I don't really like roguelites. At least I always thought. The only one I really tried was the Binding of Isaac. I never progressed far, I never really got the hang of it and had a lot of unsuccessful runs. I finally gave up on it. So I went for years without trying new ones. Until Hades. I played it quite a lot and had a lot of successful runs, but never fully beat the game.

I returned to it with the recent launch of Hades II into Early Access and finished (except a few achievements) my save. The gameplay and difficulty is very well-balanced for my skill level and it managed to motivate for several weeks. Overall I put over 100h into it and the pull was so strong, I got Hades II right away. I know not very patient of me. Another 40h later and I finished the content that is available so far. I can see myself diving back in for the 1.0 release or a big update.

Afterwards I looked for other well-received roguelites and picked up Dead Cells and all the DLC in a sale. Similar story here. 80h in, I made it to 2 BC and unlocked a most weapons and quite a big chunk of the outfits. My playstyle is rather slow and deliberate, but I enjoy the challenge a lot. 2 BC is kicking my ass a bit and I'm thinking about moving on again.

I'm currently thinking about what comes next. With the steam sale going on, I am considering Hollow Knight, even though I have very little experience mit Metroidvanias. Also Sekiro is a possibility. I never played a From Software game or our souls-like before. (Mostly) fighting human-sized enemies and a focus on parrying suits my preferences well.

If anyone has recommendations for other roguelites or games to jump to, please leave a comment.

I'm glad I tried a genre I had written off before. It resulted in a lot of fun playing hours. I recommend stepping out of your gaming comfort zone once in a while.

I watched a YouTube video about this topic today and thought it was the perfect idea for a post here. It’s pretty straightforward, it’s games you played in the past that you’re still stuck thinking about, or games that taught you a lesson that you’ve held on to.

I’m going to start. For me, the two games that perfectly exemplify the idea of a game that sticks with you are Sekiro and BioShock. I have a feeling Dark Souls will be a popular choice but I think Sekiro did it more for me personally.

Starting with Sekiro, I honestly think it’s the closest to perfect I’ve ever seen in a video game, at least for a first playthrough. It’s fun, challenging, rewarding, thoughtfully made, beautiful to look at, it’s got great voice acting, memorable characters, and I honestly can only think of two mini bosses that bring the whole game very slightly down. Every other aspect is a 10/10 from me. Not to mention the combat is the best combat of any game I’ve ever played. Personally, this game is the purist example of a game that forces you to get good at it, and does the best job at teaching perseverance. In the rest of the Souls games, you can upgrade your weapon, get a new weapon, use buffs, summon NPCs or another player to help, if you’re getting stuck. With Sekiro on the other hand, you need to get good. Above any other game, this one showed me just how well hard work can pay off. I feel about this game the same way video essayists feel about Dark Souls. If you know, you know.

Moving on to BioShock, this one really taught me the value of a good story, and showed me that video games truly are art. It helped that the game itself is a ton of fun to play, but on top of that the writing is just phenomenal. I’m assuming most people on here have played this one so I won’t get too into it, and in case you haven’t, most of what I’d be gushing about would spoil the whole game anyway, so I’m just leaving it short, but yeah. This game is the finest example of video games being an art form.

What about you guys? What has stuck with you the hardest? I’ve got more games I could talk about but I’d love to see discussion from you.

I’m not going to do a detailed write up on this but I’ve always heard that The Force Unleashed was a really good set of Star Wars games that are still worth playing today, if not for the game at least for the story. That wasn’t my experience at all.

This is just my opinion and experience but the first game is awful to play in 2024. Most of your abilities miss the target every time. Picking up objects with the force has a 50% chance of picking up the wrong thing, sometimes from way off screen and often missing stuff in the foreground. Throwing them is also incredibly inaccurate, often times you’ll just throw things at walls or the sky. The combat isn’t balanced whatsoever and it’s basically unplayable at higher difficulties.

Your force grab and throw abilities make most enemies pointless and your light saber does surprisingly little damage even with upgrades. Far better to just bounce people off the wall. Then what’s worse is later on they introduce shields that stop you from using the force on some enemies. They do pretty much the same but with the lightsaber getting blocked. Rather than encouraging variety, they just leave a giant hole in the combat. It’s dreadful. The mechs are also ridiculous to engage and can’t be engaged in melee should they stomp you to death. The even worser part is, the story is 6/10 interesting and the boss battles are a mess.

Then the second game, oh boy. On PC it’s almost entirely broken. It crashes and most of the cutscenes don’t play unless you patch the game (I did) and even then, crashes happen often. I had about 10 over just 4-5 hours. Textures also glitch and slowdown is frequent. I played both games with a 60fps patch (necessary imo) and the performance issues exited with or without that patch. Awful.

