The Gamer's Quarter

[Ketch]

[Shapermc]

[Ketch]

Ok, how about Pheonix Wright:AA then?

[Shapermc]

I'm cool with that.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Ethoscapade]

i'm having a lot of problems with you all congregating at GDC and recommending each other's stuff for the umpteenth time. i'd held off on god hand et al all this time, don't you see? when every single god damned board member is this enthralled by it, it's all i can do to weaken.

also, dessgeega: today while cleaning out a bunch of junk i found a copy of blue wing blitz with manual; as far as i can remember, you are in possession of my former wonderswan (the game is basically front mission wsc). if you'd like to pm me your address again i'll mail this off to you at some point or other as it's doing me no good keeping it.

[Shapermc]

Do you like challenging games and have a soft spot for brawlers? God Hand is the fucking game for you then.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Nana Komatsu]

[dessgeega]

i've actually been playing wario ds some more. it does episodic cadashalike pretty well, possibly better than portrait of ruin (which i havn't played). and it has a zidane headbutt reference. does everyone hire their localization staff off of 4chan these days? the english script is actually pretty swell otherwise.

i'm up to the upper asylum in psychonauts. black velvetopia is a perfect example of double fine's difficulty with creating intelligent platforming setpieces. someone tells me not to go into the street because there's a bull but wait, i can run to the next alley between the bull's charges but wait, sometimes i can't and i need to find another route, but sometimes i can even though there's another route, and sometimes it looks like i'm supposed to find another route but what i'm supposed to do is just run to the next alley. and there's dogs who want me to buy their paintings which cost real in-game money and are expensive and it's not really clear what they do but also i need to find these four playing cards but i also need to recruit a bull fighter to fight the bull but the bull fighter won't fight because the flyer advertising the fight hasn't been painted but the dog can't paint it because the bull keeps charging but wait that's actually all a red herring - and what's this? sewers! but there's nothing down there! and all of it's dripping with some kind of half-assed psychological subtext.

double fine clearly had lots of ideas, which probably would have fit fine in a monkey island-style adventure game. crammed into a small platforming stage, though, the results are very confusing to the player.
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[dessgeega]

i finished psychonauts, something i honestly believe tim schafer cannot claim. (and with a digital joypad no less!)

tim, jrpgs already have the market on killing your dad cornered. also please learn how to make platformers if you intend to continue developing them.
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[Ethoscapade]

i hundred-percented it with a digital joypad.

the former accomplishment is, i would say, considerably more inexplicable and, well, unwieldy than the latter. i must have been really in the mood for a 3d platformer? i don't remember much about it except that the pacing seemed a little rear-loaded, if, um, that's the proper opposite of the expression "front-loaded" (i'm sure it isn't; it sounds like a fetish porno).

incidentally, i'm playing monkey island for the first time ever right now, on scumm DS. it seems.. obtuse, in a way that i'm not used to video game logic puzzles being. funny, though!

EDIT for as long as i have the most recent post:
http://www.playeradvance.org/forum/showthread.php?t=6122
haven't tried that yet, seems to miss the point, but! remake of sml with smb3 (allstars) graphics.

[dessgeega]

is it really this hard to make a decent bubble bobble game on the ds? bubble bobble double shot comes really close, which is the disappointing part. initially it looks just like the original only with taller stages. the stages are smart and iconic. the play mechanics are the same. and the sprites are gorgeous.

but of course, the developers couldn't leave well enough alone. so now you've got colored enemies - red, green and blue. each can only be trapped in the appropriately colored bubble, spit by the appropriately-colored dinosaur. (there are three of them now.) in cooperative play, each player is a different color. (can you play with just two players? i don't know.) in single-player, though, you need to switch between colors with the l and r keys. when you're the right color you can trap an enemy. some enemies are secondary colors, like purple, and you need to use two different primaries - red and blue - to trap them.

it adds nothing to the game. it requires no skill. it's not like ikaruga where being one color or the other means you're immune to half the projectiles on the screen - it's just there because the developers thought that a new game required a new mechanic. it's more obtrusive than bubble bobble 3's giant characters, whom you need to trap in giant bubbles by holding down the shoot button instead of tapping it - which is a much more natural skill. possibly the colored enemies work much better in multiplayer, where players (whose colors are set from the beginning) need to work together to clear a screen, but in single-player it does nothing but get in the way of what could have been a really great bubble bobble remake.

