My 2020 Diary
The long-awaited sequel to My 2019 Diary is here!!!
List items
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just got to stormblood recently. starting a new free company in europe (Twintania, Light DC). just gonna be small and chill
update 11/3: the Susano trial is pretty cool!
update (apr): hmm.... i like scholar and summoner a lot..... the 1-50 arcanist and scholar storylines are great! maybe my favourites so far, even among the expansion jobs! but i guess i still like paladin best after all (which i also just finished the lv60-70 tournament arc for lol. can't go wrong with tournament arcs.) oh and the naadam story arc is pretty neat. i even liked the sidequests.
update (jul): i'm in shadowbringers. it's pretty cool, though it has yet to reach heavensward highs imo. also levelling a BLM on the side to not stress about keeping tank pace now lol.
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Surprisingly decent production value, and very good writers. Kinda iffy on how the mtx and ads work, but it is what it is
Eternal City S1: really cool weird-ish fantasy. Kind of annoying how much they try to push the mtx currency options as the "right" choices, to collect sigils etc, but i hope it won't matter. Looking forward to season 2
Titanic S1: This is a lot cooler than I expected. There's some ups and downs between episodes (some seem too short?) but the premise is intriguing. Like the movie, it's got that setup where you get to see the different strata of the Titanic. I like that the main character is someone with a well-defined history. The paid scenes all seem fun to take too. The whole romance thing I don't mind so much, but it's nice that the drama doesn't wholly revolve around the romance. (I might like this more than the movie?)
X-Files S1: I never really watched much X-Files, but this is not bad. I enjoyed it. Kinda dodgy that the psychology guy's weird trick/superpower thingy is all locked behind paid currency, but I bet the other paid scenes are great fanservice to fans of the show.
Kinda over this whole thing for now, but I'll surely come back. Heck, I even liked the silicon valley romcom thing they have that I tried the first episode of. And that survival one I guess is written by the mass effect guy? It's a solid format with good writers, which goes a long way!
Update: whatt it shut down. what a huge bummer. there was only a few days heads up and it's dead. those stories were fun :/
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It's one of those games where being "smooth" really helps a lot with the experience. The UX design is great, even by Nintendo standards. Extremely helpful and considerate in timing. This really is a game worth studying in the coming future. Only issue is I need a yoga mat or something, my ass bone hurts from the floor exercises.
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cute
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This is quite an affecting visual novel. I'll probably think back to this a lot later. And that solitaire!!!!
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the more i play it, the more infuriating and loathsome i find this game to be! it's not a good time! the puzzles are so annoying and tedious! rule combinations often feel inconsistent or arbitrary! it really feels like it was made by programmers, but not in a good way! the only thing i fully liked were the clever environmental puzzles, though honestly they don't live up to how everyone was saying their minds were blown by it or whatever. i've got the "basic" ending (which is, ugh!) and i kinda want to just do it all so i can feel justified about not liking this game a lot, but i don't know how much more of this game i can stand. a dozen or so hours, with 357+42 puzzles solved should be enough, right? :P idk we'll see.
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iceborne came out on PC! it's fun! turf wars seem a little too common though. and weapon designs are still a bit disappointing... but oh well!
update: hunting horn feels like an even greater solid weapon now, with new combo options that i feel has made it more accessible. the bread and butter being O and L2 back and forth is smart, and it's so much easier to position/rotate in between attacks now. i still think it needs more defensive options but i do appreciate how offense-oriented monster hunter improvements tend to be.
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oh yeah, i'm still playing this thing
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and this thing. they're just great time wasters for when i don't want to be somewhere. lol
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testing VR mode. interesting stuff
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vr test. fun arcade style game
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VR test. cooler than i expected!
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dunno if this is really a game but another vr test
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it's surprising how quickly i can get used to this game. it's so goofy but fun to mess around with. it feels a lot like playing super mario 64, strangely enough. but with guns.
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VR test
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the spaceship alien game is great. werewolf is fun. also played other party packs but can't be bothered looking up which is which.
