Lurker > MrMallard

If it's like 48 hours after you break up, that's one thing. Someone might think you were fucking around behind their back for longer than the break-up, or it could just be way too fresh and they feel like you never really loved them. From that point on I'd say you're getting further and further away from that feeling.

If it's like a month later and they're guilt tripping you over being in another relationship, then yeah I'd say they're just angry, bitter people who haven't gotten over it and are fucked off that you did.

3: For The King

First up, For the King is on sale for like $10 right now. Look up some videos. If you like how it looks, get it. I'm gonna do my best to do this game justice, but I'll probably fall short.

For the King is a turn-based roleplaying game in the style of a tabletop RPG. Each playthrough is randomly generated on hexagonal tiles, with a handful of different campaigns to play through. The main campaign sees you confront an evil chancellor who has assassinated the king of Fahrul, taking you from the small town of Woodsmoke all the way to his evil lair out in the middle of the ocean. Other campaigns involve slaying a monster at the top of an icy mountain and slaying a Kraken that's disrupting sea travel for everyone.

You have three character slots, and you have about 12 classes to choose from to make your ideal adventuring party from scratch. You have performing minstrels who fight using their talent skill, playing lutes to attack and to buff the party, you have woodcutters who use the strength stat, boasting high damage numbers and moves that cripple the opponent and inflict bleed, and you have the herbalist class which starts with an innate ability to party-heal. Then there's the hobo, which is a joke class that's mediocre at everything and starts with a pointy stick that can break, leaving them without a weapon. You name them, modify their appearance and send them out into the campaign.

I had a friend, and one night I was dicking around in his Xbox and downloaded the game. I played a little bit, then I was like "dude you've gotta try this". The game is couch co-op - one player can control multiple characters, meaning that you can play between one and three characters by yourself, but you can also have up to three players controlling one character each. We would play with one of us controlling two characters and the other one controlling one.

The first time we played For the King was at 8pm. My friend had to work in the morning, so we were just gonna chill until like 11pm or something.

The next time we checked the time, it was 5am.

For the King is great for roleplaying your own little characters. I used to play an aggressive character who'd drink rum for a damage boost, but it fucked up my hit chance. I used to say that I was going into a Rum Rage. You really get lost in it, because the stakes are so high and you want to level up and do a good job.

The way that most of the campaigns work is that there's an oncoming cataclysm. You have to do objectives like clearing caves to stop the oncoming cataclysm, but you're only delaying the next cataclysm until you finally face the final boss. You need to level up, take risks and make progress before you get three cataclysm tokens. To that end, you have three life tokens - if your character/s die, you can revive them with those tokens. But once you run out of tokens, that's it. You're dead. The campaign is over, you lose your equipment and you have to start from scratch.

When you complete objectives or finish a campaign, you get Lore - this is a currency that unlocks different random overworld events, new clothing options and new classes for your characters. The store is packed - you can buy a seafaring casino ship event, you can buy siren events, you can buy statue events that give you a ton of XP and a boon to your stats. You can buy new loot to add to the drop table too - it's very robust.

For the King is designed to be played over and over again. The sense of progress and roleplaying is fantastic, and the characters are well and truly yours. I cannot overstate how much I love this game, and it's an unbeatable couch co-op experience; if you like this game, share it with a friend. It's so much fun that I can't even describe it. I'm not friends with that guy any more, but I still play For the King on my Switch because it's a great game with a lot of fond memories behind it. Out of every game in this last stretch of three games, I need to champion this one the most - it's an indie game, and it has a sequel coming out very soon. Look into it, see if you like it, and for the love of fuck, play this game. It's an absolute pearl of an RPG.

Bad_Mojo posted...

Going to Alaska

https://youtu.be/OCR6DTbcpik

The game looks and runs like shit, but the actual fights run pretty decently and I'm enjoying the Krypt grind. Maining my boy Baraka.

I bought the game on sale for fourteen bucks. Used to play it all the time on a friend's Xbox but I haven't been friends with that guy in years. It's a hard pill to swallow when you first start playing the game, because everything that isn't the actual matches is choppy and ugly and runs like shit - the hair especially looks like dogshit, and characters with lots of hair cause the most slowdown on pre-fight banter and fatalities.

It's not a good way to play the game, but I'm getting used to it and I'm actually having a lot of fun. If I can get fourteen hours out of the game, that's one dollar per hour of entertainment. That's not so bad.

Some of the absolutely worst fanbase imo:

Pokemon: It's no surprise since the biggest fanbases attract the most jerkoffs, but Pokemon has like multiples axes of shitty fans.

You have the original Genwunners who bitch and moan about the Keyring Pokemon and the Ice Cream Pokemon, god forbid Pokemon fit an arbitrary definition you made up about what is and isn't a Pokemon.

