Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore (Steam, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox X/S)
Arzette is a very specific joke for nerds like me who know too much about the history of video games. It’s designed to look and sound just like a Phillips CD-i Legend of Zelda game; a cursory glance at the credits seems to indicate that someone from Digital Foundry may have consulted on it to get it right. A friend of mine has a CD-i that he allowed me to play some time ago, and you have no idea how badly games like those play, especially on that awful controller. Fortunately, this game plays totally acceptably while still having a slight metroidvania angle to its 2D action platforming levels. It’s got a bit of a slow start, but after that, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, so if you’re in on the joke, you’ll likely have a good time.
It’s only been “irrelevant” because of the poor reception to Sims 4. The Sims was the first great “life sim” game, and the 3rd installment added a crazy amount of content. That’s all we wanted. More stuff to decorate with and places for our Sims to explore. Nah, Sims 4 took away the variety and added paywalls and multiplayer and was just generally a poor experience.
For anyone holding out hope for #5, this is on par with Blizzard announcing their smartphone diablo game. EA killed this franchise, and yeah I’m a little sad about it.
NiMH is perfect for an application like this, where the power draw is high but you don’t need the batteries to retain charge while in standby for that long, so the high self-discharge rate is irrelevant.
I finished Doom in the most recent re-release (Doom + Doom II), Ultra-Violence, Pistol Start and no save scumming. The base game isn’t too difficult, but still one level per episode gave me some trouble. The fourth episode is a massive step-up in difficulty though. E4M6 took me a lot of tries, but it got a lot easier, once I found some secrets with extra weapons.
After Doom, I continued with Doom II, still on UV, Pistol Start, no saves, and the first few levels are no issue, but it got tough real quick. Basically, just like E4 in the first game, it’s often about finding the best path to more weapons and ammo. The levels are also more open, so you usually have a few different paths to choose from, so figuring stuff out takes a bit. Depending on how it goes, I might start looking at the wiki to check out secrets and pickups and kinda plan a route that way.
I also finished Lies of P. It’s a good game and I had fun, but the there are definitely some weird decisions by the devs, although they were pretty minor. Weapon durability felt pretty pointless, I think only for two or three boss fights did I have to sharpen during the fight. Same with the jump, which is only needed a few times. However, since it’s like Dark Souls, so you need to sprint to be able to jump, any more would have sucked anyway. Might as well put in a dedicated button like Elden Ring and make it better, or just remove it. The weapon system was pretty neat, even though I basically just used three different heads and handles. I loved the perfect block mechanic, especially if it also destroyed the enemy weapon. Too bad it doesn’t work on the monster enemies, I guess, since they don’t really carry a weapon. The story got pretty lame in the end, but it’s whatever. I disliked two boss fights, the first Black Brotherhood fight since it was a gank fight, and the penultimate boss, because the hitboxes were just really weird, and I was constantly getting shoved around. Even on a perfect block I was a mile away from the boss, so a follow-up really sucked
Finally, I started Horizon Forbidden West: The Burning Shores DLC. I played the base game earlier this year, when it released on Steam, but I’m not really feeling the huge 3D open world right now. I’ll still finish the story, since it’s pretty short, but will probably only do the critical path and little to no exploring.
I think, it works kind of well in games where you’re able to enslave/recruit the random encouters (Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and such), as it’s then a surprise what you’ll find, somewhat like a slot machine.
But the way the more recent entries work in these series, that you find out what creatures roam the world by exploring, that kind of works, too.
More generally, I don’t particularly like the problem that random encounters solve. Which is that you’ve got sections of gameplay where nothing happens, so you throw enemy encounters into there. That also goes for non-random encounters.
RPGs do this and I used to enjoy RPGs as a form of escapism. But now that I’m doing more stuff in real-life, I want it condensed down in roguelike form, or I’ll just play other genres…
AC 1 & 2, I know they’re pretty jank now and black flag stole the show, but it was entrancing for young me, it felt like I was entering another world. I would no shit just wander the world for hours just taking in the simulated culture and learning how people lived, it was so fascinating to see how life was back then. I guess that’s why AC3 bored me so much, American history is just not interesting to me as it’s so recent relatively
I don’t really like random battles for the most part, but they are not normally the thing that makes or breaks a game for me, either.
Some of the first jrpgs that I remember handling battles better then the typical final fantasy was Chrono Trigger and Pokemon. In Chrono Trigger, you can typically see the enemies before you have to fight them, though they would often surprise you with enemies that you couldn’t see jumping out. I think that worked much better than just the normal system where if you walk around long enough you get a battle. Then Pokemon has 2 different things that it did. First, for trainer battles, you can see the trainers on screen so you can make sure you are prepared before you go into a fight. Then for the normal battles around the world, it does use random encounters, but they take place ONLY within certain spots, like in tall grass or in a cave. So you still have a lot of freedom to roam around in areas without triggering battles, and when you do go through those spots, you know that a battle could pop up, so you can be ready for it. There are also items you can use to avoid encounters.
For dealing with the annoyance of low level enemies, I think Earthbound had a pretty good system. In Earthbound, it shows you enemies on screen rather than doing random encounters, and once you get to a significantly higher level than the enemies, they will run away from you instead of coming at you, so you are free to just ignore them.
I agree these games made big improvements but I still see them as bandages to the inevitable problems that came with random encounters. There’s no undoing the interruption of flow you know.
I think it’s a tradeoff though like I said. Because I don’t know how you can have a combat system as cool and creative as say Undertale (blending turn based and realtime bullet hell) or battle network (blending turn based, real time and card game) without it being completely separate from the overworld.
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