What Game/s are You Playing? Daily / Whenever Check :) (GAMEPLAY)

[Gamevet]

I’ve been playing the RE4 Remaster on the PS5. I really love these games, but the whole management of supplies and being given so little along the way, even though I’ve pretty found every resource available, gets very frustrating. It really became a problem when the Spanish guy and Chris are holding off a hoard, while inside of a boarded up cabin. I’m burning though all of my ammo and haven’t had a flash bang in what seems like hours. Just one of those would help in this overwhelming scenario, but no, Capcom likes to do that to you. I couldn’t even buy one from the merchant.

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to try to beat this on the hardest settings, unless it was the only game they could afford for the next 6 months.

[Aussie2B]

As I posted in the other topic, I beat BoxBoxBoy! on my 2DS XL, and I'm still chipping away at the bonus stages. I'm currently up to World 14, with World 16 being the last. The first BoxBoy! didn't even get to the ending until the completion of World 17, with five more bonus worlds after that, so that's a sizable difference. However, the number of stages per world varies, and it seems like BoxBoxBoy! has more worlds with seven or eight stages than the first game. So maybe it kind of balances out that way. Too lazy to actually do the math.

Other than that, I'm still on a DS kick, buying up cheap-ish individual games and lots that interest me, so I briefly tried out a bunch of recent acquisitions: Big Brain Academy, Brain Age, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, MySims Agents, MySims Party, My Word Coach, Picross 3D, Pictoimage, and QuickSpot. And before physical 3DS game prices potentially climb more due to the closure of the eShop, I finally grabbed and tried out Hey! Pikmin, which is one of the few 3DS games I've had a strong interest in, if only because I really love the first Pikmin and also enjoyed the second well enough (though obviously Hey! Pikmin is a spin-off with very different gameplay).

[YoshiM]

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom like most of the universe, it seems. I've got about three hours logged maybe? I'm down in Hyrule scoping things out. On one hand, it feels like a big DLC download as everything so far plays the same (save for the obvious Super Hand) but that feeling of sameness melts away as I plow forward and find a new wrinkle. On the other I like the fact that I really don't have to relearn how to play the game-my skills from BotW shift over pretty well. I just now have to be good at gluing things together. Now my kids are tackling it so I don't think I'll be able to pry it out of the main Switch until Tuesday.

I'm also almost through "Untold Stories" for the PC. Steam had it on sale for like $2 or $3 so I bit. Not a lotta game but cool story that brings "Tales from the Darkside" vibes. It's a hybrid text adventure with graphics that's episodic in nature. The text adventure part happens with an on screen computer your character sees. Each episode is different and brings more interactivity. The first is a straight text adventure with you looking at a tube TV and an old style 8-bit computer. The next episode plays a little more like a first person graphics adventure (think "Myst") and it goes on from there. I don't want to spoil anything as it's a little spooky and all the episodes connect. I haven't played the final episode yet, but hopefully tomorrow I can get a chance.

On the table top side-I've been reading a lot of the Cypher RPG system (like Numenara, Godforsaken and such) and I'm really digging it. When I get a chance (and can convince the kids to create some characters to try it) I'll probably run a one shot Numenara (science fantasy genre) to see how they like it. A couple of my older kids are down with it. My usually RPG couple are interested....providing I help them convert their D&D characters to the new system.

[Aussie2B]

I finished up all the optional stages in BoxBoxBoy! on my 2DS XL, getting all the crowns as I progressed, so there's nothing left I could do in the game besides improve my rankings. Doing that was fun for a little while in the first game, but it quickly devolved into having to basically do flawless speedruns, which isn't my thing. So I decided to put the system away quicker this time, without caring much about my rankings.

In addition to buying DS games, I bought some GBC and GBA games recently and tested them all out. I splurged a little getting a copy of Pokemon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire. I really enjoyed the GBC one years ago, and hearing this one is very similar, I figured I should give it a shot. It's too bad the planned DS Pokemon Pinball was canned. I also purchased a lot consisting of Game & Watch Gallery 2 and 3, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Spyro Orange: The Cortex Conspiracy, Spyro 2: Season of Flame, Crash & Spyro Superpack, Namco Museum, Cars, and Meet The Robinsons. Some stinkers in there, but my main reason for buying the lot was to get Mario vs. Donkey Kong. The interesting thing, which wasn't even advertised, is that it's the Not for Resale version. As far as I can tell, it plays identical to the retail version, which is good for me, as I don't want to have to get a retail copy too in order to play it, but it's cool to have as a collectible as well. It does remind me of something I regret, though. Back in the early '00s, I used to buy loads of used games for NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, etc. from GameStop, and I don't know if my local GameStop was unusual in this regard or not, but I remember seeing Not for Resale SNES and N64 carts for sale there, priced no higher than the retail versions, all the time. But I didn't know anything about them and assumed they were somehow inferior to the regular versions, so I never bought any. Now I know what they were used for and that they're sought after, with some being worth hundreds, so I really wish I had the foresight to pick up those oddities back then. C'est la vie.

Anyway, as for what I'm sinking some real time into now, I decided to return to Code:Realize - Guardian of Rebirth on my Vita. I picked up this game as soon as it launched in the US back in 2015, but 7+ years later, I still haven't completed even one route, despite really enjoying it. Other otome visual novels kept popping up, after years of almost no localizations, and pulling me away. Norn9 followed very soon after, so that's what took my attention in 2015, but I even returned to Code:Realize previously, got a little further, only to get pulled away again. Apparently, I last played in 2018, leaving off after just finishing the common route and starting Impey's route. So that's where I picked up, and even though my memory is foggy on what happened in the common route, I'm still getting sucked back in. The common route is the first eight out of thirteen chapters, and I'm now on Chapter 11 of Impey's route. So not far from finally completing a route. After that, who knows. I definitely want to complete every route eventually, but with my track record, who knows what decade that'll happen in, haha.

[Aussie2B]

Still slowly chipping away at Impey's route in Code:Realize - Guardian of Rebirth on Vita. I'm a ways into Chapter 12 now. It's hard to put it down each night, but I can only allot so much time to gaming each day. Now that I'm seemingly nearing the climax of the route and have seen how things have been playing out, I'm very curious about the other routes. I wonder if they share much in terms of characters and plot points or if each goes in a totally different direction. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm usually not super into characters who are positioned as the gag character in a visual novel, but Impey has gotten more interesting and endearing as the story continues. So I'm excited to see what remains in the route and possibly starting up another.

Other than that, I very briefly tried another recent purchase: Imagine Ice Champions for DS. Yes, I specifically sought out this game, haha. I know the Imagine series is regarded as shovelware and even seemed to make a lot of male gamers angry back in the day (though I think, for many, their anger had nothing to do with the quality of the games but rather the fact that so many games were being made for female gamers instead of them, considering all the anger I've seen directed at high quality otome games just for not being waifu games instead), but something I learned recently is that a handful of Imagine games are actually localizations of Japanese games. So I've been getting the ones that interest me. In the process, I've ended up with a couple made by Western developers too, and those ones seem more deserving of being labeled as shovelware. But honestly, even if many of the Imagine games were based on stereotypes and left something to be desired in terms of quality, I appreciate that Ubisoft cared to target female gamers to such an extent. But I am glad that the teen girls of today have excellent otome games from Aksys and such to play rather than, say, Imagine Party Babyz, haha.

[Aussie2B]

I was apparently right at the end of Chapter 12 in Impey's route in Code:Realize - Guardian of Rebirth on Vita, yet it still took me all this time to get through Chapter 13 and complete the route. I don't know if it's legitimately longer than the previous chapters or if I've just had less time to play each night. It probably had a lot more voiced lines than the previous chapters, which take more time to listen to than to simply read the narration and Cardia's lines. Anyway, it was very anticlimactic because I didn't get the good/true ending. It just abruptly stops and goes back to the title screen, no credits or anything. So I'm not counting it as beaten either. I started up a new game, skipping everything I've previously read. I ran into the glitch where characters still won't voice Cardia's name even when it hasn't been changed. Supposedly, it happens when you start a new game and can be resolved by saving and fully exiting out of the game. Hopefully they'll be back to saying her name the next time I play. Right now, my goal is to get the proper ending with Impey before moving on to another route.

[Aussie2B]

As I posted in the other topic, I properly completed Impey's route in Code:Realize -Guardian of Rebirth- on my Vita about a week ago. I guess third time's a charm because that's how many times I ran through the whole game. It appears like I probably could've got the good ending my first go but screwed up on the last question. The second time through, I was picking all the answers I didn't do the first time, which were mostly the wrong answers, and the game didn't even give me that final question before launching into the same ending I had before. I'm guessing you have to get affection up to a certain value (which is totally hidden, unlike in many other romance visual novels) to trigger the question that will unlock the good ending if you respond correctly. Anyway, the third time through, I knew what to pick and got the good ending, credits sequence, and epilogue no problem. I still haven't done the unlocked bonus scene, though. I might save those bonus scenes for after I do everybody's route. (I assume they're just fanservice-y stuff.) I've been really enjoying getting back into the game, but I'm starting to lose steam, to make a bad pun. Right now, I'm on the common route again, picking different choices than I did to get on Impey's route to see whose route I'll land on next. Once I've locked in a route, I might stop there and take a break (hopefully not a 5-year break this time, haha). Stopping at the start of Impey's route turned out to be a good move, since I had little difficulty jumping back into the story there, even if my memory of the common route was a little foggy.

[Tron 2.0]

PS5
Demon's Souls

Bluepoint remake is pretty much a one for one of the original but i'm enjoying the game so far.

[Aussie2B]

I played Code:Realize -Guardian of Rebirth- on my Vita until I got to the start of Van Helsing's route. I wasn't trying to land on his route, but I'm not surprised either, as I was picking the first listed common route choices that I hadn't yet chosen, which had me going with Van Helsing for the few times you get to choose one of the dudes to study under/visit. But it feels like Van Helsing, who's srs bsns 24/7, will be a good contrast to Impey, who profusely expresses his love to the point no one takes him seriously, haha.

