Lurker > Paratroopa1

#23: Understand

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/1/AAA-H0AADhE3.jpg

The Witness is, in my opinion, one of the greatest puzzle games ever made. Possibly the greatest. It annoys me to say that, because it can only stroke Jonathan Blow's enormous ego, and he's kind of a dick, but it's simply the truth - he made a masterpiece. Outer Wilds, Baba Is You, and Retrun of the Obra Dinn are all in that mix for me as well, but The Witness came out first, it's the one I played first, and it truly and properly blew my mind. There's a lot of things I like about it - its clever, out-of-the-box problem solving, its focus on being attentive and catching little details, the way in which you have to put everything together piece by piece to understand the game in full. But the best aspect of The Witness is the way in which it teaches the player. The puzzles have rules, but there is no explanation for the rules; the player is simply left to intuit the answers by themselves, by following the game's examples, and figuring out how the puzzles work. Many of my favorite moments in The Witness were going "aha!" at a puzzle after having figured out how it worked.

Understand takes that part of The Witness and makes an entire game out of it. Understand is not as good as The Witness; if The Witness was on this list it'd be my #2 or #3 game. Don't go into this expecting The Witness; this game is a small, simple little puzzle game with no frills. But it does have quite a bit of depth and challenge, and it does make for a really excellent companion piece - a game that's clearly taking after The Witness's mechanics and ideas and adding its own little twist to it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/2/AAA-H0AADhE4.png

I don't want to overexplain Understand. This a game, after all, about Understanding, and that should be left for you to do on your own. This game has no text, and offers no hints at all; you simply have to start playing and figure out for yourself what you need to do. So if the concept interests you, I would play it without looking up too much more about it.

If you want to know a little bit more still, then I'll explain the very basics of the game. Much like The Witness, you need to draw a single line that cannot overlap itself, on a grid that has symbols on it. There's sets of puzzles, and each set of puzzles has its own 'rules' that need to be followed. Figuring out those rules for each set of puzzles is its own new challenge of deduction - the game starts out by giving you some puzzles that help show you the solution, then requires you to figure out what's going on.

One of the things I always expected to see in The Witness that it never really does is having puzzle rules that trick you into thinking you understand them, but it turns out that you had it wrong the whole time. Understand seizes on this - some sets of puzzles make you think that you understand the rules correctly, but there'll be some twist where it was actually some other rule that you didn't know you were fulfilling correctly, and suddenly it doesn't work like it should. There's so much creative puzzle work like this in Understand and it makes it a real joy to see what each new set of puzzles is going to bring.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/3/AAA-H0AADhE5.png

I have yet to beat Understand. It's an extremely hard game; I've probably completed something like 75% of the game's puzzles, but I've gotten kind of stymied on the rest. The game really asks a lot of you - the game's 'rules' can get quite complex or difficult to figure out, more than you would expect, and devising a way to solve them takes a lot of brainpower. But it's fun as hell. I'm completely content to let this game sit uncompleted - looking up the answers to a puzzle game would sort of defeat the point. If I never complete the game, that's fine - I can always come back to it someday and try again.

Understand's not for everyone - it's a dry puzzle game with simple graphics and no music. But it is for me! It's a pretty cheap game so I'd recommend it to anyone who really liked the puzzles in The Witness. It's not as good, but nothing is. At the very least, this goes into my pantheon of cool puzzle games to check out; even if it takes a lot of ideas from The Witness, it's got its own ideas as well, and a creative puzzle game like this one isn't something that comes around all that often.

Next up: I already talked about this game's imitator, but it's got nothing on the real thing.

The Pathless

I didn't get any updates done for a while because I had some other stuff to focus on, but also, because this run was an absolute roadblock for me. I don't want to bully the runner or the couch commentator here, they both seem like absolutely lovely people! I don't want to focus on excessive negativity in these writeups because I think that everyone is trying their best and deserves to be respected.

But uh, okay, so this run was boring, and I badly need to get that off my chest. The game isn't a compelling speedrun - it's almost 2 hours long and the novelty of the movement wears off after about five minutes, and nothing else in the game is all that interesting to watch. That could have been offset by good commentary, but this was nearly 2 hours of dead air. The runner/couch explained basically nothing about the game and entire boss fights went by with barely a word. Almost any time there was commentary, it was either just gushing about the game or talking about how good its music is - which it's lovely that you love the game so much but as a viewer, I don't really know about the game or understand what's going on. I know a lot of good games that have good music. Explain what makes this one special, I'm begging you.

