I’ve been playing it on and off for over 20 years now with some definite highs and lows but I have nothing but respect for the devs (3 people) and community. It’s not on any store fronts and they just do their own thing.
Most 90’s and late 80’s point and click games (Sam and Max, Full Throttle, Monkey Island, The Dig, Loom, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Zack McCraken and the Alien Mindbenders, Kings / Space quest, Dark Seed, Beneath a Steel Sky)
I was going to try and do some hunting for potential RPG Maker gems, but then I searched the tag on Itch 😅 I’ll probably stick to the Multiverse mod for FTL…
Recently bought and played Minecraft. What I enjoy is playing singleplayer while also doing roleplay in my head and making up story and conversation between me and villagers.
My brother got my wife and me some miyoo minis, and I’m almost through TLoZ: Minish Cap. He loaded the tiny best set so I have too many choices and haven’t picked what I’m playing next
After La Mulana I wanted to try more Metroidvanias, so I tried Castlevania: Symphony of the Night but found it incredibly dull and dropped it after a couple of hours.
I understand the historical significance of its level design, but the combat was so easy that traversal became boring, as enemies respawn every time you change rooms. Also, the sprites are beautiful and detailed, and the game looks great, but Alucard’s movement feels off due to the animation.
I then switched to Touhou Luna Nights, which was really short but fun. The time stop gimmick was fun to use and I liked the bosses. The metroidvania aspect was a bit shallow, probably due to the length of the game, as it’s mainly used for optional powerups.
I started playing Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin. It seems like a fun game, the writing seems really cheesy (but enjoyable) and the combat is fun. A big problem tho is a bug that keeps triggering a slowdown at random times, which is really annoying and got me killed in a bunch of encounters.
Finally, I wanted to play Infinity Nikki, but I kinda lost interest with how the developer has been behaving lately. Can never trust gacha games.
Oof yep I feel that one. I love the wheel and spoke moderately open world level design, but if you actually need to move the story it can be very difficult to find where the next bits are.
Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the GameBoy Color in the mid-90s. I got to the second temple, and was totally stuck - to progress I needed to learn to jump, which I inferred was in this temple, but I just couldn’t figure out where it was.
Wandered all over the available map, which of course was constrained due to lacking the jump skill and other story-driven tools. Nothing.
Finally bought a game guide, which explained to me that I needed to bomb a wall in one room in the second temple to progress. It was indicated by a small crack, a staple in Zelda games but invisible to me in my first experience with the series.
The cherry on top was that by that point, I didn’t have any bombs to break the wall, and I recall that I didn’t have the ability to buy or acquire any and had to restart the game to progress past the point where I was stuck.
After that point, Zelda: Links Awakening became one of my favorite games of my childhood. It is hilarious how much frustration it caused me before that realization.
Some games really do depend on learned conventions from previous games which can feel a bit unfair to the uninitiated. It’s a double edged sword of avoiding too much tutorializing vs alienating newcomers.
Yeah, well, the original Zelda flagged bomb spots even less, so...
It's weird to me that Simon's Quest gets so much grief for this when Zelda 1 and 2 (and particularly the localized version of those) were full of that exact "defer to the guide" nonsense.
In fairness, some of that stuff comes from trying to play older games out of context, since a lot of tutorializing used to happen in the manual, but not on any of those NES examples.
I’m playing Oracle of Ages for the first time in a while, and it is not great! The level design is flawed. The eighth dungeon is a a dark room, some ghosts, and a hint owl that tells you to “attune your ears to the sound of sword on stone” which, right, standard Zelda fare, good of them to make explicit the reminder. But none of the walls clank! You need to push one of the non-pushable statues out of the way, in the dark, to even expose the bombable wall. I went over the whole place twice, and then thought “oh maybe they’re doing a cool metapuzzle thing and I’ve got to leave the dungeon and bomb a new entrance” so I went out and tested the whole area with my sword and then bombed everything in case I was just misinterpreting the clank sound.
The underwater dungeon had the interesting raise/lower water level mechanic, but I explored in loops for an hour before looking up where to go next. I’m not saying it’s supposed to be easy, I like a challenge, but it felt like the layout was deliberately withholding information, which is bad design.
The Long Hook is an upgrade for the Switch Hook. The improvment is marginal and the puzzles that require it feel confusing (I finally have the tool for this but it’s not working (before you know about the L2 version)), forced (this is the same puzzle but the anchor object is two tiles further away) or frustrating (oh of course I was supposed to know about the offscreen anchor).
The Long Hook has an entire dungeon dedicated to it.
It seems all my fond memories are actually from Oracle of Seasons. I wonder if they had parallel teams working on them.
I sorta had the same problem with Ocarina of Time. Was stuck in the Deku Tree basement. Didn’t know you had to use a stick with fire to burn cobweb. I thought the game was broken and was thinking about returning the game until I accidentally solved it by fucking around. Not sure if Navi explained it or not, but my English wasn’t very good when I was 10 and the game didn’t had my native language as an option.
When I was 5 or 6, my grandmother got a NES and three games. One was Crystalis.
Me and my two cousins played the game in turns, and we eventually got to the first boss, which was quite an achievement because there are puzzle elements to the game.
We could not beat this boss. Several years later, I have my own NES and I borrow Crystalis. I’m pretty sure I got to that boss again and realized something. Hitting him produced a sound that no other monster had. It sounded like hitting solid glass. I finally intuited that I wasn’t strong enough and leveled up to level 3, and wouldn’t you know it, I beat the boss.
It’s one of my all time favorite retro games. It was so ahead of its time. Worth playing if you’ve never tried it.
Back then on my GBA I got stuck in a Zelda Oracles dungeon for quite some time until I looked up what I was supposed to do. Turns out there was a hint, I had read it, but it was mistranslated and was garbled in my language.
It’s supposed to tell you running makes you jump farther. Translated text doesn’t mention jumping and instead sounds like a weird nonsensical idiom about “travelling far”. Specifically travelling in the sense going on a trip, not just going from place A to place B.
I had a similar problem with ocarina of time (and lemme tell you having to run around in not one but multiple times was a… blast…)
It was the first Gannon fight where you shoot the paintings… I’d never played a Zelda game before and it took me ages to give up and look it up (thankfully this was after the internet was born, and walkthrough sites were all over)
I got stuck in the first dungeon, because one room required pushing two blocks together but I didn’t even think any of these blocks could be pushed at all!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne