The Gamer's Quarter

[Ketch]

Pitfall: the Lost Expedition

This is a game that I've had my eye on for months, and finally bought it cheaply. It is good, with lots of humorous little touches and neat details (ie. falling off a huige drop makes a flock of birds fly up from the jungle where you land). It has 'quite' amusing dialogue too, and overall reminds me a bit of those Saturday morning adventure cartoons. It is short and fun (I'm 24 p/c in and only got it yesterday).
Give it a try if you like this kind of thing, don't expect the best and you should enjoy it. The natives goo "oogadeeboo" (or some such stereotypical rubbish, so avoid if that is an issue for you.


http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ps2/pitfallharry?q=pitfall%20lost

[helicopterp]

When not studying for finals (which ended today! hooray!) I was tearing through Majora's Mask, finishing up a re-play that I started this summer because I got stuck on the fish boss back then.

I really love this game. Really Really Really.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Harveyjames]

Did you find the Beaver dam?

[a_plus]

i played the hell out of within a deep forest yesterday, from start to finish. i love it! my girlfriend was sitting next to me watching it all and helping me out with some of the puzzles and jumps. then we jumped into knytt and seiklus for a bit.

[helicopterp]

[dessgeega]

in addition to playing twilight princess in the mornings, i've been playing a bunch of gameboy advance games.

yesterday i replayed some of bruce lee: the legend returns, which is an amazingly good platforming brawler. i've completed it once, and occasionally come back to replay as much of the game as i feel up to, from the beginning. it's really good. there are stealth portions, but the stealth combines naturally with the platforming, and even better, is actually useful outside of the stealth stages in the normal brawling parts of the game - enemies take more damage if you sneak up on them, and certain weapons can kill unsuspecting foes in a single hit. and it's just very satisfying to unleash a flurry of punches and kicks at a pile of enemies while bruce lee makes bruce lee noises.

i replayed hachiemon, because people seem to still be very enthusiastic about it. i played it earlier but dismissed it as being an above-average but uninteresting platformer. this time i spent more time with the game . . . and came to about the same conclusion. the premise and character design are all very lovely, but the actual game doesn't really do that much for me. the platform-grabbing mechanic has been done before, and better.

and i played metalgun slinger, another japan-only release. same deal - above-average but dull platformer with unskippable cutscenes. the palette is gorgeous, though. the motorcycle sequence is actually probably the best part, which is the opposite of most similiar games.

last, i spent some time with warioware and rhythm tengoku. i completed a few more perfect challenges, including two late-in-the-game stages that i was expecting to be beyond my ability. that made me feel good! but i'm still frustrated by my inability to clear the perfect challenge on the samurai stage, despite the fact that i've managed to do it perfectly several times before - it's one of the several stages that (as far as i know) you need to complete perfectly in order to earn the medal. anyway, if i get courageous, i'll try to finish the drum sessions (i've done almost half).
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[Scratchmonkey]

I played Stand in Line in Freezing Weather from 3:30 to 7:30 AM and Try and Get a Wii.

I lost by three people.

[Redeye]

[Harveyjames]

Yeah, it's funny how that Samurai stage ends up being one of the last you perfect / get medals for.

[OtakupunkX]

I played Guitar Hero 2 for four hours straight Friday night. Also I managed to get my hands on a copy of Capcom Classics Collectoin 2 and have been playing Strider.
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[Harveyjames]

[Cycle]

I knew Keaton existed, but I don't remember ever finding him. I got to the beaver dam as soon as I got to the beach area, though.
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[Harveyjames]

You just stand in the middle of one of those of circles of magic shrubs that shuffle away when you get near them and then wear the Keaton mask. I don't know how you'd work that out without being told, mind, but just hearing the rumour that Keaton, the Ghost Fox can sometimes be found in Termina field is enough to set your imagination off.

The ghost ship in Wind Waker is cool just because you're more likely to discover it by chance, but it's a shame it wasn't used better than it was. I would have made it so finding the ghost ship was optional, and there was no map to help you find it, and that it was really fucking hard once you got on the ship. Naturally the reward you got for beating it would have something incredible like 'The Ghost's Sword' or somesuch. Either that or something completely unexpected, like once you're on the ship you take part in a bizarre ghost gameshow.

There are rumours that you can see a ghost in San Andreas if you go to the right spot at the right time. There needs to be something like that in Twilight Princess. Maybe there is!

[Cycle]

Oh wait, I DID find Keaton. It was so long ago I last played that game...
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[a_plus]

i just sat down to play majora's mask (emulated) and could only get about 15 minutes in before motion sickness kicked in. it's a shame, i really like what i've playd of it so far.
i have been playing final fantasy tactics, too. i have four week sof unemployment so maybe i'll actually make some progress in it this time!

