koifish

On 9/8/2023 at 7:01 PM, Gloves said:

You could have used the Sage version man come ooonnn.

I haven't seen this, could you post it?

okay, 3 games for me cuz I don't have much time. Also, permission to drop any of them at any time and replace with another.

1. Wild Card

2. Picross 2

3. SaGa 2

3. Big Hurt Baseball for Game Boy

3. Beat Hal Pro difficulty on Hole in One Golf

1 hour ago, DefaultGen said:

SOTN is a foundational game! We wouldn't be forced to deal with the term """Metroidvania""" without it, and you're not going to tell me anyone would ever say that if only Simon's Quest existed. 10/10 by default.

Ha ha, got me there! Hm, a good point. Am I judging these games historically or by my own feelings? Maybe everyone should play Batman after all.

Also, you raise a good point. Any game that led to "metroidvania" existing definitely deserves a 6.

On 1/22/2024 at 3:08 PM, GPX said:

Don’t get me wrong, any score is up to you, it just feels that your end score doesn’t quite correlate with your comments.

Part of it is the wording for the polls. I would give batman for nes a 10 personally, but would never say "everyone should play it". It's not a foundational game. It's still great though, so I give it 8.

In this case, symphony isn't a bad game, just a boring game. Too easy is a cardinal sin for my gaming needs. Having to make the game hard for yourself on purpose is more often than not a failure on the devs.

That said, I did play a while and I might enjoy playing it again or on occasion, so 6 text speaks to me.

Music is my other most important part of a game. There are plenty of games where the only part I like the soundtrack (ie. FF7). I won't rate boring games highly just because the music is good however. Just mentioning because symphony is a great soundtrack. Yamane also did my favorite CV, Bloodlines, so there's a little extra bias there.

Anything that isn't gameplay won't change my opinion 99% of the time. Great atmosphere /music/you name it is meaningless if the game is bad. When I want a story I read a book. When I want visuals I go to a museum, or to a park, or to a movie. When I want music I put on an album. When I want to play I boot up a game. If the game is dull then why am I here? I can get story/etc by watching someone else play it instead.

On 12/17/2023 at 9:19 AM, JamesRobot said:

A lot of this type of difficulty comes from transition of video games from the arcade to the home.  Whereas gameplay was really designed around bilking kids out of as many quarters as possible.  Giving just enough progress to encourage the player to keep feeding coins to the machine.  Devs just used the existing arcade template in the early days of the home console market.

In the NES era we start to see some consideration for the home experience with more unlimited continues, progress saving via battery or codes, proper endings, and elimination of score as the primary goal of the proficient player.  It's super rare to see a score display on modern AAA titles.  Just crank the difficulty up a notch if the game is to easy.

Are there modern big-budget games with scores in them? I feel like that died decades ago now, aside from intentional anachronism (ie. New Super Mario Bros and successors).

On 4/19/2022 at 9:03 AM, phart010 said:

The inverted castle was an afterthought. It’s an unpolished bonus. Take it or leave it

People always yell at me when I say this about Kanto in Pokemon Gold/Silver.

It's not bad, but not great either. Cardinal sin is that it's way too easy (you have to make your own difficulty) and it gets boring long before its over (I quit before even getting to the upside down castle). Meaningless padding of a billion items and abilities that you'll never use is novel for replays and detritus otherwise.

Great music and art though, and if you suck at games then you can just grind until you win, a great boon to hack journalists and internet game reviewers. I'll give it a 7/10; If you suck at platformers then this is the one for you!

The soundtrack is 11/10 though; Download that and listen to it a lot. In fact, download every CV soundtrack.

EDIT: Changed my mind. 6/10

On 4/15/2022 at 8:01 AM, fcgamer said:

Oh and the guy who never played it and never will, will you go out with me for beers or something?

Let me know when you're in Seattle and I'll take you up on that!

On 4/16/2022 at 4:31 PM, Reed Rothchild said:

The two usual miscreants  

Your ebay notification is showing. XYZ

Why compare these games? While they occupy American minds as key long-running JRPG series, they don't have much in common beyond genre. DQ is known for consistency while FF is known for changing core systems. Moreover, some of these games aren't even a similar genre; How can you compare FF10, a linear JRPG, to DQ10, an MMORPG? Or FF11, an MMORPG, to the "open-world" (and not online) DQ11? I feel like I might as well be comparing Mario and Sonic games simply because they were rival mascot series.

On 1/5/2024 at 10:16 AM, ikk said:

I beat it last year, but I have no idea what to rate this game. The flying through rings works and is actually enjoyable, but all the short missions in between are laughably bad and if you fail you have to redo the rings.

