paralogue.org

I've been going through Persona 3 Reload basically since it came out. I've been doing it with a 100% single playthrough guide just because I can't see myself doing all this twice over and it's been really good. But strangely it feels a lot longer than other Atlus games? Like I'm projecting I'll finish this with a 50 hour playtime. Soul Hackers 2 was 45. I beat Persona 4 Golden in about 51. SMTV was around 60. And yet this sort of just feels like a much longer game. Is it simply a bit more repetitive? Am I less invested in the characters?

I think possibly so -- I love the themes of the game and the overall tone but I'm not sure I'll remember a lot of the slice of life after all this. One thing I like in games is bleakness. I like to stare a hopeless situation in the face and then put it away. It's an interesting form of play for me; it defuses my own life anxieties seeing how low my own stakes are.

Anyway, let's talk about what you're spending your time with.

right now it's ring racers, and it'll probably be ring racers for quite some time.
currently i'm 36 hours into the game and still have one emerald left to go until i've got them all… on normal speed. i've spend the past hour or so just practicing that special stage while backgrounding the summoning salt nes tetris docu and i finally got it once. so now i just need to do it for real!
and then i get to do it all on fast speed, and then do all the time trials, and then start playing online and see if i can make a few friends this time too.
hopefully i don't end up attracting a colombian boyfriend this time, though i dunno, he was kinda sweet…

i made it through my grief stage and hit a point where suddenly everything clicked for me and… i might even like it more than srb2kart?
but i don't deny that it takes a certain kind of freak to get into this game. it almost feels like it's ideally made for people who are already familiar with the modded srb2kart experience and it keeps piling features on from there. but that also makes it fun for a certain sort of neurodivergent (me) who notices all the callbacks to those community mods and gets a thrill out of seeing them "officially" recognized.

as of late..i've been playing through <a href='https://iopwiki.com/wiki/Reverse_Collapse:_Code_Name_Bakery' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery</a>. i originally picked it up just for the admittedly silly desire to get a steam profile background it provided. but it was actually fun ?! i forgot how much i could like a tactics game.

its like.. well, ive only gotten to the second chapter. but it feels like "illegal incursion into the northern caucuses, madoka magica edition"

its been making me think about the kind of game i want to create in the future. i kind of want to create some kind of grand strategy game mixed with tactics, high level diplomacy, low level battles, strung along either through a linear or emergent narrative. just thoughts. but it feels like a turn based tactics game is the only way to really realize my ideal video game vision. i still need to create it though!

i've been enjoying <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/2132850/Rabbit_and_Steel/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>rabbit and steel</a> a lot! it's rare that a co-op game captures me thoroughly. it's a bullet hell with raiding mechanics a la ffix or if you wish to extend it even further, world of warcraft raiding! the cutesy exterior had me a little weary at first, like "its going to be one of those cozy games" but i was pretty quickly proven wrong. there's a surprising amount of complexity and the feeling of finally beating that boss is a great feeling. i still haven't beaten hard mode. grab a friend

i've come back to <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/2088840/Picayune_Dreams/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>picayume dreams</a> again. what is there that's not cool about picayume dreams? i liked the mystery and the overall scale of the world. characters warped beyond recognition fighting in an infinite loop to... save earth? the game outscales itself once you beat it, so it's not something you're meant to play forever. beat the story mode a few times and savor it. get in an hour long flow state and kill millions of baddies. it's good stuff. it's picayume dreams.

i seem to have recommended two rougelites. i tend to come back to the genre after binding of isaac did a number on me. what is it about this kind of game that's so appealing?

meri wrote:

i seem to have recommended two rougelites. i tend to come back to the genre after binding of isaac did a number on me. what is it about this kind of game that's so appealing?

Do you ever ponder about your preferred styles of play? There's the obvious <a href='https://matthewbarr.co.uk/bartle/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Bartle test</a>, but I think in general it's about how these games tickle parts of our brains and what we do when we play.

