[unhappy days]

today i played pilotwings 64

it's a ... frustrating sort of game!!

this is partly due to the fac that i'm not very good at it. i think i enjoyed the snes version better, though.

[GcDiaz]

Yesterday I played F-Zero, Final Fantasy 2 and Killer Instinct. On a SNES. My sister's, in fact. Dunno why she's held onto it this long, but I'm kinda glad she did. With a gamecube, ps2 and 360 in the very next room, the irony did not escape me.
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Steam/PSN/Xbawks: GcDiaz

Let's bring sexy back!

[taidan]

Got God Hand yesterday. Lost three times in the first level, and each time I started from the beginning, saying to myself "I can do better!"

And I did.

[another god]

[boojiboy7]

So I played some Tourist Trophy today.

Fuck, that gaem can be such a bitch. It does have a pretty good soundtrack (including a good disco-ish remix of Romantic Rights), but it likes to beat you up a lot. Which is nice, since the Gran Tourismo games usually just let you have whatever you want pretty easily.

I do like the dual analog setup for controlling the gas/brake. It makes the smoothness neccessary for riding a bike a lot more doable than the stupid ps2 analog buttons.

[Pijaibros]

[boojiboy7]

Pijai, it's probably good that there is not a portable Third Strike, because as much as I like that game, you would probably kick my ass at it for the etire bus ride to Louisville.

[Brock]

Hi guys, I have been playing things.

Jump Ultimate Stars keeps pissing in my cereal. Some of the missions seemed difficult in the first game, but some in here are flat-out unfair. Possible? Sure, just...fuck. Still, it's entertaining. At least there'll be some life in this one after the game is completed.

Final Fantasy VII is disappointing now that I am out of Midgar. I got as far as Costa Del Sol and decided to take a break. All that direction and motivation seen in the first seven hours, pretty much lost.

Final Fantasy V is nice and speedy. Story seems a bit too basic. I'm setting this one aside until I finish VII.

Final Fantasy XII seems very confusing. I guess I tried to tackle it with the mentality of an action game, so not being able to attack at will, dodge attacks, etc., threw me off. Same as above, I'm going to wait on this one.

I'm considering buying FFVIII and, when it comes out, FFVI. They will probably not be played for a long, long time, but I'll have them on hand, at least.

[Clueless Gamer]

[stotelheim]

[dementia]

Every Extend Extra. I love it.

Please, can someone confirm the original indie dev gets royalties from this game?

[Clueless Gamer]

[remote]

I'm playing World of Warcraft, and I'm liking it a lot more than I ever thought I would. I loved Dragon Quest VIII, but I now wonder if I would have, had I been playing WoW back in the fall of '05. WoW almost makes DQVIII — and maybe even FFXII — seem sort of quaint in comparison. I mean, with the absolutely huge world and real-time day/night cycles, etc. It's still a big RPG with quests and dungeon hacking and all that, but what you do in the game isn't even half of it: it's what you see, where you are, and how you move through this massively, brilliantly realized world. The one significant thing that those RPGs have over WoW is a coherent, defined narrative structure. I guess it's up to players to create their own stories in something like this.

It'll be interesting when Rogue Galaxy comes out. I still want to play that one, but I wonder whether I should even bother to spend the money on it right away. Maybe I'll wait until I've burned out on WoW. Could be a while before that happens, the way things are going...
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Felix]

you're a changed man

[Koji]

Interestingly, I've been replaying the heck out of Gunstar Super Heroes, a game that, some may recall, I attacked for being way too easy and poorly designed. Well, I still believe it's poorly designed; nevertheless I've come to appreciate it on a new level by trying to 'speedrun' it from beginning to end. I still haven't been able to beat it in a single play, though, mostly because I don't take my time at all in anything and take the fastest routes everywhere and don't pick up hearts unless it's necessary, calculating precisely how much energy I'd need to beat a boss, a few hits taken into account. Some stages I can go by unscathed, but Seven Force and Black's moon tend to get me, not to mention that darned Unblinking City (which I don't die in anymore, but in the next section, if I make too many mistakes.) It's quite gratifying to at least see my times going down, and sometimes even my score going up (since I still try to hit everything I can while I run like hell toward the next section.)

