What are you playing?

[pierrot]

I got a PS2 slim recently so decided to play a few games that slipped me by. First up is Shinobi. Gonna be honest, it's not that great which is a shame. Lots of straight corridors filled with indentikit enemies, bad camera work, so-so combat, looks kinda crappy. Not a great jump to 3D. I'm about 5 stages in but honestly might jack it in.

Yeah, I actually finished that game last year, and it made me feel very different about it than when I first played it when it was released. It kind of sucked, really. The second half of the game, and especially the last level, are just a bunch of gauntlets over wide-open expanses of insta-death. If the camera, and dashing (in the air, anyway) weren't so junk, it might almost be reasonable. I think Shin Shinobiden is still objectively a worse Shinobi game, though.



I've been making slow but steady progress in Xanadu. I'm only on floor 6, but I've sussed out the map of the floor pretty well. Found the couple of dungeons, and the doors to the next floor. So I'll be scouting out the dungeons, and progressing on. Floor 5 gave me the second crown, after I took out another horror of the deep. This time it had crystals on the tips of its tentacles, only one eye, and a bunch of knarled, gnashing teeth. I beat it's face in almost instantly though. I'm feeling a little more confident now, partly because the game has been just unloading gold on me lately. I also found a +2 Large Shield (or "Shiled" as it's misspelled in the inventory menu), and a boatload of pendents in one of the dungeons, so that's helpful. I cracked 100,000 gold, and at that point I decided to go shopping. That is, after upping my charisma by downing a bottle, of course. I was able to get the best weapon money can buy (the Halberd), the second best armor money can buy (Half-Plate), one of the upper tier magic spells (D-Thunder, which targets all enemies), like 20000 food, and 50 keys. After all that I still had 9000 gold left, and was able to quickly bump that up to 29000 with a few lucrative enemy encounters that I happened to get. I went ahead and did a bunch of leveling up at the church, as well. So now, if I needed to buy keys again, they would be 1200 gold each, instead of the 875 I last bought them for (after the CHR boost). I'm not quite as concerned about that now that the gold seems to be flowing in (I'm already back over 100,000), but I am still a little worried about what kind of nightmares lie in wait in the lower floors. I've been pretty much blocked off from returning to the fifth and higher floors, without using items to jump floors. The Nagas down here are scary, too. With the Halberd, and D-Thunder (which Nagas are unfortunately resistant to) I can basically mop the floor with everything right now, but if they do catch me, they can pretty easily kill me. I haven't capped the proficiency on my armor yet, but I am still a little worried about later floors. I'm still holding back on leveling up as well, though. I could probably roll through another two rounds each of levels for Fighting and Wizardry, but that would continue to up the price on keys (as well as the clinic, although I never actually use that anyway).

With the first three bosses appearing on floors 1, 3, and 5, and considering that the ones on 3 and 5 were guarding crowns, I'm assuming the last two crowns are going to be on floors 7 and 9. I think there are ten floors in total, but I'm not totally sure. So, I'm probably only about halfway through, but I feel like I'm picking up some momentum, at least. Here's hoping that I don't suddenly start running into a bunch of unavoidable enemies that raise my karma, or something.

[PretentiousHipster]

The flaw with Myst is that the puzzles aren't really my style. It comes down to memorization, which is easy to workaround with taking pics of stuff with your cell phone. The puzzles other than that are either trial and error of clicking a button and seeing if that does anything. If not, go back and then click another button and repeat until you get the result you've wanted. You also have to explore quite obtuse locations to move forward. It took me ages to realize that there's a level to the left of a treasure chest for example.

This is another reason why I find Obsidian to be better even if it's one of the clones. The puzzles are more logical and mathematical. I find that to be quite fun and had a blast going through them.

Of course, this just comes down to my preference, so I guess I shouldn't fault Myst for this.

[marurun]

I beat Bloodstained over the weekend, but I'm holding off on writing it up for Game Beaten until I'm done grinding a bit. The game is clearly intended to be played some beyond the first clear, so I'd like to account for that (and enjoy it).

[PretentiousHipster]

I'm just gonna focus on Zelda games from now on. Really motivated to do a video ranking Zelda games after seeing on that got 70k when he didn't even play half of the games.

Beat the Earth Temple in The Wind Waker and that might be the worst dungeon I've ever played. I remember the Wind Temple afterwards being even worse than that. Last time I played it I gave up at that point. I of course will beat the game this time, but I will have some gaps between playing them. I won't review this as people don't wanna see reviews where someone finds it mediocre.

Managed to get to Kakariko Village in Twilight Princess. It still didn't really pick up yet, but I've been told that it will very soon.

Started Oracle of Seasons today. It definitely seems to be one of the most action packed Zelda games. The setup only takes like 10 minutes and right there you will already be fighting enemies and entering dungeons. I like it when dungeons are treated as a sort of tutorial as it comes across as intimidating but teachers you the ropes at the same time.

This is like the Majora's Mask of game boy colour Zelda games. This may sound weird, but both were made by the same engine, yet are very different simply from what gimmick is used. With this case it's like Link's Awakening DX. Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb did say that Majora's Mask sucks because it's like a romhack of Ocarina of Time, and it technically is the same here. Unlike them I'm not calling that a bad thing.