I was planning to take a break from Code:Realize and start something else, but I'm tempted to go back to it. Nothing else is really sparking my interest at the moment. I think it's just that I've been so exhausted at night lately that I don't feel I have mental energy to properly get invested in something new. I was think of starting up LocoRoco on my PSP and did play a few stages, but I don't know if I'll continue. The game is super charming, and I've been looking forward to getting into it, but I'm still not feeling it, and I don't want to spoil my experience with it by trying to force it when I'm not in the headspace for it.

[Spartacus]

Well, I've finally retired and chose Elden Ring as the first game I would play now that I actually have the time. I considered playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom first, as it was renowned as the greatest game ever made by folks I don't know. But in planning my retirement I included buying myself the best gaming TV and sound system I could afford as a retirement present to myself and frankly the TV was too much for Tears of the Kingdom. 720p on a 4K TV? Kiss my ass!
I had enjoyed playing the Souls games on the Xbox 360, so I had an inkling what Elden Ring was going to be like. FromSoftware does excellent Middle Ages action rpg's and I love skulking around the old castles and ruins while I grind, grind, grind. I have no complaints about the game, but I'm playing on a PS5 that I'm using for the first time and I'm having some controller issues that make playing the game very exasperating. The worst of which is accidentally hitting the Home button on the controller while in combat. The Home button is placed between the sticks, making it very easy to touch when moving the thumb sticks rapidly in a panic. When you push Home while playing, it brings up a Trophies menu that entirely fills the screen but does not pause the game. You are blinded to what is happening in the game while enemies chop you character to bits as you frantically look down at the controller to find the Home button to push again and clear the Trophies. This happened so many times that I actually Googled PS5 controller Home guard and found a place selling exactly that for both the PS5 and PS4 controllers. I purchased both and so far it's been working very well. I included a pic of one on my controller.


https://i.ibb.co/T4vtKmX/Home-Guard.jpg (https://ibb.co/T4vtKmX)

It's an 1/8 thick piece of hard plastic with adhesive backing formed to fit the round surface of the controller. It puts the Home button inside a pocket that can still be activated with a deliberate effort. Just what I needed! My second controller complaint isn't aimed at Sony, but at the game designers who thought it would be cute to assign long winded celebratory gestures to impress, I assume, online friends with something you may have just done in the game. The very same controller button that is also used to pick up items, something that you do constantly. You find yourself sneaking around in catacombs trying to pick up as much loot as fast as possible by hitting the pick up button as quickly as possible, when BAM!, you've just accidentally triggered a two second moronic gesture during which you cannot control you're character. Naturally, the animations draw the attention of everything you hoped wouldn't see you, which attack you mercilessly while you're character struts around pumping his fist in the air. What a stupid way to die!

Being retired means I've lost my sugar daddy who funded my collecting hobby, but it's nice to have meaningful time to play the games now. I thought with the new TV I'd spend more time streaming shows I never had time to watch before, but no, I just grind, grind, grind all day long. It's fun! :)

[YoshiM]

Still Tears of the Kingdom but lately my mood has been shifting from "wow this is really cool" to "I should really play it to get through it." Once I'm going and off exploring, I'm enjoying it though the thought of "how long will this feeling last" is starting to form like clouds over a mountain. One of the things that gets me thinking that way is I'm essentially playing practically the same game I just finished in the series, but it's The Second Quest with a better version of "Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts" put in. I still have to find shrines to get my stamina and health built up. I still have to find Korok seeds to expand my weapon, shield and bow slots (though I can carry a Ponderosa's buffet worth of food along with every other item I've accumulated). I get that "Cheers" feeling visiting some places that still exist from the first game-seeing the familiar sights and some characters, but then I move on. But yet I will probably plug away at it, even though I got "Untitled Goose Game" and "Tempest 4000" looking at me from the pouch in my laptop bag.

Right now I'm just getting the "low hanging fruit" of shrines. I've opened the map up from the west and I'm now working my way east. I'm in the Necula area and have just perched myself on one of the archipelagos-the one with the construct that's all blocks but now packs a meaner punch. The shrine is in crystal form and the thing shrugs it off its shoulder when it attacks you. I tried taking it away from him and then launching it back to the platform the shrine's ring is at but either it fell to the ground or I can't get it until I beat the bad guy. I saved it for now and knowing me I'll probably stab at it some more later at home. Even with that feeling of sameness and a question of "why do I continue if I feel this way", the exploration factor and the building puzzle solving is the dangling cheeseburger that keeps me following it. I have about 7 hearts and the second full ring of stamina.

I did finish "Untold Stories" finally about a week ago. I just decided to plow through the last story one night and got to be a little late. I loved the vibe and the atmosphere but in the end I can't see going back to it for another run through. Apparently in a couple sections where you can wander in first person there are hidden items. I didn't have the inclination to look and I don't have the desire to go back to find the stuff either.

Steam has their big sale but so far I've avoided it. "Would I ever play it?" for a lot of games that look good, like Spider-man. Then the Steam Deck.....very tempting to have that ease of play at my fingertips. It's why I love my Switch but then again...would I play the games in my library? That usually grounds me and dispels the FOMO.

As I was typing, I discovered my space bar really wasn't fixed by Apple. It was too old to be covered by their keyboard class action lawsuit but they replaced the keycap for free. It was doing pretty good and then it is just becoming a pain. Groan. Now I know where that Steam Deck cash could go....

[Aussie2B]

Congratulations on your retirement, Spartacus!

I ended up not returning to Code:Realize or LocoRoco. Instead, I decide to use my free time to "process" my recent purchases. By that, I mean cleaning, repairing, testing, cataloging, and shelving. Since I have such little time each day, taking care of those tasks is a very stretched out ordeal, but it's fun and satisfying in its own way. And it's what I sign up for when I try to get old used games as cheap as I can. Anyway, I bought a PSP lot that was in rough shape. Even though it came with the console, accessories, and several games, I bought it almost entirely because of one game included: Shepherd's Crossing. I've taken a weird interest in the publisher Graffiti Entertainment recently. They seem to still be around as a mobile game company, but back in the day, they were releasing a strange assortment of stuff for the 7th gen systems. A lot of it was edutainment, and they were mostly games from Western developers, but for whatever reason, they released a few very niche Japanese games. They also seemed super disorganized, with many releases getting canceled and others being delayed or so hard to find that consumers were wondering if they were canceled or not. I bought Shepherd's Crossing 2 back when Amazon sellers were practically giving them away for only a few bucks each, and now that's the most valuable game in the US DS library. I have a feeling their other games from Japanese developers are probably pretty rare and could command higher prices secondhand in the future, so I bought Windy X Windam for DS a while back and now jumped at an opportunity to get the PSP version of Shepherd's Crossing at a reasonable price, even though I already had the PS2 version, which a different publisher localized.

Luckily, the copy I received is CIB and in decent shape. The lot came with eight other UMD releases in their cases: Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve, LEGO Batman: The Videogame, LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, Call of Duty: Roads to Victory, Toy Story 3, Cake Mania: Baker’s Challenge, WALL-E, and God of War: Chains of Olympus. Four of the nine games are missing their manuals, and four (not the same four) had UMD shells so cracked and falling apart that I had to buy third-party shells to replace them, which was a first for me. The cases were covered in stickers and grime (some appeared to have residue of spilled cola on them), but they cleaned up nicely. So after all the work I put into the games, they all play fine and look good. The lot had a 3000 model console, which was advertised as not working, so I didn't even factor that into the price I bid. It came with a third-party battery and charger, both of which seem low quality and are probably toast. I was able to get the system running with the charger and battery from my PSP-2000 that I bought new. However, the power light doesn't come on, and there are signs of corrosion. I ordered a new Cameron Sino battery (which many PSP collectors swear by), but I'll have to open this thing up and see what can possibly be cleaned and fixed. Beyond the system and games, there was a torn up GameStop case that I tossed, a South Park video UMD, and two memory cards. The 2GB and 8GB memory cards are a nice upgrade over the pathetically small 32MB card I've been using all these years, but I've been using my card for literally nothing but save files in my UMD games, so I don't really need more space. That said, a nice bonus is that the cards in the lot have some digital games installed on them: LittleBigPlanet, Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Toy Story 3 (I guess because the UMD was falling apart), and four PlayStation minis (Angry Birds, Orbit, Jane's Hotel, and Mahjongg Artifacts). Besides getting a physical copy of Toy Story 3 in the same lot, it's all new to me (unless you count having Disgaea on PS2 and Angry Birds Star Wars on Vita).

So even if it's taken an investment of time and effort, plus the cost of replacement parts, I'm pretty happy with all I got out of a purchase that was mostly for the purpose of one single game. I think with a little more work I'll be able to use this new-to-me PSP just fine, and considering how flaky my PSP-2000 has been, I would very much be happy to have a second PSP if I can get it working well.

[Aussie2B]

I also picked up a sizable lot of 25 Game Boy Advance carts, so I cleaned and tried out all of these: Medabots AX: Metabee Ver., Aero the Acro-bat, Splinter Cell, Legends of Wrestling II, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Sonic Advance, Fire Pro Wrestling, Cars, Island Xtreme Stunts, SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of The Flying Dutchman, Corvette, Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles, Mega Man Zero, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Cruis'n Velocity, Mega Man: Battle Chip Challenger, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past, Tony Hawk's Underground, Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, Mario Kart: Super Circuit, Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2, Sonic Advance 2, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Konami Collectors Series: Arcade Advanced, and Yu-Yu Hakusho - Ghost Files: Spirit Detective.

Some shovelware in there and some stuff that gets acclaim but is probably not my cup of tea (Fire Pro Wrestling, the Tony Hawk games, etc.), but overall, I'm happy with the assortment and the price I got them at. I had been looking to get both Mario Kart: Super Circuit and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and this lot let me kill two birds with one stone while also getting a bunch of other cool games. This is a hefty increase to my collection of GBA games too. I had 40-some before this, and only two games in this lot (Cars and Zelda) are duplicates for me. It also tips the scales toward mostly loose, as around half of the 40-some I had before this lot are CIB. That's fine, though. I'm glad I was able to get some nice CIB GBA games back when the system was current gen, but I'm not crazy or rich enough to collect complete GBA games these days.