You have the competitive scene with IVs and EVs and hundreds of hours of egg breeding per Pokemon - I really hate the idea that there's an ideal way to play Pokemon that involves no-lifing the game and looking down on people who don't subscribe to the same insane mental philosophy as you.

And then there's the people who are kneejerk defensive of newer titles like Scarlet and Violet - I was on board with SwSh, and I thought Arceus was an okay game, but the former generation of games were clearly undercooked and S/V was clearly worse. Instead of thinking "huh game freak fast-tracking development on new games and releasing legends arceus and s/v in the same year is kind of fucked up, maybe they should treat the devs better and spend more time developing the games", the discourse becomes "the newest games don't run like shit because they're released in an unfinished state, it's because the games are too advanced to run on the Nintendo Switch!".

I sincerely hate all three of those factions, specifically I hate the idea that any of those three viewpoints are the definitive way to experience the Pokemon franchise. Also Ash haters and people who mythologize Red from gen 1 are stupid and annoying.

Sherlock: Fans of Steven Moffat's Sherlock are some of the most delusional people I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. We're talking about a shipping war that was so prolonged and intense that the fanbase ignored the show bringing a character back to life without explaining it, demonised a character who married one of the people in their ship to the point of hatemail being sent to multiple real people involved in the show, and when the final season ended up being a poorly produced pile of dogshit, they became convinced that the season was dogshit on purpose and that there was going to be a secret fourth episode that explained why the season was dogshit and got their favorite pairing together and all that sort of insane fan rambling.

Sherlock was a part of this compound fandom on Tumblr called Superwholock - Supernatural, Doctor Who, Sherlock. When Supernatural ended, it was such an insane shitshow and the fan theories people were making to justify their favourite gay pairing was both hilarious and kind of validated through foreign dubs. Supernatural fans were annoying, but the culmination of their fandom was legitimately hilarious. Doctor Who was annoying all through Steven Moffat's run - I maintain that despite a few good episodes, Moffat is a wanker and his run on Doctor Who was wanky and annoying. Chibnall's run ended up being annoying, but I rejoined the Doctor Who fandom after Moffat and I genuinely enjoy it.

Sherlock's fanbase was a steaming pile of shit all the way through. No hate if you enjoy the show, but if you were there to witness the brain rot firsthand, you know what I'm talking about.

Good, that guy bites

Mother by Pink Floyd:

https://youtu.be/xe3NUKCnZp4

The Sign by Ace of Bass:

https://youtu.be/iqu132vTl5Y

I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) by Meat Loaf:

https://youtu.be/P6Do1Hx0pdE

No I Can't by the Mountain Goats:

https://youtu.be/FwEmK5cGgLo

Girl I'm Gonna Miss You by a bunch of uncredited background singers, not Milli Vanilli:

https://youtu.be/ZPvVV_qxtPM

Would I Lie To You? by Charles and Eddie:

https://youtu.be/jTUVlYZRr90

Please Don't Go by KC and the Sunshine Band:

https://youtu.be/PwrVePMx6t0

Just Another Day by Joe Secada:

https://youtu.be/B6LhWbQthAI

Have_A_Cigar posted...

Colorblind is their only song I like

Colorblind is the only song of theirs I dislike lmao. I guess we're mortal enemies or something.

I wasn't super flash on Somewhere Under Wonderland though.

Rivers of Babylon by Boney M.:

https://youtu.be/jSxQJUv1e8k

Moonlight Shadow by Mike Oldfield and Maggie Reilly:

https://youtu.be/e80qhyovOnA

Only You by the Flying Pickets, originally by Yazoo:

https://youtu.be/AIGIYAwv2kw

Did He Shoot Her by Elton John (I have a LOT of Elton John and David Bowie, be thankful I'm showing restraint. Also I'm listing songs I already know by heart bc I'm still listening to Moonlight Shadow):

https://youtu.be/HIvEjjfw6qY

Rock Your Baby by George McCrae:

https://youtu.be/Wdo-ZiHqbls

I'm on Fire by 5000 Volts:

https://youtu.be/J_jQ4iMZ_a4

Needles and Pins by Smokie:

https://youtu.be/0S-t45AGIpc

Action by Sweet - I was gonna skip this but the chorus kicked in and it fucking rules:

https://youtu.be/rls1DV4HktE

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/8/7/AAbh80AAErVn.jpg

She did an album recently with her dad.

I was listening to a bunch of their songs last night, and it just kinda clicked. Like there's always been that little bit of a buffer because of lines like "I'll miss you while she slips into something comfortable, and I'll miss you when I'm slipping in between" - eww - but I think the angsty, unlucky-in-love vibe of it all is a step behind my own personal development.

