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1

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: September 26, 2024, 07:53:23 AM »

Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate (Steam)

Set of short point&click adventures. Generally fairly entertaining/amusing.

I think that progress at finding the bonus objectives should be retained across replays of each roomisode rather than you having to achieve them all in a single play to get the best score. This isn't a Quest game where you're finding better or worse solutions, these are primarily just finding specific additional jokes - and having to repeat that every time isn't particularly entertaining. The second & third roomisodes particularly have points where the world state changes and access to some of these is lost.

The bonus roomisode has you lose access to verbs and I don't care much for that either.

(Also RigRug is bad.)


Dragon Age II (Steam+EA)

Entertaining but not as good as Dragon Age Origins.

Made the MC a rogue again. As the Origins MC is still extant (for all that they don't appear in II) I left the II MC with the preset name & look rather than customising them (although I elected to use the preset which removed the nose scar (?) rather than going with the strict default).

As with Origins I let the game decide how attribute/ability points should be distributed for the non-MC characters as they levelled up. The MC I primarily put ability points into the two-weapon, assassin, and duelist lines (although I never had them use the duel-centric duelist abilities).

Ultimately sided with the mages, lost Isabela, Fenris, and Sebastian across the course of the game. Did not put the MC into a relationship with anyone.

I like the idea of the game structure. But, it feels like anything in the city which isn't plot-relevant barely actually exists, and as a result I don't think the game does a good job at conveying any sort of progression of time. I don't remember any incidental characters who change across the years or so on.

Inventory is annoying. They give all items a star rating which reduces as you get further into the game and better equipment becomes available, which sounds like a good idea in isolation. But, I have seen the game give separate instances of accessories which it lists as having the same effects different star ratings - so what am I supposed to take away from this? Do items have hidden stats which it doesn't list?

Also, you can't see what rating currently-equipped equipment has. Thanks, game, practically defeat the entire point why don't you.

Also! General storage is in a location where you can't take a party, and you can only adjust equipment for people who are in the party. So if you pick up a fancy sword for instance, once you're free to check if anyone wants it you first need to reform your party to include all applicable characters, then if no-one does want it you can separately go to storage to drop it off. On the off-chance that you pick up a weapon that someone does want but they don't have the stats for yet, if want to check this in future you need to get it out of storage, then leave and reform the party to include them to check. That said outside the fairly early game I don't think I ever saw any character not have the stats for anything I picked up.

Switching topic to reuse of dungeon layouts, in my view essentially the only problem here is that all of the unused doors in each dungeon are still visible. (I guess also parts of the map.) All they had to do cover (or replace) the unused doors with walls. Or even just pile stuff in front of them like they do with some of the caves in the outdoor areas.

I hate the city gangs system. Not to suggest that the city shouldn't have gangs. But it really put me in mind of Superhero League Of Hoboken in how you get attacked a bunch and then you've (essentially) killed everyone (after an eventual hideout quest for each). There must have been a better option.

I intend to go on to Inquisition at some point but not immediately.



(Got a 403 page several times while trying to preview this message, posting without previewing seems to have worked fine? Is previewing broken for anyone else?)

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General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: July 30, 2024, 08:52:38 AM »

Have you played Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection on mobile, Twil? It's not deep mechanically, but it's very long and completely free. After you beat it 100% you get to do it again without the ability to mark squares.

I have! At the time I thought Expert Mode was terrible but that didn't stop me from replaying puzzles in it aways after hitting 200% completion. Unhappily my save didn't transfer when I got a new phone but your having brought it up has gotten to start going back through it.


Glass Masquerade 3: Honeylines - Folks & Spirits (Steam)

It's more Glass Masquerade 3.

Since the previous expansion they've added the option for piece cuts more in line with the first two games, so it was good to see those again.


Retro City Rampage DX (Steam)

I was afraid that this would be structured like the classic GTA games (e.g. beat score X in location 1 to unlock location 2 etc.) but happily it has a more linear, story-based one.

Has a lot of amusing scenes/callbacks if you're into the gameplay at all. The final mission was terrible, though, a format switch to a racing game style view where you have to get through extended sections of obstacles to get a brief chance at damaging the final boss, with no checkpoints. Might be less of an issue if you have a controller with a turbo option but I don't.

In keeping with GTA and the like, the game has a bunch of checklisty side tasks. I beat all the spree-style ones (albeit not with gold medals for a significant amount) but didn't bother trying to collect all the loot items I'd missed etc.


Superhero League Of Hoboken (GOG)

Somewhat amusing point&click adventure/RPG hybrid which doesn't really work on a gameplay level.

Much too heavy on the RPG side, and a bit too light on the adventure side.

The superheroes in question each have unusual powers, but most of the powers are either used once to solve a puzzle or are essentially just offensive magic for RPG battles. A couple have utility/traversal uses. One of the later heroes has a power used to solve multiple puzzles!

One of your initial superheroes has the power 'put animals to sleep' (actual sleep, for clarity). One of the initial missions you get is to deal with a bunch of rabid sheep. You may connect these two concepts. No! Putting animals to sleep only works in combat. The mission actually needs to be handled by an item you get in a different location. Not good! There should have been much more emphasis on solving problems via powers. (Or at least in getting the equipment you need to solve problems via powers, which does happen at least once at least.) The combat-only powers should not have been, or most characters with them should have also had non-combat powers.

Battles are also often just a chore and there should have been less of them.

Gaining access to additional areas of the overworld is decently set up for the most part except for the locations which aren't actually on it, which are all accessed via train. The problem is that the train system was set up by someone who hates public transport and wants everyone else to hate it. Every train only runs between two specific locations, and each train is only usable if you have a keycard specific to it. Stations are somewhat evenly split between having one line or having two lines. It shouldn't be required to have to go looking for the relevant station after you get a new keycard! Any train should just be able to go to any station that you currently have a keycard for. This isn't really a puzzle.

Also it might just be me but I think it's weird that there are so many locations which are essentially in pocket dimensions that you can only access via train. I don't know offhand if the locations in question are supposed to actually be distant from the overworld but our group of superheroes isn't supposed to be dealing with problems outside the area around Hoboken anyway?

3

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: June 23, 2024, 05:57:16 AM »

Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (Steam)

Personally really didn't need the Antlion caves section.

In general was quite entertaining, didn't have any especially terrible defence sections (although the Magnusson-Device-focused one was getting close to it), didn't require too much use of the terrible rocket launcher.


Picross S Namco Legendary Edition (Switch)

Cleared all puzzles.

On the one hand, excellent, new developer-themed Picross S game. On the other hand it's primarily focused on Namco's games from the NES & earlier which I have very little familiarity with.

Nothing mechanically new to me in this edition to comment on.

Some of the translation did seem a bit off at points, but it could be that they were keeping in line with historic translation choices.


Runaway: A Road Adventure (Steam)

Point & click adventure game. It was fine.

Had an overreliance on pixel hunting and no way to highlight hotspots that I could find. The majority of the time I got held up it turned out that I had missed some item somewhere. (Plus a few situations where there were hotspots referring to collections of items/containers, where the character would not actually take an item from the collection/container until a need for it had come up. This would be fine if applied consistently but the character has no problems with taking a heap of individual items they don't currently have a need for, and it means there's at least one situation where a hotspot which will be relevant for taking from later isn't easily distinguishable from a hotspot that only exists for flavour.)

