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Post by dsparil on Mar 3, 2021 8:52:28 GMT -5
The way card drop work in the original is so asinine. Mercury and Salamander have a high drop rate (20%), but everything else is so low including Serpent which you need for some increases. That one at least can be gotten early in the game if you know to grind the Earth Demon at the beginning for it. I honestly don't think I got anything other than Mercury and Salamander the first time I played the game. Last time I played it, I tried to get all the cards using a map for the enemy locations and I gave up before getting all of them. I don't think the series got this type of system right until the last one with Order of Ecclesia since it's incredibly obvious when an enemy has a glyph and getting it isn't random. I'd go so far as to say OoE is the only one to actually get magic right in general since everything is magic in that game including melee attacks.
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Post by spanky on Mar 3, 2021 19:17:15 GMT -5
Gokujo Parodius (Super Famicom via Super NT, Replay)
One of the best shooters for the SNES IMO. Fantastic music, a large amount of playable characters, really funny. Plus, it's much more manageable than most shooters. It still can be tough in sections but the game is pretty generous with bells and power ups.
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Post by spanky on Mar 4, 2021 19:57:35 GMT -5
Messed around and beat a ROM hack titled TMNT of Rage (Genesis via Mega SG, First time).
OK, so I guess I wasn't aware but there are tons of Streets of Rage 2 ROM hacks where they put in new characters. Normally I wouldn't want anyone to mess with SoR 2 because it's a PERFECT game but seeing screenshots of the Turtles in this game triggered a certain part of my brain and I had to try it.
Anyway, this is exactly what it sounds like. SoR with the Turtles replacing the heroes. The Turtles sprites are taken from Turtles in Time and look pretty good but some of the animations are kind of weak, with lots of non-action frames being used as attacks. Going to the extra mile to draw in a few new frames would have helped I think. The colors had to be altered a bit as well and they're kind of ugly to be honest. Three of the bosses have been changed to Turtles villains which was a nice touch. The music is the same but for whatever reason in this version the song in Stage 5 was replaced with the Stage 1 music. No idea why.
The game actually adds some new mechanics. All the turtles can now run and each has a running attack and the turtles in general are much faster than the SoR 2 characters. You can now juggle enemies which is something I'm pretty sure you couldn't do in the original. Jump kicks will hit multiple times and often send opponents flying in the air. The timing is tricky but you perpetually juggle some enemies. It's really easy to do on bosses for some reason and makes most of them a cakewalk. I breezed through the game on hard difficulty.
It's not perfect but I enjoyed my time with this.
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Post by Snake on Mar 5, 2021 12:12:51 GMT -5
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (GBA; First Time; 8 hours 3 minutes)
(Disclosure: This playthrough was done using the Card Mode hack by Dev Anj. This hack takes the cards, which are normally obtained as random drops from enemies, and places them in select locations around the map to reward both progress and exploration. This allows for a greater use of the card system than you might normally experience, and also makes the game easier in certain parts.)
At this point, I've played roughly half of the Castlevania games that took Symphony of the Night's cue in going for an open-ended castle and plenty of action-RPG elements such as equipment, levelling up and new items to traverse previous inaccessible areas. Circle of the Moon is a bit of an odd duck in that it was the only one during this era to not be made by the usual team headed by Koji Igarashi, but instead the Konami studio at Kobe who had just developed the N64 games and would soon put out the aces Konami Krazy Racers. That change in staff explains a bunch of things, particularly the return to the somewhat stiff movement and whip of the classic games, and a greater focus on action than RPG compared to the other games.
Wow! That's really cool. I need to try that hack. I remember beating this game and having like, only 4 or 5 cards by the end. I felt like I missed so much, and it was all because of the stupid drop rates. Hearing about the connection with Konami Kobe makes sense to me now why Dracula's final form design at the end of Circle of the Moon was basically rehashed from the last fight of Castlevania 64.
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Post by Digitalnametag on Mar 5, 2021 23:17:39 GMT -5
Persona 5 Strikers PS4 FTP 38 hours
This is easily the best spin-off game Omega Force has ever developed. I'm sure P Studio had a lot of input. Unlike say Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors, or Dynasty Warriors Gundam, Persona Strikers is unmistakably a Persona game. There are no bases to capture or generals to defeat here. Just like in Persona 5 you sneak through dungeons and ambush enemies. Only during battle do some hints of a Warriors game show and even then only in the basic combo strings. In fact the game reminded me more of Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy VII Remake than a Warriors game. The game is somewhat challenging too. It starts off fairly difficult but it does get a bit easier in the end due to the breadth of abilities available to you later. There are plenty of challenges available for the hardcore though.
