Sumez

28 minutes ago, TheGreatBlackCat said:

but besides Ys and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood I can see why PC Engine has remained a relatively obscure console to collect for (in The States). I feel like you're not missing out on much.

Parasol Stars? Ninja Spirit? Splatterhouse? Legendary Axe? Bomberman? Devil's Crush? Bonk? Tonma? Neutopia? Sonson 2? Jackie Chan? Nexzr, Soldier Blade, Sapphire, and Super Star Soldier? Best ports of Gradius 2 and Salamander? That's just scratching the surface.

It's no NES or SNES, sure, but if you can find enjoyment in the Saturn library, the PCE should be ripe for you.

May... bea.

The timing and parrying stuff never clicked with me even after playing the entire game through.

It's a good game no doubt about that. Its just not made for me.

9 hours ago, guitarzombie said:

Of course the first one is practically flawless

...yeah it just plays completely differently 

"and all I can think of is..."

Who???

1 hour ago, Gloves said:

I don't play the third game in a series when I didn't like the first two. I'm not a sucker lol. 

Do you enjoy all of the six first Might & Magic games?

1 hour ago, Gloves said:

I don't play the third game in a series when I didn't like the first two. I'm not a sucker lol. 

Do you enjoy all of the six first Might & Magic games?

Wand of Gamelon?

13 minutes ago, Gloves said:

So by the *third* game they got it right. Well ain't that peachy lol. Shame I didn't play the third game cuz the first and second weren't so dialed in.

God dammit how can you even begin to criticize Sonic gameplay without having played the single most essential game in the series 

27 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I'd criticize a side scrolling racer with blind corners.

It's not a question of "being good" or "struggling." It's about putting forth satisfactory gameplay.

To repeat myself. I'd agree with this argument if the games were actually designed that way. But they aren't.

38 minutes ago, Gloves said:

In a racing game you can see the corner coming, and/or there's usually some other visual aid to tell you a turn is about to take place in the form of signs or other visual cues. 

But you're still gonna perform better when you've raced the track before and know the corner.

Across the entirety of Sonic 3 & Knuckles I can think of a total of two occurrences where a spike would show up and hurt me without giving me any chance to react to it. It's not something that defines the game at all.

The Talos Principle - Beaten 31/3

I think this game has probably been hyped up a bit too much, or at least I was definitely expecting more from it.
The most immediate comparison for the game is probably The Witness, a game I definitely loved. As in, it's a first person puzzle game which pretends to say some vaguely insightful things about humanity I guess.

The difference between the two is interesting though. While the puzzles in The Witness were mostly delegated to individual little boards placed around the game world, the way the world was integrated worked as quite an interesting companion to the puzzle solving, and was at least as much a part of the game as the puzzles themselves - and unsurprisingly, solving the puzzles would often creep into the game world around them.

In The Talos Principle, the puzzles are set in the game world itself, like in a traditional block-pushing puzzle game - although usually confined to individual walled-off puzzle rooms.
But where The Witness feels meticulously hand crafted into every detail, the first impression I got from this game was a set of standard assets randomly mashed together to form a game they weren't really designed for. And as you move around trying to solve the puzzles, everything just feels a bit more cumbersome than it should be due to the core engine clearly not being designed with a puzzle game of this sort in mind.
My immediate reaction was that this was some sort Unity asset flip - is this really the game people have been raving about? What's really going on, as I'd later learn, is that the game is built from bits and pieces of a Serious Sam game, which as expected really does feel quite unfitting for both the game's setting and its gameplay.

The puzzles are a bit unfocused as you start encountering different components. There's the usual stuff like boxes, or fans that move you or objects around, locked doors and keys, etc. But the components that define the game's identity to a bigger degree seem to all be based around line of sight, justifying the first-person perspective. A jammer that can open doors or disable turrets, or crystals used to connect color coded energy signals around the map. These are really interesting components, but the way they play into the solutions are usually the same across most of the puzzles they feature in, which means they eventually grow a bit old.