You will die a lot for stupid reasons because the game is broken, like you take damage during a cutscene or sometimes just fall when you fly into something. As frustrating as these moments can be, it did make me laugh more than most games. I even had 1 mission where I died after finishing a mission

It almost reaches so bad it's good territory for me. I'll just give it a 3.

I feel the same way about Sonic 06. That game is like The Room for me. No such love for superman 64 however; Second time I failed a mission and had to fly through rings is when I chucked the cart.

On 1/17/2024 at 11:25 PM, scaryice said:

I continue to be surprised at seeing Shin Onigashima appear so often in these polls; I had no idea it was that well liked/remembered. FDS is kind of a weak spot for my Famicom knowledge.

My favorite anecdote about FDS is that Volleyball on FDS sold better than Kid Icarus, Metroid, and both Zeldas.

3 hours ago, Tulpa said:

In my case the rubber itself wore out. I tried a silicone fix, but that only lasted a couple of weeks. 

New pads or find a dead controller with good pads were my two choices. 

And as I stated, get the right ones and they work just fine. Heck, buy like two or three packs for every controller you regularly use and you're set for the rest of your life. 

Rubber is different, I can't speak to that. If it's just the pads though, then I bet fixing them is easier than finding replacements that aren't junk.

I'm surprised you can't retrofit existing pads. Is there no conductive material you can apply to them? Maybe graphite would work.

One of my top NES platformers. I wouldn't say everyone should play it though, because it's pretty difficult, and also because some will complain that it is not a "real" batman game. If you like hard platformers though? Play it, it's worth it.

recently got a retrobit legacygc controller, and it is pretty good, a surprise given my being a hard ass over controllers. My only complaint, aside from the face buttons being just okay, is that the d-pad diagonals are a little tough to hit. Does anyone know of methods that might work to improve the diagonals on a d-pad? Maybe I can do something to improve the feel and make them easier to hit.

17 minutes ago, DefaultGen said:

It's probably like Fisher Price: Perfect Fit. Watching the computer player incorrectly match shapes to identical shapes sure is something. For a longer game, Airport Simulator 2014, which took around 20 hours to beat and like 16 of those hours are just driving the little luggage cart around from point A to point B.

so it was like the forklift parts of shenmue?

2 hours ago, Rhuno said:

That game killed the franchise for me; I could tell pretty quickly I was not going to enjoy the game. Aside from the Link's Awakening remake, and dabbling for a bit with Breath of the Wild, I haven't played a Zelda game since.

pretty much same for me, I had no love for the aonuma Zelda games. I liked link between worlds and the four swords games too though. Tri-Force Heroes i never really had a chance to play; Now that the 3ds network is being taken down, I probably never will. For me though, none of them are better than NES Zeldas and Link's Awakening.

17 hours ago, G-type said:

I had bought this game for the switch, but later picked up as a part of a bundle that included 1700 games... I'm sure I'll never see more than 1% of the games in that bundle.

1700 games? Is a shovel included?

10 hours ago, Link said:

Majora's Mask. 

Take everything I don't care for in my favorite franchise and focus everything around that. And make the graphics ugly. 

I feel this way but I gave up on it by the time I hit the swamp. This is the kind of game I would rather watch someone else play while only half paying attention.

some of them were for the game boy completion challenge. They include every game boy version of Jeopardy, "Sports Illustrated for Kids: The Ultimate Triple Dare!", and Cool World come to mind.

Another one is "C.O.P. The Recruit" for DS, and "Need for Speed: The Run" for 3DS. The latter was a gift and I felt I shouldn't disappoint the buyer. The former, I honestly don't know what I was thinking. I spent like 25 hours beating it and I have no idea why I bothered. All I can remember is the really really lame music for action sequences, which included a guy rapping and saying "what I say is real, I'm not faking" every once in a while. Seriously, why did I play this to completion? It was as long as it was underwhelming. Was I just desperate? Did something captivate me about a very poor man's GTA clone? I still have no idea.

I think there's another game I've finished like this, but I don't remember it. Related however; My friend beat daikatana a few years ago. He said the best part of doing it was knowing that he would never have to play it again.

The only games whose stories I like are Mother 3 and Ace Combat 4. Both are good stories and generally good games, though M3 drags at points.

