What are you playing?

[PartridgeSenpai]

Playing Recore: Definitive Edition on Game Pass right now. It's so fun! It controls really satisfyingly, and the shooting and platforming both feel great. The game is kinda weirdly immediately quite hard though. That certainly threw me for a loop.

I adore the character in the robots though. The doggo robot is SO CUTE. HE'S SUCH A GOOD BOY I LOVE HIM. There's so much personality put into the little chirps they use to talk and the pantomiming they do to emote. If there were toys of Recore, I would probably buy some because I love these little robots already X3

[pierrot]

ReCore was the only game I've played recently that didn't devolve massively into me trying to complete everything. I liked it, but it felt really unfinished, all the way around. Felt really empty, despite plenty of doodad check-boxes. Combat was basically just unfair through most of the game, and the final area erased a lot of the goodwill I still had toward it (and apparently it was even worse in the 'un'-definitive edition). I'm curious about your final thoughts, once you've finished it. I got really jazzed about ReCore when I saw the E3 trailer for it, and then pretty much forgot about it until the end of this year. I guess I was expecting something more, or maybe just something a little different. I really liked swinging around with Seth. I guess I just thought those kind of mechanics were going to factor into the gameplay more.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Lost power last night. Dug out the Vita, which blessedly still held a charge, and played (lol "played") the last three hours or so of Muv-Luv Alternative. So good. Easily the best thing I've played in 2019 and I'd unironically have to place it somewhere on my Top Ten Games Ever list. Weebiness and all.

My daughter is playing Link to the Past and doing surprisingly well. Forgot how often this game dumps health refills on the player: hearts, fairies, jarred fairies, potions..... That said, you ever go insane watching someone play a video game and have to resist every impulse to yank the controller away?? My daughter is forcing Link to cut down every bush and patch of grass in the game. EVERY ONE.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Elminage is awesome. The team that created it made a few Japanese Wizardry games, and it wears its inspiration on its sleeve. It is a grid-based first-person dungeon crawler with an emphasis on equipment. While it doesn’t scale down the difficulty of classic Wizardry games - normal enemies can kill you quickly, enemies you’re not ready for will wreck you - it does add a few player conveniences that streamline the experience a bit (but only a bit...the game’s mechanics remain almost inscrutability complex).

Right now, I’m rolling with a werebeast fighter, a dwarf cleric, a devilish brawler, a dark elf thief, an elf mage, and a fairy alchemist. After 15 hours, our levels are hovering around 13-14, and we’re just entering the just-above-starting level dungeons. The mage and cleric have learned all their spells, but are still 12 levels from a mastery. The cleric is essential, but the mage, while useful with high level magic, spends a lot of rounds defending. I am tempted, in a few more levels to promote her to a Samurai so she can fight, while keeping most of her spells. I might also promote the cleric to Bishop at some point too, but I am dreading losing the ability to heal my party as frequently; so, I may not.

[pierrot]

My daughter is forcing Link to cut down every bush and patch of grass in the game. EVERY ONE.

Bone-- that's, like, how to win at Zelda, though, bruh.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Elminage update:

I was exploring the Sky Garden dungeon when I encountered a carbuncle nest. I needed a carbuncle jewel to complete a fetch quest for the elf king; so, I grabbed it, fended off a few carbuncles, and proceeded back to the elf city. I thought I’d just turn this in like any other fetch quest, and didn’t bother to save. When I arrive, however, a succubus has stolen the Ring of Change from the elf king, and I am dropped me immediately into a boss battle. Moreover, one of the succubus’ henchmen (a “death ringer”) tolls the bells of death in the first round, giving me five rounds to complete the battle before my party is wiped out. I eliminate all of the henchman by round three, giving me two rounds to defeat the boss. The first round, I pull out my most powerful attacks and spells, but they are doing pathetic damage, indicating that I’ll need to cast a series of stackable debuffs to defeat this boss. (Her attacks didn’t do much damage to me, either, for what it’s worth.) I can do that, but I’m going to need more than one round to do it, which is all I have left. (To my chagrin, defeating the death ringer did not stop the countdown.) I go all in on the next round, with both my mage and cleric casting instant kill spells. The succubus resisted my mage’s petrify spell; my brawler did about 20 total damage; the spell cast by my fairy’s magical cape didn’t do much, but my cleric - three moves away from defeat - connected with his spell, instantly killing the boss, gaining us the coveted Ring of Change, and perhaps most importantly, saving me from having to restart from my last save.

