Sno

Okay, okay, i've listened to this episode of the Bombcast, and i think those guys kind of have a point. (Though Brad's argument started and stopped at being dismissive of the game for it having a time limit.) More broadly though, they were generally just going on about Majora being probably the most obtuse and difficult Zelda game, and they're not necessarily wrong. As i said before, i think you definitely benefit from having a good solid understanding of other 3D Zelda games before going into Majora, so that the only things you're struggling with are the things unique to Majora. (Dan asserts that you need to abuse a secret in the game and manipulate time in a certain way to provide a way more manageable time limit for dungeons. I don't think he's correct in it being necessary, i'm pretty sure i had played through most of the game without knowing it was there, but it is an available option. At the very least, you want to reset the clock before starting a dungeon.) I mean, but yeah, if you go into those dungeons and you're struggling to figure out block pushing puzzle #23, you're going to run out of time. It definitely helps to already have a good sense for how those things play out. (Replaying the dungeons goes quicker than you would expect though, it's not the severe penalty everybody always builds it up in their heads as.)

It strikes me as very odd that the control for cycling Manny's focus isn't mapped on the gamepad layout as far as i can tell, and there's even unused buttons in that mapping. Getting Manny to look at the right hotspot on a shelf full of objects is quite laborious without it.

Haven't played it myself yet, but the word i've been getting from friends is that it plays like Valkyria Chronicles with an AP system that more closely resembles the AP systems of early-mid 90's PC tactics games. The major complaint i've been hearing is that it just plays out so incredibly slow.

Whatever version just went out on Steam within the last 24 hours, it started happening after that update.

The last update appears to have unlocked the framerate for me and now it runs at something like 400fps according to the built-in framerate counter in Steam. They should probably fix that...

I had started another game to just quickly go through the commentary mode, which seems like a really great commentary mode and all, but in the hour or two it took me to burn through to the start of year 2, the game had CTD'd at least four times. Trying to move through the content as quickly as possible seems to exacerbate its instabilities. Still, totally worth it for the story Schafer tells about cleaning up pigeon poop.

Some of the GB guys have also just generally been big detractors of Majora, there isn't a ton of fondness for the game out of that crowd.

Before i forget, i've played Revolver360 Re:Actor, it's available on Steam. (Yes, that name is terrible.) That's a hell of a shooter. So it's a side-scrolling shoot em` up that plays out on a 2d plane like you would expect, except you can spin the camera either upwards or downwards in a cylindrical fashion, and this causes enemy ships and bullets to collapse into thin lines that you can destroy with a laser attack. What about 3d depth? There is no depth, if anything overlaps in the screen space, it acts as a collision. That is, except for what's going on in the background, where your ship simultaneously acts as the cursor in a rez-like lock-on shooter that is happening at the same time you're spinning the camera around to manipulate the 2d side-scrolling playfield your ship exists on. There's a bunch of other ship abilities to contend with as well, the levels are packed with branching paths both obvious and hidden, and there's a really great challenge mode too. The game is nuts, people should check it out. It also looks terrific, it has a great aesthetic. The is incredible too.

Don't go into shmups specifically aiming to beat them, play for the high scores. It doesn't matter if you win, see how far you can get on one credit and try to optimize your play along the way. You'll get better faster and have more fun.

It varies a lot, i think Cave's games tend to be fairly improvisational and are loads of fun because of it, for example. Certainly, there is memorization and practice, lots and lots of practice, but the tacitcs you can put into motion tend to be much more varied than in other games like... Well, let's say Ikaruga, which often feels like it's only a few steps removed from playing a rhythm game. Sure wish Cave would put their games up on Steam. Or really make them at all attainable in the western world.

You should play Super Metroid, it is completely natural to want to play Super Metroid. It would have to be a very, very different game to make that work. It's kind of one of the weird things about Super though, that it has more ideas than it has need for. It's kind of overstuffed, but it's actually still keenly aware of what it is, and the things that needed to matter are absolutely the things that matter. It very easily could have felt bloated, but instead there's just all these weird little edge-case quirks around a very solid core. You have to wonder why the game is like that though, the GBA games prune out all of that peripheral weirdness.

Well, i like adventure games, and i love shoot em` ups, so i guess this game is kind of being made for me.

They should totally remake Omikron. I want to play a less-terrible version of that weird-ass game.

I just finished Grim Fandango after playing it for the first time ever. It's pretty good. Really quite good. I feel like i'm missing something though, but perhaps it's simply a matter of not really having any nostalgia for that game specifically or its genre as a whole.

