EvilRedEye wrote:

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Let's start an angry online petition for a Tunic reboot. With a decent combat system it could've been a 10.

It WAS decent, it’s not Tunic’s fault you’re all a bunch of pussies.

It was half decent, until the bosses showed up and showed it up.

Yossarian wrote:

He also said slightly disappointing.

Heh.

Popeye (NES) - Home console conversion of the Nintendo arcade game, of which I completed all unique rounds in both modes. I had a go at the arcade game before this and while it had some nice crisp sprites, it was a surprisingly spiteful, awkward game. This version in comparison is uglier but feels more responsive and fairer, and seems to play better overall. You collect items being dropped by Olive while avoiding Bluto. I think this is inferior to Donkey Kong but it's OK. It's thematically a bit depressing in 2023. Two men beating each other up over a woman - toxic masculinity ahoy! [6]

Popeye no Eigo Asobi (Popeye Lingo Game) (NES) - This is an edutainment game based on Popeye. You translate Japanese words into English using a 500 word translation sheet that came with the game (I had to really hunt around for a good photo of this on Japanese auction sites to use as a substitute). It's meant for Japanese kids to learn English but you can kinda use it the other way around. There is actually a fan translation and unofficial MSX port that translate the title screen and convert the katakana characters to romanji but then you can't use the translation sheet plus it still isn't a perfect solution - ideally you'd have a version that displayed both the katakana and romanji. That said, it's not like it would ever be a great language learning tool anyway. I just used the original untranslated Japanese ROM. There are three modes - in the first, you translate words from one of six categories (as you can guess, I played through this mode six times to get all the categories). In the second, you basically play a game of Hangman with the words from a particular category (again, I played through this six times to do each category). I had to abandon the idea of getting the maximum possible score with this mode since it would be based on pure dumb luck and would be an utter grind. The third and final mode is intended as a multiplayer mode where you try and build one of three words displayed in Japanese at the side of the screen using the letters that Olive drops down onto the stage. This is a bit of a tedious nightmare as collecting the wrong letter wipes out your word and Olive is extremely shattershot with her letters. Overall, this game is extremely dull and unhelpful for language learning - this was possibly one of the most tedious experiences of my gaming career. [2]

I wouldn’t give sitting around a [5], it’s tedious and the graphics are awful.

ShabbyMcCrabby wrote:

How are you choosing these old games to play? Or is it alphabetical and you're playing them all?

The ones I’ve mentioned here are:
* Some low-hanging fruit from Atari 50 that I had a quick go at and ended up finishing with little effort.
* Mega CD games that I went into hoping they’d be moderately good but were disappointing.
* Some of the big names from the NES era that weren’t great for whatever reason. I was also curious about the short-lived NES edutainment range after reading about them in one of Jeremy Parish’s NES Works books so that’s why I’ve been playing those.

Have you played Inside?

JonB wrote:

Have you played Inside?

Yeah. Completed it.

At least I think I have, I was pretty confident that I had played and completed Limbo until i started what I thought was a replay and realised I didn't remember any of it past the spider!

Playing any CRPG after Disco Elysium feels like self-induced suffering; Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly no different in this regard, with all these incessant dice throws where there's only success or failure, nothing interestingly grey in-between.

That is the case with the best of the best, yes; it's all basically downhill after that. Disco is this beautiful artistic role-playing enigma that by all gaming industrial standards never should've been but somehow got made anyway. 

It didn’t shy away from nothing, and had both the smarts and emotional insight to tackle difficult topics and dive deep into the human condition.

Baldur's Gate 3, for example, feels like a horny, theatrical teenager in comparison.

Someone will complain about the lack of combat but doing away with combat as the fallback basis of interaction remains the future of role playing. Then again, Disco already did that too.

It's also ferociously fucking funny at times.

Now I have the end credits song stuck in my head.

Ratchet and Clank

That's a fucking banger right there. Probably an hour or two too long, and I appreciated you can just skip the puzzle wank. Stunner to look at, solid humour, decent story, awesome weapons.

Rare I see a game to completion these days


Easy 8.

b0r1s wrote:

It's a beautiful game and great fun. 

Favourite gun?

Spoiler:

I really enjoyed he ricochet one.

Nah never got round to it. I'll give it a go at some.point but they're great inbetween style games. Brainless and pretty.

Stray PC

A fun little 3D platformer with some neat ideas. You often stumble across the solution through chance and random experimentation that actual thought - but I guess that's very cat like. "What happens if I jump up here and bat the thing down?"

Needs a little extra polish on the platform targeting, sometimes you'll jump down when you wanted to go up, and getting too close to the edge of, say, a table means the option to jump up disappears. But given that you're a cat and you can't really fall to your doom during your run, it's not too much of a problem.

[7] for people who don't like cats, and [8] for sensible people.

I get them mixed up but defo enjoyed 4 the most and 1 the least