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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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Far Cry 3 (360) by dkirschner |
| Lots of fun so far, reminds me a lot of Assassin's Creed now. Lots of hunting, skinning, killing pirates. --------------------- Excellent game, great story, main characters, fun gameplay overall. Side quests mostly alright at best (but fun supply drops). |
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most recent entry: Sunday 17 March, 2013
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Finished the main story of Far Cry 3 yesterday. It was a trip (ha, get it?) I'll not spoil much since this came out relatively recently and many people haven't played it yet. Thoroughly enjoyable game. Excellent story, a bit weird/funny/over the top at times, but still really good. I never made it far into Far Cry 2 so I can't say how similar it might be, but for my comparative purposes imagine some assemblage of Just Cause 2 and Assassin's Creed (esp. Brotherhood). Besides the story, you go around liberating the island by securing enemy strongholds and disabling communications towers. You can also do Wanted Dead quests, Path of the Hunter quests, Supply Drop quests, and various other non-quest but just-if-you're-interested activities for no relative reward. There are also additional quests, which the game calls 'story quests' or something, but which are just quests where you have to go do some usually trivial task for some personality void NPC. Anyway, all this extra stuff is totally optional and I quit doing it once I began feeling like I wasn't getting anywhere in the game and these extra quests started feeling repetitive.
These extra quests can get very dull, especially the 'story quest' quests. The mundane NPCs are really lifeless. They stand there, utter the same couple things aloud, repeat the same few conversations, and crucuially don't respond to you in the least. I was disappointed with this. Supposedly I'm their savior and they don't interact with me at all. Also, the game uses like 5 skins for NPCs. There were towns full of twins, triplets, sextuplets, octuplets...
The world itself didn't feel too alive in large part because of this. Pirates, for their part, were either guarding their posts or driving maniacally down the road (for no purpose I ever saw), gleefully stopping to hunt you if they saw you. The animals on the island felt more real than the mundane people, and many of my favorite parts of the game involved hunting or just watching animals. You need to hunt animals because they're how you craft ammo pouches, rucksacks, syringe packs, etc. You either stumble upon them haphazardly in the wild or hunt them by looking for their icon on the map, which is their general zone of habitation, and go looking. You kill them and skin them, in gross detail, while your character expresses accurate sentiments like "Eeew," "Ugh, gross" and "Fuuuck." Many times I'd be walking somewhere and hear a predator roar, and I'd start looking around trying to find it, only to see some deer or something dart past me with a leopard in hot pursuit. The predator kill the prey. The prey run from the predators. It's very cool. One time I was hunting deer by a riverside and I killed a deer, which fell into the water. I ran up to the water's edge and BAM! A giant crocodile attacked me from the water. I jumped out of my seat...then killed and skinned it. That was awesome and made nature feel so vibrant, and after that was really when I began paying attention to the predators around me because it dawned on me that I wasn't the only hunter on the island. Anyway, most of the hunting I did just to make everything I could, and I did it relatively early in the game, after only a few main story missions, just to craft everything I could. But after that, there was no point in hunting and I didn't do it the entire rest of the game, except for the odd Path of the Hunter quest, which asked you to kill a special animal with a specific weapon. These were sometimes challenging (especially using the recurve bow) and usually granted materials to make the final [crafting item] in a set, like the wallet that holds the most money or whatever, but ultimately hunting and crafting were over with too quickly. After that, I ignored all animals unless I could use them to kill enemies.
I wish some of the other activity types rewarded you instead of just gave you a high score, like the racing. I would have liked to race, if there were some reward to gain. But there wasn't, and there were rewards for tons of other things, so why bother? One activity was called Trials of the Rakyat, and was the part of the game where they forced multiplayer into your experience. Walking around the island sometimes, I'd see a bright red rock with something like [XxPWNYOUxX], who held the high score for that particular Trial. Nothing like that to break the fantasy. I played a couple to see what they were, and you just try and kill as many enemies as possible with the weapons provided. Fun, but just leaderboard type stuff. And I guess everyone can see your dumb Xbox Live name plastered over rocks in their game.