I made a commitment to watching every run, though, and I'm sticking by it! I procrastinated on this one for a long time but I did get through it. I'm not gonna make a new category at the bottom for bad runs, but this is the first run that was hard to get through. Oh well, at least I'm sure it'll be the worst run on Monday! (She said, knowingly)

I do really wanna stress though that I don't wanna bully the runner or the couch. They're trying their best! If this run was like a half an hour I wouldn't have minded nearly so much.

- This game does look kind of neat, at least. The movement tech is a little interesting at first but gets old, but I'm pretty sure this would be a fun game to play.

- Also, it has a super cute bird! I love our eagle friend. Nobody told me this would be a BIRD GAME. It does earn points for that.

- She names the eagle Pumpkin which is a very cute name for an eagle. We get to rub Pumpkin a few times throughout this run which is good.

- Pumpkin apparently comes from the same family as Claire from A Short Hike, having the ability to do multiple double jumps.

- The commentary hits a lot of 'bad commentary' cliches throughout this one. Besides "talking about how good the music is" we also get awkward jokes! This joke of Woody lines from Toy Story every time they pull on the string to climb a tower gets old.

- Donation: "Looking forward to seeing you guys never touch the ground!" (Runner touches the ground) "Whoops"

- Almost all of the dead air in this game is filled by a donation comment game of asking people what they would name the eagle in this game and it gets extremely repetitive, but it did bring in a surprising number of donations.

- The power of twitch chat demanding more bird rubs achieves more bird rubs.

- At some point during a boring stretch of the run I started looking at future games in the schedule. Thank goodness we get Castlevania IV next, just a nice, solid speedgame.

- Not skipping a cutscene that would save time just so we can see the very important story of this game. Dear speedrunners: I do not care about the plot of the game you run. I'm really, really sorry, but I just don't. And if you're going to explain the plot, you can go ahead and do it during the cutscene instead of later during the gameplay; I don't need to watch this game's cutscenes in church-like silence.

- I ended up accidentally watching 10 minutes of this run twice because Youtube forgot my place in the video and the game is so boring that I forgot where I was.

-hotdogturtle-- posted...

I think my answer is actually Super Mario Maker (Wii U). Due to a combination of circumstances leading to its success, it had a certain atmosphere and community style that I don't think can ever be replicated again (even its sequel SMM2 did not feel this particular way that I'm describing, due the the fact that it was coming up from prior knowledge of SMM1). Plus differences in physics and objects between the two games (spikes are normal obstacles in 1 but have insanely bloated hitboxes in 2, eliminating most of their former usages).

I had over 1100 hours in SMM1, but despite strong arguments that SMM2 is a better video game (which I even agree with), I only managed around 550 hours and at least part of that was the missing spark.

Edit: I classify this game as "replaced" because Miiverse is closed (can't comment on courses) and they removed the ability to upload courses. The eventual closure of playing online completely is inevitable.

Totally agree, SMM1 is my answer to this.

It's coming, I got stymied by this extremely long (and kind of boring) Pathless run and I've had a bunch of stuff going on this week

Zelda

Yes, because of Mystery Inc

The "Fred is a good character now" redemption arc is a beautiful thing

I just realized that Kirby and the Forgotten Land has TWO final bosses that come out of nowhere. Arguably three!

Kong

Why do people keep wanting more than two parties. More than two parties just means more terrible options to pick from and the vast majority of Americans prefer terrible options

Pokemon

I knew who the Professor was the moment Van Zieks was like, I need to know who that MONSTER is, like yeah I get how dramatic irony works

The big twist is that Sholmes really was a genius the whole time and was just fucking with everyone

There's a hilarious amount of foreshadowing of Sissel being a cat in this game; they basically beat you over the head with it at every turn with Sissel not being able to read, not understanding what human objects do, being able to relate to animals, etc. It's honestly hysterical how much they just slip right by you, although you did end up predicting it. I didn't predict it because I had honestly forgotten the cat existed

GAA2 was great but it isn't a top tier game for me because I can't escape the feeling that it was all rushed

MacArrowny posted...