I play a lot of Roguelites too, but it's because I like something in hand that soothes the body while the mind is occupied. Like EMDR, thoughts process while doing these gameplay loops, but all the same the sessions are discrete and it results in an overarching progression that allows for mixing things up.

I started playing <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/2128270/Path_of_Achra/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Path of Achra</a> last night and it's utterly bizarre. It's nothing but the combat loop from Rogue games, pure stat progression from room to room in a sort of puzzle way. That said it's written in an absolutely esoteric, Dune-inflected prose that makes it a little impenetrable. I just do loops -- am I doing it right? What does this build, like, mean? It's all text for systems upon systems that then collapse onto me right-clicking to do an automatic action anyway.

Oh, the Bartle Test! It's been a long time since I've seen that brought up by someone else, Bartle & co's vision of MMOs as a sort of expansive wild west of human expression is a bit silly in retrospect (I think but have not read that a lot of literature was sort of hype for something that didn't quite exist), but there was something so wonderfully humanist about it by imaging this more ideal society. They also had an interesting study on gender in MMO but I'm having some trouble googling around with it (they noted a huge group of basically house wife MMO players who tended to be in their 30s).

Last thing I played was <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/501860/Slayer_Shock/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>SlayerShock</a>, meant to be a sort of playable procedural Buffy the vampire slayer ImSim. It's a very 6/10 game that hits exactly what it wants to do, and there's something kind of fun around the fact that since a lot of the in game map space is proc gen soup, I especially liked how it reproduced the vibe of being young and walking around a big suburban space when there's nothing to do but wander, it's a taste like mellowed bittersweet.

Path of Archa reminds me of another tactics roguelike where you could move around a room and do tactics inside of it, but I can't recall the name -- had a sort of similar vibe. I used to be hardcore into <a href='https://frozendepths.net/roguelike/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Frozen Depths</a>, it's kinda novel to me a Complete and mostly feature complete roguelike.

Don't have something I'm strongly playing right now, I have had the feeling I should be trying more stuff.

JennyDog wrote:

Oh, the Bartle Test! It's been a long time since I've seen that brought up by someone else, Bartle & co's vision of MMOs as a sort of expansive wild west of human expression is a bit silly in retrospect (I think but have not read that a lot of literature was sort of hype for something that didn't quite exist), but there was something so wonderfully humanist about it by imaging this more ideal society. They also had an interesting study on gender in MMO but I'm having some trouble googling around with it (they noted a huge group of basically house wife MMO players who tended to be in their 30s).

Could you expand a bit more? I didn't know a lot about the context here. For me it's just -- what do you get out of using this space? I grew up on .hack so it was sort of primed into my head that everyone wants to live in some shared world for a different reason. I don't know if MMOs converged on just everyone raiding. I don't think they did.

i have been playing The Finals! for those of you who do not know it is a 3 person per team competitive FPS made by a dev team consisting of a lot of old battlefield bad company 2 developers! as such the environments are entirely destructible but that isnt the best part. I have been playing competitive shooters since i was like 12 years old and i am now 24, and rarely do i find a game that occupies my mind and body in such a way. in the past i believed that csgo and tf2 were perfect games(i no longer think this about csgo) but when i was like 16 i realized i didnt really have fun 100% of the time with those games and i went into a kind of non-gaming phase. its only very recently that i was able to really truly seriously devote myself to my own mental and physical skills in regards to team based shooters. i do not believe i can communicate the euphoria i feel from playing this game, i am at all times experiencing near infinite depth and possibilities! the movement, gunplay, and various other mechanics play together so perfectly that i regularly enter a flow state :) i know part of this is because i have been yearning for such an experience for a very long time and not everyone else will experience this upon playing The Finals, but in the interests of maybe possibly sharing this feeling i would wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone in need of a deep, competitive shooter to sink your teef into! i would compare my experience to progressing in learning a martial art(i practiced martial arts for many years as a kid but definitely not to the level of involvement emotionally and physically that i am now, given my age and maturity). triple thumbs up from me!!

