The GHZ Forum

Once you hit Truth/Doubt you're stuck with it.

I mainly have trouble choosing between "doubt" or "lie". Even if I have evidence that seems to indicate a lie, when I accuse them, they're all like, "Oh yeah, prove I was there!" Like shit, that's NOT what I wanted to accuse you of!

On the bright side, these are by far and away the best motion capture facial animations I've ever seen. Even big-budget Hollywood CG has yet to achieve anything like this.

Also, the stuff that plays on the radio while you drive - are those genuine archival recordings or is it all original material?

The King of All Cosmos is telling me my Katamari can't make a very good island for this camel.



THIS IS TERRIBLE

Green Gibbon! wrote:Also, the stuff that plays on the radio while you drive - are those genuine archival recordings or is it all original material?

It's all genuine, which is pretty awesome. The only original tracks are the instrumentals and Elsa's songs.

Lately I've been playing Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Yesterday I finally managed to finally 1cc it on Normal (as Marisa). Now I'm bashing my head against the wall trying to also do it as Reimu, as well as make progress in the Extra Stage and start working at the Hard difficulty.

It's maddeningly frustrating but addictive as hell. Scrolling shooters are a genre I've always really liked but somehow never played all that much (danmaku shooters in particular). I plan to go through the whole Touhou series eventually.

I beat Fantastic Dizzy.

Playing the extra levels in VVVVVV 2.0. So far I've beaten all of them (with all trinkets) but the two hard ones (A New Dimension, which I haven't really tried beyond an initial look, and Golden Spiral which is just *grueling*). Also, the "How Badly Do You Want It?" trinket in Roadtrip to the Moon can go to hell while fucking itself. Goddamn. That one probably isn't so much *harder* than, say, Doing Things the Hard Way, but the difficulty curve on the initial segment is backwards rendering it really goddamn frustrating. Or maybe I'm just terrible at it.

So I managed to get a hold of the PC Gamer Demo of Minecraft, since I haven't tried the beta yet. Holy carp is it addicting.

Sniffnoy wrote:Playing the extra levels in VVVVVV 2.0.

Wait, there's a VVVVVV 2.0?

Seems to just be an updated version with a bit of extra content from what I can gather online. Is this the case?

Crowbar wrote:

Sniffnoy wrote:Playing the extra levels in VVVVVV 2.0.

Wait, there's a VVVVVV 2.0?

Seems to just be an updated version with a bit of extra content from what I can gather online. Is this the case?

Yup. The biggest difference is purely internal - the entire game was rewritten in C++ by another guy, allowing it to finally work properly on Linux without going through Wine. (Though fullscreen still sometimes crashes my computer. Also I guess I don't really need it on Linux anymore as I have Windows now as well? But it's preferable not to have to restart the computer, certainly.)

It's actually not compatible with old save files - Terry is going to write a converter, but in the meantime he's pointing everyone to an unofficial one (ConVVVVVVerter) that some guy wrote. Unfortunately the new version has a bug in that certain saved info - in particular time trial records - doesn't always load properly on startup. It's being worked on, I gather. :P

The actual new stuff is a level editor (I have to wonder what it is that's since falsified previous explanation of why a level editor would be impossible) and 10 (not-integrated-into-the-game) levels made with it. (Disappointingly, there's no records kept of which ones you've beaten or with how many trinkets.) One of them is a port of Notch's 4k Java demake of the game (VVVV). They're actually prettty good, quite a few of them do some clever things with the mechanics that weren't done in the original game. Though Pyramid of Doom is really easy and pointless and not very well-put-together and I kind of have to wonder why it was included. Variety Show's a little disappointing too, but the rest are good. The new levels also include "warp lines" -- if these are used, leaving a screen can deposit you pretty much anywhere, geography disregarded. I'm not sure I like that. (Note that level-editor-made-levels never give you map access.) I guess it was included so as to allow for the VVVV level? Especialy annoying is when someone uses it to implement a bit of ad-hoc wrapping (instead of using the built-in wrapping!), thereby breaking the convention that looking at the background can tell you what sort of wrapping is used in the room. But I guess you should pay attention to the background anyway because it does guarantee that at least that much wrapping is used? I think?

One of the levels, Vertiginous Veridian, has what looks like an alternate path to a trinket at one point, that actually just brings you to a bugged area. Didn't test it enough, I guess, didn't realize people could go that way. :D

Weirdness: The level editor includes 2 new music tracks you can use, but SFAICT (having not yet played through the two hard ones) only one of them is actually used in the new levels that come with the game. Also I don't think Souleye has made them available for download anywhere so far. I kind of have to wonder why this was done?

If you already bought the original game you should be able to get it for free - people who got it through Steam got it upgraded automatically, apparently, and everyone else got an email saying where to download the new version...

Sniffnoy wrote: Weirdness: The level editor includes 2 new music tracks you can use, but SFAICT (having not yet played through the two hard ones) only one of them is actually used in the new levels that come with the game. Also I don't think Souleye has made them available for download anywhere so far. I kind of have to wonder why this was done?

OK, apparently they are both used.

...and having now played through it and gotten all the trinkets, I don't see why "A New Dimension" bills itself as the hardest. The longest, probably. But it isn't even close to Golden Spiral. The long upward part for trinkets right at the beginning looks really hard, but, well, it isn't. It's almost certainly the buggiest, however.

Kirby Air Ride. Fun in short bursts, but I think it's still a bit too reliant on the one-button thing.