16 minutes ago, wongojack said:

For the bundles, I just accepted that I'll never play them all.  I think of it as more like offering a tip to charity than actually buying the game.  This way, I have a lot of these games in the library that I can go back to if I ever decide I do want to play them, and all I've lost is a few bucks thrown to a good cause.  I also, always adjust my donation amount to give the max possible to whatever charity they are featuring.

not a bad idea; I usually just give 100% directly to a charity and turn down their gifts as it cuts into their margins. The process is still good if you get something out of it and i don't mean to say it is not, it's just me. I'm a weirdo in that having excess stuff becomes bothersome, which is the real reason I turn down tshirts and stickers and tote bags and stuff. I'm a bit stranger though, because for me, any purchases, even digital ones, become clutter or waste in my mind if I am not generally using them. I once collected often, but now find it specifically irritating to have things in my possession that go untouched. They're just burdensome to me. Even with digital things, which don't take up any more space physically, bother in this way. I often go and delete things that are sitting on a hard drive for too long, and I've long hated that steam won't let you sell or trade away games you no longer want, because it bothers me that they exist in my library (which of course is all because it hurts their margins, and would give people too much of an illusion of actual ownership, but that's a subject for a different thread). That's another part of why I stopped doing it.

1 hour ago, Brickman said:

Fair enough maybe it’s not for you. Not everyone is into platformers. I really just wanted to point out that this isn’t a super meat boy clone like you and others are trying to make out.

People in here are giving their opinions on a game they have only watched a YouTube video of which is just crazy in my book. Flicking through a game on YT is nothing like experiencing the game. 

depends on the game for me. Years ago I realized that due to being around long enough, and due to having played enough games, that I can tell how something plays just by watching it and know if I would like it or not. Maybe if it is something truly different from anything you have played before, then it will be hard to get from a video, but the vast majority of games barely step away from conventions established now decades ago. I argue that a video is all I need to get the gist pretty easily of what it feels like to play a given game, simply because they're only so many variations of a same theme. The only exception that comes to mind is maybe something like Baba is You, and even that is still essentially a puzzle/logic game. I mean, if people couldn't get a good idea of how a game might play from a video, then why would anyone watch game trailers or other release info? In fact, I might even argue that the number of trailers for games that show no gameplay and instead show pretty images of the characters and things like that are designed precisely because they know that too many can see what a game will play like from watching and will then know that it is not for them. At least use some intrigue to get them hooked up front before you hit them with yet another follow-on! That's one thing I like about indie games in my experience; They typically don't have the budget for a bunch of nonsense fluff videos and so they just get to the point. But anyhow, yes, I don't think it's strange at all to be able to make a good judgment of what a game will be like to play from a video, or else gameplay trailers would not exist and no one would bother showing off a game at all.

Just now, Reed Rothchild said:

Online osmosis.  Bought Minit yesterday for $2.50 because @Gloves had me intrigued about it once upon a time.  My backlog list has Firewatch and The Witness because they're all over the internet as milestone games of the 2010s.  Isaac, Cave Story, and Axiom Verge are 3 of the first games I bought for Switch because they're all over lists of the best launch(ish) titles.  @DefaultGen's ravings have me interested in Cruelty Squad.  Etc.

 

Interesting, maybe I don't spend enough time online anymore. Maybe it is for the best though; listing off indie darlings just makes me tired from reading lol. Too many games and too many life obligations to worry about not playing this or that, and bundles get me frustrated. I used to get humble bundles, for example, and what I found was that I got a bunch of trash I would never actually play. Come to think of it, I think I bought their COVID bundle in 2020 and I don't think I have ever installed or downloaded any part of it XD I learned from touching fire to not do it anymore obviously that is a me problem though, not their problem for providing it.

14 hours ago, Brickman said:

Not sure what you mean by this. We're still in the 2000's  unless you mean early 2000's which wouldn't be right because this game was released in 2018. Also the game has more actions than double jump and wall jump. And the controls are extremely tight, probably some of the best I've ever experienced in platforming.

What made this game so good is that the story really integrated well with the platforming. All those deaths really made me feel like I was struggling climbing the mountain with Madeline as opposed to the very generic story in past platformers.

If people aren't into platformers then that's fair enough, they won't enjoy this game at all. But anyone who loves platformer games like SMB, Ninja Gaiden, Donkey Kong Country,  Battletoads etc. they definitely owe it to themselves to give this game a go. It can be a moderate level difficulty platformer all the way up to one of the most difficult platformers ever made depending how deep you want to get in to the game.

yeah, I mean 2000s as in 2000 to 2009. Wasn't aware people referred to the entire century as the 2000s. Do people now do that for the 20th century? I've only ever heard people say 1900s to refer to the time at or around the turn of the century.

