dualhunter

Finished Star Ocean. Back in the day I saw it in gaming magazine and it looked awesome (that and Tales of Phantasia, played the GBA version of that years ago). Years ago I briefly tried it but found the first battle hard. Turns out the problem was I tried to move around. Moving the cursor with the d-pad is too slow. If you just keep attacking it's easier. It's mostly easy, when it's hard it's because it's cheap. In the hardest post game battle, it was really tough because the enemies spammed attacks and I never got a chance to hit back. Once I finally manage to hit them it was easy. Overall I enjoyed it despite some annoyances.

One Piece, Sand Land, My Hero Academia, That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime, and Konosuba.

He did a porno after the incident that made him infamous. An ad for it said "John Bobbitt Uncut", but that's not what the news said. 

6 hours ago, Reputator said:

 

Wow, same. April 2001

 

 

aahhhh that screenname 
 

ooooo here's the oldest image of Mr. Wade Steel that I have

 

 

I just have a folder full of old message board stuff

 

some of you guys that hung around the PC community board might remember this crap

 

That last one is missing Krinords the Pikenator.

Landlord at work opened up access to the roof.

44 minutes ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

Was never a sub when I was a kid but I'd hit up the local grocery store and grab a GamePro or an EGM whenever I had the chance. I had always wanted a Nintendo Power but never subscribed. My buddy on the bus had a sub though so I'd read his.

 

I seem to remember there was a merger at one point.. I think it was EGM that bought out some other mag but I can't remember what it was. I also remember in the mid-90's those magazines were pushing 200 pages each. You could roll one up and kill somebody with it.

 

Also, I'm old... so if any of this sounds weird to you, it's because it was before your time.

EGM had EGM 2 for a while. I guess EGM 2 was a safer name than EGBM.

14 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

FFVI is my favorite JRPG. I appreciate that it's not paced as well or has characters as interesting as Chrono Trigger, it's probably not as much of a leap forward for the genre or series as FFIV was, and its impact is a ripple next to FFVII's splash. But it came out at the right time in my life for me to go absolutely apeshit over it and the nostalgia is undefeated. I have a lot of early internet memories tied to it as well, it came out when the transition away from BBS to modern websites was in full swing and there was a lot of fansite bullshit out there on places like Geocities that had nonsense like how to get General Leo in your party that didn't work and required a shitload of effort.

 

Obviously I'd play a remake, but I love the game as it is, warts and all, and I think it kind of stinks that in versions like the Pixel Remaster, the Sketch glitch is fixed. Is it better that your save can't get totally corrupted? Of course, but I like an inventory with 500+ Excaliburs for Shadow to throw like they're ninja stars and for everyone to dual wield Atma Weapons.

There was a set of Game Genie codes that changed the drops so you'd get all sorts of good stuff including Marvel Shoes, Atma Weapons, Ragnaroks and Illuminas. They'd drop through out the game so you'd have them early on. Atma is weak with low HP and the other 2 swords drain MP so it can be worth using something else like Excalibur early on (though if Edgar and Locke haven't learned magic yet, there's no sense worrying about MP), but Illumina one shots the early bosses even at low level and even when it doesn't trigger Pearl.

3 hours ago, best3444 said:

I'll check psn for this and maybe try it out. Is there mini games in this?

Sort of. There is the coliseum that except for 1 fight to get a character back into your party is completely optional. Other than that I suppose you could argue that a few things that happen once or twice are mini games.

There are 2 spots where you control multiple parties with multiple advancing enemy parties and a stationary boss. They're both mandatory but not difficult.

For the opera scene you have to select the right text at number of points. You're supposed to read a book for the correct lines before hand but you can always look up the correct lines and keep them handy either on paper or your phone, just don't take too long picking an option.

There's a "fishing mini game" where you walk up to fish along the shore, grab at least one and bring it to an NPC. It's mandatory and has an effect on the NPC but it's just at one point. You'll be making multiple trips bringing fish but once it's done, it's not repeatable. Whether you get the good or bad scene doesn't matter for the rest of the game so go ahead and keep bring fish and just YouTube the other outcome if you don't feel like trying for both (either save before hand or on different play throughs of the whole game).

Besides that there are a few sequences that are different than most of the game such as the serpent trench that could be loosely considered minigames if you stretch it. Don't bother trying to figure out the correct time for the clock in Zozo by talking to NPCs, just look it up online. I suppose you could consider the auction house a mini game but it's more like a store that wastes your time.

