[Old-Sckool]

Bought Danganronpa from the Steam summer sale, and beat it today, though I think there's still some post-game stuff left to do.

The strangest thing about the playthrough was at a lot of parts I felt that I'd already seen/heard about some of this game, like some of the major plot points, even though I've never actually looked into the game before. Couple of things story-wise disappointed me about the game. The end of the first chapter gave me the sense that the main character had some weird ability that let them absorb the essence of those that died, and I was hoping that'd be the game's big twist. I was also hoping that the game would randomize what characters would survive to the next chapter, so that you could learn more about everyone on subsequent playthroughs. A big issue I had with the story is that I felt like the investigations revealed too much information to where you could easily figure out most of the important "plot twists" that pop up during the trial. I played on the "nice" logic setting though so I don't know how much of an effect that had on anything. I also felt like there were too many points where the script felt padded out.

That said, I still liked the trials. The voice acting helped to make retreading old information/obvious reveals entertaining. My favorite element in the game had to have been the non-stop debates, and I wish you weren't booted out of them after making a single counter argument.

[djtiesto]

STILL playing CS2, this game is taking forever... the end game is ridiculously stretched out.

Also playing a bit of Link's Awakening for Switch and the goose game

[djtiesto]

I beat CS2, Zeruda LA and the Goose Game... so now it's Luigi's Motherfucking Mansion Dark Moon. This game is dank af.

[djtiesto]

2 week break starting soon so I finally started playing Trails of Cold Steel 3...

[MicMotorhead]

I'm over halfway through the TNT: Evilution map pack for Doom 2. On Steam, I'm playing Dark Quest II, Diamond Joyce, ECHO and Kathy Rain.

And I'm pretty much always coming back to Euro Truck Simulator 2/American Truck Simulator here and there. Unironically really good games.

[djtiesto]

Quarantine and WFH have been pretty good for my game playing... beat Astral Chain, Star Ocean: First Departure R, and FF7 Remake. Also beat DQ Builders 2 but am finishing up some postgame stuff before moving on to something else.

After that I will do a chronological playthrough of my backlog, 2 or 3 games from each system I own in chronological order... starting from NES and SMS, and going all the way up to Cube and Wii. First orders of business will be Felix the Cat, River City Ransom, and the Famicom version of CVIII.

[MicMotorhead]

Been toying around with a lot of roguelikes. I really like these so far: Nethack, We Slay Monsters, Curse of Yendor, Golden Krone Hotel, Once Upon a Dungeon, Dream Quest, Monster's Den, Legion's Crawl, Wazhack and Curious Expedition.

Also been playing Wizardry 8 and it's surprisingly good. Never really played this series before.

A while ago I also completed the first person shooter Amid Evil and it's straight up amazing. It's the best game I've played in 2020 so far and definitely in my top ten of all FPS games I've played.

And I'm getting into Mount & Blade too. Kinda time consuming, so I'm not geting very far.

[djtiesto]

Beat CVIII on the Famicom and then my RGB modded NES decided to shit the bed. So was playing Golvellius on the Master System. I'm pretty far, have 5/7 of the crystals, hoping to have it wrapped up in the next few days. Then I'll try once again to beat Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap.

[djtiesto]

The announcement of the Alex Kidd in Miracle World remake had me go and play through Alex Kidd in High Tech World. What a shite game. It starts out in a Japanese castle (this was a reskin of some game based on an anime called Anmitsu Hime) and you have to collect 8 pieces of a map to an arcade. Some of the pieces are easy to find, some are completely inane... and there are a lot of instakills. So if you get 7 of the 8 pieces of the map, but walk down the wrong stairs and collapse and die, you'll have to restart it... you can also try on a piece of samurai armor and get stuck in it and get a game over. After escaping the castle, you get a password, and then there's a really terrible sidescrolling part, your character has a huge hitbox, cannot duck, and ninjas are flying around everywhere throwing shuriken at you. Then you go to a little village, which also has some game overs (such as if you pick up a gun and try smuggling it through the checkpoint). To get past here, you have to go to a little bamboo shrine and walk over and pray 100 times to get the passport. Then there's another shitty sidescrolling part. You can restart from the sidescrolling parts if you die, but you only get a password for the first one... and if you let the controller idle on the 'new game/resume game' screen it'll go back to the title screen. I very nearly beat the final sidescrolling part, left it idle to grab a beer, and then found out I couldn't continue, I had to put in the password to go back to the first sidescrolling part, beat that again, and then do the stupid praying 100 times part again. So many terrible design decisions here. But I managed to beat it at least, heh.