[pierrot]

I've been playing a fair amount of Demon's Tilt since I noticed it was added to Game Pass the other day. Initially it was pretty annoying to play. The flipper physics are just kind of weird, like they tried to actually program them like the Crush games instead of real pinball flippers, so they just end up a little bit too slow sometimes. Also the default visual settings are pretty horrendous. It starts out too zoomed in, and the camera constantly follows the pinball, but that makes it really easy to lose sight of it in the hail of flashy-neon-bullshit. It really should just shift to three different camera heights depending on which layer of the table the ball is on, but it doesn't. So I zoomed the camera out a bit, have it tracking the ball a bit less, adjusted some of the contrast settings, and put the ball-trail setting on, and it has become much more playable. I've also started to play it more like a real pinball machine, by cradling and aiming, post passing, cradle separations on multiballs, etc, and that has also made it so the flipper physics aren't quite as noticeable. Maybe I just adjusted to them, or something, though. I don't know.

Anyway, I've only played the normal table so far, and my high score is 562.3 million. I really thought I was going to get over a billion on that one, because I was over 500 million on the second ball, with 99x multiplier, and had completed the ARCANE rituals, with ZODIAC, and HERMIT more than halfway completed as well, but the ball dropped onto the second round of the hermit mini boss, from the second tier, in a way that when he swung the ball down, it went straight between my flippers. I was kind of pissed about that, because I also had both of the ball drain rebounds up, and I should have gotten the warp between the flippers from killing the boss after the homunculus, I was also one ball lock away from the scorpio multiball--. Oh well.

[pierrot]

"Here's your meat."
"Well, there's something I usually only hear boys say."

Oh my god. Please tell me it was a teenager who wrote this crap--.


EDIT: "His gorgeous blue head draws closer to mine."

Is this from a writing class down at the Y?

[prfsnl_gmr]

Playing Elminage Original.

Against my better judgment, I ventured into the depths of a second-tier dungeon. I was doing OK until I got to a fight with a hellrider, two demon valkyries, and a pair of succubus. I handle them, mostly, but then the succubus uses “soft fingers” charming my thief and brawler. One, the brawler, proceed to kill the other, the thief, which is not the worst outcome, I guess, and I defeat the succubus in a few turns. After the battle, I discover that the succubus’ move docked my thief a hard-earned level(!), and since my thief is dead, I have no one who can competently remove traps from the chest dropped by the enemies. My alchemist does her best, and predicts a ghost swarm. The chest is a mimic, however, and springing the trap crashes the game. (This is a well-known bug in the 3DS version, apparently.) As I reload from my save, the game is like, “You wanted a hardcore dungeon crawler, right?” Oh well, that’s as far as I’m going in that dungeon...for now.

One cool feature...the game lets you replace the stock character art with pictures you take using the 3DS camera. My daughter is really into drawing anime characters right now, and I have commissioned - at $2 a picture - new character art from her. I have three of the portraits so far, and they are basically the cutest thing ever. There really is nothing like tackling a difficult dark, high-fantasy dungeon crawler using smiling characters drawn in colored pencil by a ten-year girl.

[BoneSnapDeez]

The chest is a mimic, however, and springing the trap crashes the game.

It'd be hilarious if that was intentional. Talk about the ultimate chest trap.

Cute that your girl is getting into it. My daughter's been playing the Cally's Caves games on Steam, which are all about a kindergartener who wields a massive assortment of guns. Think she's trying to tell me something.

Oh, and I have played Elminage Gothic (via GOG.com). Not finished, but played. I mostly remember it being............. difficult.