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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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2285 registered gamers and 3255 games. 7787 GameLogs with 13264 journal entries. 5110 games are currently being played.
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Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana (PS2) by dkirschner |
| Charming. Way too easy. Neat exploration and overall fun to play. --------------------- got a bit boring in the end, lots of cliche story bits, very jrpg-ish, wouldn't go out of my way to play. |
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most recent entry: Sunday 20 May, 2012
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I've been burning through games faster than I can think much about them. Just trying to get this massive list shrunk a bit. I could have skipped this one though. Oh well! It was fun enough, but nothing special. I thought it would have some neat item/crafting system but that part, which was one of its unique bits, was just lame. The other unique bit that I did like was that you get Mana (otherwordly spirit-type beings) on your journey, and when you get one, sometimes it comes with a skill, like the Earth mana you can summon as a stepping stone, one of the others gives you a barrier to protect you from fire and other things on the map that hurt you, and at the end you get one that lets you fly some, which actually kind of renders most of the others useless. Each dungeon and area is a navigable map with obstacles and things that you need to jump and use your mana skills to get around. There are items and treasure everywhere to get you to try and reach places.
I'll explain the item system briefly. So there are like 15 or so different types of mana (fire, earth, dark, light, etc., etc.). In order to get mana, you can extract it from enemies, and more often, from items in the environment. So if you use extract element on a rock, you get some stone mana. Each mana you can hold up to 99. Ok so there are the obvious things like rocks giving you stone mana or fire giving you fire mana. Then there are like 100 other items, like various foods and plants, that also give you different types. These items respawn every time you leave a map screen and come back, so you have infinite mana of most types, basically. You use this mana to create items, which you find recipes for throughout the game. So your basic healing potion takes some water mana. You've got to use a Mana (creature) with a water attribute to help you make the potion. Some mana are more efficient with whatever mana type (water Mana is more efficient with water mana than the spirit Mana is with water mana, and the fire Mana can't even use water mana).
Does this sound needlessly complicated? It is. I think it just adds steps to getting a damn healing potion! Why can't I just find a healing potion? Why do I have to extract mana first, then tell my Mana to use the mana to make the potions. And I can only have 9 of each item in my inventory? Come on! You have to constantly go through menus and make potions...it gets old.
Atelier Iris has item shops where you can synthesize items. This is part of its whole "alchemic RPG" theme. You can create items for sale in shops. I didn't see literally any benefit to doing this. I did it a handful of times in the beginning. Shopkeeps will tell you what they want and provide you a list of ingredients. Very quickly after the beginning, the ingredients required to make things are themselves things you need to synthesize first. So then when you do make something, which is usually just some other ingredient, you can actually deviate from the recipe to make a better quality version. So for example there might be like worm-infested apple, dry apple, apple, sweet apple, or apple pie. Right, different versions. These have some bearing on the outcome of the synthesized item, like how good it is or something. Each item has a % and if you look at the shop it will tell you what the 'hot items' are and why. So like, the worm-infested apple I made might be the hot item because it's 'wormy' or something. There are lots of weird 'reviews' of the synthesized items...deadly odor, sweet and sour, heavy, adult...etc. Random townspeople will then tell you like 'i love the bread crumbs at mojo's bakery. i make them a part of my daily routine. i love the bread crumbs because it is deadly odor.' Seriously. The NPC comments on the items I made were kind of funny because they were usually horribly out of context. Anyway, this whole item synthesis served no purpose whatsoever that I could tell and I quit doing it almost as soon as I started.
I also didn't bother with 'mana synthesis,' which is where you can augment your weapons with mana to add attack or defense or fire resist or whatever. I didn't do it mostly because I didn't know if I could remove the mana once I attached it, and also because you can't augment equipped weapons. So you have to unequip your weapon first, then augment it. One step too many to care!
So all these things I didn't care about. I could afford not to care because this was the easiest game I have played in forever. I didn't do hardly anything extra and I breezed through it. There was one boss that killed me twice I think. Otherwise, no deaths and generally didn't even come close. It helped too that you can switch in alternate characters during battle with no penalty and they get to act immediately. And you can switch characters out when they die. So basically I had 5 attackers instead of the 3 on the screen.
This game would have been much better if it were more difficult. They could have helped with with more interesting battles. The game tags itself as a 'strategic RPG,' but it is hardly strategic. It is very mindless. 99% of fights were 'x, x, x, x, dead.' Just plain attack all the time, even on bosses! The only reason I did anything else (besides a couple bosses) was (a) to hit more enemies at once since some characters' attacks (the useful characters) hit multiple enemies at once, and (b) to hit enemies immune to physical attacks. There were a lot of REALLY annoying enemies who were immune to physical attacks. Two of your characters attack with magic, and they are both weak, so you have to bring in one of your other characters and waste mana just to kill these stupid physical-immune creatures.
Oh man, and maybe the worst of all is that at the end of the game I was still fighting enemies from the beginning! And there are like 10 enemy types with like 4 variations each. The notorious 'Puni' enemies had so many different types and they all looked the same with a different color. My god, it was so stupid. So yea, like level 50 at the end of the game, and here comes an army of level 1 punis. Will I win?! Why is this a random battle?! And the game makes you travel over a horrendous world map all the time, so even if you're not in the difficult areas mysteriously encountering simple enemies, you're in early easy areas encountering the same simple enemies.
I really sound like I hate this game huh? It really wasn't that bad, just some annoying things. The story wasn't anything special. There were forced romances, a couple 'what, you're my SISTER?!' moments and other things typical of dull stories. The high point though was the silliness of it. I liked the game in that it didn't take itself seriously at all. The characters were enjoyable. There was a cat girl, and I expected to hate her, but she was actually cute. I especially ended up liking her voice. And there were a lot of little side missions/side stories involving shopkeeps and other townspeople that I enjoyed.
Yeah, anyway, glad to get it off my shelf, but too bad it wasn't better. I think when I heard it was focused on items and it was strategic, I was somehow thinking of a non-grid-based Disgaea. Not even close!
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