Mischief Makers

Pretty cool. I was surprised by its structure, with very short levels and a fair amount of ones with unique objectives and design. As always with Treasure, the boss fights are fun and the game controls well, though its strangeness doesn't always work in its favor. For one, I think it's a little ugly---I don't like that a good number of the levels are made up of these blocks with faces on them, I would have rather seen them try to craft unique environments. Some of its experiments don't quite pay off, but I like that it's trying things.

Still fun though. Not top-tier Treasure, but in the better half of their games imo.

No order:

-Beyond Good & Evil
-Drakengard
-Sutte Hakkun
-Panzer Dragoon Zwei
-Maximo: Ghosts to Glory

Celeste

So this is a pretty rigid game. It's responsive, but so much of it plays like a manicured execution test rather than a process of navigation that allows for a player to really stretch and improvise. All that I heard about this game before I played it was about the storytelling, and I think that facet is really bad. Just bad cutscenes and annoying characters and some of the most heavy-handed metaphor use I've seen in a game. Did people like it because it was encouraging? Because stroking the player's ego is one of my least favourite things a game can do.

Still, it's nicely put together and well segmented. I played it all, even if I didn't feel good about it afterwards.

Eternal Darkness

I like the first half of this game, which plays like a survival horror Timesplitters, with all the protags getting smoked by evil gods, but it begins to repeat its environments and throw legions of slow, boring enemies at the player---a player with entirely too much ammunition and spells. The sanity effects that everyone hypes up aren't that impressive and shouldn't be happening in the back three quarters of the game, as the player gets a spell to replenish sanity fairly quickly. There's no genuine psychological dimension, a story that starts off promising and then goes nowhere, and weak, overused combat.

A shame, because I like the setup and the multiple time periods and settings.

@tokyoslim Have you ever seen a Japanese silent film with a benshi? I've watched a couple with benshi audio tracks before and it's great!---I'd really like the opportunity to see one live. That's why the dialogue cards tend to be pretty infrequent and bare in Japanese silents, there was usually someone orating at the same time.

Also it's a shame that it wasn't That Night's Wife; I think that's the best Ozu crime story.

Dragon's Crown

The first Vanillaware game I've played, and I thought it was pretty tedious. It's about 3 hours of game that it wants to stretch out to over 8. It wants to ask things of its player in its story and sidequests and the like, but they all amount to running back and forth in town or going back to the same handful of levels and playing them again. Its beat-em-up combat is ok, but I wish the enemies were more of a challenge and asked for more than just being stunlocked. I guess the art (which is neatly stylized, but only really impressive with screen-filling enemies) comes at a price---there are only so many assets that can be made. Hard to tell if the amount of artwork couldn't fit the ambitions, or they just really wanted to pad the thing out. Pretty lame.

Resident Evil --> Only in Darkness Can You See the Stars

@irongrey said in What are you top 5 movies of all time?:

I thought of these five:

Zodiac
Summer Interlude
The Double Life of Veronique
How Green Was My Valley
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

I like this list

Five that came to my mind:

-Not on the Lips
-The Profound Desires of the Gods
-The Smiling Madame Beudet
-Distant Voices, Still Lives
-The Shop Around the Corner

There's a few dozen more where these came from. Not sure if some of these are even my favorites from their respective director, but they just popped into my mind so there.

Slowdown never used to bother me much. I remember playing Perfect Dark back in the day and thinking that it was cool that the game would go 'slow-mo' when lots of stuff was happening. It wasn't until I got into CS that I realized what was going on, and that it really impeded the ability to play the game.

Nowadays I'm not to bothered by it unless it's drastic, constant, or impedes gameplay in a major way. There are some games I won't play at less than 60 FPS, but they're mostly multiplayer games, and I don't play many of those anyways.

Input lag or buffer bothers me a lot more.

I recently played two games that were pretty similar to each other: Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon.

Nuclear Throne is straightforward, flighty, and a bit ugly, but I think it's the much stronger of the two. It's a fast, well-modulated experience that's formed around its running and shooting. Levels are the right size, are naturally paced with open areas and hallways littered with interesting enemy combinations---and builds, which are dependent only on character, passive upgrades on level up, and two found weapons, feel well-suited for some situations but difficult for others and fit well into the game's fast pace. You kill quick and die quick with no grace period of I-frames or consumables to lift your head above the water. It's volatile, and it gives the sense of surviving against the game rather than providing confidence or power over its play-space (like the next game...).

Enter the Gungeon isn't bad, but I beat it on my second run, which I don't think should ever happen in a game that has arcade or roguelike inspirations. Enter the Gungeon's levels are too big, with too much running around and too many rooms that are frankly a joke. There isn't a reason for there to be 5 floors---make it 3 so playing through the game doesn't take 45 minutes. Success in this one is (like The Binding of Isaac, its biggest inspiration) based around build: get a high DPS through finding a good couple of weapons and good passive upgrades, and make sure you can stand a few hits. Always worked when the game wanted to give it to me. Over time I learned to appreciate it a little more; there's a lot of content here, and the 'Kill the Past' segments are cool, but its fundamentals can't carry the weight of all of its rooms and guns and secrets and shops and bosses.

Enter the Gungeon is made for those who want a lot of a thing, Nuclear Throne is for those who want that thing to be precise.