Like I'm not gonna act like I'm this mad Casanova douchebag slaying mad poon all weekend every weekend. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty unlucky in love. I won't get into it because CE's userbase is like a gang of sharks that can smell cringe in the water from 5 miles away, but I've been rejected a lot and I'm not super sexually experienced with women. Men, sure - I'm open online about my bisexuality. But not so much with the ladies.

That being said, I had a moment recently after a not-great hookup with a trans girl. I've been doing the hookup thing for way too long, and I realised that if I was gonna like meet someone and have sex and all that, I want to find someone I get along with beforehand and just sort of settle in with them beforehand. idk, I'm just more self-conscious and I wanna start settling down.

Counting Crows appeals to that sort of wistful loneliness, Adam Duritz got dumped a lot, but I put a lot of stock into that melancholic looking back at things that went wrong. Nowadays, I wanna look forward and put myself into finding someone.

Another aspect of it is when I saw them live back in April. The music sounded great, but I've been commenting that the band looked really old and it kinda took me out of it all. I think I realised why - Adam Duritz is a 60 year old man singing songs about heartbreak that hit the public when he was 30. They're songs of heartbreak and longing that I associate with my own youthful angst, coming from a sixty year old man. And like I get that Elton John and Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow etc. still do their old love songs because of what they mean to their audience, but it was just kind of a jarring experience. The music was phenomenal, they put their entire crussy into that concert, but there was a weird dissonance to it.

I still like the music to a degree, but I think what really connected me to it is gone. My priorities are changing as a person, and confronting the ageing of it has left me in a really weird headspace. It's not that I don't like the band or their music any more, it's that it doesn't strike the same chord it used to for a couple of different reasons. I still like songs like Omaha and Rain King and all that, but singing about like "we're not together and I miss that but I've gotta process our love and here's a bunch of grandiose expressions of how I feel" is just kinda out of my wheelhouse now.

Tagging for later, I've got some good ones

4: Dragon Quest II

So first of all, DQII is a lot more of a tedious pain in the ass to begin with. The story is fine, I like that they go for the big cutscene even in the NES version, but when it came to finding the prince of Moonbrooke it's easy to fuck up and get lost. Then there's growing pains all the way through to recruiting the princess and through a bunch of missions. Personally, I think the moment you get the boat is when the game reaches its full potential and gets really fun.

I never got that far playing the NES version. It was too jank, and I really disliked that the battle screen went into this black void and had a cluster of different enemy groups. That combined with the tedium involved with finding the Prince of Moonbrooke is what turned me off the game.

Once again, the Switch port is a presentational disgrace that makes the gameplay a little more bearable. I found it easier to find my bearings and follow a walkthrough, though granted I last played DQ about five years before I got the Switch version. The game also introduces an annoying sidequest where one of your characters gets poisoned, but in hindsight it lets you grind up the princess character so whatever.

I think a lot of people write off DQ2 as being worse than the first game. On the NES version, I don't blame people for having reservations - I quit before the point where I later thought the game got good. But I think actually playing through and finishing DQ2 is a different story, especially when you consider the circumstances behind it.

Dragon Quest II launched like a year before Final Fantasy 1. The party system, the boat, all that shit was Dragon Quest II. The first half of the game is a slog, I totally agree, but it ended up blazing the trail that Final Fantasy would tread in competition with DQ.

I still prefer the original Dragon Quest over the sequel, but the Switch ports are both unappealing as sin on the presentation front. When push comes to shove, I came to really enjoy DQ2's mechanical improvements over what was, unfortunately, just a little bit of a lesser experience in DQ1's case. The magic is in party management imo.

I'm always gonna appreciate the NES version of 1 over the NES version of 2, but honestly, removing all that and making boh of the games ugly helps you appreciate DQ2 on its own merits. It's a good game, and I like the shitty mobile port of it better than DQ1's shitty mobile port.

I really enjoyed the first Mission Impossible movie. It still holds up today, it's stupid fun.

I like the lady with the glasses, Luther is the best character in the series and the part where Tom Cruise goes "they're dead, they're DEAD!" is hilariously hammy.

Avatar was the first show where I was a "fan" - like I discovered fanfiction because I needed to know if people were creating their own Avatar stories and shit, I needed more of it. Avatar is always gonna have that super special place in my heart, as far as I'm concerned it's flawless - "but what about--" literally everything has flaws genius, but my love for it supercedes the minor gripes people have for it.

Justice League was pretty great too. It just didn't have the direct pipeline into my brain, it was a Saturday morning cartoon on a network channel whereas Avatar came on after school on a dedicated after-school kid's block on a national broadcaster. I'll absolutely go to bat for Justice League, I like it better than the fucking New 52 animated movies where everyone's a snarky dumbass. The other movies are hit and miss, but they're artistically interesting and cover interesting ground. Turning those movies into an interconnected franchise was a dumb move.