[dessgeega]

i've been playing linley's dungeon crawl, which plays like a leaner, meaner nethack. it's tighter and faster and more focused; most of the boring bits and exploit-the-system tricks have been excised, there are no real incentives to stick around any place for too long. there are a huge variety of character generation options (including a vast selection of religious alignmnets, which are actually chosen during the game rather than at the outset), but i've been playing a dwarven fighter, one of the easiest characters to play. (also, customizable, selective auto-pickup is fabulous.) (also, randomly-generated faux-elizabethan english insults!)

i'm actually playing the tile version of the game, which is probably the most thorough re-skinning of an ascii game i've seen. it uses paperdoll graphics to generate sprites that show a character's worn and wielded equipment - not just for the player character, but for enemies as well! items like scrolls and wands change after they've been identified to reflect your knowledge of their properties, and every monster has a unique corpse sprite.

in rhythm tengoku, i've been following the perfect challenges, playing whichever stage it randomly selects (and completing more of them than i expected to). i understand now why it's random. the first challenge of the game is passing each stage in order; the second is attaining medals in any order, working on a stage (if you so choose) as many times as necessary to attain victory. for those players who've medalled every stage, the randomness of the perfect challenge extends the longevity of the game by preventing a formulaic approach to the stages and by giving equal weight to every stage in the game. yesterday it brought me to a stage i'd completely forgotten existed. the random perfect challenge is roughly the equivalent of the mix towers that open up at the end of a warioware game.
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[helicopterp]

[Harveyjames]

The first time I played Majora's Mask I remember how I felt exploring the abandoned town on the last day before the end of the world. It's awfully sad, but the worst part was when I went into the usually-locked staff room in the hotel and discovered her never-to-be-worn wedding dress. It's heartbreaking!

That game takes a while for you to get your head round it, and sometimes you can feel overwhelmed by it. The first week I had that game, whenever it got too much I'd just watch the world end from different points in Termina. Once I went to the ranch to watch it because I thought I might be safe there. It's so sad going round the farmhouse and talking to the family. It made me think about how I'd like to be with my family if the moon was about to crash into the earth, too ;_;

[Cycle]

I once climbed onto the ranch house roof and just watched the moon fall. I love the music that plays, and the colour of the sky. I have the music in mp3 form somewhere. In fact, I'm gonna listen to it now! Anyone else want it?

My friend hates majoras mask because he didn't like how you reset events after you helped people EVEN THOUGH I THINK THAT WAS HALF THE POINT, also he thought it was frustating to constantly switch between masks and items towards the end which is a fair complaint, I guess. They should have assigned the different masks to the digital pad.
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[Harveyjames]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Mission in Snowdriftland

WARNING: Your snowman character is so saccharine sweet he will hurt your teeth by just looking at him.
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[dark steve]

Black is even better than I hoped. There's some really great level design in here. It reminds me of when the first Medal of Honor game came out for psx.
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[squidlarkin]

All this talk of Majora's Mask made me try N64 emulation again, 'cause I'm a sheep. But I played other games too!

Sin and Punishment is dead sexy. Everyone who says it's a rail shooter is lying, it's a cleverly disguised run-and-gun. And Robotron 64 is exactly like Robotron, if Robotron were tedious and easy and had horrible music!

[a_plus]

oh, final fantasy tactics. so, so much final fantasy tactics.

i finally made progress in this game. there was one battle i always got stuck in (goug execution area where i think you first fight gafgarion) and i breezed through it. i just got to chapter three last night. i've got my main batch of 5 people including ramza (anja, as i've named him, per my usual game-naming conventions) that i use for everything, and three squires who are still unused in battle that i throw around for doing jobs/propositions from bars. i also have mustadio and uh, the holy knight, whatshername. i don't ever use them but keep them around. now i'm running to all the bars to do all the new propositions that have appeared, before i continue with the main game. i bet that'll make me ridiculously overpowered for the story battles, though.

this game is really good at making me manage things and make choices i don't always want to do: eg, a character is very proficient in three job sets, and i could REALLY use them all, but i can only use two at a time! i usually don't like this kind of thing but it's not like, super tense decision making as it can be in other games.

[dessgeega]

so i finally got around to spending some more time with time pilot '84. the first time i played it i dismissed it as a poor attempt to recreate the charm of the original by a development team who had nothing to do with it. time pilot is kind of a tough act to follow. reading this description by nfg lawrence, though, made me want to give it another chance. it's actually not that bad, and expands on the mechanics of the original in logical ways. it doesn't have quite as much grace or sense of freedom as the original, but what game does?

also i played berserk! the roguelike. it's inspired by the manga, but not really based on it. it arguably isn't a roguelike either. it's really a tactical combat game that uses some roguelike conventions. i'd want to mention it to shaper if he wasn't on vacation, but he doesn't really go for roguelike games and the connections to the manga are pretty tenuous.

i have been experimenting with minotaur and troll characters in crawl. if i'm ambitious i'll attempt a berserker.
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[ApM]

Just finished the second case in Phoenix Wright: Justice For All. von Karma's daughter is fucking awesome.

[dessgeega]

andy, finish justice for all already.
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[Lasa]

I have a bad cold now which I'm going to blame on playing 2 player lost labyrinth.

[Scratchmonkey]

Finished Final Fantasy XII. The most enjoyble one for by a fairly wide margin, both in terms of mechanics and story, even if the story was unacceptable to most people who like Final Fantasy because it wasn't very Final Fantasy, i.e. not enough high melodrama.