This topic is incredibly poorly worded. There are plenty of games with 'out of nowhere' final bosses because the games don't have a story. It should specifically be for games that have a villain you fight throughout, only to be replaced by something bizarre at the end.

Well you clearly understood what he meant so I don't see the problem

Guitar Hero is an interesting one because like, as popular as, say, Guitar Hero II or Rock Band 2 were when they came out, there is literally zero chance of them ever being re-released, because they're outdated, licensing issue black holes. They might put out a new one, but if you wanna play the original Guitar Hero and see where it all began you'll only ever be able to do that on the PS2.

I think that these types of games are against the spirit of the question though - these are games that essentially have 'replacements.'

10

I'm annoyed that G2-5 is just a continuation of G2-4 but oh well, whatever

hot take G2-4 isn't that good except for the twist reveal and the last segment

Chrono

GAA2 is a top-half ace attorney game but I've cooled down on it a bit

I played Ghost Trick after the 2013 contest and I can't get over the plot twist of Missile not being a joke nom

It'd be kinda sick if Quantumania was a secret backdoor F4 pilot. I mean, you still want this to be an Ant-man movie, obviously, but it just kind of feels like they should show up.

Yeah, you have kind of hit most of the major games in the 'puzzle-mystery canon.' I mean, there's a lot of other games out there that are at least somewhat like these, but Ghost Trick was definitely the best of the ones you haven't played. I'd give a soft recommend to Hotel Dusk/Last Window - don't do into them expecting Ace Attorney tier shenanigans or even very good gameplay but it does have one of my favorite protagonists. I'm trying to think of what other stuff is out there.

Leonhart4 posted...

Yeah, he had to lie to Sissel because telling the truth never worked.

Although they don't use this explanation in the game, I think it's funny that Missile had to put the fear of god into Sissel to get him to do anything, because well, Sissel is a cat, there's no way he's gonna keep to a schedule under normal circumstances

I also did like how you demanded an explanation for how it was possible for Ray to know that ghosts would disappear after one day, and there really was an explanation - he was lying.

Anagram posted...

SG is the cat and that's going to be the final plot twist.

You were correct on the first half of that, but not correct on the second half! I love this game's one-two punch of plot twists at the end with "you're the cat/Ray is Missile." It's absolutely hilarious how well it works that Missile somehow goes from being a goofy dog you meet once, to the game's secondary protagonist, to the mastermind behind your whole situation in the game.

I think it's hilarious that you kept insisting on calling him SG the whole game. Your intuition was obviously right that "Sissel" was not as he seemed, but the joke is on you because your name ACTUALLY WAS Sissel the whole time - that's the only thing about Sissel's sense of identity that was correct! Calling him SG, on the other hand - well that's just a misnomer, because he sure ain't sunglasses guy, that's Yomiel. (It got even funnier when you started calling Yomiel "Sissel" and Sissel "SG.")

Surprise, I'm getting a couple of these done

#24: Iris and the Giant

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/4/AAA-H0AADgCM.jpg

I have to write about two roguelike card-game-things in a row? Why did I do this to myself? Not too much backstory about how I found this one - Dels gave me a soft recommend on it one day and I remembered it like two years later when I went to check out games in order to fill out my 2020-2021 backlog. This one ended up being a really nice discovery.

Iris and the Giant is a roguelike deckbuilder. There's a framing story of - I guess like, a sad, shy girl and her father trying to get her to open up to him? It kind of falls into that same trap as Ring of Pain where they were trying hard to make their game "mean" something, but this one comes off as very earnest and sincere; it's just a story about a sweet girl and a nice dad growing closer. That's nice! The actual game takes place in this metaphorical-I-guess fantasy land of skeletons and minotaurs that the girl has invented in a card game that I guess she created in real life or something. I don't remember the details. The visuals are very appealing and the monsters are cute. There's a giant mimic.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/5/AAA-H0AADgCN.jpg

The gameplay premise is surprisingly novel for a roguelike-deckbuilder; I expected something akin to Slay the Spire but this is not Spire at all. You have a grid of enemies, and each of your cards have different properties - swords can be chained together, axes hit a 3-wide area, daggers ignore shields, etc. You attack, then the enemies attack back, if they can, rinse and repeat until you can reach the stairs. The hook is, every card in your deck is a one-time use. You use it, it's gone forever, and if you run out of cards, it's game over just as if you ran out of health. You get booster packs as you progress which lets you add more cards to your deck, so you're always replenishing what you have, but it adds an interesting challenge, deciding what you should have in your arsenal, and deciding when best to use it.