In summary, I've gotta rep Avatar, but I have a great fondness and appreciation of Justice League as well.

5: Dragon Quest I

I'm going to start off with the negatives. First of all, the music mixing is dogshit - when you go into a battle, there's this really loud oscillating opera music that's really fucking annoying. I don't like the obvious phone art, with the player sprite being a particular point of contention, and the pictures for the monsters in this game look like they were traced in MSpaint and painted in KidPix. On a presentation level, Dragon Quest on the Switch is kind of dogshit.

With that being said, on a foundational level, I've got a lot to say about this game. I've actually played the NES version almost to completion in the past, which is absolutely classic - the music is good and the spritework is blocky and basic in a very charming way. I actually want to highlight the music, since the Switch music is a totally different soundtrack - here's an awesome metal cover of two of the game's songs, I've had this under my belt for years:

https://youtu.be/DJiadqvauMM

What makes that game so hard to finish is that everything is menu-based - you want to talk to a character, you have to open a menu and select the Talk action. You want to go down some stairs, you open the menu and select the Move action. You want to open a chest, you have to open the menu and select the Open menu. There's a very good piece of armour laying on the ground at one point, like an invisible item in Pokemon, and you have to stand on the specific tile, open the menu and select Search.

This can be forgiven because Dragon Quest 1 is the first JRPG ever. Turn-based RPGs existed beforehand in the form of Wizardry and Ultima, but what would become a defining spin on the concept of turn-based RPGs - and what would bring the turn-based RPG to home consoles in a way that would make them a massive success - was started on the shoulders of Dragon Quest 1.

With that being said, the constant menuing is one thing that drove my teenage self to fatigue with DQ1. The other thing that got me is that the game comes down to grinding - you are obligated to grind and raise your level to a particular level to learn a better healing spell, otherwise your fight with the Dragonmaster is genuinely unwinnable. And by the time you've unlocked the Dragonmaster's castle, you're probably not going to have that spell. That turns the last chunk of the game into a monotonous grindfest. I love this game, but it is unequivocally a monotonous grindfest.

So despite being a cheap, ugly piece of shit by virtue of being ported from mobile, all the way from a base version that released in 2009 for Japanese flip phones, the Switch port of Dragon Quest helps a lot with playability by... just letting you press A to interact with stuff. Walk over the stairs, you automatically travel up or down the stairs. Wanna speak to the king, press the A button. It's a small QoL improvement, literally the bare minimum, but it helps to make the game more palatable.

Despite the dogshit music, battles are also a lot better to sit through as well. It lacks that classic DQ charm, but you're in and out of basic fights and the boss fights are still weighty and mechanically fun. The game is much more palatable by virtue of eliminating some of the outdated tedium in the form of that interaction menu - which isn't entirely removed, it just isn't the sole interface with the entire world that it was on the NES.

Dragon Quest is a very basic turn-based RPG, but there's a purity to the experience that I genuinely find captivating. It's the first JRPG y'know. This is where it all began. It's got an excuse plot, there's a sidequest about rescuing the king's daughter from a dragon, and mechanically you can bring the princess into your fight with the Dragonmaster because saving her changes your sprite to show you carrying her in your arms. The phone port actually adds dialogue where the Dragonmaster thanks you for bringing her directly to him if you choose to do so. And on top of that, there's a playable epilogue!

I enjoyed Dragon Quest because despite an earnest, humble attempt to have an open world and a bit of a story with the princess and the dragon and the Dragonmaster and all that - it's a very gamey RPG. I enjoyed grinding on this version because it was less tedious than the NES version. The presentation blew ass, but it was a lot easier to just play and experience. Like I said, there's a purity to Dragon Quest 1. It's not perfect, not on NES or phones/Switch, but I'm a very big fan.

WrkHrdPlayHrdr posted...

Buy DQ11 and play it.

I really enjoyed Ni No Kuni when I played it but I couldn't help but feel that it was designed for a 10 year old and I don't know why. Maybe the story, but the story is a little dark IIRC. I should give it a playthrough again and beat it.

I downloaded the demo, and when the battle went into that open space where you can run around I noped out pretty fucking hard. That being said, I hear it's not actually ni no kuni-adjacent, and if it really bothers me that much I can play the faux-8bit version of the game.

Aww hell yeah, here's that guy

I saw that the sequel came out a while ago. If you've tried it, how did you like it?

First of all, love that Almost Lover is in the OP. I'm hipster trash and I love seeing my tastes get validated.

I've got some more songs that are loosely in that vein.

Some Kind of Window - Rachael Yamagata:
https://youtu.be/6GtkVOsQywI

Moreso about coming to terms with a break-up, having trouble moving on and truly saying goodbye. If I can't wish you well, there will be no moving on.