I thought it was a stupid design choice that, if you choose Earth and beat it, the stage selection menu will then automatically select the first moon, but if you beat that it'll be on the final stage, instead of going for the second moon, thus not letting complete runs flow as they should. It's evident that the game does not expect me to try to beat it all in one sitting; but thinking about it, I believe that the actual way it was intended to be played is by following this pattern: Earth - moon of your choice - final stage. It's not exactly Outrun we're talking about here, but it's still not a bad choice, considering that a total play-through following this pattern would be a lot shorter than a full run: maybe ten minutes, amount that would be suitable for a portable game.

So yes, I have a new appreciation for this game. I finally consider my money well spent.

[EU03]

I finally got to play Technic Beat today. Has Sampling Masters music, so I am happy.
I still don't grasp the more advanced techniques of chaining and I don't quite like the perspective that you're given, but it's fun nonetheless.

Also played some Mushihime and Espgaluda. Is it just me or does Mushihime feel shorter? In any case, I am a long way from 1Cing both of them.
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[username]

Elite Beat Agent: The Christmas episode is one of the most awkward transitions I've ever seen a game try to make.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3

[Deets]

[Mr. Business]

I found my Simcity 3000 disc today, so I installed it. Boy, that was a mistake.

I'm still pretty rotten at starting up a city from scratch though.
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Taking a break.

[Felix]

[Moogs]

I turned on Animal Crossing DS last night after 5 weeks of inactivity. I saw snow, weeds, and cockroaches.

[Koji]

[fundogmo]

Indigo Prophecy started out what I might dream the investigation portion of a Wii Phoenix Wright might be like, but then exponentially degrades into playing Simon (the 80s toy) overlayed on top of the single worst story I've ever seen put to a game.

I heard it gets bad, but I never expected the horrors I saw.

I'm almost tempted to replay it to see how linear it truly is, but I don't think my heart could take it.

[username]

[Moogs]

[BotageL]

I saw a video of the US one. It's so Very Special Episode it hurts to watch it.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[Broco]

I've been rather obsessed with Panel de Pon (a.k.a. Tetris Attack) lately, to the point that I hallucinate panels when I shut my eyes. (No joke.)

However, I still suck. I must've played around 20 hours in the past week and still can't reliably chain more than x3 or x4. I was starting to think that maybe it's actually impossible to reliably make large chains owing to stack randomness, but searching for videos of expert players quickly disabused me of that notion. From what I've been reading on forums, I'm thinking now that it's not so much that I have no talent, rather that this is a game with a very deep skill curve, in the hundreds of hours.

[professor_scissors]

[Broco]

I'm not sure what you mean by Level 7 CPU. If you mean the 7th CPU opponent in VS mode, at what difficulty?

Actually despite my poor chaining ability I do decently on VS mode, because I've developed a quite effective defensive style of play that lets me survive even very large quantities of garbage. Basically I always ensure I have panels I can pop near the top of the stack, and in the event that I don't I "panic" and pop random stuff at high speed until the top of the stack is more fortuitous. I just focus on surviving like this as long as I can and eventually the CPU dies from my luck chains, since it is much less good at coping with garbage than I am. On Hard I can usually make it to Thanatos/Kamek (I think that's Lvl. 9) without any continues, and on Ultra-Hard (pressing L+up when selecting difficulty) I can make it to Lvl. 5.

So if you meant Hard or lower difficulty, I think I've already passed your litmus test? That said my understanding from reading the forums at tetrisattack.net is that VS mode is for babies and the real action is in Endless or Score Attack. (I understand good players chain so much they're never at any risk of dying anyway, so VS is a joke, especially with the cheap garbage-based chains.) And so far my best Score Attack result is only 2500pts, and I die around Speed 55 in Endless...