Puzzle solutions mostly weren't too out there but there were a few weird ones.

The character is quite bad on the 'Adventure game protagonists are jerks' scale.


Thirty Flights Of Loving also the included Gravity Bone (Steam)

Short first-person experiences.

They're both pretty unusual and I don't think I'm really the target audience.

Had resolution problems when playing Thirty Flights which meant around half the rendered image wasn't actually displayed but I don't think this caused any actual problems. (First person game so generally could just look around to see everything, although there were a couple points where camera movement is restricted so it's possible I missed something during those.)

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General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: May 25, 2024, 01:12:06 PM »

Mega Man 11 (Steam)

Decently enjoyable. Played through on the default difficulty, which may have been a mistake - was harder than preferable, but fortunately I was able to be carried by E Tanks. I can't say I did a good job of using the gearing system or alternate weapons outside of boss fights so I guess I wasn't really meeting the game halfway here though.

The game feels weirdly uneven, location-wise - the robot master levels all feel like they're around 50% longer than they need to be, then the fortress is comparatively short. (And there's just the one.)

Didn't bother with any of the challenges.


Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra (PS2)

Mostly enjoyable. Probably the best of the three systems-wise, although not at all perfect. For one thing the game brought up the concept of managing character resistance to Gnosis early but then you barely ever fight any Gnosis on foot until late in the game. (Which is also a bit of a problem for chaos, who wants to kill Gnosis with one of his moves to boost another of them, although I have no idea how effective that mechanic actually is.) Mech combat is also more interesting early on when your energy is more limited and devolves somewhat later into primarily just continually repeating the same sequences of moves, bosses with shifting elemental defences aside.

Also saddening that Shion only gets one type of throw, which only works on humans, and even then doesn't work on some humans (or on humans facing the wrong way). Still v. amusing to spend most of a few boss fights having her continually send them to the ground.

The Miltia sequence in general is the highlight of the game as far as I'm concerned. The lowlight possibly Merkabah, which almost feels like a joke. Abel's Ark isn't great either but at least it doesn't have you retracing your steps so much. (Although it then does of course ask you to do that after you've left in order to get some goodies. But then Merkabah did that as well.)

I played through the first set of levels in HaKoX when I first ran across it and came to the conclusion that it was terrible. When the story decided that I needed to go look at a HaKoX machine to continue I played through half the second set and reconfirmed that it was terrible. Didn't touch it again.

Also didn't beat Ω Id or Erde Kaiser Sigma. I looked into the Id fight (after giving it a try and being slaughtered - this was directly after getting the key, not at endgame, although it sounds like that doesn't really matter) and it sounds fairly terrible, so not bothering with it - and my understanding is you essentially need to beat it to get what you need for the Sigma fight (which I also tried and didn't do very well at).

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General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: April 20, 2024, 08:04:37 AM »

Logiart Grimoire (Steam)

Regarding the additional puzzles which were added in the post-early-access release, while it's still a bit annoying that they're not integrated into the main game structure, it turns out that they are still at least somewhat thematically linked.

Each of the puzzles is tagged with two or three keywords, often a subject along with an action and/or location, so this is similar to how the majority of the puzzles in the main game need to be unlocked by combining two or three of the other puzzles. For example one might have 'Cat' and 'To Cook' and the puzzle resolves to a cat in a chef hat using a cutting board.

And this actually leads to a lot of these puzzles ending up much more novel than I'm used to seeing in a while, so it was ultimately a good experience despite my previous complaint.


Anuchard (Steam)

Shortish action-rpg where you go into various dungeons to restore various people/entities and parts of the world.

It's trying for some amount of depth re cycles of history etc but ultimately I think it's a bit too short to really reach what it's aiming at. (And it's implied that all the characters in the game are literally the only people in that location, given a few of the events, which makes some of the later events not really make sense.) I did like some of what it was doing.

Never got especially good at the combat but happily it never got especially difficult. (The combat itself isn't particularly deep, either, so that could be a turnoff for some people.)


Dráscula: The Vampire Strikes Back (Steam)

Fairly bad old spanish-developed point & click game.

Crashed on me numerous times, had some issues with the english voice work. Some unfortunate 'jokes'. The interface is also fairly clunky.

The most annoying problem is that often exits which weren't otherwise interactable weren't indicated by anything - you would only know there was an exit if you clicked to walk somewhere and you changed location as a result. The prime examples being a tree, and a non-visible secret passage happening to be in a cupboard which is in the same room as a second, visible secret passage and where when you initially opened the cupboard you got an item out of it. (It also doesn't appear to really work with the geometry of the location, given the cupboard is against a wall with a visible corridor on the other side.)


If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers (Steam)

Started playing this much more recent point & click only taking into account that it was well-thought-of and short, unhappily completely missed that it was a horror game which I am really not in the right state of mind for currently. Ended up being a much more discomforting experience than I was hoping for as a result.

That said, it's very polished and has some good sequences. There is one sequence in the third chapter that overstays its welcome a fair amount though.

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General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: March 17, 2024, 09:42:44 AM »

Apocalipsis (Steam)

Played through both the main story & the side story.

I think it mostly tries to ride on its graphical style, which doesn't always look especially good in action. Outside that it plays pretty similarly to a worse version of Machinarium (which I already have a low opinion of).

The game is split into discrete levels where once you've solved whatever puzzle is blocking you from leaving you can't diegetically return to. You can return via a level select feature although this puts you back at the start of that level leaving you to solve the same puzzles over again. (For clarity, you can still return to the level you were up to via level select.)
Getting the non-bad (?) ending turns out to require you to have collected a bunch of non-puzzle-related items throughout the game. A little surprisingly, once you've actually beaten the game (and presumably got the bad (?) ending), you can actually just skip back to the levels containing these items (presuming you look them up, I guess it's not as simple if you don't) and pick them up, then return to the final level and re-complete the game with the other ending, rather than having to replay the entire thing.

anyway i thought that was surprisingly merciful

The main story has Harry taking an Orpheus-like role to rescue his beloved who was executed for being a witch. Then per the side story she literally is one, and not exactly a benevolent one. I don't have the capacity to understand exactly where you're trying to go here, Apocalipsis.


Dragon Audit (Steam)

Fairly short & simple 3D point/click-style adventure game which I enjoyed a decent amount. Contained more ribald jokes than I was expecting. Unfortunately had barely any unique responses for using the wrong items on things.

The graphics are fairly primitive but this is only really a problem in a couple of instances, the prime example probably being that the camera can start acting up when in confined spaces.

The story has been left open for a followup so hopefully one is made.


DUSK (Steam)

Horror-FPS which to some extent I enjoyed inversely to how heavy it was going on the horror. Somewhat correspondingly, my least favourite of the episodes was Episode 2 and my favourite was Episode 3 (which also had other things going on in addition to being comparatively less horrorful).

If they make a followup I'd likely play it.




The full version of Logiart Grimoire is out now, and they have added 115 extra puzzles to the game above the Early Access version - but unfortunately they're not included as puzzles in the core tech-tree-like gameplay mode, they're all siloed off in a separate area where you just access them through a list. This is quite disappointing.

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General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: February 25, 2024, 03:52:13 AM »

The Hex (Steam)

Pretty good. The gameplay is more in service of the narrative and/or comedy than Inscryption's, at least for most of the characters. A couple of them could be expanded on. A little disappointing that you don't get much opportunity to do anything fancy in the programming sections (although that of course essentially also ties into the narrative).