Update: played more party packs. still great. at some point i basically had a sudden identity crisis from one of the questions in fibbage enough about you and couldn't answer it, and the game just carried on as if the question was never asked. I really appreciated that. Thanks jackbox.
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welp
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i landed a plane! sort of. something broke and the plane couldn't taxi straight, but at least i got on the ground
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The purest, uncut CSD experience.... no more chores, shorter downtime, just constant cooking and serving... it might be my favourite yet. seems like the toughest too! the breadth of menu options is pretty good. I can't stop playing it...
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oh yeah i did this again this year. made an alt controller type game with FMV cutscene, pretty fun work. favourite games i played this year are Get Up https://globalgamejam.org/2020/games/get-together-3 and Organ Repair Man https://globalgamejam.org/2020/games/organ-repair-man-4 (for the opening animation lol). lots of good stuff
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i'll finish this dang game finally, let's go
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giving this another honest try. i'll definitely finish it this year!!! it's a pretty good game, it turns out.
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the level of craft that's put into this game is plain amazing. but what on earth is this narrative direction lol. michael bay movies carried significantly more subtlety than this. i mean, look, let's at least strive to be on the same level of subtlety as the rock.
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i generally like clickers that has different playstyles you can adopt at different resets (see: shark game). the interface isn't great on mobile but i can somewhat get into this. feels pretty unremarkable otherwise, but sort of in a good way (good design sometimes means being invisible yadda yadda).
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i played a bunch of genesis/megadrive games, don't really remember which ones now. castlevania bloodlines,gunstar runner, gain ground, crack down, shinobi, light crusader, and so on. a lot of them were kinda bunk, but some are pretty neat!
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I'm only about halfway through chapter-wise, and it's just about as disappointing as i expected. It feels like a decent prototype that they had to quickly polish. Once again, there's something to be said about how the mistake amateur cooks tend to make is putting in too many ingredients into a dish. More and more mechanics keep getting introduced and they don't feel particularly elegant or clever. The story pacing is kinda inconsistent and confusing. Things just don't seem to come together, design-wise. The game could probably use a few more iterations before it was polished up and served as a product. TBQH I probably wouldn't bother completing the story if this wasn't for the game club..
I also have a personal nitpick with the food: the dishes seem to be heavily leaning into East Asian cuisine, but they do feel a bit too... narrowly considered. The fantasy aspects of the recipes can also push them into nonsensical territory sometimes, e.g. why does the venus flytrap plant stomach go into mapo tofu? Does it replace the pork mince or something? How does the rat tail go into fried vermicelli? Dragon heart... goes in dumplings??? Is dragon heart really like lean meat you can mince and shape?? And then extra ingredients may be described as garnish or whatever, that not only isn't reflected in the art (makes technical sense), but I honestly can't even picture what it means when you garnish these dumplings with some bones. These questions make the food sound totally incongruous and weirdly uninspiring. I think the point of cooking in fantasy settings is to ground fantastical life and biology in relatable yet still imaginative terms, and these recipes don't quite find the balance it needs. They could at least use some descriptive language instead of relying on the art, which can be a bit difficult to read on its own.
And I don't know, maybe this is another side effect of how the game was designed as a whole. Between the way "flavour" works in this game, how recipes are designed per character, the "computer-generated" nature of the recipe ingredients, and so on. Just another one of those "didn't quite come together" parts of the game. It's just frustrating when the ideas seem like obvious potential winners.
Update: Finished. This was not worth the time investment! It just completely dropped the ball on most fronts, especially anything related to the food. totally lacking in focus and elegance, resulting in a game that seems less than the sum of its parts. I do want to commend them for at least completing the production of the game to a point where it is definitely "complete", but the overall package is yet so mediocre and uninspiring that I kinda wish they sacrificed more things to make the remaining experience more worthwhile! Bummer!
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Oh, I get it now. This is some slick, quick, deliciously on-point 2D action game. It's like sinking a 3-pointer with one eye closed. The roguelite progression and variety is as lavishly designed as the 13-course meal of your dreams, just bites after bites coming at you nonstop. The animation, the combat design, most things just happen with such precisely satisfying principles that every button press just feels like it was meant to be. Bim bam boom. Love it.
