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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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|  "Sega while you can" , posted Fri 8 Nov 22:01  
In a strange pre-2023 Konami-like attempt to avoid making money, Sega is delisting a ton of games from Steam and elsewhere. While all good soldiers have already joined me on the (Japanese) Mega Drive Mini 1 and 2 train and now have an arsenal of 100+ wonderful games, this is still an incredible loss of access...think of how much fun you would be having if you were playing any of these wonderful games! And grab them if you haven't!
Alien Soldier: Gunstar Heroes converted into maybe the world's hardest boss rush. It is so wild and creative!
Story of Thor/Legend of Oasis: almost Saturn-level graphics, such a gorgeous action RPG!
Crazy Taxi: heck yeahhh
Gunstar Heroes: the best run-and-gun sidescroller shooter ever made! It is never not fun! If you friends don't want to play it with you, they are not fun and you should get new friends ASAP!
Jet Set Radio: THE CONCEPT OF LOVE (before Xbox)
Landstalker: another bafflingly wonderful action RPG, even if the text sound effects are too bad!
Phantasy Star II: madly difficult now but an astoundingly grim, moving, and unique story, doing advanced and ambiguous things in RPG stories back when Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy were still crawling out of the proverbial primeval waters onto land!
Phantasy Star IV: almost Mega CD levels of cinematic ambition and such rocking fun music and world design!
Ristar the Shooting Star: it's quite a charming last-gen Mega Drive platform that may or may not be by old Sonic Team depending on who you ask. The boss music is the best thing Sega ever did!
Shining and the Darkness, Shining Force I, Shining Force II: just think, Sega once had two major wonderful RPG series running at the same time yet both perished by the DC era!
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(2):Sega and Ristar while you can" , posted Sun 10 Nov 14:22:
quote:
What is the reason for these games getting delisted? Are they going into a new retro collection (Sega Senior Citizen Selection or some such) or does it have to do with expired licenses?
It's very strange! These are all first-party games so they don't have to pay anybody, and it can't be a strain on servers to host the infinitesimally small early games. I don't get it.
Edit: fixed my spelling, and while I'm at it, why not promote Ristar the Shooting Star, which in addition to being highly charming and adorable is secretly one of the very Mega Drive platformers and tons more fun and creative than Sonic 3 or Sonic and Knuckles, despite being from major portions of the same Sonic Team (I suspect).
Here, this infinite loop of the infinitely perfect boss music also showcases the infinitely clever bosses! You know, rare female composer** Sasaki Tomoko also scored Nights into Dreams!
**It's nice to remember that from waaaay back, in many of these wonderful soon-to-be-delisted games, Sega had major female leads. The somber, profound Phantasy Star II was directed and written in 1989 (!!) by Aoki Chieko, and her own protege, the dearly departed Kodama Rieko ("Phoenix Rie"), in turn directed Phantasy Star IV and later Magic Knight Rayearth, all in the 80s and early 90s!
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Sun 10 Nov 15:12] |
| | "Remake of a beloved classic" , posted Tue 12 Nov 22:11
We are now in the era of endless nostalgia pandering, and we're now getting more and more remakes of old gems by new teams that were not involved in the original, but are mostly composed of fans of said classic. It's always a dangerous proposal, especially when the team starts working on the second game of the franchise (the most popular) and skips the first.
So it was with a lot of apprehension I approached Bloober's Silent Hill 2.
To be honest, I'm not as much of a fan of the original as some on the Internet. It's a very fine game! But the discourse around it quickly tired me, and I feel Siren is superior to it in most ways (I'm very very eager to play Slitterhead btw. It even has a nurse named Lisa, so we're already in "cult classic" territory there).
I have forgotten a lot about the original in the 20 years since, so I looked at the remake with relatively new eyes. I can't say for sure what's new and what's from the original, but in general, my expectations were exceeded in all areas! The level design remains very strong, the game is still very linear but with a few areas of relative freedom, the repeated environments (normal/cursed) are still novel enough to not feel like padding, the music and sound design are of course incredible (especially with headphones), and the scenario is... fine. It's fine. I know James if from an era when straight white males in video games could only have two emotions, "sad" or "angry", and it would take a few more years before they would be allowed to be quippy. But honestly? I don't remember Maria and Laura to be so annoying, and seeing James rolling with the flow instead of putting them in their place made me very annoyed. You're here to find your wife, stop accepting every side quest like you're a JRPG protagonist saving the world but also finding all 20 lost piglets!
On the elements that are unmistakenly from the remake, I found the new voice acting very good. It's still eery and out-of-place in a Lynchian way, but it feels more professional and less "school theatre" than what I remember of the original. James in particular is great.
The environment artists have made an amazing job. Everything looks great/gross, there is a progression in the... derelict-ness (?) of the places, and you feel like you're catching tetanus just by looking at the cursed environment.
The puzzles have been changed, and the game leaves a sort of ghostly manifestation where the old puzzles were. I'm ambivalent about it; is it supposed to push the idea that James is trapped in a loop and has flashbacks of the previous times? Eh. I find it unnecessary, but it's not distracting so OK.
