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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 3254 games. 7786 GameLogs with 13264 journal entries. 5109 games are currently being played.
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Halo 3: ODST (360) by dkirschner |
| Halo Noir. Interesting twist on the usual aesthetics of the series. Detective element to it, and change in narrative style. Cool. ---------------- Not very exciting, game on rails. Linear, no exploration. Good storytelling though! |
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most recent entry: Saturday 11 May, 2013
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I'm torn about this Halo game. It's obviously just a placeholder in between Halo 3 and Halo Reach. It took me 6-7 hours only, 3 sittings over a week. The story is simple and doesn't have strong ties to the others. The characters kept mentioning something about "like on Reach" but I have no idea what they were referring to, and I just played Reach. In ODST, the Covenant appear above a city somewhere in Africa, and I think above other Earthly cities. The entirety of the conflict between the Covenant and your ODST team here is that the Covenant is searching for something. That's it. Your ODST team dropped in to complete a mission, with fuzzy secretive orders, but something went wrong on drop and the team was scattered throughout the city. You play as the Rookie and you play this detective game to find all your drop team members.
Basically there are two phases to the game. The first is when you play as Rookie, wandering through the mostly deserted city tracking down beacons. Fights against the Covenant are scarce and often avoidable. When you near a beacon, you need to turn on, I don't know what it's called, night vision or something. This looks like Batman's detective mode or various other vision modes that highlight enemies and useful objects in other games. Activate night vision and you can follow the beeping sound emanating from whatever beacon object to find it. When you find the object, there is a little scene showing, as if tapping into the memory of the object, what it "saw" in the past, which is a snippet of story about what happened to one or more members of your team.
Then you enter the second phase, which is to play through that memory. This is the meat of the game with the typical Halo gameplay - drive vehicles, kill Covenant, work with ally AI, reach checkpoints, and so on. Once you complete that part of whichever teammate's story, the game brings you back to Rookie in the city to find another beacon. You go through this back and forth until Rookie finds out that his team has all pretty much found one another, but then he hears a distress call from the captain, earlier presumed dead. Rookie goes and hooks up with her and there is a final mission to locate and then rescue some alien bio-computer called an Engineer. Again, this guy seems like he's supposed to have some connection to the rest of the Halo story in other games, but I can't remember anything about Engineers or aliens who look like this one, a floating brain with appendages thing. And before you know it, with no fanfare or anything, the credits roll.
The strong point of Halo: ODST is the storytelling. The Halo Noir detective story presentation is fresh. Find a clue about your team, then play through what happened from other characters' perspectives who left that object there, or who destroyed that bridge that Rookie is standing at the edge of, or who were captured on security footage of that camera, and so on. The other characters' trajectories all link up by the end and, although the story itself isn't much to praise, it's the structure of it that I liked.
The weak point of Halo: ODST is that neither phase (detective or mission) is exciting. The detective phase with Rookie is a lot of aimless wandering through the city in the dark. Your night vision is almost always on because it highlights Covenant in easy-to-spot red outlines. I just looked at my map and tried to go from point A to the waypoint point B as efficiently as possible. The aesthetics of the abandoned city under siege somewhat make up for this, and the same can be said for the mission part, because there are fires and Covenant ships flying by and massive background scenery and all that, but there is really nothing to do, nothing going on, except to trek from point A to point B in a rather uneventful fashion. In the mission parts, the game is completely on rails. There is no exploration whatsoever. You usually get in a vehicle and let your teammates drive you around, or you drive them around. But in other Halo games, there are multiple approaches, you can explore the terrain, devise clever strategies for taking out Covenant outposts. In this one it's just linear set pieces. Drive along this 2-lane road for 20 minutes. Defend this building for 20 minutes. They're coming from the left so aim left! Now they're coming from the right so aim right! Escort this guy from here to there on a path with no alternate routes. It just lacked excitement and failed to engage me very deeply. In fact, when I played the other night, I started playing a game with myself: How long can I play Halo: ODST with only my right hand on the controller? The answer was that I hit several 20-minute stretches where I literally just needed to aim and shoot with my right hand and drink coffee with my left hand.
I guess I'm happy to have played the game, but I would have rather been left with the awesome impressions from 2, 3, and Reach. I will just look even more forward to playing 4!
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