how I was supposed to place those without trial-and-error bruteforcing - and there were actually several clues that I completely missed.
Some were definitely rather vauge, but others related to a super clever logic puzzle that I hadn't even considered, connected to their sleeping positions. It just required approaching the problem with a completely different mindset I hadn't even considered.

So no, the "groups of three" feature isn't there because some identities aren't discoverable. Every single one of them is. It's there to offer you a genuine sense of progress, instead of going from zero to "game completed" in a single move. Many deductions rely on other deductions being correct, so making a mistake could easily lead you down a completely messed up path, and if the game wasn't able to give you some feedback on whether you're on the right path, it would have been completely unwieldly to ever complete.

I do think it feels a little bit lenient - some times it would confirm things I wasn't completely sure of, mitigating the need for genuine deductions. It's not ideal, but it's honestly hard to judge what would have been the best possible balance for this feature.

[Immryr]

Yeah you need to remember TloZ isn't made for sweaty nerds like us anymore and probably wasn't ever since Link t the Past

( i think link to the past is pretty challenging lol. last time i played it i was getting nowhere until i got the sword forged earlier )

you might be sweaty, blinge. i'm not because i use lynx africa.

[vol.2]

This is not true at all. I'll admit, playing the game I also felt that there were some I really had to brute-force. This was specifically some of the asian workers, and some of the people which

Spoiler

survived by fleeing to a nearby island

, where telling which of those were which had seemingly no reliable clues.

But after finishing the entire game, I looked up how I was supposed to place those without trial-and-error bruteforcing - and there were actually several clues that I completely missed.
Some were definitely rather vauge, but others related to a super clever logic puzzle that I hadn't even considered, connected to their sleeping positions. It just required approaching the problem with a completely different mindset I hadn't even considered.

Ok. I looked up some of the clues and I see what you mean, although there are still at least 10 characters that are all PoE in groups. And there are still people for which the "direct" clues are fully based on clothing, and the game is not entirely consistent with the way it handles clothing and rank or position. In most cases, I was able to fumble through it without too much difficulty and I did not need to find all the clues to figure out who was who. I find it interesting that there is an in-game way to figure out enough people to get the rest by PoE, but I seriously doubt that anyone actually got those more esoteric clues simply because there are far easier ways to solve it, and why would one go looking for clues that might not even be there if you already have the correct answer?

Spoiler

I did find the sleeping position thing with the numbers hanging down myself. That's how I placed the Indians and the one crew member that had the tattoo of of woman on his arm. Once I noticed the numbers, I got all those. I didn't find clues for the Chinese crewman, the two Peters brothers (which was which), the bursor (outside of his clothes), a couple of the stewards, and at least 2 of the random seamen. I see from online information that we are indeed supposed to assume the bursor from the fact that he could be found in the bursor's office, and the Peters bros are solvable via their hammocks (Samuel's is missing after he dies). The clue for the Chinese crew is supposed to be the one guy's shoes hanging out of the hammock. I can't imagine a world in which anyone actually had to spend enough time working on that to reach the shoes, especially since you need to visit three separate scenes to put it together (one scene shows his body with the shoes, the hammock scene with shoes hanging out, and his death scene. From there, it's 50/50 on the other two Chinese and the game expects PoE on those, as it does on the two women. I got the women immediately though as I figured the younger looking one would be "Miss", and I was correct. I don't necessarily like that though, as it could be wrong. A lot of the "clues" in the game were like that to me. It felt very much like answering a question on the SAT where you are supposed to choose the "best answer" and not necessarily the one correct answer. Sure, this is actually close to real life, so there is that it's got, but games don't have to be just like life to be good or fun, and I'd rather see it optimized for fair challenge and fun. As far as where the survivors fled to, you are supposed to deduce from Henry Evans that they went to Africa, but there's no real reason to assume that they didn't go anywhere else. Why couldn't he have went to Morocco later on? For the record, I did get Africa quickly, but it's still a "best guess" situation.

Just to be 100% clear. I loved Obra Dinn. My complaining about it is just super nit-picking of a game that I thoroughly enjoyed, in spite of the technical issues I think it has. If they made another one, I would buy it immediately.

I think the biggest improvement would be a better way to go from one body to the next when a new corpse is found in a memory. I found being stuck with the compass to be extremely annoying and following the "ghost" around the ship to be equally so. There were two or three occasions where the ghost would disappear on me while I was following it and I would have to exit the game and start the scene over to get it to work right. I also found the system of going back to the scenes later on to be very clunky. I think they should make the scenes all accessible directly from the book once you see it the first time. I also think they should have a central location for editing your guesses for all the crew. You can't do it from the manifest because there's no way to edit the individual pictures, only the method and killer, and you can't directly do it from the picture as it takes a lot of hunting around and mouse presses. I want a page that's just a list of the pictures that you can scroll down and enter the info. That's essentially what you get with the portrait, but all in one spot.

[ryu]

Yeah you need to remember TloZ isn't made for sweaty nerds like us anymore

I thought Breath of the Wild was fairly difficult. Many of the enemy camps, especially early on, require strategy if you want to conquer them and you really needed to know what you were doing against Lynels and the Guardians.

But then I upgraded stamina a lot more than health so maybe it was just that for me.

[Blinge]

okay i meant Zeldo from wind waker on so about a 15 year period

[aak]

I got the Arcade Archives releases of Sunset Riders, Metal Slug, and Mappy on my PS4, so whenever I want to take a break from Garegga I usually play those. My goal for Mappy is to get to at least round 16 (Mappy is an old-school endless game but it technically "loops" after round 15) with a score of 150k+ since I've been able to get around 100k a few times in my life and 150k seems like the next big milestone. If I still feel like playing it after that I might try for 200k since that seems like a very competent score for this game.

