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doubleddenden · 1 year ago

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As for my review of Teal Mask, I think its fine enough, but could have used a bit more story to it and a few small towns. I feel like I tried to pad out the experience as much as I could on my own, but it was still a lot shorter than expected.

What's still unacceptable is the performance and glitchiness. Slow downs, clip ins, and other glitches are still present- some are a little worse than you'd expect. Now granted, it's not as bad as SV at launch, but it's still very, VERY noticeable when they didn't even bother to polish shadow pop ins or map clipping in actual cutscenes or important trainer battles. And this is the thing- slow downs had been fixed a little until they dropped Teal Mask, so idk what's wrong. They could have waited til October and polished it up a bit, but I guess they REALLY wanted to catch the tail end of summer. At this point, they must no longer give a damn about performance at all and just want it to be done and over with- which on a certain level I can say "mood," but on a level of someone that bought the game, I can say "hey what the fuck???" And no, boycotting wouldn't have worked- Pokemon is at the point where saying "i'm gonna boycott" actually helps their sales, so there's no point in bothering.

But still, I will point it out again, and so will others so that the next games will be polished a little better.

As for the actual content- I did enjoy what was here, but again, I feel like they could have added more.

More under the cut:

Carmine and Kieran are the main new characters you'll be focused on, and they're decently entertaining and likeable for different reasons.

Carmine is a bitch- She hates you because you're a foreigner tourist, she's vain, she's full of herself, she's cocky- and it's enjoyable actually getting to go from such a rough welcome to becoming her friend. She's a fun asshole that made me laugh more than once, and it's always fun to knock her down a few pegs. In a way she's similar to Klara, except Carmine isn't quite as much of a pushover and has valid reasons to be a bitch. But again, her growth is fun to watch- not in the sense she ever stops being a bitch, because thankfully she just stays that- No she just becomes Bitch, but Friendly, and that's fine, great even! She's snide, rude, and competent, and I like it.

Kieran, however, is a rival that does something I've wanted Game Freak to do for YEARS- but unfortunately, it's just for a small time dlc rival. Still, his growth is unique for a "friendly rival" in that he goes full reverse, and you get to watch him just actively lose his god damn marbles. It's great! :D I look forward to seeing him again one day, because his team was actually super strong.

The rest of the characters- if we can call them that- are just basically NPCs- with the exception of Briar.

Briar doesn't really do too much, but she's... suspicious. Thats about how I can describe her.

Now I'd also add Ogerpon here- I was shocked with how on the mark I was with my predictions. I won't spoil anything but I do like him a lot.

OH SHIT, I forgot Perrin, which is weird because I actually really liked her. Perrin doesn't get a whole lot of stuff, she's literally for a mission, but she is entertaining in that she finds cuteness in any Pokemon she sees. Her whole side mission is really fun too, and I think she might be hinting that she'll return in a future game? Unsure.

Oh, there's also an annoying side quest with rich people- they're annoying, but you'll want to do it for another side quest. trust me.

Story is decent enough- definitely not as in depth as the base story, but unlike IoA and CT, Teal Mask actually sets itself up properly for Indigo Disk to be a continuation of the story. The story here is pretty small though, but its interesting to see how Carmine and Kieran grow and interact with the main character. The story of Ogerpon and The Loyal Trio, while not the most eloquently written, is actually not quite as front and center as we were led to believe. Kieran's obsession with Ogerpon is actually weirdly refreshing- I can't think of a single rival that actually competed with us for the right to catch a legendary Pokemon.

That being said, again, it is short lived and not nearly enough was done to justify all the promotion. I think we could have had The Loyal Trio be alive and living in the lap of luxury and see how they're actually jerks- that would have helped cement the "alternative story" we were told, and could have padded out story by giving us missions to either rein them in or fix problems they cause. Maybe have Perrin play a slightly bigger role in helping us find Ogerpon, have Briar actually do something besides be a suspicious chaperone-

Hell, instead of the 3 nameless NPCs that come with us, more could have been done story wise by having Arven, Nemona, and Penny with us as a group trip instead of it being "a lottery." Nemona could have been a battling menace, Arven could have been looking for new ingredients, Penny could comically struggle to find good signal, etc. Or heck, make them actually characters that have smaller arcs. I guess they couldn't do that because technically you can play Teal Mask as soon as you begin the treasure hunt, and in fact you can battle Ogerpon at both level 30 or level 70, so I guess maybe they couldn't outright connect it too much to them- but I still say maybe a post SV main story bit could have been added for those three plus us, and maybe Carmine.

I think all of this is going to pick up a tad more with Indigo Disk- I just hope it's not as quick as Teal Mask was.

Now as for other things:

Music is good- I think though they swapped to some older music making style that doesn't sound as good quality wise as Paldea music. But I absolutely LOVE Carmine's theme, and the wild battle music is a cool mix of Hisui and Paldea. The legendary music is also fun, and I'll definitely go back to listen to Ogerpon's. But Carmine and Kieran's music sounds a lot like it was made with the same DS soundfont style that you'd hear in Bede's theme or something. Crystal Pool, though, is hauntingly pretty and reminiscent of Area Zero.

Graphics have a more saturated color and are improved in some areas- but other than a few locations, there's just not really a lot to look at. Crystal Pool, however, is a really pretty place, and there's some very strangely unique cave areas that look like you're supposed to DO something in there, but nothing came of it. There's certain areas where textures look great, certain where they look bad. Actually, I find that I have similar issues as I did with Legends Arceus, where the textures and graphics just don't load until you're right in front of them, and you can visibly see the bubble range when grass, trees, and mountains just suddenly appear or gain texture. Hell, flowers just spawn less than 2 feet from you. Again, shadows and textures clip and glitch sometimes too- even in talking scenes, and that just isn't acceptable. Overall, texture work feels like they stretched out certain outdoor textures to make them look gross and pixelated or really realistic in others.

That being said, I think Indigo Disk might look better- I only saw a snippet right at the end, but there's a room I think I've seen as part of Blueberry Academy in the trailers and it actually looks like it comes from this decade, so I hope it looks that good when it eventually comes, because a lot of the rest looks unfinished. Charming enough in some places, just... could be better.

Now that's the environmental graphics- character and Pokemon models look pretty decent and have some good texture work. I suspect that's a different studio making those, though. But god damn, someone was paying attention to Perrin's ass and legs, and Briar's ass too. Not a complaint, I'm glad they had fun- you can just see the creases in the pants though is all I'm saying lol. The new character models look really good overall, and Carmine, Kieran, and Briar have really interesting eyes.

Animation isn't really much to write home about except what I think are mocap animations in regular talking- which is about par per course for base SV. That being said, it's kind of stiff in some scenes, particularly in some scenes with The Loyal Trio, where you can practically see them moving robotically as they move in scene to run away. It gets a bit worse when you see the frames drop from npc's within very close range.

the new Pokemon and forms are... Okay, I guess. Ogerpon is definitely one of my favs and her masks are very fun, and Okidogi is easily the better of the trio. Blood Moon Ursaluna also looks great, although I do prefer og Hisuian. The rest are... ehh to bad. I have slight hope for Dipplin since, apparently, it can use Eviolite- Pokemon that can't evolve further can't use it, ergo it must be able to evolve, just not until Indigo Disk.

One more complaint is that I feel like the map being smaller than Paldea probably helps it run better, but I think a few towns or villages are necessary, just full stop. Kitakami having 1 town just doesn't vibe right with me. In that regard, it almost makes Paldea feel smaller in comparison, because this one village has all of this land, you know?

I know I've done a lot of complaining, but I did honestly find stuff I liked. First of all, once you progress enough in Carmine and Kieran's story, you can get the Teal Card which unlocks more hair styles and a shit ton of more accessories to Paldean stores- Clothes wise, though, you only get new Jinbei outfits, and you don't get the other two until you beat the main story, and then a special one until you do one more side quest. But, more customization is always nice. and I finally have a hairstyle that I'm somewhat okay with.

The pokemon variety in Kitakami is also surprisingly done well. I've used Pokemon I wasn't really expecting to use, such as Poliwrath, Yanmega, and Morpeko. Even then, I'm surprised to see some Pokemon like the Conkeldurr or Tandemaus families here- mainly because this is WAY far away from Paldea and back in Japan.

That's another thing I like- outright confirmation that this is way, WAY far away from Paldea and not just a repurposed European area to the north. A plane and bus ride are required to get here- this makes it the furthest new area a main character has ever traversed, and to me? That's really cool. Further still, they tell us point blank at the beginning that Blueberry Academy is in UNOVA, which I am excited and a little scared for, but don't expect to really get to explore all that much. Idk, stuff like that feels very soulful to me.

Speaking of Soul, there's a decent amount of Hisui love in the Blood Moon quest. I won't spoil it, but something happens that made my jaw drop, and it was really, REALLY amazing.

Finally, difficulty is subjective to each player and how they approach this dlc, much like IoA. I think, however, they tweaked it way better to be beginner friendly AND very challenging for post game content with npc characters and wild pokemon you can encounter VERY EARLY (if you're not careful or go venturing too far off) being around level 70+. Personally, I brought along some Pokemon around level 60 and 50 to get me started and had some difficulty, then I went further and caught local pokemon and trained them up too with even more difficulty. But it was still pretty fun, the fights were challenging, Carmine and Kieran actually use strategy to win, and the NPCs can kick your ass if you're not prepared. I actually lost a battle to a bitch in a cave of all things.

Overall, a 6/10 is passing, even if barely. I dock points because of lack of polish and glitches, and then dock a couple more because of things I wish they'd have done differently. I enjoyed it, but they seriously needed to let it cook longer. No, you did encounter glitches and I am not exaggerating or making it up, you're just not paying attention to the slow downs or floor clipping in battles or you're just outright lying to yourself. Make your concerns heard so GF will actually do something about it- They do listen sometimes, believe it or not, even if most of the time they plug their ears up and hum gen 1 music to silence most criticism.

I actually look forward to Indigo Disk. At this point, I hope it releases in January and not November. They need to take their time with it, because I have a feeling things are going to be a bit more story heavy.

#doubled plays games #den reviews stuff #pokemon #pokemon scarlet and violet #pokemon teal mask #teal mask

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kingzephy · 2 years ago

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Man. I just keep thinking about Dead Souls and how much I fucking love it. Im just gonna ramble about it under the cut

Im not finished w it yet im almost finished but. Its so criminally underrated and it sucks that it hasnt gotten a proper good localization or port that isnt janky and laggy. I dont regret buying or playing it in the slightest.

Yeah its absolutely got some issues and I could talk about them for a long time, but it scratches this itch for me that I just cant explain well. I love it. I love cheesy campy media thats so bad its good which is honestly a big reason why i like it. It doesnt take itself too seriously at all. In a way it almost reminds me of some games I grew up playing, like re4 and house of the dead in a sense. Its really nothing like those games but you know what I mean

I actually dont mind the controls too much (though to be fair I had to switch to the type b control scheme and that feels better to me). Not being able to do the auto aim and walk at the same time doesnt bother me as much as i thought it was going to but it’s probably cuz im used to that from re4. Thankfully theres multiple aiming modes which makes up for that and you can walk around with the strafe aiming which is actually mostly accurate and feels good to use

Some of the weapons like Majima’s shotgun or Ryuji’s gatling gun especially are really satisfying. Even if theres a few enemies in particular that drive me insane (the monkey boys and especially the molotov cocktail zombies are so annoying they are the bane of my existence) overall i dont have too many issues w the combat aside from. Heat snipes being difficult to trigger sometimes, the auto aim can be a little glitchy every now and then, and occasionally getting overwhelmed by hoards of zombies but thankfully theres good weapons and attacks for that. I like that they included shit like chainsaws and flamethrowers

I love all the characterization they squeeze in for Majima and Ryuji especially, Its always great getting to play as Majima of course and I kinda think hes at his best in this game in some ways for several reasons, despite the weird localization. Hes just out there living his best life and I love that for him. Its good getting to see him like. Actually kinda happy for once. Its always nice getting to see him interact with characters like Akiyama. AND it was good getting to see more Akiyama and Hana together ofc

I really love the hostess conversations and the nonchalant and casual banter, I eat that shit right up. So much interesting dialog. I really enjoy the substories quite a bit, some of them more than others but i love how they poke fun at certain tropes. Theres a few real stand out ones. The main story is enjoyable and funny in a ridiculous way, even if the pacing can be weird and the plot is objectively not done well but I love it anyway for its cheesy edginess. Theres a few scenes that have really stuck with me. I think its funny how a lot of the citizens are in denial or are straight up just unaware of the outbreak and act like life goes on like normal which is something that I think. Aged well. Given the current state of the world rn

As a fan of other survival horror games its fun seeing the very obvious references to other games and such (L4D, RE, etc). I like getting to see Kamurocho in a state of complete disarray, I think the idea of separating the unaffected areas and the quarantine zones is smart and a cool idea so theres not constant zombies everywhere, the game gives you a bit of reprieve (even if it means theres some backtracking and taking the long way around things sometimes). I like how the zones move and change over time as the story progresses and more areas get infected.

Anyway. I dont really care if a piece of media is objectively good as long as Im personally having a good time and having fun w it and I can definitely say Ive had fun. If I wasnt a yakuza fan I can tell you for a fact I would not like this game but. I dunno. I am not immune to its charm. If youre a big yakuza fan and you haven’t played it I recommend at least checking it out on an emulator or something

#my stuff #yakuza #this is barely coherent i just have a lot of thoughts about this game

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weirdmarioenemies · 4 years ago

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Name: The Ghost Gang

Debut: Pac-Man

Fufufu... frighteningly Funky Friday, friends!

This post has been waiting patiently in the drafts since my Pac-Man fixation way back in July, and it has really been about time it gets to be posted. And what better Friday to talk about ghosts than the one before Halloween? I can think of two. One would be Friday the 13th, and the other would be a Friday that Halloween itself falls on. But I’m posting it today! On only the third most ideal of Fridays!

Yes, I’ve already talked at length about some Pac-Man ghosts, but there are so much MORE. And they’re all so wonderful. My Best Ever Characters list includes “Ghosts” in the Namco character section, because they are all so wonderful. And now we’ll talk about some more notable ones!

