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Post by spanky on Jan 18, 2021 7:41:43 GMT -5
Finished Trials of Mana (Switch, First Time) this morning.
I was left underwhelmed by the demo, but the Retronauts episode and the high praise around here encouraged me to check it out. Secret of Mana is and was a personal favorite SNES game of mine. It was the first real "epic" RPG type game I ever played the whole way through (not counting Zelda). In 1995, realizing that I wasn't getting the "real" sequel to it hurt*. It really built this game up in my head, to the point where I was a bit disappointed by it when I actually got to play it. It's a damn fine game, don't get me wrong. Late era SNES games have this incredible level of polish and 16-bit RPGs really hit the sweet spot for me as far as game length and mechanics.
Anyway, this is a hell of a remake and manages to greatly improve on the original. One of the best RPG remakes I think I've played. The game looks really nice. The Mana games have nice aesthetics and the creature designs, while not being Dragon Quest levels of iconic, are very memorable in their own right. The frame rate chugs a bit on the Switch but you get used to it. The sound is good and I actually really liked the voice acting.
The new combat system is great. It's a bit repetitive at times but overall very engaging once the enemies get tougher and you acquire more techniques. Your AI partners are fairly helpful, and I'm glad they can use items and spells on their own. They had to be micromanaged in the original. They also never feel so smart that the game feels easy. One of my complaints about Dragon Quest XI is that the AI knows what to do the vast majority of the time and it makes things a breeze until the endgame.
The game is pretty easy though. Especially compared to the original where you could screw up your party by misapplying your stat points. Here the bonuses and new techniques you can pick up with your stat points are very clearly laid out. I used a team of Duran, Angela and Hawkeye and while the difficulty peaked in midgame for me, by the end I was blazing through the bosses. Angela's best spell, Ancient Curse basically nukes bosses and endgame enemies.
Overall, I was really impressed by this and wish the Secret of Mana remake got the same love. Haven't touched the post game content yet but I probably will. I might even start a new game with the other 3 characters I didn't use.
*Nothing against Secret of Evermore. I think it's kind of underrated, really.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 18, 2021 9:57:25 GMT -5
I've been playing quite a few games lately, and I finally managed to beat a couple for the first time! However, I'm not yet able to get a time measurement on one of them since it's a Switch game that doesn't measure its playtime, so I'll write about the one I did measure playtime for and discuss the other one when the Play Activity can be bothered to give me a general idea. Tanglewood (Mega Drive; First Time; 3 hour 31 minutes) This is one of those games I privately refer to as "New Retro", where it's a brand new game made for a retro console. You can play this on PC, Mac and even Linux (with a Dreamcast port on the way!), but this was designed for a Mega Drive so that's how I chose to play this. I've always admired the idea of developing something new for an old system, but this is my first time playing such a game for one that I have some reverence for, and it was indescribably cool.
It's a puzzle platformer where you play as a fox wandering through the woods, with a very naturalistic bent in its presentation. So there's no on-screen display and the sound is either in-game noises from animals and the surrounding environment or brief musical cues to punctuate important moments in between the silence. The game is generally quite good at conveying things that this never becomes a problem when trying to solve puzzles, though this becomes less so as the difficulty increases and trial-and-error starts to become irritatingly common. Not helping this is that while you're allowed to look up and down, the levels are designed in such a way that you sometimes never know if it's safe to jump a gap and have to resort to a leap of faith.
That said, I was always compelled to keep playing. There are plenty of puzzles offered with mechanics that interact with each other and result in some fairly clever combinations based on your established knowledge. The environments regularly change and each of the chapter's acts offer a new spin on ideas, so it never gets tedious. There's even a couple of moments that legitimately took my surprise and made me want to see what happened. In a weird way, it felt like the kind of game I'd always pictured whenever people talked about the cinematic platformer Another World, but without the instantly harsh difficulty that put me off that one. It's hard to articulate how exactly, but that's how it felt to me and I'm very glad to have played it.
If you've like to give it a shot, get it from the developer's itch.io page where you can get both a version to play natively on your computer of choice and .bin file for the Mega Drive version: bigevilcorporation.itch.io/tanglewood
(NOTE: Be sure to read the included manual PDF for advice on enemies and certain mechanics.)
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Post by dsparil on Jan 18, 2021 12:12:25 GMT -5
Bug Fables (Switch, First Time)
With this, I think you really need to ask yourself if a competent but shallow early Paper Mario clone is really what you want. It does shake things up a bit in having a three member party, but that is less of dramatic change than it may seem. It’s also less of an RPG than Origami King (which uses HP as a proxy for attack and defense increases) since a party wide +1 HP, +3 “MP”, or +3 badge points are all that can be chosen at level up and there’s no equipment at all outside of badges. There are a handful of badges of modify attack or defense along with one permanent upgrade for each, but some of these end up wildly unbalancing the party composition due to their scarcity. This is isn’t completely awful or anything, but there’s absolutely nothing special about it either.
I finished in 25:11:53.
Rating: 6
Escape From Tethys (Switch, First Time)
Seeing publisher Sometimes You is not a mark of quality since they’re the bottom of the barrel when it comes to major indie publishers on Switch, but this metroidvania was actually pretty good! As the title implies, you play as a scientist that needs to escape from the planet Tethys after it’s attacked. It’s all very Metroid derived although with a single map instead of areas. There’s a lot of upgrades and optional secondary weapons to collect. Maybe there’s too many because the game isn’t all that long so they don’t all get a huge amount of use.
I finished in 2:24:35.
Rating: 8
Returner 77 (macOS, First Time)
A okay adventure game set on an alien ship that I ended up souring on entirely by the end. The backstory is that Earth was attacked by some kind of crystalline aliens which were seemingly fought off but required sending out 8,000 “Sleepers” to repopulate the Earth and 77 Returners to guide them back. The first 75 went missing, and #77 follows in the footsteps of Col. Ling (#76) on one of the aliens’ abandoned ships in order to get back to Earth. This is basically all mechanical puzzle with some tacked on inventory items. Some types get reused but there’s some good ones mixed in. The graphics are very nice, and this is basically the sole Unity powered game that never did anything to annoy me at all.
The gigantic let down is the story. You get little video clips left by Col. Ling which is mostly where the story content is. However, it ends up unfolding in a way that is incredibly contradictory as if the developers suddenly decided to change direction at some point. It also seemed like the game wasn’t even finished because of a message at the very end. However, a quick look at the release notes shows that this wasn’t the case and also that the final area came out after the others and is noted as such. There is a second game, but it’s actually a prequel that isn’t supposed to be as good with a story that’s even more confusing. I think that message might have been a very confusing teaser for the next game, but who knows at this point.
Rating: 5
Valley (Switch, First Time)
A really good first person platformer with some FPS elements that I avoided for some time because the eShop description doesn’t quite sell the game properly. For one thing, it isn’t described as a platformer which is literally the main gameplay. You play as some kind of archaeologist or treasure hunter searching for the legendary Lifeseed in the title valley located in Canadian Rockies; it also seems to be set in the late 70s or early 80s but this is a minor detail. After a canoeing mishap, playfully foreshadowed in a “Canoeing for Beginners” book seen at the beginning, you find out that not only is the Lifeseed real, the US military found it during WWII and conducted all sorts of research on it.
At the same time, you find the LEAF exoskeleton that was being developed there which gives you great jumping and running ability, and control over life and death!!! For some reason the game makes a big deal about that at times, but it’s over exaggerated. Inside the valley are floating orbs dubbed Amrita by researchers that power the suit’s functions. These can be extracted from the environment or placed back into it, but basically you can kill plants for extra energy or revive them to replenish your extra lives.
It’s really the core gameplay that’s so great. There’s a great sense of speed and leaping around feels so great. The environments are mix of regular outdoor areas and military facilities with a little ancient ruins mixed in. There’s good variety of platforming between those types of areas. There’s also some monsters to fight which isn’t too stressful even though suit energy is also your health and ammo. You get suit upgrades (double jump, grapple, etc) at a fairly regular pace too. I really wish this was longer since it’s just so fun to play.
There is a timer, but it’s broken.
Rating: 9
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 19, 2021 9:31:36 GMT -5
The Switch finally bothered to give some rough approximation on this one's Play Activity, so I'm gonna write about it now!
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD (OG on Xbox, Played on Switch; First Time; 7 hours 30 minutes) (The time given above is an estimation, since the Switch doesn't accurately record your playtime unless you're using the Parental Control app.)