Anyway, I've been playing Mario Kart: Super Circuit on my SP and having a good time with it. I don't know why I mostly ignored this series starting with this one, considering how big I was on the first two Mario Kart games.

[Aussie2B]

I'm still playing Mario Kart: Super Circuit on my Game Boy Advance SP. I've earned gold on every Super Circuit cup in 50cc and 100cc and started working toward the same in 150cc, which is obviously tougher. I've unlocked all the extra cups (that is, the tracks from Super Mario Kart) in 50cc and got gold in those, and now I'm working on unlocking them all in 100cc too. It's a little annoying that you can't unlock the extra cups on the first try, since there have been many times when I've earned gold and got 100+ coins on my first go. In fact, there's only been two times where I got silver rather than gold on the first try. I remember having a lot of trouble with 150cc in Super Mario Kart as a kid, so we'll see what happens here, but I imagine that game is just harder overall. For one, the Super Circuit tracks are definitely a lot more spacious than the narrow ones in Super Mario Kart. That was one thing I noticed about Mario Kart 64 even back in the day, how the tracks felt ridiculously wide compared to those in the original. And I've never played any version of Rainbow Road that seems a fraction as challenging as the narrow, borderless one in Super Mario Kart. Anyway, I've gotten some double star rankings in Super Circuit, but I know the highest ranking is three stars. I imagine trying to get triple star rankings on every cup is where things would get real tough.

[fpbrush]

I don’t know if we cover Switch games here, but I am currently enjoying Metroid Dread. It’s a nice combination (so far) of Super Metroid look and feel, plus stylistically like Metroid Fusion—which I missed out on awhile back. Also, it’s almost like a 2D Metroid Prime, kinda weird.

[Aussie2B]

Feel free to post about Switch games and other modern games in this topic! As long as topics aren't created in the Classic Gaming section solely for discussion of modern gaming, we're not picky about topicality.

I'm still chipping away at Mario Kart: Super Circuit on my Game Boy Advance SP. It took me a number of tries to finally get first place in the final cup on 150cc and unlock the sunset title screen, and now I'm unlocking the 150cc versions of the extra cups. I've also started dabbling in the Time Trial mode. I beat the top default times for eight of the tracks so far.

[fpbrush]

Time trial modes can be nice to dip your toes into once in awhile. The MK version on SP is enjoyable with the mode7 and all, I haven’t played that one in a bit.

Still brushing through the MD here…still very early in the game, but the level puzzles so far are keeping occupado.


I'm still chipping away at Mario Kart: Super Circuit on my Game Boy Advance SP. It took me a number of tries to finally get first place in the final cup on 150cc and unlock the sunset title screen, and now I'm unlocking the 150cc versions of the extra cups. I've also started dabbling in the Time Trial mode. I beat the top default times for eight of the tracks so far.

[Aussie2B]

I got the top times on some more tracks in the Time Trial mode of Mario Kart: Super Circuit on my Game Boy Advance SP, but I stopped keeping track of how many. I've been struggling a little to get gold on the last couple Extra cups on 150cc, but I'm not playing that much at this point. My night routine lately has been to play a tiny bit of Mario Kart (like sometimes only 15 minutes or so) and then watch an episode of Sailor Moon off of the Blu-rays I bought several years ago. I'm just about done with the second season, so I think that's a decent point to take a break and finish up with Mario Kart too. It would just take way too much effort to get triple star rankings on everything to earn that nighttime title screen, so I can save that for a later point. I just wanted something to play for a bit that wouldn't be too involved, but I'm feeling ready to get into a meatier game now, once I'm done splitting my free time by watching anime too.

Other than that, I picked up another small, cheap lot of DS games and briefly tried them out: Disney Fairies: Tinker Bell, Disney's The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure, iCarly, and Mario Kart DS. I think it's pretty obvious which game I got the lot for, haha. I'm pretty satisfied with my Mario Kart collection now, as I'm only lacking the two most recent physical releases (and don't even own a Wii U or Switch, so it'd be pointless for me to get MK8). Well, unless you want to count the arcade cabinets, haha. I played some of the Mushroom Cup on 50cc in Mario Kart DS, and boy does it feel slow compared to Super Circuit. The tracks are huge in comparison, and the Super Circuit tracks are already long compared to the tracks in Super Mario Kart. But I'm sure it's faster and crazier on 150cc. The rest of the lot screams preteen girl, haha. Most people would just assume they're shovelware, but I was surprised to see Tinker Bell had a way more active board on GameFAQs than I expected. I guess it has its fans, and the publisher did go above and beyond with all the stuff they packaged with the game (stickers and such). On the flip side, iCarly has probably the sorriest manual of any game I've seen that has an actual paper manual. There's literally only a single page of barely formatted plain text about the game itself (and the standard few pages with health warnings and legal mumbo jumbo). It reeks of "If Nintendo didn't require us to include a paper manual, we would've included nothing." So I got a chuckle out of that at least.

[kupomogli]

Started a new character on Tactics Ogre Reborn, I didn't know there was an emblem for getting no incapacitations, I just wanted no incapacitations. I would have actually quit no incapacitations if I didn't find out there was an emblem for it so I figured I'm going to go the whole way and get the emblem for that and no chariot uses on the same run. The game is much harder than the original Tactics Ogre and much less grindy than Tactics Ogre PSP, so it's way harder than getting no deaths on the original. I'm about to change to the lord class on chapter four so pretty close to the end of the game. I plan on going atleast one other path in the game before doing the side content afterwards so I can get both lord and princess(especially since Lans and Warren require the princes ending to get on your party.) A lot of content, wouldn't matter if it wasn't all great content within an amazing game.

[Niku-Sama]

i've been playing metro last light the past few days. PC version
its what i expected

[Ostin Powers]

Currently, I'm diving deep into the world of WoW, and my secret weapon is Levelupper. They're like the ultimate gaming sidekick, offering everything from PvP carry to mastering arenas. Need to breeze through dungeons or level up at warp speed? They're your go-to NPCs! With Levelupper, it's not just about playing; it's about conquering like a true hero. And guess what? You won't have to grind for gold; their prices are as fair as a medieval marketplace! Explore their services at https://levelupper.com/ (https://levelupper.com/) and prepare for epic quests!

[YoshiM]

I'm taking a break with ToTK and tried some "Untitled Goose Game". It's a cute roaming puzzler but one problem I am having is that I've watched my kids play this game so the things I've seen so far I know what to expect. I did get sucked into an eShop sale and picked up "Doom 64" followed by "Quake II". "Doom 64" I played on the N64 but it gave me motion sickness. So far this version hasn't and I do enjoy the simplicity of blasting things. I have not tried "Quake II" yet.

Having my kids ask about things in ToTK made me want to play it but I still feel I should give it some time, so I tried out "LoZ: Skyward Sword HD" for the Switch. I loathed the motion controls with the Wii version. Even more so when I got more kids which tend to orbit you while you play, not heeding the many warnings of someone getting clobbered. When the inevitable happened, I would first console them but after a few more whacks, one tends to get a little testy. You'd figure the pain receptors in their little bodies would register that the invisible circle at Dad's/step-dad's arm's length is a no travel zone. Nope. I hoped that the Switch version would make it more playable but now I have to deal with precision stick-flicking. On top of that, I'm so used to BoTW's and ToTK's camera control that Skyward feels like it's a step back (and not in a good way). There's probably control settings I don't know about, so I'll have to revisit it.

Lately I've been pouring time into my new Apple acquisitions, the 512K Macintosh and a now fully functional Powerbook 180 (though it's probably borrowed time as I had to crack the hard drive open to put tape on a stopper to destick the arm. It actually worked and I had a functioning 40 MB hard drive). I just got OS 7.1 installed on the PB and that's it as out of 9 diskettes, only 2 worked for transferring floppy images to. I had to do a "disk brigade" of installing a disk image on one and while that was loading in the laptop, I had the other getting overwritten with the next disk in the sequence. The two Mac games I played were "Golf", a solitaire card game on the 512K and "Puzzle", which is a built in slide-style puzzle game where you have to arrange the tiles properly on the PB 180.

I have two NOS packs of Sony disks on order from Amazon so I'll try out some more titles. I really want to try "Shadowgate" on the 512k. Mac OS7....no idea what's available and what would look good on a grayscale screen.

[fpbrush]

Another day, traveling through the star system in the Metroid Dread game. Actually, haven’t gotten far in the game. Rn I am at the Cajun gator-looking character.

[YoshiM]

This past weekend I unearthed the Atari 2600 to finally play the Immortal John Hancock-produced "Catacombs of Chaos". And it was chaotic, to say the least. The rooms you travel through and their contents are randomly generated (hence the "chaos", though the last room you came from seems to be remembered), so you don't know what to expect. To put it bluntly, the game is basic wandering filled with hope that what you need will appear. You could get lucky and stairs appear quickly to get you down to the treasure's level or it's just an exercise in tedium. At worst, the game gets you stuck between to rooms with only one exit. This happened to me twice-I exited a two direction room from the left and I landed in a cul-de-sac. I turned back and the last area I was in got reset into its own cul-de-sac. After going back and forth with no change, I had to reset the game and start over. Losing all your life sends you into a dark world where you wander in the void though the same room setups until stairs are found. After a while, I just flipped the power off.

I then got in some Pitfall 2 and H.E.R.O. until I had to shut it off for a bit. Later on I decided to play some Genesis Mini and I decided to play Phantasy Star IV. It's been probably a good decade since I played a classic style JRPG (Pier Solar was the last game of that style I played). I had a great time playing it! It was strangely zen getting into a rhythm of assigning tasks to my team. I made it to Tanoe and am now trying to make my way into the basement of a storage building to get this herb (?) to help at another town. Hahn keeps getting slapped to near death that forces me to go back to the surface after a while. I could do a save state but the thrill of collecting Meseta to get equipment prevents me from doing that. I almost have everyone who can wear it have titanium protection. After my session I looked up the manual so I can better plan the use of Techniques.