The good news is the second game has a decent story and surprising visuals. The combat is much improved and a lot more balanced honestly. It’s just that the gameplay is incredibly dated. The whole game is mostly just go to room, door is locked, enemies appear, you kill them, door unlocks, repeat until boss fight. There’s also platforming here which is.. bad. Inaccurate controls and imprecise movement makes that hell. So the second game is much better even with the issues, but I still barely had fun with it.

Seems to me like these games rode by on the gimmick of the dark side and extreme power. In their time, both games were pretty good. All of my friends seemed to like them. But in this year? I don’t think there’s any reason to play the first, and only novelty in the second. Just watch the cutscenes are movies.

I’m sure many people have nostalgia for this though. These games used to be more unique and the story was unusual for the time. Sadly we aren’t likely to see a continuation and finish to this series. Thoughts?

Got the games years ago for the GBC, and I've always love it. But I always got stuck in a handful of dungeons. Level 3, level 4, level 6, and finally the black tower.

But I was finally able to solve it myself with no hints! This is in my view one of the best Zelda games.

We've got two big sales going on, and I'm currently deciding what I would like to pick up. I'm planning to get Expeditions: Rome since it's 60% off, and I'm trying to decide if I want to finally get Terra Invicta.

What patient games are the people here planning to pick up? Maybe I'll find a few that I "need" to try!

I've been playing dark souls lately and wanted to see what pegi wrote about it. It's mildly amusing

I grew up with goldeneye and perfect dark.

I decided to play the recompiled version of this game on my steam deck.

First of all, this game had some really big environments for n64. It’s surprising how much they fit in these old games.

Secondly, after you finish the main game, there are two bonus missions where you play as another character to see their side of the story.

Modern day these are called “dlc”.

The shooting range portion of the game is either too easy or impossibly difficult. I’ll try with mouse to kind of cheese it.

My understanding is that when you complete the shooting range and combat simulator there is another unlockable mission.

Now that I am typing this I wonder if there is another unlockable level for completing on the hardest difficulty like golden eye.

Anyway, if you have or have not played this game, it’s totally worth playing the recompiled version of the game.

https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark

Works on Linux and Windows perfectly.

If you run it on the steamdeck, you can just download the Linux version, add it to Steam, then manually tell it to run with proton. I didn’t know this was possible until yesterday, but it will not run on steamdeck without proton due to missing dependencies that are included with proton.

Have fun.

I'm born in 1992 so this game is a bit before my time. I started playing it and got completely hooked. It's an absolutely fantastic game that would still hold up as a quality indie game today.

Music is amazing. Characters and character development is amazing. Story is very good. Combat is genuinely fun instead of feeling like a chore that cuts you off from the game. Art style is amazing.

I was surprised how much quality they could fit onto the SNES back it the day, it's a really good game and everyone with a potato can ploy it.

Pro tip: Remasters have some UI unpleasantness so it's best to stick to SNES emu version. I tried the Android and they used some native android font that ruined the immersion a bit. There's also a tight running section that's particularly unsuited for the mobile version. SNES is best, as originally intended.

What’s the rush?

Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm based third-person melee combat game that rewards you by landing your hits on the beat. From a list of flowing combos comes a catchy beat, skilled moves, and rocking visual effects. This is a masterpiece of a game and its stylistic characters banter in hilarious ways, its world comes together to feel alive, and its art style just never stops hitting those notes. If you want to know about the hype, let’s get into it.

Music make you lose control

This is what keeps the game together in a rhythm-based fighter, it’s the peanut butter that glues the bread into a sandwich. The music is phenomenal, I just need you to listen to it.This is what I’m talkin’ about. What’s missing from this though is the kicking beat that you make with your moves as you play. The game rewards you as you hit your combos by adding to the soundtrack, and it all works so so so well.

Never stop fighting, rockstar

Combat is the actual bread that makes our sandwich and this is what you spend most of the game doing. Each time you get locked in an arena, it’s intense and thrilling as you dodge enemy attacks, time your parries, and plan out elaborate combos to maximize your score.

I can’t emphasize this enough though: you can be bad at this and still have an incredible amount of fun. I’ve always stayed away from games like DMC that require you learn combos but the list here is roughly 20 moves long at most and you learn them intuitively as you experiment.

Enemies have legs or wheels or fire or..