Where the game really shines is in the new combat. Now I understand why the marketing spent so much time talking about it (even though it was a mistake at that stage). The issue of Silent Hill/Siren is that, in order to differenciate the game from the super soldiers of your average Bio Hazard, the game has to emphacize the lack of combat-readiness of the average protagonists. Unfortunately, this runs into two pitfalls: on one end, it makes fighting frustrating and boring (Silent Hill 1 and a few games with a female protagonist are eye-rolling like that. Rule of Rose I think?), or the usual videogame grammar allows the character to progress and become too strong towards the end, which shatters the illusion of the helpless protagonist (Siren 2 is here).
Siren 1 is probably the best game in terms of balance there, with a heavy emphasis on stealth, and a few select characters able to fight in their own ways so that it doesn't clash with their personality (Remember Miyata and his Holy Hammer of Destruction).
SH2 remake sticks to the original direction of forcing James into many fight scenarios, so stealth is not really an option. A few situations allow for Bio Hazard-like "running through the crowd until the next door and hope the enemies trip on their own pathfinding", but in general you'll be stuck in narrow corridors with no chance to escape.
The fights become sort of Punch-Out!!! duels, with very clear tells, attacks that can't be easily interrupted, and weighty attacks with a lot of intentionality and commitment. There is a step button, but despite the trends of gaming moving towards the Dark Souls fights since SH2's release, the remake doesn't become "roll through the crowd and backstab everyone": the invicibility of the step is very limited, the enemies have very strong tracking, so you either take them head-on or you run to kite them or lose them.
This really highlights how great the mannequins in particular are. They are hidden, they are gross (and sometimes hilarious, which provide some much needed levity) and you have to look for them everywhere even though they are some of the most unsettling designs. They have low health but deal tons of damage, so you have to get used to them. They're great. The combat is great.
Although my reaction may be because I don't use firearms except for bosses, so I take on everyone with the steel pipe. Maybe you don't play Punch Out!!! so often if you use the guns as intended (at the end of my game, James had enough ammunition to take on Raccoon City).
So, yeah, great surprise. Now I'm changing gear for a few weeks, and looking forward to continue into Slitterhead.
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Virtua Okami" , posted Fri 13 Dec 19:07
Eat your vegetables, it's time for a revival of two series that I seem to recall a lot of the Cafe considers "artistically interesting, but maybe not that fun!" That's right, a new Okami game and more news on the new Virtua Fighter in the same day! Unlike other art appreciators who are happy to like high-brow stuff even if they secret think it's not very interesting, the Cafe is counter-cultural enough to appreciate the art even while not particularly wanting to play these games, even if we know we should! Or maybe that was just me and everyone wanted Okami 2? Either way, I am glad to hear.
I had to pause for a bit to remember the history when I read the initially puzzling comment that the new Virtua will be by the Ryuu Ga Gotoku team. Let's see, without using wikipedia, my recollection is that Ryuu Ga Gotoku is basically a fragment of some of the old Shenmue team, which was a Suzuki Yuu thing and thus maybe an AM2 (AM3?!)-adjacent group and thus Virtua. So maybe it's the perfect successor? Or maybe I have mixed everyone up and we need re-gather the Daytona team to make a proper Virtua Fighter 6.
LET'S GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| | "Re(3):Virtua Okami, alas for Falcom" , posted Tue 17 Dec 17:29
quote:
The only problems of the original Okami were Issun and that other guy that keeps making references to Viewtiful Joe. Remove them and the game is amazing and I could play it over and over again.
Which is why Kamiya being back to direct the game doesn't fill me with confidence. He loves that kind of stuff.
On the other hand, Kunitsugami was esthetically fantastic, and somehow I hope the young staff that worked on it will share a bit of their talent to make the game look gorgeous and novel (unless Kamiya only hires his buddies and no new staff).
Eh. We'll see.
I thought, "hmm, how is it that Devil May Cry 1 and 3, the games which Kamiya directed and whose template has been followed by so many of his later games, and which he loves and is one of his most loved works, doesn't have an annoying sidekick character, and yet that figures so strongly in his other games?"
And then it occurred to me:
Dante is the annoying sidekick character, but since there's no stern main character he gets a pass.
Elsewhere, the founder of Falcom has passed away.
I hope he continues bump-combating in the afterlife!
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| | "Team Ladybug's new game" , posted Sat 18 Jan 20:02
Blade Chimera, the metroidvania from 2D craftmen Team Ladybug, is out and is, to nobody's surprise, very good.
It has similar pros and cons to their other games: it's very pretty, it's a bit too linear for my tastes, it controls extremely well, and I feel like the gameplay gimmick works better than in their previous games. It's also just the perfect length, not too short, not too long, just perfect.
But the real reason to talk about it is that it has several classic fighting game references sprinkled all over. There is even an arcade game corridor, with at least Vampire Savior, Virtua Fighter, Metal Slug X, SF2' and SSF2X, and others. And just next to it, there's an enemy that can do Jedah's contract super to steal your soul and instakill.
How can I not love this game?
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