Didn't touch any of the ARG stuff (or even discover pretty much any of it to begin with) and missed a bunch of secrets, but I ended up watching a video some days afterwards which went over it all.


Cat Quest (Steam)

Quite enjoyable. That said:
* It ends up being really checklisty which is a style that's kind of falling out of favour with me.
* For a significant portion of the game you end up walking back and forth between distant parts of the world map which gets to be a pain. You get some quicker ways to move about later on but some sort of fast travel would have been vastly appreciated.
* In relation to both the above, you can't tell if a location has anything level-appropriate available for you without visiting it. (The map does at least distinguish incomplete dungeons/quest boards from complete ones as I recall.) So unless you're keeping separate notes, every time you've gone up five or so levels you need to traipse around everywhere to recheck.
* Main story tasks which are on-map, meanwhile, don't have any sort of level recommendation attached at all, so the majority of the time I ended up being vastly overlevelled for them.
* The drops from chests give the impression of being primarily randomised, which isn't great. (If you get a second instance of a drop you already had it improves the one you already had.) You also see fancy chests a bunch of places from the beginning which you can't open until completing a lightly secret quest halfway through the game, but then once you can do so they thoroughly outclass everything in the regular chests. Then you get semisecret ultimate equipment later in the game which thoroughly outclass everything in the fancy chests. Still have to open them all though to flag each dungeon as completed!

All that said I still wishlisted the sequel afterwards.


Return Of The Obra Dinn (Steam)

Great.

Unfortunately I didn't end up getting everything correct in the intended fashion. For one example, at one point I thought I remembered something which indicated which of the brothers was which, but after having entered that information it eventually became clear that it wasn't correct when none of it locked in later, so that essentially ended up giving away what the correct values were. In most of these situations I did end up finding evidence I'd missed later on. (And, of course, there's no real way for the game to guard against this situation, and it's reasonable enough to conclude that there shouldn't be.)

Did identify the Chinese crew members via evidence at least.


Rock Of Ages (Steam)

Beat the story mode, missed around 4 keys. As far as I can see getting them all doesn't do anything important, so not worrying about the rest.

Not really a fan of the gameplay, likely because I'm not really a fan of tower defence.

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General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: February 03, 2024, 05:29:40 AM »

Rakuen (Steam)

RPGMaker-based adventure game. (No combat.) Decent, although unfortunately I didn't care for half the musical sequences.


Prose & Codes (Steam)

Essentially a decent amount of substitution ciphers of text taken from copyright-free books. So I found it pretty entertaining.

I was playing on progressive difficulty, where for each genre the puzzles start off having 6 letters pre-solved and that number goes down the further you go, with the last ten or so puzzles in each genre having nothing pre-solved. You can also play the entire game with nothing pre-solved, or with fixed amounts of letters pre-solved. (I don't know if the pre-solved letters are curated for each puzzle or if they're randomly selected.)

There's a followup which uses text from poems rather than prose but as a person who isn't really into poetry I don't intend to play it.

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General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

« on: January 23, 2024, 10:47:22 AM »

Pokémon Scarlet - Hidden Treasure Of Area Zero Epilogue (Switch)

Accessing this is actually locked behind a mystery gift. ...that means that they can arbitrarily remove access at any time by just stopping distributing it, like they'd been regularly doing in older games but not so much recently. Not great! (Unless they put out an update that changes how it works later.)

Counterbalancing that situation is that this is pretty terrible, and appears to primarily serve just as a way to give you access to Pecharunt. So it might not be a huge loss if it was shuttered at some point.

If you want any actual lore about Pecharunt you're better served by the video put up on the Pokémon Youtube account rather than the DLC itself.

With regards to the Indigo Disk postgame, I did a little of it but it's really not doing much to entice me back to do any more.


Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch)

To my knowledge, I did everything except for beating the badge gauntlet level in the special world. (Unclear if there's anything else locked after that.) I was never able to get the timing down for consecutive parachute hat deployments and that level starts off with a lengthy section of them - not dealing with that on every reattempt.

Very enjoyable, possibly a bit on the easy side overall although that's hardly something I'd complain about. Also feels sparse for some reason that I think is mainly due to there being comparatively little postgame content? It has been a long time since the last 2D-centric platformer (...at least the ones I consider to be part of that category) so I may be internally comparing it against the wrong titles.


Escape Goat (Steam)

Escaped the Prison of Agnus (all rooms completed) with 1308 deaths.

I assume the majority of the deaths were in Final Path 9, but the game doesn't give you a breakdown unfortunately. Terrible room. Second highest probably a different room in Final Path, where there's concentric moving-block pathways where all the inner moving blocks have buzzsaws. Could not control the goat's jumps anywhere near finely enough for the sort of movements needed for these rooms.

I'm not going to try the alternate (harder) set of levels, although it might be interesting to look up someone else's playthrough of them.

10

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: December 31, 2023, 01:53:55 PM »

Pokémon Trading Card Game (3DS VC)

Primarily a replay, although I'm not sure if I've ever actually played the entirety of the game from the start through before. Generally entertaining although given that my final deck was 80% my original deck (Charmander & Friends) with Dragonair & supporting cards added in in place of some of its less necessary ones I suppose I can't be said to have really gotten into the spirit of the game. Collected all the cards available in the VC version.

I've never actually gotten around to playing the sequel, I should probably do that some time.


Pokémon Scarlet - The Indigo Disk (Switch)

At BB Academy, the 'B' stands for Busywork. Both of them.

The plot is sparser than the plot from Teal Mask, especially for the parts where you're at BB Academy itself. It does at least continue on from the Teal Mask plot & tie into the main game to an extent.

The problem is that a lot of things at BB Academy are paid for with a new BP currency, acquiring it is comparatively slow, and several of the things you're going to want to spend it on cost a significant amount. Also, most of the postgame appears to be gated behind BP costs - I haven't touched any of the parts in question yet as a result as I was already fed up with collecting it.


Super Panda Adventures (Steam)

Fairly breezy world-map-based platformer. You can get upgrades which allow access to more areas in levels you've been to before, but given the number of levels I hesitate to refer to this as metroidvaniaish. Does not have any way of tracking whether you've collected everything in each level unfortunately.

I feel that some of the plot lands a bit more awkwardly these days than it would have 9 years ago.

The final boss was a major difficulty spike over pretty much every other boss in the game and took me a fair amount of attempts to beat.

Also replayed Commander Keen 1 again but that hardly deserves its own section. Didn't try the randomizer again. I've formed a tenuous conclusion that given I replay the game for its breeziness, using the randomizer would actually work at cross purposes to that.


The Walking Dead: Season 2 (Steam)

Finally got round to this after playing the original season in... 2014.

The impression that I have is that it's generally more stressful than the original season, which does match up with the time interval between the two, but makes for a less enjoyable experience.

The situation at the end of my playthrough was Clementine & AJ in Wellington.

11

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: November 26, 2023, 11:09:04 AM »

Edna & Harvey: The Breakout (Steam)

Point & click in the 'has responses (of varying degrees of humour) for a lot of incorrect actions (but not all)' vein. Main characters not as sociopathic as I was expecting going in, although far from free of it.

The interface isn't brilliant, and some animations are pretty bad. An enhanced edition has been released (not as an update) since I originally bought this so maybe it does a better job with those.

