bbalpert

@randomexpletive This worked for me 👇

Warframe on the technicality that the review scores are from 2013/2014, even though I played it in 2019 (by which point it was practically an entirely different game)

Its 2013/2014 scores were in the mid 60s

Dragon Quest Heroes but with a UI that didn't take for-fucking-ever to do ANYTHING.

Seriously, ever line of dialogue adds 2-3 button presses to skip through, plus a very short but not insignificant pause between lines. And those add up when the process of "just saving my dang game" is

• Walk up to priest guy
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• STOP mashing so you don't accidentally select the option to cancel out of the conversation (which itself involves a few more lines of dialogue)
• Move your cursor down to the Save option
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Select the file you want to save to
• Wait for the 3-4 second long "your game is saving" jingle to finish playing
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Stop mashing so you don't accidentally select the option to go back into the "choose your save file"
• Move the cursor down to the "I don't need anything else from you right now, thanks" option
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue

All told, that interaction only takes like 5-10 seconds, but it's an interaction that should take almost zero seconds. And EVERYTHING in the game is like that: Buying equipment 1 piece at a time, sitting through a 3-4 second "you completed a quest!" jingle each time you turn in one of the 12 quests you've completed, going to an inexplicably separate room 2 loading screens away from the shops and save point any time you want to change your party members...

I wanted so badly to love that game but maaaaaaaaaan does it seem to drag for literally no reason.

I would say "SimAnt, but with crazy intricate hive simulation systems", but I the sprite graphic spiders from the original game were scary enough as they were. I don't need any giant 3D spiders in my life, thank you very much.

I'm lookin' at you, Grounded...

But one thing that could be cool is a remake/successor to early '00s scare-em-up Ghost Master.

I've been slowly working my way through Armored Trooper Votoms, the anime Austin Walker described as "Rambo with mechs". Having not seen any of the Rambo movies, but knowing roughly of them, I think that's pretty spot on. I just finished the Kummen (i.e. space Vietnam) arc and am currently in an interstitial arc that I might (inaccurately?) describe as "what if the hotel from The Shining was a space ship?"

Some specific positives about the show:

• wow cool robot/haha robot goes brrrrr
• Sick jazz tunes
• Interesting story about PTSD that hopefully (and presumably, given the series' reputation) doesn't completely shit the bed
• The most absolutely extra, over-the-top, dramatic "Next Time On..." preview narrator. For example the narration for the preview of episode 8 is "Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles so he could know the future. Macbeth fell into Hell following the three witches' prediction. Chirico will divine his destiny from the Prototype. In Woodo*, what you need to buy your future is jijirium** and a little bit of risk. Next time, The Deal. Business in Woodo carries the scent of death."

*Woodo is the name of a city (or planet?)
**jijirium is basically the unobtanium of the Votoms universe

Seriously, the "Next Time..." previews are so good (but warning of spoilers obviously if you watch past the first few)

Hitman 2016 without saving

I checked the Robot Entertainment website and a little ways down on the FAQ, they confirm that it will eventually come to Steam (and no, your save won't transfer between versions). So it seems like the smart move is to wait (unless you don't mind losing progress).

https://robotentertainment.com/omd3_faq

Also on the matter of having to wait, I feel like the game encourages you more than previous games to take a more active role during the waves. For the early parts of most missions especially, your traps alone are simply not going to stop too many units. So you're usually going to need to do some not insignificant amount of cleanup to catch everything that runs right through your killbox, especially if you're going for a par time.

Now while that might sound like I'm trying to defend the game by saying that, I kind of preferred the more passive "sit back and watch your Rube Goldberg nightmare deathtrap do all the heavy lifting for you" style of OMD1. Not to say that there isn't still some element of that here, there's just not as much of it.

*Edit: After spending more time with the game (particularly in Endless mode), the inability to leave the game running idle does seem like a bigger potential issue than I gave the OP credit for.

The spider crabs in Ecco the Dolphin were fittingly nightmarish additions to an already panic-inducing ice level. As if you weren't already on edge enough about getting lost in a frozen labyrinth and drowning or getting crushed against a wall by free-floating blocks of ice, you also get to deal with groups of dolphin sized spiders* that can accelerate from stopped to full speed almost instantly, have no telegraphing animations that they're about to attack, and can survive more than one hit from you.

*Not technically spiders, but spider crabs. Still.

(cw: a gif of these spider crabs from the game)

And yet somehow that ice level isn't the scariest level in that damn game?!

This person has the right idea.