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idling for cardsplaying games with Steam trading cards that I have but haven't touched yet.Other games I played:
Played QP Shooting - Dangerous yesterday. It's a shmup that's
quite difficult, despite the cutesy graphics and the relatively
irrelevant storyline. It's (ostensibly) about a dog-girl, QP, who is
desperate for pudding. The first stage has her fighting chickens,
trains, stoplights, and finally an old friend who is obsessed with
videogames, in her quest for pudding. The second stage features crows,
apple-tossing pine trees, butterflies, and potted plants, and the boss
is from an April fool's joke yaoi game who believes the main character
is a boy.
Some of its features:
* Defeating an enemy or some
projectiles generates stars from them and their bullets. you can chain
picking up stars (not defeating enemies).
* QP uses "rbits" (tiny
rabbit-looking things) as little pods that generate additional bullets
for her, and she has various rbit formations she can use. For example,
the default three formations are one that shoots an arc in front, one
that shoots an arc backwards, and one that shoots concentrated fire
forward. Other formations are unlockables. You have three formations
on hand when you play, and you can switch between them anytime.
*
Game comes with "Arcade" and "Conquest" modes; the latter lets you play
single stages. (You get upgrades to start the latter stages.)
Also, if you own the game on Steam, the extra character "QP - Dangerous" is unlocked in the game 100% Orange Juice.
Just like in QPSD, this version of QP is obsessed with pudding, and
gets stat boosts from holding pudding-themed cards in her hand.
----
Another game that I decided to try is Snuggle Truck.
It a pretty simple game with an amusing premise -- you're driving a
truckload of stuffed animals to a zoo. Navigate a linear 2D
environment, and try not to lose too many of them from the bumpiness of
the ride -- and there will, of course, be lots of bumps. You can choose
to speed up, slow down, tilt forward, or tilt back your truck, while
the 9 or so stuffed animals in the truck's cargo hold are individually
simulated and each of them could fall out if you go over a bump or
ascend a ramp a little too roughly. And sometimes you get to pick up
extra stuffed animals that just suddenly fly out of nowhere.
The
stages are pretty short, but there are a number of them, so it's good
for pick-up-and-put-down gaming. Each stage gives you medals for
different accomplishments -- bronze, silver, and gold medals for
increasing difficulty, an "ark" medal for finishing with all the animals
you start with regardless of time, and a "speedrun" medal for finishing
with the minimum of one animal but in a very short time. Getting
enough medals in one set of stages unlocks the next set.
Not exactly the most glorious game of all time, but kinda amusing and fun.
----
Yet another game I played is 99 Levels to Hell.
It's a platformer with some degree of randomness. Basically a
roguelike -- collect treasure, kill enemies, go deeper. Every ten
levels, there is a boss fight; complete the boss fight to unlock the
next set of levels.
Each level randomly picks from one of a set
of predefined level layouts for that ten-level group, and also randomly
distributes powerups, special doors (which can be elevators that
randomly take you up or down, shops, slot machines, or secret book rooms
that reveal more of a story (which doesn't seem to have much to do with
the game but I'm only like 20 levels into what is alleged to be a
100-level dungeon).
The level layouts can get a little tedious,
though after a while you'll have learned the layouts and know which way
to go. It's not quite as much variety as if they had used fully
procedural generation of levels (a la Spelunky for example), but it's
still decent.
You start off with the Magician unlocked; he starts
with 5 health and 4 bombs and a short-range spread shot. Pick up
upgrades to gain extra attacks, more range, or do other things. I'm not
sure what some of the items do, but I haven't checked to see whether
there's a manual yet...that said, it's not like roguelikes tell you what
items do anyway. (I think there's one item that takes you straight to
the boss of the area!)
Overall, a decently fun game. Note that
it uses mouse to aim so you have to use left-hand controls (WASD+space)
for platforming -- I know it took me a while to learn this for Terraria
the first time I had to do it. On the other hand, you can jump off of
ladders, and can even jump out from beneath one-high passages where the
ceiling and floor end at the same point. I also think that the
red-colored crosshairs icon (for where you're aiming) and the blood
effects and the red bats all blend together a little too much (they
should just change the crosshair color and get rid of the blood
effects), but that's about it for specific issues I've found. Pretty
fun game, overall.
(This was copy-pasted from a post I made at Caves of Narshe.)
Go Go Nippon is a visual novel about a guy who visits Japan and stays with two cute girls. Blatant emphasis on cute.
It's supposed to serve as a basic tourist's guide to Japan, actually. Tells you the kind of electrical adapter you'd need, as well as the fact that foreigners can buy express train + normal farecard combos for transit use. And much more. And it does this effectively.
However, in the course of doing this, the perspective character is pretty much turned into a country bumpkin otaku who is impressed that a major train station has a bunch of shops and thinks that having 24-hour convenience stores and vending machines is a sign of neighborhood safety. Also, he clearly wants those two girls, whose parents are conveniently out of town for the week. Conveniently. This point is not even subtle.