This game is like the Elixir Problem on steroids. But it works really well, because EVERYTHING in this game is an Elixir Problem, so deciding when the best time is to use your best cards is crucial, because the best time is not never - you'll die if you take that approach. So the anxiety of using your cards is something you get over fast. You're always getting more cards, anyway, so nothing is ever *truly* lost forever, you'll probably come across more later. But it ensures that every single tactical choice in this game is interesting, because of it. Is now the best time to use your card that'll take out a huge group of enemies? Or will you need it even more later?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/6/AAA-H0AADgCO.jpg

This game is quite challenging, but not overly demanding. Some enemies can feel almost a little unfair, nearly completely cockblocking you if you don't have the right cards, but once you know that you're just going to need to hang onto a couple of axes to defeat Cerberus, it's fine. Hard mode is completely masochistic - you'll run into situations where it's fundamentally impossible to win - but on normal mode the game never quite feels like that. It's always doable, but always putting pressure on you as well. I think it walks a really fine line balancing wise. Ring of Pain is a game that's playing it a lot more fast and loose, with items that have fanciful combo potential that let you break the game - Iris and the Giant is tight like a board game, with everything planned out so that the math will just barely work out in your favor if you play perfectly.

The main downside to this game is that it's not as addicting as some of the other roguelikes - runs don't differentiate themselves from each other that much, as the list of upgrades you can get is minimal and you'll see most types of cards in a few plays. A few upgrades do change the way you play a bit, and there are some super-rare cards that you can really work your ass off to get (you have to use steal cards to get them from big enemies - stealing cards is a major mechanic in this game, and it's pretty fun). But, for the most part, every run feels a little samey, and once you've mastered the game it doesn't feel like there's too much to do. I made a 100% file on normal in about 20 hours and felt like I couldn't go much further than that - I played hard mode for a bit but it's so overwhelmingly hard that I'm not even sure it's fun. Still, for a game that only lasted me about 20 hours - a far cry from Ring of Pain's 140+ - I found this game to be the more enriching of the two overall.

Next up: If you liked The Witness, you might also like...

Yoshi

In my childhood, Goldeneye was THE biggest game from when it came out until Pokemon, and continued to be a solid #2 behind Pokemon for another year or two. It was colossally huge.

Leonhart4 posted...

MGS1 vs. Goldeneye would be a debate. MGS4 vs. Goldeneye is not.

Yep.

I'd still take Goldeneye in the former, I think, but they're definitely peers and they leave behind very different legacies so it's a bit apples and oranges

redrocket posted...

Is Goldeneye really bigger than MGS4, or is that just a GameFAQs take?

I think MGS4 being bigger than Goldeneye is the "GameFAQs" take, if we're going to call something that

Ring of Pain isn't too complicated; the stats are all VERY discrete about what they do.

By the way I pull my screenshots from google image search to save time and I'm annoyed by how often it's screenshots from earlier builds of the game - the second Ring of Pain screenshot is old lol, but whatever, it doesn't really matter

I just wanted to see if anyone would take the bait on the other possible meaning of my last hint. It was a double entendre! I thought I was very clever.

#25: Ring of Pain

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/2/AAA-H0AADgAm.jpg

Ring of Pain is another one of those roguelikey things that I like to spend a lot of time on - to date, I've logged 143 hours on it, which makes it my 14th most-played Steam game of all time (only 5th out of games on this list though). I didn't play this one right away - I wasn't sure if it'd be good enough to be worth my time/money, so I earmarked it to see if it'd go on sale at a time when I could use a new roguelike to play on a rainy day. It went on sale, I was in the market for a good timewaster after I'd had my fun with SNKRX, so I ended up diving into this one.

