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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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Vanquish (360) by dkirschner |
| So far this game is incredible. It's really fast shooting and movement, kind of hard to keep up at first.........Yeah, beautiful, fast, fun shooter. Highly recommend. |
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most recent entry: Saturday 14 January, 2012
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I found Vanquish on one of those "Best Games You've Never Heard Of" lists, which I love oh-so-much. Vanquish rules. It's apparently masterminded by some established Japanese designer. You can tell someone masterminded it, and that the person is an action/shooter mastermind indeed. Vanquish is a third-person shooter, a FAST third-person shooter. There's a cover system like Gears of War, and lots of guns too. The major difference between this and other shooters I've played is the booster pack. Your character is in this hi-tech experimental military armored battlesuit, like a good Japanese robot-man-mech protagonist. The suit has rocket boosters that let you slide around the battlefield on your back all John Woo-style, firing guns the whole way, like if you went on a Slip n Slide with a rocket launcher. It can be a little dizzying until you get used to controlling the speedy sliding mech-man, but once you get the hang of the orientation, it is tremendous fun. I found myself sliding circles around bosses, zipping from cover to cover, and careening toward enemies to jump up and melee them with a foot to the face. Each gun has a different melee move, and while they all do the same thing (1-hit kill on normal enemy soldiers) they have unique animations.
The guns themselves bring an RPG element to the game since they are upgradeable. It's a neat system that I figured out early. You can equip four weapons at a time. You always have stun/frag grenades, and then the other 3 slots (right, up and down on the D-pad) you can equip whatever other guns you like. So, an example of the upgrade system: I have an assault rifle equipped that has half ammo. If I pick up another assault rifle, it completely fills the ammo. If I have full ammo and I pick up another assault rifle, I get a bar toward an upgrade for the assault rifle. Once I get enough bars, I get a star. When I get a star, the gun upgrades stuff like its fire rate, ammo capacity, or damage. Guns either upgrade to 5 stars or 10 stars. The damage boosts are only for the max level, as far as I could tell. The trick is that when you die, whatever gun you were using is knocked down a bar. This doesn't seem to *always* be the case, and I never figured out exactly how it worked, but I played with this assumption. So if I'm using a maxed out assault rifle and I die, I respawn with full ammo, but it's no longer maxed out, so I lose my damage boost. I thought around the problem of losing damage boosts by always keeping at least two max-level guns on hand. If I died using the assault rifle, and thus lost my damage boost, I'd respawn and equip the other gun I had maxed out, usually the heavy machine gun. I maxed both these guns out ASAP and had them maxed for at least half the game. A 50% damage boost makes a huge difference!
The style of the world and the character designs are awesome. The game takes place not too far in the future where a Russian extremist group led by the antagonist launches a nuke and destroys San Fransisco to spark nuclear war with the US. Your character is this elite DARPA operative, and you go to a Russian orbital space colony with a ton of US Marines and have to rescue this scientist who is the one that developed some particular technology that powers your battlesuit and powers various weapons the Russians are going to use. You've got to stop the Russians from forcing him to launch more nukes and avoid war. The colony itself looks amazing. I cannot stress how amazing the colony looks, like the distant cityscape of this orbital colony is one of the coolest things I've ever seen realized in a game, movie, or artwork. And the fighting going on inside the colony is dynamic. There's always a spaceship crashing or a building blowing up beside you, things happening in the distance. It's very cool, and the pace that the game moves you is so fast (it slows down a bit in the last third or so), that you're just playing it in this GO GO GO! mindset. The enemies are generally standard cannon fodder, as are your endless AI Marine allies, but the beefier enemies pack a punch and provide a challenge, at least before you get all leveled up. By the end I was mostly just unloading 1000 assault rifle rounds at +50% damage into their faces and winning. Some of the enemies were more challenging though, like the first couple times you face these giant Soviet transformer bot things, or the mobile fight against the Marine commander.
When I beat the game, it gave me some stats. It took me 6 hours, 44 minutes. This "cover usage" stat I was never completely sure of. Does it mean I spent 19.12% of my time in cover or that I used 19.12% of the available cover throughout the game? I died 38 times. 595 friendly marines died in battle. I admit to letting many of them get wounded on purpose because when you revive them, they drop a gun for you. Many of those I let become wounded just went on to die. Sad! I assisted 33 friendlies. This is totally higher because it doesn't count all the times I assisted people and then died. So technically all these numbers are higher. I killed 942 enemies. I destroyed 8 secret statues. At the credits, there is a space shooting minigame where you shoot all the staffs' faces that are plastered on asteroids. I shot 76 developers.
Highly highly recommend this one.
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