Oddworld is a series that I remember being quite a big deal in the late 90s/early 00s for its unique art direction and for mixing comedy quite well with more serious themes such as consumerism and slave labour, but the only one I'd ever played much of was this FPS with platforming back on the original Xbox. I was very bad at it since I was an idiot at the age of 9, and I hadn't been able to play it since because our old Xbox crapped out and the game was never made backwards compatible, so I thought I'd finally revisit it on the Switch and see how it fared.
I quite like the vibe of Stranger's Wrath, where it's very blatantly a Western but with enough of the Oddworld trappings where it feels very much like its own thing. In particularly, I really dig how the Stranger's slow and stilted delivery isn't just a nod to the likes of The Man With No Name (played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's legendary "Dollars Trilogy"), but also carries the suggestion that the Stranger isn't very good at talking - either to other people, or in general. The settings are clearly inspired by Westerns and similar enough to the grounded look of the Oddworld games that the two work wonderfully together, resulting in plenty of gorgeous locales that I frequently stopped to take a couple of pictures via the Switch's screenshotting function.
The fact that small critters make up your various kinds of ammo and weapons adds a cool diegetic touch to your arsenal, and I really appreciate how you can either kill everyone or capture them for money. It lends a lot of versatility and in-the-moment thinking during the more hectic firefights, and there are plenty of those because this is a pretty tough game on even the easiest difficulty. Definitely don't go into this one half-cocked and guns ablazing, or you'll be dead in seconds.
Perhaps my only criticism is how repetitive it gets after a while. To be fair, Stranger's Wrath does a lot to make each bounty feel unique with their own specific areas full of geometry, gimmicks and ideas that are barely reused elsewhere. And because you often have the ability to choose from multiple bounties at once, it means you can replay the game with bounties in a different order every time. I suppose I just wish there was more optional bits than the one hidden black market in one of the towns that perhaps played around with some puzzles or more esoteric ideas. But then that's more a case of the game not being what I want it to be, rather than it being bad for what it is.
Still, it's definitely a game I'd recommend checking out if you're into more unusual FPSes.
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Post by JoeQ on Jan 19, 2021 11:40:42 GMT -5
Onimusha: Warlords (PS4) - Replay, Time: around 15h? Originally played the Genma Onimusha version way back on the original Xbox. Even though this HD remaster was pretty pretty barebones and for some reason missing the extra content and enhancements of Genma Onimusha it still held up and was a lot of fun to revisit. I got the Platinum Trophy, which took four playthroughs and beating the infernally frustrating Oni Spirits mode. Rating: 4/5Alphabet Challenge: ---D----------O----------- Number Challenge: ----------
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Post by mainpatr on Jan 19, 2021 13:50:13 GMT -5
Onimusha: Warlords (PS4) - Replay, Time: around 15h? Originally played the Genma Onimusha version way back on the original Xbox. Even though this HD remaster was pretty pretty barebones and for some reason missing the extra content and enhancements of Genma Onimusha it still held up and was a lot of fun to revisit. I got the Platinum Trophy, which took four playthroughs and beating the infernally frustrating Oni Spirits mode. Rating: 4/5Alphabet Challenge: ---D----------O----------- Number Challenge: ---------- How was That Puzzle? You know the one.
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Post by lurker on Jan 19, 2021 14:31:29 GMT -5
The Switch finally bothered to give some rough approximation on this one's Play Activity, so I'm gonna write about it now!
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD (OG on Xbox, Played on Switch; First Time; 7 hours 30 minutes) (The time given above is an estimation, since the Switch doesn't accurately record your playtime unless you're using the Parental Control app.)
Oddworld is a series that I remember being quite a big deal in the late 90s/early 00s for its unique art direction and for mixing comedy quite well with more serious themes such as consumerism and slave labour, but the only one I'd ever played much of was this FPS with platforming back on the original Xbox. I was very bad at it since I was an idiot at the age of 9, and I hadn't been able to play it since because our old Xbox crapped out and the game was never made backwards compatible, so I thought I'd finally revisit it on the Switch and see how it fared.