Dr Sparkle's (Chronsega) coverage of the game

[MicMotorhead]

I remember that b.s. with the samurai armor. Great game design

That Alex the Kid game that was built-in on some old Master System consoles was cool. I can still remember the water music from level 1.

[djtiesto]

On the final chapter of Traysia, an obscure Genesis RPG from 1992 by RIOT (Telenet) and published in America by Telenet's US branch, Renovation. I hope to finish it tonight...

It's a super-flawed game that's so simple to break - by keeping up to date with the latest armor, and equipping one or two "stick" accessories (that increase DEF, you can equip as many accessories as you have free inventory slots), enemies will literally not be able to damage you. I think there was only one point in the game where enemies were damaging me (when I got overzealous with selling my equipment and found out I didn't have enough to buy replacement equipment). The graphics remind me a bit of an early Genesis game like Thunder Force II, grainy, dithered, with a slightly darker look than most of the other RPGs at the time.

The music is fantastic, and there's a fairly interesting underlying plot of a civil war between wizards, with the "good guys" losing and the evil wizards infiltrating different kingdoms and stirring shit up. The combat is like the early Ultima titles, grid based with slooooow movement and a clunky interface. The world map is seamless, large (though lacking in landmark) areas that are easy to get lost in. My favorite part is a kingdom consisting of 13 different towns built on top of one another. The plot here you need to piece together by discussing with the NPCs (and trying to parse a fairly poor translation), wherein a group of wizards manipulated the city's noblemen to keep pushing further and further underground, eventually the enslaved citizens ran up against curses (turned to stone) and uncovered ghosts and other horrors down there. Still not the greatest game but interesting enough and super obscure for an English-released RPG.

[djtiesto]

I beat Traysia, now I'm playing Wonder Boy in Monster World. For some reason, I never really got into this one back in the day... yes, ironic considering my avatar. It's not bad but one thing I do not like is that your initial walking speed is REALLLLLLY SLOOOOOOW. But you get boot upgrades that make your character faster. Halfway through the game (just beat this giant snowman boss) and you can finally walk at a nice, brisk pace. The graphics are very nice for an early Genesis game, it wouldn't look out of place as an SNES game, in fact there are a few areas with a colored pencil look reminiscent of Yossy Island.

[djtiesto]

Beat Whomp Em! on the NES, a sprite edit of a Saiyuki game replacing the lead character with a Native American (seriously, you still go through bamboo forests and stuff)... it looks like it'd be a decent, Mega Man styled action platformer, but apart from the nice graphics it kinda sucks. The music is HORRIBLE, and hit detection is off.

[djtiesto]

Finally beat Castlevania 1, some 30+ years after first playing it. The first phase of the Dracula fight was ridiculously tough, especially since you couldn't just spam him with holy water like some of the other bosses

Also beat Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys, Power Blade, and about to beat Willow. Then playing some River City Ransom, Rygar, Felix the Cat... got lots of good NES lined up.

[djtiesto]

Beat a whole shit ton of NES lately - Felix da Housecat, Rygar, Willow, River City Ransom, Power Blade, Simon's Quest, and.... LEGACY OF THE WIZARD!!! One of the hardest games...

Now onto SNES, starting with some Breath of Fire 2. Wonder if this will overtake #3 as my favorite in the series?

[djtiesto]

Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon (PS5 version) - up to chapter 12 now and this game is fantastic! Awesome storyline, fun turn-based battles, and some spectacular minigames (hell they even have a fully featured Virtua Fighter 5 as a minigame). One of the best RPGs I've played in years.

[djtiesto]

METAL GEARRRRR?!?!?! on NES
I'm nearing the end of it according to this FAQ I've been following, but this one area with all these goddamn pitfalls keeps tripping me up.

Then it's off to Ghost Lion, Rambo, and Magic of Scheherazade on NES.

I've also recently finished Actraiser Renaissance and Arise. A lot of people seem to like both but I felt they were both fairly disappointing.

This post has been edited by djtiesto: 05 November 2021 - 06:06 PM

[Maxim]

djtiesto, on 05 November 2021 - 01:06 PM, said:

Ghost Lion

Use a turbo controller if you're going to play this one to the end. It destroyed the A button on my Gravis Gamepad.

[djtiesto]

Lately: Trails of Zero, TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, Mega Man 4, 6, 7, 8.
Soon: Stray and Star Ocean 6