So the story, right, very interesting. You (rich white boy) and your friends get captured by pirates on this island. After an excellent opening scene, you escape and start on a journey to find and rescue your other friends. On the way, you meet a few important locals who help you out, one of whom gives you a tattoo, or "tatau," as the game insists, which has some mystical qualities and grows as you acquire skills and become a Rakyat warrior and champion of the Rakyat people. There are several levels to the story, and as I keep saying, it is quite good. You figure out later, once the game starts throwing Alice in Wonderland quotes at you, that your character has gone far down the rabbit hole, and doesn't want to come out. Your character goes through a transformation on the island, saying some pretty hilarious and typical rich white boy stuff about finding his purpose in life (which is, he now knows, to be on this island with the Rakyat, though I have no idea what he thinks he will do on the island once his friends leave and he kills all the pirates). For whatever reason, whether it's mystical and out of his power or because he wants to, I'm not entirely sure, he becomes somewhat power hungry and vengeful. This does make some sense since the pirates killed some of his friends and ruined his vacation, but the sense that it DOES make is made NONsensical by his clingy girlfriend who insists he is changing and keeps asking things like "What have you become?" and calls him on his cell phone in the middle of a mission to check in on him. SHE makes his transformation weirder by adding a relationship dynamic to it that, to me, was either overdramatic or unnecessary. Or both. Either way, I didn't like his girlfriend at all because I empathized with him. I wonder if people did like his girlfriend. I wonder if girls liked his girlfriend and empathized with her more while boys empathized with Jason. So yeah, the whole self-discovery/transformation thing was...interesting.
Add to that the hallucinogenic staple of the story. The island is filled with drugs, and you take them a handful of times, often in relation to the Rakyat and becoming a warrior. ALL of these trippy scenes were amazing. I loved them. To me, they clouded what was really happening between him and the Rakyat leader, I forget her name. I think she may have been using him (especially based on the ending I got where she goes all Species on him), but I can't be sure. I think the drugs muddled his mind and caused him to make, or led him to, poor decisions, and to think of himself as invulnerable, or more of a hero than he was (and he was a hero). So maybe because of the Rakyat leader and the hallucinations, and the tribal tale he was told, he became a bit self-aggrandized. I do need to watch the other ending on YouTube, that reminds me...
The main characters in the game are excellent, and I will remember them for a long time. The hippie doctor Earnhardt, the hilarious German/American spy, Vaas, oh man will I never forget Vaas, the Australian slaver...And the ending missions, wow, so wonderfully tense. You'll realized as you play the game that many characters die. The death near the end is one of the best deaths I've ever experienced in a game. I mean, not best as in I wanted it to happen, but unexpected, well-executed, fitting, etc. And speaking of deaths, I really like how Jason (your character) should have died about 5 times but didn't. I can imagine how pissed off Vaas was every time he thought he killed Jason but Jason came back. There were many, many, many authentic "holy shit!" moments. The action sequences also were excellent, from escaping burning buildings to getting free from being bound underwater.
One final thing is that since the game takes place somewhere in the South Pacific near me in Singapore, there are several references to Singapore, and I noticed some Malay (again like Just Cause 2, which was full of it). For some reason though most of the NPCs sound Hispanic or Australian. I think they're supposed to be like Maori, but it only sort of worked on that front. Anyway, according to a character in the game, in Singapore it's illegal to buy or chew gum. False! For the record, anyone who tells you that is misinformed. You can bring gum for personal use, just not large amounts. You can chew it. No one cares if you chew gum. You can also buy it here at pharmacies. Just go to a pharmacy and say you want gum. Easy. I wish people would quit perpetuating Singapore as a place with such backward rules. There are some to be sure, as there are everywhere, but the whole "gum is illegal!" thing is plain wrong. This same NPC also calls Singaporeans "ricepickers." There's no rice picked here. I didn't particularly like that character because he was the ultra-American patriot, but definitely was irritated by the Singaporean stuff.
So anyway, awesome game. Great fun. I'm going to hang on to it and probably go clear the rest of the outposts and disable communication arrays and whatnot before giving it back to J. Oh and also, multiplayer was fun. I did some team deathmatch.
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