My friend recommended this to me over the summer and I decided to try it out. I'm loving it so far. Controls are surprisingly smooth in a way that isn't always the case for third person shooters. Aside from your standard guns (single-shot pistol, burse-fire pistol, shotgun, etc), you have a very nice combat mechanic where you can telekinetically pick up nearby objects and chuck them at enemies.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. You play as Jesse Faden, a woman who has decided to enter the fictional three-letter agency called FBC (Federal Bureau of Control), to search for her brother. The two of you were separated as children during a paranormal event involving a slide at a playground.

Yes, it's a bit silly, as is the plot point that once you enter the building, you swiftly become the new director of the FBC. I guess internal promotions aren't practiced there. Details are a bit fuzzy (I began the game a few weeks ago), but to my recollection, Jesse is bestowed her new leadership role by the old director, who exists somewhere as a ghost nearby his corpse.

He marvels at Jesse's ability to wield his service pistol, which I guess indicates her own superpowers, which I believe were granted to her by the aforementioned paranormal event. There's some kind of psychic presence that she continually talks to, which is also directly linked to the same childhood experience.

So now, as director, Jesse's first, well, directive, is to eliminate an evil spiritual presence that has taken hold of the entire building. Which is enormous, by the way. More on that later. This presence is called the Hiss, and multitudes of workers in lab coats are possessed, hovering ten feet in the air, chanting to themselves. Some are innocuous, just chilling out and meditating with their mantra I guess, but others have gone full satanic and glow crimson red and shoot at you with demon weapons.

Jesse herself is basically a female Keanu Reeves, very laconic, wooden, matter-of-fact. She might say a line or two that I guess is supposed to be snarky, but just sounds like an autistic person trying to imitate a normie. Which is all fine, well, and good - I'm not casting shade at neurodivergent peeps. Perhaps it will be important to her character later on.

Okay, enough about the story and characters, which like I said, are a little hokey, but are also kind of fun. The gameplay is fantastic. Environments are destructible, and littered with items that you can pick up with the wave of your hand and hurl at enemies. It's very satisfying to switch between shooting them up, and as your ammo recharges, picking up a nearby bench and hurling it at them. If no item is nearby, Jesse's telekinesis will yank out chunks of concrete from the walls and floors.

You get other powers too, like dodging (basically just throwing your body ten feet in any given direction) and levitating. I can't stress enough how natural it feels to maneuver, which is a breath of fresh air, because some of the earlier-gen games I was revisiting (Perfect Dark and Metroid Prime) were lacking in this regard. (But to be fair, it's hard to pull off smooth acrobatics in the first person.) Even aiming feels easier than what I've been grappling with recently.

The game is challenging, but not too vexing. Which means it's probably too easy for your more hardcore flavor of gamers. But I'm okay with it, it's a damn nice ride.

The game is not linear. In fact, it's kind of a mini-open-world. The FBC's facility is *enormous*, with plenty of side-quests along the way. Side-quests grant you different kinds of points that you can cash in for new abilities - think Horizon Zero Dawn or in the Mouth Shadow of Mordor.

The game fosters an eerie atmosphere, but sometimes it tries too hard to be creepy and it falls flat. For instance, there are instructional videos with puppets that you can find at various points. Think the Candle Cove creepypasta: a low quality kids show with distorted sound effects that borders on nightmarish. It's kind of neat but, uh, why would the bureau be creating puppet shows for their adult employees? Maybe there's some paranormal explanation that I haven't found yet. Perhaps it's in one of the hundred or so documents of lore that are littered about the facility, which is a fun extra, but I got tired of reading them. I was never one for SCPs, but these are be like catnip for SCP lovers... well, the whole game is, really.

I believe this has been out a few years already, so if you haven't played it yet, I recommend it.

While a lot of my retro setup has gone little-used for some time, the NES is a system I've been using fairly regularly.  It's the system I have the most nostalgia for as a kid, though since I didn't own one myself my time with the games was somewhat limited.  I've owned a NES since 2007, but as the 'games I have finished' thread shows, I've only finished a relative few of those games.

Well, I decided yesterday to cross off the biggest missing title on that list.  Yes, I beat the original Super Mario Bros. today for what I'm pretty sure is the first time.  I finished the GBC version, SMBDX, back when that game released, but the fact that you have to restart the world you're currently on in the NES game had always caused me to give up and stop trying.  After all, I've beaten a version of the game before and I've beaten every level on the NES version except for 8-4, that's good enough, right?