Strikers has a similar game-play loop to P5 as well. You no longer have social stats or confidants but there is still a large amount of time spent talking to the other characters. The game is framed around a road trip and this allows for a lot of fun interactions with the P5 cast. Seeing this cast again was great.
What can I say I'm a sucker for new Persona stuff. I loved Strikers. The new songs were great too! I did give up on the post game stuff as the super bosses have more health than I care to chew through and don't offer any extra story content. I feel happy with the near 40 hours I spent with the game. Now I'm ready to tackle some other new releases.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Mar 6, 2021 12:00:21 GMT -5
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (GBA; First Time; 8 hours 3 minutes)
Hearing about the connection with Konami Kobe makes sense to me now why Dracula's final form design at the end of Circle of the Moon was basically rehashed from the last fight of Castlevania 64. That's pretty rad. I never played the N64 Castlevania games, so I had no idea they deliberately referenced that design. At some point down the line, I'd love to be able to give them a try. I know they're often brought up as an example of the growing pains for 2D games making the jump to 3D, but I wanna see for myself how it fares. It'll definitely be a while though, since I can't find a way to emulate the N64 that doesn't have distracting issues, to the point where I feel I might just have to buy an actual N64 and get myself one of those fancy flashcard cartridges for whatever's too expensive. In the meantime, I've got another game to add to the thread. In fact, this is the 20th game I've beaten for the first time since I started doing this, which is really awesome! Holy Field (PC; First Time; 1 hour 12 minutes) A few weeks ago, I talked about beating Myth Bearer, a short but sweet action-RPG developed by JC Bailey. I briefly discussed his upcoming projects Deep Rune and Unkingly, but what I wasn't aware of was that he had another game available on his itch.io page. This game, which I only found last night while failing to find a cool game to play on my Android tablet, is Holy Field: another action-RPG but with real-time combat and an overall structure similar to the King's Field games. Dying costs you some XP, nothing is directly conveyed to you other than signs and odd remarks from characters, and the world is interconnected with passageways and shortcuts to help you get around.
This was made for the 2020 LowRezGame jam, where the game is made with a resolution of 64x64 in the span of a two weeks. So a lot of assets are reused from Myth Bearer and the amount of camera space available is pretty small. However, I think that the content reuse is handled fairly well and I like how the small camera space creates the suggestion of a larger world, despite the relatively small map size. That short dev time also explains the game's overall length as listed in my play time, but that's not a bad thing. It makes for a nice, quick affair if you want the thrill of playing something in the King's Field style in a much shorter span of time, and there's SEVEN New Game+ modes where enemies get tougher (and possibly more secrets to be found), so there's plenty to keep returning to if you're still itching for more.
The game's free, so there's no reason not to give it a look (although maybe throw some money at JC Bailey if you end up enjoying it): jc-bailey.itch.io/holy-field
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Post by personman on Mar 6, 2021 19:47:43 GMT -5
Ace Combat 7 Skies Unknown (PS4, first time) Beat this a while ago but I got so sucked into it I'm only getting to saying anything about it until now lol. So in short, I love this one to death and I think it may have won the spot AC5 used to have as the best game of this type in my eyes. Reason being they just nailed the moment to moment to gameplay damn near perfectly. For one, the balance between gimmick missions and plain score attack missions is spot on and they even do well mixing the two in the same level. Much as I loved the variety from AC5 it did have a few missions that could be kind of a drag to sit through on a replay and there were too many of them with checkpoints so sparse that messing up could really grind your momentum to a halt. The mechanics here usually are dealt out in a brief enough manner I don't feel thats a problem and I can only think of like two missions that have issues I really didn't like (as someone from arizona one of the missions that has a huge sandstorm show up brought back some trauma let me tell you). But besides that, the game dares to actually be pretty hard! Crazy I know, usually this genre is fairly breezy so long as you got the grasp of pitch and yaw and all that stuff but the enemy ai is aggressive enough to actually keep up with you and the time limits are pretty strict. Might not sound like the best thing but after going through Project Wingman which had zero limits honestly I just think it fits with this kind of game better. On top of that it has a nice side effect of giving attacker planes a real use, seriously in the ground attack missions you best bring something actually equipped for it for a change. I freaking love that and at last I had a good excuse to fly my beloved A-10. They even fit in some tech play in the form of post stall maneuvers that gives a bit more depth to some of the later dogfights. They just did a really, really good job of balancing the missions out. Like even as brutal as some of the special enemies can be checkpoints are generous enough that you don't feel like you lost a ton of time like previous entries tended to do. Also really liked some of the