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Beating Games

Partner and I finally wrapped up Date Everything today and we really had a blast. Neither of us would ever have picked up a "normal" dating sim, but this one was so bonkers and charming (and the cast was so incredible) that it kept us entertained from start to finish. The playthrough clocked in at 52 hours, which was honestly way more than I would've expected. You don't necessarily have to stick with it that long, but we were set on seeing all the characters through. Unfortunately a bug kept us from finishing one of their arcs, and I'm not sure I'd necessarily play the whole game again since we probably would just make the same decisions. I guess Youtube can help us out there.
 
Really enjoyed Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Fantastic addition to the series, and honestly just a really good Gaiden game in general. Didn't intend to play most of the side content and instead found myself platinuming it, which was surprising as its my first platinum in the series!
 
I finished Shantae and the Seven Sirens. It took me several hours to realize the game was running too fast on my PC and making it harder, so I finished it on my Steam Deck. Pretty good fun.
 
Despite my many issues with it, I got through Lies of P. It is a shameless clone of Bloodborne, but there is just enough of something I can’t put into words that kept me going. It certainly wasn’t the overall story or the voice acting. I’ll give the voice actors the benefit of the doubt and blame the direction. The localization across the board seemed fairly rough.

I will give the game credit and say the “Humanity” system is probably better than anything Fromsoft has done with Dark Souls’ Humanity, Bloodborne’s Insight and whatever Sekiro had with NPC’s dying if you kept losing. I like that there is no numerical indicator on screen or in menus, but certain things like looking at a special painting or interacting with a cat will give a good idea what it is.
 
I’ve been playing another crab’s treasure , which is delightful if a bit easy if you abuse the R2 specials, and kept thinking about Lies of P every time I unlocked a shortcut. Ideally a soulsborn shortcut is a big deal and you breathe a sigh of relief when you see one but I feel like there wasn’t much thought put into the Lies of P ones. Just kind of sprinkled in wherever, never really helping with a run back.
 
The shortcuts felt very inconsistent to me. Sometimes, they would show up too early and shave off almost no time. Other times, there wouldn’t be any meaningful shortcuts, especially on the near endless final area.
 
"Beat" Tiny Bookshop, inherited the physical bookshop and saw credits, the game goes on but I'm counting that as beating it. Absolutely adored my time with the game. There's a lot more to do in the town than I expected from the demo and I was already sold after playing the demo.

I posted about it here but do want to note that while I played it on Switch there is a Steam demo too. The Switch doesn't support touch controls but it was a perfect handheld game.
 
jpfriction said:
I’ve been playing another crab’s treasure , which is delightful if a bit easy if you abuse the R2 specials, and kept thinking about Lies of P every time I unlocked a shortcut. Ideally a soulsborn shortcut is a big deal and you breathe a sigh of relief when you see one but I feel like there wasn’t much thought put into the Lies of P ones. Just kind of sprinkled in wherever, never really helping with a run back.
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There were a few attempts at circlebacks and shortcuts and a couple of them even worked all right, in certain levels. There was one I was even impressed with (that also got me the shell I used for the rest of the game). But overall yeah, it wasn't quite as thought-out as From's own examples, but that's also a really high bar to clear most of the time.
 
I contend the shortcuts and circle-backs are not as important in Lies of P because LoP is fairly on rails compared to something like Dark Souls. While Dark Souls kinda shepherds the player into certain directions, it's still fairly open, multiple branching paths, and has a kinda Metroidvania quality to it in that respect. Lies of P has very little of that and seems to be more concerned with telling its story and using the traversal through Krat as a key part of the narrative. Basically, Lies of P is far more linear than From's games and shortcuts become questionable (especially in light of Stargazer placement).
 
Paul le Fou said:
There were a few attempts at circlebacks and shortcuts and a couple of them even worked all right, in certain levels. There was one I was even impressed with (that also got me the shell I used for the rest of the game). But overall yeah, it wasn't quite as thought-out as From's own examples, but that's also a really high bar to clear most of the time.
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Oh I was talking about Lies of P. The shortcuts in Another Crab’s Treasure are decent, they just made me think about how Lies of P’s weren’t.

Being able to respawn directly outside the boss arenas does render them somewhat moot I suppose, but the areas are huge and moon snail shells are rare enough that shortcuts do come in handy for the exploration. I suppose just plopping more bonfires everywhere accomplishes the same thing when you can teleport between them, but just not quite as satisfying as unlocking that door you saw an hour ago from the other side.
 