I loved the first dungeon of this. It's a love letter to the original Zelda game. It even contains the same boss, yet one that looks just so cool.

[prfsnl_gmr]

The opinion of someone who thinks Majora’s Mask “sucks” because it’s a “ROM hack of Ocarina of Time” either hasn’t played the game or incapable of holding opinions worthy of consideration.

[PretentiousHipster]

The opinion of someone who thinks Majora’s Mask “sucks” because it’s a “ROM hack of Ocarina of Time” either hasn’t played the game or incapable of holding opinions worthy of consideration.

Did some research and it seemed like he was trolling phew. When Majora's Mask came out he gave it an 8.3/10, and said this: "Even though it uses the same engine that drove Ocarina of Time, and the gameplay is the same on the surface, the adventure is extremely different." Unless his opinion changed that drastically like 15 years later.

He is known for his infamous opinions, like hating Yoshi's Island, but I'll always respect him for his Kane & Lynch: Dead Men fiasco.

[PretentiousHipster]

I honestly enjoy Oracle of Seasons more than Twilight Princess and Wind Waker, but I do have my share of early complaints:

There are already way too many seeds and I can see this being chaotic quite quickly. Also with the seasons. It is a very cool gimmick, but I bet soon it'll be a case of trial and error over figuring out what season to make it to advance to the next screen.

There is also a lack of originality aside from the gimmick. The songs are the same as in other Zelda games, and I think I only saw one original enemy so far, which was the miniboss of the first dungeon. Everything else, including the 2nd miniboss and the first two dungeon bosses are the same. Hell, the dungeon bosses are even in the same order as in the original Zelda.

[pierrot]

Xanadu is for real, for real. I'm really getting into the thick of it. If you aren't paying attention, and don't learn a lot of the subtle mechanics in the game, you won't get anywhere. Floor 7 was basically a bunch of false walls (which warp to other false walls, but 80% of the floor is just a small section replicated over itself) between ladders, which can only be avoided by corner cutting them. Basically there's a bunch of one tile junctions with unbreakable blocks forming narrow corridors into them, and ladders above and below). If you mess up, you get sent to a junction that looks identical, to where you were, or sent into a pit that you can't jump out of. (I think there are only two of those, but there are a couple other spots in the main section where you could just soft lock if you don't have a floor warping item, or something).

For a moment, I did think that the game was going to force me to take a karma increase by killing off these maidens that were blocking the only way into the floor dungeon. It turns out that you can get past them by getting to the other side of the encounter screen, but it's kind of tough, because there are so many of them, and they move around sporadically. If an enemy ever touches your sprite, it basically triggers the combat calculations, so the enemy will never move away from you. Forutnately, I remembered that the Candle item turns me into a ghoul, temporarily, which would prevent me from taking damage from stronger enemies, but it also makes it so I can't physically attack them either, which is perfect for this encounter. So I was able to escape, and was kind of proud of myself for figuring that out. I was really proud of myself for figuring out how to get through the Floor 7 dungeon, without resorting to maps (which I refuse to ever make), though. At first I had no idea what was going on, because it seems to just be empty, and it's really easy to loop back around from the right side, to the left. I couldn't figure out what was happening, because the dungeon starts you progressing north, but then basically forces you south. I hadn't quite gotten the layout of the first few rooms straight, in my head, until I went back over it a third or fourth time. Once I did, I came to the realization that it was basically like a tower, four rooms wide. So I sort of numbered them from left to right, and made sure not to take a left at a 'room 1,' or a right at a 'room 4' (to avoid wrapping around into some other room I couldn't be sure of) and followed the path south. Most of the time there was only one of the four rooms that let me continue south, but there was one point, pretty deep into the dungeon, where it forced me to snake around a little bit by going north, then west, then south twice. Toward the end of the dungeon there were a couple rooms with some actual monsters, and some pretty sweet items like a +2 Battle Axe, which is better than my Halberd (with some more proficiency) and a +4 Large Shield, plus a bunch of other goodies. The problem is that the boss in the dungeon, who I assume guards the third crown, is a gigantic, heavily armored, skeleton warrior, who I can't do any damage to.

So, I've mostly been just trying to level up the proficiency on my latest and greatest equipment, but I'm not really sure if it'll be enough. I may have to level up a bit, also. I'm at 120,000 HP, but the boss had 750,000 HP--. I went to scope out Floor 8 a little bit, as well, and that's mostly an open floor where I have to jump from a bunch of hanging ladders. There hasn't been a great need for keys, it seems, in these two floors. Although I did have to burn 16 in order to get from the Floor 7 dungeon to the doorway to Floor 8, there was at least a room in the Floor 7 dungeon with nine keys just sitting there. There were also no locked doors at all in the dungeon. So maybe I can stop worrying about the cost of keys, and just level up (I have 155 keys, and almost 100,000 gold again), but part of me is still scurred. I'm also a little upset that a lot of enemies can do ridiculous damage to me, and even if I find some that won't kill me in a few hits, in order to train shield and armor proficiency, the proficiency values are climbing very, very slowly. Right now, that's probably not as big of an issue as the fact that I can't hurt the floor 7 boss. hopefully that changes once I max out the proficiency on this Battle Axe.

[Ack]

?

[prfsnl_gmr]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan