the thing about Sonic 06 is the worst version of it was so thoroughly broken that the rest didn’t matter. playing on ps3 at launch was so painful, and i remember the demo actually running better than the retail release. i know about project 06 but even salvaging it doesn’t make it a great game, it’s just average at best.
bubsy 3d and earthworm jim 3d are possibly two of the worst games i’ve ever played because even if you get around how mechanically broken they are, they’re devoid of any fun or interesting gameplay.
i’m a lot harsher on games that waste my time, though. i can forgive a game that tries something and fails but a game that doesn’t respect you or itself?
which is why the worst game in the last ten years for me is twelve minutes. pure hot shite.
See, I think Bubsy 3D is pretty fun and inventive (I wish more 3D platformers used tank controls…), but I do understand its brand of esoteric psychosis isn’t for everyone. I do concede that the PS3 version of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is likely buggier than the 360 one which is what I played. The 360 one’s bugs are largely tolerable.
Project ‘06 is a fundamentally different game from a fundamentally different context so I don’t think about it as a version of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). I think it’s weird that people do.
I wasn’t planning on buying or playing Iron Lung the video game, but I got it in a Humble Bundle and it’s about an hour of playtime so I figured why not. Unfortunately, I’ve watched this game be played by A Certain Youtuber, and it’s one of those games where if you know what’s going to happen it gets kinda “ruined” in that sense, as the game is pretty linear and all the scares are scripted. Which is not to say it’s a bad game, it is an interesting challenge just trying to grapple with and learn the controls of the submarine, I actually did at one point crash it while turning which kinda scared me, ahaha. Once you get the hang of it it’s almost relaxing.
Also, yeah, there’s the movie. I saw it a couple weeks ago and I think it’s great. If you like indie games and/or indie films I think you should go see it.
I finished Warhammer Rogue Trader last night and I had a lot of fun with it, even though it suffered from my trademark “Done with the combat near the end™” thing. I didn’t find everything in the universe but I’ve had a lot of fun with it and would definitely recommend it to people.
I haven’t touched the DLC yet but when it’s on sale for a reasonable price I might return to that world for a bit.
I’m genuinely happy that a friend of mine ended up getting me into Warhammer through a weekend of a Only War ttrpg campaign that taught me it was more than the cringe space marines.
I’ve started doing RetroAchievements recently! It’s a nice way to let myself play old games from the beginning instead of keeping them on an abandoned savefile from decades ago lol. So from that the most recent actual completion was 100%ing Banjo-Kazooie. That was a nice nostalgia trip, but man does Rusty Bucket Bay still suuuuuck D: It’s still a pretty good game for the time, but a lot of games have taking very important lessons from it. Looking forward to Tooie sometime, but we’ll see when.
After last year, where I played a handful of games that took dozens of hours to finish, I wanted to choose a few short ones (< 10 hours) from my backlog. Over the weekend I played three very different games that I wanted to recommend:
Family Man by Broken Bear Games
A small open world game set in a coastal town where you owe some criminals money and use every opportunity to make it by working at a car wash, at a diner serving customers, collecting trash or help the town’s colorful citizens out all while you want to keep your family happy and safe. This game can be really stressful (as it is supposed to be), but it was also fun. The story and its twists and turns are well written and the game hooks you without being overly cinematic. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the characters you meet and the tasks you can do for them all take a very surprising turn. Also the town you explore is just the right size for this type of game. It’s really small with just a bunch of buildings and the surrounding environment, but seems more filled with details than a lot of other big open world games. I prefer this way more than a world that’s just an empty background.
s.p.l.i.t. by Mike Klubnika
Short game about hacking into a system in a post-apocalyptic future. It’s bleak, but captivating. Definitely not a feel good game. The hacking was surprisingly fun, as someone who works in coding but absolutely hates doing anything with the command line/shell I was kind of intimidated at first, but you don’t need any special knowledge as the game gives you enough instructions and lets you try things out. Haven’t played other games by the developer but might check them out in the future.