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I've never been a fan of the main storyline (just because of how it's paced) but of course it's still fun to just hang around the neighbourhood and look at the meticulously realised signage and stuff. I wish I can go into more of these shops.
One of the more interesting part of playing this re-release is learning about the intent and philosophy behind the English translation. For example, it's really fascinating to me how they translate Kiryu saying "Majima-nii-san" into "Majima-san" as a sort of half-literal half-liberal translation of keeping the respect put into the name without making it too complicated for the English reader, while still colouring it with a Japanese honorific anyway. I don't know if I personally like that particular decision, but it's still just so fascinating to see these small things that they must have put some amount of thought behind.
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oh yeah, played more of this with the get to work etc packs. got some mods that make it pretty fun too. turbo careers is a somewhat small but meaningful change, with lots of community gallery content support to boot. have some personality please is a huge change by just making sims more autonomous and use social actions on their own. it's hard to understand why it isn't an option in the game to begin with. i made a new sim to submit for the baby challenge, which now i'm playing as a black widow sort of challenge, and it's been pretty fun. maybe the first time i actually made a major renovation/house design project in building a basement prison for all the victims to die in lol. it's really putting a burden in my bills but it's worth it!
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i guess i forgot to write this one in earlier. just logged in here and there to check it out. it's still kind of a bummer because the majority of its issues are technical problems that can be solved given the right schedule. they better get things right eventually...
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started subscribing on a whim. can't be bothered to wiki every game release so i'll just dump all the entries here!
Chatventures: it's a fairly simple RPG, but has all the RPG stuff I want. Straightforward and surprisingly action-y in a way that reminded me of Kingsway. I can just keep playing this all day. Maybe I should get into MUDs...
sok-worlds: surprisingly fun to make stuff on! I tried to recreate a dream I had just the night before. Very limited toolset, but feels just smooth enough to be encouraging. Though I wonder how much of it comes from the familiarity with the basic Unity 3D movement.
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for game club. half life is half life, but i don't really like this. the theming is weird, and i feel like i'm always going the wrong way. the wrench is bad... why have the wrench at all.
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I just got around past the bridge. This game is kind of amazing. UI quibbles aside, what I find lacking the most so far is how little actual painting there is. The painting mechanic itself feels a bit too simple. It's more like photography than anything.
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I forgot to log this because I guess I just kinda took it for granted that I'd be playing this forever. It's animal crossing. The trajectories has been smoothed out and streamlined to a ridiculous degree, but it still allows for a pretty chill play. You just have to kinda hold yourself to not play too much of this. The slow ramp up is enjoyable in that way, starting with only 2 villagers and a facility to familiarise with fucking around one quarter of the island and so on. It's a nice presentation.
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This is more WoW than I thought! The lore and story writing is really fascinating so far, but I can't really stand the general look and feel of the game. Unfortunate!
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I don't really care much for the original Superhot. This feels kinda like the ideal Superhot experience, surprisingly. There's a surprising amount of expression in getting your hands tangled up in cool, strategic poses, and dodging attacks like the matrix but for real. Definitely one of those things that feel way cooler to do than to watch.
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Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab. This is way cooler than I anticipated a free movie tie-in game to be. A mix of different recording techniques gives it a unique dream-like feel. There's only one real open explorable scene, but the whole design is solid. Totally worth trying.
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Museum of Symmetry. I thought for sure this was on a VRodeo at some point, but I can't find it. Anyway, it's really good. It's simple and playful and showcases really fun animation in VR.
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Seems fairly well-made, but has extremely questionable moments even early on. The first thing that happened to me was grabbing some pin-up or whatever and the guy gets a boner. And like that wasn't enough, he immediately comments that the game developers should have made it bigger. What the fuck??? Did they think they were making a Leisure Suit Larry game? The whole thing feels completely off the mark in a lot of ways. It's a bummer, because I think Tequila Works does great work otherwise.