[AGermanArtist]

[vol.2]

My goal for Mappy is to get to at least round 16 (Mappy is an old-school endless game but it technically "loops" after round 15) with a score of 150k+ since I've been able to get around 100k a few times in my life and 150k seems like the next big milestone. If I still feel like playing it after that I might try for 200k since that seems like a very competent score for this game.

Mappy is great. I think I'm due for an NES/Famicom night pretty soon and I totally forgot Mappy existed.

[Steven]

Done with Tales of Hearts. Time was 49 hours and some minutes.

When this was released, it was regarded as being very good, and possibly one of the best games in the series, but I am not really sure what to think. Cool battle system, but it was held back somewhat by the DS, as evidenced by the massive slowdown that can occur sometimes and the scale of battles feeling rather small and limited somehow. Having only three characters in battle instead of four contributes, but summoning someone to sort of add a fourth character contributes to the slowdown, so it's very clear why they didn't have four be the standard here. Friendly AI is just not good at all. Keeping everyone alive is much harder when they seem intent on suicide by standing right next to the enemies and doing nothing, but ultimately I never had anyone dead at the end of a battle ever, so maybe it's not that bad. Not getting any Grade at all until like 45% of the way through the game is extremely weird. I wonder why they did this, but I still have about 4800 Grade for the Grade Shop soomehow.

Hardest story boss in the game = sandworm by far lol. Or maybe it's just because I was playing on hard, but sandworm kicked my ass a few times. Final boss was probably second hardest, mostly because of Dead Star being able to insta-kill your entire party in one hit. I had enough of that unstoppable hi-ougi kills your entire party instantly crap in Vesperia, but at least here it isn't guaranteed to hit everybody, or even anybody.

A long time ago, when Tales of the Abyss removed the head armour slot and an accessory slot, someone said that at this rate eventually the only equipment you'll get is a weapon and one accessory. I wonder if whoever said that ever played Hearts, as this is probably the closest it comes to that, as your only equipment is two accessory slots. There is no armour at all and your weapon is fixed, unless you count the Soma Build system, which I still don't like. Fortunately, accessories in this game are very powerful. Still weird to have literally almost no equipment, but it's fine.

The music is really disappointing, both because it's not very good music in general and also because of the DS itself. The sound quality is low enough to make it sound bad, and a handful of boring, droning tracks was repeated so often that it made me want to listen to something else. Basically, you get to listen to the same annoying, boring music for hours on end and it doesn't even sound good because of how compressed it is. I hope I never hear some of the music in this game ever again. Some of the audio is compressed enough to sound quite harsh, so I ended up turning the volume down many times to avoid the harsh audio. The sandstorm in particular sounds like someone left the water running, which I thought was funny.

Having the real story not start until you're 60% done with the game was definitely a bold move. I think it kind of worked, as I forgot that the first 60% of the game even existed by the time I was done, but it also meant that that part of the game wasn't super ultra platinum mission critical to the story. It's still important enough to justify being there, but it was still kind of odd how separate the two parts of the game feel. I think some of it could be cut for brevity without losing too much.

I am officially putting this game in the "good" area, but I'm not in a hurry to revisit it. I bought Hearts R recently at Book Off (2090 yen, tax included? Sure, why not) and I hacked my Vita TV to make it compatible with this game because I thought it would be interesting to play it on a bigger screen, but I think I have had enough Tales of Hearts for now. Don't have time to finish it before Xillia on Friday anyway.

[AGermanArtist]

ARC Raiders pretty much all weekend and this morning.
I also started Silent Hill 2's remake since it's included in PS+ now and it was in my wishlist awaiting a steep reduction. I haven't played the original.
I just started it up to check out the controls etc and spent a little time walking around/crossing things off the map. So far, so good. I'll get around to playing it in time.

[1KMS]

I'm either hearing this, or that it's an Arkham-ified profanation of the CAG from NG veterans.

i really wonder how Double Dragon Revive will be like.

From what I've seen it's at least in the ballpark of Dynamite Deka 2. There are probably some spammy shenanigans you can do, but isn't that what makes a Double Dragon game?

[AGermanArtist]

I'll put it this way. After this, I'd love to see a Platinum Batman game. The problem with Ninja Gaiden 4 isn't the combat, it's the setting, the narrative, daft looking bosses, lack of variety in enemies and a blatant excuse towards the end to recycle areas. It's a great action/fighting game, just a little undercooked in pretty much every other aspect. And despite the availability of so many moves and combos, it outstayed its welcome after around 7-8hrs. That's when I found my enthusiasm wane somewhat. But for those 7-8hrs, it's the best of its type.

[Lethe]

Silent Hill f is in the running for worst game in the series

It's got nothing to say, no sights to show you, the plot goes nowhere, the theming is a farce, the music fell out of my brain the moment it stopped playing. Bereft of any other experience with Ryukishi's writing, I'm willing to assume that this game is just a big elaborate trolling scheme. Beyond the surface aesthetics, it's ironically one of the least Japanese SH games and shares most attitudal similarity with the Western-developed ones. Calling it Downpour 2 would still be a disservice because at least Downpour has an appropriate length for its hour of plot and doesn't constantly lock you in arena rooms with the world's most tedious combat system.

tl;dr review "an utter waste of everybody's time".

[Marc]

Damn. The reviews has almost convinced me.
Oh well, Tormented Souls 2 just landed, I'll stick to that.