I've been struggling with figuring out what to call these genres of games. I don't like to merely say 'roguelike' or 'roguelite', because that doesn't really narrow down the gameplay genre - a lot of roguelikes are action, but a lot of the ones I play are pure strategy, like this one. But I can't say 'strategy' because in gaming terms, that tends to imply war tactics, moving units around on a field, which this isn't. There's cards involved, but it's not a deckbuilder. It's sort of RPG-like, I guess, but it's not like it has a story or adventure, it's just numbers and swords and HP and monsters. Is that an RPG?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/3/AAA-H0AADgAn.jpg

So I guess this is a roguelike card-RPG-thingy, or something. You venture through a dungeon of 16+ floors, where each floor is a ring of cards that represent monsters you have to fight or items you can pick up. You can flip through the ring of cards either left or right to get to exit, but you have to either fight monsters on the way, or try to skip past them, risking taking an attack anyway. Killing monsters gives you souls which are money you can use to open treasure chests, which contain items that boost your stats and have helpful effects. Fairly standard stuff, but the whole ring of cards idea gives you a lot of important tactical choices for how to approach each floor; you can avoid dealing with a particularly strong enemy, but to do that you'll have to deal with whatever lies in the other direction.

Ring of Pain is a fairly unforgiving game, definitely at first, and I nearly bounced off of it originally. It really punishes you for going in unprepared; the game doesn't give you a lot of freebies and it expects you to have a good plan for how to deal with things, or you'll run out of HP pretty quickly and die. Even though the game tells you via its stats exactly how much damage you'll be looking to take, it's hard to pace yourself without knowing what's going to come up in the future. This game was fun, but I banged my head against the wall at first because I felt like making any kind of progress at all felt random.

But, I started to learn, bit by bit. Figuring out how to hit really specific stat threshholds was important, as it's hard to know when you first play what stats need to be prioritized, and how much of any stat is 'enough.' And, at first, I was taking too many common items and not putting enough priority on saving up for rare items; that was hurting me a lot. I kept trying to build around common items not really understanding that they were meant to be discarded pretty early on in favor of bigger and better things.

So after a few hours of playing the game and complaining that it was too hard, I kinda figured it out, and from there I started having a lot more fun with it. The best part of Ring of Pain for me is the sheer amount of content here; there's *tons* of items to discover and a lot of them have pretty fanciful and interesting effects that change the way you play the game, without any particular items being too overwhelmingly overpowered or underpowered, so seeing what items you get and what builds you can make each run are pretty fun. I think an important aspect of roguelikes is that you want to be able to make builds that you want to tell stories about later, and Ring of Pain passes this test. There's also a ton of items that you have to unlock by doing achievements, which gives you a lot of fun goals to work towards; I've done them all by this point, but some of them are really quite hard, such as finishing a run with low max hp or never picking up any items better than common, and devising strategies for how to do them was fun. Ring of Pain passed my "50 hour roguelike test" pretty well; after 50 hours, I was still figuring out new things I could do and continuing to test the limits of how to play the game.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/4/4/AAA-H0AADgAo.jpg

The presentation of the game is kind of a mixed bag. The music and sound design are superb, and the visuals have a pretty striking style that's kind of fun. The writing is annoyingly pretentious, though; I feel like this game is TRYING to be very deep and philosophical with its metaphors and its darker implications, but it all comes off as really trite and silly, like edgy teen poetry. I kind of wanted to make this writeup all rhyming couplets to make fun of it, but I just went for a standard review instead. It's harmless enough, though - I'm not here to play a roguelike for the story, anyway.

That's Ring of Pain. I don't have too much to say about it - it's just a rock solid card-rpg-roguelike thingy. I'll be logging a few more hours in it yet, I think, since there's been another content update since I last played, and I don't think they're done yet, which is great. I love a roguelike that continues to have content updates which help the game stay fresh for a little while. I can never decide how to rank these things, since my interest level in all but the best of roguelikes do have a shelf life, but for what it's worth, this one had a pretty long shelf life.

Next up: You're probably not going to get this one, but it's not the most obscure game on the list, so maybe someone will know it. It's a mostly-overlooked roguelike deckbuilder from early 2020. (Yes, another one of these.)