I finished P3R the other week. I wrote <a href='https://backloggd.com/u/marukoto/review/1640650/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>a bit about it</a>, but to expound on it ... it made me feel sort of tired with its own stakes. I understand why P4 hit harder: it can feel relaxing when it's all just fun and you're defeating a bad guy. But P3 really wants you to think about the fact that your life is defined by the fact that it is finite: that it's really up to you what you do with it, but you shouldn't just give up or give someone else the reins. In a sense it's what I can find to be an otherwise boring existentialism — we got a lot of it in the 2000s! — but it lands better than I otherwise would've expected.

Anyway, not to get into anything necessarily that spoilery.

I bought Animal Well the other week, too, and started playing through it. I kept feeling this distance from it. Everything was well designed, and I disinterestedly would notice the thoughtful design and it would feel like nothing. Not fun, just like, ah, that's clever. But I would get bored, or frustrated, or whatever. And I can't tell if I just hate video games now or if I'm exhausted with them or ... shouldn't this feel good? Shouldn't I want to come back? Shouldn't it be hard for me to stay away?

I'm playing Fire Emblem Awakening right now and it's at least closer to that. I die a lot, playing through Hard Classic, and I reset and I try again, trying to master five minutes of gameplay across the span of hours, only to make one bad move and need to try again from scratch. RNG resets every time. Eventually the game gives you better weapons if it's been long enough since your last save. It gradually opens up.

Do you ever feel that way, though? That you just go through the motions of trying to enjoy yourself, and you see things that would've made yourself at a younger age feel excited and intrigued, but it all feels like nothing? Granted, when I was super young, I played a bit of Cave Story and didn't care about it at all. Whereas Metroid Zero Mission was intensely fun. Perhaps it's a constant thing for me — just hating quirky thoughtful games like that.

My TV broke eight months ago and then I put off getting a new one until like. three weeks ago. but I have a new one now which means I'm on an FFXIV kick again.

I've been playing it since like mid 2020 (thanks COVID) off and on. I cleared the main story campaign up to Endwalker, the most recent expansion, but still have the patch content in between it and the next expansion Dawntrail that releases the end of this month I have to get up to date on. I've played through the raids and alliance raids since I started playing again, which were all pretty run; FFXIV does a good job of teaching mechanics as part of the fight and executing them is fun. It's kinda like a rhythme game in that you want to be executing your job's gameplan of skill rotations while also making sure to dodge AoEs the boss puts down or walking in certain patterns to match mechanics, and the interplay of doing those together is satisfying. I'm looking forward to Dawntrail a lot.

I mostly play White Mage, with a side of Dancer, which is fun but also means when I fuck up and fail mechanics and die the raid wipes sometimes as a result which isn't great lol

Good lord, I finally beat Fire Emblem Awakening. It took me so long — I would basically redo the same 3-5 minutes of gameplay for an hour and a half a lot as a stray member would die, I would reset, get back to the same spot and try not to make the same mistake again. I feel like if I played Conquest it would probably be even harder because I needed to use the grind additions to keep my lower level members at a fair place. There's a lot of ways to massively break Awakening, but I just haven't mastered my Fire Emblem cheese skills much. Besides using Nosferatu Dark Mages as tanks — they have insane Def for some reason. They're just OP in general.

Next up I think it's time for me to read some VNs. I don't know if I should tackle some of the smaller ones first before going to like 80 hour yuri-fests...

I've been playing a lot of Picross 3D lately too — it's really theraputic when you're just listening to lectures to tinker away at it. I was a little spooked at first because of the dynamic of "two groups of x" vs. "three groups of x" but I slowly internalised it and then got used to the pattern matching implied. I feel like you see the same few arrangements so often that you could make solving these fairly well-optimised for a TAS or whatever.

I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas again and having a really good time. My builds always trend towards energy weapons, but I think I will can my current save and start again with a pure unarmed build. And then, try to embrace survival over barter. A lot of effort was put into making hunting, gathering and crafting a viable alternative to bartering with lots of recipes for useful drugs and medicines and armors. I'd be voluntarily shunning guns and energy weapons and explosives just for the hell of it, but it would be fun make the scrappy early game even more tough.