The Time I've Wasted - Lori McKenna:
https://youtu.be/93WrEBNMb6k

Very tear-in-your-beer country song lamenting lost time in a relationship that didn't go anywhere.

Spring Street - Dar Williams:
https://youtu.be/PywAKe7P2Ss

A song about finding yourself and moving on.

6: Brave Dungeon

I know for a fact that there's another dude on CE who loves this game. Brave Dungeon is a nice, casual turn-based RPG set over a series of bite-sized dungeons, occasionally interspersed with some banter between your main character and some side characters at a bar or something. I legitimately haven't played Brave Story in five years because I unlocked everything, so I don't remember a whole lot.

This is one of the first four games I ever bought for the Switch. I got myself $30 of credit and I bought three games the Christmas that I got it - Stardew Valley (which is GOATed, c'mon), Opus: Valley of Stars or something (which I didn't like, and which I found out was a free mobile game years later), and that Gunvolt/Mighty No. 9 crossover game (which wasn't fantastic). I'm pretty sure Brave Dungeon was the fourth game I ever bought.

Here's what I like about Brave Dungeon: it's fairly brisk so you're always making progress, the art is really good, it's a short experience and it's built to be replayed. After every run-through, you get these crystals which you can use to buy perks in a New Game + shop. Eventually you get stupid OP and unlock a final dungeon that rises to the challenge, at which point you just fuck around, buy everything and play a minigame. You can also buy concept art and unlock a sequel tease that took years to come out.

I like that the game is so intensely playable, geared specifically for that New Game + experience. It's a game you can burn through, it wasn't built to last but you're going to have a lot of fun pushing it to that expiration date.

I'm tired as shit right now, and Brave Dungeon is kind of a basic game. But it's really, really good. The Switch has some trashy anime games, and this game is fairly above-board and classy all things considered - it's a solid package and I have a lot of nostalgic love for it. I wish dumbass animu budget RPG games were all as fun as Brave Dungeon.

The Final Act is a mid show, a bunch of the episodes feel super rushed and cramped. The final arc does okay I guess, but I'm not a big fan of the story developments.

It's a 6/10 ending. I like where it leaves the characters, but I don't really buy the resolution y'know.

In a bottle with a fuckload of sugar, left to age for a couple months so it can be sold for a princely sum of five dollars.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/8/7/AAbh80AAErVn.jpg

I played 4 earlier this year after playing 5 in 2021. That game is the definition of "the real reward was the friends you made along the way", because I didn't get how the game was such a big deal but I loved the characters.

The Adachi twist was kinda mid. Like okay, he was a misanthropic misogynist who became a cop to own a gun and he began murdering people, and some dickhead demon gave him the power to do it for their own amusement. I get how it was meant to be shocking, but the reveal was kind of mid to tell you the truth. I wasn't a big fan of that demon twist either, I kinda called it.

And it suffers especially in comparison to Persona 5. Like that's just how the cookie crumbles, what with P5 coming out so much later and being such a massive step up. That being said? The Akechi twist was kinda mid too, though I love how hard he fucking loses it and gets outed as a psycho. It's just got more meat to it, and the eventual big bad of the game was way more to bite off as well.

Adachi isn't a chessmaster, he's a fucking douchebag - and while it's arguable that he's meant to be an unsatisfying douchebag to direct players to dig deeper into the real antagonist, it doesn't change the fact that he's an unsatisfying douchebag. Like everything about Adachi is a letdown, except his implied kinda-sorta in-progress redemption later on. Akechi is a psycho and a wannabe chessmaster, and it makes outsmarting that chumpasaurus rex really entertaining.

Adachi was a villain by chance, Akechi was a villain by force. It comes down to personal preference, but personally, knocking that smug prick Akechi off his perch was way more entertaining than listening to another misogynistic rant before Adachi murders another woman by pushing her into a TV.

superben posted...

Wish the final fantasy games were in ur list

I haven't played the Final Fantasy games on my Switch ;D

The FF games I've played to completion are 5, 10, 10-2, 13 and 13-2. I've seen playthroughs of 7 and 9 - 7 is a jankfest that I don't think I would enjoy playing, though I enjoyed watching the playthrough very much, and I played a fair chunk of 9 until the PS1 Classic emulation jank on PS3 took its toll. I've also played a significant amount of FF1 as the Dawn of Souls version, and I was playing FF4 for a while too.

