[Rud31]

Another pretty good game is the first Capcom Jojo's Bizarre Adventure for PS2. I'm not sure how much mileage dudes that don't speak the language would get out of it. It looks fantastic though. It plays pretty good. The voice acting is also great. The stages actually play out like a Jojo fight. New enemy that seems impossible until gradually learning what it takes to beat him.

I'm going to have to get a friend to pick up Phantom Blood for me.

I also grabbed the PS2 Berserk game and am not really feeling it at all. It's Dynasty Warriors with a HUGE SWORD and Korean MMO grinding.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[CubaLibre]

Dynasty Warriors is already Korean MMO grinding. Also it already has huge swords. So I guess it's just Dynasty Warriors.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Rud31]

Well Yukes does do a good job of making it feel like you are swinging a huge fucking sword around. But so far I had fought about 1000 snow monsters, 200 dogs, and 20 tree monsters.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[allensmithee]

Man, I love that game. I see where you're coming from, but it is totally rad for me. And normally I hate grinding.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Finished my 100% play-through of Vice City just now. I like that at 100% the game gives you infinite ammo in all the weapons without any need to reload. I don't really like how at 100% there's not really anything to do with infinite ammo weapons other than run around causing mayhem. Still had fun getting to 100% though. Took me about 23-4 hours, a couple hours longer than GTA 3, compared to San Andreas which took me more than 60 hours to 100%.

Now I think I'll focus on 100%-ing GTA 4 but I think it's going to take a while.
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[Mikey]

[Mr. Mechanical]

I'm thinking about setting a goal to do it on all of them on all platforms but I doubt I'd really be able to commit to it.
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[Toups]

I've been digging back into Phantasy Star II. Its mechanics are dated as hell (if occasionally in charming ways) but I still find something weirdly compelling about it. But good lord is it a grind-fest...

I think no one would've gotten past the first dungeon if it weren't for the awesome music.
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[Broco]

I also pick up now and one of those 8-bit grindy RPGs like Dragon Warrior and Phantasy Star, and play up to the first dungeon or two. They're really satisfying for a bit, but there's no way I'm getting anywhere near winning them.

[protoblax]

I've put myself on a mission to 100% complete every metrovania for the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, this currently spans three games. One of which is Harmony of Despair. Welp! A plan's a plan.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Tlon]

[Broco]

Hard to believe there's only three Metrovanias in such a major, long-lived platform... really, this is a genre that never had the heyday it deserved. (The name itself kind of says as much: it's like it never really occured to any developer that a game other than Metroid or Castlevania could be based on exploration and related character development.)

[extrabastardformula]

Playing Link to the Past for the first time. emulating the GBA version. First impression is that it's harder than the 3d games but mainly due to health refills not dropping.
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[diplo]

[Sniper Honeyviper]

Supposedly, the emulator-style features in the PS2 Sega Ages port of PSII (frameskip, difficulty settings) make it quite playable. Lord only knows why they didn't release this version to XBLA instead of letting Backbone shit on it.

[The God Of Poverty]

[Mikey]

[boojiboy7]

[costel]

Air Fortress is an effortless work of pure genius. I'm up to the fifth fortress, and the tension is just unimaginable.
Viking: Battle for Asgard is pretty damn good. It's not great or anything, but it's certainly a fun way to kill some time. I actually really like the platforming sections a lot.
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[Rud31]

[extrabastardformula]

[Moogs]

Alice: Madness Returns makes me feel like it's 2001.

[ionustron]

[ionustron]

I haven't had much time to play CLADUN lately, and what little time I had has been trying to draw my team. I'm still interested at the very least, but as I play with the little drawing program, I can't help but think if they've ever bothered to look at GraphicsGale or a java oekaki board.

Can't help but feel like I'm going into a dumb range with the following statement but looks like all the promises will end up being disappointments. The retro soundtrack option so far is dire. It sounds like someone plunked some midi piano lines of the songs into a some hey guyz! its your favorite NINTENDO vst plugin. I said it back when someone posted the trailer someodd year back, but it could have been done much better and added to the whole thing while still being separate yet it's mostly a throwaway. It was like them saying you remember this? It was great wasn't it except the majority of famicom jrpg really weren't. I'm not crying for Konami pastiche, just for something alittle more loving.

As the backgrounds on the main world are, kinda, yet is completely thrown off by how two tone*¹ the characters are. Seems like it was done so that anyone could pick a premade head from a list and call it your custom character. You can edit the "head" and give it details more inline with the details of the tiles, but the editor is deceptively limiting. I half love it and hate: The beauty I find in rpg-maker-ish things is that there are always clear intentional limits that the designers set in place, yet there tends to be so many ways to break them. The lone PSX RPGMaker english port had a world map that was constructed with puzzle pieces, a hub setting waypoints from explorable tile map to tile map. With careful planning of a single custom sprite, you can build a simple coastline, which wasn't in the default game data, letting you begin to make a more explorable map. I almost made a system that bypassed the intended Dragon Quest style battle engine, upon hearing legends of people managing simple action platformers with the top down engine. The 3rd RPGMaker on PS2 from what I understand was very pared down in comparison to the previous one with more focus on better graphics and (poor) 3D models. It's bizarre that they'd then constrict story scenes to portraits behind a preset image backdrop. The creative workaround was making a party member with a baby model, joining in events, spawned inside of a crate object to cause the camera to clip forward, hiding it, while placing NPC models of your team acting out what you wanted them to do.

