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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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Namco Museum DS (DS) by jp (Mar 23rd, 2025 at 14:11:20) |
I picked this up a while ago because it was cheap. It also had a few games I was curious to try - and while I could (probably) easily boot up MAME and load some roms...why not just try them here.
So, this game collects Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug II, Xevious, The Tower of Druaga, Mappy, Galaxian, and Pac-Man VS.
I was familiar (have played) most of these so I only really spent time with the ones I was most interested in...The Tower of Druaga, Mappy...and out of curiosity I tried Dig Dug...
a. I thought it was Dig Dug, but it's Dig Dug II which I had never played! This was a nice surprise...especially because the game has no digging...which seems really weird. It has a sort of top-down view and you can inflate enemies as per Dig Dug...they die you get points. I actually thought this was pretty lame. But I also noticed the map had these brown lines (that seemed to have no meaning) and these little squares (that also seemed to have no meaning). From reading the menu stuff - pretty impressive actually because it has all kinds of options (you can set dip switches and the like, so good effort here from Bandai Namco!), I realized there was another button in the game! So you can pump/inflate and also "drill". And you have to drill on the square points, this creates a fracture line and portions of the map sink into the sea. So, it's a top down island! Weirdly, my first game I did none of this and got pretty far just on pumping...but the drilling is where the points are! I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Dig Dug II didn't do so well commercially, and perhaps there's actual digging later on?
b. The Tower of Druaga - this game looks like a sparse version of Gauntlet meets Pac-Man. It's a maze, you need to get the key and leave for the next level. You're also a warrior with a sword and a shield. Sounds good! Except that I never really got/understood the timing for the attacks and the blocks and ended up dying all the time in ways that felt super unfair.
c. Mappy is sort of Elevator Action meets Hard Hat Mack? You need to pick up objects and avoid animals chasing you. You can drop on to trampolines that then let you land on different levels of the building/house you're in. This is fun and fine except that it's super easy to get caught in situations you can't get out of. Like, enemies coming from left and right and you can't escape. I think there might be something I'm missing here - either in terms of strategy or gameplay, because otherwise the game feels too unfair?
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13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PS5) by dkirschner (Mar 10th, 2025 at 17:15:54) |
This is a visual novel/RTS hybrid for the PS4 that I'd never heard of until I was looking for PS5 games. It's really well reviewed and caught my eye since it's from Vanillaware, who has made some great RPGs.
One thing to note is that although it’s a genre hybrid, its constituent genres are presented in unique ways. I haven’t played too many visual novels, but this one has more interactivity than what I have played. You control characters (13 of them) in wonderfully drawn 2.5d locales. Each scene looks hand-painted. The game is beautiful. But, you run around and talk to other characters like an RPG, exploring different story branches for each character, all of which contribute to telling the whole complex narrative. As you talk to characters, you discover “thoughts” and consider them in your “thought cloud.” Having more thoughts opens new interactions and branching pathways.
On the RTS side, battles involve your squad of up to 6 characters defending a node in the center of the screen. It’s not tower defense, not that kind of defending. It’s also not really MOBA-esque. It’s more like a horde mode, except it’s an RTS instead of a shooter. Hordes of kaiju are encroaching on all sides, gunning for the central node, and you need to prevent them from destroying it.
So, those are the two halves of the game. Do the “Japanese high school” sim thing, then do the “kaiju mech combat” thing.
I found the visual novel portion to be far more compelling than the RTS portion. The story is very complicated, which made it fun to try and follow. It’s also well-written, with a useful encyclopedia of people, places, and things, as well as the option to rewatch any scene you want to. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with something like this (nor cared to), but it was so creative, and they throw a lot of twists and turns at you, so it was consistently exciting. There are 13 protagonists, numerous other characters, and like 5 time periods (yes, time travel). And the story is told in a completely nonlinear way, as you bounce around from character to character, with scenes unfolding anywhere across the span of the like 200 years that the game takes place in. This means that some of the protagonists are different people in different times or timelines. This was confusing at first, but once you realize this is happening, you just need to learn who is who when. To make it even crazier, you learn that some characters are androids, others have implanted memories, some characters are figments of imagination, and others appear to be cats. And since they’re in high school and this is a visual novel, they are all romantically attracted to someone.
