dschult3
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Post by dschult3 on Oct 23, 2023 19:34:35 GMT
I'm still playing F-Zero 99. They've added more tracks, so it has become more interesting. My son used some gift cards to purchase Super Mario Wonder, and I've played it a bit too. The game is rather fun and innovative. I never thought the Mario Team could get any more trippy than with the "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy" level in Yoshi's island, but here we are. I'm not playing much, since it is my son's game, but I like what I've seen so far. I have also been playing Virtua Cop on scipioafricanus' Saturn. I was initially thinking I had to take apart the second light gun, since it wasn't working, and then all of a sudden it was working perfectly. I suppose the electrolytics needed some warming up. Anyway, the game is damn fun. I missed out on the light gun games of that era, because I had a Nintendo 64, and those games were nonexistent. After getting through a couple of rounds with my wife, we ran out of continues. The "KLUTZ COP!" put down my wife got was an unexpected highlight of our gaming hour.
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Post by Imperial Khador on Oct 24, 2023 5:02:11 GMT
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana - PS5 Super Mario Bros. Wonder for - Switch
On the last chapter of Ys 8 now. Still enjoying, but looking forward to it being done.
Really enjoying Super Mario Bros. Wonder though, so far. No surprise there, really. Not going through it too quickly, so I'm just playing a few levels a day.
I gather that compared to the NSMB games, multiplayer has collision between player characters turned off. I will miss tossing each other, but I can see this avoiding a lot of fights among younger players I know.
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Post by Imperial Khador on Oct 29, 2023 16:47:47 GMT
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - PS5 The Legend of Heroes - Trails into Reverie - PS5 Super Mario Bros. Wonder - Switch I'm enjoying Ys 9 so far, but I'm a little worried that one of the core gameplay elements is very similar to the Ys 8 raids, which I didn't enjoy.
Edit: I get why folks are mentioning this one as a visual downgrade from Ys 8 as well. Any earlier bugs aside, since I'm playing on PS5 and it has been out long enough to have some stability patches, so I might not be aware of them, Balduq is a big medieval city, so a lot of it is unfortunately brown and grey and the alternate 'Grimwald Nox' (at least so far) are even darker. The Isle of Seiren in Ys 8 was a lush, tropical setting, with a lot of vibrant colours, so Ys 9 locations that I've seen thus far, suffer from the comparison. This doesn't extend to the character designs though, as I do think the Monstrum characters all look interesting and distinct.
Trails into Reverie has been lovely so far. It's the capstone to both the Crossbell and Erebonia arcs, so I'm still in early stages of the game, just seeing what familiar NPCs are up to.
Edit: Getting into the plot a little more...I like it, especially switching between the 3 story paths. However having Crossbell occupied yet again does feel like we're going back to the well one too many times. It doesn't help that Rufus Albarea was one of the least enjoyable minor antagonists for me in the Cold Steel arc (though a lot of that goes to his English voice actor/direction rubbing me the wrong way), so having him be much more prominent in this one isn't a highlight for me
That said, I'm not too worried about it, because I know this one is very much a Crossbell/Erebonia epilogue, so I know a lot of this stuff is going to be wrapped up in a single game. I'm running around areas that I've been dealing with since Trails from Zero, and there's a nice feeling of checking in on these familiar places and characters, but also being ready to move on. I'm very much looking forward to new locales and (mostly) new characters in the Calvard Republic when Trails from Daybreak gets localized.
One odd thing that I've noticed is a baffling change in pronunciation of some common english words in this one ('Ebon' for example, is repeatedly pronounced 'Ee-bon', when it was 'Eh-bon' any time it was used in Cold Steel). It makes me wonder if there was a change in the voice director for this entry, or maybe a directive from Falcom. A comparison from another series that was relatively recent is Persona 5, where some of the names were pronounced very strangely in the English localization, but Atlas' US localization team explained that they were directed to use those pronunciations by the Japanese team.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Nov 3, 2023 3:37:53 GMT
Bullet Witch (PC). I thought it was going to be a flawed cult game, as it was made by Cavia, but frankly it's just shit. The gameplay itself is the most generic third person shooter: slowly circle braindead enemies while shooting, rinse and repeat. Six levels, two badly designed bosses. What could be interesting is the main character, which is a proto-Bayonetta, except that she has no personality and her witch powers just don't work very well and are useless, as the game was obviously released in an alpha state. All the levels are these exceptionally large, empty spaces with the same few easy enemies. Sometimes the bad music doesn't even load, the animations are slow, the frame rate tanks even on current hardware, you can't jump and shoot at the same time... I really felt like I was playing one of those in-development indie projects from the 2000s, the kind that would never be released. I don't think I have played any game this boring and unfinished in many years. I can't overstate how boring it is, even for its short runtime.