I quite like the vibe of Stranger's Wrath, where it's very blatantly a Western but with enough of the Oddworld trappings where it feels very much like its own thing. In particularly, I really dig how the Stranger's slow and stilted delivery isn't just a nod to the likes of The Man With No Name (played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's legendary "Dollars Trilogy"), but also carries the suggestion that the Stranger isn't very good at talking - either to other people, or in general. The settings are clearly inspired by Westerns and similar enough to the grounded look of the Oddworld games that the two work wonderfully together, resulting in plenty of gorgeous locales that I frequently stopped to take a couple of pictures via the Switch's screenshotting function.
The fact that small critters make up your various kinds of ammo and weapons adds a cool diegetic touch to your arsenal, and I really appreciate how you can either kill everyone or capture them for money. It lends a lot of versatility and in-the-moment thinking during the more hectic firefights, and there are plenty of those because this is a pretty tough game on even the easiest difficulty. Definitely don't go into this one half-cocked and guns ablazing, or you'll be dead in seconds.
Perhaps my only criticism is how repetitive it gets after a while. To be fair, Stranger's Wrath does a lot to make each bounty feel unique with their own specific areas full of geometry, gimmicks and ideas that are barely reused elsewhere. And because you often have the ability to choose from multiple bounties at once, it means you can replay the game with bounties in a different order every time. I suppose I just wish there was more optional bits than the one hidden black market in one of the towns that perhaps played around with some puzzles or more esoteric ideas. But then that's more a case of the game not being what I want it to be, rather than it being bad for what it is.
Still, it's definitely a game I'd recommend checking out if you're into more unusual FPSes.
My experience with the series lies mostly with the Game Boy port of the first one.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 19, 2021 14:53:27 GMT -5
There was a GB port?!
It's too bad that the original 5 game plan for the series never happened especially since they managed 4 games with only 2 counting against that total before taking their ball and going home. I don't think anyone has even said that the long term plans even were. I'm honestly doubting there even was one and that it was pure hype more than anything.
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Post by JoeQ on Jan 19, 2021 15:51:41 GMT -5
How was That Puzzle? You know the one. The crest one? It was fine, I've never had trouble with it.
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Post by lurker on Jan 19, 2021 16:20:28 GMT -5
There was a GB port?! It's too bad that the original 5 game plan for the series never happened especially since they managed 4 games with only 2 counting against that total before taking their ball and going home. I don't think anyone has even said that the long term plans even were. I'm honestly doubting there even was one and that it was pure hype more than anything. I thought it was a port... Edit: Turns out it is kinda, though the wiki calls it a demake. It's an extremely abbreviated one, due to system limitations.
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Post by spanky on Jan 19, 2021 20:44:01 GMT -5
My kid woke up from his nap early and I was trying to keep him quiet so he wouldn't wake up our infant, so I decided to play a video game he would like to watch...something with Mickey Mouse. I settled for Mickey's Ultimate Challenge (SNES, First Time). I played it on "Cake" mode which was really easy like you might expect. Just trying to kill time here!
Not much to say about this one. It's basically a short collection of minigames based on things like Concentration, Simon, Sokoban etc. with a Mickey Mouse theme tying them together. The final puzzle is a fucking sliding puzzle and I hate those things. And for some weird reason, the box art isn't represented in the game at all. Overall, it's a pretty thin experience but probably one of the better Hi-Tech Expressions games. Low bar, I know.
I never played this as a kid but even if I had I think I certainly would have rather played one of the Capcom Mickey games.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 20, 2021 10:29:16 GMT -5
A few smaller adventure games:
103 (Switch, First Time) This is more of a shortish experience rather than a game per se and best described as a first person "walking simulator" in a looping art nouveau decorated corridor with weird messages on the walls and some strange human-sized dolls. The eShop (and Steam) description spells things out too much, but I just had it on my wishlist and grabbed it because it was on sale and was looking to burn some gold points. I think it works a lot better not knowing anything at all going in. I get the feeling that this might have originally been designed as a VR game, but I can't find anything that says this supports VR on PC. This could be more explicit in what you're even supposed to do, but it's quite effective with the proper ambiance assuming you don't get stuck.
Rating: 8
AntVentor (Switch, First Time)
A short adventure game about an ant that's also an inventor ergo AntVentor. There's a bit too much adventure game logic to the design which is entirely inventory driven, but I still liked it overall although stay very far away if you have any kind of serious arachnophobia. The content is a bit thin for a full price of $8, but the sale price of $4 is much more reasonable.