That said, it still dipped into "light-show" mode way too much and made me wish for a little Elder Scrolls sparseness. jRPGs are still just a little too Andrew Lloyd Webber for me to sit through without fidgeting and wondering when they'll just get on with it.

[Mister Toups]

[dessgeega]

works for me. von karma has a whip.

2-player lost labyrinth you say?
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[Lasa]

[a_plus]

nethack is definitely the next step! if you can print it out, the manual is very necessary (but read it, printed or not).
then after you've been playing it religiously for a year or two, you can jump into spoilers so you can get past level 10. or when you just get fed up with the game. somehow, spoiling nethack doesn't seem like SPOILING nethack, if that makes sense at all. it's kind of a natural progression of the game, to me.

[Scratchmonkey]

I would agree, especially since many of the Spoilarz are probably essential for survival.

I'm an Angband and a Dwarf Fortress fan myself. Angband for the super-basicness of it all (I don't even play variants, I just like how Vanilla gives you a fairly sparse experience with a little more variety than Rogue or Moria) and DF because dwarf mode is the best strategy game I've ever played plus the potential for genre-mashup is incredible (the future development plans for it are ridiculous and it bears repeating that it's still in alpha).

[dessgeega]

totally advocating crawl in this thread. it's leaner and cleaner and more focused than nethack or angband, and it has a fantastic graphical interface (you can play it ascii if you want too). start as a dwarf or minotaur fighter.
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[Six]

start as a spriggan enchanter! never treated me wrong.

oh, except all those times.

[Scratchmonkey]

So this one of the "no longer in active development" roguelikes? I noticed that the site hasn't been updated for a year and a half or so.

I've always been meaning to try ADOM, which I missed the first time around for two reasons:

a) I only had a Mac for a long time.

b) When I did get a PC, I avoided ADOM out of spite because I was a Roguelike Snob and I was holding a grudge against Biskup for refusing to release the source and thus preventing the game from being ported to, say, a Mac.

I think I'm pretty much over the snobbery, so I should probably give it a chance.

[Six]

as far as i know, it was never abandoned or anything. i've been out of the loop for a while, though. i hadn't known about the tiled version. (also, there's something kind of irksome about the tiles, but i can't put my finger on it.)

while we're at it, as far as roguelikes go you could do much worse than iter vehemens ad necem, aka ivan. i don't think it's the cruelest i've ever played, but it's probably the craziest. the tiles are really cute, in a sick way. (check the screenshots! "your body glows in a crimson light. you transform into a two-headed moose!")

[a_plus]

i have adom, and read through the manual thoroughly, as i always do with any roguelike, and it sounds great. i never gave it enough time to get past the first cave, though! it was pretty good, from what i played. i get the sense it's sort of an elder scrolls roguelike, or maybe a roguelike close to what the elder scrolls games attempt.
i think if you're into what i just mentioned, and dwarf fortress (love that one), you'll like adom.

[dessgeega]

iter vehemens ad necem is gloriously violent. i've never managed to escape the first dungeon. (that giant venus flytrap!)

i have been playing berserkers in crawl. they add a few welcome layers of complexity to the fighter-kill-everything dynamic. they can go berserk to gain brief speed and power, but can't do anything but clobber enemies while in this mode, and become slow and hungry after it wears off (you must kill every enemy within range while in berserk mode or you risk leaving yourself vulnerable). you also can't go berserk if you're hungry, requiring you to keep closer tabs on your hunger than a plain fighter. berserkers start with a religion, too - probably the most straightforward one, trog the god of killing stuff, who asks that creatures be slain in his name. crawl has easily the most robust implementation of religion i've seen in a roguelike game.

in rhythm tengoku i've been clearing two or three perfects a day. i have sixteen left, and am continually surprised at my own ability.

also i've finally cleared 100,000 points in time pilot '84, which i am really warming up to.
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[Cycle]

I played wii tennis last night and it was awesome because jesus was watching and cheering me on from the stands.

i'm getting clubhouse games for christmas. anyone else have this game? i'd love to wifi sometime!
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[a_plus]

i definitely just figured out the meat of how every extend works and now i'm actually starting to get high scores that are partially high!
i still haven't figured out how to get more than 6 of the red quicken guys, though.

[JasonMoses]

[Cycle]

way to burst my bubble now i'm not looking forward to christmas at all
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[a_plus]

well i keep plateauing with every extend. i can grab 7 quickens, now, by letting multiple red blocks stay on the screen before collecting, but even if i hit them all and grab the +10 second yellow blocks, i keep running out of time and topping out around 1300000. rggh. maybe i should start in on heavy mode...?

[Nana Komatsu]

[a_plus]

the original doujin one

[dessgeega]

[Cycle]

posting from a wii.

i assumed you knew! it is advertised on tv here along with yoshi island and some other game, and is getting great reviews from everywhere. ps how is yi ds?

dess you should totally pick it up so we can play shake the soda over wifi.
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[Nana Komatsu]

I have been playing Contact for the last few hours while watching Amelie with my mom. I am not enjoying it. It's an odd game and I'm constantly confused as to what I'm doing. I'm not having fun and I keep dying to this fucking rock golem boss.