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
There’s also Capitalism (1995) or its sequels that you might be able to find. I’ve never played it, but they reused the engine for Seven Kingdoms which was (and still is!) an excellent RTS.
It’s not exactly “set in the Japanese finance ministry”, but it’s contemporaneous with your time period, and the developer is from Hong Kong, so maybe it’ll scratch your itch.
Considering it is a microsoft game, just wait for the Palestinian children to appear.
But to actually answer the question. Gears was a game from the late 00s/early 10s made by Epic who had been making THE best arena shooters for almost a decade at that point. The chainsaw bayonet is just another Impact Hammer or Gauntlet. It isn’t something you are actually supposed to use outside of stunting on other players. Which lines up with Gears being a cover shooter through and through and charging out of cover being a REALLY good way to get gunned down on all but the easiest of difficulty settings.
I actually did play it on XBox back in the day, I just don’t remember anything. But yeah, I’m re-learning that pretty quick. Still though, the chainsaw is pretty awesome, why not explain it?
I’m trying to avoid buying from companies on the palestinian boycott list, but I already know a Gears of War remake playable on Steam Deck is gonna be one exception.
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Aktywne