So, here we have the Ghost Gang of Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, in and around their Ghost House, in an image I got from the Annoying Orange Wiki. Though I love them all, I’m not gonna talk in depth about ALL of them, and out of these four, I’ll give the spotlight to my darling Clyde.

Look at him. Do you think he’s darling? Yes, you do. You are probably aware that each ghost has their own behavior, and Clyde will target Pac-Man until he gets close enough to him, then entering “scatter mode”, where he will instead move randomly. Why change it up when you’re so close? Does he even WANT to catch him? Well, I have a theory...

The official Pac-Man Twitter has not one, but TWO posts showing Pac and Clyde as friends, emphasizing the importance of kindness. And it’s just Clyde he seems to be friends with... so this has me thinking, they’re Secret Friends! While Clyde is part of the Ghost Gang, he doesn’t actually WANT to attack Pac, so he targets him to make it LOOK like he’s doing his job. When he gets close, he sort of just lingers around to try and seem like he’s doing something while not actively trying to get him. It’s the perfect strategy, and the others have never found out, and Clyde and Pac get to be friends, and it makes me happy.

Before I talk about some more ghosts, I’d like to analyze the ghosts as a whole! Pretty much every Pac-Man game has its own self-contained “canon”, if you can call it that, and each one brings its own interpretation of what the ghosts truly are. And my favorite of those is that of the very first game!

The first Pac-Man has three intermissions, famous for being where the second-most iconic Pac-Jingle is from, but they deserve to be even more famous for how bizarre they get. The first is pretty standard, with Pac being chased by Blinky, only to turn the tables and chase Blinky instead. The second, however, has Blinky get his sheet caught on something sticking out of the ground and rip, revealing a human-like leg! Are the ghosts just people wearing sheets...? Nope! Because in the third and final intermission, Blinky’s sheet comes ALL the way off, revealing him to be some bizarre flesh blob, wearing a sheet! Awesome! Is this true for all four of the ghosts? Is just Blinky hiding this embarrassing secret? Pick whatever explanation you think is funniest!

My SECOND favorite is from Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, a wacky point-and-click style adventure game where you manipulate Pac’s emotions in order to make him do funny things. I highly respect whoever thought this should be localized as the direct sequel to the most iconic video game of all time. But in this one, the base of villainous operations is a creepy factory, and if Pac gets caught in the machines, he turns into this familiar shape! Is... is this factory MAKING ghosts? Are they artificial? Wow!

The other iterations don’t have nearly as wacky implications for how the ghosts came to be, but I’ll tell them anyway. In the Pac-Man World series, they seem to be naturally occurring creatures native to the Spectral Realm, who entered Pac-Man’s dimension and began to live on Ghost Island. In Ghostly Adventures, they’re the souls that were forcibly extracted by the Pac-People who were on the losing side of a world war that killed Pac-Man’s parents, and are now forced to spend eternity in the Pac-Man equivalent of Hell. Bo-ring!

And now time to talk about even more ghosts you may not know about!

Clyde is the only member of the Ghost Gang I’m actually going to talk about here, because there are so many ghosts that the world needs to know about! Like Orson from Pac-Man World! He built and piloted a scary robot Pac-Man and kidnapped Pac-Man’s friends and family, but he just wanted to be loved. Pac does not accept this as an excuse. He eats Orson without a shred of remorse. I guess it’s justified from his perspective. They become friends later, though! Canon ghost friend!

Speaking of canon ghost friends, there’s Miru from Pac & Pal (she’s the pal)! I know she doesn’t look like a ghost, but she might be one. It’s kind of unclear. But I love her so here she is. She helps Pac by collecting fruit for him, but this gets fewer points than Pac doing it himself, so some players don’t like it. I, however, think it is worth losing a few potential points in order to let Miru feel like she’s helping.

Yet another friendly ghost is Yum-Yum from Junior Pac-Man! She is the daughter of Blinky, and she and Junior just want to be together, but of course, their parents will not allow it. That, however, is what ultimately allows them to be together, as while their parents are off bickering, the two little lovers are able to escape together! How lovely! Too bad Junior Pac-Man is in some bizarre copyright limbo and Yum-Yum never appeared again. Goodbye.

Here we have Bash, who is a somewhat strange character. He looks like he’d be the big bad boss of all the ghosts, right? Maybe even their ruler? Well, maybe he is, but we don’t know, because he was made exclusively for the Pac-Man crossover event in Sonic Dash! He never appeared again! I think he should, though! He’s funny. Despite his apparent authority, he just talks like a school bully.

One of the newest ghosts at the time of writing is Creepy, who as I’m sure you can tell, debuts in the Pac-Man DLC for Minecraft! This DLC is kind of weird. But good weird, because Miru is playable! Her most major role ever! But this is Creepy’s paragraph. He explodes, and this hurts not only the player, but his fellow ghosts, and even destroys walls, which crumble into glitchy text! Especially neat is that, when eaten, his eyes remain black with white pupils as they retreat to the Ghost House!

The VERY newest ghost at the time of writing is Itchy, from Pac-Man Party Royale! Itchy is not a “dangerous” ghost, but a “mischievous” one, and I think that’s great. As far as I know, they are only capable of inverting a player’s controls, but new effects were said to be included at some point. What a pleasant design, too, with the seafoam coloration and black sclerae! And how magical it was to witness a NEW GHOST revealed in real-time, during the time when Pac-Man was all I could think about! What are the odds? The odds were high. It’s the 40th anniversary year.

Finally, I will leave you with this little fellow. He appears in Pac-Man Arrangement, and is constantly vulnerable, even acting like a Power Pellet when eaten! However...

He can combine with the other ghosts to transform them, giving them new abilities! Blinky gains the ability to charge forward, Pinky can now hop to far-off points in the maze, Inky creates a mirror duplicate of himself that mimics his movements, and Clyde wanders around spitting up extra Pac-Dots in places Pac-Man has already been. That’s so cool! I love this ghost! I love that he has cute little nerd glasses, I love his role in the game, everything! Why haven’t we seen more of him? What’s his name, anyway?

I see.

#clyde #orson #miru #yum-yum #bash #creepy #pac-man #pac-man world #pac & pal #minecraft #sonic dash #pac-man arrangement #i am not going to tag the last one's name #Funky Friday #not mario #mod chikako

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literaphobe · 3 years ago

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hi michelle!

could you rate the mcc games pleaseee, i would love to hear your thoughts :)

(also, i hope you're having a nice day!!)

here are my ratings for the games :) only mcc16 but u can ask for non mcc16 in another ask this just got long

sky battle: very pog. i like how u have to run around to various locations to get loot, but also u get to kill people but also u gotta be fast bc oh no the border is closing in!! bridge u little bitch!! jump! fly! run! i think it's cool how it's all up high so u could fall to ur death but also that gets annoying esp towards the end of the game n idk it makes it harder to clutch up bc of how the arena is built so u get many oh :( moments instead of oh!!! moments. plus the thing at the bottom kinda sucks like ok so u jump there as a last ditch attempt but there's no Real thing to save u there so u just die its stupid. make it worth it. i like the three round thing tho :D like its ok that u died u can try again bb!!! and im interested to see more cool ways to kill people in this than just standard pvp like dream used the fishing rod n it seems he has more tricks up his sleeve so im excited to see him 'make them regret allowing fishing rods' like he said. 8/10

battle box: my beloved!! i like the 9 rounds thing where u go up against every team n each member gets a Cool Thing that can help them in special ways. the wool thing is cute too. good game that tests pvp well! i like the maps mostly n the kits r usually cool unless they suck then they like make me go ugh 🙄 9/10

to get to the other side and whack a fan: it's cute bc there's quite a bunch of maps for this n there are 6 rounds so u can still come back even if u fuck up a round. but some maps r annoying bc they are frustrating n not intuitive or they are just annoying or like if u fuck up the first time ur almost guaranteed unable to finish or u get real close n then fuck up n then can't finish or some shit. sad :( i like it when the pov im watching does good but if they don't do good it sucks and the map is lousy >:( but its a very cute game n i think the punching is funny unless the pov im watching gets punched >:( then what the FUCK bro that is SO messed up WHERE is the sportsmanship :/ dhfshsfj 8/10, but that score rises depending on the maps

parkour tag: im glad because it reps parkour but it's got this unpredictability of one person having to catch three different people presumably all running in different directions. a balance of skill timing n luck n also teamwork :) also like battle box i like the 9 rounds. however the scoring is a bit scuffed n unless they change it its always gonna pull down good hunters who don't have other good hunters on their team etc, i can elaborate on this using dream as an example but that would have to be another post. 8.5/10

sands of time: i really like the some of the new changes like how they have brain puzzles in the form of the blue wool thing so it's not just ur skill in the game but also it combines various skills like fighting strategy and maze running and also parkour it is very satisfying to watch but also scary it really keeps u on ur toes and its fun watching people solve stuff and get the coins its like a treasure hunt i love it more just thinking about it... the vaults r cool the sand to give more time is cool n its awesome when the whole team works great n gets themselves a lot of time n farms a lot of coins hehe the downside is it can get terrible if u die or ur teammate dies and ur sandkeeper doesn't communicate well enough n no one gets saved then that is sad :( still tho conceptually i like it a lot n its potential is cool n the suspense of not knowing how well all the teams did until the end is good too 9/10

survival games: this is like sky battle but on da ground and u get a lot more loot but also if u die thats IT like ok too bad u lose no coins no redos u cannot redeem urself u cannot come back time for u watch the other teams play ig :/ like it's too long a game to have three rounds for too so losing means gg n u gotta wait a while. cute maps tho n its fucking awesome if the pov u watch doesn't die :) n they kill a lotta people :) 7/10

build mart: EWWWW 0/10 GJHJGH jk ok i genuinely do think it's a good game even tho there are certain issues like how despite the changes made its still a tad bit disadvantageous to colorblind players and also it can be disorienting in certain ways like depending on how u look at it a part of me thinks its annoying to collect materials n maybe they should just have everything at their disposal another part of me thinks its cool that they go out shopping for their littol building materials flying around n shit or even in the old shopping cart version its like a warehouse they got stone in BULK boys 6.5/10

ace race: god its fun i like the tridents n the BOING noises n how they go Zoom n Fly n Jump i like the pretty maps but i also do hate player collision n some of the glitches but they have fixed that so hopefully all things go smooth soon :) 8/10

hole in the wall: what the fuck its so glitchy. get well soon but it is kinda funny but it has also caused wars to break out. i like the three round thing as usual n i like the various jumping and shifting strats for various holes to go through (hehe) it is a pretty suspenseful game n i do hold my breath at some jumps bc u don't always know when they hit spacebar if they r getting through or dying. 7.5/10

grid runners: i don't fucking know man they haven't played it yet

anyway these ratings could go up or down. it all depends on how good the pov im watching does 👍 hope this helps

#ask #mcc #mcyt

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zeta-in-de-walls · 3 years ago

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My thoughts on the MCC games

So my mind is still dwelling on MCC. Damn, I loved it.

I thought I’d share my thoughts about each game! (Note: I always watch Tommy for MCC.)

Big Sales at Build Mart. It’s alright. I think it’s good as an early game - I enjoyed that it was first this MCC, allowing the teams to get used to each other and it didn’t matter too much in points. Whereas I kinda dislike it late game - it’s not one I want to be high pressure. In some respects its a lot more chill as you’re less directly competing against others and more working together to build something. It still feels tense and as a viewing experience its alright but painful to see streamers making mistakes which they inevitably do as its so high pressure. The changes of getting rid of the boats was so, so good. Losing Buildmart before was often because you failed a turn and lose so much progress which was way too devastating. much easier to navigate now too. (I didn’t like how in one build Tommy couldn’t see a block properly under glass, but usually the builds are very nice.

Hole in the wall - this one I’ve always really enjoyed watching. It’s a fun game with a great level of difficulty. Tommy’s pretty good at this one too and I like that he has a real habit of messing around in it. This game is the one where Wilbur lost his voice in MC11 after too much shouting. In MCC13 it was singing christmas songs. Something about it just makes everyone want to mess around. I like how although its mostly a solo game, team communication is useful ust shouting out colours and shouting out warnings. I saw Vikkstar being warned about approaching walls before they killed him a couple times by his teammates for instance and I like that. (Contrast ace race where its so hard to give much meaningful advice.) That said, the game is extremely glitchy! Hbomb demonstrated it this round but people have always been sliding through walls plus players with higher ping get an advantage. I would understand if they wanted to shelf it. I think it’d be hard to fix - 40 players in one area with moving slime walls will be so hard to handle. I wonder if they could have 10 separate maps instead or something to make it more feasible to play as I’ll be sad if it has to go.

Skybattle - really really fun from Tommy’s perspective! You can tell he loves it so I love it too. Rounds kinda have a tendency to all end the same way with little bridges towards the centre, might be cool if there was some existing narrow walkways to the middle as well and maybe new maps though I do like the current map as well! Hah, but yeah I love it! It’d probably be too much played too late but its the absolute perfect mid round game and every MCC there’s always really cool exciting plays. Its really fast-paced which sets it apart.

Survival Games - it’s a classic. probably a little frustrating points wise as its a single round meaning an early death is so costly. survival points in this one are worth so much. I seriously enjoy it though it is not one you want too late in the tournament. Also a good opener as its not too intense from the start, even if it gets pretty intense as the map shrinks. The maps for these games are always awesome and well-designed. (I think puffy might have fallen in an inescapable hole though? She was getting attacked at the time so maybe it was escapable but yeah - careful playtesting is important to make sure no spots like those exist. Which is hopefully the case!)

Ace race - I greatly enjoy this game. Tommy’s generally surprisingly good at it which helps. It just seems like a really fun minigame to play. Obviously this MCC the map had some errors and was maybe too confusing. The map was long and every moment had something new to process, a chiller section or two where you can observe and take it in a bit more would have been nice. It is a little fiddly with a lot of different mechanics leading to glitches. Tridents are just annoying! But its one thats a good time. I only dislike how its so much a solo experience - you can try and give advice to your team but its so hard to give useful input unless you’re right by your teammate. I quite enjoy this one being fairly late game as its exciting but not so harsh as the elimination games.