Rating: 7
Down in Bermuda (Switch, First Time)
An okay puzzle box-y adventure game that was a little disappointing by the end. You kinda play as a pilot that crash lands presumably in the Bermuda Triangle and traverses a series of six islands to escape. They're very much in the style of puzzle boxes despite being islands as mechanisms pop out of the grounds as you solve mechanical puzzles. You need to collect all the golden orbs on each island in order to progress and also find all the quasi-hidden white orbs which are also tied to progression; each island has a map hidden in plain sight that shows the white orbs you still need to collect so that's a much less annoying element than it could be.
I had previously played this a bit on iOS and macOS previously since it's part of Apple Arcade, but it didn't feel great to control. It's too fiddly on an iPhone, and the camera is too clunky to control with a mouse. It feels a lot better on Switch. The left stick moves the cursor, the d-pad pans and the right stick or L/R rotates. It is a little weird to me that I ended up buying this only for better controls, but it's on a big new release sale of $8 down from $20.
This is generally fun, but it also messes up the endgame. It isn't even technically bad, but it's a good example of how ending on a disappointing note might be worse. You do all the stuff on the final island, get an ending and then an additional island unlocks which requires finding all the hidden Relics. I already had all but two since they're not deviously hidden, and the island menu shows you what you've collected and the total. So you get all the relics, prepare for something to happen, and it literally just plays the credits! If the last few bits of the game had just been moved to Relic Island, I wouldn't have been left completely disappointed.
Rating: 6
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 20, 2021 15:36:32 GMT -5
Stacking (Xbox 360; First Time; 3 hours 31 minutes)
This was one of a handful of digital games released by Double Fine in the early 10s born from the "Amnesia Fortnight", where the dev team split into four smaller teams and created game prototypes during the uncertainty of if or when Brütal Legend was going to be published. This game, designed by Lee Petty, is an adventure game where everyone is a matryoshka doll and you, as the smallest doll, can take control of progressively bigger characters to solve a variety of puzzles. And 'variety' is very much a deliberate description, as each puzzle has multiple ways of being solved - requiring different characters and approaches to solve. As such, the game is very open-ended and you're even encouraged to replay older puzzles with new characters just to see what happens. I very much like how this is one of those game's where seeing it in action gets across its ideas and overall vibe much better than I ever could, especially in its presentation. It takes place in a cross between Victorian English society with brimmings of the Great Depression, with themes such as child labour and extreme income inequality driving the events while having a fairly successful mix of comedy thrown in (actually quite a bit like the Oddworld games albeit more light-hearted). There's a particular focus on lifting elements from silent cinema of the 1920s: characters only ever talk in text boxes or brief speech bubbles, cutscenes are staged and shot as if they're filmed on a stage with props and curtains, and the soundtrack by Peter McConnell is inspired by the style of music performed or added to silent movies. The end result is an adventure game that's entirely its own thing both aesthetically and mechanically, and one I'd happily recommend to adventure game fans and people who love works with a strong 1920s feel about them. It's available on computers and is backwards compatible with the post-360 Xbox consoles, so it should be quite easy to get. In fact, you can even grab it off of Double Fine's itch.io page (with the Lost Hobo King DLC expansion thrown in for free!): doublefine.itch.io/stacking--- I wanted to add as a personal note that this is the fifth game I've beaten for the first time since starting this challenge a few weeks back. I'm really pleased about that, and how doing this can helped me to revisit and better appreciate games I might've taken longer to get round to. Even for games I wasn't able to beat, such as Poochy and Yoshi's Woolly World for the 3DS or Switchball for the Xbox 360, I'm just so happy that I've given them a shot. I'm gonna try to keep doing it for a while, but I just wanted to say thanks dsparil for doing this awesome challenge for so many years, since it's likely done the same for at least a couple of other folks!
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Post by dsparil on Jan 20, 2021 16:27:05 GMT -5
Thanks! Truth be told, this tradition was started by JDarkside in 2016, moved to The Great Klaid in 2017, then Son of Suzy Creamcheese in 2018. I've run it from 2019.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Jan 20, 2021 16:37:08 GMT -5
One of my complaints about Dragon Quest XI is that the AI knows what to do the vast majority of the time and it makes things a breeze until the endgame. Wait, people actually play with the AI on? If that makes it too easy, why not turn the AI off?
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