Anyway, it was when gamemaker was first getting really big in my circles and I remember tons and tons of games like this, where you single screen platform in a bunch of spikes and obstacles and shit and just keep retrying the same screen until you win. I Wanna Be The Guy was the most infamous, but overall they weren't so bad I guess, tedious is my main descriptor. The problem was there were just so many of them that they started to run together. Sort of fun when I was younger but I don't have interest now. Moreover they are tiring. I'd rather play something cool like castlevania, that keeps things fresh with new ideas introduced through progressive stages, and moreover, that rewards mastery of technique without being obnoxious about the precise particularities. The doublewalls (forgive my shorthand) were eventually a process like was described by a previous poster for super meat boy; just sit and grind the same stupid screen because I didn't press whatever button combination at the perfect frame timing, and you just keep doing it piece by piece until you have the pattern down, only to have to do it again on the next screen. Things like that, like kaizo Mario hacks, it's a crap game to me. If I wanted to obsessively grind one pattern of extremely time-specidic and overly exacting and obnoxiously demanding inputs forever, all until I clear bullshit stage 437, and only just to go onto bullshit stage 438 and do it it all again, then I would rather just play a rhythm game, where at least you get the fun of a great song out of it (and a much more amusing showpiece for future arcade onlookers), or really at that point I should just learn an instrument, a far more useful observation of obsessively practicing the same inputs over and over. And yes, I realize this description oversimplifies music, and doesn't account for jazz at all, it's just how exacting games like doublewalls make me feel. They give the distinct feeling that I should be using my time for something more useful. Like I said, I played some of these back in the day and they were okay, but overall I think they are boring, and the ones that are stupidly specific about how you beat them are just trash IMO.

With all that said, I was surprised to learn from this thread that the person who made celeste also made an untitled story; that was one of these games that I remember being better than the average. I never finished it because I recall it getting boring halfway through. I don't think i would like celeste and would probably quit it too, based on descriptions here. I don't get the feeling that it would be enough divorced from my opinions about meat grinder platformers for me to not get irritated by it, and it would probably irk me that you had to do the stupid grinder shit to 100% it. And I don't give a shit about story in games, so there's no reason for me to play it just for that. I'd rather have no story period, which is why I stick to the games that I do. Maybe I'm mistaken to say so on this game (very very rarely, I do enjoy a game story) but I'm not interested right now. I admit my knowledge could be mostly based on old video I saw when it first came out, and it's mostly a response of "oh it looks like X, pass" and I could find that I am wrong. But looking at it right now and understanding what goes into it, I expect it is a hard pass and that I will live happily having never played it. If somebody wants to send me a crack sometime then maybe I'll try it but that is what it would probably take for me to give a rat's ass.

correction: I remember now from above posts that I did play the pico 8 game once. It was unimpressive imo. Also my post above is a bit more edgy than I usually post, hopefully it doesn't bother you too much. If it's indie platformers, the only choice that comes to mind for me is La-Mulana and Cave Story.

14 hours ago, sp1nz said:

It's one of the most known/popular games in the spaces I'm in, so when people say they've heard about it for being a Switch game or have just heard about it in passing it just throws me for a loop. Like in my mind it's maybe one step removed from Cuphead's popularity as an indie game. Maybe that part of my comment was stupid but I just got that air from couple comments in the thread already and felt like putting it out there.

Anyway appreciate anyone's opinion/experience being different than mine.

oh I see. Well, I definitely knew of celeste but had barely any interaction with it. I haven't kept up with new releases regularly since probably 2013, and basically stopped following game news entirely by 2018 or so, and as such I'm not privy to newer stuff much.

I distinctly understand that phenomenon though; I call it "subculture famous", when everybody in a subculture knows of a thing relevant to that culture but it's almost unknown otherwise. You could also use it to describe instagram fame, where people can be famous and known by millions, and yet the vast majority has no idea who they are. People here are excellent examples of subculture famous ideas. For proof, just go ask anybody who doesn't play NES games about Journey to Silius or Rockin' Cats. We all know them pretty readily but the average person has no clue. That's subculture famous in a nutshell.

Now I am curious; How do you follow indie games? I have overlooked them for the most part, but I also struggle to sort through them or even find them since they are by definition difficult to find. Curious of your info channels.

5 hours ago, Gloves said:

It's just not my kind of game tbh. I got my fill when I 100%'ed Super Meat Boy when that came out all those years ago. Recognizing of course this isn't a SMB clone or anything, but it's similar and it's just hard for me to want more of that.

Yeah, I don't fully remember, but this is basically another platformer with double jump and wall jump, right? There were so many of them in the 2000s that I'm pretty sure "platformer with double jump and wall jump" was a joke name of one of them. I'm in the same position, I've played too many platformers to want one right now. Maybe a historically noteworthy one, but not just one that happens to be popular.

55 minutes ago, sp1nz said:

Also really shows how some people are not in the indie space, especially on PC when they don't know about this yet, just saying.

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you explain this?