Deciding to have another run at Cuphead. It is so brutal but I can not call it unfair, which makes the brutality hurt even worse hahah

Dude, I've been dying to play Cuphead! That game is everything I love, but I'm waiting for the physical Switch release. Although if that's not out by the time the Steam Deck comes out (I'm planning on picking one up for my birthday), I may just cave and get it on Steam.

I've watched a few playthroughs and speedruns but was in no way prepared for how much focus it takes. Like I am talking 6 year-old about to chuck a fit at the cheating AI levels of focus. But I can't get mad at it cause the game is so god damn adorable.

I’ve gotten like 30 hours into Shin Megami Tensei V and have decided the following thus far:
Combat is chef’s kiss. Balance is great, battles are snappy.
The open(ish) world is fun. Stuff catches your eye all over the place, lots of stuff to do.
The writing is eh. The demon war stuff is interesting, but I have zero investment in the kids. It feels like they didn’t settle on the writing until late in development. Smt is gameplay heavy, so it’s pretty easy to look past, but it is disappointing considering how fun the crew in Apocalypse is.

beat digital devil saga 2. cool game but i did get slightly bitter towards the end cause the final dungeon is a bit too repetitive and long and the final boss caught me in a shitty instadeath loop my first time fighting it and meganada kinda sucked.

teardown part 2. i enjoyed part 1 a while back but it was a bit overreliant on heist missions that your toolset was limited enough it could get annoying having to spend so much time on each one. part 2 addresses all of that and overall its design tends to be even more freeform and the extra tools they added take the game from a 9 to a 10 for how much goofy shit you can do

thief 2. some thematically great levels and the expansive and open level design can be incredibly freeing and fun to be set loose in, but the mechanics and guard ai feel a bit finicky sometimes. not enouhg to be a problem in the better designed missions but in the very late game, especially the last few maps, it's agonizing and tedious

baba is you. i'm tackling it in bits and pieces but i've gotten further than i did the first time i played it.

atelier lilie. it's an old atelier game so it's harder to get into the groove of than ayesha or rorona but it's good japanese practice and it's cool getting to finish the original trilogy

fire emblem radiant dawn. had some rough times with this one early on but i finally got a good setup for ike's gang to steamroll

grand theft auto iii. interesting game historically, kinda sucks to play now and the writing is like an early 2000s indie comic that thinks it's really funny. mostly finishing it cause it's short and i only have a handful of missions left. playing the original pc port with a mod that lets you be reimu

thief 3. lot of cool ideas but i'm not sure it's able to execute on them very well, and somehow they went from thief 2 feeling like you lived in an antigravity chamber to tying all first person camera movement to garret's head rather than his body so now the act of turning and moving forward in the direction you are looking as a bit of a chore and the open world is pretty awkward and has bugged out on me in bizarre ways a couple times. also not a fan of how heavily downgraded the blackjack is now

grand theft auto iii done. i hated it. it's funny how the ending is just you killing the evil bitch who betrayed you, in order to save the annoying bitch, who you now kill for being annoying. lots of thematic depth, in gta3

thief 3 done. annoying game. there are some good ideas but mostly it just feels like thief 2 but bad. ending was sweet though, it's thematically fitting

gta vice city. it plays better than 3. not sure how i'll feel about the story cause it's not gonna have the things i like about scarface.

deus ex. holds up pretty well but i am playing with biomod. writing's better than i expected, not exactly poetic but being blunt fits for its subject matter and cast

senran kagura 2. big improvement over 1. on an emulator 1 runs better but it also runs a bit too fast, 2's frame cap might be less smooth but the game is less annoying and feels more like an actual decent beat em up. writing's kinda weird though, hebijo route in burst might hold the height to me for how it goes about the general plotting and character writing, lots of really weird and memorable moments in that part of the game.

Just finished Yakuza 0 after about 50 hours. Although a solid 10 hours was spent playing pocket circuit racer. The ending was heartbreaking. Just started Yakuza Kiwami and loving how many callbacks there are already.

Slowly trying to grind out games of Classic Score Attack in Tetris Effect. It is such an unforgiving game mode, especially as it gets faster. You basically have to find a spot and commit extremely quickly for each piece or else you will stuck with the most awkward looking stacks. It is such a fun way to play the game outside of that.

Finished up Halo Infinite on Legendary as 100% as I can currently until they let you replay missions, since there are miss-able skulls, and I didn't wanna look up spoilers before I played it all... By far the shittiest part of the game are the bosses that you are pretty much required to cheese on Legendary, so I don't know whose bright idea was to add them in. The final boss wasn't even hard compared to some of the previous ones, and I /hate/ waves of enemy type boss fights. So uninspired, so bland.

I played through Act One of Inscryption. It's cool, and also one of those games the whole world has decided not to spoil, so that's good for newcomers.

Played a little Hunt Showdown too. Game still tense. Too tense for me, and I'm too clumsy and accident prone for the stakes.

My back has been hurting for a week due to what I assume is the Flu and COVID shots conspiring against me. So I'm gonna play some more Switch games. I just bought a port of Saints Row 4, which is a game I remember liking.

deus ex. i've been using biomod which i expected to be bigger but most of what it's done is make swimming a skill worth investing into and make passive defense augs less of a bother. otherwise, it's held up better than i expected. it's not an eloquently written game but few 90s pc rpgs were and i appreciate how blunt it is about its thoughts on politics

I've been getting a real bad itch for Spider-Man games. I've completed the Insomniac games on PS4 (besides DLC).

Thinking about going back and playing through all the Spider-Man games that are on Xbox. I always wanted to play the Xbox 360/PS3 version of Spider-Man 3 when I was young, but was stuck with the PS2 version.

I'm gonna give Banjo Tooie another fair shake

I'm nearing the end of Final Fantasy Six and I still have yet to figure out how to properly use Gau. I refuse to look at walkthroughs due to sheer stubbornness. I'm really enjoying this one though.

Oooo FF6 is the only one I made a decent effort at. I reached the mid-game where you get access to the Airship and everything and gave up because I needed more hand-holding. Your post in the picture thread makes a lot more sense given that context hahaha


My roomie and I have been grinding runs in Spelunky 2. His approach is very devil may care, while I go a lot slower and cautiously. It works out that I make deep runs more consistently, but his deep runs end up with a more powerful character. Jokes on him, spikes don't GAF about how many bombs or health you have lmao