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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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Xenosaga (PS2) by dkirschner |
| Must have been memorable because it's all familiar and coming back to me. Looking forward to doing the whole series! --------------- Excellent game, love all the cut scenes, characters, story, complexity... |
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most recent entry: Saturday 31 March, 2012
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I just finished Xenosaga, then looked at some walkthroughs to see how much stuff I missed and read a few boss strategies, and then re-read my previous logs for the game. Turns out I did a pretty thorough job for what a normal person would know going through! I got the vast majority of the segment addresses open, did very well with managing character stats and abilities, and got a ton of the special items. The stuff I missed was almost exclusively "secret" where you have to, say, go to a specific spot with a specific character as the leader in your party and perform a specific action, with no hints or anything to do it. Also, from reading my earlier logs, I played this game much less critically than I started out playing it. That's good on one level. I got into it. That whole gender issue faded into the background in the game, but damn if it was obvious in the beginning. And regarding the whole Nietzsche title, yeah...no. Albedo likes to talk about how will is all that matters, and he's certainly chasing power, but other shady people are trying to control him and say that he's not as powerful as he thinks. Yeah so, it's about will and power, but not Nietzsche. There are no more uberpeople than the insane villains of all other RPGs, who are all superior beings of higher consciousness and whatever they've deluded themselves into believing...until you defeat them.
I don't have much to say. It was an awesome game, took me a bit shy of 50 hours. I somehow remember it taking 80 the first time. Perhaps that's because I was obsessed with the card game. **Edit - I read the box back when pulling out Xenosaga 2, and the box boasts 80 hours of gameplay, which is nonsense. On howlongtobeat.com the average is 45 hours to complete the main story and sidequests.** So my previous 80 hours must have been just playing that card game so much. This time I started excitedly playing it when it became available, but it didn't grab me, so I quit bothering with it. I really wish you could have actual opponents in the game instead of just playing against stock decks. It's odd the things you spend time with in a game on multiple playthroughs, and/or 10 years down the road. I don't remember last time paying so much attention to upgrading my characters and killing enemies on skill point modifiers. This time I was meticulous about it, and a good thing too. Those skill point modifiers are amazing and I was able to max out all of Shion's stats with leftover Tech points, give almost every character Medica All and the revive spell, and I got really far in the skills. I don't even know from last time that I could spend Tech points on stats, but it made a huge difference. Max out defense and you take so much less damage. By the end of the game, Shion was a beast. Killing enemies on the modifiers was a little tedious at first, but as the game progressed and I began to have more control over boosting, it typically didn't stretch battles much. It was actually kind of fun and an added challenge to kill enemies only on that one modifier. There were definitely some tense moments in boss fights as I was trying to time the battle slots just right. So yeah, in a sense I feel like I was abusing the point system.
The story is pretty confusing. There are a lot of moving parts, and what I'm going to do next is browse through some story online and see if I can't make more sense of it. Or I'll boot the second game and check the encyclopedia there. If I remember correctly, the second game did a very good job of catching me back up. There was one story bit that was stupid. The party is protecting MOMO, the 100-series Realian, because she's got super universe-maintaining important data in her that all the bad guys are out to get. So what do they do? They LEAVE HER ALONE to help injured people after the Gnosis attack the Kukai Foundation. How freaking stupid can you be? So of course Albedo is there and abducts her. Good job driving the story forward, but that is the most unlikely scenario I can imagine. Do you often leave the key to saving the universe alone and unattended? No. No you don't.
I did good not using walkthroughs. I only had to do it once, and that was this elevator with boxes on it and a panel in the center that you push to take it up. But it was this weird puzzle that I would never have figured out. Once I read the answer, I think it's clever, but I dunno how I'm expected to think in those terms. So there are 6 floors, named 2-7. Each floor has another number next to it. 2 has 3, 3 has 6, 4 has 9, and so on. I got the pattern. Now what to do with it? I had been just shooting boxes and pushing the elevator button when it lit up. Shooting the boxes was somehow tied to being able to raise the elevator and to which floor it went to. I couldn't figure it out. Nothing made a pattern. So I looked it up. Turns out the numbers (3,6,9...) are how many boxes you have to shoot to get the elevator to go to the corresponding floor. Whoa. Now, there aren't just boxes, but different sized boxes that use a single block as a basis for size. So there are boxes that are one block big, two blocks big, three and four. So you've got to just shoot combinations to give you the corresponding number of the floor you want to go to. Spent a lot of time on that one.
One of the biggest realizations I had while playing had to do with managing my EP resource. I had used Shion as my primary support character most of the game. Since I timed killing enemies on the skill point slot, I took a lot of extra damage, so I had to heal a lot. That's a lot of EP! At some point I realized that I could save myself a lot of EP and time. Shion has a Boost +1 skill that just gives someone +1 boost. In minor battles, you often don't build the boost gauge, so if you need to boost to jump ahead in line and attack on the skill point slot, you can't. BUT, if you cast +1 boost immediately, it's the same EP cost as a normal heal and that'll allow you to jump in line and kill enemies on the skill point slot instead of just waiting x number of rounds for it to naturally land there on your turn. Good times.
Okay, so thumbs up for Xenosaga. I'm going to pull out Xenosaga 2 and see how that starts off. According to the internet it's like 25% shorter than Xenosaga 1, and since I took extra long on 1, I imagine 2 will feel relatively short. Hopefully it's good though. I do remember it being less awesome. Onward!
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