[Tron 2.0]

PS5
Dark Souls II,Got the itch to play it again so i am for now.Still now that this callback to the era of snes,rpgs,sea of stars is out i'll probably try that next month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jkeh6O1Rzs

[YoshiM]

I got farther in Phantasy Star IV by going into the the first bio-production facility and gaining Riko, the Numan. Aaaannnnddd.....that's as far as I got. The TV was in use so I focused on my Mac Powerbook 180 I recently got, along with 20 (so far functioning) 3.5 HD diskettes. I loaded up "Oregon Trail" and it was quite the difference from the old Apple IIe version I played back in school. One of my twins played it to completion as a Doctor (easiest setting). It was interesting as she was asking questions that could be answered by actually reading the screen.

"What do I do now?"

"Just read the screen."

"What...I have to?"

I got a little frustrated as it was like she refused to try anything on the screen that could answer her questions. It kinda shows how games are presented these days with tutorials on how to do, well, everything to a degree. She can plow through "Untitled Goose Game" but "Oregon Trail" was a stumper until she actually investigated stuff. I really wanted to get this game on my 512K but I don't have the hard drive module nor an 800K disk drive.

The next game I tried, which I never played any iteration of, was "Shadowgate". I died a lot at first due to my torch burning out. I had to find some instructions to learn how to properly interface with everything. On top of that, I had to also dust off the investigation skills and CLICK EVERYTHING THAT LOOKS LIKE IT CAN BE CLICKED! One gets a bit soft in adventuring when everything these days tends to glow, shimmer or somehow indicate "Hey! I'm usable or context sensitive!". Once I got the torch situation figured out (click on "Operate", then your sputtering torch and then click on a fresh torch) I continued to die in other ways, which was comical. I was really impressed with the digitized speech on a game that's pretty small! I went to a couple rooms and then saved as my legs were falling asleep as I was sitting on the floor, my modern laptop on one side to put files onto floppies while my Powerbook was on the other. Putting tape over the open hole on two disks, I made two 400K disks with "Shadowgate" on them so I can try it out on my 512K

And that was that for the long weekend. It was mighty hot, so I didn't do much with tech at all.

[Aussie2B]

I finished up Mario Kart: Super Circuit on my Game Boy Advance SP a while ago, getting gold on every cup, which was a little tricky for the last couple cups of the Super Circuit and Extra cups on 150cc. I clocked a time on every track in Time Trial, getting the best time and lap on most but not all. I'm satisfied to leave it there. I didn't get a triple star ranking on any cup, so maybe I'll tackle that someday, but I can tell it would take a huge amount of time, practice, and luck to pull that off on every cup.

Anyway, I finally bought and started up a game I've been wanting to play for a couple years now: Fuga: Melodies of Steel. Its sequel already came out a few months ago (in what is planned to be a trilogy, I think), and normally, I'd be all over a new Little Tail Bronx game as soon as it's out. I mean, I imported Solatorobo as soon as it launched in Japan and then preordered the US release too (good thing, considering its current value). But the first Fuga launched when my daughter was still an infant and still not sleeping through the night. So I wasn't really in any position to tackle anything particularly involved. And with it being digital-only, there was no reason to buy it until I was actually ready to play.

I've only had one session with it so far, so I'm still in the midst of tutorials and trying to figure things out. I'm going into it practically blind, and being a modern game, there's no manual or anything, at least not for the PC version I bought on Steam. I debated which platform to get it for, since I could've gone with PS4 (or Xbox One, but that's not even hooked up), but it was cheaper on Steam due to a sale, and I got the Deluxe version with the digital artbook and soundtrack and such, which I'd rather download to my PC, if possible, versus having to be on my PS4 to use. It's definitely a low-budget game. You can tell this was published by CyberConnect2 directly, instead of having Namco Bandai funding. Tail Concerto and Solatorobo feel like they had bigger budgets, in terms of comparatively to other games of their time and platforms. But I like what I've seen so far. The music is excellent, like usual. I'm not sure if the art is still Nobuteru Yuuki, but it looks nice enough. The cutscenes feel like a visual novel, and the battles are that of an RPG, but it all feels like a unique combination and not quite like anything I've played before. Definitely nothing like Tail Concerto or Solatorobo gameplay-wise, which I'm still a little iffy on. Each Little Tail Bronx game seems to move further into the territory of being an RPG, but I love the platforming action of Tail Concerto. But it's fine. If they intended for all the Little Tail Bronx games to be super similar, they wouldn't give each its own unique title. The fact Fuga is its own series shows it is its own thing within the Little Tail Bronx umbrella, and I'm cool with that as long as it's fun in its own right.

[fpbrush]

Finally got through the next boss battle and have been venturing through the dread galaxy obtaining upgrades. The putrid sucker kept tryin’ to mess up the flow, but I knocked him down after a handful of tries.

[Aussie2B]

I just finished Chapter 3 (out of 12, I think) in Fuga: Melodies of Steel on Steam. The further I get, the more I'm enjoying this game. Even in Chapter 3, there were some little tutorials as they introduce more and more mechanics. At first, the battles didn't seem much different than those in a traditional turn-based RPG like Dragon Quest or what have you, but now I really see how it's a strategy RPG. It's not a grid-based strategy RPG like a Fire Emblem, Shining Force, or Final Fantasy Tactics, and it's not like the Ogre Battle games. There's really nothing I can think of to compare it to. But it's definitely strategic, with the importance of formation, weaknesses, managing limited resources/turns, etc. I haven't sacrificed anybody so far, outside of the mandatory tutorial sacrifice that's then undone, and I'm hoping to keep it that way. So far, I've always chosen the more dangerous paths, just to get more experience and better items. Hopefully that'll help me in the long run. Oh, and I already ordered both volumes of the soundtrack on CD. The music is just too good to not add them to my game soundtrack collection. Besides, I already have the full soundtracks for Tail Concerto and Solatorobo, so it's a no-brainer.

[calthaer]

Been trying to complete Hollow Knight. Must be near the end? Missing a lot of charms...I like the game, and the ability to stick pins on the map to note places you can't get to (yet) is good but clearly I haven't been using it quite enough.

A few friends and I are making our way through Baldur's Gate 3 very slowly; played on Friday.

Been slowly grinding away at Nightmare Dungeons in Diablo 4; have a seasonal barbarian that's level 84. Don't know if I'll make it to 100 before the season ends.

Rarely play any classic games these days - the gaming PC gets my attention almost always.

[YoshiM]

Haven't gotten back to "Phantasy Star 4" as my lunch breaks have not been consistent. Tuesday and Wednesday I was off as my wife, adult kids and youngest son went to Minnesota to visit some old family stomping grounds. I didn't get to play anything during that time, though I did work on a tutorial for NESMaker (I have no idea if I'll even MAKE a game with this as I had so many false starts). I take that back...I DID get to play some "Dungeons and Doomknights" on the NES. I got past the stupid first save area that had graphics I thought were just background but it wasn't. I backtracked so much trying to figure out where to go next.

I did try the game "Faith" for PC, which is a horror game but with 8 bit style graphics and sounds (including digitized voice, like something you'd hear a TI-99/4A voice module croak out). The first chapter was alright, though I got the "murderer" ending. No hand holding or much informing of what to do, so it was just a trial and error mixed with looking up wikis. It has cut scenes that look like live actors were possibly rotoscoped with old computer graphics. It's well put together and does get the anxiety pumping.

Finally, I played a "day's" worth in "Arcade Paradise" in bed as I juuuusssst didn't want to go to sleep yet. When I dropped my Switch Lite on my face, I knew it was time.

[Aussie2B]

I'm up to the intermission before the final battle of Chapter 6 in Fuga: Melodies of Steel on Steam, so I guess I'm about halfway through now. Still no sacrifices. It looks like there's only one character left to recruit, bringing the total to 12. Makes sense, since you need six for a full battle party (the three actively fighting and three more supporting them), and the game starts you off with six. So you could sacrifice all of the original six and get six more to replace them (two of each weapon type, just like the initial batch), but any more sacrifices than that would leave you shorthanded. Which is good, because there should be a penalty to overusing what's basically an insta-win option for the hardest battles. I've heard of people doing a "genocide run", but not even having three active fighters for all the regular battles makes the game really tough. Anyway, I just don't like losing characters. Like, I've never played a ton of the Fire Emblem series, but I'd always try to avoid losing anybody in those games too. Getting back to Fuga, I'm still really enjoying it, though I feel like the pace has slowed down a little. I think it was Chapter 4 where there started to be way more forks in the paths, and probably because I keep picking the dangerous paths, it seems like the chapters are getting more time-consuming. So it does make my sessions with the game a little less satisfying, in that I want to keep playing and make more progress but have to stop to get to bed. But really, if the game leaves me wanting more, I can't complain.

[YoshiM]

The Switch got some love. Played the "Dave the Diver" demo, which was fun. It's an action RPG that has you diving underwater to capture fish that you can use in recipes at your sushi restaurant. Get fish, collect material to craft or sell, serve drinks and sushi and buy upgrades to go deeper. Deeper meaning deeper under water to get more stuff to level up and move the adventures forward. It's got potential but I'm holding off on pulling the trigger as I have other games I want to get through. I also got in a little "Animal Crossing: New Horizons".

Haven't really done anything retro lately. I'm thinking I should probably spend some time with a classic.

[YoshiM]

I decided to dig out my DSi XL for kicks and try some games I haven't gotten around to in a while. I grabbed my R4 cartridge and "Metroid Prime: Hunters". When I played last, I just left the Archives and I was sitting at the navigation screen. I sent my ship to the next location, Alinos, and mucked my way through there. It didn't take long to get back into the controls and got through the level, narrowly beating a hunter (?) that was waiting for me after I got this crystal-thing from the hidden room's cybernetic security system. I died the first go but I was able to beat the dude and get to my ship. Sucky thing was, I could not for the life of me jump onto my gunship! It took a few tries (with the timer counting down to 24 seconds) but I finally got on and off the planet. I'm now sitting at a defense station ready to do who knows what.

Controlling it was a bit cramp inducing but I still had a good time. I'm hoping I'll have time tomorrow to continue.

I tried storing my R4 cart in my Metroid case where the cartridge goes and found that it indeed is not the same size as a DS cart! The cart split apart but I was able to snap it all back togther. I have not tried playing it since. While its got some DS games on there, I mostly use it for emulation.

