#games i played

[tawnyfool]

Games I Played | 2023 & some fav quotes Games I Played | 2022

[a-wa-c]

Finished Half Life 2.

10/10 no notes, what the fuck happened to games man?

Like, hey here's an enemy that is annoying, now you get to use them as an army. HAVE FUN.

Hey, here's the Gravity Gun that you've had for basically the entire game, in the final act it can just straight up kill a bitch-ass-Combine soldier for the final chapter of the game. HAVE FUN.

We pit you against a Gunship or a Strider, but please have as many guided missiles as you like to kick the shit out of them. HAVE FUN.

Like seriously, if anyone has a better perspective on this than me, please tell me why I feel that games these days don't have section where you just have fun. The battle is the fun, not worrying about your ammo.

[thatoldstandby]

Games Played March 2k25

Continuing my series; January here, February here. The end of February had me go through a massive loss that I still haven't recovered from. Probably will never fully recover from. Grief's a bitch! Grief at the future you were planning on for years even more so. But even so, there is one constant.

Video games. Just, fewer of them than previous months. Because of the grief.

CARRYOVER GAMES

And Yet It Moves

An Old Game I think I picked up from a Humble Indie Bundle? Wanted to play a game that I didn’t need to focus on and work through some backlog while watching an episode of a DnD Liveplay. I hadn’t touched it before today; and two hours later I “rolled” credits. What an interesting game as a time capsule. It’s fine! Simple game; puzzle platformer where the gameplay gimmick is that you can roterate the world 90/180 degrees at any time; and a graphical gimmick of everything being cut out. It’s kind of hampered by weird movement physics, but it it were any “better” the game would be too easy? Rough to say. Honestly, this is going to be a weird sentence, but it feels like the game equivalent of a zine? No I will not be elaborating on that right now.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Total game time: Approx 90 hours from start to end. I said last month how much I was digging base Cyberpunk, but that it’s a pretty firm 7/10. It’s good, but not really great, and a great promise for things to come. Phantom Liberty though? Fuck dude. Dogtown is *such* a good area that’s clearly been arduously designed around the character and possible movement sets; the encounters are designed such that it takes into account how much more powerful V is in Cyberpunk patch 2.X, the quests are loads more interesting, the main story is loads more interesting. What a step up. I wish it had been more of a proper Cyberpunk 2 instead of add on DLC; but hey. I’m not exactly begging. I needed a game that let me kill with relative impunity and Cyberpunk gave that to me and for that, I give it grace.

A Game About Digging a Hole

Boy it sure was. It’s a fun distraction. There is nothing else to say about it here.

Trails In the Sky Third

Wrote about this last month, I’ve kept chipping away at it. It’s good, I don’t know that I love-love it. The main story is a bit scattershot, but the character work is choice and I love the side stories that the game is giving. I think I’m on the second to last floor, but there’s a bunch more side stories and other stuff to do. It’s good.

NEW GAMES (Games what were released in 2k25)

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Finally got back to this, I was able to accept that someone can experience happiness, even if it won’t be me. I’m not sure how much I’m digging it, but it’s a good Podcast game. I think the problem with featuring Majima as the protagonist at this point in his existence as a character is that he effectively can’t really do pathos. Majima isn’t a character anymore, and hasn’t been since Zero, he’s the goofy side character who gets put into Situations because he doesn’t have normal human reactions to things. This isn’t really a problem as a side character; but as a main character that limits what your story can do. And for all that the Yakuza games are ridiculous, the best ones still have at least have some solid melodramatic roots. A Majima game can’t do that because Majima no longer has solid roots, he is caricature. And it’s kind of kept that up; this game has been all side-quest dimension all the time, even when it’s trying to focus on the kid and his family drama. It’s not bad; but like, it’s not going to rate high in my Yakuza ranking because of it. That said; plays like a dream, it’s fun as hell and the two fighting styles are really well thought out.

[happymeishappylife]

You can read my reviews of these here.

[wandringaesthetic]

Regarding Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, being the second video game I've beaten in 2025:

I first want to say how beautiful this game is. The sprites and animation and the lighting on them are so, so good, especially in the handful of set piece duels. Each character looks unique and interesting, which is difficult for a cast this big! The music is also great. The voice actors are good once I got used to them, and all this huge cast has unique voices and lines. (although, unlike Fantasian, where I think the performances added a lot, I feel this game could have done without them.) Presentation, overall, is top notch. The only negative thing I have to say in regards to how the game looks and sounds is while the mix of 2D characters and 3D backgrounds mostly works, the fact that most monsters and bosses are 3D doesn't, and I wish they'd used 2D sprites for them instead. Some of these monsters look really cool, and I wouldn't mind seeing a full game in the style they're animated in, but they don't mesh well with the 2D sprite characters.