The House of the Dead (SAT) and The House of the Dead 2 (XBOX). While the Saturn port of the first game looks terrible and the bad frame rate gets in the way (it doesn't even compare to how well the Virtua Cop games look and run), it's still a very playable and fun game with many routes to discover and a good variety of enemies and bosses. This port also adds a Saturn Mode that has different characters with their own attributes (more bullets per clip, higher or lower damage, longer reloading times etc.), but otherwise it's the same game. By the way, the Japanese version is entirely in English, including the dialog, so it's very import friendly and much cheaper than the US copies.
As fun as the first game already is, the sequel tops it in every way. More varied setting (a Venice like city), faster action, more set pieces, more levels and bosses, more cutscenes with their legendary terrible acting that is instantly memorable for the wrong inflections ("Suffer like G did...?") and nonsensical phrases ("There's no such thing as a second chance!"). The XBOX port is an unlockable in HotD 3 and it has an arcade mode, a boss rush, some training minigames that are actually fun and an original mode in which you bring two items to the game (extra lives, more powerful bullets, higher point multipliers etc.) and collect more items for the next playthrough. Even playing with a controller I had a lot of fun with it, probably still the best game in the series. Just a small warning: while it's fully playable on the X360, it has both slowdowns and two or three places in which the game speeds up to the point that it's almost unavoidable getting hit.
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dschult3
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Post by dschult3 on Nov 3, 2023 12:49:07 GMT
Bullet Witch (PC). The House of the Dead (SAT) and The House of the Dead 2 (XBOX). Your review for Bullet Witch was a good old fashion internet trouncing. I love it! I was wondering about the House of the Dead on the Saturn. Should I just skip it? Also, do you have a Japanese Saturn, or have you modded yours so it can play Japanese games?
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Nov 3, 2023 19:55:00 GMT
dschult3 - I have an american Saturn and an Action Replay 4M cart, which bypasses region locks to run JP/EU games and also works as a 4MB expansion to play Capcom fighters (like Vampire Savior). I've been using it for around 13 years, it's quite good. Just keep in mind the newer All-in-one carts with the switch on the top also run backup cds and are read by the games as memory carts (you can save your games directly to them), so nowadays they're the more complete package. I'm thinking of getting one myself next year. The first HotD was never ported anywhere else, so your only options are either emulate the arcade original (emulation for the Model 2 board is spot on nowadays), get the Saturn port or play the modern remake, which sadly doesn't look so good. Since the Saturn port has its own share of problems (terrible graphics and framerate, not enough additions to a game that was already very short), I would say to get it only if you find it for a really low price, which is why I recommend the jp version if you can run it.
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Post by Imperial Khador on Nov 4, 2023 18:44:16 GMT
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - PS5 The Legend of Heroes - Trails into Reverie - PS5 Super Mario Bros. Wonder - Switch I'm happy to report that Ys 9 doesn't seem to rely as heavily on the 'Griswald Nox' sections that were so much like Ys 8's raids as it looks like early on. You have the other Monstrum party members (even those you've not recruited yet) helping in active combat, so it feels like they're going fast as well. They've also introduced sections with 'Prison Adol' that remind me a bit of playing as Dana in the past in Ys 8, though instead of having abilities the party hasn't learned yet (like a double jump), he has almost none, whereas the main party has a bunch of movement abilities. So far they're short enough that they've served the purpose of being breaks to the main gameplay. The movement abilities that each of the Monstrum bring (so far I have the grapple-like 'crimson line', the ability to run up walls, and a glide ability) make travel around Balduq a kinetic and fun experience. It's not as fun as, for example, web-slinging in the modern Spider-man games, but Falcom games are done on a much larger budget, etc. It serves the same purpose of making travel fun. Balduq itself still feels like, as I heard someone describe it, 'if Assassin's Creed was on the PS2', so it still feels like a less vibrant setting than Ys 8 was, but the increase in NPCs to talk to helps, as I think Falcom and their localizers excel at making minor NPCs feel like they have something going on. The place is still very sparsely populated, but it helps. Edit: One thing I've noticed with a lot of the mini-games that fall into story quests is an option to 'proceed as though you've succeeded' option along with retrying. I haven't used it yet, as I can usually get through on my second or third attempt if I failed, but this is something I like to see, as it's a sign of the developers respecting a player's time.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Nov 5, 2023 2:43:30 GMT
