Lurker > Kenri

Vampire Survivors (Steam)

This game is so stupid (complimentary)

I have a couple more achievements/secrets to get but I killed the Director and Je-Ne-Viv so I think that's enough to call it beaten.

Yeah I've basically never seen a game do an endgame point of no return the way Gato Roboto does, especially in a Metroidvania. I guess Dark Souls, since it boots you straight into NG+? In any case it's pretty annoying, and the warning could be much clearer.

I've owned Goldeneye since around when it came out and never made much progress at all in it. Someday I'll beat it, maybe.

Yeah I would have liked Majotori way more if it had more general knowledge questions and less about anime and Marvel films.

Heck yes, Phoenotopia: Awakening is amazing. Definitely a hidden gem. It's just a shame that they've all but said "we're not making a sequel, the game didn't sell enough" because yeah, it desperately wants a sequel.

Sonic Spinball (GEN)

I think this is the first console game I ever owned. As with the other SNES/Genesis/etc era games I've beaten recently, I used a bunch of save states to finally finish this -- but hey, it's been 25+ years that I've owned this game. Time to wrap it up, however imperfectly, and move on.

I have a lot of affection for this game but it kinda sucks. The pinball doesn't feel very pinbally and the Sonic doesn't feel very Sonicy. It's very hard to make the ball do what you want, to say nothing of trying to control Sonic in the rare sections where he's not being a pinball. Dishonorable mention to the bonus, "realistic" pinball, stages, which are maybe the least satisfying pinball facsimiles ever made. On the bright side this game has some wicked boss designs and the soundtrack still slaps 30 years later.

Lone Fungus (Steam)

Another Hollow Knight clone. In some ways this is the most Hollow-Knight-fangame of all of them, but in other ways it's the only one that has, like... any actual identity of its own at all. It's a lot more meaty than most recent metroidvanias - a normal playthrough is like 10-15 hrs and it took me 19 to 100% complete it (not getting all achievements though). There are a lot of fairly difficult platforming challenges but they're generally self-contained and optional, and I did all of them even though the rewards are. Bad. I imagine your enjoyment of the game will depend a lot on whether juggling six different movement techniques while pogoing off spikes for absolutely zero reward sounds like a good time to you or not. I am usually not that person but it clicked here. Definitely worth a look if you're a metroidvania fan!

one night, hot springs (Steam)

This is a very quick one (especially if you read fast). I got both endings that involve heart to hearts with the other characters and it only took me 36 minutes total.

This game definitely makes me wish I had stayed at a hot spring when I visited Japan last month, but at least I went to one on my first visit back in 2015, before I had a tattoo (uh, not to mention before I was trans -- if this game is to be believed maybe they'd be cool with that, but color me unconvinced). I was with family this past time anyway and a public bath was probably a hard no from them regardless, so no big loss I guess. Anyway the game is cute and made me tear up at one point, and IIRC it's free. Can't ask for much more.

Zapling Bygone (Steam)

Okay so, I played it nonstop for 3 and a half hours until I had beaten it, so clearly I was enjoying myself a lot. That said, it's hard to shake the feeling that this is just Worse Hollow Knight.

Underleveled posted...

I'm not laughing at him, I'm more so laughing at the game, being bad enough for someone to just abruptly stop playing and consider it beaten.

Oh yeah I didn't mean to imply you were laughing at him, I didn't get that sense from your post. Was just continuing the conversation. My bad!

Kid Chameleon (Gen)

I played almost all of this during downtime at work today. Here's a question: why was I so so so bad at games as a kid? Like yeah this game gets kinda hard eventually and it is pretty long, but the first couple levels are a cakewalk. How did I never make it past the first, like, 5 levels? I played this all the time as a kid. It would be like playing SMB1 and getting stuck on 1-4 forever. Incidentally, I could beat SMB as a kid, not that that counts for much.

Anyway this game rocks (it desperately needs some QOL improvements though). I played it pretty much straight through - some detours to alternate levels and elsewheres, but no major warps and I killed all four bosses.

Underleveled posted...

I actually laughed out loud.

Honestly? Mad respect to the idea that a game is beaten whenever you're done with it, whether you actually hit the credits/final boss/etc or not.

The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse (SNES)

Not actually a game from my childhood since I only got an SNES after the GCN, maybe even the Wii, was out. I did play some Mickey Mouse game on a friend's SNES and loved it but it wasn't this one, and honestly it was probably pretty mid. This one definitely is!