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I played through Returnal. Well outside my wheelhouse, but a fun game. Don't much care for rogue-like elements in my games, but despite the pretty high challenge level I managed to slip through a lot of the game without incident. It definitely ratchets up the stress levels, though. I had some roadblocks finding the stuff I needed for the true ending, but my final run saw me so overpowered that the final boss went down like an absolute chump. Still very ambiguous on the ending, so... yeah, not much closure, but still a worthwhile journey overall.
 
Finished off Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2. Which was very similar to the first game, but you sure as shootin’ don’t go into an EDF game expecting bold gameplay innovations. Point in fact, the entries that *do* mix things up are the Bad Ones that nobody likes much.

It was a lengthy game; about 104 missions, and still shared the first games problem of giving you a million billion guns but restricting what each character can use to a single category, but also requiring you to keep using the same guys so you can have enough HP to survive later levels.
 
Finished Stories Untold. Great game, though I was completely lost through the third episode and spent half of it just following a walkthrough without understanding how the codes work. The story is overall great. I mean, I've seen this kind of thing in horror visual novels but it is well told and integrates well with the gameplay.
 
My take on Stories Untold is still super mixed. The fact that it's like, a 2 hour game, and it nails its absurdly high fidelity first person POV of interacting with early 80s tech with meta stuff going on is pulled off so masterfully I think everyone should play it. It does really get dragged down by how incredibly limited the gameplay is though. The first story in particular is just frustrating in how few commands and terms it recognizes, knowing they could have just build in an actual Inform client, and Story 4 just infuriates me.

Just to spoil the hell out of it: The first 3 stories are great little standalone vignettes. Some little haunted house thing, interacting with some weird space probe, something super obtuse spooky government project/maybe cosmic horror/who even knows bit, and then... this fourth one recontextualizing everything in the first three into just this sort of owl creek bridge/survivor's guilt fantasy where some teenager drinks and drives and has a serious accident, and what's really going on is just seeing bright flashing emergency lights and hearing emergency services radio chatter. It's a bit of a twist just for the sake of a twist, and it just lessens the entire experience so much, having all this intrigue and mystery and then totally dismissing it for a grounded after school special message. Just... why?

Feels like part of a general trend with indie horror stuff, too. I have similar gripes with the similarly visually ambitious Enigma Studios games.
 
It's definitely a take I understand. I think the first two are my favourite, checked out with 3 despite it being aesthetically my jam and found the tie-in in four kind of been-there done that (though I like how it's nice try dude when you try to change the tragedy)
 
Reminds me of the big “twist” at the end of the late 90s movie Campfire Tales. Really didn’t add much of anything other than a moral.
 
Beat Keeper tonight. Bizarre, fun game that's a feast for the eyes and quite trippy. The controls and camera take a bit to get used to but the game is absolutely worth it.

keeper-light-shining-puzzle.png


It's on Gamepass and around 5 hours long, if you don't have Gamepass I'd still recommend it.

I was about to be frustrated by (spoiler for about two thirds of the way through the game) the second time you get broken apart, but then the game went "what if you're a lighthouse but Sonic the Hedgehog" and all was forgiven, and there's another wacky fun change after that.
 
Me and my boyfriend played through the original Max Payne over the past week and finished it yesterday. It was honestly a lot of fun, I never played the games growing up (I remember my brother having Max Payne 2 on his pc when I was a kid but never played it myself). Wanted to give a huge shoutout to an incredibly well crafted epilepsy safe mod by Znakemaster for the first game. It removes all of the full screen flashes in cutscenes and when using painkillers, which makes the game very playable for me.

Three things I’d like to say in a quick mini review:
1. Love the pulp and noir vibes in it, and low budget comics with real actors, great b movie vibes and despite being low budget I loved the presentation and ended the game really enjoying it a lot.
2. I really wish there was controller support for the game on PC but I will say that the auto aim feature that actually uses bullet magnetism works really well! It doesn’t actually lock your cursor on targets but it moves bullets towards your target after firing. We played it with controller using a custom steam confit and it was great but it’s making me wish that the steam controller 2 rumor is real.
3. Do not play the ps2 version on ps4/5 as it literally has no quick save and quick load, if there’s no choice sure but I have heard nightmares about the games lack of checkpoints.

We’ve started Max Payne 2 on PC, which seems to fortunately be a port that works a lot better (and also has a great epilepsy mod too also by Znakemaster, but i will give a heads up that in the first nightmare scene there are still slower full screen white flashes). Its widescreen patch unfortunately breaks cutscenes a bit (but it’s also incredibly funny when it does with an enemy ragdoll suddenly spawning in mid conversation), and playing it at a high framerate also breaks scripting.