I tried out the demo for Owlboy. I have a history with these indie titles that are event/media only for a really long time before they finally let just anybody at them where when the demo finally comes out, I don't care anymore. Lookin' at you, Braid! Anyway Owlboy actually sucked me in by the end and I was really enjoying myself, there's quite a bit of action and the pacing of the demo is really good in terms of keeping stuff happening (although it seemed pretty slow at first while it established that rhythm). I had this feeling that I was going to think it was really boring. It feels a bit like Demon's Crest, though that may be just because of the way you fly (and the general SNES-ish quality of it).

It does contain a really annoying "dark" section, and I say that as someone who put a few of those into his own game.

Found my N64 and have been playing Goemon's great adventure. This game seriously is one of the best platformers ever and the soundtrack is amazing.

Lately I want find new 2d platforming games to play. Anybody have any suggestions?

guys do not try the online pokemon trading card game. I just lost a whole day to this shit.

Radrappy wrote:online pokemon trading card game

Oh my god

My buddy bought Tatsunoko vs. Capcom the other day. It plays like MvC3 if it was made from a cheaper plastic. I haven't taken the time to learn any of the more advance moves (Advance Guarding, Baroque, and team hyper combos) though. Maybe it will get better after I do.

Beat FFXIII a couple of days. Replaying FFV Advance to wash my memories of it.

So I got Ghost Trick a while ago after doing a decent job avoiding spoilers - gameplay mechanics included, and I was pretty much expecting something with the same format as the Ace Attorney games; which would be ok, but the MUCH fresher experience I had instead was very welcome.

Easily one of the best games with a short lifespan *cough* I've ever played, in spite of its flagrant racism towards blue people.

I discovered a neat little gem by name of Gunple: Gunman's Proof. It's as if EarthBound and Zelda had a baby. a cowboy baby.

I finally got around to finishing Bastion. It's a great game and you should buy it (buy it with the soundtrack too, you won't regret it).

The ending really threw me for a loop. It's not often that a game gives you such an abrupt moral choice but I thought it was handled pretty well. It was very much a "head versus heart" choice and I had to cope with a lot of cognitive dissonance when I realised that, if it were me, I'd take the selfish ending - spoilers: the one that doesn't involve saving the planet - and I thought the game was appropriately non-judgemental. It wound up teaching me something about myself.

In terms of gameplay, it's all right, but a bit button mashy and the difficulty is all over the place, due in part to the game's constant narration and energetic soundtrack taking up large chunks of cognitive economy. Kind of like playing with the radio on. But it's unique and different and tense, plus the game always has a surprise around the corner to keep things fresh. It's not a game I want to play more than once, though. If you like games with narrative then you owe yourself to check this out, the storytelling style is really unusual and the narration works a lot better than I could have imagined. The art is great, too; if they ever release an art book I'd love to get my hands on it.

I was looking forward to that, but the demo kind of turned me off. It did feel a bit button mashy and the level design wasn't too interesting. I felt like it would've gotten repetitive fast. Plus the narration just wasn't working for me, everytime that guy made a comment about some inane action it just pulled me out of the game world. It seems like there was some other game I played recently that had a similar feature and it bothered me there, too... what is it I'm thinking of, Infamous?

Any other thoughts on Bastion?

I had a similar feeling that it was going to get old fast, in fact it was already old before the demo was over. I'm not sure if it was that the combat was imprecise or if, due to the elaborate character animation, it was so precise that it felt imprecise--either way I didn't really like it. It felt like it was too far over on the Diablo side of the Diablo-Zelda spectrum for my liking. I did like the narrator though, and I think his consistency right from the beginning makes him feel like he's really a part of the setting.

The soundtrack really is bitching. Listen up.

I recently played and finished Red Dead Redemption, at the vehement request of someone at work, because when you're a Game Tester you seldom want to play games in your OWN LEISURE time, so it's like the first game I've played and completed during my own leisure time with this amount of depth in a long time. The game reminded me a lot of Shenmue actually, but what I really liked was that what felt like what was a story quest and what was an optional quest was kinda blurred in the respect that you can go anywhere on the map to what's available to you at any time so because everything has the same "prerequisites", that is just run around and you'll come across the next quest trigger is something I really liked in a game as open ended as this. I never found the story engaging until the last about 1/5 of the game, because I'm always being betrayed or my agenda's always being delayed because almost everyone is being a douche to me, so it wasn't until the last parts of the game when I felt like I was reaching near my goal and was living a quiet farm life did I ever get the feeling, "I wonder what's gonna happen next?!"

What's funny is when my bay was talking about the game at work, someone mentioned about hogtying a woman and putting on the train tracks, and I was like what you can do that I have to play this game 'cuz that sounds so awesome, so then after a bit more conversation I turned on my computer and when to Youtube to see the Dastardly Achievement, and everyone was watching, and right when the train was about to hit the woman I closed the browser everyone's like "awww" and I went, "I have to save that moment for the game!" By the time I finished the game, I never did hogtie a woman and put her on tracks, so basically I never did end up doing what spontaneously attracted me to the game in the first place.

Before that, I played a Fire Emblem game on the DS, I believe it's a remake of the original game, and it's called Shadow Dragon. It's a pretty solid Strategy RPG, though with the way I play (no one is allowed to die), I tend to restart all the time just to redo the battle so no one dies. Which is a lot since FE games are hard.