Early on you get introduced to a mechanic where the main characters flash back to Edna's childhood to remember things that she's forgotten, which seems interesting at the time, but then it only ends up getting used twice more across the game. I think there should either have been one or two more of those sequences, or if that wasn't possible, the rest of the game should have been shortened so that they were more of it proportionally.


Ninja JaJaMaru: The Lost RPGs - Ninja JaJaMaru: The Ninja Skill Book (Switch)

NES RPG somewhat similar to DQ1/2 (I imagine, not having played the NES versions of those).

Structured a bit atypically - after finishing Quest 1, when starting Quest 2 you're delevelled back to level 1 and lose all your equipment and get a basic set - then the same again after finishing Quest 2 and starting Quest 3. When moving on to Quest 4 you keep everything you had at the end of Quest 3, though. (Quest 4 is essentially just an endgame sequence and you can't actually get any new equipment in it in general, except from random drops possibly).

You can actually select whether you're starting from Quest 1, 2, or 3, so not sure if you started with Quest 3, whether you'd follow the same process into Quest 1 and Quest 2 and then enter Quest 4 with what you had at the end of Quest 2, or if you'd just go on to Quest 4. Each of the main quests has different equipment sets past the early items, and the characters also get partially different sets of Jutsu. One concern with that possibility is that Quest 1 is to some extent flagged as 'the first one' so I'm not sure if it'd make sense to rotate into it after completing a different quest.

The way text scrolls is terrible and was persistently annoying for the first couple of sessions of play, although I guess I ended up acclimatising to it.

12

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: November 08, 2023, 10:14:54 AM »

Save Me Mr. Tako: Definitive Edition (Steam)

I initially started playing this as something to do when I wasn't playing Xenosaga II, but it quickly ended up taking over. It ended up being significantly longer than I was expecting. Also goes to some unexpected places.

Very lightly early Kirby in style. (No floating though. Even underwater.)

You get different abilities with different hats, but rather than being extractable from enemies they're primarily either given out at locations which require you to have the abilities in question, or at every checkpoint you get to select a single hat to equip from every one you've previously had. Getting hit once typically causes you to lose your current hat, or to die if you're not wearing one. You can have a hat in backup which you will automatically switch to if you lose your current hat. (Unfortunately there isn't a simple way of switching your current and backup hats, although it is generally possible if you have some room available.) There's also some mechanics for being locked into specific hats when the game really wants you to be using particular ones (in which case you won't lose them by getting hit, but you will still die if you get hit enough.)

Lives are plentiful, which is good because some of the bosses & enemy gauntlets you end up against will quite happily burn through them. When dying in a boss fight you actually come back without having lost any progress against the boss, which feels unusual, but I'm certainly not complaining. On Classic difficulty, you get limited to a cap of 9 lives - meanwhile on Normal difficulty, I died something like 40-50 times against the first phase of the final boss. I never actually determined what was damaging it and what wasn't, but somehow ended up getting through. I assume that if you game over you do not keep your progress.

Some of the later levels end up getting a bit too long for my preferences.

Think it's pretty great overall.


Glass Masquerade 3: Honeylines - Wings & Tunes (Steam)

It's more Glass Masquerade 3.

Previously, I had commented on the main game that despite them adding a few different rule options to the puzzles and a way to randomise them, the puzzlefeeling was very samey, which I put down to how the puzzles had been restructured to actually allow the rule options in the first place. Well, alongside the DLC release there was also a patch which corrected an issue with the rule randomization. To elaborate a little, there were essentially three rule options added for how the pieces get distributed to the player, and three rule options added for how the pieces should be cut - and the problem with the randomization was that if you had both of these set to random, it would only actually roll the one number and use that for both choices. So the first distribution option would always be used in conjunction with the first cut style, etc.

So, that probably wasn't helping.

(There is also a fourth distribution style, classic, 'just give me all the pieces at the beginning', which doesn't appear to be a valid option for the randomizer, so from my perspective they still have problems there.)

I do think that the structure changes are still a part of the problem, though. They've also added more variety to one of the cut types in the interim but there isn't really anything they can do to add variety to the other two cut types.


Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits Von Gut Und Böse (PS2)

I had been thinking while playing how much better the skill & mech systems were in this game than in XS I (mechs moving ludicrously slowly notwithstanding). Then the game ended. And most characters had only just started learning any level 3 skills, and the mechs had been comparatively underused. So. Probably still an improvement for the systems to give you the impression that they were going places.

Battle system has some points where it takes the gloves off again, and points where it puts them back on, similar to the first game. Unlike the first game the Erde component attacks are all terrible for some reason??? so can't rely on those for anything, but happily the game never gets to the same style of enemy sets as in Song Of Nephilim until after you get Erde Kaiser Fury in the postgame. (Of course then I found myself using it in the majority of battles it was available, which isn't brilliant.)

Beat Dark Erde Kaiser, no desire to bother with the remaining superbosses or GS missions.

I can barely remember anything about Febronia from the first game outside of that she was at that church. I assume that the plot points involving her might have made more sense if I had more immediate context. Possibly I should look for a summary online.

Anyway, thought the game was generally enjoyable. Will get around to XS III at some point but not immediately.

13

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: October 14, 2023, 02:52:10 AM »

Logiart Grimoire (Steam)

Picross from the Picross e/S/etc. company with a tech tree theme. In the sense that you start off with simple puzzles which solve to soil, fire, water, etc and you get access to more complicated puzzles by fusing solutions you've acquired so far, for a simple example soil + water provides access to clay, for a more complex example human + sword + armour provides access to warrior. Complicating things are that each puzzle both has a rank (out of 11) and a category (which there are also 11 of), so you also need to go up ranks and gain access to additional categories to access puzzles.

Unfortunately, you can't just try to fuse solutions ad hoc. You have to select individual puzzles which you have access to that haven't been unlocked yet, and you will be given clues as to what components are required for it. (The game makes clear which puzzles you have the components for vs. which you don't.) I can understand the need for the current system to the extent that you get far too many components for it to be feasible to try to unlock every puzzle via an ad hoc system, but if I have components that look like they should be fusable I feel like I should be able to just request for them to be fused and seeing if that results in anything.

Also, a lot of creatures require 'Heart' as a component, which feels like a misstep. (In the sense of it leading to heart being overused as a component.) Fusion involving creatures is also often kind of whimsically set up, e.g. goat requires heart + paper.

Puzzles go up to 40 x 30, which is a bit too large for comfort for mouse controls, at least on my monitor. I probably should have checked for if there was an alternate control scheme.

Ultimately I thought it was pretty great despite those concerns. The game is currently in early access so I'm not sure if there's still anything substantial yet to be added. Separately, they still need to do a followup to Pokémon Picross (despite there no longer being a reasonable system for one to made for).


Fit For A King (Steam)

Only picked this up because it was in an on-sale bundle with something else I wanted (Astrologaster), was subliminally driven into playing it by people talking about Ultima while it was still fresh in my mind.

Did one playthrough as comparatively non-evil, where the summit ended in a draw, then a completionist one as comparatively evil where the player character 'won'. (Never actually ended up executing anyone so ultimately the main evils in question were 'reforming' the church and bankrupting the kingdom.) Those both had a decent amount of amusing moments.

Started on a third playthrough with the aim of initially going to the summit with the minimum, then reloading and going back with incrementally better setups to see how the summit changed, but this quickly got onerous. I also got distracted into seeing the ending descriptions for each different entity you married/divorced but that ended up getting annoying to set up as well.

