been playing Hyper Demon again for the first time in a year and a half. i got sucked in around the launch in 2022 and put a ton of time in, but i gradually drifted away in favor of other games. it's nice to go back and see that i still have the impulse, that i can score better than all my friends even 500+ days later lol
it's fun to play this around people because the question is invariably "how can you tell what's going on?" it's very pretty and very fast-paced so most people just see it as a kaleidoscope. but, like devil daggers before it, hyper demon is very understandable and bound to a specific set of subtle rules that are rewarding and empowering to learn/master. the colors and shifting visual effects and everything also all serve real gameplay purposes - telling you enemy states, informing you where weak points and resources are, telling you when an enemy is behind you. once you map those purposes to your mental model of the game, it becomes a lot easier.
Hyper Demon is so cool... I really gotta check it out soon!!
I've been playing some Cantata recently. I think it's best described as a "turn based RTS" or a "tactics RTS" but it's definitely in that zone between RTS game and tactics game and it borrows from both genres in interesting ways.
I think one the most compelling parts of it for me so far is the art, which is frequently overwhelming and fairly difficult to read, but always gorgeous and strange. The character design is wild. Everyone is colorful and the line art is incredible.
The story is also pretty interesting. I've completed three fairly long campaign missions and encountered three factions so far. The first faction is a kind of imperialistic human soldier-boy faction led by a decadent king who seems kind of like a dipshit (but then turns into a turbo powerful unit, haha). Then there's a nature faction made up of a combination of beings that seem like aliens... and beings that seem like modified humans? weird monsters? hard to tell. There are these centaurs that are part tree or something? I like those guys a lot. The final faction is a sentient rogue robot faction led by a bunch of robot minds in the same body... I like that this faction converses in perhaps the most "normal guy" voice of the lot. The humans are so imperialistic in this world that it ends up feeling like the robots express more human care for one another and levelheaded calm than anyone else, haha.
The factions play pretty differently and have enough variation that I've had to relearn my play style for each one. I think one weakness is that the tutorial I was given was only for the human faction, which is the most typical-RTS-y of them all--collecting gems with structure, making other structures out of them, etc. Some of the other factions have key economic units (at least I think they're economic units? they hold resources in their inventories?) that I haven't been able to completely figure out yet, haha.
Anyway, highly recommend it. Very weird. Playing it is sometimes a little tough and I have encountered several frustrating bugs, but it's really delightful to see something this fresh and strange.
I've been playing some Lightyear Frontier recently with my wife.
It came out on Early Access a little over a week ago, and it's a pretty nice chill game.
TL;DR You build a farm on an alien planet and explore and you clean up and restore areas to help nature. It also has mechs. And 4 player co-op!
I don't have any screenshots easily available on me, but hopefully the steam store page should be enough!
I played some Splinter Cell Blacklist yesterday, which always makes me want to make something. I think it is a pretty masterful video game. Every way to play it is extremely cool, which is impressive for a stealth game that's trying to recognise every playstyle in that context from "don't let anyone see you" to "nonlethal only" to "kill everyone quietly" to "kill everyone loudly but by surprise". Typically I am a nonlethal player but yesterday I was playing "lethal and as fast as possible and rolling with the punches" which is a whole different kind of fun. Here is a video of me doing that.
i'm like 90 hours into ff7 rebirth, where i wildly fluctuate between loving it and hating it. it sure is a thing!
i think the most interesting thing about it to me is that it's more an interpretation of a source material than a remake, kind of like baz luhrman's romeo + juliet, and i've long advocated for square enix just treating the final fantasy canon as a collection of works that people can adapt for radical (or orthodox) retellings of "the classics"
Played some Destiny 2 with one of my partners this morning, and a bit of Stardew in between bouts of gamedev after they went to bed. You know, just cozy stuff.
Played the first full mission of Pacific Drive last night. It scratches several itches for me, most notably the one where you hoover up loads of crafting bits and bobs and use them to make incremental upgrades to something. The other need it fulfills for me is one I didn't know I had, which is the need to hear a guy doing a kind of "Car Talk guy" impression yammer at me for hours. Major childhood flashbacks
I wasn't really aware that this was a kind of twist on a looting and crafting survival game, but I like those so I'm enjoying it. I do appreciate how the environment is full of weird objects and sounds that move or trigger in response to your actions, but through a kind of unknowable linkage--you end up wondering whether you are really controlling these chunks of moving rock and outbursts of eerie audio, or whether you're just imagining it. It's not always atmospheric so much as tense, and the game does seem to be aiming in a very honest way for a kind of "gamey" version of that alien-haunted Zone shit... not much of what I've seen so far has been particularly spooky, which I'm totally fine with. Going to play more for sure!
i'm getting back into Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition on the Switch again, it's kind of becoming a bit of a "wake up" routine for me to play while i'm prepping breakfast and doing my usual daily full time admin work.
i also just recently started getting into the tag missions in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 on the Switch. i'm sad i never got to play the tag missions mode very much on PS3 before the servers went offline, and you get paired with a computer player instead... which, while cool in its own ways (especially considering how legitimately amazing the Ninja Gaiden AI is), just isn't as fun as the idea of cooking a bunch of demons and ninjas with a buddy next to you or on a Discord call. i actually just recently played Devil May Cry 3's Bloody Palace 2P mode with a buddy of mine a couple weeks ago, and that was a ton of fun if not also hilariously broken... and it jumpscared me when we got to a boss fight and suddenly the game went 30FPS and split screen
i usually have a habit of playing the same 7 games over and over when i have the free time to game. i don't really play a ton of modern games outside of the fighting games.