for my birthday shaper gave me a gameboy micro (with a ladybug on it!) and i've been playing soundvoyager with a pair of taped-together headphones. at night, always at night. it is very ambitious, especially for something coming out of the supposedly backwards-looking bit generations project. the closest analogue i can think of is dolphin on the vcs, but that game requires you to recognize pitch, while this one actually asks you to identify the location of a sound using left-right speaker panning. it works pretty well, though it requires a surprising amount of accuracy for something so expirimental. i'm definitely getting better at it each time i play.
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[Cycle]

Played through a bunch of games I haven't finished or haven't played for awhile.

Finally played Thief 3, which is pretty awesome, but is a little bit dissapointing in some aspects. The game and level progression is pretty formuliac unlike the earlier games, but the level design is still fantastic so it's not that much of a problem. The wandering through the city parts feels like it wasted lots of potential, but I like how the city was presented as a sort of character in the game, and had meaning locked away in it. I have a few other issues as well, mainly due to the xboxification, but it's still a great game.

I force myself through Invisable War, which is also way more formuliac than the previous game. Has a few great ideas, but most of them were executed poorly. I lost interest after Cairo but played to the end. I wish we would get a REAL sequel

I reinstalled Painkiller, quickly remembered why it sucks, uninstalled it and chucked it in my "games to get rid of" pile.

Played through FarCry which is still a pretty pimp game despite a stupid story and boring corridor bits. I love the open-ended nature of the outdoor areas.

Played through Dark Corners of the Earth again. Still a fantastic but flawed game. Valve could learn a thing or two from this game (and Head first could learn a thing or twelve from valve). I had to work around two game breaking bugs.

I think that's it. The most games I've played through of a single weekend ever, but I guess I'm happier that I'm going out on weekends instead of staying inside the whole time.
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[Lasa]

Digital Eclipse continues the trend of near unbearable lag in online games with TMNT.
I think I have more fond memories of the NES version actually.

[ryan]

Yeah, a friend was downloading one thing, which caused TMNT to freak out, despite showing his ping as four green bars.

War Front is making me pull my hair out. It fluctuates between decent and I HATE YOU, STUPID GAME. Maybe if everything didn't blow up after being shot twice I wouldn't be so annoyed. Or maybe if my tanks responded to being shot at. Or if my heroes were worthwhile. Just give me a giant robot already!
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[dhex]

i've got gothic 3 up and running...finally.

boy did they ship this a few months too soon.
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[ryan]

I hope you enjoy sudden trips to your desktop.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Nana Komatsu]

Oh come on, it's not Darwinia or anything.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Nana Komatsu]

I downloaded the demo of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the arcade game. I only actually played it a few times in arcades though I played the hell out of the NES port. Still, I was pretty shocked how much more detailed the sprites are in the arcade version. Also, I don't remember this game being nearly this hard before, although if someone told me that the American NES port was dumbed down, I would not be surprised. I don't know that I'll actually buy the full game since I have no Microsoft points on my account right now and really don't feel like buying any more right now.

I played some more Dead Rising and it continues to improve the more you play. I beat the three psychopaths in the jeep once I figured out how to trap and then slice them to death easily.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Shapermc]

[Cycle]

You could probably skip Invisable War. It's not a bad game, really, but it's so bland and boring compared to the original. All the good parts were taken out, pretty much. There isn't much reason to play it unless you really have to see where they went after the first game.

Thief 3 is pretty rad, you should totally crack that one open.

Where did you get stuck in the sewers? I don't remember having too much trouble there. I hear 360 compatability is pretty terrible for this game, though. You were probably stuck at the part where you have to touch all of the gratings to move the bad guys down the street, then run back to the other side to get out.
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[Lestrade]

I watched someone play God Hand and it looked silly and boring as all get out. If it wasn't for the so-bad-it's-funny (for 20 minutes) dialogue, I probably would have fallen asleep.

