You’ve unlocked a childhood memory. I was like twelve browsing used video games, guy at the store asked me what I liked and I said RPGs. He handed me a copy of Suikoden and said “I know it looks like absolute garbage but I promise it’s actually really good.”
At the time, my taste hadn’t developed enough to understand what was wrong with the American box art but I didn’t say anything.
30 is acceptable for most games but stuff where the gameplay is mainly the movement itself (platformer, racing, first person shooter) needs to hit 60. I could go lower than 30 for the visuals on a lot of games but that’s the threshold where the interface starts feeling unresponsive and that really gets to me.
I got an idea for a fictional TV. It’s a black rectangle with a moving picture in the middle. There’s a logo on it that almost says the name of a real TV brand but in a slightly different typeface than they use and one or two of the letters is changed.
This is a revolutionary idea that nobody has ever had before, which if implemented will actually negate the need to use AI to create fictional TVs for us.
This post was finally the push that made me buy it, having been interested since I first heard about it. Only checked out Barbuta and Bug Hunt so far.
I’m loving Barbuta. It’s scratching that itch that only Tomb Raider 1 and Dark Souls 1 have scratched before. There’s something so weirdly cozy about this air of open hostility where the individual challenges aren’t actually hard to execute. I haven’t made it very far in yet, only found/bought three items, but I’m already in the headspace where I wanna push myself to keep replaying it until I can beat it without using any eggs and I’m not one to normally care about that sort of thing.
Bug Hunt is okay but, in terms of the framing device that this is a compilation of old games, I’m not buying it. Its mechanics and writing and tutorial pop-up windows feel distinctly like a modern indie game. Barbuta only slipped once that I’ve seen so far, with that I Wanna Be the Guy trap on the first screen.
“If weak to fire then cast Fira”. You don’t even need to have your characters learn the weakness first by scanning them, they just intuit every weakness.
spoilerThe frame story of Returns, where Guybrush is telling an account of his life story to his son, is that a filter we’re now supposed to retroactively apply to the whole series? The end of this game, another “it’s all just Disneyland” ending like Revenge had, felt very pointedly like a cover-up. The whole story is low-key building up this theme of Guybrush actually being a terrible person and his quest being both personally unhealthy and harmful to those around him, with little things like the game silently marking off the checklist of horrible things he did on the how-to-be-evil pamphlet he got from LeChuck and big things like Elaine confronting him with his actions while they travel together, so when the ending turns into such an anti-climactic non-sequitur it reads like he can’t bring himself to tell his son the truth of what happened and you hope it’s because he actually gave up the quest and knows that isn’t the story kids want to be told but fear it’s because shit got real in a different sense and he doesn’t want Boybrush to view him in that light. With that in mind, now I can’t stop wondering if that’s what the Carnival of the Damned always was: an act of self-censorship by the hypothetical storyteller.
The enemies are placed on a grid and your characters have abilities that can move them around or place traps on certain squares, plus as part of the game’s time travel theme you can reorganize the upcoming turn order. Use those together and you can arrange the absolute sickest combos, knocking everyone into a big cluster and then wailing the shit out of that cluster.
Just be sure to play the original DS version and not the enhanced 3DS version with new art, voice acting, and story additions that ruin the tone.