Ironclad Tactics: It’s an interesting design, a mix of tactical combat and deckbuilding that isn’t like a lot of games on the market, but you can only release some cards by playing with friends and there’s no central server so I have to schedule games with my existing Steam friends, most of whom don’t own the game. This is the sort of game where a public lobby is basically necessary and there is not that thing. Maybe they will add one because it is still in development? I hope? Because that would make it a lot better.
Jamestown: I love shmups but I am terrible at shmups. Like, back when I was twelve we had a sit-down arcade cabinet version of 1943 in the coffee shop near school and I played that thing to death and I never stopped sucking at it. Twenty-five years later, absolutely nothing has changed. Jamestown is gorgeous and clearly very detailed in its gameplay, so far as I can tell from watching other people get much further in it on Youtube than I will ever get because I keep blowing up.
Alan Wake: hey look it’s a shitty story AND a shitty game, that’s an innovative twist
Guacamelee!: The visual design of the game is fun. The fighting is fun. The endless jumping puzzles are challenging and much less fun than the fighting, and there are a lot more jumping puzzles than there is fighting, which: I get that it is a platformer, but it is a platformer about a luchador fighting the King of the Dead, and the crucial “fight/jump” balance is off in the wrong direction entirely.
Deadlight: “What if the original 2D Prince of Persia was a zombie game?” “Then it would be okay.”
Spelunky HD: This is interesting in contrast to Jamestown and Guacamelee in that I traditionally excel at platformers but I am awful at Spelunky. Granted, it’s a combination platformer/roguelike, but I like roguelikes too and… man, I suck at this game so hard. It’s kind of embarrassing. Every time I die it’s from the stupidest goddamn thing. “Oh, you didn’t see the arrow shooter trap? Dead.” “Oh, yeah, spider death. Probably shoulda jumped on that all Mario style, but you screwed it up.” I glanced at the Spelunky wiki at one point to see what some item did and was shocked to see how deep the game goes and how far I was from playing it even half-competently.
King of Fighters XIII: I will not drop $80 on a USB arcade stick. I will not drop $80 on a USB arcade stick. I will not drop $80 on a USB arcade stick.
McPixel: The joy of games like Wario Ware is that usually you can intuitively figure out what you’re supposed to do in the brief time frame allotted to you. McPixel decides to instead make your objective deliberately obtuse. I am not sure why they did this exactly. Maybe they don’t want people to have fun playing their game? That would be bold level design, I suppose.
Sepulchre: The developer and author explain that they wanted to make a “true” horror game because all those other horror games rely on shock and that’s not real horror, real horror is the sense of creeping dread, like in this game where the shocking twist is like the least shocking twist ever when it comes to horror fiction and also the voice acting is kinda bad and, let’s be honest, “creeping dread” and “bad pixel art” do not exactly go hand in hand. On the other hand, it is free, so you get what you pay for almost.
Gunpoint: I got to the point where you pick your ending and I stopped because I can’t make up my mind. Other than that this is a great little game with lots of neat mechanics, good writing and decent retro graphics that are simple without being all HEY LOOK WE DID BLOCKY PIXELS because god, I am sick to death of pixel games being pixel games for the sake of being pixel games.
Ducktales Remastered: Loses a bit in the modern translation (the story cutscenes are just kind of annoying) and to be honest, there are plenty of platformers out there that learned all of Ducktales‘ tricks and improved upon them, which is to be expected from a game from the late 80s, isn’t it? I mean, yeah it’s great that this bit of gaming history got remade and all, but it’s like everybody acting excited that Nintendo remade an old Zelda game in HD: I am not sure why I am supposed to care that much.
Babel Rising: hee hee squish all the peoples squish them and zap them hee hee hee this is all I have ever wanted from a god game ever
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What are you playing on? Console? PC?
If you have any access to iOS, highly recommend The Room, a really well-crafted puzzle game.
If you haven’t, try The Last Door. You’ll be happy you did.
Everyone is bad at Spelunky. I racked up something like 1,000 deaths on the freeware version before finally beating it. Even after “mastering” it you’re still far less likely to win any given attempt than you are to die in all sorts of horrible, hilarious ways.
The way you feel about Jamestown, I feel about Deadpool. I love the story, but I am horrible at run’n’gun. I’ve made some progress with the aid of DP’s healing factor and some Captain Kirk-style tumbling from cover to cover, making up for my lack of shooty-bang-bang with some mad hack’n’slash skills, but I’ve become stuck at a point where the ranged accuracy that I lack appears to be an absolute requirement for continuing.
My girlfriend and I have been enjoying the HD remake of Wind Waker, but part of that is the fact that it’s just a really weird, atypical Zelda game that we both loved when it first came out. I know there were people who hated the sailing, and I could not understand it. I loved the sense of scale it gave, and the sense of isolation; for once you were not alone because no one could bother to devote limited resources to populating half empty towns, you were alone because the sea is dangerous and uncaring about your safety.
Yes, but Deadpool has that auto-aim function you can get by rapid-clicking the trigger expressly to get around that. Or does that not help enough?
Just to jump in re: Wind Waker, that one is a bit of a special case; Wind Waker was gorgeous, but it was also very, very obvious that the Gamecube didn’t have the hardware power to present the game the way the creators envisioned it.
The HD version has a colorable claim on “this is the way the game was meant to be experienced” not just being marketing bullshit.
As far as Ducktales Remasterd goes, my primary complaint is that they dumbed it the fuck down. Getting an absurd cash count in the original Ducktales was HARD. You had to press up against walls to find secret rooms and do things like take a leap of faith out into the void in the possibly vain hope there would be an enemy there to pogo off of. There was no map. Some of the boss mechanics were downright punishing.
The Remastered version is pretty as all get-out and I like the extra content and all, but it ain’t the game that wore a permanent groove into my thumb from needing to hold down the B button constantly to pogo.
I’ll take a look at Ironclad. I don’t typically like card-based games, but if it looks worthwhile I’ll pick it up and widen your pool of folks to play with.
The place where I’m stuck in Deadpool has the flying mutants that toss lightning. I just can’t seem to manage to get the lock and tag the buggers before they dart out of the lock and fry poor Wade.
I concluded a while back that I wasn’t too interested in games that won’t let me play as a female character. (Exceptions that got past this barrier are Layton and Phoenix Wright, since they have good writing and good female side characters to make up for it.) Unfortunately, I don’t think anything on your list qualifies. 🙁
Guacamelee!, Spelunky HD, and King of Fighters all have female character options. In Babel Rising you are literally a formless god so you can pretend to be female-aspect if you like and it works perfectly well with the story (female gods can make the piddly humans go squishy too).
I also suck at Spelunky.
On the other hand, try Gone Home. It’s a different kind of game, but with a kind of storytelling that totally sucks you in, not to mention that the story itself is *amazing*.
Ducktales remastered feels like a flash game that belongs on a smartphone to me. That isn’t a compliment.
By the way, MGK, who have you been playing as in King of Fighters?
Or who is a frequent team member, at least.
“Guacamelee!, Spelunky HD, and King of Fighters all have female character options.”
I did not realize this! I’ll have to look those up now, thanks for correcting me.
Spelunky is interesting because it caught some flack for having a straight-up “Save the Damsel” thing going, and not only that but you knock her out, carry her around, and fling her at stuff.
But then I learned you can also sacrifice her to Kali, or swap her out with other characters (including men)? I’m just going on Let’s Plays here, where I’ve seen fat female adventurers toss Chippendales dancers on the altar.
The current version of Spelunky lets you choose whether you want to rescue damsels, dudes, or doggies (or a random selection of all three).