Disney's Aladdin (Gen)

Honestly I should have put more effort into this game as a kid. It doesn't feel nearly as unbeatable as e.g. Lion King did, and it's gorgeous, and, uh, kinda fun I guess. Not high praise but I definitely played worse games when I was younger!

Battletoads & Double Dragon (Gen)

So when I started this game my initial reaction was "oh no" because I had a lot of trouble with it as a kid but now it seemed brain dead easy. No worries, though -- the difficulty ratchets up fast. After a trivial Turbo Tunnel knock off in stage 2, there's a fairly tricky stage 3 -- and after that, a shitty Asteroids knock off level that drained my lives like crazy. And after that, basically every enemy and boss can combo you to death from full HP because you have no invincibility frames, and lots of hazards are instant kills.

It's not the hardest game I've ever played but getting through without save states would have been tricky. Anyway, I'm officially checking this one off my childhood backlog.

Killer Instinct (SNES)

So I normally would not count it as beating a fighting game just by beating the arcade mode once, but here I am doing that because I don't like this game or understand how to play it. I mainly just used Orchid's upward swing over and over and eventually won through attrition. I'll probably never play this one again.

Pokemon Pinball (GBC)

Man, here's a game from my childhood that doesn't hold up. This game is wonky. The hit detection is super broken so sometimes the ball and your flippers phase into or through each other. The ball can also phase through other objects on the board sometimes. It feels like in-game events triggered by hitting certain board elements are meant to happen in a specific order, and therefore your ball is magnetized towards/away from them no matter how you shoot it depending on if you're following the order or not -- I can't really prove that but it's what it feels like.

There are only two boards and the Red board is insanely harder in every way than the Blue board, but you have to play both to catch every Pokemon. The mechanics for catching rare Pokemon or moving to advanced locations aren't explained or obvious. It's kinda just a mess! On the bright side, the sprite work for the Pokemon's portraits goes unbelievably hard.

Getting 151 Pokemon is an insane grind so eventually I just started using save states. On top of the grind, this game is fucking impossible, so I'm not sure I'd have ever finished it otherwise. The victory does feel pretty hollow as a result, but whatever. This game's been in my backlog for like two fuckin decades, time to call it good enough and put it to rest.

Elon and friends are conspiracy nutjobs so of course they're gonna push one of their own.

DragonGargoyle posted...

With how mid-low I usually see this game ranked

I thought Dual Destinies was loved almost universally, especially on this board?

Vectorman 2 (Genesis)

Definitely prefer the first game but this one is fine, I guess. Shout out to my friend from elementary school for giving it to me like 25 years ago, though the version I beat was emulated.

Kirby's Pinball Land (GB)

I finally got around to setting up my Steam Deck with emulators so maybe I'll make some progress on my old game backlog.

This game is fine but the pinball physics feel slightly off, getting to the boss battles is frustrating, and the bosses themselves are pretty simple. Clear the three boards and you can fight Dedede. I'll just say it makes sense that I beat Metroid Prime Pinball as a kid but not this, that game is much much better.

lmfao

I played Mini Ghost last year, I think? I don't remember anything about it lol, just that I enjoyed it.

Ghost 1.0 (Steam)

Geez, I don't know what to make of this game. It has some of the best presentation I've ever seen in a Metroidvania title. I'm not sure I can remember any other MV with full voice acting this high quality. It even has a somewhat interesting plot, though there's a fair amount of cringe too (why are characters in this sci-fi cyberpunk future still referencing movies from the 70s and 80s...?) It's got a weird control scheme but I don't think I'd recommend remapping it much because it works; even if jump on LB feels like a weird choice it's pretty necessary since you'll be using your right thumb on RS to aim.

The issue is that it's a rogue-lite and that whole conceit feels pretty half-baked.

So basically, throughout the game are places where you trigger an alarm - some are mandatory, others completely optional - which will lock you in the room and force you to survive waves of enemies until your mission control can override the alarm. Each time you survive an alarm, the alarm levels up and increases the difficulty of the next alarm, up to level 20. If you die, you lose all non-permanent upgrades but the alarm de-levels to 1. The problem is that the best source of gear is from surviving alarms, so anytime you die, you're heavily incentivized to go and grind alarms 1-8ish to reequip. Which is a huge time sink, and for what...? To be back to essentially where you were before?

