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Phantom Abyss (PC) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 19:14:27) |
I'd heard of the game's hook (or gimmick if you will) as, everyday it's a different 1st person platforming game/run, and if you die - that's it. Play a different run later.
I'm guessing stuff changed along the way, though the concept is still here - it's a reasonably challenging rogue-like 1st person platforming game. I've had fun, you have a whip to help you climb and each level has different modifiers (the whip has an ability) and you can pick up boons in your run (if you have enough coins to afford them) and hopefully make it to the end. BUT, you see a bunch of ghosts for everyone else who played this level - if someone died, you can collect their spirit or something for a small heal! During each run you collect keys you can use to buy permanent upgrades, and so you go up the progression ladder of many roguelites...
Someone described this as first person temple run, which is close enough? I mean, the levels themselves are a lot more interesting than the "mere" reaction times that temple run goes for, here you can side-step/etc. stuff - and there are different paths, and in all you can be a bit creative for how you approach stuff...I've had fun so far - unlocked all the green levels and I've started on the blue ones!
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Cuphead (Switch) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 13:37:03) |
I only get to play this when my son comes around - and we play together and I realized, yeah - I need to either start practicing seriously or just give up. And, I enjoy playing it co-op, so there's not much sense in practicing, so I decided to give up.
We did make it to the 2nd island(?), and played some of the levels there - but I was clearly starting to see a steeper path to success. As in, it too us (mostly my fault) more and more tries to make less progress. He's already played it, beat it too? So, not much point for him really.
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Sonic Rush (DS) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 13:34:08) |
I started playing this from the saved game - with new(?) character Blaze on "area 2" (I don't remember the exact name). And, I just could not beat the level - it was set in the casino world, and everything was moving super fast and on "automatic" - so, you just press move and the character zips along, bounces, etc.
It's actually quite boring! Because you just do this, at some point you hit an enemy (very few enemies in the game!), lose your rings, and then carry on. But, I'd lose because I'd fall into a bottomless pit, lose three lives and then out.
I'd say it wasn't so much frustrating as it was a disappointment. Yes, the point of Sonic is that it's "fast" - that's it's thing. But I find that there's little interaction to the game for most of the levels - you just "go along with the direction". It's neat when sometimes you get bounced around automatically, but for the most part I like to control the character.
So, I deleted the save file and started a new one, this time with Sonic in the equivalent of green hill zone. This level has two areas and then a boss. So, it's like 3 levels make up a level.
And, the experience was pretty similar - run on automatic for a while, lose rings suddenly or die, repeat with a bit more caution...etc. I did make it all the way to the boss fight - which I almost beat one too many times, and I just realized - ok, this is dumb - at least the boss fights have more gameplay ( you dodge, make an attack when the weak spot is open, etc.) - but it's still a pretty boring/uninteresting platforming experience.
So, off to the shelf it goes!
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Secret Files: Tunguska (DS) by jp (Apr 4th, 2025 at 19:16:25) |
I think there's a weird moment in time when everyone thought that point-and-click style adventure games were dead, but they were not. And, I think this game is an example of a game that was under the radar of "mainstream" games press at the time? Or at least under the radar of the average consumer of videogames...
This particular game is also a strange little time capsule - it's a port of what I think was a PC game...also at a time when people where porting all kinds of things to the DS. And, it works! Well, from a UI perspective at least. And it works pretty well. At least compared to another adventure game I played recently on the DS whose name I'm blanking on as I write this. I bounced on that one because it had some character/3D interactions that were awkward and unintuitive. Here, they were much smarter about it (I'm assuming they made UI "concessions" because it's on the DS). So, while you have a 3D character that navigates a static space - you don't actually have to move the character around directly in order to interact with objects/places in each scene. Press one button and all the interactive spots highlight, and you can just tap on them directly. I LOVE this solution - especially because I was never a fun of the "hunt for the pixel" approach that many games had (on PC) - and I'm super glad it didn't come across into this DS version (for all I know, the "here's all the highlights" was also possible on PC).
But, the UI triumph aside, I still kind of bounced off this. I got stuck on a puzzle (how typical!) - and what I had to do was leave a location to visit another location and then continued...this seemed really "unfair" to me - as in, unintuitive - mostly because I had assumed I could not leave the locatio in the first place. It wasn't entirely unintuitive - but it was the sort of puzzle where I was sure I should be able to (in this case) get the key out of the aquarium - but it turns out that no, I had to leave the place, do some other stuff, and then come back. At this point I was well into the tried-and-true "try all the things with all the things", except that I did not know I could leave the location I was at. Sigh.
