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Kirby Super Star Ultra (DS) by jp (Nov 22nd, 2025 at 17:34:15) |
I had the case and manual, but no game. So I bought the game. That seems kind of silly, but it is what it is.
So, I had to test the game - to make sure the cart worked and all that.
So far, it's pretty interesting! I played the first "mission" (it said the difficulty was easy) and it took me a bit to get used to Kirby's swallow-and-gain-special-ability power. Some enemies give you a special ability when you press a button after swallowing them. This is instead of just "firing" them. There's like three buttons and I still get them confused to be honest. We'll see what happens as I play more.
The first mission has maybe 4-5 levels. And then it rolled credits! I was surprised of course - but I knew there was more game. The credits also rolled really fast which was kind of funny. And then it played a "of its era in terms of quality" CG cut-scene/movie. Weird.
Now I need to explore all the other things that opened up. There's also a 2-player co-op mode...
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BALL x PIT (PC) by jp (Nov 19th, 2025 at 21:19:10) |
There's plenty to grind here - new characters, upgrade buildings, level up characters, etc. And it's fun - at least I've been enjoying it so far (I've made it to level 4 of the pit - the fungus world!).
I think what I enjoy the most now is that a "run" (this is really quite the roguelike) is - when you succeed ~20 minutes. Shorter if you die sooner, of course. So, it feels like a nice "snack" game experience - I harvest resources, do a run, harvest again, and exit. It hits a sweet spot for me in that sense. Shorter runs would probably feel less interesting because not enough development of your within-run build (which upgrades have I picked up, etc.), and longer then becomes a proper sit down and play session.
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Silent Hill 2 (PS5) by dkirschner (Nov 16th, 2025 at 11:56:46) |
I am sure I played Silent Hill 2 back in the day, but I only have vague memories of some of the enemies, namely Pyramid Head and the nurses, and of running around the town itself (though that was also in Silent Hill 1 and others I think). I had heard that Bloober Team's remake was excellent, and so it was. This is a game that I didn't want to put down, but occasionally had to put down because my nerves would get too worked up (and I was often playing it at night and would eventually get sleepy or know I should go to bed because I had to get up early in the morning). But my sessions were regularly 3-4 hours.
It's not a short game, took me upwards of 20 hours, and rarely dragged. The only part where I was like "okay, come on..." was the end of the Lakeview Hotel after you have to store all your equipment in a locker to ride an employee elevator. There is this really tense part where you have to navigate an employee area and solve some puzzles without equipment, while one type of really deadly enemy stalks the halls. I really didn't like those enemies! You encounter them before and after while running on grates. They cling to the underside of grates, monkey-bar-ing beneath you and lashing at you with their tongues. You have to walk on the grates, so you have to be wary of those monsters and try and avoid getting tongue-lashed. This particular time, they were walking normally in the hallways. Anyway, I had no health items (you stash those away as well) and was down to a sliver of health. I really didn't want to do the whole area again, so I looked up a puzzle solution so I wouldn't have to wander around anymore and risk dying. Right around that part, I kind of looked up two other puzzle solutions because I wanted to get out of that hotel. Every other puzzle in the game (and there are many), I solved without hints. Puzzles in this game are interesting because they often don't require a lot of thought per se; rather, they require you to collect various items, and then do something with them. The puzzles are definitely clever and mechanically intriguing though, even if solving them was usually just a matter of exploring everywhere.
There is another part later in the game, when you are in the bowels of Silent Hill, where there is this (for lack of a better term) "dimensional cube" that rotates. You can rotate it every which way, and you have to figure out how to set it so that you can pass through it into the next area. You do this like three or four times and have to get through three or four areas through the cube, which are all dark, drab, terrifying places in the Otherworld. I was ready for that part to be over because I couldn't tell how far I was progressing and it was just like one brutal area after another. So, "tense" is definitely a good word to describe the experience of playing.