It's the sort of metagame that becomes rewarding in these maker things that by themselves seem much of a novelty to be worthwhile and that's why I also hate it. After a good number of problem solving successes I tire and lose interest before I get anywhere. Though this is more of a personal trait than a fault of the game.

With Classic Dungeon it's feeling far more limiting than it usually does. It's weird how they differentiate a male and female sprite (that they'd need to specify a gender as a statistic for one thing!) ONLY by how the feet are placed, so that every "female" sprite is standing on a one foot side pose while "male" is standard mirrored even pose. While editing the head gives you slightly more extra space than you'd need to make a head, it doesn't leave quite enough to design an outfit, or an entire sprite, pushing you towards relying on outfits about as simplified as the intended character designs in protest of the backgrounds or even enemy sprites. Also, you have no control over how your character is animated at all. Together it's a big challenge to make something that's unified to the rest of the visual design yet conforms to 2 different body postures - and has to bounce statically when walking.

Then there are hair options which dwarf most of that nice body drawing you just did but at least follow through. The first thing I thought when I went through them was feathers, or nice big cape, except that I find that I can't adjust the scale or position of the object. For it to work that way would mean I'd have to make someone much taller than every other humanoid in the game which I guess isn't a big deal if it makes at least an interesting silhouette.

You can't design over the capehair, and it's all very defeating anyway when you notice that the moment your hero/ine jumps facing back to you, their equipped armor sprite suddenly clips over everything you designed on the head layer meant to overlap and improve it. Except the hair, meaning you have to use the hair as hair or have a broken sprite.

So the perceived intended flow reads to me like okay kids! make your Main Character (because you love our 4th wall breaking internet humor but we're sexy 8-bit*² awesomesauce!) Pick this head out of this list, scribble on it if you want, pick some hair on this list, your done play list play list...) I get why it's streamlined, I also get that less linear rpgs with any custom character element like to constrain your costumes because shit brown daedric-adamantium armor is stronger, so it's bizarre why they pitched a gimpy paint program from the start.

All the more hilarious when you export your design data to share with others: 4 bitmaps presumably 30x30 pixels, 16 indexed colors, 1 string of text line description, 1 string of speaking text box, and what should be a byte for your gender. Possibly a couple more picking a design from a small set list of nemesis for him/her. All of which dwarfed by the stupid wide image every playstation game attaches to every single savefile. Over 200kb which shouldn't ever be a big deal except this is a game done in a style that is finite to it's core.

This is far too much words to put into nothing. I hope it gets better.

*¹ as in, go in the sprite editor, and characters tend to have 12 of their 16 colors blank.

*² they didn't actually say that (exactly (yet)), but close to that at most opportunities. Ugg.

[Toups]

How have the controls changed in the gba port of lttp?
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[Toups]

[Toups]

Also the enemy designs are so so awesome
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[Rud31]

[Broco]

I've always thought that the GBA layout is superior to the SNES's (and regret that they decided to bring back the four face buttons on the DS). I for one find it hard to remember which face button does what in any given game -- I always need to relearn it when I pick up a game after a few months without touching it. Given the shoulder buttons, there's very little reason to have all those face buttons -- if the shoulder buttons are used as "modifiers", they can multiply the number of actions that the face buttons do, and typically this dovetails intuitively with most games' movesets. For example, in the GBA Metroids you hold a shoulder button to fire missiles instead of regular bullets, and this is actually the best Metroid input scheme.

Even Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, a complex roguelike whose DS version used all the buttons, found a way to work nicely on the GBA given some long-presses. The only genre that benefits from it (and even then, with the "modifier" approach, could be squeezed in in a way that would at least satisfy casual players) is fighters.

[remote]

I want a romhack of ALttP for GBA with Link's stupid voice removed.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Hekatoncheir]

[Drem]

The Uncharted 3 beta is really difficult to play on an SD tv. I have trouble distinguishing anyone standing more than 10 game ft away. I was prepared for it to be exactly the same as Uncharted 2, but it actually feels fairly different. There are some interesting features going on as well, like the mid battle random objectives/power-ups and the Countstrike-esque mid-battle power-up store. I just wish I could see everything better.

[Deets]

[Toups]

yeah, in a lot of ways mother 3 is more sophisticated retelling of the same basic story.

phantasy star II is like many old RPGs that really required you to use your imagination to immerse yourself in the gameworld. but I am finding it rewarding despite (and maybe because of) the tremendous effort involved.
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[diplo]

PSII's achievements, as I understand them, seem so caught up within the insularity of video games' own evolutionary path, and the game itself is so aggressively antiquated and abstracted, that it's just not enough to keep me going. I'm generally okay with tolerating shallow or wonky mechanics if there is some vision in a game's world, but the cognitive dissonance one has to maintain to keep going in PSII is just overbearing. I also am kind of confused by the praise for the soundtrack, which has to be one of the least individualized I've ever heard. It's very, very hard to tell the tracks apart.

[Toups]

that's part of why I like it so much
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[Toups]

phantasy star II is again another game that's really hard for me to recommend to anyone with any sense. but there is something to it that captures my imagination, though truly it may not be inherent to the game at all. I would never insist on its brilliance or anything, but despite not having played it until 2005 or so, the game somehow formed a strong emotional connection with me.
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[negativedge]

toups just say lonely game I mean we have this phrase and everything just use it

[diplo]

most video games are lonely games

[negativedge]

UR A LONELY GAME DIPLO