The current plan is to play the Pixel Remasters on Switch as well as FF8 and maybe FF12. I also wanna try FF14 when I get a decent enough computer. Like I mentioned in the last post, I love a gamey RPG - FF5 is probably my favorite game that I've finished, I really liked 10's Sphere Grid and 10-2's dressphere job system, and while I'm fairly open-minded about 13 as an entire package - it's gorgeous and I don't hate the characters like some other people do - that game is flawed on a foundational level. I really liked 13-2 though.

people gonna be mad about this one boyos

7: Cat Quest

I'm not huge on this sort of action RPG, the style of battling is a bit close to Link to the Past and I got my fill of that as a teenager. Yes I know that sounds insane, I got my fill of a lot of things as a teenager and people find it hard to believe that I had short, intense phases that ended up dying out and killing most of my interest in the thing instead of becoming life-long interests. Or maybe the insane part is comparing Cat Quest to LttP - the only resemblance is the combat to a slight degree.

Long story short, this isn't the sort of game I go nuts for most of the time. But Cat Quest was a really great, lightweight play experience that held my interest. I really liked it.

It has that open feeling where you have quest boards and little quest chains, and you can just go and fuck around with the enemies to raise your levels. Some games, RPG or not, are more story-based experiences - Final Fantasy 13 is more of a story game than it is a "game" game, what with the intensely railroaded gameplay and star progression. Other games, like Final Fantasy 5, are more gamey RPGs. I liked Final Fantasy 13 to a degree, the gameplay was scuffed but I didn't mind the experience - but Final Fantasy 5 is one of my favorite RPGs ever. I like gamey RPGs. I don't dislike more story-focused games, I love Night in the Woods, but I love an RPG where you can turn your brain off and make numbers go up with relatively few restrictions. That also explains why I like Oldschool Runescape so much.

Tangent aside - Cat Quest is a gamey RPG. It's not too heavy or committal, but there's a nice little story to follow along with and there's like some genuinely interesting and fun storytelling. On top of that, the presentation is airtight; the art is nice, a bit basic but the cat angle helps bring it back, and everything glues together fairly well. It's got like a pop-up book art style almost.

Like, Cat Quest could have been a trashy cash-grab piece of shovelware trash. But it isn't - there's enough effort, budget and genuine love that makes the game very playable.

If you get into those moods where you can't bring yourself to boot up something that takes genuine mental, emotional or reflexive effort to enjoy, Cat Quest is a great game that scratches that "game" itch without requiring or expecting a great deal of commitment. That being said, the airtight presentation and unexpectedly decent story gives the game enough depth to be an engaging and enjoyable experience.

teep_ posted...

<3

for my part, I'd second @Aeriis and add @mrmallard (who can't be tagged for some reason ._.)

I can be tagged now : )

I was warned the other day so that might be why. Thanks teep, I appreciate the kind words and I second bluezero's nomination fwiw

There's a YouTuber named Billiam with 8 hours of video content about the show Lost

DoubleOSnake posted...

yeah i really like easy on me. What do you mean overexposure, compared to like who, taylor swift? and what do you mean by belting?

Adele was on the radio multiple times an hour when I was growing up, so I'd have to listen through the same three or four hit songs repeated ad nauseum. That really made me hate her music because I wasn't particularly fond of her to begin with.

By belting, I mean - for example - when she goes "we could have had it AAAAALLLLLL" in Rolling in the Deep. I've tried to express this unsuccessfully in the past, but Easy on Me is more... melodious? Like yeah she's tapping into her powerful vocals, but it's not just a wall of fucking sound.

And I know that's erroneous and flippant to say, but I think it comes from that negative bias I mentioned.

I didn't like a lot of her music due to overexposure. Like she's talented, but her belting really aggravated me.

I will say that when Take It Easy On Me came out, though, I couldn't get enough of it. More songs like that please.

If using a third party app is illegal, then don't do that I guess.

If using a third party app is legal, fucking use it. Everywhere is getting fucked - Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, even Tumblr is dealing with staff overreach fucking up the site more than usual. And they want you to pay more? Fuck them. Look out for yourself.

Of course, I say that under the impression that it's legal - but frowned upon at best - to download a third party app and access YouTube that way. If that isn't the case, then wait for a grey area to pop up and do that shit. Fuck em.

#8: Phantasy Star

So heads up, this is the last game on this list that I've never finished.

Most of those unfinished games are either actual dogshit, or they're games that I didn't quite take to as a matter of personal taste. Phantasy Star isn't in either category.

Rather, what gets me about Phantasy Star is how lost I can get. Like I'll be stuck at one point of the game, navigating the same coastline and fighting the same random battles to the point of frustration, and then I'll drop the game for months. Then when I come back, I'm totally lost. That's a "me" problem, and it doesn't stop me from loving the game.

First of all, for a JRPG of its era? This game is gorgeous. I honestly think that the Master System has underrated visuals at the best of times, having more of a detailed display in games from Phantasy Star to Alex Kidd to the Sonic ports. The scrolling is choppy and the sound is a bit wimpy, but good god does Phantasy Star show off what the console is capable of on a good day.