Gameplay-wise, it's really standard survival horror, even stripped down to basics. There are no frills. You have a melee weapon, and you get in order a pistol, a hand shotgun, and a rifle. Two different items restore health, one a little bit and one to full. You also have a flashlight. That's it. No other weapons, no special moves, no inventory. Coming off of the irritating inventory management and frustrating combat of Alan Wake 2, I loved having few items to deal with and no inventory to manage. I regularly had over 100 pistol bullets, and by the end of the game (or at least before the last bosses), I was rocking nearly 50 health items. Yeah, I was basically invincible. /flex. It's just you and your few items and the hell that is Silent Hill. Oh, and a few other poor souls you meet along the way who also are there.
There aren't many enemy types, though each type gets an additional subtype as you progress. The vomiting things later can explode upon death. The "legs" later can climb walls and ceilings (terrifying). The nurses develop a faster, more aggressive variety. Despite some lack of variety, they never cease to be dangerous and scary, especially those freakin' legs! So, the legs, imagine a pair of legs that walk with another pair of legs sewn on top of them at the hip, which can attack you like arms. These legs like to act as mannequins. They hide and jump out at you. I don't know how many times I was walking through an area and either would be totally surprised by legs jumping out at me or would spot legs poised in a corner or behind a piece of furniture or wherever, often noticing them just in time for them to jump out at me. Or, I would notice them, think I was really clever, creep up to them to shoot them, never knowing when they were going to leap for me. I think the legs were the scariest enemies in the game, followed by the monkey-bar grate creatures.
The story is presented in a rather obscure way that made it feel good when you made sense of something. Everything seems to be a representation of something in James' subconscious, so if you can think about what the enemies might mean, you can make more sense of James' emotions and the story itself. I definitely had to look up "what really happened" after I beat it though because I still wasn't quite sure. All in all, this was a great survival horror mystery to play through. Definitely a highlight of the PlayStation Plus month and a strong recommendation for survival horror fans.
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Sword of the Sea (PS5) by dkirschner (Nov 6th, 2025 at 16:25:06) |
Easily beatable in 2-3 hours, Sword of the Sea is by the same folks who did Abzu. It shows. This is another movement-focused journey (also akin to Journey) where you bring the ocean back to a desert (hello Journey), befriend a dolphin and a shark (hello Abzu), and fight an evil fire serpent (hello God of W...wait, no). Where the swimming in Abzu could be frustrating, the "snowboarding" in Sword of the Sea feels excellent. The level design is also much improved, especially readability in terms of where you need to be going. I was NEVER lost, which is saying something! I remember swimming around rather aimlessly sometimes in Abzu, though there were always beautiful schools of fish and whales and things to watch and interact with. Those fish are actually here in Sword of the Sea too, plus the rideable whales, turtles, and so on. There are flags, paths, beams of light, collectibles, good camera work in cut scenes, etc. that direct your attention to the right place.
The game is beautiful to look at, with stunning landscapes that dwarf your tiny figure. I don't know what else to say about it really. If you like the Journey/Abzu brand of chill, exploration-heavy, environmental indie games, this is a no-brainer. It just guided me along for its runtime, and it's like I was unaware of time passing, totally absorbed in it. Great experience!
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Indika (PS5) by dkirschner (Nov 6th, 2025 at 16:06:25) |
This one was a trip. I had no idea what to expect. Some kind of psychological horror, I thought. It's a little bit of that, but it's got more of an experimental flavor. It actually merges two genres, a 2d pixel-art platformer and a full 3d third-person exploration game with steampunk vibes (like Syberia). I certainly didn't expect the former. The intro hooked me with an unexplained retro sequence that morphed into a great-looking Unreal 5 scene. Whoa.
You play as Indika, a Russian Orthodox nun, who is tasked with delivering a letter to a monastery. On her journey, she encounters and travels with an escaped convict who is trying to go see a holy relic that he hopes will catalyze a miracle and heal his gangrenous arm. Her being a nun and traveling to see a miracle is tough because she seems to have the devil inside her.
The game alternates between themes related to religious philosophy, absurdism, and surrealism. I suppose I would have expected the religious themes, but the game is funnier than I thought (also very dark). The soldier who can't aim was a good laugh. There are these moments where you are like, "Wait, what is this?!" Giant cans of fish in a cannery. Warped staircases and rooms that turn sideways. A puzzle about rearranging a bridge that made me laugh out loud and go "Whaaaat, no waaay!" in the best, most surprised fashion.