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This is pretty fucking cool. I mean, I love murder mysteries, and this being a wholly simulated whodunnit story is really fascinating. It's kinda amazing when I just walk around the first time, seeing something on the ground going like, what the hell happened here?? and I can just rewind it immediately. The rewind/fast-forward thing and the follow mechanic is a bit clunky, but there are workarounds anyway. I think this is a really fascinating way to get introduced to characters in a whodunnit, and see what they're up to at all times. It's kinda sad that this didn't take off so much! I'll definitely be recommending this to people more, I think.
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Tried the VR version for a bit. Still figuring things out so not a lot to say just yet. I feel like the transitions between "cinematic view" and the regular VR view has some interesting narrative potential, though I assume it's more of a compromise for this game than anything.
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cute puzzles! there's a surprising amount of variety that isn't just "make x bigger or smaller". i like the cinematic cuts to other scenes, it works better than i expected.
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played this during our easter quarantine livestream. some sections are a pain in the ass, but honestly it felt like it was worth it when i finally reached hollow bastion.
update: i finally finished it. fuck ansem. why was this game this hard. wow.
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finally picked my tatacon back up, and even streamed it a bit. surprised to find that there's a somewhat active taiko streaming community on twitch. played around with tjaplayer3 on PC too. kind of annoying to set up, but it works! Just too bad that i don't have a working ridge racer chart on it yet, and difficulty switch tracks are kinda busted.
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watched this played and just wanted to note, it's an interesting student game that deals with art interpretation by way of dream interpretation/re-enactment. feels a bit clumsy at times, but so much more well polished than i would have expected. it's fairly simply structured and generous in letting players progress, but it still manages to keep things unpredictable and strangely compelling. I'm glad i caught this!
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i bought this again on android not realising that i already own an android copy. oops. well whatever the game is fun. simple level-based roguelike that fits really well for a phone. i had been looking for something like this for a while, dunno how i missed out on it...
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now that kh 1 hd remix is done, time to move on to the re:chain of memories remake remaster. sora's older voice sounds so weird in this. i set this to beginner because i just can't anymore. let's just make some broken decks and blast through this without having to completely cheese it because some boss has some bullshit attack that kills me instantly or whatever. i have lost all trust in KH, one game in lol
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saw this installed on my computer so i gave it another spin lol. such a simple and exhilarating game. love the sound of the wind whooshing in my ears. may be just missing one last small piece to make the failure/reset more interesting to complete the experience...
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VR good.
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it has some major UI and UX issues but it is very compelling in a strange way. Cooking is all about plate spinning, and it's funny how the techniques and workflows have been abstracted in such awkward ways. Even the way the kitchen is laid out is so annoying lol. Feels nice when you nail a recipe efficiently though.
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it's been crashing a few times, so i think i'll hold on this for a bit first. seems cool, but very small indeed (compared to wotc).
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forgot how good this game is. messed around with character pools some more, it's a lot of fun.
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starting to show its age a bit, but it's a great repository for kids with too much money and creative energy making a whole bunch of weird levels. the actually impressive levels are fun to explore with friends too.
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What a plonker I am!
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played some minigames with friends. it mario party.
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funny how many problems get solved by just running up to some dude and stabbing him in the neck
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I totally forgot to log this way earlier. Even if it doesn't reach the same peaks as HL2, it's still pretty darn cool. I feel like there's a lot of subtle design elements that makes this more impressive when looked at through a designer's lens, like the difficulty progression for example (and the level design especially is Valve-tier for sure). As "free" as the idea of VR is, it's honestly ironically a pretty restrictive medium!
The weird thing to me is how, apart from its general aesthetics, it doesn't really feel like a Half-Life game? But I guess HL are games where you can just zoom through a level at impossible leg speed and jump/crouch around. Crouching alone is kinda awkward in VR, I mean you definitely won't be crounch jumping with your regular human legs.
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Alyx got me nostalgic. I even re-installed SMOD! Still a fun game. HL2 and the episodes are weird cause I feel like they're always more impressive AND kinda more janky (though still stable!) than I remember. And oh gosh why is it so long. There's so much video game.
oh yeah sadly i found out that smod redux doesn't have the gintama bombs in cutscenes? which smod version was i playing??
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why driving is so hard??