Battle Box: very cool game assuming the map’s fun! (Some MCCs had ones I didn’t care for.) And they remember to never ever give any players TNT ever again. There’s a bunch of tactics to employ, custom items, flanking. It’s just a really nice strategic mini-game. I like how its lots of ranged combat and there’s enough rounds that you don’t feel too bad about a mistake. It’s good anywhere in the tournament. Glad it got added to the practice server as its a lot of fun to watch streamers just play. Though they don’t ever practise the wool rushing tactics on there. xD Shame Tommy’s not built for this game though.

TGTTOS: I love this game! Lots of fun to watch and its kinda solo but also you can help your team and work together with some effort. Hmmm... though some of the individual maps for this game can be very hit-or-miss. I think generally you want like at least 80% of players to complete the map. A few of them have been too long and hard. Lots of punching goes on in this game and I kinda don’t mind. The one with the wool targets was probably a little too confusing. I like most of the original maps for this game aside form the cliffside punching one though I understand the same maps every time would be bad. Rocket jumping seems kinda finicky so I’m not a fan. Tridents, elytras, ice, and bridging are all great fun though and I do enjoy the variety. Again its good anywhere in the tournament!

Parkour Tag - Not a fan. I like it in concept I guess but aah the scoring is annoying. It gives you points for survival which is so dependent on the person hunting you and it feels like there’s strategy about choosing the hunter for each opponent but in reality there’s not. I kinda wish the same person could be the hunter every round just so one person has that role. The maps have never felt that fun as it generally feels like scrambling around. Also this game rarely shifts the scores much at all, the ways points are awarded is just too strange. Maybe a bigger map and longer rounds? I don’t know though. This game is terrible as an end game and I guess its okay earlier. Yeah, I really wish there was a good parkour type game but this one isn’t it for me. (this is still much better than Parkour warrior mind!)

Rocket Spleef - Alright. I feel like this is one that’s hard on new players as rocket jumping is odd - getting kills in this game is also not easy. Hopefully they practice the mechanics on the practice server. That said I do enjoy this one quite a bit, it’s fun to watch. The deal breaker is the map. Some maps are just way better than others. I think by the end of a round the maps should be pretty much destroyed and I think it’d be awesome if rounds ended with only one or two people left alive. As long as its got a good map though it’s plenty of fun! It’s exciting without being really intense or high pressure and three rounds is a good amount. Good anywhere in the tournament.

Bingo But Fast - I don’t know how I feel about this one. Please don’t do it the nether again, that was too much. xD I think this game is too intense for me - it’s really fast-paced as completions start happening right away and earlier ones are worth more points. Also it’s another that is stressful to watch the streamer play non-optimally. That said it is an interesting game and I think its cool to have a mode like survival minecraft - generally I like how many games highlight different fun activities in minecraft. It’s such a varied tournament! Again I like this one best mid-tournament, not too late or too early. Maybe I’d like it a bit more without the locking out. like after the first five completions, the remaining completions of it still get a few points - a fixed amount. This is an interesting game but it’s also a really hard game!

Sands of Time - This one is pretty awesome. A lot of fun to watch even if its so so painful for a streamer to lose. Nice dungeon crawler feel, with cool maps and exciting traps. The vaults matter a lot to points. I like how less confident players can do safer stuff and its a very team-oriented game in the best possible way. As you don’t know how the other teams are doing it gets pretty intense and works well as a last game. Some traps are a bit annoying and I think ones requiring a second player are cool in concept but a bit too demanding. Also please please never make it out of snow again. People kept missing the snow! That was painful. Tommy’s interesting to watch and has successfully solved some risky traps even if he sometimes makes poor decisions xD

Damn this turned out long! Listen, I love this event. All the games are delightfully unique and challenging and fun to watch. These are just my personal opinions. This is such a well-made and impressive tournament with such a great variety of games testing different things.

Feel free to argue with me about any of these. Sorry parkour tags fans. xD

#mcc #analysis #thoughts #tommyinnit #long post #i would have ncluded the legacy games too but eh #footrace was fun but ace race is better #parkour warrior was alright at first before practicing and was more than due to retire #it did not fit in with the tournament #its too much an individual skill thing #and so frustrating to watch #lockout bingo also existed i guess #bingo but fast was an improvement i suppose #no strong opinions

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adamrevi3ws · 4 years ago

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Jedi: Fallen Order

When I finished playing DOOM, I told myself that the next game I would play wouldn’t be one that pissed me off. Unfortunately, Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order did not live up to those expectations.

While the source of my frustration with DOOM was mainly growing pains with its intense gameplay and action, Fallen Order mainly drew ire from me due to its unfinished and unpolished nature. Its publisher, EA, is in the same club as Ubisoft, Bethesda, and apparently now CD Projekt Red, often releasing games as broken glitchy messes when they first come out to meet quick deadlines. I’ve seen and heard how unplayable this game was at launch, and while it isn’t as bad as it was then, it still has enough subtle mistakes to ruin my gameplay experience. The main source of this and my frustration, in general, was the extremely finicky and unresponsive controls, particularly found in its two main selling points: platforming (and plot but I’ll talk about that later) directly lifted, if not plagiarized from the Uncharted games, and Dark Souls-esque combat gameplay. Nothing really lines up or “clicks” when it really needs to. Regarding the platforming, it feels like it takes a miracle to properly grab onto something and takes a thousand tries for a jump to work. When the double jump gets introduced, it really only works when the game, in its divine ignorance, feels the whim to let it work. A lot of reviewers complained about the difficult and unwieldy ice slide sequences in the game, and while I had my fair share of annoyance on a very specific ice slide, I think it’s just a symptom of a much larger problem. The combat shares this similar “the game only works when it wants to” problem. You don’t always dodge or block right when you want it to, but I think its biggest problem is healing. Instead of pressing a button and having part of your health restored, pressing said button instead “calls” your robot companion, which needs to do a special little animation and THEN you get healed, which takes a long 15 seconds. Not only does this waste a good amount of time in a game where time is absurdly precious in its hardcore combat, but every other time I tried calling the damn robot it straight up ignored me. I don’t know if this is a glitch, or it needs a cooldown period, or you can’t heal while being hit by an enemy, but it made the fights a lot more unnecessarily grating than they already are. Speaking of straight up screw you moments from the game, whenever I hit the “target” button in close combat with multiple enemies, it’d always target the farthest away enemy, for no reason. All of this is a shame because these main gameplay components are actually quite fun when they aren’t broken? A lot of the level design allows for really fast and exhilarating platforming that is absurdly fun when it syncs up, but that’s only, like half of the time. The combat can be enjoyable too, allowing for some great lightsaber duel boss fights, which can feel pretty cinematic when the combat actually works.

Outside of gameplay, the game’s unfinished nature shows itself a lot in its cutscenes. Its graphics just straight up dip and fail to fully render for 90% of these moments, often also feeling extremely choppy and cutting off a bit too soon. There was even one time an enemy was supposed to show up in a cutscene to initiate a boss fight but they just weren’t there and it was quite confusing because it felt like the main character was speaking to an empty wall. Around the middle of the game, both cutscenes and gameplay sequences would just freeze, and this is probably the first game I’ve played in a while to straight up crash on my PS4. If the developers took an extra, idk six months to actually fix this game a bit more I’d rate it a lot higher than I am now. I was actually warned about the game’s poor performance before playing, with a friend mentioning its horrible load times, but I didn’t know it’d be this bad. As my unopened copy of the infamous Cyberpunk 2077 waits on my mantlepiece for the developers to actually make it a playable game months after its release, I fear it may have the same fate as Fallen Order, still being quite a bit buggy and annoying over a year after its messy launch.

With its buggy and incohesive gameplay in mind, Jedi: Fallen Order’s strongest element is its plot. To my surprise, this is much less of a Star Wars game and more a game that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. Taking place between episodes 3 and 4, I kind of expected it to be an epic quest detailing the rise of the rebel alliance, but instead, I got a more generic treasure hunt storyline heavily reminiscent of the Uncharted series. Although this sounds quite disappointing, the game’s plot still soars in its great character arcs and setpieces interspersed the vague framework of its less-than-original overall plot. Combine these great individual moments with an absolutely bombastic ending and it almost makes trudging through the glitchy gameplay worth it. This is elevated by some great voice acting performances, particularly from Cameron Monaghan, who gives a movie star performance to the main character, even in a lot of moments where he doesn’t have much to work with. The setting is also a high point. Disney’s milking of Star Wars has led to a variety of media set between episodes 3 and 4, this game feels particularly special because it is more focused on the aftermath of Episode 3 rather than the buildup to Episode 4, which I think the rest of the media in this era is focused on. It’s clear that there are so many parts of the game that the studio put a lot of love in, ranging from the plot, to the memorable soundtrack (Mongolian throat singing, anyone?), to even the hilarious enemy dialogue, I just wish they put this amount of effort to make the game fully playable.

The one elephant in the room regarding this game that I haven’t mentioned so far is the game’s worlds/levels themselves. They aren’t annoyingly unpolished like the gameplay but aren’t really a labor of love either. Instead what we get is an admittedly gorgeous maze of areas within a few planets, constantly getting more twisty and confusing as you go on. It may visually resemble an open world, but it is very much a series of paths that make you go “hmmmm, should I go back to that other branching path to see if there are any healing upgrades or character customization options I can collect?” There’s nothing wrong about this MetroidVania style format, but frankly it’s not my type. A lot of the areas look visually similar so it’s quite easy to get lost, and despite each planet’s map being absurdly big, there’s no way to actually fast travel between areas, just between planets. Finally, the incentive to go back and explore isn’t particularly convincing, where the healing upgrades are a bit too well concealed and the character customization options are like, absurdly mid. This is the one time I actually wished an EA game had its own in-game currency so I could buy something cooler than “the same damn poncho you’re wearing except a slightly less boring color combination.” Come on, man! The one good thing I’ll say about the overall game world is that the in-game map highlights which paths you haven’t explored yet, making it much easier to get on track. While the game’s maze-like level style isn’t necessarily my thing, I think if the developers tried to make it a bit more interesting a lot of people would get a kick out of it.

Jedi: Fallen Order is a game that finally made me understand my college professors that went a bit too hard on my grammar mistakes when grading papers. The central content and ideas this game presents have a lot of potential, but they’re heavily weighed down by an infinite number of fixable mistakes. I give this game a 6.7 out of 10 stars.

#jedi: fallen order #jedi fallen order #cal kestis #star wars

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she-toadmask · 4 years ago

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I’m in a mood tonight so have me rambling about my music tastes below the cut

Eclectic is a good word for my music tastes like

In theory I like musical theater, in practice I have a few shows I know and like, a few songs that came on a tv radio thing from a musical I have heard nothing else from, and little to no opinion on anything else. Chicago? Great. Sweeney Todd? Haven’t listened in a while, has a couple of no-no songs, pretty good. Little Shop of Horrors? Haven’t found a recording I like for Dentist but the music is great. CATS? 2019 fucked up the music, London cast recording is where it’s at, shame that Growltiger is so racist because the parts that aren’t being racist are great fun (London not Broadway). There are definitely others (Mean Girls is fun, Be More Chill is pretty fun too, I really like the junior version of Seussical’s music, Something Rotten has a lot of fun songs), and while I’m not a Disney stan or anything I do like the style of a lot of the music, especially villain songs, sometimes I want songs that are like Disney villain songs in style but aren’t those songs specifically and it is so hard to figure out how to look that up and it is frustrating. Most things not on that list...I probably haven’t listened to and therefore have no opinion. (Phantom of the Opera is not my vibe though I’m sorry it is important because it’s been running for so long but that is just not my type of music)

I like late 2000s to mid 2010s pop music, that was when my dad got some CDs for a birthday or something and then I ended up listening to them a lot for some reason, also when I liked Just Dance a lot and listened to the radio in the car going places. There are definitely older songs I like and probably a few more recent ones but really that’s the time frame where I liked the most mainstream music. Not that that’s a good or bad thing, it’s just a thing.

Specific artists, when it comes to music that isn’t fan music, Voltaire and Creature Feature are my favorites. Most songs of theirs I’ve listened to, I like.

There are also probably some other artists that I like a lot of their songs but don’t pay enough attention to recognize they’re the same group in those songs, mostly thanks to this one Creepypasta-themed playlist that obviously had a lot of edgy music. Lots of MCR, Set it Off is a group that I’ve heard a number of good songs from, Hollywood Undead (apparently maybe there was some member drama, idk I just like what I’ve heard both pre- and post-whatever happened), probably some other groups with multiple songs.