But I decided, like, seriously, you should beat Mario 1.  I put the Mario 1 / Duck Hunt cart into my NES and started playing.  By the way, the NES dogbone controller is fantastic, it's the best NES controller for sure.  I quickly got to world 8, since I now know where the warp in world 4-2 is thanks to watching lots of Mario content on the internet, and... proceeded to struggle like usual.  The levels in world 8 are quite difficult!  They're long and have few powerups.  8-1 and 8-4 have no super mushrooms at all, so if you want to have an easy time at Bowser you'd better get through 8-4 without dying after playing through 8-3 and getting both of its powerups.   That's pretty tricky.  The challenge of these stages is fun, they are challenging in ways that frustrate but keep you coming back until you do better, but I do think that 8-1 really should have had a powerup in it.

Before that though, in my first run I blocked off the 4-2 warp, so I kept going... and got through the level 4-4 maze first try.  I died in world 5-1 and restarted (in order to take the 4-2 warp), but I guess I have that route memorized for some reason, I would not have guessed that since I don't think I remember any of the OTHER mazes... I certainly don't remember the 8-4 maze's solution.  Honestly, I had to go look it up.  The solution is perhaps disappointingly simple -- just take each first pipe after the lava pit -- but I'd forgotten it.  Once you know where to go this level's actually only a moderate challenge at most, so long as you haven't died at all and have that powerup from the previous level; otherwise it's very hard thanks to the Hammer Bros. and Bowser at the end's endless streams of thrown hammers. 

It took a little while, but today I eventually got it and beat Mario 1.  It feels pretty great!  I know it unlocks the second quest, but I'd honestly completely forgotten that it unlocks a level select after you beat it, how silly.  Why couldn't they have put that in as you go, why the "hold A when you press Start to start from the last world you reached" continue code?  Some elements of classic game design don't make much sense.

So, Super Mario 1 is a truly fantastic game.  It's the best game of the 1980s and it's still exceptionally great today.  But... those physics!  Gah, if there's one thing about this game that is hard to go back to as someone who has played many many hours of newer Mario games it's the physics of SMB1.  The way you run to build up speed, the sudden nature of your speed increases, how easy missing a jump can be if your speed at launch was just barely off, how dramatically different the game feels from the more refined NSMB style of physics all modern Mario games use... it's a big learning curve to get used to.  To anyone used to newer Mario games there is a sizable learning curve to this title, I won't deny that I got frustrated more than a few times because of this games' weird physics.  Once you get used to it it feels alright, but... yeah, I think I like new physics better. 

However, it is true that the physics increase the sense of danger in SMB1.  Every jump in this game is hazardous in a way that would never happen with the more precise controls of the newer games.  Even enemies are a significant threat, as in maybe the hardest thing to get used to in this game when compared to most any newer Mario games, you get only a VERY VERY small bounce off of enemies after jumping on a foe in SMB1.  Indeed, often I think that in this game it makes more sense to avoid enemies than to attack them!  Koopa Paratroopas particularly are dangerous, you get such a small bounce off of them after the first hit to knock their wings off that there's a high likelihood that you will die upon landing as they land just behind you and hit you.  The ending part of this game is dangerous and feels threatening in a way that the more friendly, refined newer games in the series have to put much harder-appearing level designs in to come close to.

That's not to say that I like the physics here or the lack of bounce off of enemies, though; honestly, I like the newer style more.  This game is frustrating and punishing, and it sometimes doesn't feel fair (though it is) due to how odd the physics rules are in SMB1.  But once I'd played this enough to start unlearning at least a bit of that Mario Maker / Mario Wonder / etc. physics and control style and having finished it for the first time, I can say that the original Super Mario Bros. is indeed still one of the greatest things this industry has ever produced.  Level 1-1 is gaming's greatest stage ever, and the rest of the game is all-time-great fantastic as well, with a very well done difficulty curve from beginning to end.

That was a terrible and insulting pun to all involved.  Sorry about that.

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2023/12/fr...-shut-down

Embracer Group, a company with a name that sounds as ominous as "Umbrella Corp", bought and have now shuttered Free Radical.  Maybe they couldn't quite catch the gaming world on fire the way Goldeneye and Perfect Dark did, but Time Splitters 2 is still a good game in it's own right and the series as a whole was pretty entertaining for what it was.  Look, they haven't pumped out much of anything, but it's still a shame to see them close down like this, with all their IP owned by some giant megacorp instead of being able to hold onto it themselves or even make it public domain.  Seriously what's Embracer going to do with it?  Their name means "holding on" after all, they aren't ever going to use the IP but they will NEVER give it up either, JUST in case there's some online brief burst of nostalgic popularity they think they can cash in on at some point down the line.