I loved a great many of the (120!) characters. They're nearly all conceptually great, including some 100% optional, jokey ones (Francesca my beloved shouty healer came with me more often than not), but they're not always super well integrated into the plot or even their own side plots.

The central plot is good but not great, and I don't think I ever credited just how much Suikoden plots rely on angst. There are hints toward being that kind of gutwrenching: Nowa and Seign are briefly on opposite sides of a war, Seign's father publicly disowns him. But you're not being forced to kill your dad or ally with your friend's killer, and that sort of pain might actually be the Suikoden secret sauce.

(That and baths)

All the stuff I mentioned so far is okay to great.

Most of the criticisms I have are for the gameplay, which is poorly thought out in several small ways that add up, for example:

In most Suikoden games, each character has a few inventory slots. There's also a small shared inventory, but restorative items have to be on the character in order to be used in battle. A lot of people don't like this, and it's one of the things that kinda dates the earlier Suikoden games.

So there's only the one shared inventory here in Eiyuden! Great, right? But you still have a small inventory (30 slots that you can upgrade to 60 later) and restorative items still come in stacks of 2 to 6, except now, instead of each character carrying a couple stacks of them just in case, they're just jamming up your inventory in a game that is still balanced similarly to the old Suikoden games where healing magic is rare and expensive, and MP restoring items rarer and more expensive still. So you're going to need those restorative items. So you gave up the conceit of this actually being what these characters have in their pockets and got only another annoyance in exchange.

For another example: you have a turn order bar, but you still enter commands for your six character party all at once, so it doesn't help you react to changes in situation. There are many examples of making "improvements" to Suikoden II without considering how this effects gameplay downstream, so what we get is a tweaked version of a 25 year old game, which would be okay except some of the tweaks actually make it worse.

So overall, Eiyuden adds up to something that is very beautiful and charming but not that fun to play.

STILL. Nearly everything I've seen online about this game is someone complaining about how disappointed they were in it, and I think those people had unrealistic expectations and Eiyuden deserves better than that. This is still more or less the third or fourth best Genso Suikoden game. In some ways it really is a very thoughtful love letter to JRPG fans and anyone who has feelings about pixelated sprites. It's a decent game that you can see the ghost of a great game in. Like maybe the next game from this studio could be a classic. But small studios with kick-started games often don't get that chance, even if their founder didn't die.

Because that's the elephant in the room, isn't it? Between the time I started this game and the time I finished it, Yoshitaka Murayama, creator of Suikoden and founder of Rabbit and Bear studios, who made Eiyuden, died of cancer.

And I don't know what to say about that. He wasn't so often interviewed that I feel I have a sense of who he was, nor was he quite someone whom I felt like I knew through his work.

I do know there are several thousand backers listed in the credits of Eiyuden Chronicle, people who had faith that he and the people he chose would make something cool, sight unseen.

That feels weak.

I guess I'll eulogize him the same way a lot of people did, with the tagline from Suikoden I

[ps1snake]

games i played 2024!

[shinysamurott9]

2024 Gametalk: Mega Man X5 Improvement Project

So I want to try making a thread or series of posts talking about all the games I play over this year. I'll start with this one, the Mega Man X5 Improvement Project

So I've played most of the main Megaman platformers via the Legacy Collections, haven't played BN completely, SF or Legends though. As anyone who has played the main platformers can tell you, quality can vary a lot, especially, especially with the X Series. Base X5 is definitely on the weaker end of the spectrum imo. It's not an awful game but it's a major step down from X4 and it has a lot of issues and poor execution. From what I've read a lot of that comes down to a significantly lower budget and little direction from Inafune beyond "Conclude the story".

I was aware of the improvement hack for a long while but I got curious about it a few days back and decided that I'd give it a shot, and frankly, I was extremely impressed. This game fixes, not every issue with X5, but a hell of a lot of them, along with a lot of miscellaneous changes. This includes, letting X use incomplete armours, Heart Tanks sharing between X and Zero, additional ways to get certain items, letting Zero get all Heart Tanks and all parts being obtainable with no worry about rank.

There's plenty of other notable changes like a proper retranslation to be more accurate to the original script and removal of RNG with the Shuttle, but the things mentioned above are the most important to me because let me tell you, they are absolute game changers when playing through. It allows you to be so much more flexible with the order you fight each boss, making the game so much more replayable, an essential element to Megaman games imo.

It really does feel like you can get a lot more out of the characters tool kits. The Gaea Armour is not just viable for X, but actually really good, because of some rebalancing, and the fact you're not locked out of using it until basically the end of the game. Many of the special weapons are given new functions. Like Dark Hold giving you Spike Immunity, F-Laser and Charged Tri Thunder being able to destroy the bomb in Duff Mcwhalen's stage, Zero's F Splasher being able to push Gaea Blocks and you can even re-enable the Fourth Armour’s Nova Strike if you want it.