Imperial Khador - Nice review of Ys 9, good to know that you're enjoying it. I greatly enjoyed Ys 8 and thought it was among the best games I've played in recent years, even if the raids/hunts were repetitive and I could go without them, so going by your review I think I'll enjoy 9 too. I've been playing many short games recently, usually ones that can be finished in a day or two. Yesterday and today I just played through Linkle Liver Story (SAT). It's a simple and short top-down action-adventure; to give a better idea, I'll just say that it's a spiritual successor to Crusader of Centy, even done by the same developers (Nextech). Except that it was obviously made on a much lower budget: if Centy could still go toe to toe with Zelda, Linkle Liver has very small and much simpler maps, less characters and less features in its gameplay, it also looks less graphically impressive, even on a more powerful console. The main character, a fox-girl, is followed by a creature that closely resembles the Pepelogo from Monster World 4: she can either attack enemies directly or throw the creature (Puchimoko) at them. Besides that, she carries four different staffs that can be changed into various weapons (swords, hammers, staffs, boomerangs, axes etc.), each based on an element (water, wind, earth, fire, darkness, light), but they all work similarly and only differ on speed, power and reach. There's a simple world map, presented as a 3d globe, and each level is very short, some being just one small area. Even the largest dungeons have 3 floors at most. While the pixel art is big and detailed, the animation has very few frames, there aren't many enemies and some levels just look ugly and kind of a mess (like the clock tower). Despite the pretty first village, the scenery is always very static and non-interactive: a simple example are the animated flowers or cuttable grass in Zelda/Centy, which here are replaced by static flowers that you can't interact with and even have to walk around them. There are many bosses, though, and they're all large, taking most of the screen. On the other hand, the sound design is just terrible, with mostly annoying and very repetitive sounds. It's a charming little game but among the lower-budget ones from that era, you can definitely see why it wasn't localized.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Nov 19, 2023 6:51:59 GMT
My choices of games had a lot of ups and downs lately, and this week is certainly a down: Sonic Heroes (XBOX).
I think I can summarize all its problems by saying that Sonic Team never had time to test their games and apparently hated cutting down features, so we end up with a lot of ideas that are great on paper but just a few minutes testing them in the game makes it obvious they should be cut. The "three-characters" gameplay seems great and a nice improvement over Sonic+Tails in the Genesis entries... But then, to force the player to use the "power" character, every enemy has a life bar, so they both kill the speed/momentum and force an awful combat with terrible controls. Cutting the "power" character would speed things up and make the game much better. Having a level with pinball mechanics is a classic Sonic feature, but this one has obviously wrong physics that make no sense, terrible collision detection and underbaked tables (among the annoyances, hitting a flipper will usually make the ball hit *below* the flippers above, the tables weren't adjusted in a way that the ball would go up naturally). Again, these levels should've been cut, it would be obvious to anyone testing the game that they didn't work. Having four teams to play should be an improvement over Sonic Adventure 2, but not when they all go through almost exactly the same 14 levels and 7 bosses, so you're being forced to play the game at least four times to unlock the final level - at least one of the teams should be cut. I'll even tell which one: Team Chaotix has a gameplay based on exploring/searching things in the levels, but it's obvious the levels are too long and linear and the game's camera is VERY against that, trying to redirect itself all the time - if Sonic Team didn't have time to revise the camera for this team, they should've, again, just cut it. Having a flying character should be fun, but creating an invisible ceiling over them (instead of just limiting how many times they can go up) and making they fall straight down like a brick as soon as their stamina ends (instead of letting them keep momentum, like Tails did in previous games) is asinine. Sometimes I really get the feeling no one played the game. Then there are the bonus levels, which try to repeat the Sonic 2/3D Blast (Saturn) ones but are completely uncontrollable for some reason - if they couldn't nail the controls down, they could've just... Again, cut it.
Of all the cuts, I would say "melee combat" is the most important one - Sega tried too much to force melee combat on 3d Sonic games and it never worked (Heroes, 06, Unleashed and Boom are all examples of Sega insisting on this stupid idea). Heroes is actually a very fun game when there is no combat, so much that Amy's campaign (which has much less enemies) is a high point and very fun to play. You should quickly kill enemies just by jumping on them and that's it.
Unlike SA1 or 2, which would have to go through deep changes to become really good games, Heroes is very disappointing because it was easy to just cut everything that wasn't working and still end up with a sizeable, fun game. But, as I said, Sonic Team apparently preferred to push every idea onto the game disregarding if they could make it work or not. Two characters (speed and flying), three teams (Sonic, Dark and Rose), no bonus levels, no pinball levels - now we already have a very fun Sonic 3d game that would probably be above the Adventure ones. With the extra time not spent on stupid features, Sonic Team could even refine the existing levels (differentiate them better for each team) and design better bosses.
