Posts

What I Played and Read This Week - '26/01/18

Games As a lapsed Doomer, I check the Cacowards  each year, go 'oh, that looks neat' at a few entries, download one of them, and get a few maps in before remembering I'm pretty sick of Doom  maps at this point. This year was slightly better; I saw When Them Demons Cry  in the runners-up and couldn't resist checking it out, and while I thought the very Higurashi -y opening and ending sequences (featuring The Junkyard From Higurashi and a very appropriate climax) sandwiched a somewhat generic middle (underground temple, Hell, demons, zzz: not much to do with Higurashi  beyond the Japanese aesthetic), it had me hungry for more. A finalist, In the Doghouse , quickly got too hard for me. A previous year's finalist, Doom 2 in City Only , suffered from the usual community project problem of every map being ridiculously huge. (Modern maps in general are too long for my tastes—I prefer shorter 3~10-minute maps in the style of the original duology—but community projects take ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What I Played and Read This Week - '26/01/11

I'm going to be real: I spent most of the week playing Arc Raiders . Sorry.  Games I beat the hardest version of every stage currently available in Megabonk,  and I intend to stop there until more are released, despite having barely touched the roster and still being missing about a third of the unlocks. The trouble is that it's simply monotonous; it's better than Vampire Survivor  and most of its clones, but with Risk of Rain's  ability rotations replaced with a bunch of autofire weapons, the gameplay never really changes; you're just zooming around the map as your character kills things. It doesn't help that all the bosses feel the same: they draw from the same small pool of MMO raid-esque attacks, and, infuriatingly, all of the final bosses have the same annoying clear-pylons-to-progress gimmick. It doesn't help that the unlocks have been a slow drip: rather than unlocking items by meeting specific requirements or buying them from a store, you must do BOT...
Post a Comment
Read more

What I Played and Read This Week '26/01/04

Happy new year! Games Arisha to Kagami no Arisa popped up on my Twitter feed; it's a VN/spot-the-difference webgame in the vein of those spot-the-impostor games sweeping the market, with the big gimmicks being that (1) the impostor is a friendly mirror doppelganger who's pretending to be you; (2) you can only see your own appearance between  rounds, so it's more like remember-the-difference; and (3) missed differences persist between rounds, so it doubles as a(n increasingly creepy) dress-up game. There are multiple endings; unfortunately, these are a bit predictable, and you'll most likely get the least interesting one on your first playthrough, but it's an enjoyable time and the art is very good. If you can read Japanese, you should check this out. I underestimated Ninja Gaiden ; the last two stages are brutal, and I'm currently stuck on the final boss. What's the deal with dying to a boss sending you back to the start of the subact at best and the start ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What I Played and Read This Week - '25/12/28

Image
Happy holidays! Check out my sick tea haul: On to the usual. Games After finishing my Dynasty Warriors 4 rare   item collection, I took a look at Xtreme Legends , the expansion disk. Unlike DW3XL , it doesn't add new Musou Modes, just standalone stages (one for each character!) and Xtreme Mode , a pseudo-roguelike mode where you build up officers, troops, and stats over a series of procedurally generated stages, with the end goal being to conquer all of China. I wasn't too into it; the stages are missing the strategy feel—large forces clashing, reinforcement gates—that makes Warriors  so appealing to me. Perhaps I would've found the prospect of infinite randomly generated Warriors  content more appealing if it were 2003 and I didn't have two decades of hand-crafted  Warriors  games ahead of me. Instead, I got really into Samurai Warriors 1.  Initially, I was a bit put off by it: during battles, it bombards you with "Missions" to capture such-and-such a poin...
Post a Comment
Read more

What I Played and Read This Week - '25/12/21

Games My journey through Data East's platformer catalogue continued with Congo's Caper . I appreciated it for its verticality (think Sonic the Hedgehog if switching 'tracks' was often only a high jump away), but what I'll remember most of all is the strange powerup system. There's only one powerup that doesn't just give you lives: the red gem. What it does depends on your current state: When you're Monkey Congo, collecting a gem turns you into Human Congo and taking a hit kills you. When you're Human Congo (the state you respawn in after losing a life), collecting a gem fills one notch of the three-part transformation bar. Taking a hit turns you back into Monkey Congo and  empties the bar. Only by collecting three gems in a row without taking a hit can you turn into Super Congo. When you're Super Congo, taking a hit only removes one notch from the bar; if there are no notches left, you return to Human Congo. Collecting a gem refills a bar, or giv...
Post a Comment
Read more

What I Played and Read This Week - '25/12/14

Games A desperate Google search for 'best SNES platformers' took me to Joe & Mac , a platformer/beat-em-up about Neanderthals and dinosaurs—until the last stage, where you walk into the biggest dinosaur's mouth, explore his guts, and find out that he was controlled by Satan the entire time. He's also pretty nasty; two continues and I still haven't taken him out. The last couple of stages have some pretty nasty 1-tile platforming that doesn't suit the controls very well—they're fine but not THAT good—but I was otherwise completely satisfied. I like the tradeoff between the normal jump, which is low but completely actionable, and the spin jump, which goes quite high but doesn't let you attack until you peak. Nuclear Throne  got a big patch, so, after a long absence, I'm back to that. It took a half-dozen runs to work off the rust, but I got a win. At the risk of being declared legally insane, I think the game looked better at 30 FPS; it made the im...
Post a Comment
Read more

Moshimo no Meikyuu - Review

Image
Moshimo no Meikyuu ( MOSIMOの迷宮),  by   ksg-nushi (ksg主)  aka  Enryuu (えんりゅう) 2007, PC (RPG Maker 2000) My introduction to Enryuu's work was their earlier Alex no Mousou  (アレックスの妄想), a rather strange JRPG that combined a silly multi-crossover plot with unique and fascinating battle and equipment systems. It was also so hard, I still haven't beaten it. Moshimo no Meikyuu  is both less difficult and less unusual, being a DRPG¹ with more recognizable systems and drawing from the VIPRPG community's collective Moshimo setting rather than a dozen different licensed works, but it's little less interesting. The lukewarm early-game had me unsure I would finish it, but once the game finds its groove, it really shines. Nowhere is this clearer than in its dungeon design. B1F is linear and largely empty and the next few floors aren't much better, but, starting with B5F, most floors have interesting geometry, unique central gimmicks (occasionally descending into Labyrinth...
Post a Comment
Read more