The modding community is very lively right now. I'm most looking forward to Nova Arizona, an overhaul that would add territory east of the river with an ethos modeled after Tamriel Rebuilt. But, the whole meme about the style of FNV is very funny to me. I am consistently shocked by how obvious it is that it is a commercial mod. I think the reason Bethesda doesn't want to hand Obsidian the reigns of their license again is how horribly the launch went + the incredibly spotty quality of the product. In spite of that, though, its probably one of the most successful "mods" ever besides counter-strike or team fortress. The more I look at community mods and patches and overhauls for the game, the more obvious it becomes that most of them are removing rough edges from content recycled into the game from Fallout 3. Almost everything I thought was original is really just a reskin when I really thought back to when I played FO3. Maybe it would be different if they had another year to work on it. Even into the DLC releases things were shoddy. Some of the recorded voices really sound like they got somebody to use their desktop mic setup or something. for example, the shaman in Honest Hearts. You can like, hear the bitrate and room echo, it's so funny.

ive been playing caves of qud and a really stupid thing happened. I stepped on a clam thinking i would attack it, and it teleported me halfway across the world. so i stepped off and back on, guessing that it is some sort of method of travel. but instead of taking me back to where I started, I did this cycle of stepping on and off until I arrived at a place surrounded by like, frog people. they all grabbed me and killed me. what a total waste of time.

I've been trying to figure out what I want to play next. You want to know my, like, full list? Here's everything I have onhand to go through that I like, own / bought / have onhand already:

- Umineko
- Chaos;Head and Child
- Kanon
- Clannad
- Steins;Gate and 0
- Yu-No: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world
- You and Me and Her
- Yume Nikki
- Tunic
- To the Moon
- Trap Shrine for some reason
- The Talos Principle
- The Silver Case (+ 25th Ward)
- A few smaller VNs I've been curious about: Winter Polaris, WORLD END ECONOMICA, Shadows of Pygmalion, Sea Bed, Return to Shironagasu Island, Misericorde, If My Heart Had Wings
- Fruit of Grisaia
- House in Fata Morgana
- Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins
- The Caligula Effect
- Rewrite+
- Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance
- Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD (PS3!)
- Disgaea D2 (and 4, 5, 6)
- Drakengard 3
- Eternal Sonata
- Bioshock 2
- Atelier Sophie 2 (and the rest of the Mysterious series after that, as well as a few stray others)
- Final Fantasy V, VIII, IX, XIII, and XV
- Tales of Symphonia (I have it on Steam, but now that Retroachievements supports it, the GCN version with some HD patches would be superior)
- Corpse Factory
- 428 Shibuya Scramble
- .hack//GU Last Recode
- Pseudoregalia
- Resident Evil 4 (2005)
- Indigo Prophecy
- Phantom Brave
- Obduction
- Digimon Survive + Cyber Sleuth
- Dies Irae
- A futile attempt at reading Cross+Channel instead of learning JP
- a dumb Konosuba VN fuck you
- Alpha Centauri? Daggerfall?
- Final Fantasy Tactics
- Mana Khemia
- Ever 17
- tons of Pokemon ROM Hacks on my 3ds: Pokemon Unbound, Wilting Y, Inclement Emerald
- SMT4, Devil Survivor, Digital Devil Saga
- Jeanne D'arc and .hack//LINK for Vita

Stuff I wanna revisit:
- Caves of Qud (duh)
- The Citadel (I'm really bad at it)
- Code Vein
- Momodora
- Black Mesa
- VA-11 Hall-A

So uh, suggestions welcome I guess. Also if I buy a game, someone please fly to my house and slap me.

Short list of the titles that are currently queued up

• Flying Shark
• DOOM II (The new Nightdive update will motivate me to finish this)
• Giga Wing
• 1944: The Loop Master
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
• Hebereke 2

I have also been dabbling in Street Fighter Alpha 2 until the Marvel vs. Capcom collection releases later this year.