I think I will switch to the GBA version soon anyway, since it appears to have more training modes available, and some gameplay improvements such as being able to raise the stack while stuff is popping (= potentially infinite chains!). In the long run I don't want to be stymied by the 13x max chains of the SNES game (assuming I ever get to the skill level where that is a problem).

[option]

Judging from your stats I am only slightly better than you at Tetris Attack and I have been playing that thing for years (off and on).

Great game though, I find it so very relaxing... its a very zen-like experience if it catches me in the right mood.



I rented god of war today and got to the underwater swimming part. I stopped playing there and dont think I'll play it again.

The game has some very inventive dungeon elements, I wish there were more of them and less hack'n'slash.

At its very best its a clever and beutiful platformer. At its worst its a simplified DMC with more box-pushing.
I do like the finishers though, they should have just made those the battle system and gotten rid of the filler before that (hit-block-hit-block etc)

[another coma]

I am very impressed with Streets of Rage Remake.

I would type something about my impressions of my friend's pre-release copy of Lost Planet but aside from the giant worm encounter and the nice atmosphere there's not too much to report.

It let's you shoot the fuck out of things though, and some of the enemies have character, like this hopping mech thing that tries to defeat you by stomping you to death.

also, one of the characters in the cutscenes looks like Alyx with some really odd cleavage.
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[Lurky]

[Rud31]

[kiken]

I was given Ookami on/for Christmas, so I've been playing through that. I'm at the part where you get shrunk down to the size of Issun and have to navigate insects and peoples' feet in Sei-an City.

The graphic effect of the game is really intriguing, but I can't help thinking about how much better it would look through VGA (it does have a tendancy to occasionally suffer from some of the de-interlacing blurring that makes Sly Cooper nigh-nausia inducing to play).

[Moogs]

Superman Returns is an awful video game. It made me hate video games in general during the brief time I played.

[BalbanesBeoulve]

Finished GTA: Liberty City Stories today. Didn't do any of the extra side missions (mainly just racing) and it only puts you at 40%. I cheated my way through it. Used weapon cheat codes after getting busted or dying because it's a pain in the ass buying more weapons every time you die. Also, god damn it the fighting is shit. They really need to fix it for 4. 3rd person gun combat can obviously be done well, Rockstar needs to learn how. Since I wanted to do as little as fighting as possible i also used the full armor and full health codes. The driving missions were still fun though.

It was an OK 15 hour game, but a big step down from San Andreas. I can see why it was a budget release on PS2.

[EU03]

imo, Liberty City Stories is generally just better as a handheld experience. In fact, it was the GTA I enjoyed the most, and I played though the PS2 ones.

I think the nature of the game is more suited to the portable, anyway. I don't want to fire up a console when all I want to do is just do a small mission or two and drive aimlessly.

Anyway, I blew through Metal Slug 4 today with a friend. It's not as good as 3, and the jumping portions were annoying. Still fun, though some parts just seemed unneedlessly hard, even for a Metal Slug game.
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[falsedan]

I spent a week in a beach house with 12 friends for my Christmas/New Years holidays, where we played heaps of co-operative Guitar Hero 2 and Wii Sports. Man! The rhythm part of Can't You Hear Me Knocking on Hard is the best track in the game, and I want to play it now… War Pigs bass is a close second.

Also I suck at Wii Baseball.

Yesterday I took a cigar and my DS Lite to the park behind my house and finished the third case in Phoneix Wright. I like to think of Phoneix Wright as a boxing game, with Deductive Reasoning as my forehand and Presenting Evidence as my powerhand… one one two one two *pow!*
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[Mikey]

Wik: Fable of Souls - definitely a fun XBLA game.

[RecessRapist]

I finished Kirby: Sqeak Squad this morning. Its a surprisingly short game :(

And right now I keep getting my ass kicked in GodHand's fighting ring. Some challenges are just ridiculous.

I've also been stuck on Chieftain's last song in Elita Beat agents. I almost got blisters from that game.

[username]

Is that the 3 star difficulty level, as that is where I am currently stuck as well. I can get up to near the end of the third section, but you gotta be damn near perfect to have even a prayer on that song.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3