Discuss games you've been playing

[The Colonel]

i played captain rainbow. it's mostly about the guy from nes golf scratching his huge smelly balls

[The Colonel]

it's not the worst game ever but for a game with a really experimental and weird premise somehow they thought birdo was a forgotten nintendo character and also had trouble coming up with character arcs other than "the guy from murasame castle cums too much when he touches women" and "birdo proves she's a woman because only women can use vibrators" while you walk around the same three environments for 10 hours

[neen]

started learning and practicing some of the crazy x-ray scope stuff in super metroid. first was g-mode (cool 4* frame trick in a 60 fps game heyeaurgh), and next up is x-ray climbing.


*: technically it's only a 4 frame trick sometimes. depends on which flavor you want

[Solid Snix]

External Link: Tweet

[neen]

tonight: learning x-ray glitches in super metroid: g-mode (for backdoor entry into maridia and lower norfair), bluesuit (from picking up a suit upgrade with x-ray and an active shinespark), and x-ray climbing. mercifully, a knowledgable member of the sm community was watching for the majority of the stream and he walked me through the parts that i didn't immediately understand from reading the wiki. you can even watch the vod here if you want. it's like 50% dead air and you'll probably want to skip the first ten or so minutes as it's just me fumbling around.

Originally Posted by Alakazam

really miss having a game in my life like this, in this manner, where i'm actively learning and improving

it's never too late to pick up a new game or repickup an old one.

[The Colonel]

psychonauts 2 is gonna eat my time for the next few days because while i don't even like psychonauts 1 that much these days, as a kid i was so obsessed with it that i replayed the entire game in two days earlier this week and playing 2 is one of the most surreal experiences i've ever had and completely feeding into what kid colonel always wanted despite in lots of ways being an entirely different game tonally and structurally and arguably suffering from the expectations of being psychonauts 2 in ways that psychonauts 1 never did from being a weird one-off xbox game with edgy writing. but i don't hate 2 despite it being so different so that's a good sign i guess

[The Colonel]

psychonauts 1 runs through my blood enough that when i see footage of the game muted i hear the sfx in my head and i can remember music from it with zero reference. it's actually kinda intrusive and irritating

[The Colonel]

i've also been playing marathon infinity and this is a piece of bungie's history that deserves more respect and appreciation, it's rare that you see an fps game where the designers stopped caring about making fps levels halfway through the trilogy so half of the maps in the final game are just you wandering through surreal dark lava passageways and reading about a guy finding a magic knife on a dead body and slowly losing his mind while being tracked by men in black, while you yourself are contending with an army of invisible floating enemies chasing after you across the lava.

one of these maps has a shortcut secondary path that forces you to swim through long pools of lava, but it just ends with throwing you into a secret level full of massive swarms of enemies who gun you down instantly if you don't rush for the exit again. there's also no save point on this path and the next map opens throwing you into a jail cell with all your guns lost and only 10% of your hp remaining so if you die on this route you have to restart from three maps earlier. oh yeah also all of these weird puzzle labyrinth maps are heavily built on exploiting marathon's weird movement physics, which are entirely different from doom and give you perfect air control, because in marathon when you're falling you will always drift exactly in the direction you're facing, so if you turn around at all with the mouse you can completely control where you land, so they actually try to pull lots of platforming with it where you're running and drifting from platform to platform

only halo 1 ever matched up to marathon infinity's bizarre energy in its level design, by making everything way way too big and filled with too many inexplicable similar-looking dead ends and then making you replay half of it backwards so it all feels even bigger and more time wastey. give me back the early days of bungie where they'd make this kind of bizarre bullshit again

[Danny Trabajo]

Because I'm thankfully out of the habit of turning the Nintendo on, I'm going to call my progress in Monster Hunter Stories 2 at 90% completion with the verdict, "The greatest Gamecube game of all time."