I still haven't beat Crackdown (I literally did not touch it for a week after I bought it), but I hope to finish the main "quest" before I leave for Japan.

[dessgeega]

i reached one of the ending routes in soundvoyager last night (the one that required me to play three levels of sound picker). tonight i am going to go back and work on a different branch.

i wish my copy of god hand would arrive.
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[Shapermc]

[dmauro]

I got to Level 5 in Shoot the Bullet last night. I'm starting to think I don't like that slow-down fog stuff. I really don't like not being able to see bullets coming and it's hard to tell when you're in the fog and when you're not, which inevitably leads to causing a collision with a bullet (which is of course the point, but that doesn't make it any less anoying).

What's up with the second to the last stage of level 4 being so easy. I beat it on my first try.

Anyways, it's still probably my favorite shooter ever, even though I haven't even made it all the way through yet. I just really like that I can keep trying over and over with no load times or anything to slow me down, until I perfect a stage, whereas a game like Mushihimesama (also one of my favs) discourages restarting and encourages playing through the entire game all in one go.

[Mister Toups]

[SuperWes]

I've been playing Wario DS and I demand that Dess takes this back:

[aerisdead]

I hate Wario Master of Disguise.

It's utter tripe.
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aerisdead

[dessgeega]

the dialogue is pretty unnecessary - in just about every game i've ever played that has dialogue. the treasure descriptions frequently make me giggle, though, which is worth something. the game has very clever level design but playing through it really does feel like a chore. forced touch screen input aside, i am impressed at how well platforming with a single thumb works.

i was very proud to have retrieved a blue key from the castle dungeon in castlequest, which involved solving puzzles, making very tricky jumps, and plundering sunken ruins (before your oxygen tank runs out). i couldn't reach the blue door, though, and had to quit the game with it just out of reach. i know that andrew toups picked up a copy of this game too and i am wondering when he will play it.
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[helicopterp]

I bought and played through the first chapter of Lunar Knights. I have a feeling I could really get into this game. It's an Action RPG based on Boktai anime (I think--I have no substantial knowledge of RPG's or anime). It throws you right into the game. I think it hit me that I was really digging the game when, after having dealt with enemies in every room until then, the room before the first boss was a prison. There were no enemies inside, just really depressed people in jail cells. It was a very somber tone for the game to take, especially considering that the agents of these people's agony are space vampires, which is mildly preposterous.

Also, there was a really, really weird shooting section right after I beat the first boss. It worked remarkably well. It was in faux-3d and on rails. It was stylus-controlled and required that you choose whether to at any given time to move your ship OR to fire at enemies. It is impossible to do both at the same time because to move the ship, you drag it around the screen with the stylus. To shoot enemies, you tap them. I am still shocked that it worked as well as it did.

I think the second chapter has to do with a different character with a different type of combat (the first chapter's protagonist swings a big sword). I will, of course, let everyone know how I feel about it as I get further in it.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[simplicio]

I don't typically care to meander in games (Wind Waker and maybe Secret of Mana being exceptions), but Rhythm Tengoku really just has me roaming around listlessly, poking here and there, picking up a medal or two maybe. I already "finished" it, which is usually the point at which I put down any game (I abhor playing for collection/100% completion), but this one just keeps amusing me.

I wonder if it would hold my attention the same way if it was translated?

[Scratchmonkey]

[Nana Komatsu]

I assumed it was because the first two were known to be gimmick games based on the sun sensor, and Lunar Knights drops the gimmick but didn't want to be associated with the stigma that comes with the name.

That said, to an American, "Lunar Knights" sounds a lot more interesting than "Boktai" as a game title.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Scratchmonkey]

I can see that, as much as it sounds utterly wanky to me.

[Nana Komatsu]

Konami is all about the wank.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[SuperWes]

[helicopterp]

[simplicio]

See, I don't think I'd ever do that with Ouendan or EBA myself. Playing them for me is thrilling and frustrating, but it's a very specific and limited experience, and long-term play begins to feel like grinding to me. It's actually (along with Gitaroo Man) one of the only "proper" rhythm games I can stand, by virtue of that slight analog departure from the sheer rhythmic recitation the Harmonix/Bemani/DDR gameplay offers.