My backlog has been outpacing the games I have been able to get through recently. Hoping to cut into that heading into autumn and winter.

biggs wrote:

Short list of the titles that are currently queued up

• Flying Shark
• DOOM II (The new Nightdive update will motivate me to finish this)
• Giga Wing
• 1944: The Loop Master
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
• Hebereke 2

oh those are some good titles. for the arcade games, are you looking to get the 1cc? or just make it through them?

i'm curious how you end up feeling about 1944. as someone who adores raizing, i tend to forget about their later 8ing-branded work and wonder if it's actually worth investing time into.

---

i'm still out here racing rings, though i've just started to play online. it's strange… despite putting over 100 hours into the single-player game, i still feel unsure about how to actually play competitively. with srb2kart, i felt like offline practice translated pretty effectively to good online performance, but here i think there's a whole lot more going on that's hard to learn except by being thrown into the fray.

it's also a bit sad to see that, for as much effort was put into the game, the online servers are pretty vacant. usually there are only like 25 to 50 players online during peak hours, which is a fraction of what srb2kart used to pull, and that itself was already extremely niche as online games go. maybe the skill floor was really that offputting to people…

but still, every so often i see names that i remember back from when i was playing in 2020 and 2021, and it kinda makes me glad that they're still around. even if they likely don't remember me by now, i still remember them fondly…

I'm basically trying to finish Picross 3D still. Lol. There's only like one book left!

The weight of my impending trip to Japan is constricting me a bit — basically to Steam Deck or 3DS games only. Ironically, what I've been doing instead is trying to understand how to play Final Fantasy XI. I finally got Horizon going. If anyone wants to try with me ... let me know ...

watermoon wrote:

oh those are some good titles. for the arcade games, are you looking to get the 1cc? or just make it through them?

i'm curious how you end up feeling about 1944. as someone who adores raizing, i tend to forget about their later 8ing-branded work and wonder if it's actually worth investing time into.

I'm not quite ready to start 1cc runs on anything, just yet. My first attempt at that will be Gradius II, possibly my favourite sequel ever. Trying to play through as many STGs as possible to figure out which titles appeal to me first.

biggs wrote:

I'm not quite ready to start 1cc runs on anything, just yet. My first attempt at that will be Gradius II, possibly my favourite sequel ever. Trying to play through as many STGs as possible to figure out which titles appeal to me first.

that's entirely fair! i always felt like stgs are surprisingly diverse when it comes to playstyle, and some types just end up clicking better for one person than another, and it's really fascinating how just a few subtle changes in one direction or another can completely change the game's appeal. personally, i never really got into danmaku and tended to favor older gameplay styles, and after a bit more searching i ended up gravitating toward the type of proto-danmaku "manic" stg design that was popular in the '90s and became much rarer to find after that. but the whole genre is full of little pockets like that, where one company goes off and develops a style that might only last for as long as the company is still around, and unless you explore you'll never know what you might end up falling in love with…

I played Soma and it kicked my ass emotionally and I was also playing the new Doom release before then and its new episode and that kicked my ass pretty hard too cuz the Nightdive guys hired all the cool doom ppl to make a really hard episode ... Shoutout to Xaser Acheron hes the coolest and apparently spearheaded the project and made a lot of textures and sounds for it. I love him

I finished signalis (first run, second will be later) and i have a lot to say about it that i am drafting right now. so stay tuned for a new topic i suppose.

I'm in the process of making my way through "Konosuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World! Love for These Clothes of Desire!" which is, of course, not a mandatory play by any means. When I'm in the gaps between stages of life I tend to come back to Konosuba a lot. I remember rewatching the series a few times and reading the Megumin manga around 2021-2022 when I was not sure where my career was going next. So, given I'm in another inbetween moment, it's not that strange that I'm revisiting it again (even though season 3 is out and I simply have not seen it).

It's a VN about dressing up the girls, 'what if?' scenarios and sort of retracing previous jokes. I am comforted nevertheless.