This game launched just after Final Fantasy II and before Dragon Quest III. The colours pop, the cutscenes - while a little stiff - are lavishly detailed in comparison to the competition, and the design of the characters feels a lot more detailed and articulated. FF and DQ are fine, but for the time, Phantasy Star blew them both out of the water. And the dungeons still look incredible with that faux-3D effect.

Secondly? I love that the devs went with a sci-fi setting. Yeah, Final Fantasy had robots, but this was a game where you can build a spaceship and travel to different planets, and you were killing aliens and other assorted weird sci-fi bugs. It works. Final Fantasy is magitech, Dragon Quest is occult, and Phantasy Star is Space Opera. It just fucking works.

And lastly, the game is just so interesting on so many different levels. You have Alis as one of the most fleshed-out female characters in gaming, let alone a lead protagonist, up to that point. You have two totally seperate soundtracks, with America only getting an inferior soundtrack due to not receiving the peripheral that would play the smoother version of the soundtrack. All that stuff about when it released and how it looks - Phantasy Star is an anomaly.

And what gets me is that I've never been able to get into the later games. The second game is okay, but that difficulty curve is scuffed. I tried playing one of the PSP games and I just straight up didn't like it. But that first game is just such an intensely interesting product that I'm just enamored by it.

I have trouble getting through Phantasy Star, and it's to such a degree that I've never finished it myself. That partially results in the ranking it's gotten on this list. But I have a great fondness of this game.

Old-School Runescape.

The Mining and Smithing skills own my entire ass

#11: Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Let's get a few things out of the way. First of all, Ni no Kuni is a gorgeous game - the cutscenes are great, the graphics are fantastic, the music is really good and I liked the story a lot. I love Level-5, their PS2 output is GOATed and Professor Layton is one of my favourite game series ever. This is in no way a "bad" game.

That being said - I didn't finish the game. I got the boat, ended up getting stuck and didn't care to progress further.

Now, I've been watching a streamer named Snapcube play through Dragon Quest 8 recently. It was made by Level-5, and the way I understand it is that you just fuck around and explore the map, experiencing the world until you come across a plot trigger. Perhaps if I had more patience back in the day and just explored and shit, maybe I would have finished it?

Well, to tell you the truth, I thought about going back to Ni no Kuni recently. And I ultimately decided against it because I didn't like the combat. The little arena where you throw your guys and do your attacks and all that kind of bothered me, and by the time I hit the port town where you get the ship, I was getting to my wit's end. I don't mean to criticize; I understand that it's just not for me, and the system is probably robust and all sorts of fun for people who click with it. But it felt more like busywork to me.

Ni no Kuni is a fine game with a lot of great pedigree to it and an excellent presentation. But it just didn't click.

10: Torchlight II

I like dungeon crawlers. Like back in the day, my sister's laptop had FATE pre-installed on it and I played the fuck out of that game. If they ported FATE, I'd play that shit in an instant. I've also talked about my enjoyment of Diablo 1 and 3. So Torchlight is a slam-dunk, right? It's even made by a ton of former FATE devs!

...

There's something off about Torchlight 2's presentation. The font is the same font they use in that House Party game, it's like a font that's meticulously designed for cheap, shitty boner games. The homescreen is jank as hell, and I personally didn't care much for the cutscenes.

I played a fair bit of Torchlight II, and it was okay to a degree. But it didn't have that insane addictive quality that I think I was looking for. I didn't vibe with any of the playstyles that I tried, and I didn't care about the story. Mowing down waves of assholes didn't feel super great.

And again, I don't mind stupid dumb-ass dungeon crawler schlock. FATE is a well-presented all-ages title with generic monsters, going down multiple randomly generated dungeon floors to get loot and taking it back to town. I like that. I didn't really glom onto the sort of presentation and vibe that Torchlight II was trying.

Like fwiw, it was definitely okay. Chalk it up to me being a Diablo III dude, but I just didn't get into it and it became a slog that I didn't want to finish.

#9: Hand of Fate 2

Hand of Fate 2 is a very fun idea. You're playing a board game with this evil fella, where you roll dice and spin wheels and do puzzles to determine your chance of success. He deals out a maze of cards for you to traverse, where you get events like - for example - chasing a thieving vagabond who steals 30 gold coins, and based on a mixture of skill and luck, you can either get your coins back or lose them forever.

The game is played in scenarios, and those scenarios have different endings. In one, you might seek out the support of a noble king - depending on how well you did, he might lend you the support, or he might politely decline because you didn't get enough tokens to convince him of your worth.

What makes Hand of Fate 2 such a novel game is that when you inevitably get involved in combat encounters, the game shifts into action combat. You actually get a 3D dude with a moveset, and you physically beat up whatever the fuck is antagonizing you. It skirts close to an action RPG in that sense, but the rest of the game pulls it back with its heavy focus on points and roleplaying.