clever moments some of the mechanics brought to like, for instance towards the end of the game you have to ID your targets to determine whether they are friend or foe and at one point you need to do this to keep your own allies from firing on someone you're escorting. I just thought that was really cool. Now what they dropped the ball on was about everything else, ha. The story is... hilarious. The pacing has to be the worst I've seen in a long time and the dialogue, oh god the dialogue is so, so , so damn bad. Like here this screenshot is completely unedited: Thankfully most of it is the 'oh lord I'm laughing' sort of bad but still, it got distracting at times. Too bad because there were some nifty ideas here, for instance there is an inversion of the usual trope this series settles into with the whole 'rookie pilots because a famous legend' thing the series always sticks to which I appreciated even if it just circles right back around to it at the end. There's some subtle unreliable narrative in the details that is neat as well and I liked that for once the side the player is on isn't portrayed as squeaky clean. Still though its all just presented in such a damn mess its really hard to follow and brought through the mud by the terrible dialogue. I honestly do like the themes it shoots for, warning how rampant automation could spell bad news and how people who cant freaking communicate with each other shouldn't have power like this but... they just didn't stick the landing at all. I'd say a weaker soundtrack too. While what is there serves just fine only like one song really stood out. Of course when you have to compete with the likes of 'Zero' your stuck in a shadow I don't think many composers can get out of. I get the impression much of the things like story and presentation were on the back burner while they struggled to switch engines like 3 times. Supposedly this game barely happened and the producer had to convince his bosses with a heart felt powerpoint presentation to convince them to keep going. Details probably fuzzy on that but still, after how dull AC6 was, the insult to fans that was Assault Horizon, and from what I hear the heartless cash grab and microtransaction filled disaster that was Infinity its just makes the success this entry has been just that much more special and I'm so happy to see the series really, really is back from the blackhole I believed it to have disappeared into. This game is wonderful in the ways that count the most. If you haven't gotten around to getting this one and used to enjoy the series then please, do so. Rating: 9 So happy I was brought back to my days sitting in front of my PS2 for hours on end, haha. And speaking of that I found out the european version of the premium edition of the game includes AC5! So when I'm ready I can go through that again and get a closer comparison... though boy was it a pain in the ass to buy it. Yeah turns out the PSN, amazon, etc really didn't like that I'm not actually in Glasgow Scotland. Eventually I figured out Play Asia has gift cards for all regions by the looks of it so theres something to keep in mind if you'd like to get something from the Playstation store outside of the US.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Mar 7, 2021 19:14:53 GMT -5
Kirby's Adventure: 3D Classics (OG on NES, Played on 3DS; First Time; 2 hours 40 minutes)
I've never really played a Kirby game, despite often hearing people singing their praises. At some point, I seemed to have planned on addressing that by getting the 3D Classics version of Kirby's Adventure, but I quickly lost interest after a few stages and never picked it back up. Since I still had the game on my eShop account, I figured I'd redownload it and give it another shot. To my surprise, I ended up getting all the way to the end over the course of a day or so!
In hindsight, I can see why I lost interest, as it's a very simple game that can be stupidly easy - if you let it be. There's plenty of secrets, abilities, and tough encounters that you CAN check out, and I've since come to appreciate that kind of freedom towards letting the player decide how challenging they want things to be. It makes for a very approachable game for folks who just want to have a quick blast with cute visuals, solid gameplay and awesome music, but there's still loads to dig into for completionists and people who want a greater challenge.
On this go, that aspect appealed to me greatly, and is likely how I beat it so relatively quickly. After a weekend of picking up and dropping a handful of other retro games that were way tougher than I was in the mood for, I really needed this. And now I'm very curious to check out the one other Kirby game I've got: the beloved Super Star (I might even check out the DS Ultra port since there's even more stuff and is generally regarded as an even better version). No idea if I'll play the other games, but I'm looking forward to see how it goes.
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Post by spanky on Mar 7, 2021 20:50:07 GMT -5
Highly recommend Super Star and Ultra. I personally think it's the highlight of the series but I'll admit I stopped playing most of the games in the series after 64 bored me to death.
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Post by dsparil on Mar 8, 2021 8:48:43 GMT -5
I will always love 64 because it has the absolute weirdest copy abilities in the entire series. They really phoned in some of the combos like burn+burn, but then it has stuff like the fridge, the melting ice cube, volcano, the slightly horrifying cutter+cutter, self immolation, the "Swiss Army knife", fireworks and the exploding snowman. Plus there's fun stuff like the double ended light saber, homing missiles and fire sword.