I don't think i understand what this game is trying to be, but i hope it gets funded so i can find out.

I have now finished the game and will say that I had probably around half a dozen CTD's and softlocks each over the course of the game, and came across lots of other oddities such as the new directional analog control sometimes not mapping properly to the scene's orientation, or some elements in certain scenes not rendering properly, and probably a dozen or so hotspots not being interactable with the new mouse control scheme. (This was most noticeable when you go to the diner at the end of the first year, there are a lot of miscellaneous things in that scene that i was not able to click on, despite being hotspots that could be interacted with via the other control schemes.) Most of the softlocks i had happened around the vip lounge in the second year, i got stuck in the elevator that leads to it from the ticket area a couple of times, the door closing shut in front of Manny and him not being able to step out or return to the previous area. Also, after ascending the ladder in the kitchen area and trying to interact with the locker beneath you, manny would descend the ladder and get stuck on a corner while trying to turn around and interact with the doors, becoming completely unresponsive. One more that stood out to me was right after your ship sinks in the third year, if you try to access your inventory while holding the diver, the game softlocks there. The inventory is unresponsive and there's nothing you can do. This one was repeatable, i tried it a few times and it happened each time. The CTD's seemed completely random, but always happened on scene transitions. It seems pretty buggy to me.

That is mildly infuriating to see.

This remastering seems really buggy, i've had it soft lock on scene transitions, scripted interactions, and even in the inventory multiple times each, always forcing a save restore. I've also had it crash to desktop multiple times. The original game certainly can't have been this busted, or was it? I'm also not liking the remastered lightning model. The new textures, the shadows, the increased resolution all look great, but the original lighting model is clearly tweaked to hide the seams in the models, which the new lighting model tends to instead highlight. (It looks especially terrible with the white suits Manny and Glottis wear in the second chapter of the game.) Also, speaking on the game itself, there's been quite a few points where the story gives Manny no clear motivation to be doing anything he's doing. You're left kind of randomly clicking into place events that have no clear connection to the objective you may or may not have, simply hoping to find the story again. You're almost never presented a convincing image of a character who could be acting with a clear objective in mind, given the arbitrary and piecemeal tasks he's setting himself on. I've said before that i don't have a strong history with point and click adventure games, so maybe this is just an accepted part of the genre that people don't even think about anymore. In my limited experience with the genre, that hasn't been the case, and it feels really, really weird in such a character-centric and narrative-focused game. A lot of it could ultimately just be blamed on arbitrary and strange puzzle design, perhaps.

Take a second and think about the fact that Super lets you disable and enable equipment at will. Instead of a fairly straightforward progression of beams, Super has to support every possible combination. There's a reason the GBA games got rid of equipment toggling.

Beyond those, and beyond various well known glitches, there are also tons of other weird tricks in Super that aren't really useful in any particular context, but are kind of fun to play around with. Try charging your beam and then switching to a morph ball while the beam is charged, for one. Even less useful - to speedrunners at least - are the secret beam combo attacks, where you have to go into your inventory and disable all the beams except for a combination of the charge beam and any one other. (Also, yes, you can selectively enable and disable power-ups.) Then switch to power bombs as your sub weapon, but don't go into morph ball mode, simply charge up the laser to spend a power bomb on a powerful special attack.

Ack, well then my memory of that game isn't as clear as i thought it was.

Majora's Mask is incredibly standalone, and most Zelda games are. You might infer that you are playing as the same Link from Ocarina, but the game doesn't even care enough about that to make it explicit, and virtually nothing else provides any connection to the prior game. You should have no concern about just going ahead and playing Majora. Beyond just narrative, i don't think you would even gain any uniquely valuable perspective on it by playing Ocarina first. (As you definitely would by playing LTTP before ALBW, for example.) If i had to reach for something, i'd say you might find Majora a touch difficult without the prior experience of playing Ocarina, you might also perhaps find the time limits a little constraining without that prior experience. (In this case though, it doesn't have to be Ocarina you've played. If you've played any 3D Zelda, you're probably going to be fine.)

The next wave will have the Megaman Amiibo!

I echo this sentiment, they were one of the last good gaming blogs providing a catch-all cross-section of gaming news. Definitely gonna miss it, and i'm not sure what i'll replace it with.

I'll throw in another vote for the Dark Brotherhood probably being the most interesting and well-designed questline in Oblivion. (Actually, it's possibly the most elaborately designed questline in any of the TES games.) Play at least as far as the party, it doesn't really get better than that. The Thieves Guild stuff in Oblivion is really good too, though the best of it is all on the back end of that questline.