The thing about Shang-Chi, Guardians, and Black Panther is that the main characters already have low-tier superhero powers at the start of the film, so they don't really ping as standard superhero origins to me, all of those characters already kick ass. I guess you'd call Shang-Chi an origin story since they do talk about his past and how he became crazy good at martial arts, and Guardians is an origin story because it's how the team got together

By my count, Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel the only superhero origin stories in the MCU (as in, shows how the hero of the story gained their superpowers), so they tend to stay away from them for the most part

For the large part, CotM2 is more of the same as CotM1 with a new cast, slightly more polish and a new co-op mode and that's really about it - I stretched out my writeup to be a bit longer than that but that's really the main upshot. But I liked CotM1 a lot, so

Kong

-hotdogturtle-- posted...

I have no idea whether or not I've heard of that game before because all of the Bloodstained games have very similar titles and I couldn't tell you how many different games there are.

There's just three. Ritual of the Night is a SotN-like, and Curse of the Moon/Curse of the Moon 2 are Castlevania III-likes.

#26: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/8/AAA-H0AADfy8.jpg

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon was a very pleasant surprise when it came out a few years ago. I presumed, going into it, that it was going to be a kind of low effort 8-bit pastiche meant to promote the main game they really wanted to sell, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, sort of in the vein of when Inti Creates also made Mighty Gunvolt. Curse of the Moon, however, ended up being a loving tribute to Castlevania III that ultimately builds upon and surpasses it; it is more Classicvania than Classicvania has ever been. It's a genuinely great work of retro-revival gaming.

I expected it to be a one-off. Of course, the sort of middling Mighty Gunvolt did actually give way to a sequel, Mighty Gunvolt Burst, that I consider a good game and genuinely worth playing despite its questionable pedigree. But I kinda figured that Ritual of the Night (albeit not developed by Inti Creates) was kind of the main focus here; Curse of the Moon wasn't supposed to spin off into its own series. Apparently, I was wrong. The announcement and release of Curse of the Moon 2 came as a huge surprise to me.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/9/AAA-H0AADfy9.jpg

I'm a big fan of retro-revival stuff. I've long been a staunch proponent of bringing back the late 80's and early 90's into modern games; delving into the alternate history of gaming where we never figured out how to make 3D games, or where we couldn't make 3D games look like more than a collection of polygons. It's not merely a matter of nostalgia for me, though I imagine that plays into it somewhat; I think that these art styles and game philosophies still have something to add to the medium, and that there's still tons of ways to build upon what was made in those years. Mega Man 9 was still the most mind blowing example of this philosophy being put to work; the decision for Capcom to make a new mainline Mega Man game that looked like the NES classics that I hold so dear is still one of the best things that's happened to me in my life. Mega Man 10, however, was even better; a statement that Mega Man 9 wasn't merely a one-off gimmick, but something that they were willing to repeat, to build on the retro-revival style itself. Mega Man 10 is one of my favorite games of all time for a reason; I think it's exceptionally well-polished, built on decades of understanding of how to make that style of game, and it sheds the gimmicky nature of MM9's back-to-basics formula to take on a new identity of its own.

This is why Curse of the Moon 2 was such an exciting sequel prospect for me, and it delivered. It's hard for me to say if I prefer the first or the second, because I think both are pretty comparable games, but I do think CotM2 builds on the first in some great ways. The new cast of characters all feel more differentiated from each other in this game than in the first, and all of them kinda feel more powerful to use, in their own ways. The different story modes in this one have a lot of new ideas that feel less like they're thrown in there at the last minute, too; the last act, where it kind of turns into an adventure game where each character goes to different levels and you have to find secrets, is especially fun.

As I probably said in my review for the first game, I just really enjoy the Classicvania mechanics. The characters in this game have sluggish movements, and I like it that way; every jump is a commitment, and every attack comes at a potential cost. Of course, I've said that I don't like Dark Souls, and I'm basically describing Dark Souls, which is sort of hard to square; I guess it's because I'm not very good at 3D action games and 2D platformers are kinda my native tongue, so to speak, so I'm just more used to this kind of thing. I like that the subweapons in this game feel powerful and wise usage of them is key to winning. I do feel that this game is a little too hard at times; some of the bosses feel like they require a great deal of trial and error and some of the levels (the volcano level comes to mind) are a bit on the overwhelming side. I played a lot of this game in co-op mode, which I think made the game a little easier to handle; the co-op mode is surprisingly fun, having a friend helps a ton and being able to stand on each others' shoulders is cool.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/0/AAA-H0AADfy-.jpg

The game is, of course, stylishly presented; the pixel art in this game is superb while also remaining true to what was in style in 1990. I feel like the soundtrack was better in the first game, with generally more memorable melodies, but this game really goes heavy metal with the VRC6-style chiptunes and it's a really interesting listen - probably a little too experimental and baroque to be a crowdpleaser for most, but I enjoyed the intracacy and the pushing of boundaries it's going for; this game is trying to be heavy and dirty, like an old Grunge album.