What kind of game is Hyrule Warriors anyway. I was interested to hear that it existed but then I never heard anything else about it
I've been playing Metal Gear Solid 2, for work, which is to say, I and the entire team I'm on have been getting paid to play Metal Gear Solid 2 as research. It's incredibly peculiar, but very interesting and does a ton of cool stuff that I really don't think comes together, but there's nothing like it. I guess it just reinforces my existing Kojima takeaway from playing Ground Zeroes, which I wrote up on Cohost and might as well go here now:
i never played any metal gears besides phantom pain which i didn't like very much mostly. ground zeroes seems like what i wanted from phantom pain: linear-nonlinear missions with a surprising amount of freedom of movement, in the dark, in the rain, pleasing systems in surprising places, cool smart takes on commonplace interactions. a modern "project igi". nice. i also enjoy pointing my binocs at something and asking a guy to tell me what it is. that rules and i want to steal it.
unfortunately ground zeroes is a single short mission and then one of the most appalling cutscenes i ever saw, i never know how anyone doesn't conclude that kojima's a fuckin creep and also a dogshit writer
still, i can kinda see an appeal of this guy's bullshit. you want to see what he does next. it probably won't be good, but it'll be somethin'. most games of that budget aren't anything
Oh I also just started Star Wars Outlaws on PS5, and so far it's really not grabbing me, and I'm constantly distracted by how bad the graphics are. I thought this game was supposed to look good! Is it just the PS5 version that drops the ball? I don't get it at all. It's incredibly washed-out, it's running at a pretty low res, and none of the art feel that competent. As with Jedi Survivor/Fallen Order (not that those are by the same folks at all) the tech anim side is also bewilderingly lacking. Fix your damn blends, gang
Hyrule Warriors is basically the "Zelda" take on the Dynasty Warriors franchise, which revolves around "huge scale" battles where you rack up literally thousands of kills every minute while you bounce around claiming forts/keeps and taking out commanders. they're mostly known as a "turn your brain off" kind of game, or derisively as "Y-button simulators", but they're a lot more about strategy than they are about explicitly action. Hyrule Warriors, IMO, is a lot more fully-formed than the games that it's based on.
and don't get me wrong, i love Dynasty Warriors games -- but Hyrule Warriors just feels like it has so much more depth, between its giant boss battles (which DW generally doesn't have), its amazing character diversity, and the way that it really feels like a total love-letter to all the eras of Zelda as a franchise. it's still a very simple game at its core, but has decent variety considering the nature of these games tend to be very "grindy" between leveling up every individual character, the dice rolls around weapons and weapon skills, game modes that are essentially built for farming materials and money, single-use mixtures that apply various buffs and alterations to the game, and literally hundreds of hours of content.
i haven't played HW: Age of Calamity yet, specifically because it's a "canon" entry, in the sense that it actually follows a plotline through Breath of the Wild, whereas Hyrule Warriors has its own original story and is more about covering the whole breadth of the Zelda franchise. i have a hard time "skipping" games, so i feel like i need the context of BOTW to enjoy it... and even then i don't think i'd be able to enjoy it as much just because HW:DE has a sense of campiness and ridiculousness to it that comes from its premise as a game. like, HW:DE's main antagonist is a whip-wielding, busty dark magic lady who wants to fuck Link so badly that her palace is covered in statues and portraits of him. lol
i started wild bastards and ufo 50 in the past few days. wild bastards is fully sick, it's like a strategy board game except the battles play out in little FPS showdowns. flavor is out of control fantastic. ufo 50 is also insanely cool, 50 NES-era style games in one package as if it were a mega pack for a forgotten console. not all 50 are brilliant but altogether it creates an impressive showcase and you're bound to find a few that you end up loving.
re: star wars outlaws, i have heard there are some questionable graphics ini stuff that are only modifiable on PC (naturally) and it's possible that is in the console versions as well
it's one of those games that's even better the second time, when you say "fuck it" and start save scumming to get that 17% or even 8% chance to get a piece of dialogue that changes the plot in a huge way, where you stop acting like how you would in real life and start going off on giant communist rants (wait, no, i do that in real life...) and where you start actually figuring out how all of the pieces fit together.
i'm planning on figuring out how to do some of the side quests. spoilers below:
there's 3 side quests i wanna do.
1: figure out what's going on with evrart. dude's sketchy but i didn't talk to him much after i had to in my first playthough.
2: the communism sidequest, where you meet up with these random students who have a magazine about communism.
3: becoming something other than a "sorry cop", i keep saying sorry! i wanna be a superstar cop!
anyway, its been really fun so far and i love finding all these little bits and pieces i didn't on my first playthrough. cranking up my points into skills i didn't before was really fun, as was 360 spin-kicking a racist.
I'm a sucker for Vanripper's artstyle, so their new game this week was a nice treat to have, especially since it's got some more interesting gameplay behind it this time.
Sort of Bullet hell and puzzle game at the same time, Generators break, diagnose what parts to get, get them and repair the generators, all while ghosts are trying to kill you. Surprisingly a lot of fun!
Free game, got about 3 hours out of it iin the end, played it twice for the hard mode