And then there’s fan content. Random Encounters is my long-term favorite, the tone of the music is generally pretty light, idk they do a slight musical theater style (they call their songs ‘musicals’ so yeah that’s a vibe), and while their members have changed, the music is still really fun. The Stupendium! I found him pretty recently and boy I’m glad I did, he does more rap-style content, like a number of his songs are raps, but don’t let that turn you off before giving it a listen. Even outside of being about the game itself, a few of his songs just slap really hard, a few being very very anti-capitalist or just social commentary because of the source game, and just very very good. The Fine Print is a really really really good one that is also ‘capitalism sucks’, It’s A Joy isn’t really capitalism-related but someone could probably write a thinkpiece about societal stuff with it, I haven’t listened to it as much but A Matter of Factories (not to be confused with the similarly named A Matter of Facts, a rap that is just a bunch of trivia, sparked by a challenge by another channel) is also pretty anti-capitalist and anti-imperialism, another that isn’t exactly anti-capitalist but more an examination of society and stuff is Vault Number 76. I don’t even know much about any of the source games (aside from 76 being a glitchy nightmare lmao) but the songs all still slap. I almost forgot about Nook Line and Sinker, another wonderful anti-capitalism song. (Adding in A Purpose for New London. More social examination. I like the other guy’s ending better on a vocal level, but both are very very good.) (somehow I forgot Doctor! Doctor! which has its humor from the game it’s about but also has bits about how private healthcare is fucked up. The Stupendium is British BTW) If you just want some fun shit, he’s got that too. The Most Fashionable Faction is just a fun TF2 rap, An Impostor Calls is one of the collab songs he did with another guy and it’s pretty fun, I only have heard one ending of the Lego vs Minecraft rap battle but it seems pretty fun, These Hallowed Wings is a lighthearted one, Why Did I Say Okie Doki? is DDLC vibes of course so creepy but also with some upbeat to it (does that even make sense), Losing My Patients is kinda fucked up because Surgeon Simulator but it’s also really fun, What A Fowl Day is a very very good one, Way Deeper Down is good if you like Undertale (it’s also just genuinely good and fun). Honestly the only two I would rather skip when listening to him on shuffle are the two that have him partnering with SquigglyDigg, neither of the songs have anything wrong with them particularly I just. remember Squiggly’s awful takes on Lilo and Stitch and how she is the kind of person that’s like ‘you can call yourself whatever you want but there are only two genders’ and is miffed when people don’t recognize she’s a girl from her (drawn) profile pic like she gets upset about people trying to be polite because she disagrees with them being respectful to nb people or some shit

Also I like lyrics a lot and sometimes I can just go off vibes (like I don’t really like the really really heavy metal stuff like it’s really annoying when I’m like ‘I want a song about a deal with another power’ and all that comes up is either really heavy metal that is just loud and I don’t know what they’re saying (I’M NOT DISSING IT IT JUST ISN’T MY TYPE OF MUSIC) or a type of blues or something that also isn’t usually what I’m after at that time) but I also have a lot of appreciation for good lyrics and lyrics about stuff I like (which led to my friend being weirded out because she doesn’t listen as closely to lyrics as I do so when I tried to share some Stupendium songs she was just listening to the vibes and was like ‘you listen to weird music’) so like what it’s about matters

Also Biggering slaps. That is very tangential but it just slaps, go listen to it. How Bad Can I Be is fine I guess, like it’s catchy and all, but Biggering is just so much better. (The fact that multiple people have written video essays about Biggering and that movie should speak to how good it is. At least go listen once you can look it up on YouTube it’s just really good)

Also mental animatics are a thing. They just are. So that also can affect how I feel about a song.

Oh and The Cog Is Dead has a lot of good songs, how did I forget them

#untagged #delete later

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eri-blogs-life · 4 years ago

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Eri’s Itchio Adventures, Week 14

Does a game need to be entertaining to be good?

It’s... a question for the ages. And the game I played this week, Pagan: Autogeny, is one of those games that made me think about this question a lot

So, first... what is Pagan: Autogeny?

Pagan: Autogeny is described on its itchio page and steam page as “an exercise in aesthetic maximalism - In other words, it’s pretty big, at least by normal altGame standsards.”

And like the loading screen shown above says, this game definitely feels like an exercise in user hostile design. It feels like everything in the game is intentionally made to make you feel like it’s bad. But does that mean that it’s good, because it does such a good job of being bad?

I mean, yes, because it does a lot to pull you into the game while making it seem like the design is against you.

Okay, but first, Pagan: Autogeny is an adventure/rpg game where you wander around a forgotten mmorpg grinding to increase your stats while trying to figure out what the hell secrets this world is hiding within it.

It looks a lot like a lot of classic adventure/rpg type games. Apparently it was at least somewhat inspired by some old Morrowind creepypasta, and you can kinda see that in the style of the game.

The structure of the game as a forgotten MMORPG is definitely one of those aspects that makes it feel user-hostile. As an mmorpg, the world is huge but relatively empty, built to support many players at once in order to make it feel alive, with very few NPCs in the world. And in this case, the few NPCs that are left appear to have degraded into fairly simple polygon shapes, and each has only one line of dialogue. The regular enemies that inhabit some areas have also degraded similarly. The only mobs that appear to still have some sense of visible recognizability are the game’s four bosses, the scarab lord, the skull, the troll shaman, and the floating manly ghost body. And even then the floating manly ghost body definitely feels like something’s missing since it’s just a torso.

The old mmo structure also means the game has basically no instructions. There is a .pdf manual included in the download, which gives some explanation of how the game’s mechanics work - ghostly monsters can only be damaged by faith weapons, armored enemies can only be damaged by piercing weapons, and a list of the 4 weapons, 4 armors, and 22 tarot cards included in the game and what stats they increase. Except some of the tarot cards have [???] listed as their effect.

The tarot cards are weird. They are used as equipable items to increase your stats, and also used to unlock certain items throughout the game.

The game’s stats are also weird. As far as I can tell, the only stats that really matter are Strength, Faith, and Piercing, all of which are gear-based and none of which are shown on your character’s skills screen:

The skills that ARE shown are also pretty weird. Estrogen is increased by finding pill bottles around the world. Body Forging is increased by finding body parts scattered throughout the world and bringing them to the Forgotten Temple. Caffeine is increased by finding coffee pots around the world. Poetry is increased by finding scrolls around the world. And Murder is increased by killing.

The only use for these stats that I saw was that there is a weapon in the first area you need 10 in every stat to unlock. However, I was unable to get that. Why? Because in my 3 playthroughs I only got +8 levels in Body Forging, from building the statue in the Forgotten Temple. I think it might be possible to repeat the first ending I got in order to get enough points to unlock it...

Building the statue in the Forgotten Temple causes the end of the playthrough, at least depending on which ending you’re getting.

My first playthrough I built the statue and got a message saying to Observe the Heavens. When I exited the temple that the statue was in, I saw a black object slowly floating into the sky, occasionally shooting out beams of light to form like a cross like it was a dang evangelion. Along with that, I got an ending screen that told me that the Martyr was still Restrained.

I’d seen that message elsewhere - there’s a statue in one of the other areas that gives the same message if you interact with it. So, in my second playthrough, I tried interacting with that, to no avail. I was also able to collect all 4 of the arcana needed to gain the World arcana, by killing the game’s four bosses. I was then able to use the World to free the Martyr, and after building the statue I got the the same Observe the Heavens message, the same black object rising into the sky and forming crosses of light, but a different ending screen:

Well, I rebooted. The game, anyway. I still haven’t rebooted my computer or destroyed it yet, though hopefully that doesn’t do anything untoward. But, after getting the Martyr roams free ending, the world is different when you return. Things have fallen even further into disrepair, and where once stood the statue that said “The Martyr is Restrained”, there is now a door. I entered that door and followed through a series of weird, black, glitchy rooms until I found that statue. Upon interacting with it, I got the game’s next ending:

Upon rebooting the game again after that ending, I found that all my items were removed from my inventory, and the world had reset to its original version, giving me a sense that this was the final ending. But it might not be. From what I found online while googling about this, the creator has said that there’s at least one ending I didn’t get, which can only be gotten if you have the Fool tarot. But I couldn’t find the Fool. It’s presumably well-hidden, I suppose.

I may try to return, to find the Fool or to try repeating the basic game loop enough to unlock that one weapon I found in the starting area. There’s one NPC who remains after the Martyr Roams Free ending (most get destroyed), who continues to say that you should seek hidden paths, so I’m wondering if there’s some additional locale I missed somewhere.

...

The game’s weird. And a lot of its structure and style make it very hard to play. It’s huge, you walk slow, the skills aren’t explained at all, the endings don’t make sense, the game gets very loud at times with very little music in the game, just ambient sounds or very loud white noise. It’s not fun, the combat is simple and just involves walking around an enemy to dodge its attacks while shooting or hitting it with one of the game’s four possible choices of weapons. It’s not fun, it’s not entertaining, it’s not good.

But that’s exactly what makes it good, in such a weird way. Like, talking about it reminds me a lot of that one HBomberguy video about Pathalogic, and how it’s designed in a way where its not that fun to play, but it still provides for an interesting experience and says something about the nature of playing games.

I don’t know that Pagan: Autogeny says much of anything, though. It’s cool, it’s weird, and the obtuseness makes you want to come back to it and try to figure out what the hell is going on, but I don’t know that everything included in it feels like it’s leading towards anything in particular. It has a lot of religious imagery, for sure, which could make you think there’s something going on there. Autogeny, as a word, refers to organic life being formed out of nonorganic material. So presumably the game’s about the game itself becoming alive after its been abandoned? But I didn’t really feel like that was the case as I was playing. Perhaps the choice of the title Autogeny simply refers to how the game is about you coming in and making some life within the game after its been forgotten and abandoned as an MMORPG?

I don’t know...

...

So is it a good game, and would I recommend playing it?

Hard to say, man. On the one hand, I want to say it’s a great game because it does a good job of, as the storepage and the loading screen say, creating a user-hostile, aesthetic maximalist game. It’s obtuse, it’s annoying to play, and as it seems that was the point of the game.

But on the other hand, it doesn’t feel like all that leads to much of anything beyond more questions about what the hell is going on with it. So, hell, maybe that alone is enough to say it’s good at what it does.

#eri blogs games #pagan autogeny #this may be my longest writeup yet #i spent a lot of time thinking about whether this was good as an experience #i spoil a lot in the writeup here though so fair warning #its... i think worth a play #but you gotta be ready for an experience that while interesting is not exactly enjoyable

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the-desolated-quill · 6 years ago

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Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2018

Congratulations dear reader. You survived 2018. And you know what that means. It’s time for another best of/worst of list. Welcome to Quill’s Swill 2018. A giant septic tank for the various shit the entertainment industry produced over the course of the year. The films, games, TV shows and various other media that got on my bad side. As always please bear in mind that this is only my subjective opinion (if you happen to like any of the things on this list, good for you. I’m glad someone did) and that obviously I haven’t seen everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, sorry that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald isn’t on here. I’m sure it is as terrible as some have been suggesting. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay everyone. Grab your breathing masks and put on your rubber gloves. Let’s dive into this shit pile.

Hold The Sunset

The news that John Cleese would be returning to the world of BBC sitcoms was incredibly exciting, being a massive Fawlty Towers fan and all. Unfortunately Hold The Sunset was not quite what I had in mind. It’s one of those rare breed of situation comedies that chooses to offer no actual comedy. It’s not a sitcom. It’s a sit. Like Scrubs or The Big Bang Theory.

An elderly couple plan to elope abroad only for Alison Steadman’s son to barge in, having left his wife, and forcing them to put their plans on hold. Hence the title ‘Hold The Sunset.’ It’s like a cross between As Time Goes By and Sorry, but if all the humour and relatability were surgically removed by a deadpan mortician. The characters are weak, the plots are thin on the ground and the humour (hat little of it there is) feel incredibly dated. The middle aged mummy’s boy is something that hasn’t been funny since the 90s. It’s an utter waste of great talent and what hurts even more is that this tripe is actually getting a second series. I can only assume the people watching this are comatose. Either that or there’s an epidemic of people in Britain who have lost the remote.

Avengers: Infinity War

Yes this is one of the worst movies of 2018 and no I don’t regret saying that one little bit. Avengers: Infinity War was fucking terrible. Period. There were too many plots and characters going on, which made the film hard to follow (and what staggers me is that the so called ‘professional’ critics have condemned movies for having too many characters and plots before. Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice and even Deadpool 2. But because this is an MCU movie, it gets a free pass. Fuck off). The characterisation was weak due to sheer number of characters they try to juggle, resulting in characters coming off as one dimensional caricatures of themselves and scenes where characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Star-Lord sound completely interchangeable. The villain, Thanos, is a stupidly and poorly written villain, but that’s hardly surprising considering what a shit job Marvel have done building him up over the course of these 20+ movies. And let’s not forget that pisstake ending. A bunch of prominent Marvel characters die and it’s all very, very sad... except all these characters just so happen to have sequels planned, which makes this ending fucking pointless and have less impact than a feather on a bouncy castle.

I don’t know which is more shocking. That Marvel and Disney think their audience are that stupid and gullible, or that their audience are actually validating their view. Fuck you Disney.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery

I’ve always wanted a Harry Potter RPG, where you could customise your character, choose your house and actually live a full school life at Hogwarts. This year, Warner Bros and Jam City gave us just that.

That was a mistake.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the mobile gaming market right now. The gameplay is boring and involving where you just tap images on a screen until a progress bar fills up. Wizard duels are little more than rock-paper-scissors challenges that require no kind of skill. Bonding with friends and caring for magical creatures just consist of pathetically simple pop quizzes and yet more boring tapping. Oh and of course you only get a certain amount of energy to complete these tedious tasks. If you run out of energy, you wait for it to fill up... or pay up for the privilege. So determined are they to extract your hard earned cash from your wallet, there’s actually a bit where Devil’s Snare strangles your eleven year old avatar and the game effectively tries to guilt trip you into paying micro-transactions to save them. It’s sleazy, gross and manipulative. Honestly, you’re better off just playing Candy Crush.

Agony

When the developers of this game said they wanted to give the player a trip through Hell, they had no idea how true that statement really was. Agony is dreadful on a number of levels. The design for Hell itself, while visually interesting at times, is often not very practical and gets quite dull and repetitive after a while. The stealth mechanics are a joke and the AI of your demonic enemies are pitiful. All of this alone would have been enough to put this game on the list, but then we also have the casual misogyny. Agony is a gorefest trying desperately to shock the player. We see men and woman get tortured, but it’s the women that often get the extreme end. The violence inflicted on them is often sexual in nature and the game seems to go out of its way to degrade and dehumanise women at every turn. The orgasmic cries of ‘pull it out’ quickly become a staple of the game’s experience as we see naked women raped, tortured and murdered, all for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’

I would call Agony sexist, but honestly that would be giving it too much credit. Agony is like a little child trying desperately to be all dark and edgy in a pathetic attempt to impress everyone around him, and we should treat it as such. Go to your room Agony. No ice cream for you.

Peter Rabbit

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Beatrix Potter rotating in her grave.

Yes we have yet another live action/CGI hybrid, but instead of something innocuous like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sony instead decides to adapt Peter Rabbit, with James Corden in the title role.

It’s about as bad as you’d expect.

Their attempts to modernise the story are painful to say the least with pop culture references, inappropriate adult humour and twerking rabbits. Plus rather than the gentle, but slightly mischievous character we got in the source material, here Peter is a sociopathic delinquent who seems to revel in making the farmer’s life a living hell. He’s unlikable and unwatchable as far as I’m concerned and the film doesn’t in anyway earn the emotional moments it tries so desperately to sell to the audience. And the worst part is it’s getting a sequel.