The most important reason Curse of the Moon 2 is good, though, is that it has the two most important features in a game; a Zelda 2-style downstab, and a corgi who drives a tank. What's not to love? Curse of the Moon 2 isn't gonna be everyone's bag; it really specifically appeals to people who like old Castlevania games and wants one that will really properly kick them in the ass. That's me, though, so this game feels like it was made for me. And, I can play it and pretend that the dreaded 3D revolution of the late 90's never happened! It's like seeing a movie with a lot of practical effects. It's a state of 'state of the art' that I can really get behind.

Next up: There's a little black spot on the sun today. It's the same old thing as yesterday.

BN3 White is underrated imo, the only really extra content is the Punk fight that doesn't matter much, both versions have unique styles, chips, and bosses that are comparable to each other and it's hard to say which one's better imo. I think FolderBack is sort of an overpowered and ridiculous chip and the fact that it simply doesn't exist in White is almost a relief because you don't have to run it. Also I like the color schemes in White better. It's not necessarily inferior to Blue!

NiGHTS into dreams...

Never played this game before! Even after watching it, I barely understand what this was about. It's like a 3D platformer for about five seconds but then you turn into a magical guy who flies through rings? So, it's like a better Superman 64? Why was Japan so obsessed with harlequin-themed video game characters in the late 90s? Seriously, you think I might be making that up, but there are SO MANY of them. This run was fine, but I didn't follow along too closely with most of it. I don't have much to say about it - it was mostly flying through some rings and quick killing some bosses.

- "If you see the console startup screen, boo."

- From a donation: "Thanks for showcasing this beautiful experience, sweet dreams, and save the nightopians." "...We may actually be killing a few nightopians."

- Casually turning into a bobsled is a pretty cool move, I have to admit.

- Cool tech names: "TAS Tower." Unfortunately, as expected from anything called TAS anything, it doesn't go flawlessly first try.

- "It's like getting hit by a red shell and then a blue shell. Ever get Mario Karted in Nights?"

- Orb #4

- Also a that's never happened before, I don't know what it was though.

- The ending where Elliot, the random boy at the beginning who barely factors into the game at all, becomes an awesome basketball player at the end is hilarious.

---Highlights---
Kirby and the Forgotten Land
Mass Effect
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
Ninja Gaiden
---Recommended---
Shadow of the Colossus
Rolled Out!
Spyro the Dragon
Super Bonk
Blaster Master
Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth
McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure
Pokemon Snap
---Decent---
Bubble Bobble Part 2
Perspective
Perfect Dark
Alien Cabal
Altered Beast
NiGHTS into dreams...
WarioWare: Touched!
---Skippable---
Super Dream Dasher
Sonic Generations
Bulk Slash

I kept dragging my feet on watching The Pathless because it's 2 hours long and I had a bunch of other stuff to do this week but I also have two games I watched that I forgot to do writeups for. Oops!

McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure

Oh my god, I just noticed it's called TREASURE Land Adventure. Like Treasure, the devs who made it. Mindblowing. I watched the interview with Lizstar before this and I was really interested in this run just seeing how excited Lizstar was to share it, because it's one of Treasure's forgotten little gems; literally the second game they made after their debut with Gunstar Heroes. Unlike most games Lizstar does this one isn't total garbage! I enjoyed this run a lot, kind of reminds me of a poor man's Magical Quest Starring Mickey, commentary keeps the run fresh throughout despite some lengthy autoscroller segments that slow down the pacing dramatically.

- "If you're expecting to see a lot of McDonald's things, there is no food, but there are characters." The lack of food in this game truly is a baffling decision.

- This was, apparently, originally supposed to be a McDonald's game. I would have assumed that it was some other game with McDonald's branding pasted on it in post, but that is apparently not the case!