And the game is a real uphill climb too, it's a roguelike in many ways. You will die, whether you're bad at the combat - because your HP carries over between board events like the vagabond example and the combat encounters - or because you get a run of bad luck.

I really like Hand of Fate 2, but for some reason it's hard for me to go back to. I think I'm gonna reinstall it and get further in the game, because like every other game on this list so far - I haven't finished it. Check out a playthrough or a stream of it, Vinesauce has a few streams of it which is how I found the game.

It's an optional extra that the Alliance didn't spring for.

Like at work we got a new sheet press. Our old press had a reject button for stained linen, it'd get spat back out and we'd grade it and all that.

Our new sheet press didn't come with a reject button. All the functionality was there, they just didn't include the actual button until we paid a premium to get it installed.

Same goes for the Normandy. The functionality should by all means be there, but until you jump through the necessary hoops, things don't work that way.

I remember when I was going through a satanist phase, I was dabbling in philosophical satanism as a way of lampooning rigid, dogmatic Christianity that's baked into the foundation of western society. Call it being a contrarian, call it a thought exercise, I don't care. What eventually got me off of that ride was realising that the Satanic Temple was a dogshit org headed by an antisemite who was suing four former TST members for posting about antifa (despite Doug Mesner, the main head of the Satanic Temple, maintaining a pro-eugenics website and platforming a known KKK member), and subsequently learning that modern satanism was made up by a carnie using one of the foundational texts of the modern white supremacy movement.

I still fuck with the imagery and the general transgressive nature of it all, but I'm strictly against religious establishment - whether it's the Vatican aiding and abetting offending pedophiles, or the Satanic Temple being built on a legacy of hucksters and cozying uncomfortably close to neo-nazis. I don't begrudge what Christianity or Satanism means to the individual, but when you put another human being in a position of power to disseminate the principles of those viewpoints to other people, something extremely sick begins to form and it leads to abuse.

Though that relates more to satanism as a movement and attempted religion than any feelings towards "the devil". So here's my take on that: "the devil" was made up by people to contrast with "the lord", and neither really exist. What I think most represents the concept of "the devil" are groups and people who prey on the gullibility, impulsiveness and desperation of others to sell them a solution to a greater spiritual evil, often for their own gain. Whether it be ideological gain, ala stigmatizing and scapegoating another group of people out of prejudice, or physical gain in the form of monetary donations, "the devil" manifests in the form of a forced dichotomy that makes you The Good Guy and the other people The Bad Guy.

There is such thing as an informed opinion, and experts do exist on certain matters. The world isn't so subjective that you can substitute reality with your own delusions as a "free thinker", that's how you start believing that the world is flat and that other racial groups are inherently flawed compared to your own. "The devil" is a force that drives you towards those bad answers for some sort of gain for the people doing the misleading. It's something we created as a way to be cruel and selfish.

What do I think of Satan? I think his role in the story of Christianity is interesting, and that it can be extrapolated any number of ways for good or for bad. What do I think of "the devil"? I think "the devil" is just as likely to exist in the Vatican or in some huckster's dogshit megachurch in Utah as it is to exist in a hypocritical pseudo-religious establishment as the Satanic Temple.

Goddamnit.

Yeah it's a stanky riff. I love it.

So I forgot a game because I'm still actively playing it - this list was curated via my redownload list. That game is For the King, and it ranks pretty highly.

Because of that, all of the previous entries shift up one number and the next entry is the real #12.

#12: Atelier Escha & Logy

So I loved Atelier Ayesha on PS3. I actually replayed it last year, and I waited for Escha and Logy to go on sale so I could continue the story.

Simply put, Escha and Logy doesn't match up. I like the stamp system, but the thing feels a lot more closed-in. I'm not super big on how the returning cast are being portrayed, and the whole dialogue system between Escha and Logy seems kind of superfluous. The game is also very gritty and brown compared to Ayesha - like the world was clearly in decay, but there was still a lot of life in that game.

I've tried to carry on with this one and I haven't been able to. I'll get back to it eventually, but I don't particularly like it. I'd say more but I'm on break at work.

Honestly, the most likely explanation is that she was raped.

I'm not saying that to be morbid or ghoulish, I'm just surprised that after users were concerned about her being trafficked earlier in the thread, folks jumped into shitposting about Twin Peaks and aliens because she wasn't found at the bottom of some hillbilly's freezer two weeks later.

She was gone for 48 hours, a man was spotted by her car, folks were concerned that the toddler thing was a trafficking tactic. When she got home, someone called emergency services on an "unresponsive but breathing person".

I think the most likely outcome is that she was abducted, raped and then dropped off somewhere, at which point she made her way home.