Something I realize I never touched on is the specific way emotional extremes tie in to specific characters.
Quite often, what I enjoy most about story-driven games is the way you either see characters change, or get to see different sides of them. The moment that the quirky and silly kid turns deathly serious and speaks directly. The moment that a calm, collected tactician falls into a panic attack and runs away. The moment that an emotionless assassin is pressed into laughter for the first time.
One specific game that gave this feeling in spades is JRPG “Trails in the Sky”. I think it sometimes forces its extremes a bit, but it’s very good at spending a long time building joy and normalcy before establishing how much trauma and violence exists in the history and near-future of the world.
But while JRPGs can bore people with their 50-80-hour runtimes, one game I think demonstrated that principle fantastically was “Elite Beat Agents” for the DS. Within the scope of a 5-minute pop song, a focal character may go to the lowest point of their life, and bounce all the way back to happiness. Pushing the idea along with a frenetic musical pace makes it more acceptable, but it shows the importance of taking someone to both extremes.
Same. I still use the original Proteus Core labeled version. They have since re-released the mouse 3 times I think but my original is still going strong
Doesn’t need a run button. And, something kind of useful is that while revving, the game changes from strafe controls to tank controls, making it easier to orient at an enemy around a corner since you can’t reach your camera thumbstick.
I personally like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 more than Baldur‘s Gate 3. I didn’t play BG3 until like 10 minutes into chapter 2. It’s just not appealing to me. I also didn’t play Skyrim beyond exploring and the main quest.
Waiting for Silksong, like many, so I’ve finally played through Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I bought the Castlevania Advance Collection years ago, but it didn’t work on my desktop PC for some reason. I played the game for a few hours on my Steam Deck years ago, but never felt like finishing it. Since I got nothing else going on right now, I might as well go through these games, since I managed to make them work.
The “port” itself is nothing special. You get a pretty basic emulator, that just plays the old games as they were. Save states and a rewind are as good as it’s gonna get, the rest is kinda half-baked.
As for the game, it’s kinda mediocre to bad. Controls don’t feel great, everything’s pretty stiff, and you’re stuck with sprint being on double-tapping a direction, which never stops being a complete pain, so getting around just isn’t that fun. It also feels like the devs wanted to pad out the relatively short runtime as much as possible, by placing the save rooms and teleporters in the most inconvenient places, so if you die, you’ll have to go through the same sections over and over again. Save states or the rewind help here of course, depending on how much you wanna use those features. At least the game looks decent enough and the music is pretty good.
BTW, in case anyone cares, the reason I could never play this game on my desktop was because of my keyboard layout. If you use a custom one and maybe even something that doesn’t match your Windows language/region/dunno, you get an instant VC++ error on launch. Once I changed it to default US QWERTY it works normally. Only found this out recently, through a comment on the Steam forums.
Maybe I manage to finish the next game in the collection, Harmony of Dissonance, over the next couple of days, probably not, but then I’ll just come back to it.
I’ve dug up my New3DS again and am ordering some games for it. Castlevania is somewhat of a gaming blind spot for me, is there one playable on the 3DS you’d recommend?
I haven’t played most Castlevania games myself, I mainly know the DS games, and played two of them like 10 years ago, Portrait of Ruin and Dawn of Sorrow. I remember them being pretty good. The third DS game, Order of Ecclesia didn’t work for me back then, because of anti-piracy stuff. Any of those three games should be fine on the 3DS (Dawn of Sorrow is a sequel to the GBA game Aria of Sorrow, but I don’t think it really matters plot wise)
This is actually why I got the Advance Collection and the more recent Dominus Collection, because I wanted to go back and check out a few of the games I missed and re-play the DS games, to see how well they held up.
If you hacked your 3DS, you can of course also try games for other systems, like the GBA games (mostly for the aforementioned Aria of Sorrow) or maybe even Symphony of the Night, which supposedly runs fine with some tinkering.
If you’re not into the whole Metroidvania stuff and want more classic, linear side scrollers, then the old NES/SNES games are also available somehow (but maybe not anymore, unless you’re doing homebrew stuff). The standout here is probably Super Castlevania IV, but tbh I never really played these myself.
How hard is it to hack your 3DS? I haven’t done it and I haven’t really experimented with stuff like that for like 20 years. I feel like it could be a good idea to look into after Nintendo closed the eShop and second hand 3DS games are getting more and more expensive.
I could see it being alright back in the day, and it has some neat stuff, like the graphics and music, and the magic system is ok (lots of repeating stuff though, just in a different color). It just didn’t hold up, I think.
Meanwhile my ergo mouse scroll wheel is already squeaking again and soon it’ll probably start acting funky and I’ll have to get a new one lol, wish they were more durable
I’m not too heavy into gears of war lore but I would assume the Retro Lancer, which has a bayonet in lieu of a chainsaw and was introduced in Gears of War 3, was the precursor to the modern lancer.
It’s such a simple spreadsheet simulator. You can’t even see what your games look like but I haven’t been able to put it down for the last few days. I already played, beat, and got bored of it years ago. But it makes the last hour at my job feel like 15 minutes, so I went back to it.
Man, I hated playing abby, to me it sucked losing all the upgrades I had with Ellie and I specially hated having to craft shivs like we were back to last of us 1
Ngl, didnt like it even narratively because she is kinda the source of all the suffering in the game. I mean, they saved her life! Even if you have a score to settle, you now owe him one!
It’s been a bit difficult with The Last of Us because I feel self obligated to mix things up regularly, but it has been fun, especially showing off my favorite sights and parts in the story. I feel a bit like a tourist seeing a city for the first time lol
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Aktywne