1 hour ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

I think the Switch version is considered the best one since it fixed the crappy text. If the steam version fixed the text I'd probably go that route.

From the second last patch:

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A “Font type” option has been added to the config screen. This allows you to select between the “modern” font made for this version of the game or the “classic” font in the style of the original game.

Looking at some of the other patch notes, they've changed some of the Esper level up bonuses, the most interesting being speed bonuses. Odin gives +2 to speed instead of +1 but Raiden now gives +2 to speed instead of +2 to strength so you can get Raiden right away without losing the option to boost speed. A couple Espers that didn't have bonuses now do (for another +1 to speed and to replace the +2 to strength that Raiden lost). I still don't see anything about getting to keep items stolen from the last boss like in the GBA version unfortunately.

If you use the Media Creation Tool on a USB drive (minimum 8GB) you can install the latest version of Windows, just make sure to pick the keep my files option.

Hammerting on GOG

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Hammerting is a vertical dwarven mining colony sim with RPG elements. Manage a clan of

Islets on EGS

Here's what I had to say about it when I played it last year:

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Great Metroidvania. If you liked Hollow Knight but found it too long, Islets is much shorter. Some of the bosses are fought in your airship and are a bit bullet hell but most of the game is melee Metroidvania though you also have some ranged attacks. You can find 60 upgrade items that let you choose between 3 options to upgrade and it looks like it's not set. I only got 4 out of 5 arrow speed upgrades because of this but there's no achievement for getting all 5 and I mainly use melee attacks anyway. Had I known how it works I might have avoided the ones that give cash but then I used that cash for more melee upgrades from the shop and those upgrades seem to be unlimited though they get more expensive each time you buy one.

On 3/22/2024 at 4:38 PM, crispy4000 said:

 

Time Spent: 45 minutes

Rating: ***

 

Relaxed 2d metroidvania.  There's something lulling about the character's relatively slow movement and jump animations.  Once you get into a rhythm with it, its enjoyable.  It's low stakes compared to the other NES-inspired indies I've looked at, which I can also appreciate.  Not everything needs to kill you all the time.  Frequent checkpoints are also nice.  There's still nothing here you haven't seen before, but the puzzle focus elevates it.

There's an actual NES version of the game too (that you can play on NES emulator). The sequel is even better, though if you play the pacifist mode back up your saves.

1 hour ago, crispy4000 said:

 

Time Spent: 45 minutes

Rating: ****

 

It feels so good to play, and isn't frustrating in the way that the games that inspired it are.  The art is wonderful, arguably better than Shovel Knight's look.  Gaining mid-air jumps back by hitting things is a really good idea, I'm a sucker for this sort of canceling shenanigans.  This will definitely be one I return to, so it gets the full 4 stars.

 

I really liked it. Maybe it was just because of the gap between finishing it twice and the release of the DLC but I hated the DLC and never finished it.

I don't like being rushed and I wouldn't want to abandon a run because I was running behind. I've only played the 2 and 3 remakes. My initial runs I got low scores cause I took my time and saved a lot. Because 3 was short I gave it another go a few months later. You're not penalized in 3 for using the rocket launcher and the splash damage doesn't hurt you so I was able to finish quickly and play again increasing difficulty each time. I stopped after finishing the second highest difficulty because it didn't seem worth the trouble to do the hardest.

Call of the Wild: The Angler and Invincible Presents: Atom Eve on EGS.

Islets will be free next week. It's a great indy Metroidvania.

Finished Dino Hazard: Chronos Blackout. The Jurassic Park Collection wasn't on sale during the Steam Winter Sale and I saw this with positive reviews so I gave it a chance. The exploration is a lot like Jurassic Park for SNES but battles are like a turn based JRPG. Later you can tame dinosaurs like Pokemon (there are hundreds).