Wait. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of Beatrix Potter tearing out of the ground, ready to kill whatever idiot came up with this shit.

Fallout 76

I was excited for Fallout 76. A MMORPG where players band together to rebuild society after a nuclear apocalypse. Could have been great. Pity it wasn’t.

Fallout 76 is a dreadful game. Not only is it a buggy, glitchy mess that requires a constant online connection to play, which could result in you losing hours of progress if your WiFi went down, it’s also unbelievably tedious, and that’s because there’s nothing to do in the game. There’s no other characters to interact with, the various robots and computers you come across are really little more than quest givers, there’s no actual plot so to speak, and because of the sheer size of the world and the number of players allowed on a server, the chances of you actually meeting any actual players is remote. And let’s not forget all the behind the scenes drama. Bethesda falsely advertising Fallout themed canvas bags and players getting shitty nylon ones. Bethesda accidentally releasing the account information of various players trying to get a refund for said bag. Bethesda failing to program the year 2019 into the game code, meaning that the game’s nukes don’t work.

Maybe there’s a chance that Bethesda could pull a No Man’s Sky and fix everything over the coming years with various patches and DLCs, but the damage has already been done. It’s incredibly disappointing. The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have be fucking incredible to win everyone back.

Mama Mia!: Here We Go Again

I can’t stand jukebox musicals anyway, but Mamma Mia was always one of the worst. Its boring, meandering story with its one note, obnoxious cast of characters screeching out ABBA songs like they’re at some drunken karaoke session at some poor sod’s hen party has always grated on my nerves. So imagine my delight when they announced we were getting a sequel. Ever wondered how Meryl Streep met her three lovers and founded her hotel? No? Well tough shit, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is basically just Mamma Mia again. The actors still can’t sing, the characters are still annoying and story is still boring and meandering, completely at the mercy of the chosen songs rather than the filmmakers using the songs to compliment the story (you know? Like proper musicals do?).

How can I resist you? Very easily as it turns out. Gimme, gimme, gimme a fucking gun so I can end my misery.

The Cloverfield Paradox

A lot of people were unhappy about the direction Cloverfield was going. They wanted a continuation of the found footage, kaiju movie from 2008, not an anthology series. I was personally all in favour. Partially because I thought the first Cloverfield was a tad overrated, but mostly because I thought it would be a great opportunity for more experimental film projects and could be a great launchpad for new writers and filmmakers. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a great start. Then The Cloverfield Paradox happened.

The Cloverfield Paradox is basically JJ Abrams trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maintaining the anthology format whilst connecting everything together in a ‘shared universe’ (yes, yet another shared universe). The result was a cliched, poorly edited and idiotic mess of a film that actually took away from the previous two films rather than added to them. Everyone hated it and, as a result, 2018′s Overlord, which was totes going to be part of the Cloververse, was made its own standalone film and Abrams double pinky promised to make a true sequel to the original Cloverfield. A complete and total disaster. No wonder it was a straight-to-Netflix film.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Season 2

This is probably going to be the most controversial entry on the list, but please hear me out because I’m not the only one who has a problem with this season.

I was reluctant to watch The Handmaid’s Tale simply because of how gruesome the original book was, but I forced myself to watch the first season and I thought it was pretty good. It remained faithful to the source material for the most part and included some nice additions that helped to expand the story and mythos. If it was just a one off mini-series, everything would have been fine. But then they made the same mistake as The Man In The High Castle and Under The Dome did where they commissioned another season and attempted to tell a story that goes beyond the book.

There’s a reason why the original story ended where it did. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t meant to be an empowering story about women sticking it to the patriarchy. It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our civil rights truly are and how easily they can be taken away from us. It’s designed to shock, not to satisfy. So seeing a handmaid blow herself up in a suicide bombing feels very incongruous and just a little bit silly. It would be like doing a TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 where the first season followed the source material and then the second season turned Winston Smith into this heroic freedom fighter trying to overthrow Big Brother. It would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the book was about in the first place.

And then of course there’s the increased level of violence in Season 2, which many have complained about. In Season 1 and the original source material, the violence was justified. In Season 2, the motivation behind the violence has gone from ‘how can we effectively demonstrate how easily a fascist patriarchy can happen in the West?’ to ‘what brutal act can we inflict upon Ofglen to shock the audience this week?’ It’s purely for shock and nothing more. And with the showrunner (who I feel I should mention is a man) announcing that he has planned ten seasons of this, it seems that The Handmaid’s Tale is going to go even further with this depravity until it effectively becomes the equivalent of a Saw film.

The Handmaid’s Tale exists as a way of shining light on and critiquing misogyny in its most extreme form. Season 2 however demonstrates that there is a serious risk of it becoming the very thing it’s criticising in the first place.

The Predator

I love the Predator franchise, but The Predator is the worst.

People thought that this would be good because director Shane Black had actually starred in the first Predator movie back in 1987. Instead we got this bloated, confusing, obnoxious and insulting mess of a film that seems to go out of its way to ruin everything that makes Predator so good. There’s no tension. No suspense. No intrigue. Just a bunch of gore, explosions and shitty one liners from annoying and lifeless characters. They essentially took this big alien game hunter from outer space and turned him into a generic monster from a bad summer blockbuster. It no longer hunts for sport. It wants to take over the world and splice our DNA with theirs. But don’t worry, a rogue Predator doesn’t want to kill humans (even though he himself kills a bunch of humans), so he gives us a Predator Iron Man suit to set up a sequel that will probably never happen because this movie was a box office bomb and it fucking SUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKEEEEEDDDD!!!

This film also has a very nasty streak towards those with disabilities. There’s a lot of jokes at the expense of a character with Tourette’s and it has an extremely ignorant and patronising view of autism, portraying the main character’s kid as being a super genius who can decipher the Predator language and even going so far as to say that he represents ‘the next stage of human evolution.’ Presumably the Predators want social communication difficulties because apparently it helps them hunt somehow.

What with Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, the future of both the Alien and Predator franchises were very much in question. This film needed to be a success in order to make a case for Disney to keep making more of them. It wasn’t. Congratulations Shane Black. You might have just killed off this franchise for good. Thanks arsehole! :D

So those were my least favourite stories from 2018. Join me on Wednesday where we shall discuss something more positive. Yes, it’s awards season. Who shall win the coveted Quill Seal Of Approval? Watch this space...

Or don’t. It’s up to you. I don’t want to force you or anything. It’s a free country.

#quill's swill #quill's swill 2018 #worst of the year #review #opinion

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sigurdjarlson · 2 years ago

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Pokémon opinions coming in

Here’s the thing I do like what I’ve seen so far in terms of content and such. It has some neat new mechanics and content. It would be great if not for some serious problems overshadowing the good

The problem is it’s at best annoying to play and at it’s worst borderline unplayable at times because of the enormous amount of technical issues.

I’m legit going to wait till they (hopefully) patch the game to play any more of it because I got that annoyed with the frame rate and general glitchy, buggy gameplay.

I’m just gonna go play some of the older Pokémon (on switch) games. Fresh start baby, starting with Let’s Go Pikachu! :)

But seriously it’s inexcusable to release a game in this state. I genuinely think they need to let go of their release a game every year model.

I get that they want to keep content for all Pokémon media (the card games, anime, other games spin-offs etc) flowing but it’s just not working anymore.

They need more time or they need a bigger team (or both). It’s irritating because people would be willing to wait longer for a polished game that works rather than getting a game that doesn’t more quickly.

They’re a billion dollar company. There’s no excuse.

I don’t think it’s necessarily the Switch’s fault. I agree the Switch needs an upgrade in general but I don’t think that’s why it’s struggling to handle Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. It handles games that are a lot bigger and more detailed fairly well all the time.

It’s just poorly optimized, rushed and unfinished because of time constraints.

That’s not most of the team that’s working on the game’s fault of course. It’s whoever sets the damn deadlines and makes it into one Big Crunch fest.

The pure potential Pokémon has now that it’s on something that can handle so much more than a 3DS can…they’re wasting it.

I loved Sword personally. Unpopular opinion I know. It had its issues but I genuinely found it fun and really liked the characters. I was able to mostly ignore the bad because I enjoyed the good so much.

I can’t do that with Scarlet at this point in time.

I could also talk about the graphical fidelity and animations in Scarlet which is a lesser issue but one that’s noticeable. It just doesn’t..look great in a lot of places. Pokémon games have never been games you constantly fawn over the graphics in but I would enjoy a visually pleasing game nonetheless

I don’t mean hyper realism or anything obviously. I just mean a rich, detailed world that looks good.

Some of it is so low quality I’m like how can you put this out without being ashamed, Gamefreak? (The Sandwich eating animation haunts me)

There are games that look gorgeous on the Switch, so again there’s no excuse. Pokémon Snap is so goddamn gorgeous and I get it’s a spin-off game and they don’t have to focus on as many mechanics, the gameplay, etc as main series games…but they /could/ look like that if they put the damn time and effort in.

Imagine a rich beautiful world with Pokémon running around and interacting with the environment, with each other, with you like in Snap in the main series game.

Also I know I know people are tired of hearing about the National Dex but personally I think they should have all Pokémon in there (I thought this with Sword and Shield too) I don’t care if it takes longer because they have to animate and create more models. I’m willing to wait.

(I don’t mind if some pokemon come in later expansions either as long as they do make it into the game. That’s actually probably the best way to do it so it isn’t overwhelming)

I admit I’m not a big fan of the crystallizing gimmick this time around or whatever it’s called. I think it’s kinda underwhelming? They should have kept dynamaxing imo. The different forms were neat and who doesn’t like giant Pokémon?

People complain about the gimmicks but they’re usually pretty neat it’s just annoying how they’re thrown out never to be seen again next generation? I mean obviously we can’t have them all in one game that would be convoluted, overwhelming and overpowered but still. Maybe some should stick around.

Also In the list of issues this is pretty low but I think it’s time to introduce voice acting too. It’s starting to look weird lmao. (Flashbacks to Piers in Sword visibly singing with no sound coming out of his mouth) Again this would lengthen production time and be expensive but it would also be a nice improvement. (Billion dollar company they could definitely afford it)

There’s lots of other features and improvements I’d love to see but more than anything I just want a game that’s playable.

They really did take a good step in terms of content and gameplay but it’s overshadowed by the technical issues

#Pokémon blogging

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c7thetumbler · 6 years ago

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Quick Game Reviews: What I played 2018

I’m gonna go ahead and do this for the whole year, which includes games that WEREN’T released this year, but I played this year. I also made this throughout the year, so most the opinions were right after I played it and if it’s been updated further might not include that in my blurb.

I needed to type and felt like I needed to make something. This might motivate me I suppose. Let’s get started

DOOM 2016 [PC]

I grew up on Pokemon, Mario, and Doom II. I couldn’t play it until I got my new computer this year so yeah way too late. This is a pretty solid game, though thanks to all of the bonuses and honestly nearly intrusive leveling up system kinda stepped in the way of the raw combat. It’s obviously my choice, but I felt encouraged to spend a lot of time exploring areas I’d already cleared rather than run and gun.

That being said, I still loved it. The secrets were, for the most part, really clever and fun anyway and the combat is delicious. I would strongly recommend this

A Hat in Time + Seal the Deal DLC [PC]

I love this game. A lot. It’s really cute and looks really good, it’s got a ton of charm, and it’s honestly a very good time overall. I 100% the base game last year when it first came out, and I would highly recommend to fans of 3D platformers, and still worth a try if you’re on the fence on them. The mod support is also great that it’s in there and I want to try that a lot. however the DLC...

So the new level is pretty short and while it’s fun, it’s not as good as the other levels. The characters (I think) are really cute and the charm is all there and that great, but it has all of 3 levels, and 2 of them are exploring the exact same places (the boat) and the 3rd is a nice twist on that, but other than that it’s pretty barren. The time rifts were fun as well, but alone... eh. The Death Wish portion, that is the super hard challenge mode...

... is not good. Obviously my opinion, and I might be missing the point, but after having been frustrated over and over and over again, the game itself is just not tight or clean enough to warrant it. My backing for this is that a large portion of the challenges rely on originally unintended level geometry or quirky mechanics in order to complete, and having challenges that require you to be in the know about these honestly inconsistent “quirks” is just not good. Specific examples: the ice hat giving you a small boost to avoid jumping in challenges is alright but fluctuates in how much height it gives you a lot, the challenges around the train chase still have the wonky hitboxes that do not line up with what’s still on screen, and the parade challenge has an invisible hitbox on the main platform that can kill runs. In short If you have found you love the main game and are a bit of a masochist, go for the DLC.

Pokémon Ultra Sun [3DS]

This is more or less just a revisit of the same generation with some very minor changes. The story changes take the focus away from Lillie and Lusamine (and as a result how interesting the former and evil the latter are) and places it on Necrozma and Ultra Beasts. I really like what they did with Necrozma, but overall it feels like a lot less. And while the Rainbow Rocket post game was nice and fun nostalgia, it’s still missing a solid post game like B2W2 or Gen II had.

Ultra Wormholes are cool though, and all the good mechanics from SM are still there, so honestly I would recommend this if you haven’t played gen 7 and like Pokémon.

Hey! Pikmin [3DS]

It’s awful. I can’t think of a reason to pick this up.

I can rant about this for years, but it basically got the Zip Lash/ Sticker Star treatment: it took a franchise known for something and made it something else that was bad. It’s an incredibly slow puzzle “platformer” where you have to collect a bunch of treasure using pikmin you find in the level, it’s laggy even on a n3DS, and even though the point of the game is to collect enough treasure to leave, if you do that they’re all like “by the way, you still have to beat the final boss” so the entire auto-collecting side game you put your pikmin into is entirely pointless. This is honestly the worst 3DS game I played this year.

Hollow Knight [PC]

So I’m normally not that great with the games-that-are-pretty-dang-hard, and this was no exception. That said however, I did get pretty far (probably) before I got to a boss fight I just couldn’t beat (It was an onslaught of rolling knights in the raining city or something, it’s been a while). And after that I tried finding more power-ups and stuff to help, but I had to set it down after getting bottlenecked there. That being said, I can very easily see why people like this hardcore metroid-vania platformer, and would still recommend it if you’re into the Dark Souls style of high difficulty and mechanical mastery in other genres.

