[Raziel]

Fired up Siren. Still near the beginning, although cleared a few levels already. It's definitely not a very approachable game: it's difficult and nail-bitingly tense. But I already love it. Most of the time is spent Sightjacking the shibitos, observing their behaviour and patrol routes not only to get a sense of their position, but also to visualize the road ahead. Since the map does not show your position, but does indicate some of the more noteworthy landmarks, the landmarks seen through the eyes of the shibito become essential in spatializing the environment.

Also, whenever I can't cope with being spotted, I switch to shibito's vision to witness my death. It's strange seeing yourself being killed by an enemy character through his vision, but it's oddly relieving.

All in all, exceptionally interesting game.

[Mikey]

At least in the PS4 version, the 3D movement in Ether One is so damn clunky that it makes me pine for single screen navigation ala Myst. Also I may have accidentally gotten stuck in an unwinnable position because I went too far without a certain item, in like the first 30 minutes of a game. So fuck that game, I think. Also the framerate stutters and we're talking about a game barely more intense than Gone Home, that's pretty sad.


Crimson Shroud on the other hand has charmed me greatly in its first 30 minutes despite it being the tutorial phase.

[Mr. Mechanical]

Yeah Ether One I felt needed to have faster, smoother movement. I don't know why it doesn't run better. Maybe all the objects and things you can interact with? I would have played it for more than fifteen minutes if it didn't feel like swimming through molasses the whole time.

Also I 100%ed The Old Blood last night/this morning. Those last few challenge maps were more difficult than they should have been because of a new wrinkle the zombies add. Basically regular enemies will also try to kill zombies if they see them which will rob you of the points you would have gotten for killing them yourself. Since it's a score-based mode you can't really afford to let that happen so on those maps you have kill the zombies first as they appear before anyone else.

Still a great time even if it makes my right thumb/wrist area sore.
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[jodeaux]

[Kabbage]

[notbov]

Heroes of the Storm is the MOBA for saner individuals, in much how every Blizzard game of their respective genres are accessible yet deep. with that said, holy fuck do they think I'm made of money or something, I'm getting to the point where I'd rather fork over a fixed price for a "lifetime" pass for unlockables (I think Smite does this)
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[Talbain]

[boojiboy7]

I don't mind the HotS thing because I basically played for two weeks and got enough gold to buy one character from each class, so I am OK with that.

[notbov]

it just feels a bit crazy when HiRez is charging 30 bucks for all current and future characters in Smite, where as in HotS, that same amount will get you the 3 newest characters or a smattering of older ones
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[Kabbage]

Picked up a used copy of Link Between Worlds. Seems okay so far.

Liiiiittle bit pandering.
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[boojiboy7]

[Intentionally Wrong]

I have basically no time for games anymore unless we're talking about Hearthstone on my phone while I'm at work, but I managed to squeeze a couple hours of Kentucky Route Zero in last night. Episode III, from just before meeting up with Junebug and Johnny until XANADU.

That song in the Lower Depths was devastating.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[notbov]

I think HotS is going to be a boxed product as Blizzard is the only PC publisher with any sort of major boxed presence, so maybe they have a master plan involving that?
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[Take It Sleazy]

[Ronnoc]

I've been playing quite a bit of Convoy, which is FTL with a Mad Max-y skin. I kind of hate it, but it's also exactly the kind of game that my lizard brain loves, so I've put like 10+ hours into it in the past two days. I really can't recommend it over FTL. Fighting isn't as in-dept, and it really loses a lot of the drama of FTL having cars intead of people, and it's overall a much easier game than FTL (although I'd take it's final boss over FTL's every time). I beat it with default cars on my second try. It's also open world, which is flat-out less interesting (and more exploitable) than FTL's forward-pressing grid. Difficulty scales a little weird, and on the hardest difficulty, you take a lot of damage for no reason. As in, unavoidable events will just apply damage to your vehicles.


I do appreciate that, with the way combat works, you will always max out range and movement before putting any money into health and armor.

I will probably put at least another ten hours into it while I unlock everything. Unless I get distracted playing through Kentucky Route Zero again, because the game's map screens are very similar.

[Mr. Mechanical]

Started a new game on Uncharted 3 (turns out I had only played an hour of it) and now I'm up to the ship salvage yard in Yemen. I don't know if it's a controversial opinion or not but I think this one is actually better than part 2?

I still think the shooting is the weakest part but what's there is good. I like that there's a lot more puzzling and platforming, and the brawling is still great too. I really like how this part I'm on now is combining the platforming and shooting bits with lots of climbing up walls while dudes are shooting down at you, taking cover while hanging underneath something and shooting back up at them.

