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

[celerystalker]

Played through GI Joe in my Sunset Riders cabinet with my brother. We also tried out co-op in 'Splosion Man. It was more fun than I'd have expected. Not bad. I feel something weird coming on... like it may be time to try something new on PC-FX or Jaguar CD or something...

[ChasinTheTrane]

I've been playing through Super Metroid again. I forgot how incredible the level design is. Where to go feels natural and not like you're going through a maze, a common issue in a lot of games of that genre.

[Montrealer]

I always keep a few games on rotation.

Currently playing:

• Immercenary - 3DO
• Phoenix 3 - 3DO
• Star Fighter - 3DO
• The Legend of Zelda : Phantom Hourglass - 3DS

[FieryReign]

Messing around with the droid Saturn emulator uoYabause. Someone finally got Saturn games running full speed on android. A few games like Shining Force 3 don't work yet but alot do. Now I can see what the big deal is with Radiant Silvergun, PD Saga, and other games I never got to try when I had the system. Starting with Rayearth.

[retro junkie]

Been playing Darius Twin on my Super Famicom all weekend.

[Videogamerdaryll]

Metal Slug 6..on new type bartop machine with LCD screen

I'm obsessed with ZOO KEEPER..

[Videogamerdaryll]

Robotron :
I never got into this game but now can't stop playing it...I SUCK at it..


Dreamcast Ready To Rumble

Neo Geo
Super Sidekicks 2
Metal Slug 6

[celerystalker]

Played through the opening areas in Azure Striker Gunvolt and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, both of which I picked up today for 3DS. Gunvolt looks like it'll be a fun little action game, though it's likely to be way too easy by the looks of it. Still, fun to get a physical release. I'll probably stick with Luigi's Mansion for awhile. I really had fun with the Gamecube original, and I can plop it in with my earbuds and play it in bed while my wife sleeps. I could always go play something downstairs, but sometimes it's nice to be with her, even if I'm not tired enough to sleep. Anyway, it'll be fun to play in English, as I played the first Luigi Mansion in Japanese, as that's the only way I own it.

[FieryReign]

Messed around with Killzone Mercenary but got bored and bailed after the first mission. Started a Boy and His Blob again, I can probably make some progress now with a new memory card. Hopefully it won't get corrupted like the last piece of shit I had from Sony. Makers of overpriced, cheaply-made, junk.

The pstv is probably the most durable thing they ever manufactured. Maybe because there's no moving internal parts.

[Aussie2B]

I've actually been having a slow work week for once, so I've been able to catch up on a lot of things I've been needing or wanting to do for a long time. How this translates to gaming is that I've had some stacks of games that I bought or received as long as a couple years ago that I still had yet to clean up and test out. I played some Pandora's Tower on Wii; Raw Danger, River King, and Tenshi no Present on PS2; and Akai Katana and Asura's Wrath on 360. I also played a bunch of random goofy Japanese PS1 demos. It felt kind of weird to do some console gaming, as it's been almost nothing but handhelds, with the occasional PC gaming, for me for years now. I also joined midway through on a game of Magic Sword via MAME.

As for what I'm putting some serious time into, I played through Thomas Was Alone on Vita, getting 100% of the trophies like I did with Octodad. I'm still chipping away at Norn9 on Vita. I cleared Senri's route, and then I moved on to Itsuki's route. I got his tragic ending (which kinda left me rekt haha), but I've yet to go back and get his happy ending. I don't want to get too invested in any visual novel right now because I'm waiting to start a few that are coming out over these next couple months. Time for my VN backlog to get even worse, haha.

[celerystalker]

Haven't played much this week, as most of my efforts have been trying to rest. I'm having one of my worst bouts of insomnia in years, which is making me feel like doing nothing. I've spent what energy I have had on things like taking my family to the zoo and housework such as mowing the lawn, but the only gaming I've done has been working on Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, and I'm thinking of shelving it.

Initially, I was pretty into it. It plays great, looks great, and sounds great. What's not to like? Its mission-structured gameplay artificially slows the game to a crawl. Every time you complete a mission, you are forcibly recalled to a bunker, completely disrupting the flow of the game. Compounding this is a focus on collecting gems, money, and finding Boos. You end up having to redo the same puzzles over and over, which is a tedious decision that wastes my time. Hand in hand with that is that the fun of exploring a big mansion has been replaced with a segmented, linear approach full of unnecessary backtracking. Shame on you, Nintendo. It's a good game made to be more boring simply by stupid design choices.