Yep, it seems we've found that the upcoming Perfect Dark game is going to be an ongoing "live service" game, and the project leads are starting to drop off of it, reporting that while they have a vision, they can't stick to it without being told to redesign things to fit "live service" expectations.

Well... we had ONE good game everyone.  I guess we can just accept that and move on.  And to think, I actually liked Killer Instinct 3 (now updated and released as "Anniversary Edition" a few days ago).

God isn't some hack horror writer.

Did I ever tell you my favorite color is blue?

Insert Timon here.

Look we all knew this was coming.  Well we all SHOULD have known this was coming.  I warned you.  A lot of us warned you!  But here we are, they're now deleting content you own retroactively after purchase.  By "they" I mean Sony.  This is what "digital ownership" means.  You don't own a thing, and there is no recourse available outside hacking and "grey" online archives to redownload the content you already own.

Don't worry, I won't be like one of those obnoxious clickbait articles, I'll just answer you in the first sentence of this post. Wait, no, second sentence. Shit! Okay, here we go. Fifth: no, not really.

Oh, don't get me wrong. The characters and environments are still adorable. It's still kinda fun to have a bit of dynamic gameplay in turn-based battles, even if it is just some a press-a-button-at-the-right-time schtick. The dialog is still silly and fun/ny.

But the whole thing feels lacking. I'm talking, of course, about the recent remake that was released. I have fooooond memories of this RPG as a kid. And apparently fake memories too, because I could have sworn I beat it! This would have been back in the Blockbuster days (or maybe the mom & pop it would eventually come to strangle). So I probably just had to return it before I finished.

Nonetheless. I've had a copy of this sitting in my basement for, well, probably upwards of 15 years by now. I acquired it at some point or another. I kind of wish I went back to play that, to be honest, because they gimped the hell out of the remake. To beat this game, you basically just need a pulse. Not only do enemies deliver less damage and require less hits to beat, but they also put in a system where you slowly build a power gauge. Every, let's say, oh, 40 turns, you get to fire a super-mega-whammy-godzilla-goku attack. Or if Princess Peach is in your posse, maybe it'll be a super-cute-group-hug-on-the-cusp-of-a-sweaty-deviant-art-gangbang deal that heals all parties (panties?).

I'm quite certain it wasn't this easy when I was 12 years old. I remember getting frustrated and disconcerted when I got to Booster's tower and some Joker jerkoff hopped up on his big rubber ball and played a flute at me and smacked me around seven-stars-from-Sunday. "Damn, this is getting hard," I probably grimaced. But hours earlier, before I went to bed, I was playing Super Mario RPG, and it was pretty difficult.

So, as cutesy and charming as SMRPG is (that's short for Super Mario RPG), I'll have to admit that it was kind of disappointing.

What's funny, though, is that after beating the game, you can go off and beat some of the bosses again. And... they're fucking HARD. I went back to beat up the wedding cake boss into batter and I actually had to go back and *level up* a bunch before going at it. And when I ran back into the bomb boss in the mines, I found that each hit only took a single hit point off of him. No weaknesses. I'm pretty sure my most powerful spell only shaved off 8 HP.

There's some trick to it I'm sure, but I just don't have the patience to figure it out. You swung too far in the other direction Squeenix, jfc (that's short for Jesus Fucking Christ).

Oh well. Any of you knuckledheads play it? Now? Back then? Plan to? Spill your guts.

This is just a delightful video of what we would call "sprite sheets" of the Game & Watch games.  But, I did notice something.  Yes, the "frames" are incredibly low even by NES standards.  Yes, there's only two colors... BUT... These are beyond 4K in terms of resolution.  The only pixels to be found is in the display of whatever you're looking at these on.  The curves are perfectly represented, and that's to be expected when the "sprites" are literally cut INTO the display as the basic "unit" of an image akin to letter typing in a printing press.  It's something that could only ever be approximated to greater and greater precision as standard displays, both CRT with it's limited line count and flat panels with their fixed pixels increased their resolution over the years.

So, thanks for getting TC back up, but here's a fairly significant issue: there doesn't seem to be any way to mark a spoiler tag.  If you put a standard bbcode [ spoiler ] in your post, the post does not appear, it's a blank nothing.  That's pretty annoying.  If there was some other way of doing spoilered text in the text options it'd be fine, but there isn't.  Uh, could you fix this please?  There's got to be a way of having spoilers work like normal...