Another puzzle game comparison I'd make is Baba Is You - last year's biggest standout on my backlog list, and probably the best cerebral puzzle game I have ever played.
For every single thing that game does well, The Talos Principle is pretty much the exact opposite. Puzzles are often easy with straight-forward solutions, and when the solution is eluding you it's most often because something was obscured to you. or some stupid red herring. You usually end up spending more time carrying out the solution than you do figuring it out, which gets especially bad once you encounter the item that lets you record and play back actions. And some obstacles will just straight up kill you, forcing you to start the puzzle over entirely, wasting your time.
In Baba Is You, a solution would frequently force me to think in creative manners, and employ the same abilities in many different ways, often thinking out of the box entirely. It's the sort of game where when you find the solution it's like an epiphany coming to you that feels incredibly satisfying. This never happened in The Talos Principle. For most of the puzzles, solving them just felt like work.

As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of the game... There are many games of this type out there, and I don't think anything about this one stands out - I'd recommend replaying every NES Lolo game over trying this one out.

However, outside of the puzzles themselves, another element to the game is the plot which feels like some super half-assed derivative "I, Robot" style story about what separates a machine AI from human consciousness. It's such an overplayed philosophic trope that nothing this game tries to throw into that crockpot managed to engage me at all. Instead it just felt extremely annoying that it would keep bothering me with the same things. And in the most non-immersive way possible, too - via a bunch of computer terminals placed around throughout the game.
These feature an absurd number of extremely long text dumps that there is no way I am ever going to waste my time reading through at the extreme pace they kept showing up. It's accompanied by a series of interactive dialogues with a computer AI, that constantly tries to challenge your world view, again in an incredibly immature and flawed way (possibly intentionally, possibly because the writers didn't have anything better to work with).

The game's sole redeeming quality are the (usually) super-secret Star collectibles, which often featured much more interesting solutions than the game's main puzzles. Often in fact thinking outside the box, forcing you to break the pressumed limitations of some puzzles, such as placing items in a way they can interact between puzzle rooms, or even escaping the confines of a room entirely, with tools in hand (something that is normally blocked).
Unfortunately, solving the puzzle is often just half the task, as even finding out where they are can result in an tedious hunt throughout every single nook and cranny, which I really didn't have the patience for. For one of the stars, my attempt at finding it ended up taking me completely out of bounds, and going both past the killplane and through the floor. That felt so janky I'd have lost all interest in hunting down the remaining stars, if I hadn't already run out of patience long before then.
 

I never understood the hate for this movie. It has tons of great moments, and is generally almost as enjoyable as the original.

Also Janosz is fantastic

On 4/7/2024 at 7:15 AM, Dr. Morbis said:

Read for comprehension, bro!  I quoted exactly what he said; here, I'll type it again in bold for you:

"Anyone trying to race through the level without knowing where they're going is doing it wrong. It's like trying to speedrun ANY game without having mastered it first."

He literally said that racing through a level of Sonic 2 without knowing where you're going on your first time through is like trying to speedrun ANY game without having mastered it first.  He literally and actually said that.  Read it again - he explicitly states that you have to approach Sonic 2 as a speedrunner learning the game with the intention of mastering it.  Read it fifty more times if you have to.

Come on man.  Read the line you just quoted in bold yourself. 

He's saying that you shouldn't try to speedrun the game without knowing where you're going. And somehow you chose to interpret that as that being the only way to play it?
Just chill and enjoy the game, and when you know the game well, you can look cooler playing through it. Just like any good arcade-style video game.

On 4/7/2024 at 8:22 AM, Gloves said:

It doesn't even have cool fast SECTIONS for noobs to get a quick dopamine burst and to experience the speed to make you go "I want more!". Instead, every time they start you going fast via a loop or a tunnel you come out the other side and run straight into a rock or a crab placed directly in your path, creating frustration.