There's a love/hate system based on whether you use offensive or defensive abilities and either kill or spare animals or robots. You can't spare robots so you have to either destroy them and get hate points or run away (can't from some battles so you'll be forced to get at least a few hate points). Your ability to tame animals is affected by your love/hate ratio and it also affects endings. If you don't plan on hunting dinosaurs you won't need much ammo but you will need tons of bait to put them into a state where you can show mercy to end the fight gaining love points. Some smaller animals have weakness (? for each one until you uncover it) but can't be fought, you can spare them (love points, money, exp and sometimes drops) or turn them into bait (hate points, normally you'd use the bait to avoid those but I guess you could use it to distract animals while you attack them). You can fight much higher level dinosaurs, if they might one shot a party member but if you use bait on them you can show them mercy and even the fallen party member(s) will get EXP. You'll have to go back to the hospital to revive the fallen though (don't save with dead party members until you are able to get to the hospital). There are defibrillators, the description says it revives fallen party members but when I tried it, it didn't work.

I mostly enjoyed the game, exploring the island and restoring power to various areas was fun. The game seems very amateurish. Most of the bugs I encountered were minor and just a bit annoying. Often the text turns dark (mostly after reloading a save but sometimes also when you exit the game and load a save which is how you get the text back to normal). More annoying is when the button to open the menu stops working (especially when you're bleeding and can't use items, experiment a bit to find ways to get it working again). The worst are the crashes but I only encounter those in 2 spots. There's an escape from rising water event where if I failed to escape, not only was it game over for me, it was game over for the game. The other was the final battle which I had to redo multiple times before succeeding. This really soured my mostly positive opinion of the game. There are some cyber space battles where you can't use items and weapons. You have to use antivirus attacks that miss more than they hit. The end game was really annoying because it consists of a bunch of boss battles like this (big part of what made the crashes on the final boss so annoying).

It can be fun and it's currently 50% off on Steam but it includes much that is sloppy and annoying. There is a tree north of where you start that has a chapter select (I never used it) if you check the tree.

1 hour ago, crispy4000 said:

 

Time Spent: 30 minutes

Rating: ***

 

This one is also hard to judge at first play.  It's WayForward putting their Contra chops into a Metroidvania.  Visually its expectedly goregous, like Zero Mission mixed with Castlevania vibes.  But it's also very bog standard Metroid design, without any cool powerups seemingly.  You get better weapons, but they use ammo, which you can get from enemy drops.  The controls lock you out of left/right movement while you hold the trigger to aim diagonally.  Even mid-jump.  They either should have given you 360 aim control like the Mercury Steam Metroid games, or let you still run like in Zero Mission and such.

I'm pretty sure you can move while shooting diagonally if you don't use the trigger. Unless I was just not holding the trigger fully, I just remember there were times I'd fall while shooting diagonally because I was moving forward. My main complaint was the lack of full health refill, so you have to keep entering and leaving a screen to respawn the trash to shoot for health drops. 

I'm assuming you can't get it anymore but Grandia III was a PS2 Classic on PS3. It wasn't a remaster but it was nice playing it upscaled with a wireless controller.

12 minutes ago, Bacon said:

I unplugged every USB device in one of my attempts and it didn't change anything. I didn't unplug the ethernet cable or monitors.

I wouldn't worry about the ethernet or monitor cable, but if you haven't already, make sure you have the latest bios and drivers for all the stuff on your motherboard. You can also disable stuff in the bios that you aren't using so if you're not using onboard sound or video, disable them. Sometimes you'll have some SATA and/or USB ports controlled by a separate chip on the motherboard that need their own drivers or you can disable them if the main ones are enough.

I think I had an issue with the upgrade from 7 to 10 because of my sound card at the time. Unplugging all non-essential hardware and making sure everything left has up-to-date signed drivers might let the update finish. If you do a fresh install, it will only wipe the drive you select but you can also disconnect other drives if you want to be extra safe. Office 365 comes with 1 TB of cloud storage and you can sync folders like Desktop and Documents. You could get a trial and cancel after making sure everything is restored. 

Started Dino Hazard. It's a bit like SNES Jurassic Park overworld exploration with turn based RPG battles. So far it's good though with lots of little issues. I've run into some minor bugs, the English script is lacking and a lot of the mechanics could use some explanation. You can choose offensive or defensive strategies for fight which result in either hate or love points. I think later you can capture dinosaurs Pokemon style if you use the mercy option. There doesn't seem to be a way to show mercy to robots so it's either run away or take the hate points. So far I think I'm going to like it despite the minor issues.

Finished This Way Madness Lies. The Zeboyd Games formula is a bit repetitive and it was short but still enjoyable.

Started This Way Madness Lies (latest RPG from Zeboyd Games).

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