It feels like a rogue-lite system built forcibly on top of an existing MV game, rather than an actual synthesis of the two. A Robot Named Fight works as a rogue-vania because it gives you an entirely new map when you die, so getting upgrades again feels natural rather than feeling like a complete stop to your momentum. I think I'd have enjoyed Ghost 1.0 more just playing it on classic mode instead of survival, especially because the game doesn't auto-save when you die so you can just reload your save to avoid taking a death, and it feels VERY TEMPTING TO DO THAT compared to grinding for 20 minutes before you can make progress again.

Overall, good game but it could've been a GREAT game if it really got its systems all working together.

Chaeix posted...

Question: is this allowing them to sue for costing them money because of the interruption of the strike, or rather for costing money because they deliberately wasted company materials by leaving wet concrete in the trucks?

major difference in what that ruling means depending on what the answer to that question is

cause Im all for strikes but it doesnt seem unfair for a company to sue if inventory is deliberately damaged or wasted beyond what is actually necessary in the course of a strike

I think these sound distinct but are actually the same thing.

RuneterranSnap posted...

Sounds like yet another good reason to consider the SC illegitimate and completely disregard them.

+1

Cadence of Hyrule (Switch)

OK this game absolutely fucks. I tried Necrodancer and I did enjoy it but it was just too hard for me, a person who cannot keep a beat to save their life. This game felt like the difficulty was just about right, though eventually I got so many bottles/heart containers that it felt too easy and the Dark World can feel cheaply hard at points. But yeah I have been playing this obsessively for the past couple days and have already beaten the main story and Octavo's story. What a good game.

Harmony's Odyssey (Steam)

This is basically just a jigsaw puzzle game, except the jigsaws you're solving are adorable little 3D dioramas (and there are a few other puzzle types mixed in). Honestly it's pretty juvenile, BUT the story is very cute. It involves Harmony's little chaos gremlin of a cat causing problems across the globe. It's also extremely funny that this saccharine kids game is scathingly critical of the TSA.

Ocean's Heart (Steam)

Imagine a Zelda game that's basically Minish Cap in the setting of Wind Waker and you'll get Ocean's Heart, which means I loved it. There's not much in the way of large dungeons or innovative items but the game makes up for it with a superbly designed world, where exploration is extra fun, satisfying, and rewarding. It feels like every time you go down one path it leads to two more, and there are tons of secrets to find.

If I had one major complaint it's that the game is extremely easy, even compared to other Zelda games. It's a little better balanced at the start, but once you're exploring and finding health upgrades all the challenge disappears. There's an optional area you can visit to curse yourself so enemies deal extra damage, and I did this, and it was still easy but at least there was a threat of dying again. But if you don't really demand a challenge this is a fun, feel good 2D Zelda-like.

Thorn posted...

Kavanaugh was the one conservative who joined the liberals this time. In his dissent he points out that the majority is literally just ignoring the text of the law and redefining words as they please to push their agenda.

weird of kavanaugh, of all people, to act like he has any issue with someone doing this

RuneterranSnap posted...

Better question, why were her kids not taken the second she chose those names?

Maybe their middle names make it better. Could be like Nation Alismisbad Lastname.

I only learned about HROT the other day but I'm pretty interested in it. Maybe after I play DUSK and the other FPSes in my backlog I'll pick it up.

Mega Man 9 (via Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Steam)

Okay so. This is definitely the best Mega Man game of 1-10. There's some trial-and-error difficulty and a few rooms with really cheap jumps/obstacles/enemy placement but mostly it's just great all around. Almost every power is useful, the bosses are all fun, it's just a good time. I don't miss the charge buster but I do wish they had kept the slide. Oh well. Good game zone.

Mega Man 10 (replay, via Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Steam)

THIS game on the other hand. Holy shit, wasn't this supposed to be easy compared to MM9? This game fucking destroyed me, especially the Wily stages. Admittedly, I was using Proto Man, and I strongly regret that decision because I'm just not good enough at this series to deal with dying in 3 hits without it being a miserable experience, but even the platforming was insanely tough. No wonder I had to grind bolts and buy 9 of every healing item to beat Wily's Fortress when I first played this as a kid.

I suspect I'd have had more fun as Bass than Proto Man but I think he wasn't available to begin with? I dunno. Anyway, I generally like this game but those Wily stages are just brutal so I'm ending this 10 game marathon on kind of a sour note, unfortunately.