The game oozes creativity, though in terms of gameplay it is pretty basic. It's more or less a narrative adventure, but with more interaction (and excitement) than the recently played The Invincible (playing Indika makes me want to knock The Invincible's score down a peg). There are puzzles, several of which stumped me. The reason they stumped me is because (a) they were far simpler than I realized or (b) I had just never encountered a puzzle like that and so I wasn't thinking in the right way.
I really liked this. It's short, too, so no reason not to try it out.
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2306 registered gamers and 3321 games. 7855 GameLogs with 13338 journal entries. 5121 games are currently being played.
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Chrono Trigger (SNES) by haruki |
| Wonderfully fun. |
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most recent entry: Wednesday 20 February, 2008
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Gamelog Entry #2
Gameplay:
This game is so fun! I have only finally begun to enjoy the true essence of Chrono Trigger’s unique battle system. It is definitely different from your standard RPG games where you have tiny animated sprites all stand neatly in line in one place, and then wait to attack, cast magic, or use items in a turn-based style. Chrono Trigger happened to be different in a sense that you have no idea where your party members will spread to during an encounter, and your position also determines what strategy should be used during the fight. It gave the gameplay something different and innovative, and it also drew me out of my boredom of only “click, click, click”-ing through the long narrations and scenes. There didn’t exist a “skip” option back then, sadly.
At certain times I noticed I selected horrible decisions and methods as to how to go about the battle. Crono has this one move, called “Cyclone”, where at most I could have slashed four enemies at once within a circular field, given if they were in a favorable and close knit position. Instead, I accidentally selected the enemy furthest away from the group, allowing me to only attack one. I was happy when I found the unique skills of the fighters as well. Since I am quite a fan on collaborative special moves, I had to refrain myself from screaming with joy when I not only saw duo combos, but triple combos as well. It is amazingly cool.
Despite the wonder battle style and skills the game gave me, I wasn’t too happy with how stereotype seems to follow us everywhere. The two girls who were in my party are, at the moment, HORRIBLE long range, close range, any range fighters. I have actually not found any good use of them except for maybe a certain fire spell or two, but even so, HORRIBLE. What is truly interesting is the fact that a frog, by the name “Frog”, who just happened to have wandered into my party was much better a fighter than those two COMBINED. I don’t want to sound like I’m exaggerating or anything, but it is interesting. The females have very low physical strength, whereas Frog, a frog, just happened to be able to kick butt. Interesting…Frog is cool though.
Design:
One of the oddities I noticed about the game was the map, where I move from place to place. It is fairly different from most other RPGs in a sense that there doesn’t really exists a town map or area map within the giant world map. I was fairly disappointed when I select a town and only find myself inside a room. One of the most enjoyable parts about a game is giving the player a large field to explore, but if I’m only limited to the world map and room or field, then it takes the fun out of exploring the area around that room or field. When I walk in near what I see is a town on the map, BOOM! I’m inside a bar, or inn, or mayor’s house. There’s no actual town. I want to see the other settings that surround that “event place” or important place that I have to go to in order for progression and events to occur. I felt that the game world was very small and unable to expand itself. But then again, the plot of Chrono Trigger is about time travel and the makers have to make dramatically different fields to match the time I’m in, even if I am in the same area.
I think the game did a very good job in presenting humor and expression to the 8-bit sprites. For instance, during the cut scenes, depending on whichever situations, Crono would be able to look surprised, triumphant, shocked, hurt, etc. It’s actually interesting to see visual sprite expressions in comparison to most others where they’re only able to walk and talk.
The art design for the game (of which I am sure the artist is Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragonball, DragonballZ, etc…) was simply superb. I was sure that I recognized the Toriyama’s artwork style once I saw the cover of the game. Although technically the world field is pretty small, the game field is not. There is time skip to consider, so the artist literally has to redesign each place and setting to correlate with the time skips. The result was beautiful as I travelled between Dark Ages 600 A.D. to Present 1000 A.D. and Future 2300 A.D. The contrast between the world’s geography and atmosphere was simply amazing, from bright, happy present to dark, industrial future.
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