[Aussie2B]

I started up Densetsu no Starfy on GBA a few days ago, and I already have it beaten, but I still have a lot more to do. It's a fun game, if a tad easy. It's a little talky for a platformer too, but I could be saying that because I'm slow at reading Japanese, and my knowledge of the language is still so weak that I can't understand a lot of what's said (which is kinda sad, considering this is a game designed to be accessible for young Japanese children, haha). So between taking extra long on the dialogue and breezing through the action lightning fast, I felt a little impatient with the cutscenes.

I hear this series compared to Kirby a lot, if only because they're cute, easy platformers with a hero who's somewhat similar in appearance and shape, but having beaten this game, I now see that there are even more parallels. For one, there's the structure of the titles. You've got Hoshi no Kirby and Densetsu no Starfy. A possessive with the hero's name as the second word. On that note, that's one minor annoyance I have not with the game itself but with the "fandom" (if you can say there's such a thing as a Western Starfy fandom). All over the place, I see the title translated as "Legend of Stafy/Starfy". I don't care how people choose to spell the hero's name, but that's not how Japanese possessives work. For that translation to work, the title would have to be "Stafy/Starfy no Densetsu". Just as the Zelda games are "Zelda no Densetsu". When you translate a Japanese possessive as "something of something", the word after "no" comes first. A proper translation of this game's title would be "Starfy of Legend". Of course, that sounds pretty awkward, hence Nintendo going with the equivalent but more natural "The Legendary Starfy".

Anyway, that grammar/translation tangent aside, another obvious Kirby similarity is that, after you beat the game once, you're then encouraged to return to all the stages to go on a treasure hunt. As you find each item, a little picture appears on a grid-based menu, and I almost had to laugh at how reminiscent it is of The Great Cave Offensive in Kirby Super Star. It's nice that they give this longevity to the game with all the stuff you can collect after first clearing the game, to earn the true ending and such, but it's also kind of annoying how you can't even begin to work on this collection the first time through the stages. It kind of comes off as forced repetition. Like how you can't even collect all of a stage's treasures in one go, as grabbing a treasure counts as clearing the stage, forcing you to start from scratch when you go for the next treasure. You also need to do a ton of grinding for pearls to unlock the full group photo. Oh well, I complain, but I'm still doing it anyway, haha.

[celerystalker]

Spent some time Monday afternoon getting to know Gunhed on Famicom a little better. It's a strategy game based on the giant robot movie of the same name, which has loose ties to Gunhed on PC Engine, better known as Blazing Lazers here.

It's pretty fun if a little repetitive as strategy games go, but for its time, offers a pretty robust set of actions as well as some solid real-time battles. I did a write up with some screenshots in the Import Mania sub-forum in the "Opinions on poorly documented imports" thread. It was pretty fun, and for some reason left me wanting to also play 10101 Will the Starship on PS1.

[Videogamerdaryll]

Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (Sony PlayStation 1, 1999)

[Aussie2B]

I have one single treasure left to collect of the 45 in Densetsu no Starfy on GBA, and I'm assuming the final boss is holding it. Collecting the treasures was slow going at first, as I beat the game with only one of the power-ups/alternate forms unlocked, and a lot of the treasures require the use of those. Once I managed to find them all, though, everything started to fall into place. Another thing that kind of bugs me about the repetition in this game, though, is that, in the stages that end with a boss, the boss holds a treasure, but ONLY when you've collected all the others in the stage. If you fight the boss with others remaining, you get jack. And as far as I know, there's no way of knowing this until you get all but one in a stage (at least at that point, Kyorosuke the clam will tell you to fight the boss again). So, say you have 3 out of 5 treasures in a stage, and you know where one is but can't get it because you don't have the power-up yet. You could spend all eternity scouring the stage to find the other, not realizing that the boss will have it after you get the one you know about but can't get yet. Anyway, as for the other collectibles, I need about 2000 more pearls to finish off the group photo, and I need to encounter 5 more enemies for the picture book. I'm kind of at a loss as to where those enemies are. I mean, the game tells you which stages they're in, but I've already gotten every treasure in those and, as far as I know, beat every enemy along the way. I'm also pretty confident I beat the mini-games on hard in each stage to access the hidden areas to get the enemy in each of those, so what did I miss? I hope there's an FAQ out there with info on how to find every enemy.