If I had to rank these games, I think I'd go with something like:

9 > 2 > 4 > 5 > 10 > 3 > 7 > 6 > 1 > 8

The middle is kind of a clusterfuck though. 9 is definitely the best and 2 is definitely second and 8 is by far the worst but everything else is pretty solid and could easily get swapped around.

Anyway that concludes my time with this series for now since I have no interest at all in Mega Man 11 (mostly because it looks incredibly ugly, not to be a graphics snob but yeesh). I still don't think I can consider myself a huge Mega Man fan or anything but I'm glad I've finally played these games!

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1659757300553326592?s=46&t=v9nzYLLBIiNYrqldFs9NWQ

wow can't believe neil gowoke said no period of american history during slavery can rightly be considered "peacetime"

Mega Man 8 (via Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Steam)

Wow, I didn't like this one at all. I wanted to drop it during the first real stage and honestly I should have, it started bad and did not get any better. Just a mess of incredibly slow gameplay on terribly designed stages.

(I'm also now realizing that the reason the story seemed so minimal and nonsensical is because this game is supposed to have cutscenes that just weren't playing on Steam Deck. In fairness it's rated as being not supported on Deck at all so I can't complain too much.)

Xtlm posted...

At some point play the rest of the Mega Man NES games. They don't get as much love because of the nostalgia not being there for most but they are still really great games.

Funny you should say this...!

Mega Man 4
Mega Man 5
Mega Man 6 (all via Mega Man Legacy Collection, Steam)

I'm gonna be honest, playing all of these over the span of a few days made them all kinda run together so I don't really have anything detailed to say about them. They're all solid, though I think 6 is probably the weakest entry since 1. It feels much more like a kid's game than the rest, partly because of the dumb story but also because of the lower difficulty and, idk, just a lot of intangibles. 4 and 5 are both really strong, though I lean towards 2 as still being the best of the group.

Mega Man 7 (via Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Steam)

Definitely the most hit-and-miss so far. I really liked having a bunch of upgrades to discover throughout the levels, but they're almost all really obscure and hard to find without a guide. Just in general I think it plays worse (and, honestly, kinda looks worse) than the NES games though. Something about the more detailed sprites makes the gameplay feel a lot slower even though I don't think it actually is. The story is really dumb again though Mega Man threatening to kill Wily at the end kinda owns. The difficulty is also unusually low with the exception of the final boss, which I found tricky.

I mean it is, and the inability to deal with that is a problem GameFAQs has had for at least 2 decades, but sites used to be much more willing to just ban you if you were being a shithead, with GameFAQs being unusually lenient. It feels like bans are much less common in the users-as-product social media era.

It's a very 2023 internet solution to just lock something down completely instead of banning problem users.

i'm sorry but were we ever under the impression that trump wasn't selling pardons??

Mega Man 2
Mega Man 3 (both via Mega Man Legacy Collection, Steam)

These are both definitely stronger games than MM1, not to mention feeling much more fair (with a few exceptions). I used rewind/save states significantly less here but I'm still not enough of a Mega Man fan to try to do everything clean.

I think MM2 is the stand-out so far, despite being mostly pretty easy. It has the best set of Robot Masters so far and the best set of powers. I liked MM3 significantly less in this regard, though that game is much better in terms of movement options thanks to the slide and Rush. MM3 is also way way harder, even more so than MM1 despite the difficulty feeling fairer. I dunno, they're both pretty solid!

Paratroopa1 posted...

Trump is probably one of the foremost examples of people where ignoring him actually WOULD make him go away. the lack of attention would make him shrivel up into a little raisin

Raisin Donald Trump be like "make America grape again"

Journalist who decides it's their job to make news sounds like a D-tier Batman villain.

they'd be named Headliner or something

Mega Man (via Mega Man Legacy Collection, Steam)

unfortunately I am still not a big fan of Mega Man -- but hey, now I've finally beaten one of the classic ones! I guess I'd already beaten Mega Man 10 years ago, if that counts (it doesn't).

I don't know if I'd say I had to abuse rewind/save states here but I definitely did in a few key locations because I otherwise would not have had the patience for this game. I know 2 and 3 are supposed to be way better so I'll give those a shot eventually.

begging for someone to please destroy her phylactery already

Dancedreamer posted...