Ultimately I'm left with the impression that it's a game that's designed to be replayed but isn't actually that entertaining to replay very many times. Still, the first couple of playthroughs were fine.

There are probably too many hidden chests, those could have done with being toned down a bit.

14

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: September 21, 2023, 02:30:01 PM »

BAD END THEATER (Steam)

Short CYOA-style game where you take control of one of four characters, and the other three characters take their own choices per preset traits. Once you've played through a trait-based choice as a particular character you can then set that trait to on or off for them when you're replaying as one of the other characters. You're also given flowcharts which fill out with the general progression of each character to help look for things you've missed, although they're a bit simplified. (Not the sort of flowchart which lets you start playing from midgame points to be clear.)

A klnd of inherent problem where you've got four characters which interact in often-violent ways is that a bunch of the nominal bad endings end up being scenes that you've already seen from other perspectives, and the change in perspective isn't always enough to prevent it from feeling repetitive.

That aside, I thought it was pretty good.


Inscryption (Steam)

The main game was pretty fantastic. I haven't tried Kaycee's Mod, and I'm not likely to, although I can see the appeal.

I assume everyone is already aware of the game given it's a few years old now, and no real complaints are coming to mind, so not sure what else I can really mention.


Negative Nancy (Steam)

Another CYOA-style game, this time the gimmick is that it's entirely dialogue-based and whenever you get the chance to respond you can only either say 'No' or not respond at all. So you've got the normal situation where 'No' is treated as a denial, and also people might treat it as an affirmation if they asked a negative question, or they could treat it as you expressing disbelief in what they just said, and so on... and not responding could have people assuming you agree with them, or thinking that you're ignoring them, and so on. On the few occasions where somebody asks you to physically do something not responding is also treated as the cue for the PC to go ahead and do that thing.

The game is split into three proper episodes and one kinda-bonus episode.

Unfortunately it gets very repetitive if you're trying to see a lot of each episode. There is a fairly significant amount of reactivity but it feels like only in particular sections of each episode, so even if you might find something new in one part you end up then going through a low-reactivity section again afterwards, and episodes are decently long. There's also no especially good way to skip through text, at least that I found.

You can make mid-episode saves, but you can only have up to three at a time, and you're generally not going to know where a good spot is for one ahead of time.

I replayed each episode for all the available achievements, and called it done at that - I'm fairly sure that there is still a lot of content available in them that I didn't see, especially the third episode, but I don't really want to have to go looking for it.


Pokémon Scarlet - The Teal Mask (Switch)

Kitakami does not put its best foot forward, the storyline starts off quite flatly. I also started off with already having ~100 of the 200 pokémon in the Kitamami Pokédex from the maingame, which feels like a fairly wild misstep, although to be fair I don't remember how full the Isle of Armor Pokédex was when I got to it in Sword.

The storyline does pick up steam aways in, but then manages to fall flat on its face at the end. It does at least leave me interested in where Indigo Disc is going to go, I suppose.

15

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: September 02, 2023, 07:42:40 AM »

Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille Zur Macht (PS2)

Played through. Was mostly enjoyable.

The AGWS system doesn't seem especially well thought out, although to be fair I didn't really interact with it outside the sequence where Jr's team is using them by default. I was initially keeping the frames and generators up to date but I ended up stopping doing this because there was no reason to ever actually use them, so this was effectively wasting a significant amount of money. AGWS equipment, on the other hand, I hardly touched because the interface was terrible. ...and ultimately when I tried to use one later on, when Jr. was doing no damage to Simeon, his AGWS also did no damage to Simeon. I had also tried to use them against Ace Pilot's AGWS earlier, when they were much less outdated, and they were promptly flattened, although I guess that turned out to be a superboss.

And, you can buy new AGWS units for ludicrous prices. Given this and the costs to keep the regular units up to date the game seems to have thought that I should be getting much more money than I actually was or something.

The enemies in the second major area in Song Of Nephilim were incredibly rude and I ended up using Seraphim Bird on them every battle. (Maybe this is the sort of place where AGWS were supposed to be useful, although given you need to spend turns getting into them, that would be very tedious.)

Not sure when I'll get to Episode II, although certainly not before the first batch of Pokémon DLC. Since I have a PAL copy it presumably isn't going to recognise my clear save from I~


Blaster Master Zero 3 (Switch)

Played through, was good.

They have fixed the problems with catching ladders, and re-connected major areas while retaining fast travel, so that's those problems down. It's still more difficult than I'd prefer.

Another pretty great ending sequence.


Quake II - new campaigns (Steam)

Quake II 64

I had no interest in replaying the regular Quake II campaign, but I'd heard that Quake II 64's campaign was noticeably different. It turned out to be even more different than I was expecting, though. (Which was welcome.) Just a breezy linear set of individual levels rather than sets of interconnected levels.

It does end abruptly with no message/fanfare/anything, which is weird.


Call Of The Machine

While I found it enjoyable for the most part, overall I would have preferred it to be shorter.

Favourite unit of levels was probably Corpse Run which had some good opportunities to really leverage Q2's AOE weaponry, least favourite is Ruined Earth because of there being too many jumpscares.

While this campaign does at least have an ending message, the ending itself is still pretty weird.

16

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: July 28, 2023, 01:43:16 PM »

Dragon Age: Origins - Additional Modules (Steam)

Leliana's Song

Fairly short and quite enjoyable. Decent range of things to do, although the first segment is the only really open one.

The city guard situation in the first segment doesn't really make sense and I'm not sure if it's supposed to suggest that I wasn't playing it properly or if there just wan't much thought put into it.

This module also has fancy introductory animations for each of the major characters which neither the maingame nor any of the other modules have, which is weird.

The Darkspawn Chronicles

Short and fairly novel, decently enjoyable. Only note specific to the module is that it just stops once you prevent the maingame characters from winning, no information is provided as to what sort of impact this actually has on the world. Which was disappointing.

Awakening

The major one.

It vaguely wants to have a management sim aspect but it's not very good at it. You get one choice early on with regards to whether your soldiers should be protecting the major city, the keep (which is not in said city to be clear), or the farmlands - or if they should be spread across everything - but after this you never really get any information on what sort of effect this is having. A couple of later quests require you to divert some soldiers and it's very unclear what impact doing this actually has on your previous selection (if it even has any).

There's a large, gated-off section in the keep yard which is practically unused - if you make a particular choice during a quest then one person will start standing around in that section. Possibly suggests that there was more intended to be done with it that ended up being left out.

You can have the keep walls repaired & upgraded but the game doesn't let you see them from the OUTSIDE so what is even the POINT

All that aside, the main gameplay is largely entertaining.

I did experience noticeably more crashes while playing this module than I did while playing the maingame, which was annoying. Including one right after beating the final, so I had to redo that.

The Golems Of Amgarrak

Not a fan. Too many battles that put you up against a bunch of golems which each spend a lot of their time preventing your characters from being able to act. And one battle which put you up against four strong mages at once which liked freezing your characters and preventing them from being able to act. Additionally, unless your main character is a healer themself, you get very little in the way of magical healing for the module - and while as far as I can recall it does hand out a few high-level healing potions, it is only a few, so you'd better hope that you imported a whole bunch of others as well.