One of the highlights of this game is the enemy design. Each enemy is distinct and it’s rare to see a game have this many types without feeling repetitive or copied. We’re talking shields, robo-bikes, owls, fire using boxer robots, samurai, fire owls?!, and many many more. Each feeling unique and requiring a different approach and more importantly, blending fantastically. The enemy variety in each arena gets really creative by the end and you really never stop adapting.

Art so good, it gave me nostalgia

That’s serious by the way, I got nostalgia for this game thinking about how amazing the art is. It feels like it’s from a past era and yet I also can’t think of anything like it. It’s so stylized but also never gets in the way of the gameplay. It will constantly add to your experience and honestly it’s just perfect, I need the merch.

Video game stories are bad, this isn’t

What you’ll notice about this story is that it’s both very simple and very effective. A good mark of storytelling is sometimes how complex a story can be while still having you follow along, this isn’t that. Instead it’s so good that the story is very simple and yet keeps you entertained and gives context and detail to everything you’re doing.

The way they seem to have achieved this is by adding a lot of depth to their characters and giving them real personality. So even though the story is very simple in essence, you enjoy seeing what characters are going to say even in highly predictable moments. You know something is a trap, but the reactions to it are what you’re there for, not the plot point. It’s great.

And the masterpiece award goes to..

I truly believe this game is a masterclass in game design in so many ways. Everything it attempts works really well and the only complaints I can even come up with is that I could’ve used just a couple more combos and the readability in combat suffers due to some of the effects and camera. Other than that this game is perfect in my eyes.

It’s rare that I mark a game down as masterpiece but you absolutely should try this game. If you don’t, you’re missing out on something amazing that doesn’t come around very often. It’s also rare that I ever plan on replaying a game in the future, but I can already imagine rediscovering this game 5 years from now and picking it up for another playthrough.

Addressing the coffin in the room

Last things last, Tango Gameworks was shut down by Microsoft in May. This game is the last thing they produced and it really is a pity. They went out on one of the best games I’ve ever played and I was baffled to hear about their closure Please go play this game in honor of the loss of the studio, maybe then you can be as angry as I am at Microsoft if you aren’t already.

That’s it for me though, I feel like I’ve really experienced something here and if you haven’t played this game, I want you to give it a shot. It’s charming, it’s fun, it’s thrilling, and a good listen always.

If you played this, drop me a comment and share your thoughts. I’d love to hear what your experience is with rhythm games in general too. What else is good in the genre?

Until next time.

These games are definitely worth picking up especially for $10 for the whole series.

A bit of a weird title, but basically what’s a game that’s more than a year old but still considered “modern” that you love? There’s no real strict definition for modern, I’d just like to see some discussion around great games that aren’t quite classics yet (but probably will be one day).

The nature of this community typically attracts discussion around decade-old games (which is what I mostly play too), but I’d like to see some newer (but not too new) games on this post.

I feel like that game literally changed my life in the 2 hours or whatever it took me to play it.

That game is so beautiful. It made me a better person.

I was absolutely entranced.

TL;DR: probably among my favourites in the action-JRPG genre, just for how consistently good everything is. None of the systems in isolation are "the best I've ever seen", but for a 35+ hour game, it's nice when everything is smooth and enjoyable.

For context, I have played a decent handful of JRPGs, with my favourites being probably Skies of Arcadia Legends, and Tales of Symphonia. In the Tales series, I've played Symphonia, Symphonia 2, Graces f, (never finished) Phantasia, and (never finished) Vesperia.

Story

The game begins by letting you choose which of 2 protagonists to follow. The game's story is broadly the same, regardless who you choose, but certain scenes are seen from different perspectives, and certain moments are missed if your chosen character is absent. I have opted not to replay with the other character at this time, but the game is good enough that I would if I had more time. I chose the female lead, Milla.

The story itself is...fine. The setup is pretty good, with Milla being an literal avatar of the world's god, whose powers are stripped by an unknown dark force early on. The story then shifts to a fish-out-of-water story for Milla, and a quest to regain her powers and destroy the dark forces. She is joined by Jude (the other - male - protagonist), who initially has no quest, but does want to be helpful to those in trouble.

This brings us to a major highlight of the game - the characters themselves. The story feels more like background dressing for the cast to play off one another in. The skits - a Tales staple - are here, and they are predominantly well-written and performed. And the cast is wholly likeable, and have decent arcs throughout - though there are a couple of head-scratching moments regarding character motivation. I was fond of basically every character by the end, even in the extended cast and bad-guys.

One sticking point I should mention though is, because there are scenes absent from certain protagonist play-throughs, be prepared for a couple of deus ex machina moments, where ostensibly the other protagonist has been busy in the background, but you will not know exactly how or why certain story beats happen unless you replay the other story. It's made doubly-weird where, despite having the skit system for optional additional dialogue, the POV character is never made aware of what happened during certain background story moments. From what I have read online, it seems that the better way to play story-pacing-wise, is to do Jude's story first, then Milla.