- I've been tracking "that's never happened before"s and there was one in this run but I don't remember what it was.

- "It is a Happy Meal box with teeth." "So it's a mimic? I mean, anything D&D related sparks me joy but that sounds demonic and this is for children." "You've never seen a childrens' game." This was referring to the ad campaign; I was sad there were no demonic Happy Meal boxes in this one.

- "One of the many, many weird things about this game is that Ronald has his health in the form of gems, and they're always like, Ronald, won't you help me with your famous gems? And I'm like what"

- The minecart level where you have to stand on the shoulders of ballet dancers to get across is utterly spectacular. This really is a Treasure game.

- The sumo wrestlers in the next level are also really cool, their stomps make all the terrain slant and you have to use that to get across. This game's not bad!

- I love that they keep doing Ronald's poses in the background on the couch - I can't get over how goofy they are.

- The penguins that are really happy but get mad and attack you if you attack them are the cutest thing ever.

- The music in the game is pretty banging, gotta say.

- "Here he is! Our boy!" "What's his name?" "Captain Lips!" "Oh, no, it's grown at this point. It's now Sir Mister Captain Lips Esquire III where we last left it."

- I still can't get over the fact that Ronald McDonald has gems in this game. *Famous* gems. Not like, burgers, or chicken mcnuggets, or something.

- Out of context GDQ: "Here's the bean tree, which everyone in my chat absolutely despises.

- "People walk into the practice room and be like, what is this game? And I'm like, don't even ask. If you're asking it's already too late."

- More out of context: "The treasure chest opens, and it turns out, the real treasure was the gay agenda all along."

- "It was hiding on the moon and it was released onto the world and this adventure was a complete waste of time but it was the friends we made along the way and that's the moral which is really annoying when I think about it."

- The final boss music in this game is sort of insane for a game like this.

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

It makes for impressively good material for a metal arrangement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGf32gMnOxQ

- Prize segment after this run. Nothing special, but I do really want those Bubble Bobble perlers. I can never get over how good the melts are on these things.

Yeah, the PlantMan scenario and the constant use of Press and stuff like that do slow down BN3's pacing for me a bit. I think this is a big part of why I like BN2 so much. Every BN game has grinding and fetch quests and at least one quest that involves you spending way too much time in the main internet doing a really long and arduous task, but out of all of them I felt that BN2 has the best pacing. It has way more depth and better QoL than BN1, but doesn't get overburdened with subsystems and weird shit. It feels just the right length and size.

I don't understand why there's some random person who has been consistently making it their goal to make the poll feature worthless on gamefaqs

You cannot convince me that there's really 8 people who prefer BN4

I know that BN3 is supposed to be the best one, and I suppose that qualitatively it is just from its gameplay, its features, and its story, etc - definitely the most complete game - but I just have a special place in my heart for BN2. It was my first one. I love that it has good QoL features over BN1 while still remaining a pretty simple adventure overall compared to the growing complexity of the BNs that came after it. It also has the best music.

5 is good - I like the team battle stuff. I do feel like the series starts to buckle under its own weight here, though. Same for 6 - I think it's a solid return to form at the end of the series, but it feels like a little much at times (and the panic music issue is really unfortunate). 1 is a good proof of concept but feels like an unfinished game, with 2 being the finished product. 4 is... a deeply unfortunate misstep at a time when the series was at its peak popularity. They really halfassed that one in the worst possible ways.

2 > 3 >>>>>>> 5 > 6 >>>>>>> 1 > 4

Metroid

That whole chapter is probably my favorite chapter in the game; seeing "yourself" murder Cabanela is such a memorable setup and the switching the bullet trick is a classic, even if it is a little bullshit that he didn't notice the knit cap

I'm also glad you saw the secret hardhat ending because it's awesome lol

Anagram posted...

I rock a helmet, and Sissel immediately figures out I'm here (unlike dumbass Lynne), looks directly at the screen because this genre loves fourth wall breaks, and pastes Canabela without delay. Funny.

This was what I spoiler blocked. This is one of my favorite moments in the game and I'm glad that you didn't miss it, I got chills when SG turns to face you and calls you out on your bullshit, it feels so violating in a game where up to this point nobody can tell you're there