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FInished! Though 999 is still my favourite, this may be the peak of the series on most fronts. Even though I wrote down the most outlandish theories I can come up with as I played, a few things still took me by surprise. They knew how to catch us Zero Escape fans with our guard down, coming at us when we least expect it. The tone is also a lot more consistently serious, and every character felt like they actually had their place within the story. The puzzles were also quite good, for both the escape rooms and the spaghetti timeline structure straightening. Compared to VLR, it feels like this finally compares to 999 in its out-of-the-box pseudo-scientific nonsense aesthetics too. Very well put together, I like it!
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(yeah i got the itch.io bundle like everyone did)
kinda funny. turned out to be an actual RPG with a combat system, but it's so incredibly convoluted to play and awkward to control. doesn't quite live up to the concept, but it's still novel.
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uhh I guess there's no game page for Lingotopia yet. It's a game about learning new vocabulary for a language you don't understand. Unfortunately, it's buggy as all hell, has really weird priorities in the design, and of questionable consistency/quality wrt the actual translations. I wouldn't trust it to learn an actual language, which kinda kills it entirely despite some interesting ideas in there. bummer!
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A Kishoutenketsu in the countryside: quaint sokoban-style Puzzlescript game. Simple (as the name indicates), finishable in one sitting. I like it.
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DAMN this game rocks. i like minesweeper, i like match 3 RPG's, i like roguelikes, i like this. bada bing bada boom. i love the tutorialising so much, it's just "click on shit and i dunno," you love to see it.
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forgot to log this a while ago, another huge update, pretty impressive. played multiplayer and it's still fun terraria times. the install size is so small too
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fun little arcade style game where you reel in a fish while avoiding stuff. kinda awkward to control by design. sometimes feels like there's a bit too much going on, but it's cute.
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mobility doesn't have an entry so i'll just tack it onto this. mobility looks pretty cool, but you can really feel the 30FPS lock in this platformer... reminds me of dustforce and n, but i wouldn't say it flows as well. not sure if i like the level design in general either. still pretty cool though.
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been getting back into it. made some decent money through exploration! now i have a dolphin and an asp x and they're cool.
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just started playing this. idk it's fine so far. i was so over danganronpa after 2 so i hope it'll pick up in a bit.
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cute. but the pokemon don't have their own growls!!!!!! uninstalling.
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I guess i haven't logged this yet. it's still love nikki idk. they finally did a UI update to make momo's recommendation be bulk searchable which makes things sooo much easier in story mode. also i guess there's a second volume to the story now O_O
update: official mickey mouse crossover event??
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this finally came out internationally and, it sure is a gacha game. idk it's whatever. dunno if i'll even bother any more.
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i currently have 11.3K trimps with 3390 of them very slowly clearing out the trimple of doom. i may have a problem. there's so much going on in this "clicker" labelled at version 5.3.9. it's got interesting bumps in the progression that may change things depending on how far you plan to go in a single run. this game just seems insanely big, in terms of mechanics. pretty fun.
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i was telling people on discord this game had an electric fan integration and nobody believed me, unbelievable. have i ever lied in my life. it's called ambx you fools. anyway i reinstalled this to prove them wrong and it's still far cry 2, great as ever.
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I guess i forgot to log this. the story so far seems to be some really subpar isekai level stuff, tity monster included, but also like i get it nobody actually cares for the plot complexity i guess. the clicker crafting part is where it's at. it's pretty fun, there's some flexibility and potential for mastery without much stress to the crafting system. I also want to add that it looks completely insane at 144Hz refresh rate. The smoothest horizontal camera movement I ever seen. Kinda into it.