Rhythm Tengoku, by limiting the player's actions (generally one or two buttons) and presence (only interacting at the right times, which in many stages is only about 5-10% of the total playtime), puts the player in a largely passive, observant role. So in a way, the act of playing can be so minimal that there's little physical difference between playing a stage and browsing the menu. This probably attributes to the sense of meandering I feel when spending time with the game. It's remarkably pleasant.

Note that I only just thought through this here, and I think I like the game a whole lot more for it now.

[Nana Komatsu]

You should try Technic Beat.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Shapermc]

[helicopterp]

Quick, somebody tell me what system it's on!
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Shapermc]

PS2!

EDIT: Technic Beat also has a lot of nostalgia points if you like old Namco arcade games too. Like, the circle patterns for the Xevious remix are all laid out in the same patterns as the enemies from the game. It is also more "techno" music, so I like the music better.

Unfortunately it's really, really hard after a certain point.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[simplicio]

Hey, that sounds interesting!

It's funny how I can get through a couple years of TGQ/IC/SB-ing and someone can just float a current gen title I've never heard of. Is the "really hard" part the reason for that?

[JasonMoses]

Technic Beat would be a lot better if it wasn't so imprecise, unwilling to explain its play mechanics to the player, and less dependent on rote memorization. I've cleared all the songs in the game, but it never felt like my skill was pushing me through, just luck in manipulating the rings in the later stages. It does has a challenge mode that introduces complicated game concepts in a regimented manner, a little like IIDX 6th Style's drill mode. The problem is that it's not fun to play through at all, because it uses the same music for nearly every stage, and it doesn't explain how to do half the things it expects of you. So what happens most of the time is that you come to a stage that you're unsure of how to complete, and try it over and over again until you arrive at the one solution that the game accepts. I really wanted to like the game, since it has sampling masters music and good intentions, but I really didn't enjoy any of the fairly considerable time I spent with it.

[Nana Komatsu]

[Shapermc]

[Scratchmonkey]

Been playing very short spurts of Final Fantasy VI on the Micro. It's good times.

Also watched my wife and a friend play through the first third of the original Lego Star Wars. Their good cheer about the game was nearly entirely eroded by the completely craptacular pod-racing sequence; luckily they were cheered up by the unlockable "moustache" option and the fact that you can 1. purchase the Gonk droid and 2. push over the Gonk droid with your Force powers while hanging out in the hub cafe.

[Nana Komatsu]

I had one of my coworkers over after work to play stuff on the 360. We worked our way through all of the TMNT arcade game, which is significantly different from what I remember of the NES game. The entire snow stage was added for the NES port, and the sewer boss had a second form?

He played Doom but couldn't get used to the controls. I found this interesting since most people I've talked to say the control is excellent (I think this too) but he's played a lot of the PC version (and had an 'IDKFA' vanity plate on his car) and couldn't get used to the two stick method.

I let him play Dead Rising for a while, but he thought the exposition was really boring. Once I directed him to the Katana he was satisfied, but not enough "killing hookers" to be better than GTA.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dessgeega]

konami arcade collection is the rare games compilation that actually does everything right. it's actual press-select-to-insert-coin arcade emulation - you can even set individual dip switches. each game has two menus, "simple" and "maniacs". the latter contains options for screen aspect ratio and tate, not to mention replay recording - the card comes with an all-clear replay of every game built in. controls are fully configurable and you can play games multiplayer through local wireless. (and yes, it saves high scores.)

games include time pilot, twinbee, nemesis (aka gradius), and contra. the game selection could have been more interesting, but the package sets a really good precedent. (it's also completely in english, including game documentation.)
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[Shapermc]

I "finished" Rhythm Tengoku yesterday. I'll probably slowly work on getting all the medals.

Do you have to wait for that little sidebar stuff to get perfects every time?

Anyways, the game is pretty good! After you finish it you realize just how simple it really is though. All the game has been doing is tricking you into learning how to keep tempo. I felt a little tricked, but it's all good. I like it.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[simplicio]