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

[Aussie2B]

I had posted that I cleared the first loop (aka Stage 1 through 5) in the original arcade TwinBee via TwinBee Portable on PSP, but what I did specifically was make it partway through Stage 7. The harder loop isn't just the exact same enemy patterns and groupings but faster and with more bullets, like in some games. Rather, they throw at you a new mix of all the previous enemies, plus a handful of new ones, so I wanted to see how far I could get just to check out what differences I could see. That, and I wanted to see how high I could get my score. I just fell short of 1 million, but that was nearly double my previous high. Not that I was making any huge effort to boost my score. I just wanted to get past the fifth boss, but I did grab and chain yellow bells whenever I could (if only to get them out of the way). It seems like Stage 6 mostly exists to get your ship powered up again after Stage 5. The regular enemies didn't put up much of a fight. But the hard loop version of the first boss, Onion Head...oof. It's like a bullet hell shmup. I don't know how it'd even be possible to dodge the endless waves of bullets. But I got to it with a barrier, so I managed to survive long enough to beat it. But at that point, I had already died and was a sitting duck with no power-ups. I was waiting and waiting for Stage 7 to give me some bells, but there was just nothing. Barely any clouds and what did pass by seemed to be empty. So I eventually lost my remaining lives and couldn't make it to the boss of Stage 7.

Moving on, I decided to start up Brain Lord on Super Nintendo. I had been wanting to play it for a while, but I was waiting for a good time. I didn't want to play it right after another overhead 2D adventure game, so I wanted to give some space from my playthroughs of Illusion of Gaia and Metal Gear 2. Speaking of the former, that was the only home console game I actually played on a home console last year, so maybe this year I could at least do two, haha. I mean, I play plenty of home console games on handhelds, thanks to ports and such, but sometimes it's nice to sit down at a TV, even if it's not as convenient for me. Anyway, I haven't even left the first town in Brain Lord, but I'm liking it so far. As shallow as it sounds, I was always turned off by the ugly protagonist sprite. He reminds me of the hero in Virtual Hydlide, haha. But the rest of the game looks pretty nice, and the script has more personality than I expected. I really like the music too. My husband is a fan of the game and has beaten it at least once, so I watched him play it some many, many years ago, but I think it'll be nice to finally give it a go myself.

[fpbrush]

Moving on, I decided to start up Brain Lord on Super Nintendo. I had been wanting to play it for a while, but I was waiting for a good time. I didn't want to play it right after another overhead 2D adventure game, so I wanted to give some space from my playthroughs of Illusion of Gaia and Metal Gear 2. Speaking of the former, that was the only home console game I actually played on a home console last year, so maybe this year I could at least do two, haha. I mean, I play plenty of home console games on handhelds, thanks to ports and such, but sometimes it's nice to sit down at a TV, even if it's not as convenient for me. Anyway, I haven't even left the first town in Brain Lord, but I'm liking it so far. As shallow as it sounds, I was always turned off by the ugly protagonist sprite. He reminds me of the hero in Virtual Hydlide, haha. But the rest of the game looks pretty nice, and the script has more personality than I expected. I really like the music too. My husband is a fan of the game and has beaten it at least once, so I watched him play it some many, many years ago, but I think it'll be nice to finally give it a go myself.

Those do look similar. Virtual Hydlide looks like he could beat up Brain Lord, though.

[Aussie2B]

Haha, yeah, it takes a tough guy to pull off that fairy armor.

I'm slowly chipping away at Brain Lord on Super Nintendo. Not slowly because the action or puzzles are so challenging but just because I haven't had much time for gaming. I guess I'll see later on if it actually lives up to its title and gives my brain a workout. With Boxxle under my belt, the puzzles where I have to push objects onto switches are child's play for me so far. I'm only up to the second dungeon, the Site of Civilization, which is also referred to as the Ancient Ruins sometimes, but it seems like there's only a handful of dungeons total anyway. I did temporarily get stuck on the puzzle where you have to guess the third number in a sequence that starts with 12 and 52. Seems like a no-brainer now, but I was way overthinking it, probably because this game has the usual so-so translation you'd expect from an Enix-published game on Super Nintendo. The clue for the puzzle was worded awkwardly and had me going down a totally different direction.

[kupomogli]

So I have both Strange Journey and Strange Journey Redux. Haven't played either of them. Started Redux because it's on the 3DS. I absolutely love the 3D effect. So I'm playing, the game starts up and there's no 3D visible, no 3D during the story scenes, I'm like, maybe when I get to the dungeons which this is not a port, they completely remade the dungeon visuals. No 3D there either. No 3D in the entire game which really disappoints me as the first person dungeon crawler are perfect for the this and the fact that SMT4, SMT4 Apocalypse, and Persona Q have some of the most beautiful 3D with just tons of depth. Like jaw dropping.

Anyways, as for the game itself I did look at comparisons of what the original and the remake does, so the remake adds these commander skills. I am not acquiring any commander skills nor am I acquiring the passive skill that if the MC dies you don't automatically lose. I'd rather keep it close to the original as possible. It does add some quality of life features so if I'm done playing inside a dungeon I can at the very least save in the dungeon. However, I have only been saving in the terminals or at base otherwise. I didn't even save in the dungeon when I accidentally played too long after the flashing light of doom and my 3DS power cut off on me, losing an hour worth of progress.