There's an additional feature that displays the Japanese text alongside the English text, for stuff that's canonically communicated in Japanese (in the story). This would probably work well for you if you wanted to practice reading Japanese and already have a working knowledge, but if you're like me and don't know Japanese at all and are more curious as to how the syllabary and vocabulary even work in the first place, it's sorta useless.
Sniper Elite V2 is my first foray into serious military FPS games. Slightly ironic in that this actually isn't that much of an FPS -- it's got a big third-person component, showing my character on screen. Anyway, it's set at the end of WWII and it's about a sniper. The controls take a bit of getting used to because they're somewhat different from TF2 controls. but in the end they seem decent. More importantly, though, I had to turn down or off a bunch of graphics and mouse settings in order to minimize the response lag. Once I did, though, the game played pretty smoothly.
By that I mean the program ran rather smoothly. I was of course no good at the game itself. Set it to easy mode. It seems normal mode actually has you account for bullet physics such as the effect of gravity -- which is a great thing, but considering how crap I am at these sorts of games I'll just leave that option alone for now. That said, I started doing some missions, and perhaps most importantly of all, I found myself actually kinda having fun.
There're some odd instances of enemy soldiers calling off their search for me in ways that don't even seem remotely realistic, or not climbing out of their tank to totally screw me over. But overall, I actually started enjoying being able to look for, target, and take out enemy troops. And it seems like there's more stuff (e.g. bullet physics) for more advanced players. So this seems like a pretty decent game. Still kinda surprised that it got a "get it for free" day a while back.
However, most everything related to the story aspects makes up for this entirely. The cast has some of the best chemistry I've seen next to Persona 4, with them bouncing off each in a way that is endlessly amusing, and the the sub plot of wither the MC's vigilante actions are justified or not just clicks with me in all the right ways. The overarching main plot's fine, although I currently have no idea where it's heading at the point in the game.
I've also been playing though Sunset Overdrive, which, while I love the extremely fluid movement mechanics that allow you to traverse the terrain in really satisfying way, the gunplay just feels flacid and kind of not great. Odd, given the all sorts of crazy weapons that Insomniac Studios put in there.
This is an awesome game.
10 games/VNs that I have and would like to complete:
Ys II
Aquaria
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, the First Chapter
Recettear
99 Spirits
Puzzle Agent 2
Steel Storm: Burning Retribution
World End Economica
To the Moon
Shadows on the Vatican, Act 1: Greed
10 games that I have and would like to try:
The Girl and the Robot
A Valley Without Wind
Aztaka
Element4l
Dust: an Elysian Tail
Slam Bolt Scrappers
Symphony
Wooden Sen'SeY
Wizorb
Oniken
I pledge (barring social occasions) to not play any other games except for these, until I have completed (or tried) 10 of these 20.
(Further exception is made for the purpose of idling Oozi: Earth Adventure for cards, since I've already completed that game before.)
Persona 5 trailer for those who care.
Defintely jumped up to one of my most anticipated games of the year now that we've got some gameplay footage!
- Metroid Prime (Picked up Trilogy a week ago; just got to Phendrana. Probably going to take a while to beat, though; I get a bit motion-sick if I play it for too long.)
- Transformice (Just came to Steam, and oh hey! My old profile still works.)
- Contraption Maker (Build-Off no. 3 is going until Monday. Sleds!)
- Dustforce (One more red key left; unfortunately, it's Hideout, which is a nightmare. Probably going back to the level editor for a while.)
- Outland (Just picked it up from a Steam sale an hour or so ago. Movement/combat seems fluid (but definitely optimized for a controller rather than a keyboard), and I love the aesthetic.)
http://kotaku.com/the-pizza-party-where-everyone-got-fired-1685455125
Like, if you're gonna make it an abstraction, just make the whole thing an abstraction, rather than showing the detailed super-cool-looking moves just to intersperse it with the characters bobbing up and down and staring at each other as if nothing's happening.
Though I don't really get where you're coming from at all honestly, Glenn.
Especially if they have an idle animation. I kinda feel that it might be more jarring that way, since the animation implies that they're actually bobbing up and down like that, in the heat of battle.
Or maybe I'm just used to sprites.
I think what offsets that is how completely and utterly outlandish some of the designs are these days.
That, and the last three FF games not really having a classical battle system too.
There are cases where characters need to move across maps on their turns, like Tales, Valyria and Shining, but I guess sprites could do that.
As for why it's done, it's because it can be done and is pretty and it's a bonus to the people playing it. I mean you don't really need much to make an FPS aside from stick figures and vaguely gun looking shapes but those have graphics too.
Also it's kind of hard to charge $60 for sprites and I'm pretty sure the homogenization of game prices has led to massive margins for making a couple of 3D models.also
Speaking of my Steam wishlist, I added a little Early Access game to it a month or so ago called Mini Metro. I only found out a week ago that there's a free demo on the dev's website, and good lord it's exactly as addicting as I thought it would be