Gameplay

The combat is fun and really well balanced. The difficulty curve was almost perfect the entire game. I did a little bit of grinding every now and again, but honestly, every time I did, it made the next boss quite easy. I like the "partner system", which allows 2 characters in battle to buff each other, and I liked how your MP is refilled just by doing normal attacks, which meant I never really ran out of magic - this is particularly nice, as the healers are also more-or-less always healing and being useful. The party AI is also pretty good, especially if you spend a moment to fiddle with the strategy and auto-item settings.

There is a very extensive level-up system, split across a skill-tree and buff-pool. I...can't speak much on it, as there is also an auto-level button, which auto-applies nodes on the skill tree, and I used that almost exclusively. However, it's there if you wanted some good character building options. The shop system is also pretty good, and made it perpetually feel like I was accomplishing things and getting stronger.

There are a smattering of side-quests per town. Some were bog-standard "kill this thing, get this item", but there were also several that were self-contained stories and world-building. There isn't a quest marker, so some quests did require me to look up where to go, but I don't consider that a bad thing - more an "I'm impatient"-thing.

Probably more that I forgot to cover, but this is getting long for a first "patient gamer" review, so I'll stop here. This game and Tales of Symphonia are now in contention for my favourite Tales game, so make of that what you will.

Basically, title

I've been passingly interested in the Megami Tensei series for a while.

I've been a little intimidated by the number of games that may or may not have been translated and all the ports.

I was hoping someone could give me a rundown of the series and where to start, if I should play with fan translations, or whatever else I should know.

I grew up with the nes and snes, so I'm OK with older RPGs and their nuances.

Summary Time

The Impossible Lair is a 2D platformer with low complexity and fun characters than has you exploring levels to build up protection to take on a boss level that is available to you right from the start with all the moves unlocked. If you like a more relaxed platformer with decent explorations and puzzles, give this one a shot. However, if you're a platforming regular you should probably just stay away from this one as it doesn't invent anything new here.

Now lets get in to it.

Putting on the Rose Tinted Glasses

I've grown up on platformers. Since I was young I've had every Crash Bandicoot game in my hands and just recently went back to 100% the first 3 games. I've also been playing them in 2D most of my life, starting out with Sonic on the GameBoy. In other words, I know what it is that makes these games work. So when I hear that this game is going to present the initial challenge to you at the start and make that the premise, I immediately assume that the difficulty will be that you need to unlock moves to progress. That isn't the premise. Instead, your basic moveset is unlocked immediately.

So upon hearing that info you might think that its obvious, the game is going to teach you how to use this limited moveset in new ways to get you further into the lair. With ~20 whole levels to choose from and 2 variants of each level, there's a whole lot of level there to learn from.

We Have Good Bones

The good news here is that graphics are really great. They're much more cohesive than the 3D platformer in the series and they have a solid artstyle now. I can say much the same of the music, it isn't anything iconic but now the themes of visuals, music, and obstacles are all working together here. They really improved to say the least. The story is still as plain as ever and I have nothing to say about it. The characters however are also better. Most only have a few lines to say to you but hey, at least its interesting or funny most of the time.

There was a mark and we missed it here

I want to be clear, this game is very average in its space and that is really hard to achieve with a platformer. So take my criticisms with that in mind. I'll start off light on the devs here but when your main character is hit in this game, the bat flies off their head and starts flying around at random until you recapture it or it flies away. This serves as a 2-hit mechanic to make the game easier but I really hate it. Go ahead and imagine you're playing through a difficult scene and you get hit. Now, your momentum is all off as you halt your progress to recollect the bat. I think I died more times doing this than to an actual challenge or obstacle. Its odd from a gameplay design perspective because it changes the goals of the player and takes their mind completely out of what they're doing.

Then lets talk about tech. For those that don't know, platformers often have a lot of "Tech" which describes how the moves given to you play into each other. They're sort've unstated combos. A typical example is Crash Bandicoot can slide before a jump to get extra distance off the ledge and height. He can also bodyslam at the top of a jump to get boxes barely beyond his reach. Mastering that tech is usually integral to skillful play of these games.

The Impossible Lair has almost no tech. You can roll off of ledges like with crash but that is the only combo I know of in the whole game. The game makes use of that feature only a small handful of times. So you won't be learning very much at all about your moves the entire way through. This makes it more approachable to new platformer players, but entirely boring for everyone else.

So Why Play the Levels?