There are some issues I have with the game though. Some of the original design decisions don't mesh well with the new changes, primarily the timer, which is made basically irrelevant by all the streamlining. It was never that big of a factor in a playthrough unless you wanted parts but now it's just kind of superfluous. A lot of the not great parts of the stages still aren't great. Duff Mcwhalen is still mostly an autoscroller, Volt Kraken still has the Bike Section, Zero Stage 1 is still a replica of Quick Man and the Shadow Devil still exists. The hack does what it can to remedy this like speeding up the autoscrollers, lowering the amount of energy items you need to get from the bike section to get the Falcon Armour Part and making it so you won't get caught on walls in Zero Stage 1. Shadow Devil still kinda suck though, especially as Zero.

I'm not gonna hold these issues against the hack or it's creators though as the ideal solution would be to completely rework or replace these elements with something better, which is definitely beyond the scope of a rom patch like this. What I will say though is while they did a lot to improve the Gaea Armour, in my playthroughs at least, the Falcon Armour felt really underutilised. It's entirely possible to get everything you would otherwise need Falcon for via other methods such as the more accessible parts, the updated Special Weapons, using Zero or some combination of these three factors. I literally never needed to use it on my second playthrough. This could be just down to my playstyle but in almost every situation, the Fourth or Gaea armours were strictly better in my opinion. I feel like if it had the ability to charge special weapons like X6 then it would at least be on par with the Fourth Armour. Maybe it would have more use in an X solo run but idk.

The complaints here are mostly minor. Overall, the hack is a fantastic piece of work, it improves on X5 in almost every aspect it can reasonably be expected to. I honestly think it brings X5 up to the same level as a lot of the better Megaman games. Maybe not as good as X1 , X2 or X4, but probably not far behind them. If you've ever played X5, like it or not, I'd heavily recommend this hack. I'd put it in A Tier easily.

Why did I rank it like it’s a tier list? Cause it is.

For the last year or so I've been progressively ranking all the games I've ever played. I thought it would be a neat way to look at everything. X5 Improvement ranks in A Tier between Pikmin 3 and Megaman ZX. I'll update it with each game i finish. Feel free to roast me for my taste in games.

[niceigloos]

gamez i played and beat this year

redoing this here bc twitter is too yucky now

in order of play :) cyberpunk 2077 (once at tha start of the year and again after the 2.0 update

shadows over loathing (multiple times)

west of loathing (also multiple times)

dragon quest XI

lunacid (pre 1.0)

disco elysium twice because it is the best game ever made

system shock 2 (no pics) (there wont be screenshots for all of these bc some of them i forgot to take any)

lisa the hopeful (no pics)

spider-man: miles morales (no pics)

lisa the painful definitive edition

lisa the joyful definitive edition

crypt underworld (my goty!! everyone should play this game!!!!) extra pictures bc i love it so much

bomb rush cyberfunk

baldurs gate 3

garten of banban 1 and 4

no one lives under the lighthouse

resident evil 2 remake (no pics) shadow of the colossus (2018)

spider-man 2

[amemenadiel]

Here I come back like some stars during Christmas or the New Year

Welcome back, this time I hope for longer in the new year 2024! What has changed during this time? A lot, but with this I want to start being active here for those who might get to know me. But before that, it would be good to show myself even better, so I have prepared small posts about what characterizes me, but not only that - I am going to write a few posts that are important to me and necessary to start that adventure with Tumblr. I hope that whoever comes here will spend a nice time ^^

[mysillycomics]

[tawnyfool]

Games I Played | 2024

+fav quotes

2023 | 2022

[ghostwriterofthemachine]

Okay okay I've got one I think will be fun!!

Spin this wheel of like 160ish fandoms of varying levels of popularity.

Extra points for telling me all about your thoughts in the tags :D

[thatoldstandby]

GAMES PLAYED: January 2K25

Based on my Steam Rewind from last year, I figured that if I'm going to spend *that* much time and money on games, I should at least keep notes for myself. So yeah, see below for a list of a bunch of games and some rambling thoughts I had about them.

January 2025

CARRYOVER GAMES

UFO 50: Podcast game; though I might have played as much as I feel is necessary? I’ve at least touched every game, and I’ve certainly played to completion a bunch of the ones that I cared most about. Cherries would be nice, but aren’t necessary. X/50 beaten, X/50 cherries.

Balatro: Hey it’s Balatro. I put more time in. It’s fun. It doesn’t immediately hook me, which I am forever glad about.

Halls of Torment: Things that do forever hook me are Vampy Survivy-alikes, and while I’ve 100% Vampy Survivy (more or less, I have a bunch of the secret Castlevania achievements to do), there’s still more. I think Halls may be my favorite in the genre, and the changes since the last time I played were good. It really nails that power scale and set up in a way that I like. It’s also super derivative of Diablo, in a way that I think helps the formula with the loot drops. It’s good, though the endgame is unsatisfying (but then, Vampire Survivors Ode to Castlevania may have had my favorite ending of a Video Game last year, so it’s an unfair comparison my mind is making).