The battles outside of the problem ones were spread across the more usual range of difficulty at least. Meanwhile, the story was kind of mediocre and the mist section it opens with doesn't really make sense. Also the ending arbitrarily kills off the rune golem for no reason.

Witch Hunt

The plot problem with this module is that I don't think that the main character, as they had been run so far, would have any pressing interest in looking for Morrigan given she had specifically requested them not to. They give you a barely passable stand-in reason at the start of the module (getting back the stolen book) but ultimately don't let you actually run with that reason.

The library section is decently entertaining, but then you essentially just go through four small dungeons, at least some of which you've been through before, and you're at the end. Two of the dungeons have light gimmicks, one of them has a boss fight, one of them essentially has nothing notable. On the plus side, no battles on the level of the terrible ones from Golems.


I picked up Dragon Age II during the steam sale earlier in the month but I'm probably not going to play it for a while.


The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past (Wii U VC)

I had played the majority of this via emulation back in the day so I remembered a bunch of things, but still mostly enjoyable. Have the impression that I found it much more difficult when I was playing it emulated but if so it was probably just due to overreliance on savestates.


Word Rescue (Steam)

Played through this due to a lingering desire from childhood to see episodes 2 and 3. (I was never a big fan of Math Rescue so have no such desire for its registered episodes.)

It probably wasn't worth it.

The game should probably give you a free refill of slime when you die, some of the later levels (on Hard, anyway - which doesn't appear to actually impact the educational facet of the game, only the enemy count and so on) make it very difficult to actually get anywhere if you don't have enough on hand. (You keep whatever you had on hand when you die, so ultimately this leads to a situation where you try to reach a slime pickup then die so that you can get it again.)


Blaster Master Zero (Switch)

Very entertaining.

Got what appeared to be a bad ending, and on checking into it it was. (I had missed the Jump Booster.) So I had to backtrack aways then retrack to the final area again.

Which ties into an issue I had with the game: I would have liked for there to be some sort of fast travel.

Also, the controls for catching ladders are terrible, and that one jump based around that is bad. (The point where you have to catch a ladder while in a current underwater meanwhile is merely aggravating.)

One of these will be attended to in the next game.


Blaster Master Zero 2 (Switch)

Also very entertaining, mostly.

So while there's fast travel between zones after a fashion now, they've gone too far and now fast travel is the only way between zones. (And since it involves traversing area maps the fast part is variable/debatable.)

No improvement to the controls for catching ladders but there are at least no situations as bad as that one jump in the previous game this time.

The game is noticeably more difficult than the previous game, which from my perspective is a downside.

Has a pretty great section towards the end, albeit one which has a bunch of infuriating smaller sections throughout it.


I should probably wait until Zero 3 is on sale before picking it up - feels like it isn't very obvious when items on the Nintendo store go on sale though.

17

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: June 22, 2023, 02:52:47 PM »

Half-Life 2 Episode 1 (Steam)

Played through. I guess it was fine, I think the civilian evacuation sequence was the least enjoyable part.

On checking, I played through Half-Life 2 proper in 2017 and Lost Coast in 2020, so I guess check back some time in 2026 for my (minimal) thoughts on Episode 2.


Dragon Age: Origins (Steam)

Played through the main game. On normal, which may have been a mistake. But I guess I did beat it somehow.

I had previously been under the impression that Dragon Age was akin to a fantasy version of Mass Effect. Very much not the case.

Made the main character a Rogue which focused on bows as an analogue to playing sniper rifle classes in ME. Half the game later I finally came to terms with the fact that I barely ever had the character using a bow and stopped putting points into bow-related skills. I let all the other characters control their own levelups, which appears to have worked out well enough.

The first location I went to after the opening was Redcliffe, which was probably a bad idea. During the night sequence I could get through the upper battle easily enough, but consistently got worn down and destroyed by the lower battle. Eventually I determined that we were still able to travel back to the upper area during the lower battle and ended up surviving by getting some of the enemies to chase the party up there where we could get the stronger NPCs still guarding the upper area to help out, then heading back down to attract more etc. Of course this meant that all the weaker NPCs guarding the lower area died. Later read that I should not have gone here first.

Didn't really have this sort of trouble again for the majority of the rest of the game, at least. Mainly had issues when the party was up against particularly strong bosses or types of enemy (revenants), or when they were largely outnumbered (which is essentially what the lower battle here was, especially after the NPCs got picked off. One of the reasons for doing this sequence later was so that you could have a healer along to help prevent that). As far as being outnumbered is concerned, a significant amount of the time it was possible to alert part of the enemy forces and lead those away so as to not deal with them all at once.

The blood effects are very unnecessary.

I think the next thing I expect to play is Leliana's Song?


Glass Masquerade 3: Honeylines (Steam)

Cleared all puzzles.

The imagery is better than the maingame imagery from Glass Masquerade 2, but they annoyingly have all the puzzles using a fixed frame again. Further, in what's presumably an attempt to change things up, they've added a few separate rulesets to the puzzles - but it feels to me like the structure that had to be added in order to facilitate this has led to the puzzles actually feeling even more samey - and this is despite me setting it to select random rules for each puzzle. I think they have made some changes to the systems in patches since I finished so maybe things have improved in those regards?

Glass Masquerade 2 had some good expansions so hoping that 3 will have some as well.


リトルハーツ (Little Hearts) (Steam)

Played through. (On normal.)

Haven't played any other SRPG Studio games so not sure how much this game was using built-in features versus custom features.

Has some interesting features. Lots of weapons have skills attached: basic throwing weapons all have a skill which prevents them from criticalling, there are a few separate ranges of weapons which allow the user to make follow-up attacks (which can't be done normally), a lategame enemy-only range of weapons all have a skill which makes the weapons act as effective weapons if the user initiated the combat. There is a 'focused' status which can be applied in a number of ways, wears off after one battle (or staff use) and that has various effects - for example Killer weapons all have a skill which guarantees a critical if the user is focused (so long as they aren't going against the weapon triangles). Most of the top-level staffs can only be used if the user is focused.

Each of your combat units has a unique preferred weapon, which you can later upgrade. (Other weapons cannot be upgraded.) This isn't a large-cast game - there's around 17 units, and the units which are going to be usable on each map are always fixed. (Don't know whether the game has permadeath or not, but it seems like it shouldn't given these factors.) Have some weapon lists etc up at http://twilkitri.fewiki.net/stuff/Little%20Hearts.xlsx - bearing in mind the likelihood of my having mistranslated/mistranscribed/misunderstood things and/or condensed things in questionable ways.

Game very much takes the gloves off in Map 25, then again in Map 30, after being fairly placid beforehand, at least on Normal.

18

General Chat / Re: What games are you playing 2023: WGAYP, Engage!

« on: April 22, 2023, 10:25:21 AM »

Mass Effect 3 (Steam)

Mostly played last year but ended up running a few days over. I found it enjoyable overall.

To some extent I wonder if the complaints about the ending wouldn't have happened if they didn't let you choose one - in the sense that you were automatically given whichever was considered most applicable to the choices you had been making across the game. This would of course be out of step with the previous games where the analogous final decisions allowed you select theoretically out-of-character choices, but since there wasn't going to be any need to take this choice forward to future games maybe that wouldn't matter. Also unclear how the whole warscore setup would work with this but that system felt kind of underbaked in the first place.