[YoshiM]

Keeping with the DS theme, I shifted over to the 3DS now as the kids were talking about Halloween and "Animal Crossing:New Horizons". I spent time weeding, paying off the mortgage and even hit up the Dream Suite to visit a town named "meow". Next thing I knew, most of my lunch time was up. I did have some time to get through World 1-1 of "Super Mario Bros. 2" for the Virtual Console.

[Aussie2B]

I'm still chipping away at and very much enjoying Fuga: Melodies of Steel on Steam, now up to the last battle of Chapter 10. The game is presenting it as if it's the final confrontation of the game, but I'm guessing once I clear the battle, they'll explain more stuff and whip out a bigger, badder baddie. I went and dropped even more cash on more merch related to this game, so I guess that shows just how much I've been getting into it. It's reignited my love for all things Little Tail Bronx, even if it's totally different from the prior games.

Outside of that, in a harebrained scheme to squeeze more exercise into my busy, hectic life, I pulled out Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Dancing Museum for N64 and the dance pad that goes with it. I've never been much of a rhythm game person, let alone a dancing game person, but I do have two of Konami's DDR controllers that I acquired for reasons other than "I want to play DDR". I've got one for PS1/PS2 that my brother-in-law left with us when he moved out. I'm guessing a friend probably convinced him to get it because rhythm games have never been his thing either, as far as I can tell. But I don't have a single DDR game for those platforms, so the pad is useless to me for the time being. The N64 game and pad I bought simply as part of my goal to collect every Japan-only N64 game that isn't sports or some sort of Japanese board or parlor game like pachinko, mahjong, shogi, etc. But there's no reason the stuff should just sit untouched, collecting dust. It's pretty fun and is a decent workout for days when I don't want to or can't get out for a brisk walk. I'm starting to wonder if I may have a dead battery inside the cart, though. According to Google results, data is supposed to save to the cartridge, but my copy isn't retaining my scores or the puzzle pieces I've acquired in Session mode. I'd like to unlock all the extra songs, so it's quite annoying. I don't know if there's something I'm missing about saving or if I do indeed need to crack it open and replace a battery. I've only ever had to replace one battery before, and it was in a SNES game, so I'd be surprised if I got a N64 cart with a dead battery, especially when so few N64 games use batteries to begin with.

[Aussie2B]

I already posted in the Beaten in 2023 topic that I finished Fuga: Melodies of Steel and then blew through a homebrew horror game called Phobos Dere .GB. The next thing I started up and am still playing is Imagine Figure Skater on my DS Lite. I know most people assume every Imagine game is total shovelware garbage, which isn't an inaccurate description of many of them, but this particular one is a localization of the first Kuru Kuru Princess game, a series from Spike, a Japanese company behind a lot of cool games, especially in the realm of visual novels and similar games (Danganronpa, Zero Escape, etc.) That's not to say this is anything on that level, but I'm having fun with it so far. It's a very simplistic game and feels a lot like a dating sim. You travel around town, see who you can run into and talk with, and increase stats. Except here you're increasing stats via mini-games for the purpose of skating better. There is a little romance subplot, so you could even call this an otome game, but that's not the focus. What is the focus is winning the competitions, which are also pretty basic. You just have to move the stylus in a particular way when prompted to successfully pull off the various moves. The heroines you get to choose from are in middle school, so I imagine (to make a bad, unintentional pun) the target audience is girls the same age or younger. So with such a young target audience, it's no surprise the game has very little challenge. So yeah, it's nothing amazing, but it's not terrible like people assume either. It works just fine for me as something cute to relax with at the end of a long day.

[Aussie2B]

I've cleared both the town and city competitions in Imagine Figure Skater for DS. In the first, I easily took first place, but I only got third, the minimum to progress, on the second. I think creating my own short program probably hurt me, as I don't know enough about figure skating to have a sense of what's worth the most points, so I just picked things at random. Anyway, next comes the state competition, then regional. I assume after that it's national and world. I also assume "state" was originally the prefectural competition. It's funny the lengths they went to westernize the game, like how all the character names sound like an assortment straight out of a boomer's yearbook (Cindy, Nancy, Karen, Julie, Sharon, Sally, etc.), yet there still are so many things that are distinctly Japanese. For example, the start of the game has the protagonist entering middle school (though it's 7th grade), yet it's the beginning of April and there's a sign reading "opening ceremony". And then there's the sushi-eating mini-game, where you grab the pieces off a moving conveyor belt. Speaking of which, the mini-games are growing a bit tiresome, but I know I'm partially to blame there. Since you can get one level-up for each stat each week, that's what I've been doing, rather than solely completing the weekly tasks. Even though the newer mini-games increase multiple stats, they seem like a less efficient way to raise stats, given the amount of time they take. It's even more of a waste if I fail to earn the highest ranking with them. So I'm just endlessly doing the sushi, penguins, and cake decoration mini-games. None of the mini-games are bad, but they're not particularly fun either. I was thinking the stats might max out at 9, since there didn't seem like enough room for two-digit numbers, but sure enough, they cram the digits in there. The localization isn't great in that regard either. A lot of the graphical alphanumeric elements don't look quite right.

[Gametrek]

Just been checking out random PC games and emulations to be honest.

"Destroy All Humans 2" seems to work but crashes now because I literally need ram for the machine.
I mean amazing to think that a PS2 era game could be so fun right now.

"Hylics 1 and 2" both are auwsome. Just to show you what a person could do with RPG-maker and
Unity. Only sad part is that Unity does not use the same font as the first game did.

"Ex-Zodiac" is more or less if Starfox was a Twinbee game. This game was made in Godot I mean wow,
just wow.

[YoshiM]

I really haven't had time to game lately until today. After all the cooking (about 4 hours) the eating (I thankfully didn't gorge myself this year...I can't do that anymore) the kids went to play their games. My wife and my eldest two were (or still are right now) working on decorations for my wife's musical show next month. That means I can go off and play....and play I did!

I've been working to get my OG Xbox online with Insignia. I had some time late last night to get the setup stuff taken care of but kept running into connection errors at reboot. It didn't occur to me last night that the softmod settings were overwriting my Xbox dashboard settings. Once I set that to static (and reserved the IP address on my router)-connecting to Insignia was quick and easy! Then after discovering I needed to install patches for some games, I was able to get online and play!

The first game I tried was "Star Wars: Battlefront 2". I hopped on and just joined a session and got onto a team that lost all of its spawn points. Next game I got into my team was getting mowed down. The names didn't look right-I wonder if the host had bots running. Anyway, I stepped in and began to carve through to a base point (flag...my brain can't think of the actual name right now). I was able to wipe out the opposing droids and secure the point. Suddenly I could become Yoda...which I gleefully accepted. My little green booger with legs rans through and mowed down Separatist droids like a Ginsu through tomatoes! Spawn points were getting captured by my team! I only wished folks used voice chat! Anyway...suddenly we started losing the points. I got cut down and by the time I got back in the game, our last point was taken and it was game over.

The second game I attempted was "Phantasy Star Online Episodes I & II". The ISO I downloaded, unfortunately, was a modded version so I could not get online. I was able to find an American version, downloaded the DLC/patches for it and I was off to the races! Again, the person I was with had no voice and I have no idea how to easily chat. Someone chatted with me and we got into a fight but I died quickly. Gotta read up on this some before I jump back in.

Last game I tried was offline: "Soul Calibur 2". It's been years since I played this and I was gunning to give it a go. It came on and out of what I played today, THIS was the most gorgeous of the bunch! It's hard to believe the OG Xbox came out 20 years ago and that the games visually aged so well. I got through the Arcade mode with Cassandra (as I'm a Sophitia fan, so had to play the sister). Voldo and Raphael gave me some trouble but I got through them on the next try. I unlocked an extra Arcade mode and a couple costumes.

All in all, I really dug playing the ol' Box again. I moved my tower computer upstairs in the boys' room so they can play on it while I transferred all my personal stuff to the laptop I'm typing on now (which is a gaming machine as well). I was going to use my laptop as a desktop from time to time but the wires between my laptop with USB dock and my step daughter's laptop (she uses my circa 1960's desk for her virtual schooling-she can't stand a ton of noise like my third eldest, who uses the Airbnb during the week to do his work. Both are in a spectrum of autism and his threshold for noise while working is way lower than hers). So I plopped my Xbox on the file cabinet my laptop was on and hooked it up to the HDMI switch that goes to a nice Dell multi format monitor (HDMI, Display Port, component, etc.). That screen really made the graphics pop! Sure I could see some stair stepping but dang, I did not care.

I forgot to add last night I did play some "Burnout: Revenge". Ooooo the graphics look sooo good and the fast ramming of rivals against the scenery is just sooooo satisfying.

[Aussie2B]

I guess I spoke too soon about the difficulty of Imagine Figure Skater on DS. It's still far from what I'd call a hard game, and I cleared the State Competition at 3rd place on my first try, but I actually got a Game Over on the Regional Competition (which they also refer to as the Block Competition; the localization isn't good about keeping terms consistent). I like how it gives you different options for retrying, like going back to the start of the month if you skipped opportunities to improve stats. But as far as I know, I have the max stats possible at this point (gaining one level in each category every week), so there's no point in that for me. And this was with choosing the harder of the two prebuilt programs each time and only making one mistake in each program. I don't know if it'd even be possible to earn enough points to clear the competition with choosing the easier programs. One thing I noticed is that the prebuilt programs are random, resulting in a variety of potential scores, so I guess if you get programs worth less, it'd be harder to clear the competition unless you're perfect. Custom programs really seem to be the way to go now. I like how the prebuilt programs offer a variety of skills, making it more like a real program, but I'll probably just have to build my own with high-scoring jumps over and over, haha. That makes it more difficult, of course, but I assume I could screw up more and still earn a decent enough score.

[YoshiM]

I got in a little Switch action over the weekend, with some late night "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" play. I bumped into the wisp, which sent me on an ectoplasmic body part hunt throughout my island. You'd think I walked past all the areas but of course, one little spot I walked around had the last piece I needed. I wasn't even close enough to hear it when I went through the area.