Eschaton by jabuga
Very short (20-30 min) walking sim set in and around a mysterious mansion in the scottish highlands. Love the pixelated art style and sound design! The “story” though was lacking a bit as I didn’t feel like I could actually discover anything about what happened and more like I was stumbling through different scenes. This game is definitely a vibe though and people who are interested in occult/esoteric themes (like me) should check it out.
Finished up CiniCross this weekend. My feelings on it remain mostly unchanged from my “check in” post in the other gaming thread: fun little nonogram rogue-lite that I wish had maybe a little more depth/variety. The relatively shallow item pool makes it really easy to fall into builds that absolutely demolish the game, and from a relatively early point each subsequent higher difficulty becomes more a matter of time investment than actual challenge.
Ultimately, I fall into this trap with a lot of rogue-lite/run-based games. My idiot lizard brain loves checking off boxes well past the point of it being fun or engaging, and I end up liking an otherwise solid game much less than I did hours earlier. Not the game’s fault by any means, I just have a hard time not “completing” things where possible, even if it ends up lessening the experience overall.
Slay the Spire & Touhou Lost Branch of Legend - If beating the true final boss of both games counts as beating the game yeah! I legitimately thought I had to beat the Heart with the Watcher first before I could access it with the other characters so I beat it with her first. As for the Touhou fangame, I was trying out MarisaA for the first time on Normal Mode and really thought a difficult boss I came across too early was the true final boss. I just stumbled upon the true final boss without actually knowing how to get to her.
Just finished Death Stranding 2. Really loved it. Been keep track of (almost) all games I beat this year on my site for the first time, the rest of the list so far:
Drive Me to Hell
Violent Horror Stories: Anthology
Call of the Abyss
Camelot 10000CE
Three Verses
Heavenstrafer
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
A lot less games than I wish but have had a busy year so far
Just finished Deliver Us the Moon, besides the hellscape of not having customizable keybinds (praise be input-remapper) it was a fun little thing. Clearly made on a budget but any world that makes me want to know more about it after I finished it is a good world.
I beat DQ 8 properly for the first time. Still got the postgame stuff to do. I’ve been pondering on it for a while now, finally finishing a game I kept replaying over the last two decades. As much as I also like DQ XI, this just hits very differently. Gonna pace myself a bit with the postgame and other completion stuff though, I’m coming up on 100 hours on the savefile, since I did set out to do as much as I can xD
And also Delivered some Mars now, it was a fun game with some deeply frustrating sections and I really shouldn’t question the plot too much as it very much falls apart.
Also damn, what is Astarion Isaac a self-absorbed asshole.
it’s really funny that you had the same reaction to deliver us the moon/mars as me. i really enjoyed the first one, it had enough intrigue to keep me going as well as being a neat experience. the sequel wasn’t as good for the same reasons you said. i wonder how the third one will pan out, they must’ve learned a lot from making the first two games.
It wasnt really a high priority for me but I picked up Astro Bot again and finally got to the end. I hope whatever we get next from Team Asobi is something that’s not tied to being a meta-advertisement for Sony’s hardware and games and instead something that stands on it’s own beyond that. That’s not to say I think this game is particularly cynical, I like all the cameos and it’s fun to try to figure out who each special bot is cosplaying as, but I mean, yeah. I never was the biggest Sony fan and I never had their hardware growing up.
Whew. I beat Demon’s Souls (2009). Funny thing is that my last major boss, 1-4 was a big source of trouble so i elaborated a clever strategy to help me, hinging on a specific ring.
Then i beat the boss (it wasn’t easy) and noticed i had forgotten to equip the specific ring.
Whoops.
AH WELL, a win is a win.
I really enjoyed this game, the level of difficulty, which was much too high for me when i first tried playing it in 2009, was just right, now. I used a wizard build which likely helped since most enemies are melee and having range is a big advantage… Still, it had some very challenging spots that felt great to overcome. Though fuck the valley of defilement. rotten place (on purpose).