Plan after Max Payne 2 is to play Alan Wake, I’m skipping 3 for now as I’m focusing on remedy games and also even with the mods available, I do not think Max Payne 3 will be fun for me and likely give me terrible migraines.
 
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Just beat Minishoot Adventures. I had a great time with this. It is "what if a Zelda was a twin stick bullet hell" with a little town of cute spaceships. It eases you in enough that I had nothing but fun on normal difficulty as a bullet hell and twin stick shooter amateur.

I also recently beat Keeper and will heartily second it as an excellent experience.
 
Finished Max Payne 2! I think that from a gameplay perspective i liked it a lot more than the original game, but in terms of overall vibe and atmosphere, the original beats it. But despite that I still loved my time going through it watching my boyfriend play it (and me playing it for like 1/3 of it?). Was a lot of fun, and I love that this is the first game where they really went all in on the Remedy staple of TV shows within games, loved that in Alan Wake and Control, and great to see it return here.

I also really miss Sam Lake as Max Payne’s face model, in both gameplay and cutscenes, a real shame to see that gone. I don’t necessarily dislike Max’s new look I just miss his old one.

Anyhow, next will be wrapping up NG+ and all of the other endings in Silent Hill f and then hopefully we’ll be moving onto Alan Wake in some form! (Either Remastered on PS5 via PS+ which I redeemed years back or the OG PC port. Not sure what is preferable here, may go with PS5 though just because we’ve been running into bad issues with the laptop overheating atm).
 
Finally wrapped up Tactical Breach Wizards. Fun writing, fun powers, neat maps and tactics, and the scene where (mid Act 4 spoiler I think?) Zan realizes what actually happened last night and the button turns to "Regret"... damn that was well done.

I don't feel like I ever got the hang of Dall though. It was clear Riot Blocks were very useful but I struggled with them. I ended up having to use the game's (very appreciated) Skip Level feature as there were some I just couldn't figure out.
 
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Cleared Fire Emblem Engage on Hard - Casual.

I was so confused the first time I tried to play this game. The weapon proficiencies being a mechanic that unlocks classes rather than allow you to use a weapon was too much dissonance for me to grasp. That on top of a game with a lot of SYSTEMS. You can buy a stronger weapon. You can forge it. You can augment it. You can put an emblem on it.

I took off like a whole year and then tried it again. I realized I could skip everything in the Somniel except the dogs on my farm digging up ore and the Arena for leveling up my bonds. I lowered my expectations for the story. It's actually a good game in many ways. The later maps that
continually spawn enemies to prevent you from taking it slow
were a lot of fun.

I might even play it again and try some of the other characters. I still wish I had some way to see the character and class growth rates. I stumbled my way through the character progression.
 
Played Haiku the Robot over the past couple of days. I felt that it was ultimately fine, but never really rose above fine.

I liked: teleport dashing, cute character sprites, some attempts at novelty in your power-ups (getting different coatings for different environments was fun), short length.

I disliked: general lack of difficulty, extreme difficulty spike for the final boss, lack of rewards for side quests. It takes until the late game to really unlock the potential of your movement abilities and by that point you have very little to do with them. Getting the zipline ability well after the teleport dash felt a little redundant.

Still a fine effort for a (mostly) solo developer. If you want a little snack-sized Metroidvania as a treat it's frequently on sale and you could do a lot worse!
 
balder the brave said:
Cleared Fire Emblem Engage on Hard - Casual.

I was so confused the first time I tried to play this game. The weapon proficiencies being a mechanic that unlocks classes rather than allow you to use a weapon was too much dissonance for me to grasp. That on top of a game with a lot of SYSTEMS. You can buy a stronger weapon. You can forge it. You can augment it. You can put an emblem on it.

I took off like a whole year and then tried it again. I realized I could skip everything in the Somniel except the dogs on my farm digging up ore and the Arena for leveling up my bonds. I lowered my expectations for the story. It's actually a good game in many ways. The later maps that
continually spawn enemies to prevent you from taking it slow
were a lot of fun.

I might even play it again and try some of the other characters. I still wish I had some way to see the character and class growth rates. I stumbled my way through the character progression.
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Engage is arguably my favorite FE in the series. It feels very smooth, and there’s barely any clunkiness in the gameplay. I just wish map roaming and stuff will be in the next game.
 
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