I like the story more than in the previous one as well. I find myself pushing on through the game not just because it's enjoyable but because I'm also genuinely curious to find out what Francis Drake was trying to hide. I know it's going to involve supernatural monsters or something eventually but the way they're building up to it is quite good.

And the locales have been really nice and varied as well. Eventually it's going to end up in the middle of the Arabian desert and I'm really looking forward to it.
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[Tokyo Rude]

My problem with uncharted 3 is the reward is nonexistent and the risk is drake and everyone he knows is murdered and disappaars. Drake is purely motivated by hurt pride in 3 and everyone tells him so. The game pulls along that thread line until it is tome for more fun adventure. I quit about 5 hours in bc i was getting nothing out of it, but the half pull towards a consequental narrative really bothered me.

[nuttyevans]

I just like the set pieces and the banter man.

[CubaLibre]

2 has tigher action, better level design and a better grasp of the balance between shooting and melee, especially on the harder difficulties. It is also still pulp-charming. 3 gets way too far into serious-face territory and the Gearsy shootouts start to ignore Drake's acrobatic moveset. It's facially similar to 2 but erodes all the tiny touches that elevated 2 from average AAA game to pop gold.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Mr. Mechanical]

Hm I don't know about tighter action but I'll agree it does get a bit too serious for its own good. I guess 2 did have better level design but the big setpiece moments in 3 are great. I just played through the cruise ship level last night after making my last post and holy crap that was maybe the coolest or at least most memorable Uncharted level so far for me.

The burning chateau was cool too but it was kind of a retread of Uncharted 2's collapsing building level. But I don't know how they can top the cruise ship level. Apparently there's a really cool airplane level coming up so we'll see.

[Mr. Mechanical]

Finished Uncharted 3 last night. I liked it overall but now I do agree about it being too difficult. I was playing on normal and by the end it was getting tedious how much I was dying on certain spots. And all the snipers! It's like after a certain point the game just said okay every enemy encounter from now on is going to have at least two or three snipers in addition to everything else.

Really tiring.

However I liked the plane and caravan setpieces as well as the whole "wandering the desert" bit. Had to drink a glass of water after that haha.
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[misadventurous]

Man, I really enjoy most of MOTHER 3 a whole lot, but the ocean walk segment is really bullshit and time-wastey.
It is trial-and-error based, demands an unfair level of precision (easily mucked up by wandering NPCs getting in your way), sends you back to the beginning every time you mess up, and ends on a shitty unwinnable boss that you have to try to beat anyway. Oh yeah, and the mermaid machines are basically a "lol thats gay!!!" joke, and you have to sit through the same overlong animation every time you use one, so it's a joke that wears thin quickly :\

[tibyz]

Yeah, the fish NPCs can be quite annoying for the price of nothing. But overall, I think the ocean walk is quite inventive and fresh within the Big Scheme of the game (doesn't mean much since the whole game is fresh anyway). Might be that I have a soft spot for turn based rpgs that propose challenges unrelated to interacting with objects/people with a button or fighting, but that part seems, for example, like a much more constricted and focused version of the maze in earthbound, in which there actually is stuff at stake during the over-exploration you do of the scenario. That's alright.

Regarding the humour, I guess it doesn't change the fact it's a time-consuming animation, but I don't even see it as a joke per se? It just sorta helps building the overall sense of humour of the game in lieu of queer figures without necessarily making a joke out of them, but just, you know, putting them there. Setpiece-y. A lot of the game's aesthetic is about that.

And the setback's not even that long okay!!!

[Tulpa]

Wait aren't both Lucas and Kumatora gay? I can't be the only person that assumed that was the case
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[Felix]

you mean duster? I don't think lucas is supposed to have sexuality, really

he is sodomized by the magypsy when he learns PK Rockin but I don't think that's necessarily a statement on his sexuality

[misadventurous]

Felix, the only two playable PSI users in the game are the butchy princess raised by drag queens and the weepy, emotional young boy with mommy issues who (as you noted) is possibly molested by one of the aforementioned drag queens. Take a look at your avatar and try this again. Alternately, read this

I don't uh, think he was literally molested -- it could just as easily be taken as a baptism of some sort -- but I think it's also supposed to be ambiguous and uncomfortable. It's also more than a little unfortunate, just as the Magypsies are in general.