Mark Davis Pro Bass Challenge by Natsume is not the greatest Gamecube game of all time. It has stressful water. If you've played a variety of fishing games before you might know what I mean

[Solid Snix]

Originally Posted by Danny Trabajo

Because I'm thankfully out of the habit of turning the Nintendo on, I'm going to call my progress in Monster Hunter Stories 2 at 90% completion with the verdict, "The greatest Gamecube game of all time."

Mark Davis Pro Bass Challenge by Natsume is not the greatest Gamecube game of all time. It has stressful water. If you've played a variety of fishing games before you might know what I mean

ive been playing Monhun stories 1, and I gotta agree the GameCube energy is strong

[Zeek]

I recently 100%'d Psychonauts 2, and I can agree that it's just surreal that it exists. The whole time it just felt, idk, strange that "yes, this is a sequel to a game from the mid-2000s, and we're acting like nothing has happened since then."

I did find that, like other reviews, I pined more for P1 levels. P2 just didn't have that spark, or something compared to P2. I found myself also failing to keep track of which characters were which often. I felt as though they didn't do that great of a job cementing everyone in that wasn't already in the first game. However, I did really enjoy my time with it, and still think it's amazing that it even happened (aside from hunting down every single collectable, ugh, why did I do that).

[The Colonel]

overall i feel that psychonauts 1 and 2 are just very different games with different design and narrative goals. psychonauts 1 is a weird experimental adventure game with a platforming emphasis, its writing is routed in slightly edgier 2000s humor and it has no real bigger narrative goals, most of its levels are weird short storytelling experiments with gimmicks that actively hinder the platforming and focus harder on the dialog, and the campers get entire fully fleshed out storylines that you can even miss out on if you rush the platforming too hard

psychonauts 2 is a game where everything is in service of the platforming and combat, every psi power feeds into the combat, even something like clairvoyance that previously was only needed for occasional puzzles and cute visual gags, all new psi powers are things that feed into the flow of the platforming and combat like slow bubbles and stray thoughts. they specifically designed the controls to feel good for both platforming and combat, things no longer feel as heavy and more light and bouncy. every stage is built with platforming in mind first and then how they can build the theming and storytelling around it second, ultimately even dropping minds being one-off weird short stories for all feeding into a larger narrative and theme since after forsythe all of them concern one of the psychic six. most notable is the interns, who were absolutely written as 2's version of the campers earlier on when the game's aims were closer to 1's--the same could be said about forsythe's mind, really, it's very light on platforming and much heavier on weird narrative gimmicks--but quickly fade out of the overall script when 2 takes on a very different narrative and design focus, so they never get quite the same build up or exploration and mostly just feel like an odd relic

the impressive part of 2 is that it manages to merge both identities and feel like a satisfying and enjoyable follow up despite basically not being the same game, at all, and having to find ways to connect and resolve things psychonauts 1 probably never even properly considered in a wider context at all. at the very least, psychonauts 1's world and story design documents mention a lot of things and some of those things reappear in 2 but in a very different context. same with dr. loboto's dream in rhombus actually, i dunno if they ever actually planned on following up on lili's offhand mention of a nightmare about a bath tub, but they sure did there out of nowhere. makes me even more confused why rhombus is a vr game cause that's major stuff 90% of people will never play lol

[The Colonel]

i finished marathon infinity yesterday. only fps i've played that ends with your evil ai friend talking about how in the literal last moments before the universe imploded after an untold millenia, he was still thinking about how insanely cool you were

i started legacy of kain: soul reaver

[The Colonel]

legacy of kain soul reaver has some cool ideas but i've never played a game more desperately in need of a button to make the camera look up and the combat sure is balanced around making things suck ass and take like thirty seconds longer to kill anything if you let an enemy brush past you once. everything about how it handles the phase shifting mechanic quickly turns it from an interesting and fun dimension to navigating the world into a thing that just arbitrarily makes you spend a lot of time watching the whole animation for when raziel shifts so you can uhhh, go through a grate, that has another phase shift right after so the grate's entire existence was purely to be a waste of time before you do another block puzzle

[Mr. Airplane]

The Nick fighting game is good