I think Democrats are pro-life and Republicans are against it,

top 10 quotes that are entirely true when divorced from their context

GuessMyUserName posted...

okay I found the funniest encapsulation of this yet and I don't see how something can top it

https://twitter.com/isabellarileyus/status/1655333856835141637

Olbermann: The mass murderer was, like you, a white supremacist lunatic.
Moody: He's not like me at all, he's MEXICAN!

The most baffling thing about this is that she acts like fuckhead is a slur for pregnant women or something

_Blur_ posted...

Is this a soundtrack ranking or a level ranking? I ask because the level is just called River of Souls and Slaughter by the River of Souls is the accompanying track. And it works better as a soundtrack ranking than a level ranking, imho!

Just level but I've always heard the level title as Slaughter (which is admittedly a weird name when all the others are just the place name), since that's what Adon calls it in her level opening narration. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just a somewhat common mistake since I've seen other people call it that too.

Would be interested to know your level ranking if you have one off the top of your head!

_Blur_ posted...

There's a reason for that! It's largely the same development team. Iguana's founder went on to form Retro Studios after Turok 2 and brought most of his team with him. This is also why Turok 3 is so different. I always recommend Turok 2 to Metroid Prime lovers to sort of see the origins of that style of game design.

Oh wow! I might have known this at some point but if I did I had completely forgotten. It makes a lot of sense, though.

A huge part of conservative ideology is just about controlling women as property so of course they're against no-fault divorce, they always have been.

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (Steam)

This one's been a long time coming. I loved Turok 2 on N64 but I sure as hell could not figure it out. Even with cheats to give myself the best weapons early, infinite ammo, and level select, I don't think I ever beat a single level, or even managed to make much progress. Finally, 20+ years older and with bunch of features like hints, maps, and quick saves (I forget how many of these were in N64 version -- I know the hints weren't) I've beaten it. I saw someone post on the Steam forums about how some of the changes made it feel like easy mode, but that they took that as a sign to finally just beat the damn game and put it behind them. I think I concur.

I ended up feeling pretty conflicted on it in a lot of ways. It's actually way more linear than I remembered. The levels are certainly confusing but mostly because it's easy to miss things and get turned around, not because you have a bunch of options of where to go. And while I wouldn't call the game super easy it's not nearly as tough as I remember. My memory is that the Sisters of Despair minibosses, for instance, felt virtually impossible to kill. But they actually go down in 3 shotgun shots. Regular enemies sometimes take more than that!

I'm also conflicted on if I like this game or not. The levels are really cool and atmospheric and also poorly designed and very repetitive. The guns are extremely fun and unique and half of them are useless (pistol, shotgun, and plasma rifle were my go-tos for the nearly the entire game, until the pistol fell off in Hive of the Mantids and I started using the Cerebral Bore instead). There's a little bit of Metroidvania-ness where you get permanent upgrades and have to revisit previous levels (I've always considered Turok 2 to be very Metroid Prime-adjacent, or maybe vice versa -- they both even have a late-game key hunt) but the upgrades you get are pretty unimpressive.

As I was wrapping up the game's final level, it occurred to me what game it had been reminding me of all through this current playthrough: Halo 1. The cool but tedious and repetitive levels, the cool but oft-useless guns, the general lack of polish, the pistol that OHKs almost everything. I definitely like it more than Halo 1 though, not to mention Turok 1! But I don't think I'll be coming back to it.

Slaughter by the River of Souls > Port of Adia > Primagen's Lightship > Lair of the Blind Ones > Death Marshes > Hive of the Mantids

does not work with the final boss unfortunately

Mr_Crispy posted...

I didn't really like the way you had to hold down a button and aim the gun with the left stick, so it ended up discouraging me from actually using the gun most of the time.

fun fact, the game lies and you don't actually have to hold down LT to use the gun, only if you want to be anchored in place to aim more precisely. why they didn't just let you aim with the right stick like most other games do is anyone's guess though.

despite the weird controls I thought the guns were by far the best way to focus down a boss' health bar so I ended up just forcing myself to get used to it

TheArkOfTurus posted...

I kinda figured it would be the perfect type of game for this series: Well regarded by most people, new enough for enough people to not have tried it, but designed to be replayable for those who have, available on mutliple, current platforms, not too expensive, not too long... But I just didn't dig it, and I guess other people here didn't either. A shame.

Honestly I'm pretty interested in it, but I've been trying not to buy a bunch of new games lately, especially if they're still in the $20+ range. Much easier to knock out stuff already in my backlog.