The RTS part didn’t engage me as much because it was simple compared to the thought-provoking story. It’s connected, of course, but you basically earn upgrade points (can’t recall the actual name) throughout the story and by racking up high scores in combat. Spend those on unlocking and upgrading special attacks. Deploy your forces, and on normal at least, you will easily win all battles until the very end on normal by using basic tactics. There are four classes of sentinel (the giant mechs that the teens pilot to fight the kaiju): a brawler, a long-range one, an “all-rounder,” and one that flies. They’ve all got their strengths. Brawlers do big damage up close to ground enemies. Long-range sentinels get some powerful missile barrage attacks. Some characters are geared toward support. It didn’t seem to really matter what I upgraded. I actually just applied upgrade points completely evenly across all equipped skills for all characters (get everyone’s skills to level 2, then all to level 3, then all to level 4, etc.). And I totally ignored putting upgrade points into base stats. I am sure this is all more important on higher difficulties. Like I said though, it did get hard on normal at the very end. I turned the difficulty down to easy for the last two battles because I kept dying to a boss. Easy is easy.
So yeah, that’s 13 Sentinels. The visual novel part was great and the RTS part was fun enough to carry me to the next visual novel part. It also took me quite a bit longer to play than I thought it would, and I’m not sure why. On the plus side, I got a lot of exercise done while playing since it was so much reading! Step, step, step.
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Call Of Duty Mobile (Other) by Mercy (Feb 26th, 2025 at 16:16:40) |
Hey,hello I've just created a gamelog today on Call of dutyobile.
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
[latest site fixes and updates]
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2285 registered gamers and 3252 games. 7784 GameLogs with 13261 journal entries. 5111 games are currently being played.
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most recent entry: Wednesday 3 November, 2010
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The last and finally day of playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was probably the most entertaining. I said to myself prior to playing the game that I will successfully enter the cheat code unlike the earlier days. For some reason the second day I couldn’t activate the cheat code. So I tried it again today. I tried once again activating the all weapons and full health cheat code. This is the hardest cheat code for me. I can’t seem to activate it. It was getting really frustrating so I just when on to another cheat code. It was for a rhino tank. I entered this code one time and a tank magically appeared in front of me. Being the unethical person that I am, I hopped into the rhino tank and started to go on a joy ride. I realized that any car that basically touches my tank will instantly blow up. I also noticed that I can fire missiles out of the tank which was another tempting feature the creators of the game added. I decided to go on with it and just start firing some missile out of the tank. All of a sudden my wanted level started to go up and cops were all over me. The cops couldn’t stop me though. As soon as they touched my tank they just blew up. So I was just laughing as they tried to stop me on my joy ride. I was acting like a psychopath by basically running over everyone and everything in my path. Anyone that stood in front of me died. This continued for a good fifteen minutes until the army itself came after me. There were other tanks that started to come after me. They immediately blew up my tank and I ended up in the hospital. Ironically the game charges me money every time I go to the hospital. They took all my weapons and charged me for the healthcare bill. I thought that this was a sort of realistic part of the game despite the part that they just confiscate the weapons and let me go.
I then decided to ignore the missions once again. I felt like trying another cheat code. This time it was the jet pack. This was another easy cheat code to activate. I was able to activate the cheat code and start flying around all around the game. After a while I ended up in the Las Santos International Airport. I said to myself, is it possible to jack a plane? I went on the runaway looking for a plane. I noticed a private jet was just sitting there doing nothing. I took off my jet pack and hopped in the plane. I suddenly felt invincible. This game gave me the feeling that I can do anything I want that I probably can’t do in really life. I can be a pilot if I wanted, I can be a part of the military driving a tank, I can drive an ambulance and help people, and I can even be a taxi driver. When I started flying the private jet, I just began roaming around the city. I was flying everywhere looking at the scenery and just observing everything. For some weird reason, I have no idea why. In the middle of my plane joy ride, I noticed that my wanted stars just went from 0 to 5. I said to myself, so what. The cops are on the ground and I am flying in the sky. Something I didn’t realize was that the cops also had planes. They snuck up from behind me and without any warning just shot my plane. I lost control of the plane. But I wanted to go out with a bang. So I made sure that I steered the plane into the closest building and right before it hits I would jump out of the plane. Unfortunately I did not survive the fall from the plane and ended up getting “wasted”. Was it ethical of me to purposely steer the plane into a building? I would say no. But I know that it is just a game and the cops shot me down without a warning. So it was sort of a payback.
I also noticed that all the missions essentially require me to do something illegal. For example the first mission was to spray paint walls. The deeper you get into the game the more missions you would have to complete, and the more illegal activities you would have had to complete. I found it interesting how this game gives the character a lot of freedom. You can do a lot of things that are normally not available in other games. The dialogue is realistic with the characters cursing all the time. You can even eat food in the game to recover health or get fat if I want to. Despite all the freedom you get in the game, I came to the conclusion that it is all set up in a way that you are violent. Sure you can avoid killing people. But how long can you avoid doing that? Once you get in a car, you do not plan on following the rules of the road. You just want to drive non-stop even if that means driving on the sidewalk and running over the pedestrians.
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