I think all the Kirby games are worth playing. They also started to get more unified once Shinya Kumazaki became the director and then general director of the overall series around 10 years ago.
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Post by Snake on Mar 8, 2021 11:34:58 GMT -5
Zelda 2:Adventure of Link, Famicom Disc (via Famicom Mini). Replay: 3 hours, 5 minutes.
There are some differences between this Famicom Disc version and the US cartridge release. Overall, I would say this game is a lot easier. The level-ups for stat upgrades come at a lot less experience points. If you wanted to, you could buff your attack or life points all the way to "8" from the get go. Every upgrade after maxing out 8 on all stats gives an extra life... at 4000 exp as opposed to like, 8000 exp.
The enemy encounter and cave music is also a totally different track, and in my opinion, the US cartridge got the better music BGM in that regard. Sound effects are different too for certain things.
Also, the bosses for Temple 5 and 6 are different. Well, 5 majorly as that boss is a rehash of Temple 2, instead of the juggernaut with the ball and chain. Temple 6, the dragon has a smaller head, and moves slightly differently, but is otherwise the same.
Last difference I noticed... there is no easy beat turtling glitch for the Famicom Disc version when fighting Black Link. You'll just have to manage a straight up fight.
Ninja Gaiden, Famicom (Ninja Ryukenden, via Famicom Mini). Replay: 17 minutes.
Basically the same game as the NES release.
Mega Man 2, Famicom (Rockman 2, via Famicom Mini). Replay: 55 minutes
Unlike NES Megaman 2, this game has no difficulty select. "Difficult" is the default. "Crash Man" is Clash Man.
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Post by Woody Alien on Mar 8, 2021 17:41:09 GMT -5
Letter Quest - Grimm's Journey Remastered (Windows, replay, about 7h story mode according to the clock, total time 10h 30 if you want to count)
Another casual game that I played a few years ago and play every now and then to unwind and spend some time. Originally it was a mobile app then it was converted for Steam. Nice puzzle game where you have to input words in order to damage enemies, which are all ghosts, zombies and other undead... plus evil bunnies. I completed it 100% a few years ago in Normal mode, now I started Expert mode (which honestly isn't that different), beaten the final boss but not finished it 100% and just played around with Endless Mode. For a cheap app game it's not bad at all, the mechanics are sound, there's enough variation in the various enemy abilities and in our equipment, and all around it's enjoyable without the usual problems of this kind of casual games. 7.5/10
Anyone know what other similar games (word puzzles with a bit of story and action) can I find on Steam to spend some time?
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Post by dsparil on Mar 9, 2021 7:39:19 GMT -5
Anyone know what other similar games (word puzzles with a bit of story and action) can I find on Steam to spend some time?
My first thought was Bookworm Adventures and the sequel which were on Steam, but they seem to have been delisted everywhere a few years ago. It's on Archive.org though. Letter Quest is a pretty direct clone.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Mar 9, 2021 14:22:00 GMT -5
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (PS1; First Time; 1 hour 5 minutes) I was feeling a bit anxious this afternoon due to some personal stuff going on and needed something to pass the time, so I decided to play through this one. Although I've played the original Pro Skater for so many years that I know most of the level designs like the back of my hand (hence the quick completion time), I've never actually beaten the game. I'd always get so frustrated at the increasing difficulty and the relatively stodginess of certain mechanics that I usually gave up around Burnside or San Francisco. But for the sake of giving myself something to do, I just powered through and managed to beat Roswell with 27 out of 30 tapes & Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals for the respective competitions as Elissa Steamer.
It's quite a good game, and despite not having anywhere near as many moves as the sequels, I rather admire the simplicity of that. It encourages you to really vary up your tricks and plan the right lines in order to navigate your way through the stage or get the highest points. When you do manage to pull off a 10K+ point combo, it's legitimately so awesome. And it feels like a gut punch when you screw up and bail a combo of similar or even more points. In terms of the classic THPS trio, I'd say this is my second favourite, only beaten out by 3 simply because that game was less stodgy in certain areas. (2 is a fan favourite, but I find its levels a bit too large to navigate and certain goals drive me up the wall)
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Post by mainpatr on Mar 9, 2021 15:32:33 GMT -5
Anyone know what other similar games (word puzzles with a bit of story and action) can I find on Steam to spend some time?
[/quote] There's Dungeon Scroll. www.rtsoft.com/pages/dscroll.php
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