My partner and I are doing a playthrough of Daggerfall since it's one of her favourite games. I'm finding it really fun to co-play or watch her go through? It's so apparent how much Dungeons and Dragons is in this, which makes me revisit my appraisal of later Elder Scrolls games where a lot of these mechanics have in turn been refined and refined, getting further away from DnD into its own thing. Final Fantasy has a lot of the same lineage -- they wanted to make a DnD game, and then it became ... uhh ... whatever it is, now. Probably sometime around 6 or 7 it stopped being a campaign in its own right.

I also like how much leeway you're given? We're just making up a class, breaking the game and in turn our thorough character history is generated for us, with an apparently customised start of the game depending on what our choices were in a pre-game personality quiz. Older computer games weren't afraid of just shoving control panels at you. I feel like the experience has changed a lot now, and it makes me want to get a little DOS retro with it...

Anyway, our character is a mobile catbus. Or, uh, "Mobil Khatbus".

I haven't played many games recently and am kinda losing my former passion for the medium, but the most inspiring ones I've recently touched have been modern interactive fiction. Superluminal Vagrant Twin in particular sort of captures how my family's constant traveling from nation to nation growing up felt at the time. I'd love to take the game, give it a point and click interface (the typing ui isn't actually necessary), give it both more gameplay meat and more experience meat by adding more of the transient moments in life this entails, rather than jumping everywhere instantly and never having to stop at a small airport cafe. Pacian's other games are cool too. Galatea by Emily Short is old and well known but still expands my mind. Aside from IF Yume Nikki continues to be my constant refuge and comfort, I'm curious about emulating Baroque for the Sega Saturn, and the only AAA game I look forward to is Death Stranding 2.

This thread has been trending works of fiction as games, so I just wanted to add a quick two cents:
- Heaven is Mine is exceptionally esoteric and explorational and queer
- failgirl enemies-to-lovers mechpilot queerfic *clears throat and enunciates with clear diction* woof woof bark bark bark awooo

It’s really frickin good.

I've been on a bit of a video game hiatus until I finish writing my game. Sumi.

That said in the past week I've been getting into, of all things, Final Fantasy XI (retail). It's on a special campaign this month for $10 on Steam (though it seems most people tell you to just buy it on the actual store? Go away, I like my playtime tracked...) My friend Mara said I would really truly not regret it if I just went and tried it, went into the story, got my fill, and left it be.

So. Here I am.

The first thing I noticed was that it had this all-in-one, exceptionally charming interface with lovely music. Yes, PlayOnline, where you can make a profile for yourself, get an email address (terminated in 2019), join IRC chat rooms based on the PlayOnline service, send mail to people in FFXI, list your hobbies, make new friends...
FFXI itself is ... slow. Very, very slow. Over the last 24 years (omg) they've done a lot to accommodate a smaller player base that wants to level faster -- but it's buried in tons of different systems across the different expansions and this guide is trying to help sort it out for you. The more time I put into the guide the more I come to understand the quirks and just enjoy existing in the game. Even though the fucking "-" key is the menu key. Even though the mouse is extremely janky and should never be used. Even though this is 'tab through the enemies in front of you and press Enter' town. Even though you need to literally go to NPCs and press 'Trade' to get them to acknowledge your special event coupons. Even though the auction house is illegible and full of absurd prices for starter goods. Even though there's no easy way to get a warp ring until you grind enough to get the conquest points and so you're walking everywhere until you find the appropriate Field Guide or Home Point and I guess those are free to warp between? I don't know.

People say "in a week you'll hit 99 on your main job." I've put 4.3 hours in and I'm only like, level 6. Maybe it exponentially scales. I am not sure.

I'm also stuck wearing this gaudy stuff because it's the best gear for <lv 31. It came as part of the Ultimate Collection.
I think soon I'll try the Simple Mission Guide, maybe try to unlock the frame rate, maybe clean up the UI and textures, I don't know...

i decided to get back into Doom recently and im making a map. One of my favorite mapsets ever just got a new release candidate after a 21 year gap, so thats super cool.