Another thing they could cut were the voices. Dear God, those are grating and there's no option to turn them down.
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centipede
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Post by centipede on Nov 21, 2023 3:57:55 GMT
Cervantes You've basically said all that I've said about Sonic Heroes here, plus a little more. Would you have a Chao Garden in it, though? Did you notice they tried to cram all these characters in? Like they thought the game would fail without Knuckles or Amy. They had the 'Call Tails' button in Sonic 4: Ep 2. Yeah, you had to replay the games 4 times. The Easy Mode, that was Team Rose, could have been left out altogether. If they had to have four teams, couldn't they make levels that were exclusive to certain teams? This game was really the beginning of the end for Dreamcast Sonic.
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centipede
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Post by centipede on Nov 21, 2023 3:59:55 GMT
I've been playiing Nights into Dreams. I can't seem to get any higher than D, so I assume I need higher ranks to unlock the next levels. I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong. I zoom around, collect the blue orbs, race back to the evil bubble, then back to the podium. It never seems to be enough. Is this a racing/time trial game in disguise?
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Nov 21, 2023 19:46:43 GMT
Is this a racing/time trial game in disguise? Pretty much, yes. Not only you have to collect the orbs, but notice there's a combo system - your rank will be much higher if you keep your combo going (don't take too long between one blue orb and the next); also, only deliver the orbs to the bubble after you have enough of them to destroy it in one go, even if you need to take a second or third lap. After destroying the bubble, I don't remember if it's better to rush to the palace again or if it's better to keep collecting as many orbs as possible before the time goes out, you should test it out. About Sonic Heroes, I would have a Chao Garden *if* the game was already so polished that Sonic Team could afford spending some time to develop it. Otherwise, the main game is so unfinished that I would vastly prefer that they took out features instead of creating more of them. And yeah, what's the point of having four teams if they're all going through the same levels? What's more annoying than the levels are the bosses, even those have to be fought four times. At least in SA1&2 the levels were either redesigned for every character or the gameplay was so different that it didn't feel you were replaying the same level, like Tails in SA1. In the end, I think Heroes is a promising game (playing the first few levels with Sonic feels really great) that is bogged down by all the half-implemented features, bugs and excessive padding.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Nov 27, 2023 13:41:27 GMT
Two quick ones: Assault Suit Leynos Remake (PC) - I haven't played the original game on the Genesis, but the remake is pretty nice, although clearly on the low-budget side of things. Graphically, it's a hand-drawn 2d indie game; on the gameplay side, it felt very similar to Assault Suit Leynos 2 on the Saturn, except with much less customization (less weapons and equipment, only one suit). It only took me around 2 hours to beat, so it's a short game. Dark Savior (SAT) - I can confirm everything I told scipioafricanus in the previous page: nice game with unfortunately very stiff controls, coupled with slowdowns that make the platforming sections harder than they are supposed to be. Even then, there's still a fun game here, I'm enjoying it again. EDIT: centipede, did you get the better grades in Nights? I did remember that, after destroying the bubble, it's better to keep getting as much orbs as you can until the last second.
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centipede
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Post by centipede on Dec 2, 2023 11:13:23 GMT
Two quick ones: Assault Suit Leynos Remake (PC) - I haven't played the original game on the Genesis, but the remake is pretty nice, although clearly on the low-budget side of things. Graphically, it's a hand-drawn 2d indie game; on the gameplay side, it felt very similar to Assault Suit Leynos 2 on the Saturn, except with much less customization (less weapons and equipment, only one suit). It only took me around 2 hours to beat, so it's a short game. Dark Savior (SAT) - I can confirm everything I told scipioafricanus in the previous page: nice game with unfortunately very stiff controls, coupled with slowdowns that make the platforming sections harder than they are supposed to be. Even then, there's still a fun game here, I'm enjoying it again. EDIT: centipede , did you get the better grades in Nights? I did remember that, after destroying the bubble, it's better to keep getting as much orbs as you can until the last second. Yeah, I took your advice and managed to unlock the final boss, plus the Christmas Nights bonus level.
I also unlocked a Nightopian gallery. I noticed there are eggs in these levels that you can run into and hatch. I occasionally also saw random 'topians with a number, hovering over the podium.
I read somewhere these guys are the precursors to the Chao. Is there a point to unlocking them?
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Dec 3, 2023 3:31:46 GMT
centipede - If there are many happy nightopians in a level, the music changes a bit, becomes happier. If you keep breeding them, it's possible to breed a king pian and a castle appears in the background, but it's purely cosmetic. So there's not much of a point besides cosmetics, it's just a little extra thing.
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