I'd agree with you if that's actually what happened. You're not gonna get killed by that crab if you're spinning. And if you're not spinning, why the hell not? That's clearly your own fault.

These situations in Sonic 2 or 3 are extremely rare, and don't represent the majority of the game. They aren't perfect about it sure, but they also aren't nearly as terrible with it as Sonic Mania. The majority of the game can be enjoyed speeding casually through, and if you're a big fan of the game and play it through a lot, you'll be even faster at it.

Just like other games when you get good at them, you die less, you know? It's not entirely novel.
You wouldn't criticize a racing game for having corners either.

I get the point, but honestly, in practice I very rarely run straight into stuff I didn't see in a Sonic game (Sonic 2 and 3 anyway) unless I felt that I was being reckless or could have done better.

Usually the stages are designed intuitively enough that things won't get in your way to downright hurt you if you are just following the layout.

That is, until Sonic Mania. I want to love that game, but I feel like it really is that thing people usually criticize older Sonic games for.

It's not hard, because you can always just pick up even a single ring and stay invincible - but just constantly running I to stuff you had no way of knowing was there really isn't fun.

11 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

You don't get it: that's the flaw!  You're arguing that the game is great if you approach it from the perspective of a speedrunner learning the game for the first time who is hell-bent on mastering it... but what about the rest of us?!?

That's like... not what he said at all?

The game rewards someone who practices and knows the game well. That's not something only speedrunners do. That's something every decent action game should do. Didn't you claim you were a fan of arcade games once, or did I confuse you for someone else?

42 minutes ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

Hot take incoming: Sonic has never been particularly good and is a total mess of a game that only got famous because of very strong marketing and Sega fanboys wanting to stick it to Nintendo. It's the ultimate example of style over substance. Sega fans were starving for anything that could rival the Mario platformers and would latch on to anything even remotely decent and Sonic was at least a better game and character than the absolute joke that is Alex Kid.

On one hand I agree, but on the other hand I really love Sonic 3!

Style is definitely a big part of the equation, but it's also a big part of why the game just feels so good!

Can't agree on Ristar at all. It's not a particularly good game, and some of the stages are way more infuriating than Sonic ever got. But I do love hearing takes like this

1 hour ago, fox said:

Land of Illusion, while not great, feels a bit underrated.  I guess it is a sequel, but plays a lot different.  Being able to play different levels as Mickey and Donald, in addition to the co op mode, gave it a bit of replay value.

That is World of Illusion.

Land is just mickey, but imo it's also better than Castle.

Morrowind?

1 hour ago, Gloves said:

Honestly there's fair odds you and most others here simply haven't played the game.

Great pick

22 minutes ago, Hammerfestus said:

Sonic 2 is a technical improvement over the original but by the time knuckles made an appearance?  Novelty.

S3&K, S3, or S&K would easily be the better game even without Knuckles entirely

Crash Bandicoot 4 - Beaten 16/3 + all stages 22/3

Making a sequel to a franchise which already has at least 10 existing games and calling it "4" is a pretty cocky move. But a point could probably be made that Crash Bandicoot has suffered more consistently than the Contra series, and going back to the original trilogy, ignoring everything else and making a direct sequel in the same style was the only realistic way to actually make a respectable sequel to Naughty Dog's old flagship series.

Naughty Dog themselves still aren't touching the game - they are too successful making movie-games like TLOU to ever create anything fun again, but Toys For Bob manages to pick up the torch and then some. Holy shit, this game is brimming with passion and a love for Crash's unique approach to the 3D platformer genre - doing everything the original three games did well, while also completely ditching any of the superfluous mess also added by the second and third one.

It's only been a year since I played those three games for real, and my takeaway was that although all the games were surprisingly fun, the rest of the trilogy was never able to fully live up to the pure gameplay challenge focus of the first game. I don't think that's a popular take among the series' fanbase, but judging by this game I'm clearly not alone in that assessment - because Crash Bandicoot 4 tries to, and greatly succeeds at, elaborating on exactly those strengths!