Axiom Verge [PC]

This is another Metroid-style game. I really liked this one as well, especially how its power-ups weren’t the traditional “You jump higher now” traversal power-ups. It really has a nice atmosphere and theme that still feels alien and metroidy while also feeling like the glitchy world by giving you weapons and movement abilities that let you glitch and change the environment around you. I really liked it! My only real complaint is the bosses get really challenging through a result of eventually figuring out what weapon and strategy is was designed for, and there are some areas that I was completely lost trying to find where I was going next, but all in all it’s pretty solid.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch [PC]

I normally really hate games where the focus is “lol, you can barely control your character! hahaha.” I actually really liked this one; it isn’t hard to get the hang of it and it’s really funny and still enjoyable at the same time. I rarely actually felt annoyed at the controls. I had a ton of fun with it, even if it was a little short.

Kirby Star Allies [Switch]

My complaints are very much the same as everyone else’s here; it’s a pretty okay Kirby game, but it lacks real challenge and is pretty quick. the real “star” of the show is playing the game with different characters, but since you can’t do that until after you play through as Kirby, by that point it’s either grown on you or hasn’t. The best part is the unique levels they made for the DLC characters, Gooey, Marx, Dreamland buddies, etc. Those are a ton of fun. If you like Kirby games, this one’s no Super Star but you’ll likely love all the attention to the free DLC characters and it’s not bad by any stretch.

HOB [PC]

It’s a 3D, top-down Zelda style game with an emphasis on some platforming elements. The world is wonderful, definitely the Aesthetic with clockwork worlds that Spiral Knights wishes it could’ve had. I actually had a ton of fun with it. The secrets and exploration were great, combat is ehhhhhh but that’s not really the focus. It’s a good time, If you like Zelda but with some puzzle platforming and great atmosphere, check this one out!

Poi [PC]

This is a Unity 3D platformer that attempted to brush off the Unity, and does an alright job with being mechanically tighter than most, but still has the Unity feel. Controls are a bit loose, could’ve used a lot of polish, but honestly this scratched the 3D platformer collect-a-thon itch for a bit and I actually 100% it. You have to love 3D platformers like Sunshine or Banjo Tooie to be able to like this, but if you do it’s a pretty fun romp.

Princess Remedy In a Heap of Trouble [PC]

This is a fun, short bullet-hellish game with an old-school Atari aesthetic. It’s pretty fun, but honestly I like the mechanics in the free game better (though this has more content). It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s quirky (and kinda short), try out the free game and if you like that one give this a try! The main difference is the “date” mechanic, where people you heal can join you to give you a different special power from healing, to various kinda of bombs, time freezing, homing bullets, etc. Once you find one though, it’s hard to convince yourself to try something else.

Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion [Switch]

This is Splatoon 2′s expanded hard/challenge mode. I’m a big fan; a few of the challenges are eh, but overall the aesthetic and branching map structure are super fun. The expanding on the lore and bonuses are also great; even though earlier I don’t normally go for the extremely hard, I found myself 100%’ing this. There’s a really tough challenge at the very end of all that, and I would say If you liked Splatoon 2, pick this up. It’s the expansion of Single Player that it deserves, though prepare for a few frustrating challenges.

... But now you have to pay for a terrible service to play it online so keep that in mind...

Celeste [Switch]

This is a fucking great game and you should buy it. It’s a challenging (very hard) platformer in the line of super meat boy and maybe even I Wanna Be The Guy, but this does it extremely right. restarting is very quick, the controls are incredibly tight, and the levels are genuinely clever and fun.

The story is also really solid, and I can’t recommend the whole package as a solid game.

Grow Up [PC]

This is the sequel to Grow Home, a game I’ve quick-reviewed a long time back. I liked the whole explore a whole planet and find some neat stuff, however the challenges are reliant on some weird procedural animations which don’t necessarily cooperate. It kinda overstays it’s welcome as a result, though the open nature of it is really fun. I have a hard time recommending this one, but it’s still a pretty solid romp even if it fights you a bit.

Sonic Mania Plus [Switch]

Having 100% the base game which I highly recommend, I was expecting a lot more things to do with this. Encore mode is fun; I really like how you can change up your characters and have to adjust on the fly. The new special stages are tough but fun, but the pinball minigame is.. not good. Gets old pretty quick. additionally it doesn’t add much after encore mode. Might and Ray have abilities that meaningfully add some neat gameplay stuff, but after how great the base game was, I was expecting a little bit more. That being said, the DLC is a nice bonus for the base game and you can’t really go wrong with it.

Lovely Planet [PC]

So I made a point to only play this game when I was drunk. The first few times I happened to be when I played it, so I stuck with it. This is a quick-restarting FPS with a focus on perfect shots and maneuvering to destroy all the target and get to the end as soon as possible.It’s hard as balls but really silly, so if you’re into perfectionist gameplay it’s worth a go. Probably not drunk tho.

Ever Oasis [3DS]

IIRC, this came out at a time where there was a lull in Nintendo games, or at least 3DS games so this one was very much skimmed over. It’s a mix between a town management sim and Zelda-style dungeon crawling and resource gathering. On paper, and even somewhat in game, this is a cool idea; you get townsfolk who can go with you on missions, each with their own abilities, and what you get outside of the town is used to help expand you town, which will buff you/your townspeople's abilities to go further in dungeons.

In practice however... they don’t really mesh. The limitation of 1 item per party member and items being locked to specific people you need to find, going to dungeons is a chore as you need to find out which characters you need to actually play (often not your best). Meanwhile, time passes so quickly and your town’s shopkeepers run out of resources so quickly, it’s a full time job to keep up the town and then you run out. They mitigate this near the end game by have the ability to make parties out of townspeople who can’t own shops, which are very rare. The ending is good up until the last moment where they do a thing that doesn’t make sense to get some points for emotion but... It just doesn’t work to me.

All in all, it has a demo to show how a dungeon works, and if you like management AND what that dungeon has to offer, go for it. Otherwise, the setting and character design are great but not enough to really hold interest

Q.U.B.E. 2 [PC]

The First game was Portal-esque in that you navigated the first-person Cube puzzle maze without any dialogue while manipulating the chambers with a variety of cube-spawning and extending abilities. You had to piece out and interpret the story yourself. This is the opposite; there’s a lot of dialogue, story set-pieces, and it’s bizarrely paced. You’ll get through most the game in like an hour, but then the last 2-3 chapters are the bulk of the game. Those are pretty fun, but the game is still incredibly short and I liked the tone of the first better. It’s short, it’s not bad, but it doesn’t really stand out.

NES Classic

So I dunno if I love or hate this thing. It’s great because it’s an official NES with controller and emulator and gives me the opportunity to play a buncha games I hadn’t before, but the controller cable is too small, the damn thing has trouble getting enough power (EDIT: This was actually my aparement’s faulty wiring, though if you aren’t supplying it with enough power the sound won’t work either), and this things existence is probably part of the reason we’ve not seen a proper virtual console support on Switch. You can hack it to be able to upload other ROMs to it, which is neat (I haven’t done that), but ultimately it’s worth looking at the games and asking yourself: Do I really want to play most of these? Do I really want to buy this when I’ve already bought most of them?

SNES Classic

This is the same as above but more expensive with less games... But to me is a better value. It has a better selection of games (in my opinion), though they could’ve included some better ones. It still has the power issues (which are overcomable easily) but comes with 2 controllers with longer cables. Also StarFox 2 is a very nice game. I’d recommend this more than the NES Classic, but again, weigh what’s in it vs what you actually want to play if you can’t already

WarioWare Gold [3DS]

This is a compilation game done right. It has the WarioWare charm and the voice acting adds even more to it. The microgame selection and adaptations are wonderful, and honestly I don’t have any complaints. It has changed everything to fit in one of 3 (+2 smaller ones) categories: Mash, Twist, and Touch (+ blow and short). These are normally separate by category, but near the end they mix and match and even do some fun mix-up with it in the very last rounds and bonus game modes. Whether your first WarioWare or a veteran, this is in my opinion the best in the series, and I would suggest you give it a go.

Monster Hunter World [PC]

So this one is hard. I really wanted to like it, and after playing Dauntless I thought I would. I even promised friends I would play it with them frequently and keep up but... between friends being able to play when I couldn’t and the game’s wonky controls and online issues, I was falling behind and getting frustrated. That’s kinda side stuff; if I really liked it I could’ve caught up. The truth is, I liked Dauntless better because while it was also very buggy, the combat was just a lot more straightforward and responsive. Monster Hunter seemed like Dauntless with a bunch of annoyances added onto it. There are tons of collectibles and recipes, weapon sharpness is entirely pointless when the monsters run anyway to give you breaks, the weapons I played seemed sluggish to attack with, and monster attacks were unclear a lot of the time. Everything just felt like a pain in the ass or waste of time to deal with and put a lot of focus on inventory management or grinding, and to me the core game you would do that for just wasn’t there.

Like I enjoyed the free roaming and exploration, but the fighting is just not for me and that’s the whole point of the free roaming and all that. I feel bad about not liking this after enjoying Dauntless, but I just am not into Monster Hunter and will be skipping the series from now on.

Katamari Forever [PS3]

I got this one thinking it was a compilation game of all the Katamari games!

It was not. It’s actually the hardest Katamari game... Which kinda surprised me about how much of a dick they are when you start out since their controls are incredibly weird and unintuitive (you get used to them) and anything short of perfection will get the Kings to any where from passive aggressively imply you did poorly or just straight out call you awful and not to bother.

Here’s the part where randomly in the giant text post I just completely break whatever I was talking about because I’m 95% no one actually reads this so for shits and giggles the first person to reply to my tweet where I posted a link to the blogpost stating that they found this paragraph will get a free me replying back to that tweet saying “nice” back. An enticing gift amirite? Anyway continuing on.

That being said, it’s pretty fun after all that; there are one or two levels designed to be super annoying but the ones where you play the core game of quickly building your Katamari are for the most part very solid. This is for existing fans of the series, but i had a pretty good time with it after I got past the barrier to entry.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: Ultimate Edition [PC]

I’ve talked about liking Shantae before on this blog; I mentioned that I liked Pirate’s Curse but the fact that side missions and collectibles were actually required for game completion. This Shantae looks great and all, but they completely tossed out the open-like nature and makes it a series of linear levels that you have to revisit at least 2-3 times to find the stuff that should’ve been off somewhere in a different series of areas and optional that’s really just slightly out of reach due to a power up you arbitrarily find after the level you needed to use it in ends. Dungeons are completely gone; the game literally is just “go right” and remember all the little things you couldn’t get to for when you have to backtrack over and over again.

That’s just the base game, and even with all that said it’s not a bad game, it just doesn’t really feel like a Shantae game anything other than aesthetically. I spent a few hours trying to 100% the base game, but after getting 99% and discovering I had to backtrack yet again to a snake merchant to trade for dances just to use them once and trade back, I just had 0 interest in getting the final percent. There are also a variety of different takes on the same campaign where you play as Shantae in different costumes with different abilities, Risky, or even Bolo + Skye + Rotty, and again those look fun but... I don’t really want to play the same game another 10 times.

Dragalia Lost [Android]

This is Nintendo’s first jump into mobile with a new IP, and while it’s definitely banking hard on more traditional gacha mechanics (you can get 5 star items instead of Hero characters only), it’s definitely not bad. It’s pretty generous with stamina and resources, at least when you start, and my only major complaint is how you seem to hit a wall in terms of how long it takes to really progress about a week or so of playing every day in. And it’s quite a wall; there’s quite a lot of grinding needed once you get to chapter 6 (the current final chapter that really feels like just the end of a prologue (Edit, they recently added chapter 7)), so you really need to like it. The levels are kinda simple as well, though there’s a maze-like area in the story that’s a bit more clever so it’s a start at least. All and all, it’s worth a try, but if you don’t like the top-down brawler after the first world, it’s not worth forcing through gacha mechanics for; especially since after you complete normal story mode, all you’re going to be doing is grinding to get through hard and the summoning currency gets scarce fast. For reference, getting enough to be able to challenge the High Dragon quests and not immediately die in them takes 2 months of grinding specifically for that purpose if you use your stamina optimally, which you won’t because events are more fun anyway

Overcooked 2 [Switch Download]

So this is actually really fun with a friend or 3; and that’s where it really shines. Sure, you can do it single player but it just doesn’t feel as fun. This is a sort of quick time-management game where you have to frantically run around cooking various recipes before they run out of time, to get a star rating at the end. There’s some bad levels, but the majority are really fun and it feels very fair even in single layer; I always think at the end regardless of the rank that I could’ve managed my dudes to do even better. The only real complaint is the loading times seem... unnecessarily long. Especially for restarting a level. It’s nothing too bad though.

Luckily this has online multiplayer, so I highly recommend picking this up on a platform that your friends have it on, ie Steam. I got it on Switch and in hindsight since I strongly dislike Nintendo’s online service I really wish I had gotten like a 2-pack on Steam. That’s not a complaint with the game though; I really liked it!

Super Mario Party [Switch]

Probably the best Mario Party in a very, VERY long time. This is going to be a longer review. I played this first with Keewy and his roommates and we had a great time in every single game mode (except online).

The Mario Party mode is really good; they’ve shrunk the map and reduced how much stars cost to 10 coins, but 10-15 turn games can still take an hour to an hour and a half. This makes it a much simpler, easier to get mode, but the real star here is them bringing back the Ally & character dice mechanic from Mario Party Star Rush (had it’s good moments, but was on 3DS so that’s it for that). Each character can roll a normal 1-6 dice, but they also each have a unique die that has different numbers on it. These are for the most part balanced; character with higher numbers on their dice also have downsides instead of a 1. 0′s, losing coins, and in some cases gaining coins (because you still don’t move), and it adds a level of strategy to it where otherwise it would be just “roll and hop for the best. That’s what it is still, but sometimes you can choose. You can also pick up other characters who will help you in minigames, give you the option to roll their die, and add 1-2 spaces to your roll. It’s super fun.