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played this at laucnh but that final level seems rough. we got stuck for like 10 minutes and then i died in 10 seconds to the final boss('s first phase). anyway it is another risk of rain after all. the maps are so big that it feels a bit confusing but eh
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a snes-style seafaring tactical rpg with some mode7 shit................................................... yeah i can't play this game for too long or i'll relapse. i kinda like that it simplified the trading system by having a generic "yeah you'll make profit if you just decide to trade" baseline on top of all the RPG systems. the art is a bit hard to look at (no offense i meant it is literally very bright on the eyes), while the music weirdly really high key slaps. they're royalty free music from online but they're some great choices hey. it seems wild that a game with this many RPG systems was made by a single person. very cool
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idk if my brain melted in 2020 or something but this game seems like it might be decent, based on the beta? it has a lot of very obvious problems (any time someone speaks i'm like blehhh) but the part where you play as someone with their own moveset and do juggle combos and stuff, it really is pretty fun. not the most complex, but pretty good for what it is. could have been a very solid game if it didn't have so much baggage as an avengers game (i mean for example, the loot seems like the most mindless inconsequential system that's just there for longevity/mtx reasons...) would have been nice if it went all in with the character action stuff, add high scores, more complex combo mechanics (something like dodge offset?), etc.
update: oh yeah forgot to mention that the game's pretty shit when you do the generic multiplayer content, yikes.
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"Basically morality is an illusion and whatever we do will be rewarded by the world," I said, 2 hours before finishing the game.
I like that this is one proof that you can copy the structure of a dark souls to any kind of action RPG, and it'd turn out pretty darn good. This is a lot more like Diablo than anything, but I think a lot about it works great. The game does have its limitations, especially in level content, buuut it's fun enough I guess. The ending is also a disappointment tbh. The game really has its highs and lows.
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i don't know about this game... too many questions to list here. uninstalled after playing it co-op for like 3 levels.
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this game seems extremely well made. still need to play more tho
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i forgot to log this. you can fly planes anywhere in this. cool
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tfw you feel guilty from seducing your own wife
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reinstalled it on my phone just cause i felt like it
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that moguri mod is pretty good. the plot feels more lowkey than i anticipated but it's a pretty fun RPG. protect vivi at all cost
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badass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it feels a bit weird to come back to DMC's old school style character action defensive options, but they're always #1 at finding novel ways to spice up the offense. this game's just bursting with DMC sicknastiness, and it runs so well on PC too. love it.
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this game doesn't have online co-op?????????????
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this game looks and sounds cool but damn do i want to barf
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the game says that leo's personality trait is Joker.
also btw it's so good that the game interface matches to the controller you use. all games should just do that!
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the platforming really annoys me and i'm not sure if it's just my controller/switch. so pissed at acid pits.
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this is surprisingly really fun. they nailed the kingdom hearts kinda-dodgy vibes. also i simp for shimomura so
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it's still that ubisoft ass ubisoft game, but it feels more interestingly balanced with the character generation system so it's got a leg up there. i like the UI a lot, and recruitment is a lot like catching pokemon, i can just do it all day. i also really appreciate the developers being fairly open about what worked and didn't work in the game. it's no far cry 2 but it's pretty cool!
The podcast audio logs is a huge annoyance for me tho. it makes no sense it might as well just be radio show recordings on tape. it needs like a podcast player feature like in MGSV (ironic that an in-game cassette tape player is a lot more like podcasts than podcasts in this game? lol)
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i didn't know this originally stood for troubles of middle earth, lol. i think this is a fun and surprisingly welcoming roguelike. i like it!
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this feels like back when bastion came out and set a new standard of quality. it's got pretty clever procgen design that successfully expresses a kind of beyond-time timelessness in its little bits of dialogue that comes from the mythological inspiration, which is like the last inch to a narrative touchdown that so many roguelike-ish games have tried to push towards (never forget... breath of fire v dragon quarter 😔).
Wait, is it a coincidence that supergiant unexpectedly keeps making spiritual successors to weird ass JRPG's that i liked? hmm.
oh yeah regardless of that it's just a lot of fun with the action and wild upgrades that is kinda like slay the spire in that one thing can just completely break the game in hilarious, but still fun ways. they did a great job making the game play quite differently depending on the build variation you got. like how you cast, which weapon attacks you use, etc. while still having a core sort of toolkit needs that you try to aim for. having the gameplay progression matched with an unconventional narrative structure is also a delight.
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hey this game rocks wtf
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fell asleep
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the remaster looks super wack but this game actually seems pretty decent. but i think i'm still on the tanker mission equivalent of the game.
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the multiplayer actually still works! we played it. it's pretty fun.
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