Today I loaded up "Tron 2.0: Killer App" on the Xbox. I originally played this game back on PC but my machine just didn't have enough oomph to totally run the game. Plus I was (and still am not) great at the mouse/keyboard combo of PC Land. The folks that consolized the game did a decent enough job and it looks and sounds great. One con with the conversion is that the dialog was never redone, so the character that tell you how to do things mention PC controls (like arrow keys or something like that) or "action button" while the printed dialog shows the proper instruction. The light cycle mode is still a pain in the keester as the stick is used to not only go faster or slower but a slight wiggle makes you turn....in a 90 degree angle. This can get very disorientating when you are using the trigger to turn and you want to get past an opponent and then you turn.....I died a lot when that happened.

One thing I find I took for granted thanks to modern gaming is the auto save. "Tron 2.0" has none. So when I got past the first light cycle area and back into FPS mode, I died not soon after arrival to the new area. I forgot about the lack of autosave and had to go back to the last race, where I did remember to save. I do remember sporadically but the act of saving religously hasn't completely sunk in yet. I'm currently in the "prison pits" or "cell block" or whatever you want to call it. I'm on my way to get my disk back from the leader of the security programs called Kernel.

[celerystalker]

I had some fun with my sons this weekend. Ended up getting a free TV someone was getting rid of and finally decided to vertically mount one in my basement for Tate mode shooting.
11123

[YoshiM]

The wife had to get some leg surgery done, so I took off of work so I could drive her to the hospital.and back. While waiting, I read an issue of "Joystik" magazine and then played "Sonic the Hedgehog" from the "Sega Genesis Classics" I bought on the Switch. I haven't really played that game that much si ce I origi ally owned it back in '91. I have it in so many compilafions and ways to play it but just haven't. Until now. I got to the Marble Zone and acquired a Chaos Emerald before I saved and shut down to go to my own appointment (contact lens check and put my old lenses back in my eyeglass frames...which the tech broke....)

[celerystalker]

I got the fever to play some Money Puzzle Exchanger for Neo Geo MVS yesterday. I love it as one of my personal top 10 puzzle games, but good lord are those last 2 battles tough. I beat it 3 times yesterday, but I would not want to admit the shameful number of continues it took.

After the kids went to bed last night, I decided to play on the vertical screen some more, as it's new enough to me to still be exciting. I played Homura on PS2 for awhile, and my opinion on it has changed a LOT since first getting it back when it came out like 15 years or more ago. I didn't like it as much back then. It was the peak of my shooter (shmup) playing and buying, and came out in the same window as the posthumous Dreamcast games and all those Cave ports like ESPGaluda, Mushihimesama, Dodonpachi Dai-ou-jou, and Ibara, and I really didn't care for its dark color palette and polygon models instead of sprites. Really giving it a fair shake, I truly enjoyed its mechanics this time around. You move slightly slower while shooting, which helps with micro-dodging, and faster when not for macro. There are no bombs, and instead you use your sword when you can (from a slowly-filling automatic gauge) in two ways, almost like in Mars Matrix with the bullet absorbing attack. First, when in striking range, you will do a lock-on, invincible attack to up to 5 enemies of the same type, destroying them all in a flashy animation. Second, you van use it to reflect away a swarm of nearby bullets and send them back at your attacker, netting a poimt multiplier for each bullet. There are no power-ups to collect, and the sword mechanic is really the only scoring gimmick aside from the usual dropped point bonuses from enemies and percentage of enemies destroyed. It's a nice change from the gimmicky scoring in Cave and Treasure games, and it even has a standard 3 credit limit, making it to where it can't be just credit-fed. I'll probably go for a 1cc for the first time in a long time on this one!

My sons have taken a shine to Marvel Super Heroes for arcade and Sega Saturn. My older boy likes Shuma Gorrath, and thr younger likes Blackheart. I had to feel bad for my younger son, though. My daughter wanted to try, and beat him while mostly looking away from the screen and mashing buttons. He got her back after a few tries, but I could see the frustration on his face.

[YoshiM]

I got some Atari action last Monday testing out the four-game cartridge that came out with Atari's new modern paddle controllers. They all played as they should and the controllers felt like I stepped back in time, playing like it was 1982 all over again.

I did also partake in Nintendo's eShop sale and picked up "Goat Simulator" (as it looked goofy fun) and "Gris" as it gave me "Journey" vibes in its presentation. "Goat" was stupid fun and "Gris" was an artful feast for the eyes. I didn't get too far in either as I just wanted to get a taste of them before I went to bed that night.

[YoshiM]

Last weekend I decided to bust out the TurboGrafix-16 Mini to see if I still wanted to keep.that thing. After about an hour or so of play....yeah, it's a keeper.

This system (the TG-16 in general) has had a "buy/sell" relationship with me since high school. I owned this system at least three times in my life and sold it not long after owning it. The Mini was a knee jerk purchase that had me going "why did I do this?" Chalk it up to Internet influence and a lack of a good game hunt locally.

Anyway, I fired it up and gravitated to the PC-Engine side of things. "Salamander" took up most of my time as Incarved my way through it, making liberal use of save states. I think I'm on level 5. Next game was the original "Bonk's Adventure"...which is weird that the Japanese version is here but not the English version to go with "Bonk's Revenge". "Daimakamura" came next followed by "Castlevania X". All this time Inwas sitting on the living room floor and my legs didn't want to be curled up anymore. I will definitely put this in rotation for play.

[Tron 2.0]

Last weekend I decided to bust out the TurboGrafix-16 Mini to see if I still wanted to keep.that thing. After about an hour or so of play....yeah, it's a keeper.

This system (the TG-16 in general) has had a "buy/sell" relationship with me since high school. I owned this system at least three times in my life and sold it not long after owning it. The Mini was a knee jerk purchase that had me going "why did I do this?" Chalk it up to Internet influence and a lack of a good game hunt locally.

Anyway, I fired it up and gravitated to the PC-Engine side of things. "Salamander" took up most of my time as Incarved my way through it, making liberal use of save states. I think I'm on level 5. Next game was the original "Bonk's Adventure"...which is weird that the Japanese version is here but not the English version to go with "Bonk's Revenge". "Daimakamura" came next followed by "Castlevania X". All this time Inwas sitting on the living room floor and my legs didn't want to be curled up anymore. I will definitely put this in rotation for play.
There's a hack coming for it finally but not available yet for the public.

[fpbrush]

More less gave up on Metroid Prime, now moved onto Mario Wonder.

[YoshiM]

It's been pretty quiet on the gaming front lately beyond typing in a maze game for my CoCo 3. On a non game front, I got my Macintosh 512K in place and I did some writing on it. It took a few tries to boot from the floppy but I got it going. Other than the keyboard being a prime cause for carpal tunnel (that sucker is TALL), it was enjoyable to type on a CRT again. A New Year's resolution would be to negotiate with the wife to see if can organize some of her shhh....tuff in the basement so I can set up a bigger desk for retro computing. I want, nay, NEED my CoCo to be on a CRT.

Today, though, I did do some gaming. Played some N64 and dang....just not feeling it. I've touched it a couple times in the past several months and each time I don't play long. I played some "Excitebike 64" followed by the "Goldeneye" hack "Goldfinger 007". It was....ok. I used to be pretty fond of Bond but after a few generations and playing games like "Doom 64" on my Switch with dual stick control really spoilied me. It's really hard to go back to that configuration.

Afterwards it was some Wii time and there too, just not feeling the motion controls. I played a couple levels of "Warioware: Smooth Moves" and I had enough. I played some "Excitetruck" which was exciting but there too, just not feeling it. One of my younger step sons wanted to play "Tom and Jerry: War of the Whiskers" (Gamecube) and he pounded on that for a while.

Later on this night I fired up the OG Xbox and played a through Arcade with a couple of characters. Then I continued on Fable for a while until my hip hurt from being on the floor of the living room and it was time my daughter went back to her mom (she was in deep with some Roblox with her step brothers-my Macbook still is down so I couldn't join). When I got back I needed to kill some demons so I played some "Doom 64" on the Switch and got through level 5. I thought I unlocked a bunch of crap BUT I didn't save! I totally forgot that it doesn't autosave! Dang modern conveniences!

Tomorrow I'm debating going to the Garcade for an early birthday treat (and because they are closed on Monday).

[Aussie2B]

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy for me, between traveling, all of us getting sick, trying to keep up with work deadlines, and of course the holidays. So not much gaming since beating Imagine Figure Skater. I tried to start up NeuroVoider on Vita, if only because it's supposed to be a fairly short game, but I quickly realized that I have so little experience with twin stick shooters that the control scheme doesn't feel natural to me. I got a game over almost immediately, and since the game is also considered to be on the more challenging side, I decided I didn't have the patience to get used to the game while also being sick.

So I decided to go with something a little more familiar and started up Gaia Seed: Project Seed Trap, a PS1 game that's available on US PSN despite receiving no localization whatsoever. It's a very import-friendly game, though, so there's almost nothing that would need to be changed for an actual localization anyway. The menus are in English to begin with, and the opening and endings can be watched with either English narration or English subtitles. That said, the English narration is done by a Japanese man with a heavy accent and tenuous grasp of English, and the subtitles are very Engrish-y too, so either way you go, it's tough to understand. But it does have that Zero Wing kind of charm. It would've been nice if they had at least made an English manual for the US PSN release, but it's a very simple, straightforward horizontal shmup so no biggie. What isn't import-friendly about the game, in terms of actually acquiring an original physical copy, is the absurd value it has secondhand. I bought it on PSN mainly because of that, since I figured I'll never own a physical copy. I first played on the Practice difficulty mode, which abruptly stops after Stage 4, but I've since beaten the game on Normal twice over, once getting a bad ending and then getting the good. It's interesting how it's got three different endings which aren't even related to your usage of credits but rather what you do on the final bosses. To get the good ending, you have to be a pacifist and let the timer run out. You can do that on every boss in the game, but it only makes a difference on the last two. The whole game has a weird vibe, from the messages in the story to the eclectic music and trippy visuals. But in terms of the gameplay, it's nothing remarkable, though it's still fun enough. Some diehard shmup fans complain that it's way too easy, but I'm not surprised. I always kinda regret looking up what other people have to say about shmups online, haha. It seems like only diehards talk about them and make it out like anybody else who plays them should be as good as them. I see people recommending starting straight on Hard in Gaia Seed, saying they got a 1CC on their first try, and claiming anybody can credit feed their way to victory on Normal, even though the game only offers something like 5 credits on Normal. I'd say the game is relatively easy on Normal, but I ran out of credits and lives on the last stage my first go. The second time I had it beat, but even after the third time, I'm still far from achieving a 1CC on Normal, let alone Hard. But I've never been great at shmups and don't play them super often. I think I'll check out the other bad ending, and then maybe I'll move on to something else. I've been seeing the endings with Japanese narration and English subtitles, so I could replay to see all the endings with the English narration, but eh, that'd probably be overkill for me.