But it also manages to go a bit overboard. Instead of having one gem to find on each stage, you now have six. Three of them feel superfluous, as they are all based on how many fruits you are able to find, and when you are going for all crates you will get them regardless. Of course, there's the "all crates" gem as usual, and a hidden gem on every stage which is a pretty fitting addition - and finally there's a "beat the stage with 3 deaths or less" gem, which to be honest feels like a pretty fair compromise between the original's demand that you get every crate without dying even once, and the sequel's relaxed approach of letting you retry from every checkpoint as much as you want.

The stages are all quite long, at least twice as long as any stages from the original games, and probably even longer, too, and there are a LOT of them, more than twice as many, so going for every gem on every stage is a really absurd ordeal. On top of that, each stage also has three individual speedrun trophies, a "flashback tape" to pick up, and a hardcore "get all crates with no death" achievement, which is obviously much more demanding than the equivalent in Crash Bandicoot 1.

It's all way too much for me.
I understand it, though. If you want to revive this series for one single game, allowing it to go out with a bang, you really want to get everything in there. You want to allow dedicated fans to keep playing this game for ages and still be able to achieve new goals. Where it breaks down completely, though, is about halfway through when you unlock "inverted stages", giving every single stage a new mode, which tracks the same six gems separately, meaning now there are a whopping twelve gems to find on each one, most of them requiring you to just do the same thing again, but mirrored and with an awful graphical filter applied. I don't think anyone enjoys that, and as expected it's an aspect of the game that has been quite universally panned online.

Of course, you could just ignore all this, no problem - so on one hand it's really hard to fault the game for it. But at the same time... In Crash Bandicoot 1, 2, and 3, the true enjoyment came not from just playing through the games, but from learning the stages, playing better, and getting every gem. And if you want to do the same thing in Crash Bandicoot 4, where do you stop?
Getting every gem is arduous, especially when you start factoring in the inverted stages, and then there are all the other challenges also presented to you. None of them are really recognized ingame either, outside of a completion percentage on your save file, which doesn't really mean much unless you are going for the mind-numbing 100%.

It's not the only issue with the game, though. Although I mostly really enjoyed the core gameplay, the game's difficulty quite often just came down to stuff that felt outside of my control.
Issues like unfair collision boxes and a lack of depth perception was by far the most common cause of death in a stage. It's funny, because this is something the series is often criticized for, but I don't think the old games had much of an issue with it. The first game had much more stiff movement that felt less three dimensional, but that also meant your jumps were always much more precise, and you'd always hit the exact block intended by the stage design, and I very rarely felt that falling into a pit was anyone's fault but my own.
Crash 4 is intended to be quite a challenging game, which is welcome, but often it felt to me like the most difficult parts were the ones that weren't even intended to be challenging.

I ended my game at 55%, which doesn't sound like much, but that represents over 30 hours of play.
I did go back to get a few more gems and complete every optional stage, but by that point I was already so fed up with the game I'm actually disappointed that I never even managed to get into the speedrunning challenges, which was one of the most fun aspects of Crash Bandicoot 3. I know it sounds weird to criticize a game for just being too much, but it really is Crash 4's biggest weakness, and I'm definitely far from the only person who has taken that stance, judged my the most common criticism you'll typically see of the game.
 

10 hours ago, Gloves said:

The fact that Gunstar Heroes is here right now just tells me people never played Alien Soldier.

Or Streets of Rage 2 or 3, Rocket Knight, or Hard Corps

Also how the fuck did Sonic 2 win out over Sonic 3/Knuckles?

3 hours ago, Strange said:

I bought a PC Engine and then realized I don’t really want to play or collect PCE.

Why would anyone not want to play PCE?  

Pretty good game, I even think it's slightly better than the more popular Master System game with the same title and box art, though they are two different games entirely. Land of Illusion is cool too, but few people ever talk about that one.

It's quite short and easy though, so I don't think it's anything particularly memorable. It's definitely overrated, that goes for both of them.