I wish I had a good answer for this but the real answer is that each level gives you a bee to be used on the boss level to protect from a hit. So to be clear, the Impossible Lair doesn't require you learn much of anything and the sole thing preventing you from completing it at the start is that the Lair is hard. Not the fun type of hard either, the type of hard where you take no hits during the skill section but misjudge a hitbox and take a hit getting too close to a spike.

I identified that pretty early on and so it never felt like a goal for me. I just wanted to experience the levels, which I found were okay in fun, and then just slog my way through the final level. I'm not afraid of a challenge either, but this kind of game doesn't make the challenge interesting enough for me.

Should you buy it?

Again I'm going to say: if you have knowledge of other 2D platformers then this one is entirely unnecessary and will only serve to annoy you. However: This game is really perfect for a younger person. I know that games like Crash Bandicoot can get extremely hard. Its what they are known for. In my eyes though, this is a great game to teach someone how to play games without boring them to death. So it isn't for me at all. For someone who has played a lot of these, I'd say this sits around a 6/10 for me. This game does not compare well to any of the Crash games at all. However, for someone just learning this is probably one of the best games you can pick up to have them play before torturing them in It Takes Two!

As always, if you took the time to read my review, thank you. I encourage you to share your thoughts about similar games you've played, my review, or if you plan on playing this one or have played it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16348202

Civ VI Huge 95% off steam deal

Civ VI is pretty cheap right now, grabbing it at the moment for 3€, but that might change from region to region.

The dlcs packs are pretty cheap too.

Recently I borrowed my partner's copy of Links Awakening for the Nintendo Switch. I understand that many people did not enjoy the remake due to the graphics but I am one of the weirdos who somewhat enjoys the cutesy round graphics with the intense depth of field / forced perspective look. From a pure graphical standpoint I think this is a really good way of remaking a top down GB / GBC game for a new platform. I similarly enjoyed Pokémon Alpha Sapphire's graphics despite many others not enjoying them.

I think this has to be one of the most frustrating remakes I have played in recent history, solely for the inability to use the dpad for 8 direction movement. I am not against the remake using the joystick for movement, for example the aforementioned Pokémon game alows for the circle pad and the dpad to be used (for 360 degree movement and 8 direction tile based movement). My frustration with the controls in link's awakening is the forced use of the joystick with 8 direction tile based movement. What could have otherwise been an enjoyable experience is made more difficult, and leaves me wondering why I am not playing the original on my 3ds instead.

I do really enjoy many of the QoL improvements in the remake, the graphics, and the music. I also appreciate having the X and Y buttons available unlike the original gameboy versions. I'm still going to power through it, but sadly the GBC version is going to be the definitive version for me despite this version coming so close for me.

This game was for some time in my watch list, but I have never pulled the plug, and oh boy, was I in for a treat.

The game is very interesting depicting a dystopian future, where we are all headed, with an even bigger divide between rich and poor. A future completely driven by technological innovation for better or worse. The story gives you interesting perspectives from both the fortunate and less fortunate people and gives you an idea about their emotional struggles, thoughts, etc.

The game is story driven and it is not competitive or fast paced. It is for those of you who enjoy the good story and to see the consequences of their actions or words. I really recommend it and I dread the day, I will reach the end the same way I dread the day I finish an extremely captivating book, as it will leave a small void in my soul.

One of the weird realization for me as I learnt English and listened to authors who contributed to these games, is that many remastered their tracks to exclude swear words and obvious mentions of drugs, or was it EA specialists? NFS Underground and Most Wanted games were filled with rap and metal, but still got rated for teens because of that. When I've heard some of these songs in their album versions for the first time and there were actual lines or even paragraphs I've not heard before it was very weird. I applaud whoever did this and still kept these songs bangers as they are, intact, hard hitting whenever you hard them back then or now like I do.

That was probably never talked about, but here it is: someone did a very good job. You'd probably never notice that until you hear the original.

If you happen to not believe me, check the first verse from Dilated People's Who is Who. That's the worst edit of the bunch, although it's one of my favorite tracks in the game. This flow is fucking tight, DPs are Erik B and Rakim for millenials, fight me. Either way, here are these tracks:

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndEvdwIPTU4

Choppy NFSU version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om0PvVJjkgY

That didn't occured to me in the early 00s, but you can hear the MC cut being half-word in. I'm puzzled how it got into production if it wasn't a fuck you from the artists leaving a clue about the whole text, kek.

I don't know why I dumped that on you, but now you know there are specially created versions of songs for some old games that wanted to sound all gangsta but still keep themselves teen-friendly. You are welcome.