Gaming thoughts for Sept/Oct:
Quake - Fall makes me nostalgic for FPSes, so! Gone through Episodes 1-3 so far. Very much enjoyed episodes 1 and 3, although... episode 2 I'm not sure how I feel about. Episode 1 and 3 were quite varied in terms of level mechanics and general mood, and were also very... surreal and abstract? Episode 2 was a lot of castle levels and they all seemed to be based around raising bridges. I'll need to revisit them on a replay. Maybe I just wasn't getting what Romero was going for.
Tenshi no Uta - PC Engine RPG, rather Dragon Quest/Phantasy Star-ish. My biggest/only? complaint is that the encounter rate is really high. This isn't actually a huge issue since the battles are incredibly fast. It's mostly just annoying because it keeps interrupting the rather excellent overworld/dungeon music. The game itself has this odd, very zoomed out look to it, but the spritework and areas have a lot of detail in them in spite of this. Lots of weird little events in town and there's a day/night cycle. For instance, in one fishing village, I came in at night, saw some side event that involved watching crabs dancing, and got 1000 experience for it.
Doom 2 - I have no idea what to make of Sandy Petersen's levels. A common complaint is that they're odd looking, which I definitely agree with. They also don't really make a good use of space -- the city levels have a lot of dead air. Aaat the same time I'm also having a very fun time playing them, and they feel like sort of proto-Serious Sam levels at time.
PSX Legend of the River King Game thing - I've been quite addicted to this for the past uh... week or two. Seems sort of like a remix of Nushi Tsuri 2, which was an SNES Legend of the River King game (the ones the US got on the GB/GBC were Nushi Tsuri 3 and 4). The SNES version looks quite a bit nicer/has more detail in the towns and NPC sprites/unique building interiors and more fitting music, exceeeept the way battles work is kind of drag in that one. The encounter rate is really high, the escape rate is low, and the battle system's the same one from LottRK, where you just wait for some punch icon to randomly bounce around the screen until it lands on the enemy.
PSX one on the other hand lets you run 100% of the time with the risk of taking some damage or having something stolen, also lets you just greet the enemies to get them to go away sometime, and the encounter rate's really low. Also all of the player characters seem to have some unique events which is nice. So yeah gross art direction aside this is super fun.
Anyway this also got me looking at getting an N64 now, since it's got Shigesato Itoi's Bass Fishing and another Legend of the River King thing. What is my life.
Quake 3 - Just doing the single player tiers, and finding it surprisingly fun on the harder difficulties -- the bots, while not as good as UTs, have a lot of personality. (Meanwhile going to UT from Q3 and trying to play UT like Q3 does... not end well).
Yuuymai Dooru - A sidescrolling adventure game with light life sim elements about a group of friends exploring their recession-damaged town to uncover the supernatural... things lurking underneath, while dealing with their own mental/emotional problems. Also probably too obscure to have had any influence on NitW, so.
Basically you pick one of the friends to play as during the school day so you can listen to your classmates and find out about ghost-related rumors. At night, you walk one of the character's dog while investigating said rumors. You encounter ghosts but it's not entirely clear so far if they're real or if one of the characters has some kind of schizophrenia? that her father's refusing to treat out of some broken sense pride.
Unreal - Did the first four levels. THAT was a major nostalgia trip. I don't know if any FPS has really given me that same feeling of being in a *world*.
Shenmue - Up to disc 2. Did the stealth bit at the port. I'm ahead of where I need to be so I think I'll just mess around for a few days before advancing the story. The way the late afternoon sky at the port looks gives me... memories.
Quake 2 - There's a secret Hard+/Nightmare difficulty. I have no idea why it's hidden by default, since the AI only seems to behave right in this mode and the general pacing of item pickups in levels feels balanced towards it? Anyway, nearing the end of the second unit. While I'd agree that Quake 1's single player is better, I don't think the quality gap between them's all that great. (Well, I'm not a fan of Q2's soundtrack at all, at least -- Q1ish ambient music would've been a lot better I think).
GOD Pure - Speaking of PSX remakes of SNES games with kind of gross art direction that ultimately play better than their source material... Got the third party member, who was a teenaged girl that had been brainjacked by aliens into starring a cult on Ryuukyuu. The aliens were turning the cultistis into monsters or something.
Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers (The old one) - I haven't done anything productive in this really, just wandered around, dueling guys, and collecting cards. There seems to be some kind of deck scaling going on because the green-deck guys seem to have a thing for Llanowar Elves spam right now and I'm not really familiar enough with MTG to cope with that :)
Shining Force 3 - By some weird quirk of luck/level stat gain, Frank is one-shotting regular mooks, whereas Hayward and that super-generic soldier guy, both of whom should be better, aren't really that good for me. Probably should've given Hayward that level up fruit before class changing him. Ah well.
Rimo-cocoron - Unrelated to Cocoron. Stylistically it's similar to Katamari Damacy visually. Basically you get various scenes where you need to take a "snapshot" of an item in the scene and "use" it on someone in the scene to get them to interact with it, based on their wants. Once you've satisfied enough people's wants/caused enough mayhem, you can unlock the next scene, but there's a time limit so you can't mess around forever. It's vaguely similar to those flash grow games that were popular in the aughts but with infinitely higher production values. Has an impressive amount of events to trigger -- the collectapedia for Stage 2, which I played a bunch, only has like 62% of the events founds?
Children of the Nile - Someone on GOG found a thing to fix the framerate issues with this. I think this is maybe my favorite city builder now? Really unique mechanics -- I'd recommend checking out Tilted Mill's webpage for their design discussions.