Death Must Die: The Other Vampy Survivy alike I’ve put more time in. I’m not as huge a fan of this one. The basic loop is the same as Halls of Torment, in that it’s a bullet heaven survival-style game with an emphasis on gear collection and gear based builds, like Halls of Torment. What makes it different is the power set and the fact that you get those powers through a Hades-style god gifting. And calling it Hades-style is an understatement; it’s the most derivative of Hades UI and character designs that I’ve seen. If you told me it started as a Hades fangame that suddenly changed, I would not be surprised. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it rubs me the wrong way in an odd way. It’s fun though, and I don’t think I’ve figured out the puzzle that it presents, so I’ll probably keep poking at it for a while.

20 Minutes to Dawn: I don’t have a lot to add to this; another vampy survivy-like, continues to be good. Action is largely focused on the character’s ability and the weapon’s ability, of which you get one that you choose at the beginning of the run and have to reload. It’s fine, I mostly started going back to it to try to clear more, making regular process.

NEW(ER) GAMES (TO ME)

Arco: So, I technically started this last year, but I didn’t have enough time or hands on experience to really count it. It’s good! A small tactical turn-based game where actions are done in stopped time and then acted out in real time. It has a really frenetic feel, which is accentuated by the morality system the game has. Pretty frequently, you get to make a choice. Choose in a way that’s “bad,” and you may get additional items or power. But, you may also accrue guilt. Guilt manifests on the battlefield as Ghosts, enemies that inexorably move towards you as you’re planning out your turn that can throw a wrench in your plans. When you’ve only got one character, ghosts aren’t *too* big of an issue, but it really adds up when you’re rolling super deep in guilt or have multiple characters to plan out. It’s a neat wrinkle to add to the game. And the story’s neat; it’s a Mesoamerican styled world with a bunch of unique tribes who are running up against encroaching colonization and the pillaging that goes along with it. The characters are interesting and the story really clips along. I really like it; but I don’t love it, and I don’t know if I can really say why. I want to say it feels slight, but I don’t know that I can back that up in any real way. It’s a weird spot for me, but I’m glad it didn’t end up breaching my goty list, thus making that a lie and waste of time to put out.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes: One of the biggest marks of shame for games I didn’t touch last year because that thing is laser targeting me. Arthouse style, logic-based puzzle game, open ended mystery and intentionally obtuse plot, and mixed media and referential bullshit? Yeah this game was made For Me. It’s really good too. The puzzles are fantastic, and solving some of the harder ones on my own with a pad of paper was an amazing feeling. Love that eureka moment. It doesn’t breach my top 5 though; i think the final puzzle was a little bit too hard for the rest of the game, and I had some minor annoyances with the rest of the game that didn’t help it. But, fantastic game, highly recommended, A++ gold star. Love this dev.

Sprawl: Retro-style movement based FPS with a cyberpunk theme. It’s a great game, but it’s also hard. Some of the levels and later challenges require a lot of you, and I barely made it. I am Getting Older now, but I don’t get a lot of repetitive motion pain (unless I’m in an arcade for an hour plus), but this was definitely getting to me. It also doesn’t have a whole lot else to it if you don’t like retro-style or movement based shooters. But what a trip.

Marvel Rivals: Marvel Overwatch, but the characters are allowed to be unique and kind of broken. I like Marvel, I like kind of broken characters, it’s a Good Game For Free.

Awaria (No trailer apparently? Have the OST): I picked it up unexpectedly; I liked the art, and for some reason didn’t immediately twig to it being by the Helltaker guy. But it is, only instead of demon girls in suits you get ghosts in sci-fi uniforms. Which is good and fun. And the game’s surprisingly tight. It’s a puzzle action game where you have to run around a small level and drop off items with some pretty strict time limits, and I was surprised by how satisfying everything was. The soundtrack’s great, the art’s fun, and the game plays really well. I played it through on Normal, put it down for like an hour, and then was like “...but what if I did it on hard?” So I bashed my head against Hard for 3 hours and beat it. It was great, love it, so far surprise of the year.

Kinki Spritual Affairs Bureau: It’s super jank, it’s short, it looks kind of ugly. It’s *perfect*. It’s hilarious, it’s doing Wild Shit, it has an anime girl flipping the bird at her boss through a drone, it has Important Facts About the Afterlife. 

Shitpost of the year, 2k24.

[spitblaze]

[guy who doesnt watch shows voice] yeah ive been meaning to watch that show

[eridan-ampora]

baby animals move like theyre playing a new video game & havent figured out the controls yet