So, from glancing at my list of DS games I still need to play...well, I wasn't THAT interested in the story so far and the puzzles didn't feel particularly interesting either..so, it was an easy game to put on the shelf.
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Shogun Showdown (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 4th, 2025 at 18:33:00) |
Clever little tactics roguelite. It reminds me of Into the Breach and other tactics games where you are given clear information about what enemies will do each turn. It's also reminiscent of Into the Breach because of the small play space. Basically, the game takes place on a 2d plane that is divided into like 8 or 9 spaces. Any given character occupies 1 space and can move left or right. You build a "deck" of "tiles" that include attacks and other special abilities, many of which involve movement (e.g., a forward dash that moves to the nearest frontal enemy and deals 1 damage). Your goal is to build up your tiles and progress stage by stage until you kill the Shogun.
During each run, you can purchase and upgrade tiles, mostly increasing their damage or decreasing their cooldowns, purchase passive abilities, use items, and other standard roguelite stuff--make yourself stronger by strategically handling whatever random things you get.
Most every action you do takes a turn, and all characters take turns at the same time. So, you move right (1 turn) and all the enemies do a thing (one might move left toward you, one might queue up an attack). Then you queue up an attack, and those two enemies might queue up an attack and attack, respectively. Actually, it also reminds me of Crypt of the Necrodancer, which works like this, where all characters act simultaneously. In that game, when you move, everything else moves. Shogun Showdown is like that. When you do something, the enemies do something.
I beat the Shogun for the first time this evening, which was maybe my fifth run or so. I had what felt like extremely overpowered weapons, a sword that I'd leveled up to deal 5 damage with only a 2-turn cooldown. I also had a bow-and-arrow with 4 damage and a 3-turn cooldown. The kicker though was a curse that doubled the next damage on an enemy. So, I'd just queue the curse, the sword, and the arrow. That took literally half the Shogun's health bar. Did it again, dead and into phase 2. No problem. Did it two more times. Dead. Easy. When you beat the Shogun, you unlock "day 2", which is the next difficulty level. You can also unlock additional characters with different skills, and you can keep unlocking new tiles and stuff. I consider it beat after taking out the Shogun once. It's a fun game, really tight, and makes you think ahead. It doesn't do much that you haven't seen before though.
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Resistance 2 (PS3) by dkirschner |
| Hopefully better than the good first one! ------- Yes, quite good! Lame last boss battle, more intrigued by the story now than ever. |
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most recent entry: Tuesday 18 March, 2014
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Resistance 2: Better than Resistance 1: Hopefully not as good as Resistance 3: The Game: The Movie: Based on the Best-selling Novel
Hooray! Resistance 2 was pretty great, highly highly action-packed and with more juicy story bits. In this game, as compared with Resistance 1:
- Nathan Hale, the main character, is no longer a silent protagonist. Now he is a gruff military type who yells at people over the radio and occasionally punches squadmates for insubordination. He does what he wants, with no inhibitors, and damn the Chimera virus inside of him turning him slowly into a monster.
- There are many new enemy types, and several good boss fights. Except the last boss fight, which is beyond boring. My favorite new enemy is the Chameleon. These things, which remind me of the Demons from Doom, are completely invisible until they get about 8 feet from you. You can sort of hear them breathing and then bounding from somewhere, and then they materialize and leap at you, giving you…literally…a fraction of a second to react and kill it. Chameleons are terrifying creatures. Luckily, they are very fragile and it only takes a couple bullets to kill them, although they also kill you in one hit. I hated them for a while because I felt my deaths to them were cheap since I couldn’t see them. I’d make some progress through a level, and then all of a sudden “huff huff huff [running noises getting closer] rooooooar” and I’d be swinging around wildly trying to figure out which direction it was coming from, and it’d pounce and kill me. Once you die to a couple of them, you learn where they are and then they are real easy to handle. I also learned to move through areas where Chameleons seemed likely with my back or side to a wall, minimizing the directions they could attack me from.
- This game has super scary moments. The horror elements in Resistance 1 fell flat, but they nailed some stuff here. Alongside the above-mentioned Chameleons, there were also zombie-like Chimera in pods that these giant spider-like enemies (Webbers, I think) encased. In Resistance 1, there were some pod-encased creatures, but all the pods always opened if you walked by, so it was predictable. These pods are scripted to open and they don’t all open. So there are a few areas that are just damn full of pods and you never know when and where they will open. These areas are often dark, so you’ve got out your flashlight. Then you’ll start to hear the bursting of some pods and the zombie-screams of the creatures sprinting toward you (they are very fast) and it’s freakin scary.