The River Rafting mode is 4-player co-op, and it’s pretty fun as well your first run through. Not single player though; this very much shines with 4 people. However, because there are only like 8? 4-player co-op minigames, you see every game on your first run so it doesn’t really hold up after your first couple runs.

The dance mode is great; it’s like Rhythm heaven but Mario Party themed. Again, these minigames are really fun, but once you play through all 3 difficulties, which takes about 10 minutes, there aren’t any you haven’t played.

2v2 is ripped straight out of Star Rush, which is a great thing. Again, don’t play this with a cpu on your team at least. As far as I can tell, even in Mario Party mode, CPU’s make the same brain-dead decisions on the boards regardless of their difficulty level. Anyway, this has the same 4 boards but opened up vastly; You now roll, combine it with your partner, then add any allies you may have picked up along the way’s 1-2 rolls and other bonuses. The point is to land on the starspace and buy it, and it’s just a good time to see the strategy involved with either going for the stars, allies, or secondary goals. By far the best alternative Mario Party gameplay style in a while (way better than Island Tour’s linear maps and 9-10′s Car mode), but again there’s only the 4 maps.

So I guess my only true complaint is that while there are a lot of minigames, they’re split so much over the different modes they don’t feel like a lot and you see repeats frequently. Additionally it would be nice to turn on/off the bonus stars at the end and other options involving maybe skipping some of the cutscenes (star moving, places changed, etc.). All in all, the best and most interesting Mario Party in a long, long time. I highly recommend it if you have a friend to pick it up with.

Just Shapes & Beats

Got this game for a bit of random multiplayer. It’s a pretty fun, music based bullet hell game all about staying alive through the song while crazy stuff happens on screen. The story mode doesn’t overstay its welcome, but there’s also plenty of content and challenges for those who are so inclined, and only one of the levels felt utterly, bullshitingly unfair (which is really good with bullet hells) so It’s a fun time if you’re into top down bullet hells, and better with a friend in challenge mode

Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee [Switch]

I could write a dissertation on this game and how it’s neither good or bad; it’s just kinda... there. Some aspects are incredibly disappointing; the capture mechanics are absolute garbage, forced motion controls are atrocious, player/npc animations and interactions are completely stilted and lazy, the world is very bland vs Sun and Moon, the performance in handheld mode drops frames sometimes which is unacceptable, there’s almost zero post game, and even more. It’s by all means an HD reskin of a Gameboy game running on their crappy 3DS engine.

But there’s a lot of good here as well; seeing pokemon in the overworld is amazing and should be the case in the series moving forward, partner pokemon (eevee) are fun and fucking adorable, riding pokemon is great, having fast captures makes chaining a really fun mechanic, Having some of the E4 and Gym leaders interact with you during your quest makes the world interesting, connectivity with go is very limited but still good, having only one pokemon be obtainable only once in the game is a welcome and frankly overdue change in the game, removing breeding/abilities/held items really streamlines the mechanics and makes the game more enjoyable in a lot of cases, and I could go on.

I’m not going to recommend it, but I mean if you liked any pokemon game you’re definitely not going to not have fun with this one, even if the randomness in the capture mechanics frustrates you to no end

Super Smash Bros Ultimate [Switch]

So I mean it’s smash bros. Not much really to say about that, it’s pretty good. I kinda like Smash Bros not just for the multiplayer but the single-player as well, which is why Brawl is still my Favorite so take that as my approach here. The normal gameplay is fine, though the input buffer feels wonky at times and some characters are much harder to play against than others, which in combination with the sheer amount of characters makes it very difficult to get the hang of and counter accordingly, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just the barrier between playing casually and playing a bit more seriously feels sudden when randomly coming across characters that have inherent advantages from being wonky. Cloud for example seems to have a move for evertyhing, can spit out attacks very quickly, and if you try anything silly they’ll just charge a better move, and then randomly fighting a Ganondorf is like “I hope they don’t know how to read you because you can die at like 35 from a single fuck up”

The Single Player content though was... Disappointing. Not nearly as bad as Sm4sh, but it seems like they spent so much time putting as many characters and stages in the game as possible that they realized they wouldn’t have time to do old game modes the same way, so they made a system which allowed them to make custom smash battles with weird attributes and built the entirety of the bonus content on that. There’s really only adventure mode which is just a progression of Event Matches which gets somewhat stale and repetitive quickly, Mob Smash is just not really that fun past your first run or two, All-Star Smash is actually near impossible and not even rewarding, Classic does one or two cool ideas with routes but they clearly got lazy with a lot of characters there too, and the only platforming challenge in the game is the bonus level which takes 30 seconds and never changes.

Their Online mode is unacceptably bad and lacks options for random fights as well, and given that they’re charging for it this is just flat-out unacceptable. Buy it if you like playing Smash for the Multiplayer (which is almost everyone), but this is a hard pass if you were expecting a large amount of interesting content like Brawl’s Adventure mode had. Or are incapable of learning past a certain point, like me.

Katamari Damacy Reroll [Switch]

So after having played Forever earlier in the year and hearing how much praise this got, I had very High expectations! Unfortunately the controls are still ehhhhh and the game is surprisingly short; I beat it over the course of a 4ish hour flight. It’s definitely a lot nicer to you than Forever is, but in terms of amount of content it’s not aged well. If you’ve not played it before, pick it up on sale, but as far as I can tell this outing doesn’t add anything new to the original and it’s just a straight up re-release

Mario Tennis Aces [Switch]

So does anyone actually look forward to Mario Tennis Games? The past two have been husks of content and this one’s not really much better. The charging mechanic is interesting, but doesn’t feel that consistent or fair in some scenarios, but like was anyone waiting for this to get announced? Or is this just a “safe” series that sells okay and pads out the library for quick cash?”

It’s weird that they knew the Adventure mode was something fans really, REALLY wanted and touted it as some huge deal, even advertising it with a cool pre-rendered cutscene, and the whole mode with all challenges turns out to be at most a couple hours long, repetitive, and only actually has the two cutscenes (the 2nd being like 10 seconds). They made some silly RPG level up mechanic which didn’t feel like it made any difference, you can’t change your character so you’re really only learning how Mario plays, and it does a really poor job of explaining the different kinds of shots to you so it’s not even good for learning the game. I wasn’t expecting an experience worth telling for generations with the plot either, but even that gives up on itself; Luigi is possessed but he doesn’t do anything the whole game until you fight him, not even with the 3/5 power stones you have, and these power stones you spent the game collecting don’t do anything or matter because Bowser comes out of no where and “takes” the racket and power stones and challenges you to an admittedly fun boss fight. Not in a cutscene mind you, you’re just told this happens. It’s just lazy.

The game has some visual issues too; it’s missing any sort of stylistic flair and honestly just looks like an up-res’d Wii game, though with smoother models. Shadows flicker and cut through textures, and something weird’s going on with anti-aliasing that makes everything look blurry as hell too. I will say props for going to the effort of making tennis costumes for every character though; so that’s more effort than what went into Ultra Smash.

If you’re a huge, HUGE fan of Mario Tennis, go nuts. But uh, yeah this isn’t really worth your time for the price otherwise

Starlink: Battle for Atlas (Starter Pack) [Switch]

Yeah so it’s rich coming from me, but honestly this game is only hindered by the physical toys. As far as I can tell you can only play as generic Mr. No Personality or Fox, and then you only have the two options for weapons. The game could get interesting combat-wsie with the combinations of ships and like I think 14ish different weapons? But with just the starter pack you run through what the game has to offer pretty quick.

It is interesting though how I very rarely play Ubisoft games and hadn’t played one since their open-world formula milking, but right away I could tell that it was a Ubisoft open world game. There’s a lot to do, a lot of planets to explore, movement is fun and surprisingly easy, combat is pretty straightforward and has potential, but the key thing is that there’s like 30-50 facilities on each planets with like 4 different types of objectives (3 of which are “kill the same bad guys immediately here”), and you can spend hours on one planets doing some minor variance on that same thing over and over and over.

It’s a pretty good start in terms of base mechanics for what would be a cool system for an open StarFox game (and I know it wasn’t trying for that) but the repetitiveness of exploring, frankly pathetic writing in terms of characters, and locking a lot of the interesting content behind toys detracts from the experience. It’s definitely not un-fun, but after clearing 4 planets and seeing that’s just what the game is doing I don’t have any interest in continuing.

At least other than to see StarFox, because Ubisoft did them better justice than Nintendo has in years.

Best Game I Played in 2018: Celeste

Easy choice here, Celeste has a wonderful story, looks gorgeous, plays like a dream and managed to be an incredibly challenging platformer that didn’t make me lose my patience ever, which is AMAZING considering how little patience I have whenever I fail at a game.

I was going to pick the best game that actually came out in 2018 but honestly it’d be between like 4 games that I had gripes with in some way or another, so i’m going to say Overcooked 2 is pretty fucking solid and leave this whole run on sentence in the heading font because why not it’s my dead blog I can do whatever the fuck I wan-

Anyway that’s it. Hope everyone had a good year

#Game Impressions

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tumblunni · 8 years ago

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GODDAMMIT I CANT PICK A MARRIAGE

Rune Factory 4 why do you persist in having TOO MANY GOOD CHARACTERS I’ve narrowed it down to two but now i keep changing my damn mind again! I’ve decided I’m gonna see the marriages for the three characters I liked on different save files, but who should I marry first and go with for real on this save file?? i’ve run out of patience for waiting to pick a batchelor as the VERY LAST THING i do before I turn off the game, I need to do it now! I need to do it before I start this final bonus dungeon thing to rescue [spoilery dead character] from the afterlife. I WANT TO SHOW THEM MY CHILD WHEN THEY RETURN. And this game is SO LONG and cos of how semi random the skill levelling is, I dont think I’d have the patience to complete the same 20 so hours three times to complete all the savefiles, and it’d be really frustrating if I couldnt max out all the same skills on them :P SO YEAH GAHHH Need to FINALLY DECIDE between leon and dylas!

PROS N CONZ

Dylas:

* Has the most romantic chemistry in my opinion, and also my favourite main character after Arthur. (Tho I ended up not really feeling that ship so even tho hhe’s my fave batchelor he’s not the one I wanted to marry??) * is really fucking awkward adorable which is MY FAVE kind of ship! * also his romance route is primarily about cheesy romance rather than like.. lots of lusty flirty sexual attraction type stuff that I’m not really capable of understanding. * HAs a load of great character development and seems like he’d be the most happy to be with you. * is the coolest of the monster people, even if im still salty he doesnt look more like his monster form. They coulda just given him a unicorn horn and it would have brought the whole design together! * Marrying him would make me feel less salty sad that there’s no way to get him and doug to hook up when they are CLEARLY CANONICALLY BISEXUAL GEEZ * A minor con is that this would mean I have to play the rest of the game with the postgame cheat mode gay marriage thing switched on. Which could get a bit annoying since its just a character model swap and its a bit glitchy sometimes, but I like both genders of protagonist equally much anyway. i just feel slightly guilty thinking im somehow being disloyal to the one I picked at the beginning, but then again i literally only picked the girl because you cant romance dylas unless you’re the girl and GAHHH I was so happy to know you could cheat and have cheat mode gay marriage so IMMA GONNA DO IT * seriously its an option so i cant NOT take it * make up for lack of doug x dylas route by doing dylas x male protag * also dylas was the one I wanted to pick since before i knew anything about the game, he was my fave based on design alone and then his personality in his first scene was amazing and aaaa * also dylas’s romance route is REALLY TERRIBLE which is maybe a pro and maybe a con?? like.. i wanna marry him cos he had no plot and i wanna make it up to him, but i also DONT wanna marry him cos his route wasnt my favourite plot and aaaa why does my brain not make sense * also a pro: PORCOLINE * i get to officially marry into the restaurant fam! * i have literally got porcoline in my party right now while im holding the engagement ring, he needs to be there to see me pop the question! i just love this dad so much, i have to marry one of his kids * also I can pretend that arthur is still my friend and he isnt mad that i picked his brother over him and we can all be the best family ever

Leon:

* has the best and saddest romance route backstory thing that makes me feel so guilty if I dont marry him * is also my favourite design! like, dylas is the best monster but leon has the best human form design, i have no lil niggling complaints about how he looks like a wolf for no damn reason. * is the only bara character * ended up being surprisingly cute and genuine about his love and i actually really like the archetype of the flirty fake-playboy type guy who isnt the jerky playboy archetype but instead secretly adorable and shy when he falls in love for real! And its even better cos he’s a snarky overconfident trickster guy so its EVEN MORE CUTE when he drops his big facade and lets himself admit his emotions! * BUT admiteddly I still feel rather uncomfortable doing overly flirty innuendoy dating sims because I’m way too asexual to relate. I’ve had a few moments with leon where its just like... killed the moment kinda, and made me feel bad that im not the intended audience. This game makes me care about the characters so i feel just as awkward as when I’ve accidentally ‘led people on’ in real life in high school and had to super anxiously let them down. I just feel awkward even though I know that the character in-universe that I’m playing at probably isnt asexual, im still like ‘noooo i dont wanna trick him into a sexless marriage he wouldnt be happy aaaa’ * but also aaa he has the most chemistry with the female main character I think, he’s like the only one I think looks like a cuter couple with her, while I wanna ship dylas with the male mc. i just really liked a fanart I saw of them described as ‘fox and bunny’! thats totally it, her hairstyle just matches so well with an animal ears dude, and their colours have a good appeal together and stuff~ * Also i have more headcanons about what it would be like when they had kids and stuff! so thats a big appeal because getting to see the kid characters is the big reason i wanna marry a charrie * ALSO, its kinda... uhh... to put it lightly... well, Leon is literally the only dark skinned man in the entire world. SERIOUSLY. Rune Factory rarely ever has more than one character of a different race, and I just feel like if you’re gonna be so limited in your options I wanna pick that option like... maybe if they see they’re the popular ones then they’ll realise theyre making a dumb decision and add more racial diversity in future games?? or at least npcs?? seriously??? He’s not just the only dark skinned batchelor but THE ONLY CHARACTER IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. At least rune factory oceans had the whole dark elf race. (Tho that was weird that there’s apparantly no black humans in this world...)