[Aussie2B]

I got the other bad ending in Gaia Seed on my Vita. It's the hardest one to get, as you have to wait out the turtle boss and then defeat the angel boss. If you're going for the good ending, you don't have to deal with the angel boss attacking, as it does nothing until it's fired at. Even though I had already beat the game twice over, I had a couple failed runs before I got the last ending I hadn't seen. So I've had my fill at this point, and I watched all three endings again, with the English narration, on YouTube, rather than putting in the time to do 3+ more sessions with the game with the voice setting changed. Now to decide if I want to try NeuroVoider again or play something entirely different.

[YoshiM]

I did get some "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" time in on New Years, playing through the whole celebration. After that I plugged away at some "Doom 64" and got to, I guess, "Hell".

For my birthday I took my daughter and son to the Garcade in Menomonee Falls for a few hours. I had a good time but discovered that my desire to play stand up arcade games is finite. I played my usual cabs, dabbled in some others but when I had to head back to town to drop my daughter off, i was "done". I never had the opportunity (or the skill) to just stand at a classic (as in no ending) machine and play it as far as I could go. Favorite games like "Time Pilot" or "Tron" I'd get a good run then try to do it all again but would choke and get worse scores.

I think I miss the potential loss of not having enough cash to get better at a game or trying to get as far as you can on one play. Sure I could artificially limit myself by either only playing a game X number of times, putting my own tokens into a small can to simulate the amount of cash I have. In the end, I'm a realist and I *know* I'm B.S.ing myself and the desired effect is gone like smoke in the wind.

[Tron 2.0]

This on the TG16 recently i been giving the system run through to make sure it runs proper still.I been thinking about selling it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps5keePzMno

[Aussie2B]

Still not feeling NeuroVoider on Vita, and I considered starting up another PS1 game from Techno Soleil, the short-lived developer behind Gaia Seed, called Rapid Angel. Like Gaia Seed, it must've got a small print run and went completely under the radar because it too is insanely expensive to acquire physically these days. Also like Gaia Seed, it's on US PSN for a mere 6 bucks but completely unlocalized. Since it's an action game, though not a shmup, I assume the lack of a localization doesn't hurt its playability much for people who know no Japanese, but it's not quite as import-friendly as Gaia Seed. Once I saw there's a bunch of story presented only in Japanese and menus in Japanese and such, I decided I wasn't in the mood for playing a game in Japanese right now, since I know I would try to understand as much as I could with what little Japanese I do know and don't feel like putting in that effort right now.

So instead of those, I started up Rock Boshers DX: Director's Cut, which is another twin stick shooter, but it feels infinitely more intuitive to me than NeuroVoider and not as punishingly difficult, so far at least. It's also got a lot more style, from the goofy story to the cool graphical options (8-bit console or 8-bit computer) and chiptune music. NeuroVoider just comes off as very dark and bland to me. I've cleared a few stages in Rock Boshers DX and grabbed the tea, cheese, and jammy scone in all of them. It feels like there's a bit of a puzzle aspect to the stages, figuring out the proper order to do things so you don't get stuck in a bad situation. Since the stages are a single screen and pretty quick to clear, I don't mind having to redo them until I get things right. I've tried the game with both sets of graphics, and the 8-bit computer mode seems a little easier to me, if only because the simpler graphics make things more obvious, but I still prefer using the NES-style graphics anyway, which I believe were added for this "Director's Cut" version (don't know if anything else got changed or added). The game isn't stingy with the trophies either (not that there are many of them, and there's no platinum), so it's nice getting the little dopamine hit from those popping up, haha. So yeah, I'm liking it so far, and I figured I'd have better luck with it considering it's the same developer as Aqua Kitty: Milk Mine Defender DX, which I haven't played a ton of but really liked from what I did try (and that surprised me, as Defender-style shooters usually don't appeal to me much).

[YoshiM]

I spent the nights of this past weekend setting up drive images for my Apple Powerbook 180. I bought a BlueSCSI V2 device that allows me to use disk drive images as virtual (but real to the PowerBook) hard drives. It took me a bit to get things right and I had to take the microSD card out of the BlueSCSI a couple times as I forgot to do a step or an INI file got goofed up in the fixing process but in the end, the sucker worked! I even got the RasPi Pico WiFi module up and going, so this bugger can go online. Not that I want to surf the web but at least do FTP stuff or maybe visit a BBS or three.

The fruits of that labor bore a drive filled with a bunch of electronic entertainment delights. Granted it was in 16 Shades of Gray (or less) but I was able to play some "Lemmings", "Zork", some blind "Civilization" (the map screen was all white-not sure why) and some "Kings Quest 1". I didn't do a deep dive as I had already spent a long time on the floor of the living room (which is where I had enough flat space to work on this thing-thank Woz this thing was designed to be fairly easy to take apart) and my legs were yelling at me to stand up and move. The laptop is primarily going to be for creative writing and general retrocomputing, but I wanted some entertainment options.

I was going to play some Switch at work but my time flew and I wanted to leave earlier than usual due to the blizzard mid-central/southern Wisconsin was getting. At least NOW it looks like we have four seasons again.

[Aussie2B]

I'm up to the 19th stage out of 24 in Rock Boshers DX: Director's Cut on my Vita, and I've only missed one food pickup so far (in the stage where you have to battle a tank; I wasn't expecting the stage to abruptly end upon its defeat). The difficulty definitely ratcheted up after those first few stages, so it's taking me a good number of failed runs to clear each stage. Still having fun, but it's not something I can play for long stretches without wearing out my thumbs and/or getting frustrated.

[Aussie2B]

I beat Rock Boshers DX: Director's Cut for Vita a few days ago and simultaneously earned 100% of the trophies as I did so, since I went back to grab the food pickups I missed first. So that adds to my small number of PSN games where I've earned every trophy, but my platinum count is still a measly two. Some of the stages toward the end were pretty brutal, at least for me, with my limited experience with twin stick shooters. I think this is actually the first one I've ever beaten. The stages where you have to run a certain number of laps around the stage while getting more and more swarmed were a pain, also the ones where you have to lure guided missiles, and the one where you gotta kill 150 enemies with missiles. But the last few stages were a little more story-focused, as they wrapped up the few little plot points going through the game, and weren't so difficult thankfully. Not much of an ending, but that's in line with the era the game is mimicking.

Next up, I started Exile's End on my Vita. I wouldn't say I have any major problems with it thus far, but I can understand why a lot of reviews aren't so glowing. For one, the game definitely has an identity crisis. Part of the game's marketing is "NOT a Metroidvania" yet practically everyone calls it one, and I can't blame them for that as it does come off as a Metroid-style game. The developer says it was inspired by "cinematic platformers" like Flashback and Another World, and I can see that too, but I think it's those elements that put off people who expect a typical game in the style of Metroid. You start the game with absolutely no way to attack (you'd think this grizzled old mercenary could at least punch), and you take fall damage from not much of a drop at all. So you have to carefully and methodically move around, scrolling the screen down to look before you continue on, and dodge a million snakelike enemies. Finally, you find an upgrade for shock absorption, which eliminates the fall damage, though there's still the impact from a drop that stalls Jameson (the protagonist) for a second. That's about as far as I've played so far. I still don't even have a means of attacking just yet.

Other than that, like the last time I was visiting family, I'm playing some Super Mario World via the flash cart we brought with us, mostly for my daughter's amusement, since she's crazy about Yoshi.

[Aussie2B]

I finally got a real weapon in Exile's End (well, a few, at this point) on my Vita. You could count the rocks, but you only get a few, and they're better used for flipping levers than combat. I basically just dodged everything until I got the handgun, though I did use a rock on a falling worm to earn a trophy. On that note, the trophies are weird in this game. There's one close to the beginning that nearly 90% of player earn (you get it automatically as long as you play long enough to get to that part), yet every other trophy is at less than 20% of players. I've gotten two more beyond that first one, and neither was tough to get. I guess a lot of people must quit this game early on, probably turned off by the fall damage and lack of a weapon. I have noticed that some of the complaints people have with this game are straight up BS. I've been reading some pro reviews from around when the game launched, and it's kind of driving me nuts how many people claim you have to make "leaps of faith" (and thus supposedly can't avoid fall damage or landing in spiked pits). There is literally not a single area where you have to drop down blindly while you're still taking fall damage and none I've seen after that either). The controls in the game aren't complicated at all and are laid out in the digital manual too. You simply crouch and keep holding down briefly to scroll the screen lower, like in the Sonic games and a bajillion other 2D side-scrolling games. Apparently people want in-game tutorials and hand-holding, yet can't be bothered to look at a very short manual in lieu of those? It's pretty sad when games journalism is no better than "y cant metroid crawl?" sometimes.

[Aussie2B]

I just entered the Cathedral area in Exile's End on my Vita. I haven't had much time for playing, but it's been relatively smooth sailing when I do. I haven't had any difficulties stumbling across stuff I need to progress further. It probably helps that the graphics are pretty repetitive in each area, so it's easy to spot something that's different. And with examining stuff to get a bit of text, it's usually obvious what is needed where (like bringing the wrench to the stuck valve). Outside of the worm trophy, every trophy I've received so far is something you get automatically just by progressing far enough, so it's surprising I'm only midway through and already getting "rare" trophies that only 10% of players have earned, in a game that seems pretty short (even if my limited playing time is stretching it out).