- Perhaps the best scary moments and best boss fight come from this weird energy mass enemy. It's like a swarm of bad vibes that looks sort of like tomb beetles from The Mummy, and you see it throughout its level moving and pulsing through corridors, killing people. Super creepy. It's smart too, and it realizes where you have to go to escape its facility, so it starts blocking your exits, forcing you into some kind of power generator room. Fortunately for you, electricity hurts it, so you have to lure it into these generators and this scientist NPC with you will cut the power on and hurt it. So to lure it, you have to let it get almost right next to you, then at the last minute dive into the generator and run out the other side. If it touches you, you die, and it won't follow you into the generator unless it's riiiight beside you. That part was extremely intense and my favorite boss battle of them all.
- There are some updated guns and alt firing modes. My favorite new addition is to the Auger, which is that gun that fires through walls. It’s back, but you can now SEE enemies through walls, in addition to just firing through them. It makes the gun much more useful. It sometimes feels sort of cheap to just shoot enemies through walls, but with the difficulty of the game, if you have an Auger, you need to use the Auger! I also figured out how to use the Chimeran pulse rifle’s homing beacon. Never really figured it out in Resistance 1, but it’s pretty useful. You tag an enemy with alt fire, then for 5 seconds or so, all your shots just zoom around obstacles and hit the tagged enemy, useful for taking out tough bad guys behind cover.
- Hale’s life now regenerates like a standard FPS, no partial regen and no health packs. There’s also far less ammo scattered around, which makes the environments much less cluttered with crap to pick up. Also, improved checkpoint system with checkpoints after pretty much every big firefight. The last game would kill you and you’d have to play through big chunks of the level again.
That’s about all that’s different. The difficulty is still higher than average. There are a lot of cool set fights with big enemies that feel amazing to win. There was one in particular that I remember where you and some squadmates were holed up in a bombed out building and around the perimeter of this town square, which you had to clear for a landing zone. There were like 5 Stalkers, big huge spidery mechs. Once you killed one, then about 5 Drones came out too, flying heavy machine gun turrets. You have to kill that entire missile-launching, machine gun firing horde with limited ammo, first from behind cover, and eventually out in the open to get the remaining Stalkers on the far side of the landing zone. Tough stuff. There were also more than a few parts with multiple of those big giant fireball-launching enemies. Those parts could be damn hard too, especially when you were like on a ramp or some narrow place where it was hard to find cover or dodge the fireballs. There was also an Armored Drone enemy, which was so hard to kill. One level had two of those, with two of the fireball-launching dudes in the background. Hard hard hard, but very cool setups.
Finally, let me bitch about that lame final boss battle, because it really did suck. You have to run through a series of domes. Once you get inside each dome, the doors will seal, and the boss will start ripping off the ceiling and slashing into the room to hit you. You just shoot him and stay out of his way. I can’t convey how simple this was. It’s easy not to get hit, and actually I’m unsure if you even have to shoot him at all, because he moves around until he rips the whole roof off, then the door opens and you can run to the next one. In between domes, there are a handful of enemies to kill, and the boss will fling ripped out ceiling tiles at you. Easy enough to stay behind cover. Though if you do die, which I did a couple times, once by falling off the edge (oops) and once by getting smashed with flying ceiling tiles (that’s how I learned to stay behind cover), you have to sit through the whole boring part of the boss ripping up tiles from every dome you go into again. There were 3 domes I think, and it took like 3 minutes per dome of you just standing there watching the boss go through the motions of ripping off ceiling tiles and futilely swiping at you.
You eventually reach the center power core, where the boss is tethered to some power conduit. Around the core there are a bunch of electric nodes, and electricity will extend from the core to the boss to one of the nodes. You have to shoot the node to damage the boss. Then the electricity will move to another node and you shoot that node, and on and on until he’s dead. It takes FOREVER. You just run around in a circle with the boss chasing you, shooting nodes. He will every now and then stop to swipe at you, but like the domes, unless you are literally right in front of him, he won’t hit you, and staying away from him is super easy. You just have to wait and wait and wait and repeat the same actions, running around the circle with the boss trailing you, shooting at electric nodes, until he dies. It look like 10 minutes and sooo boring and took no skill. I think it was so lame because in general the game plays on a high difficulty level with lots of tough encounters. I expected something epic at the end and it was a big letdown.
No worries though, bad boss battle didn’t mar the experience. Looking forward to Resistance 3 after I finish Folklore.
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