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

[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.

[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....)