The story is good and it has voice acting which is great.... it's just in Japanese. The quality of the voice work despite the language is excellent, so that's a plus, but I would really have preferred English voice acting. It's just Sega being cheap yet again because both this and Persona Q2 had voice acting and both of them were Japanese only, where all other games including Persona Q had voice acting in English. Voice work costs money but it's next to nothing compared to the game development costs. It's just a way to cut costs and why is it that they add voice acting for the Japanese fans but then feel they need to bend the western fans over like we don't matter.

That being said, SMT Strange Journey probably has the best gameplay in the series. It's a mix of both classic style SMT with modern mechanics infused much like the addition of the Press Turn System. In SMT Strange Journey, each of your demons is preset like the older games and whenever you level them up they don't earn extra skills, what you see is what you get. The demon will sometimes ask if it can change a skill and on the original Strange Journey you didn't know what you were going to have the skill change into. I do think this is a great addition to Redux because 90% of the time I've been denying the skill change because usually there's no benefit to doing so, more often than not changing skills just seems bad. Additionally I think another change from Redux is that one or two skills will carry over to the new demon during fusion, I don't think this existed in the previous game. However, one thing that did exist in the prior game is that when you max the knowledge you have towards a demon they'll give you their source. Their source will have a few skills that you can use during demon fusion to carry those over to the new demon.

I like this new change because unlike SMT Nocturne and every other modern SMT, all of your demons will pretty much all have mostly the same skills where the demons here will keep a lot of what makes them unique to others and not just their HP/MP/Stats/Resistances.

The other thing I really like about this game is that again, it's like the classic style with the modern enhancements. One thing I've gotten tired of with the press turn system is that when you have a couple overpowered demons in the situation or you have four great demons but in the current situation two aren't as good as the others, you just pass the turn and end up taking five turns with your powerful demons and the demons who won't deal as much in this battle or situation you'll just skip their turn. Or how you might only have two demons with buff skills and you use the advantage of passing turns and you can pretty much massively debuff the enemy or buff yourselves in one or two rounds by simply not engaging with your other characters and just passing.

In the classic games and some of the modern games, Persona 4, 5, SMT Strange Journey, etc, you're at the very least required to use each character in combat and you're unable to just give their turn away to another. Now while I don't care at all for Persona 5's bloated storyline, I do prefer the combat more than the press turn system, an amazing system that I've just gotten tired of. In the case of SMT Strange Journey, what happens is that you both need to deal weaknesses and you need to have matching alignments. If you have matching alignments and deal attacks that hit enemy weaknesses all characters with those alignments will then join in a demon co op attack to deal extra damage. Unfortunately this doesn't work with critical hits, so only magic using demon's can benefit from this. Not like it really matters that much as it appears that physical attacks are more powerful than magic attacks, so the magic attacks greatly benefit from this, especially so when you're fighting an enemy strong versus physical and you really need to use magic attacks. Demon co op is essentially a non elemental rush. You can really get the most out of it with low level AoE spells since they cost such low MP.

I honestly don't really know if the questions from the demons in SMT4 mattered, but I do know on SMT Nocturne it didn't, it was just random what happened regardless of the question. On SMT Strange Journey, each demon has a specific personality and several questions. Maybe around four or five that were very specific to this demon. You need to appeal to the demon twice to request something of them and even though you might see multiple demons ask the same quest, depending on their personality the answer will be different. Once you fail multiple times it's easier when you know what the demon is ultimately looking for, but when you first talk to them, you kind of have to think based on their speech or even their look what their personality may be and how best to respond.

The one thing I don't really care for about the game are the dungeons. Now it's not like the dungeons are bad. The problem with the dungeons are that you've got several areas in the dungeon that might be completely separate. They in now way even interconnect to the main dungeon and just lead all around to dead ends. I don't feel like the game itself is grindy, but because of these dungeons, I feel like their is unintential grinding because of their design. Infact, I'm six or seven hours in, fought three bosses so far and I don't think this game has any required grinding in the least. It's amazingly well balanced.

[Aussie2B]

I haven't had the time to make updates, but like I said in the other topic, I've beaten Brain Lord on SNES and Akumajou Special: Boku Dracula-kun on my AV Famicom. Brain Lord never got any tougher than that second dungeon, in my opinion, not in terms of puzzles or in platforming and combat. Even though it's a totally different kind of game, Dracula-kun gave me TwinBee 3 vibes, in that it's a later Famicom/NES release from Konami but clearly was more of a B-tier project for them, not pushing the hardware in any impressive ways like they were with other titles, but still showing off some creative silliness in a simple, fun game. I really love how the first stage of Dracula-kun is basically a chibi-fied tour of the first Castlevania.

Anyway, not sure what I'll sink time into next, but I did briefly try out a Donkey Kong cart I recently bought on my Super Game Boy 2. I've been reading old Nintendo Power issues from around when this came out, and it got me interested in playing it and the subsequent Mario vs. Donkey Kong series that was inspired by it (at least until they turned into Lemmings clones, from what I've heard). The portability of handheld games is a big plus for me, so I've actually barely ever used my US Super Game Boy or Super Game Boy 2, but Donkey Kong takes advantage of the Super Game Boy so nicely that I think it'd be hard to make myself play through it on my SP or what have you.

[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.