My reaction to the merman statues comes partly from the cutscene where they're introduced, where two pigmasks talk about them and one of them's like "they make me feel uncomfortable" and the other's like "Really? I like them" and the first one *backs away slowly* it's pretty much an eye-rolling gay joke.
I actually like the game's engagement with queer themes and think it's generally meant to be positive, since after all it's about how that aforementioned weepy young boy goes on to save the world even as large parts of his community reject him and slag him off, and those aforementioned drag queens are the ultimate keepers of mystical psychic power... but it's also P. Problematic.

As for the ocean walk: in past playthroughs it didn't bother me so much, and it's a segment I can appreciate, intellectually, but, I guess, it's not terribly enjoyable for me to actually play through right now! Probably I'm being a bit whiny. I almost posted a rant against the Milky Well cave from EarthBound the other day but took it back when I realized that it's a deliberately hard section of the game and there are mitigating factors (like that you can skip it entirely and come back to it later without issue).

I do think it's pretty funny that Boney the dog gets smooched/oxygenated the longest

[The King]

Gitaroo Man. I got up to the shark, but I could not jump him.

Maybe, tomorrow.
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[Rud31]

Ultimate NES Remix is exactly as dissapointing as the internet says.

Berserk Dreamcast has pretty good sword movements that feel a little pointless in the post Souls world. It was a good evening game though.
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[username]

Played through ibb & obb on the PS3 as I picked it up on one of those PSN flash sales for like a buck a while back. I found out after I was halfway through the game that it was designed for co-op play with the solo single controller/two character mode put in as a half-goof for diehards who want absurd challenges. It's nowhere near that bad as there is a checkpoint after virtually every obstacle but the times where it asks you to move both characters in different ways yet still in concert gets rather confusing for one's thumbs. Probably why they removed the mode from the PC port.

Also played through Contra: Shattered Soldier. Still a fun game even if it is a bit too memorization dependent, but I have to say that the actual stage design falls off a cliff once you get past the initial four stages. Beyond that it is just boss rushes which is one thing, but for the duration you are basically warped from one single screen encounter to another with little rhyme or reason. As an example the final boss is stage five involves you hanging from a wire as you deal with a large alien below, the one before is against one you battle on the ground. Rather than have you have to walk to the side and jump onto said wire there is a flash of the screen and you are magically up there. It isn't the biggest flaw in the world but it is a bit of a letdown.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3

[Rita]

I'm alternating between Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga. I adore everything about both of them, but can't seem to derive much satisfaction from the latter. Ikaruga feels a bit empty and slow. I'm unmotivated to memorize chains because there is no real reward for them except a high score, which I have trouble seeing the appeal of (even though that's a lie and I always try to beat my previous times of boss destruction). I wonder what I'm going to decide to do next. This stage is quite a difficulty spike. This also reminds me of Sine Mora, with which I had a similar experience, but that game's STG system was hard to stomach, but whatever. Its world kept me going until I hit a similar type of wall, and set it free right then and there.

I also like the credit per hour system. I think it's one of the better solutions to my internal dilemma about the lack of concrete win conditions in arcade type games with a continue option. I don't get motivated to self-impose, because it's not in the ruleset, meaning I don't feel like I'm actually playing the game properly. If I were playing in an arcade though, I wouldn't feel very good about putting in a second credit, just walk away. One credit or die is a neat concept. But it would take a long time to clear a game, if that's important at all, I don't know if it is.

[The Blueberry Hill]

Just the other day I was thinking about how much I liked being able to play Ikaruga okay in the past. The satisfaction wasn't from scoring, so much, more about getting closer and closer to perfection. I don't really think of perfection being a thing in other shooters (at least as anything possible for me), but I feel like being able to fully change stages in Ikaruga is something obtainable and it feels really nice (in my hands I mean). Can't play it for dirt now though.

[Mikey]

[allensmithee]

I couldnt get into 2. I liked 1 in a similar way to how I enjoyed Sonic Adventure. Theyre both super janky games that sort of come together well? 2 did have one thing I was super frustrated with in 1, which was that you couldnt jump and fire mid-air.

the first Uncharted has this sort of madcap feeling, like everything is a little bit too chaotic and this makes it pretty frustrated sometimes but I liked it.
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[RT-55J]

I'm on another Metroid kick (how surprising), because it's been forever since I've played the GBAtroids.

Zero Mission: Still very iffy on this. The open-endedness is fine (if awkwardly shoehorned in), but I could do without some of the Chozo statues. The controls/physics were functional, but never really felt right. Walljumping in particular felt maddening (for the life of me I couldn't walljump off of single-tile platforms). The stealth segment and endgame are alright additions, but still feel too disconnected from the rest of the gameworld for my tastes. Also, nearly all of the bosses are dumb (both the worms, in particular).