[fpbrush]

Metroid Prime or Super Mario Wonder

[Aussie2B]

I beat Exile's End on my Vita with over seven hours on the clock, but I didn't manage 100% completion. I had 85% of the items and 3 out of 7 of the hidden messages. Around the time of my last post about the game, I started talking to my husband about it, which got him interested and then he blew through the whole thing. Since he was playing on a much bigger screen, he could more easily spot breakable walls. I noticed the obvious spots in the first mine, but I didn't realize there were much subtler tells in the other areas. So I started examining walls much more carefully from that point on, but I'm not surprised I missed some. I'll check out some online maps to pick off what little I missed and try to get that 100% completion trophy. I obviously didn't get remotely close to earning the Fast Mover trophy, which requires beating the game in under three hours. I hate speedrunning trophies, so I'm just gonna say to heck with that one. I get speedrunning is part of this genre, starting with Metroid's different endings depending on how much time you take, but it's not my thing at all.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised with the game. It's not amazing, but I never expected it to compete with the greats like Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. I don't think it's fair to hold indie developers to the same standards as industry pros on top of their game. All the mixed reviews and criticism makes Exile's End sound a lot worse than it actually is, which is sad considering a lot of the criticism is straight up false. I guess it shows the difference between pretentious indie aficionados who want to pretend they're into retro games, even though they either haven't played old games since they were brand-new or are so young they never played them to begin with, and people like myself who still play decades-old games in the present day and have no problem playing an indie that tries to be fairly authentic to the way old games played. I found the game pretty straightforward and easy, so it's perplexing to me that so many people find the game so frustrating and confusing. The only real beefs I have with the game are the crappy way the map fills in (some rooms just never fill in completely, making it seem like you've got something left to explore when you actually don't) and that the involvement of the "legendary" Japanese industry veterans didn't amount to much. Despite having the same composer as Ninja Gaiden, the music in Exile's End doesn't stand out, in my opinion, and other than a nice piece of art when the game loads up, there's nothing about the visuals that's especially impressive either. They could've told me the game was entirely made by Western indie developers, and I would've believed it no problem.

[Aussie2B]

I added roughly another hour to the clock to get the five rooms I missed in Exile's End on my Vita, but after that, I had 100% completion and saw the tiny extra scene added to the ending. It's not so apparent while progressing normally, but the areas are rather annoyingly linear when you're trying to navigate around the whole map quickly to look for things you missed. There are a lot of dead ends from places where you drop down but can't jump back up, and I often found myself thinking I could reach another area going a certain way only to hit one of those dead ends, then I had to backtrack to where I was before and try a longer way around.

Last night, I started up Lucifer Ring on my Vita. It's another PS1 game that originally only came out in Japan but much later got a US PSN release, with no localization work done to it. Like the previous couple I mentioned, it's stupidly expensive to get a physical copy of the game, hence my opting for a cheap digital copy instead. It's not quite as English-friendly as Gaia Seed, but all that people who don't understand Japanese would miss out on here is a little bit of narration for the opening, in between the five stages, and during the "ending". Not only did I start Lucifer Ring but I also beat it during my very first session with the game, and I use quotes because it was hardly an ending. Just credits, a small window of gameplay footage, and some narration talking over it. There's very little story in general. It's just a simplistic 3D beat-em-up in a fantasy setting where you collect four rings (by beating the first four stages) and use those to open up the gate to hell or something and defeat some big, evil monster. I played on the default Normal difficulty setting, and with the infinite continues, it was no problem blowing through it. You do have to start from scratch on whatever section/boss you were on if you use a continue, so maybe that presents more of a challenge on the higher difficulties. Once you beat it, you can choose which type of sword you want to use when you replay, and I hear you get a level select after a second time through, so I'll probably do that at least. The game felt really slow and clunky to me, but I thought the only way to run was by double-tapping, though apparently you can hold a shoulder button to run too, oops. It's not a particularly good game, but it definitely has that kind of quirky charm a lot 5th gen games have, in my eyes at least.

[fpbrush]

Pubg mobile rn

[Aussie2B]

Yep, holding R1 to run in Lucifer Ring for PlayStation makes a huge difference in how fluid the game feels, though platforming still doesn't feel great and is better done without running. The running strong attack just slices and dices through practically anything. I set the difficulty to Easy and blew through the whole game again, without even using any continues, I believe. In fact, I think you have to do the whole game in one sitting because it seems like the only time the game saves is after beating it. Though, after beating it a second time, you unlock the level select, which not only lets you pick the level but even which section of the level you want to start on, and after clearing a stage, you return to the level select. With that, I saw I missed two optional routes (one in the first stage and one in the third), so I started sections before those to find them, then jumped straight to the final boss to beat the game again and save the fact I've explored every section. The part I missed in the third stage was especially notable in that in contains the stage's mid boss (a basilisk). So now there's nothing left I could do in the game besides try the two harder difficulties, but I hear they don't change much (I assume it just takes more hits to kill everything). I'm satisfied leaving it there, so I'll have to pick something else to start now.

Other than that, my daughter has switched from wanting to watch me play Super Mario World to Super Mario Kart, which I've been playing via our flash cart. I've gotten gold on all the 50cc and 100cc cups, and I was apparently wrong in thinking you have to clear 150cc to get the credits. I imagine I'll tackle those cups soon.

[YoshiM]

It's been a dry spell. With work being busy, I haven't been able to take a proper break or much of a lunch, so the Switch has been dormant. With what time I've had at home to myself, I've been loading my 2DS's and 3DS with CFW along with bigger memory cards. Right now I'm formatting a 64 GB for my New 3DS, which is taking forever. I did get to play some "Kid Icarus: Uprising", which has been a thorn in my side due to its funky land movement controls. But I'm trying to wrap my brain around the controls as in the past I just pushed it aside in disgust.

[Aussie2B]

I've been coming to the realization that I probably should've put more thought into the diversity of the games I brought with me for my stay with family. In the grand scheme of things, I have more options than I know what to do with, since we've got loaded up flash carts for use on the AV Famicom and SNES we keep here, and we also brought a back-light modded original GBA with its own flash cart. But I've always used flash carts more for toying around, while the games I get seriously invested in are the ones I've bought officially. So I've got my Vita with five physical games and an assortment of PS1, PSP, and Vita games I've gotten digitally (mostly stuff that's digital-only). Subtracting out the games I've already beaten and ones I don't especially want to play during this trip (because I don't have great headphones with me or because there are other games in the series I want to play first), that leaves me with over a dozen to pick from. But around a third of the games I've got with me for my Vita are shmups and a couple are twin-stick shooters, and having recently beaten Gaia Seed and Rock Boshers DX, I wasn't super eager to start something similar to those just yet. But I wasn't feeling the other stuff right now, so I did end up starting another 2D horizontal shmup: Super Hydorah for Vita.

I've beaten a few stages so far, but the difficulty does seem to ramp up fast. I like that it saves so you don't have to always start from the beginning, though I wish I could revisit stages to search for secrets. I found one on the second stage but haven't seen anything else yet.

[fpbrush]

On the road again getting new badges on the Mario Wonder. Pretty fun, still.

[Aussie2B]

Going off the in-game map, I assume I'm about halfway through Super Hydorah for Vita, but the stage I'm up to, Galactic Inferno, is like a brick wall. It's a real gauntlet, with so many sections and boss fights, and it's been royally kicking my butt. And with its length, it's tiresome to try over and over, not to mention you lose some weapon strength with each death, so you're put at more and more of a disadvantage, since you can't repeat prior stages to power up. I could restart from the very beginning, but ehhhhh.

[Aussie2B]

After a LOT of practice, I finally managed to clear that brutal Galactic Inferno stage in Super Hydorah on Vita and then quickly blew through a couple short stages following that. It's definitely not a linear difficulty curve. But I'm a little worried if there are going to be stages just as hard or harder than Galactic Inferno. If there are, I hope they're at least a good bit shorter. Each attempt at Galactic Inferno was taking me around 10 minutes, so needless to say, that gets tiresome after many attempts. To add insult to injury, there's a cutscene at the start of Galactic Inferno that can't be skipped. It's a small scene, but it's still aggravating after you've seen it tons of times.

[Osirus]

11130

[Aussie2B]

I've got access to three different stages in Super Hydorah on my Vita right now, but they're all a pain in the ass. Mostly I'm trying to clear Underground Base, and it doesn't seem like it'll be hugely difficult to do so, but I feel like Galactic Inferno kinda sapped a lot of my patience for the game. My next game definitely needs to be something that's not quite so challenging for me to make progress in.

Still playing Super Mario Kart via our flash cart on SNES for my daughter too. I got gold in the Mushroom Cup and Star Cup on 150cc. The former was no sweat, but the latter took a number of failed attempts. But my daughter likes the Star Cup anyway, since she seems to be fond of the beach and snow tracks.

[Aussie2B]

I managed to squeak by the last boss of Underground Base in Super Hydorah on Vita and then quickly cleared the following stage. The difficulty of this game is seriously whiplash. I'm still not sure what is up with the end of Underground Base. I couldn't tell if I was actually damaging the machines firing out the electric bolts or if it's another case of having to wait something out, like the collapsing ceiling after the first Hydorah seed I destroyed. Anyway, I have two stages left to beat the game, the first of those being a boss rush (all-new bosses, not returning ones), but I don't know if I could pull those off without clearing some of the other stages to gain their weapons. There are four other optional stages left I can do.

Clearing the Flower Cup on 150cc in Super Mario Kart on SNES was no sweat too, so now I just have 150cc Special Cup to go, which I know took me a long time to earn gold in as a kid.

[fpbrush]

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all.

Enjoying Mario Wonder, still. I managed to get 2 badges and there are 3-4 more to go. All the standees. Just gonna max it all out someday I imagine. Picked Metroid Dread backup. Had to guide through a rough spot, but smooth sailing for now. It says: “Items: 61%” so good progress?

Off to the side I started playing PGA TOUR Golf Shootout. A fun little diversion from surfing the internet black hole, haha. It’s supposed to have real courses and looked arcade-y fun.

[Aussie2B]

It took some practice and the help of the better weapons I recently gained, but I cleared Charybdis in Super Hydorah on my Vita. It's one of the short stages, but I really struggle with parts that make you wait out being in extremely tight quarters with swarms of enemies. So hard to dodge without slamming into something. Moa-Urdz after that wasn't too tough, so now I'm down to two optional stages and two required.