[Aussie2B]

I totally finished off Densetsu no Starfy, finding 100% of everything, so back to the container of GBA carts it goes.

I started up Nightshade on Steam, which I had been eagerly awaiting. It's another otome visual novel, with the same artist who did Norn9. I only just today cleared the prologue, though. My excitement to play it was kinda killed by all the issues it had at launch. First, the English text was all screwed up and overlapping, making it barely readable. Then they fixed the spacing, but the font was still wrong. They changed the font after that, but it's still not the one it was intended to be. It's perfectly playable now, but all these issues were a real turn off when I had wanted to crack into it immediately. Anyway, it seems interesting so far, but other VNs I'm even more excited about are coming soon. And maybe it's a little silly, but I don't want to get burnt out on this artist's style, having just been playing a bunch of Norn9. Period: Cube, with Kuroyuki's funky art style, should be a nice change of pace.

I was also "forced" into playing some Wayne's World on NES, haha. Man, what a turd. Also a little bit of Vigilante on TG-16, which I'm not particularly fond of either. These two were via emulation.

[Videogamerdaryll]

NFL Sports Talk Football '93 Starring Joe Montana (Sega Genesis, 1992)

Sometimes I just like to play the old sports games and this one Talks..

[kainemaxwell]

castlevania harmony of dissonance on my gba android. trying to get back to a little secret of mana before firing up lego star wars 2: original trilogy.

[Aussie2B]

I wanted a decent stopping point in Norn9 on Vita, so I got both endings in Itsuki's route (though I'm strangely missing more CGs than expected), and I'll leave it at that. Next time I play the game, I plan to start up Akito's route, but that'll probably be a while with all the new visual novels that'll keep me occupied.

I've played a little more of Nightshade on Steam, but I'm still super early in the game, so not much to say there. Another otome VN release caught me by surprise when I suddenly got an e-mail saying The Charming Empire was out on Steam. I snapped that up immediately too. I don't normally buy VNs that were originally developed for mobile platforms, as they tend to be a lot shallower than full-fledged PC and handheld/console VNs, but considering The Charming Empire is getting ported to Vita in Japan and has full voice acting, I figured it was a step above most. It's not bad so far, though it definitely shows its mobile roots, and it seems like a light affair. I hear it's pretty short, but that's no problem for me, since I'm already drowning in long VNs that I've yet to complete (or even start, in many cases). I breezed through the prologue and chose to start Tanba's route, if only because he's the first listed. The chapters/episodes of each route seem to fly by too. I'm on the 4th or 5th in Tanba's route, and I've barely played so far.

It's kinda funny how I can't escape similarities to Norn9 lately. First with Nightshade, having the same artist, then with The Charming Empire, having the same Taisho Roman setting.

Besides all those otome visual novels, I also played a little Super Castlevania IV via SNES emulation.

[Aussie2B]

I've been playing a whole bunch of random stuff lately. The most exciting thing is that our CRT TV is fixed. So we've been trying it out with a lot of different stuff, adjusting the picture and what have you. On MAME, I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tokimeki Memorial: Taisen Puzzle-Dama, and Mega Twins. Via SNES emulation, I played Miracle Girls, Super Loopz, and Cameltry. Almost beat Cameltry, so I'd like to get back to that and finish it off. On the Ball was one of the earliest SNES games I ever owned, so it's always fun to return to it.

We also busted out Mario Kart: Double Dash, which we played on our Wii, for some 3-player racing and battling. Good times.

On the visual novel front, I'm still playing The Charming Empire on Steam, and I've cleared Toki Tanba and Kei Yoshimine's routes. Right now, I'm on the second chapter of Koichiro Sera's route. I also got Period Cube on Vita as soon as it came out, and I'm on the second chapter of that too. Apparently I've ended up on Hiroya's route.