The post-credits really should have just ended at this point.

My only deaths were in my attempts to get the Varia Suit right after the bombs, because I'm greedy.


Fusion: Right off the bat I was floored by how much better everything looked and sounded and felt compared to ZM. It feels so tight and well put together that I somehow really don't care about the forced linearity, or even the text dumps and objective markers. I still like how the game makes a point to never make the path to your objective a straight shot. It always finds a way to add a wrinkle to things or throw a curveball at you. My favorite part is right after you get the bombs: your route back to the nav room gets sealed off, and you're forced to find your way back going through massive amounts of uncharted territory.

It is kind of weird though. Fusion does a lot of the things that annoy me in Zero Mission, but somehow I don't mind as much.

[luvcraft]

I picked up Amnesia again the other night, and I think I'm pretty close to the end. They want me to gather the six pieces of the Triforce or whatever so I can beat the end dude. It's pretty good!

Also got on a weird Picross kick and played Picross DS this weekend. Pretty fun, and very polished.

And then I finally started playing Retro Game Challenge 2, which is full of Retro Game Challenge goodness, and has the added benefit over the first one of having all (fanslated) English text, but the original Japanese voice instead of the annoying American one.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Super Mario 3D Land is the best Mario game I've played since Mario 3. Basically it's everything I want out of a Mario game. Tight controls, obstacle-course levels, kind of light on the secret stuff but that's okay.

I had played up to Special world 5 and then put it down for a year or so. Picked it back up recently and I've been playing as Luigi and am up to the second to last stage in Special world 7. It'll take some doing but I'll finish the game with Luigi getting all the gold coins and gold flags. Then I'll run through again as Mario hitting the levels I lack gold flags for with him. Then I'll play the super secret hidden level that opens up after that.

I just don't want the game to end really. I might replay it after all this but I'll probably put it back up for a while. I think after this one I'll get back to Link Between Worlds because I don't think I made it halfway through that one either.
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[Kabbage]

Almost finished with Link Between Worlds. It's good, but know that it uses the same overworld that Link to the Past did. The dungeons are different, the bosses are different, there's more items, and the wall-walking mechanic changes things up quite a bit, but it's a lot like playing a remake.

I've been having fun with it so far. Get the feeling it's going to end up being on the short side, though.
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[Rud31]

Crimson Shroud is pretty nice! Happy to have finally played through it. If I get the urge there's new game plus and the good ending. So that's cool! The Witches fight took me 10 tries though. Never quite figured out how to handle Frea and the heal all spell wasn't that useful except in the final boss battle who actually attack conservatively compared to the rest of the game.
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[RadRad]

[misadventurous]

Hey I've been (re)playing SMRPG too. It's a solidly fun game, though I still believe Paper Mario 64 is the pinnacle of Mario RPG (or maybe PM2, feel like that's a personal taste decision). I remember thinking Mallow was the worst character when I was a dumb kid bad at videogames, but now I realize how much face his cheap hit-all lightning spell can wreck.

I have fond memories of playing the game with my brother as a kid. My single dad worked at a restaurant and once when he couldn't get a babysitter, the Jamaican dude who was boarding there and working dishwashing let us chill in his room and play his SNES. We got through nearly the entire game in one night iirc, but were so underleveled from not fighting enough that it was impossible to beat one of the later bosses (Axem Rangers). Also that same night I drank too much soda and had to run to the bathroom to pee and my zipper got stuck at, uhh, a crucial moment. Good times, good times...

You should play the SFC DQ3, it's whip-fast and looks+sounds gorgeous.

[RadRad]

Yeah, actually I haven't played Paper Mario 64 (which is weird, because I love everything I've seen about it), but its next on the list for sure!
I'm making this "Year of the RPGS", and catching up on classics I never really played.
And so far, I'm loving Super Mario RPG.
Its feels like the right kind of game after coming off of Earthbound.
Great writing, and feel good vibes.

I remember seeing Super Mario RPG at Best Buy on demo, and this was a time before I really knew what an RPG was and was confused by the gameplay, but always felt grandiose in presence.
I love Mallow and his magic, and the way they have incorporated other Mario characters in the world. Racing on Yoshi was neat, and making music notes on tadpoles was funny.
Bowser and Geno are great additions to the team as well!
Oh, and bosses are actually tough on this game! Never died yet, but it gets close!
Square's presence definitely shines through, and really feels and sounds like the epitome of a Super Nintendo title.
I kind of wish they would just remake this on the 3DS. And maybe add in a few more new tracks for battles.
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