I am emulating! I’ll test multiplayer tonight if I can track down another controller. It might interest you as well to know that I’ve heard the PS3 Emulator can do online multiplayer through its Netplay. I haven’t tested that yet (I want to with a friend though)
Thank you for testing it! Are you using Xenia through a launcher (RetroDeck/Emudeck/Retroarch)? Are you on Windows or Linux? any setup recommendations or should I just put the bios files and rom and it’s ready to go?
I’m using Emudeck on Bazzite with GNOME. It’s an entirely AMD based build.
I was mostly just able to install and go. There were two issues but they’re pretty minor and easy to fix:
I had to go into the launch script for Xenia provided by Emudeck to change the proton version used though because it wasn’t compatible with the base version used. But that may have just been a me thing.
Xenia has a weird quirk with Xbox Arcade games where you need to reopen and close the emulator too. It’s an intentional feature and I’m not really sure why it does that.
But besides those two things it works flawlessly. I have almost no bugs. I added it to Steam with Steam ROM Manager included with Emudeck and will launch it through that (or I’ll launch Minecraft, and then Xenia because of issue 2). Steam Input works fine and no tearing or graphical issues whatsoever.
I just finished testing it and It worked well. I’d assume you could play the entire game that way but I didn’t test it too long (and the controller for player 1 just sat idle) because it was just me playing.
I’m finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X. I finished the original Wii U story, which was alright but
spoilerA bit disappointed it ended on a cliffhanger and the unexplained stuff was the thing I was most interested in.
I’m now doing a few of the remaining side quests and I might try fighting some higher level tyrants before continuing with the new chapter.
I tried a couple of roguelikes, it’s a genre I haven’t played much so I was curious to try it:
I tried Hades. The story is probably good, but I just can’t stand the gameplay. I didn’t find the combat to be particularly engaging, it’s too button mashy and none of the weapons feel good to use. I consistently get to Elysium in 25-30 minutes, then die at the boss and end up having to redo everything just for an attempt at fighting them.
Similarly for One Step From Eden, it takes me almost an hour to reach the final boss, for which I’m not ready since it takes so long to get to it. I do prefer the gameplay of this one, there’s more variety in the bosses and there seem to be more options for builds, although I haven’t had success in deviating from the one strategy I found.
I didn’t really find the gameplay of either interesting enough to justify the grind, so I have dropped them.
I got back to Marvel Heroes (tldr: “mmo” diablo-clone with marvel characters), as the private server emulator resurrected the game.
The game got killed ~8 years ago, and every passing year since made my craving for the game that much worse. And late 2024 some absolute madlads released a server emulator, and it’s seems to work great, though the server I’m currently playing is having occasional lag spikes, which isn’t great. I could self-host the server for just for me and/or some friends, but that’d require effort. :D
Anyhoo, got through the story-campaign with my fav marvel character, started looking at the end game … and suddenly I remembered why I stopped playing the game in the first place. It gets pretty grindy. Oh well, I still have a truck load of characters to play - they all play quite differently, give or take some similar ones (like, the thing, hulk, etc bruisers are fairly samey, gun-tooting-heroes also are somewhat similar, but still all of them have their own twist to it). Each max leveled character gives an account-wide exp boost so leveling gets faster and faster. So… gotta churn them levels, I guess. :)
EDIT: oh right, I also finished Kathy Rain, a pretty neat detective point-and-click adventure. I can’t say I had heard of the game before, but as people were frothing about Kathy Rain 2, and the first one was on steep discount, I decided to give it a go… and oh man, worth.
The art, voice acting and gameplay were great. Puzzles were logical for the most part, but there were 2-3 puzzles which did stump me a bit and had to take a peek on a walkthrough - one wasn’t even difficult, but I was overthinking it way too hard and somehow confused red and blue repeatedly, but I guess few beers do affect detective skills… In any case I got through the game with a LONG single session, but I just couldn’t let it go.
Anyhoo, Kathy Rain was pretty dope, eagerly waiting to pick up the sequel later on.
Near-Mage. It’s a point-and-click adventure from the same studio that also made Gibbous, and set in the same world. However, the theme is much lighter. Gibbous was (while still a comedy) about cosmic horror. Near-Mage is fantasy.
While I definitely recommend the game, it is lacking a bit when it comes to riddles. Most point-and-click adventure games have lots of them, where you need to think, give up, and then just try random stuff until something happens. This is almost completely missing in Near-Mage… There is almost always a quest goal that directly tells you what to do - up to the point that situations that give you a choice are explicitly marked as such.
On the other hand, just like Gibbous, the game is beautifully drawn and animated, and all dialogues are fully voiced. The characters are likeable and - call me a furry if you want - really cute. What keeps me playing is mostly the world - there is always new stuff to discover, even in late-game, and the mix of fantasy and (what I assume to be) Romanian folklore is great.
Sparse gameplay, tied together with lots and lots of implied worldbuilding in a lore book that contains most of the story. The gameplay was okay when you got to it, but there was far too much written story locked up, instead of “show, don’t tell”.
Also, the game wants you to finish six tournaments before you get any sort of decent ending.
Pyre is more like a visual novel with some gameplay here and there. Now I don’t mind story heavy games but towards the end I found myself just clicking through the absolute ton of dialogue there was. Vastly preferred Bastion and Transistor which almost never interrupted the gameplay but were still able to tell amazing stories.
I concur on retrodeck, just a way better experience than emudeck. I like just knowing when I feel like emulating I click retrodeck and boom, it’s all there. Way more cohesive.
I think I’m kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn’t even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I’ve seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want “handcrafted levels” as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven’t seen it done well if they’ve only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.
To be honest, I get what you're saying here although I've played all their games. I think of the bunch I disliked Bastion the most. It felt like an empty PSX game. I liked Transistor, but the catch is that it needed to be played pretty much surrounding their pause-the-battle technique which was okay but it really kind of sucks to me whenever I have any game use this technique. I would have much rather it had been a full turn-based game. I like turn-based games though. There is some viking game that plays like a janky-table top where it's semi-turnbased and it was absolutely awful for it.
Mind you, I like Transistor due to its story. Which I think is the same reason why I liked Pyre. The setting, it was quite nice and if I could remove the mini-games from the game I would. Hades, I liked because they took characters the size of tic-tacs and turned them into three-dimensional beings. That was quite nice. They played on a lot of anime tropes. The gameplay was good, but it was a bit too challenging for me. I dropped it relatively early due to this. I pretty much sit in the same camp now. I wondered if maybe I had aged out of their target audience but I will probably never play one of their games again. It's just not my bag.
Hades was really hard for me too, and I played upwards of 100+ runs before beating [redacted], and another bunch before finally turning on God mode, where I think I got up to about 20% damage reduction before it stabilized.
At this point I want to push the story forward (I’m in the epilogue) but I’ve already played so much I need to wait more for the battling to be fun again.
I have absolutely no idea how you did it! My hands gave out. I mean I was literally hurting. I said no game should be physically hurting me if it's not DDR and I am not poorly stomping my way through the rhythm =P! So yeah, I stopped playing. That's when I decided to reach out, because I couldn't imagine I was the only one with this issue. More power to you if you stuck with it. Get that gold for the both of us =)
different people like different things, sounds like your friends like rougish games.
I enjoyed bastion, it was probably my favorite game of its year. I don’t care enough about hades to even give it the time of day, no matter how hot they made zagreus. With few exceptions, I don’t really like rougish games. The few that I do like I’d rather they be long form rpgs so that I can have a build long enough to enjoy it for a while.
That said, studios should be allowed to make the games they want to make. Forcing them to do art against their will results in bad art.
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