I thought that the version I had had all the DLC included but it turned out it only had some of the DLC included, as I discovered when I found myself in the last mission and realised that I was aware of there being content that I hadn't seen yet and looked into what was going on. And apparently the pack with the rest of the DLC on Steam is broken in some way, on top of being wildly overpriced, in that you can get all the rest of the DLC for free within the EA app? Very weird situation, I imagine that the more recent edition of ME3 doesn't suffer from it though.

Afterwards, went to reread Shamus Young's series of articles on the series and discovered that he had died. Ultimately also enjoyed that reread although I found some of his complaints to be a bit specious.


Picross S Mega Drive & Master System Edition (Switch)

Cleared all puzzles.

I haven't really been following the Picross S series, unsure if there's some issue with them versus Picross e or if it's due to being on the Switch versus being on the 3DS. Anyway I'm happy to pick one up that's all about sprites, even if I've barely played any classic Sega games. Hopefully they put some more out. Although on checking now, if this came out in mid-2021, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

They seriously need to stop giving the Picross and Mega Picross modes the same set of... answers. It's not so that someone who doesn't like Mega Picross (reasonable) can get the whole experience by just doing all the regular Picross puzzles, or vice-versa! They expect you to do both! If they don't want to have entirely unique answers for each mode, they can at least have some unique answers in each mode.

I have not seen the Clip Picross mode before and so on first entering my initial thoughts were 'aha, they've fixed Micross mode'. These thoughts were wrong. I was imagining that the splayed pieces were essentially a jigsaw that the game was going to put together once you'd solved all of them - or potentially get you to do that. Instead they're all just small snippets of a larger image and once you solve them all the game fills in all the area outside the pieces. It's ultimately still better than Micross. But not by much.

Color Picross mode was fine I guess. The impression I had was that it's both easier than regular Picross and more tedious.


Fire Emblem Engage (Switch)

Beat on Normal, beat the DLC campaign on normal. Got all regular supports (M-Alear only).

Some of the story sequences put me in mind of Advance Wars with regards to how familiarly the opposing characters were treating each other while disregarding the troops. I'm also unsure how well some facets really hold together (the need for royal blood seems to just disappear after comparatively little of it was collected, for example). As a whole I liked it though. I feel like it could be interesting to see some of the earlier events in light of later revelations but I've spent long enough on my single playthrough that I'm not willing to do another at this point.

I don't understand what the intentions were for some of the side features. Some of the achievements are bizarre. (Who is going to naturally buy 50 swords? I don't actually remember buying any weapons except for achievement purposes, although I can understand a person doing a gimmick class run needing to buy some.) Things like the Ring Reference etc really seem like they should be available out-of-game so that they can filled out across multiple playthroughs, assuming I just haven't failed to see them.


Soul Blazer (SNES, emulated)

Beaten.

...I think this might actually be my favourite of the Blazer - Illusion - Terranigma series? Been a long time since I played either of the others though. (Had not played this one before.)


[EDIT]

Somehow completely forgot

Pentiment (Steam)

which I played between beating the main FE Engage campaign and the DLC campaign being released.

It was great. Lots of alternatives available for replaying, although I don't think I'll do so in the near future.

19

Discussion / Re: 2022 games in review

« on: January 02, 2023, 07:56:13 AM »

Rapid-fire Games of 2022: In play order

Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse (3DS) Rating: Great
Got the Bonds ending. Better than SMTIV.

Commander Keen 1 (Fan CK5-Engine Remake) (DOS) Rating: Uninspiring
Might be worth playing, once, if you're already a fan of CK1. Visual design is too busy.

Star Seeker In: The Secret Of The Sorcerous Standoff (Steam) Rating: Great
Light magic murder mystery adventure game which goes in for unique responses to you proposing each item in the vicinity/known type of magic/etc. as the murder weapon and so on. I loved it and want them to make another one.

Shardlight (GOG) Rating: Fine
Decent adventure game, have a note that some of the earlier puzzles are less than ideal but this is less of a problem later. Don't recall any specific examples of this unfortunately.

Paper Mario (Wii U VC) Rating: Fine
Good, but held back in some ways. Partially I think it needs better reaction & being-able-to-figure-out-when-TO-react capabilities than I can bring to the table.

stikir (Steam) Rating: Fine
Very short. Kind of an art game. Fine for what it is.

Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Season One (Steam) Rating: Fine
Ace Attorney-like built in RPG Maker with some questionable design choices. Goes in for having minigames tied in to investigation segments, the one for the third episode (of three) was pretty bad but thankfully they let you set them to be unloseable.

Triangle Strategy (Switch) Rating: Great
Probably the best game I played this year. Only mechanical downsides coming to mind are informational nice-to-have-hads more than anything else. Frederica ending was too good and makes me not want to see any of the others, which are almost certainly downgrades.

Al Emmo And The Lost Dutchman's Mine (Steam) Rating: Uninspiring
Fairly bad adventure game that I mainly only picked up because a podcaster I listen to did some voice work for it. Do not recommend.

Wild Arms 3 (PS2) Rating: Great
Very enjoyable, only complaints coming to mind are not being able to flee from sandcraft battles and the final boss sequence going on for much too long.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition (Steam) Rating: Great
Balanced out my general incompetence by playing on easy, which is way overtuned in the player's favour at this point. (It won't last.) Main was a half-orc neutral-good fighter/cleric. Main party was Imoen, Jaheira, Khalid, Neera, and Xan.

Tembo The Badass Elephant (Steam) Rating: Fine
It's best when you get the chance to just rampage through things, but the game also kind of wants you to not do that a lot of the time.

The Preposterous Awesomeness Of Everything (Steam) Rating: Uninspiring
Another below-average adventure game. I like some of what the dev was going for but it ultimately feels kind of thrown together. Hopefully their more recent games are better.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition: Siege Of Dragonspear (Steam) Rating: Great
Still on easy, game mainly still easy. Updated main party: Corwin, Jaheira, Khalid, Neera, Glint. Game strikes a decent balance between open-worldedness & guided-tourness.

Wuppo (Steam) Rating: Great
Not sure of the best way to describe this, it's similar to a metroidvania but I don't know if it really counts as one. The gameplay is a little thin, to some extent it more wants to be an experience.

Star Ocean: First Departure R (Switch) Rating: Great
Side characters recruited: Cyuss, Ioshua, Mavelle, Pericci. Main issues are low overworld travel speed and having to walk that one mountain path so many times. Messed about with the crafting systems a lot more than I did when playing SO2 back in the day.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition: Shadows Of Amn (Steam) Rating: Fine
Still on easy, around here the difficulty starts to be less aptly named. Things I dislike: Proliferation of ID & related effects e.g. brain removal; defences against defence-removal spells; L I C H E S.
Got the fighter stronghold and it seemed fairly pointless; on checking now it looks like I only saw 3 of 8 events. ...I'm not sure what the game was expecting from me here.
Updated main party: Imoen (eventually), Jaheira, Minsc, Neera, Aerie

Return To Monkey Island (Steam) Rating: Great
Entertaining, quite a few standout moments.

Mosaic Chronicles (Steam) Rating: Fine
Not as stylish as Glass Masquerade and also suffers from an issue where the mosaics are split into two stories, and the second story is three times as long as the first story. More variety would be nice. (I don't know if the devs plan on adding more content, but it feels like it would be easy to integrate more at least.)

C.A.R.L. (Steam) Rating: Great
Fairly short & breezy platformer with a variety of collectibles. Not a fan of sequences where you're platforming alongside a mirror version.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition: Throne Of Bhaal (Steam) Rating: Fine
Mostly still on easy, but I ended up having to switch the difficulty to storymode for half of the final boss sequence. No change to the party.

Commander Keen 1 (actual) (DOS) (replay) Rating: Fine
Was considering doing a run with a randomizer but I didn't end up doing that.

Snail Trek (Steam) Rating: Fine for most episodes, Uninspiring for episode 2
Set of short adventure games. Goes to somewhat dark places later on.

The Journey Down: Chapter Three (Steam) Rating: Great
Finale to the series with a bunch of highlights. Better than the preceding games.

macdows 95 (Steam) Rating: Fine
Essentially a desktop with a bunch of features where there's a way to get an achievement in each, and the goal is to get all of them. Fine for what it is, mainly put me in mind of The Fool's Errand and made me want to replay it. Have not done that yet.

Guard Duty (Steam) Rating: Fine
Decent enough adventure game, some horror-oriented sections that I'm not a fan of.

Frog Detective 2: The Case Of The Invisible Wizard (Steam) Rating: Fine
Essentially a basic/whimsical adventure game in the same style as the first. Enjoyable enough.

A Museum Of Dubious Splendors (Steam) Rating: Uninspiring
You walk into exhibit rooms in a museum and are provided with a story which describes what the in-story characters generally consider some sort of amazing artifact, then afterwards see that the item in question was something like a pair of shoes. I don't mind it conceptually, but a) there's not really very much content and b) the rooms are arranged in a mazelike fashion which isn't really necessary. (And you can end up leaving before visiting them all as a result.)

McPixel 3 (Steam) Rating: Great
It's an array of micro-adventure scenarios that are often absurd. Personally that's right up my alley. The original McPixel got several free level packs over time so I'm hoping this one does as well.

Pokémon Scarlet (Switch) Rating: Fine
It has higher highs than Pokémon Sword, but I would say it was worse on average. That said, I only played Sword after all the DLC was available (got the physical release which had it all included), so they may not be being compared on an even footing.
Outside of the early game, level expectations and the economy are all messed up. The world map is far too large for what it contains. Team Star is somewhat incoherent.
But Koraidon is fun, and Area Zero content ends up being fairly moving.

20

Tournaments / Re: RPGDL 2017 Season 2 Noms!

« on: October 22, 2017, 09:28:12 AM »

Godlike

Chelle (WAXF)
Cloud Of Darkness (FF3)
Lamington (D1)
Odd Eye (ShF2)
Sir Leopold (DQ8)
Vandesdelca Musto Fende (TotA)


Heavy

Elena (G2)
Kary (Marilith) (FF1)
Lady Harken (WA1)
Peppita Rosetti (SO3)
Popoi (SoM)
Yuiri (S3)


Middle

Alma Beoulve (FFT)
Lyon (FE8)
Melady (FE6)
Nina Wyndia (BoF2)
Odessa Silverberg (S1)
Rouge (SaF1)


Light

Evil Gaia (G1)
Milon (Scarmiglione) (FF4)
Peppor (CC)
Raijin (FF8)
Suo (VP1)
Yukari Takeba (P3)

21

Music Tournament / Re: Music Tournament of DOOM 2017- Round 1, Topic 16

« on: September 23, 2017, 01:19:19 PM »

DDR SuperNova- Xepher  vs  Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War- Zero
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze- Mountain Mania  vs  Final Fantasy XIII- Blinded by Light
Final Fantasy VI- Dancing Mad (4th Segment)  vs  Deemo- Evolution Era
Ori and the Blind Forets- Completing the Circle  vs  Undertale - Another Medium

Crusader No Remorse- Main Menu  vs  Sid Meier's Civilization IV - Baba Yetu
Jazz Jackrabbit 2- Dark Groove  vs  Bravely Default- That Person’s Name Is
Transistor- The Spine  vs  Drakengard 3- The Final Song
StarCraft 2- Terran Theme  vs  Xenogears- Small Two of Pieces

22

Music Tournament / Re: Music Tournament of DOOM 2017- Round 1, Topic 15

« on: September 09, 2017, 12:38:23 PM »

Undertale- Dummy!  vs  Castlevania: Symphony of the Night- Dracula’s Castle
Shadow of the Colossus- Demise of the Ritual  vs  No More Heroes 2- Philistine
Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma- Blue Bird Lamentation (2nd)  vs   Bastion- Settling Sail, Coming Home
Metal Gear Solid 2- Main Theme  vs  SaGa Frontier- Last Battle T260G

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward- Metal  vs   Fire Emblem Fates- Thorn In You (Working, non-extended link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQD11drYtpE)
Persona 3- The Battle for Everyone’s Souls  vs  Final Fantasy XIII- Fang’s Theme
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King- Bronze Jam  vs  Caligula- Distorted Happiness
Ducktales Remastered- Mount Vesuvius Theme  vs  Xenoblade Chronicles- Crisis

23

Music Tournament / Re: Music Tournament of DOOM 2017- Round 1, Topic 14

« on: September 09, 2017, 10:59:59 AM »

Steins;Gate- Gate of Steiner  vs  Persona 4: Dancing All Night- Snowflakes
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair- Lost Paintings  vs  Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star- Altera’s Theme
Megamari- Patchy’s Castle Stage 1+2  vs   Metroid Fusion- Serris X Boss Theme
Super Mario World- Castle Theme  vs  Mass Effect 2- Suicide Mission

Atelier Escha and Logy- Alchemists of the Dusk Sky- Agame yo, Ware wa Shinki  vs  Drakengard 3- The Upcoming Battle/Armaros
Malicious Fallen- Abandoned City ~Convergence of Wisdom~ vs  Terranigma- Crysta Village
Wild ARMs- Boomerang Flash  vs  Scott Pilgrim vs The World- Leo’s Place
Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk- Tasogare  vs  Celestian Tales: Old North- The Ravager

24

Music Tournament / Re: Music Tournament of DOOM 2017- Buy-in List Part 4

« on: September 01, 2017, 02:39:46 PM »

Slot 7

Drakengard 3- The Final Song
Trails of Cold Steel- To Grasp Tomorrow
Persona 4  Arena- Heartful Cry (Arena Ver)
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep- Aqua
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island- Yoshi’s Island (World 6)
Project Diva Future Tone- Arifureta Sekai Seifuku

Slot 8

Xenogears- Small Two of Pieces
Undertale - Bergentrückung/ASGORE
Fire Emblem Awakening- Id (Purpose)
La-Mulana- Interstice of Dimension
NieR Automata - End of the Unknown
DDR X- Switch

25

Music Tournament / Re: Music Tournament of DOOM 2017- Buy-in List Part 3

« on: August 31, 2017, 11:58:56 PM »

Slot 5

Sid Meier's Civilization IV - Baba Yetu
NieR- Emil ~Karma~
Wild ARMs 4- Buried City
Amnesia: The Dark Descent - Brennenburg Theme
Sunlust (Custom Doom 2 WAD)- Ocean Flute
Bayonetta- You May Call Me Father
Super Earth Defense Force- First Encounter

Slot 6

Atelier Ayesha: Alchemist of Dusk- MARIA
Melty Blood Actress Again - Kara no Kyoukai
Undertale- Undertale
Bravely Default- That Person’s Name Is
Malicious Rebirth- Restraint
Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness- Cradle Over
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow- Heart of Fire