GAHHH I DUNNO I JUST WANNA MAKE THESE DUMB BOYS HAPPY I wish i could have like a best friend option to select or something can I give a consolation prize... IM SORRY LEON OR DYLAS and IM SORRY ARTHUR and IM SORRY PORCOLINE IF I DONT MARRY YOUR SON

#why am i so bad at decisions #this game is designed to hit my anxieties #bunni plays rf4

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apkrich-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.apkrich.com/modern-combat-5-mod-apk-free-download-latest-version-offline-mode/

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Mrityunjoy Das: It was my first ever multiplayer gameplay that I have ever played. Earlier I played this game in my iPhone & IPad I. e. on ios version way back on 2015 where I have unlocked all the available fighter characters and reached level 50 stage. Thereafter, the game was updated to a higher version which my ios version didn’t support. Thereafter, 3long years now I have finished all the story levels which I was unable to finish it earlier. Hence, one could imagine how much I liked the game. LOL

Prabhakar Singh: The game is awesome. amazing maps and adventurous campaign missions. for Multiplayer matches it can be improved more. I’d love if they introduce a new option in setting controls, i.e rearranging the tapping points for the trigger, grenade, Crouch, etc on the screen. Thank you…

Devin Smith: great game good graphics but when the last update came out today it had a flaw…. on April 19, 2019, when the new update came out when I want to go play multiplayer it won’t let me it says that my connection was lost but I didn’t have bad internet at the time.

Sarah Abdullah: Awesome Game! Like this is an awesome game! My 7-year-old brother loves this game and also askes me to always play it on my phone. The downside is that I feel like this game should be for everyone! Besides this problem…Awesome Game!

Umer Khan: I got great experience it is the game I wanted.it is historical, it is fantasy, and it has the great graphics and the important thing it is shooting game but I love its graphics are better than I thought I really recommend this game I love it a really nice adventure.

Broc Sampson: love the gameplay. fairly balanced weapons & armor. I don’t like the knife Jack’s. works with an Xbox controller. wish they would add more maps.

Gaby Villa: I was so happy when I started playing this game it’s because of it challenging and fun. I just want to say though that this game has a very big potential in going at the top of the ratings but it has a lot of improvement before it gets there, like adding more stuff in moving your character like rolling to avoid and jumping to reach high places I really had some cool ideas but I don’t want to state them cuz this game is yours and it your idea that matters. So, all in all, it best game there is.

Renga nathan S: This game is awesome and I am very excited while playing this game. This game has good graphics in weapon detail. And the other graphics also very good. This game more weapons so it increased the rate of playing. No fix in this game, but very hard to get a blueprint of a weapon so plz make it easy It will increase your rate of plays. Another good work is multi-player have increased the game in the first TPS Thank you.

victory egwuatu: it’s an awesome game alright but the graphic a wasn’t the same as the video on my phone, the multiplayer is cool and all but sometimes when I’m shooting an opponent it’s his bot doesn’t move and next thing I’m dead cause the same person killed me from behind. kinda sucks. as for the story, its really ok, plus I’ve been trying to download the remaining chapters but it isn’t downloading for some reason and it keeps disconnecting from the server continuously good game overall but please help fix it.

Grant Stuarte: Honestly, love this game, but there are several things that really annoy me that keep me from giving 5 stars. First being it 9/10 times will put you on the same map no matter what. literally today I tried it just to see; 15 times in a row I left streets, because I had already played several matches there, and it put me back in that map every single time. 2nd is just small glitchy things like someone stabbing you when they are facing away from you.

Basheer vi: Best Shooting Game. I love to play this game please make it offline soon. My Island has a low speed of internet. So make it offline it will help more gamers to play like me. I don’t want it fully offline but you need to add offline story mode too. And also online multiplayer for fastest network users. Thank you.😍😍😍😍

Charles Parr: I have been playing this game since 2013. Its a great game with awesome graphics. With that being said, I am very disappointed with this latest update. The app keeps disconnecting and when I do manage to keep a stable connection I can’t play multiplayer because it is stuck at 64% downloading map data. I hope the developers fix this soon. I have a lot of money invested in armors, weapons, etc!

Lucas Henrique: man this game is so good, great graphics and great history involved on the game but, after this last updates, I can’t play multiplayer matches and it’s always reconnecting and reconnecting… I almost uninstalled it( Just didn’t do it ’cause it has cost a lot of my time to download). And it would be the smallest problems if I could get out of the tutorial when I access the game;-;. So I really hope this game come back to normal.

Tboy Brima: The game is fun. Unlocking weapons is satisfying and they give a nice amount of free credits. The controls are very wonky. Too difficult to aim even when I use a gamepad. Sensitivity is on either side of the spectrum of being too low or too high. Higher tier weapons are very overpowered. Developers need to finetune the controls and gameplay.

kalo tamanikaiyaroi: The best graphical game so far. The 3/4d is amazing. The multiplayer freezes sometimes. Control needs a combo mode, the knife is not available to new players and support staff should be buyable with in-game cash, gold, and coins. The game sometimes freezes at the end of a match mostly multiplayer. Campaign mode the game always verify files and starts download all over, even when opening the app. The boosted mode is most of the time freezing in-game, after and when count down to start. Almost like PS4 on mobile.

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App Download Version 3.8.0n Last Updated April 18, 2019 Apk Size 58 MB Offered By Gameloft SE Category Action Content Rating Rated for 16+ Support Android Version Android 4.1 and up Installs 100,000,000+ Play Store Available

#Modern Combat 5 mod apk

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zeta-in-de-walls · 4 years ago

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Hey guys. So in MCC you might have noticed that Dream got a little salty. This was a shame for me as it’s so much nicer to watch Dream whilst he’s in a good mood. For better or worse though, he’s super competitive.

Here’s a breakdown of how the event went badly for Dream and his team. It’s pretty long...

The event starts well; Skyblockle is an interesting, if stressful game, and they do pretty well for their first time. Not perfectly though and they recognise they could do better too - Dream’s already pretty hard on himself for any mistakes he makes. But it’s purely directed at himself and how he can improve - I think it’s pretty evident he holds himself to a high standard.

Bingo is next and he kinda doesn’t know what he’d doing and wastes some time. I feel like he notes it down too much to not knowing the game but it is pretty luck-based anyway. Also this was a really quick game as so many of the items were very easy to obtain in a very short time. Anyway, they didn’t expect to do well really and Dream’s in good spirits, looking forward to the other games.

Then Battle box comes... and it’s extremely laggy and even glitchy. The weapon choices of Wooden axes and tnt seem honestly pretty bad just in terms of gameplay and the tnt is outright gamebreaking with the lag. Despite this, Dream’s team is doing well, having won their first 4 games and they’re keen to win more. Dream’s even instructing Sylveey to wait on the wool in order to maximise kill points (you can see he’s taking this really seriously as he could sound a little nicer as she’s certainly trying to win too).

Anyway, the game needs to be restarted - some players killed themselves outside the rounds and that’s not exactly fair. For whatever reason, reviving them is not possible. The chosen solution is to restart the entire round which regretfully seriously inconveniences Dream’s team. He’s incensed at the perceived injustices. He feels that it would be better to push on without restarting.

The proceeding rounds don’t go nearly as well for them as the first play through. Many teams have now realised how effective rushing strats are for this map - the axe is too slow in pvp to meaningfully stop players from quickly placing down wool and the tnt is dangerous enough to scare people from the centre. It’s a legitimate strategy but feels rather unlike the traditional battle box which is usually the closest minigame to a straightforward pvp battle. While the lag is universal, it rather this strategy which goes against purple’s playstyle which includes maximised kills. Additionally, restarting gave a lot of teams the change to realise the potential of this rather cheap strategy which they may not have with only a single round of battle box as it would have been without the lag.

It’s not really anyone’s fault that the game messed up but Dream’s ire is now directed towards the organisers and he’s lost his good spirits.

Buildmart comes next and it’s not exactly one of Dream’s favourite games to say the least. Still, it’s long and a nice distraction from the mess that was battle box and Dream has developed some strategy with his team, even if it didn’t really work amazingly.

But then comes the audience takeover. Dream was really looking for parkour warrior - which he’s been really keen to play. He’s extremely fond of parkour and wanted to try out the new course - he and his whole team had practiced the old course a lot and were ready to crush the game. But it wasn’t one of the the options in the poll at all. Up to this point Parkour warrior hasn’t been an option at all and it is one the team has every reason to want to play.

Regardless, they soon settle on Hole in the wall - a gamemode they’ve played before and enjoyed. And yeah, the system messes up. Rocket spleef, which was Technoblade’s choice, narrowly lost the poll but gets selected anyway due to faultiness from the twitter poll. Needless to say, Dream is pretty annoyed. Given how the resetted Battle box earlier, he is of the opinion that they should switch in to Hole in the Wall to accurately reflect the audience vote. What he doesn’t realise is that this isn’t possible and the situation is less similar to battle box which only reset itself, not the game choice.

This is where Dream gets outright angry, even going as far to say he feels like quitting entirely. He feels like the tournament is working against him, which it kinda is, though it’s not in fact due to human design - just errors outside anyone’s control. That said, compounded with the mess that was Battle box earlier, Dream’s in a terrible mood, especially with his competitive nature, feeling like he’s losing due to circumstances outside his control rather than his own abilities. (When fans are saying rigged, I feel like many of them simply mean that the game’s working against him rather than that someone is actively sabotaging them (an incorrect definition...). It’s a minority that kicked up a large fuss as well, not that this excuses them or anything, or Dream for not realising the effect he’s having on his audience.)

His heart is simply not in Rocket Spleef, which seems to be a pretty tough game for newcomers to pick up anyway, while the other top teams, Orange and Green, both excel at this game mode. (And Krimson too maybe? I think I missed how they were doing in this game.) It’s a shame as he can’t allow himself to enjoy the game mode at all. It is an interesting one that he’s not amazing at but isn’t terrible at either, managing to survive longer than the rest of his team, who are all also doing lacklustre. Their performance has not been helped by everything that’s going on.

Then there’s ace race. It’s a new game and pretty different from the standard minecraft experience. It’s the first time for everyone so there’s probably a few kinks to be worked out etc. and Dream and his team find it interesting but they don’t exactly love it. It’s very different from the standard minecraft experience. Their strongpoints are definitely vanilla minecraft and they’re not too confident with elytras. I feel like if they weren’t in a dour mood they would have enjoyed it tons more. Two elytra heavy games in a row is unfortunate. Still, this game acts as a breather. The one issue is that parkour warrior is finally on the board and so they’re very keen to play it.

As the next decision dome comes up, Parkour warrior, Hole in the Wall, TGTTOS, Survival Games and Sands of time are all available. These are all probably Dream’s favourite games aside from Battle box (which obviously didn’t work out this tournament). Dream notes beforehand that the one game he’d really like to play is Parkour Warrior and the one he’d prefer to avoid at this stage is Sands of Time.

So naturally, Sands of Time is chosen. He’s a bit irritated. Fortunately, Sands of Time is awesome and his team is great at it. Single player survival stuff is what they excel at after all and they all perform. They take risks, make a lot of coins, get far and are among the longest teams to stay in, coming in second overall with both Dream and Sapnap doing really well. This game proves to be what finally cures Dream and his team’s mood. The game is also worth a ton of points for some reason, putting them in with a (still small but possible) chance of making the finals.

Last game and they really want Parkour warrior of course. Yeah, it’s not chosen. Instead we get hole in the wall. Some may joke that its good that the game finally got chosen but it’s obviously not the favoured choice for this team when Parkour warrior’s an option. Oh well though! They’re disappointed to miss out on it but they do like hole in the wall and they all have fun playing it, doing decently though not nearly well enough to do better than their rivals.

By this time they’ve regained their spirits and eagerly support Green Guardians in dodgebolt. It’s an intense match and they all thoroughly enjoy watching it, especially seeing Pete team clutch out the win after being down.

At the end, Dream finds that despite everything he’s still somehow managed to obtain 3rd overall on the individual boards, the same as last time, and he’s really happy about it. His team are pretty happy too with Sapnap also managing to get 8th place in his very first event.

Dream closes off the stream with an apology. You can see as it goes on how the frustration slowly melts away as he begins talking. At first still obviously still annoyed but soon confessing that he seriously overreacted and that he still loves the event and the team behind it and holds them to a very high standard. He offers kind words towards Technoblade and Pete too, noting that the rivalry is for show and he greatly respects both of them and encourages all his watchers to go and subscribe to them, helping Technoblade to hit 2mil. He notes that he’s really competitive and he really wanted it to go well - especially as its the only time he’ll be allowed to play with George and Sapnap and really wanted to win it with them. His sentiments feel real and he expresses interest in playing again while noting that he could see them also not inviting him back after his behaviour during this even and understands that.

Overall, game choices and unfortunate circumstances worked against Dream and his team and left him in a bad mood but once it ended, he did bounce back. It’s easy to see the contrast from the last event where he was annoyed he didn’t win but blamed his own performance - not the event and not his teammates - reflecting on how he can improve and do better. (He got temporarily a little annoyed at buildmart admittedly but it was purely his fans who blew that out of proportion, he quickly reassured George that it was okay and that it wasn’t his fault.) Dream is always very determined to improve and succeed or fail due to his own skills.

This turned into a long analysis of the event, wow. Dream’s perspective wasn’t that much fun to watch and it pains me to see how it all devolved. Let’s calm down and try not to blame the event, the other competitors or Dream too hard for any of this, okay? Things went wrong and it’s mostly outside of anyone’s control. I hope he’s in better spirits if he joins next tournament.

#dreamwastaken #sorry this was so long!#i guess I had to analyse the whole event #a summary of it from dream's perspective i guess #apparently techno's viewpoint was far more entertaining #this one left me feeling bitter at least until sands of time #his talk with techno afterwards was great though #best part of the event for me #post-end i know #i look forward to the upcoming manhunt and collabs #the dangers of tryharding #and the issues with having a large fanbase #i think he forgot he wasn't just talking to his friends #analysis

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