Let me make a confession. I dislike ShoryuGame videos. I don’t like his accent and his sense of humor. But this video was an exception:
It was a surprise that the authors of Last Blade 2 included an alternative ending for a character. After all we’re talking about a 2D game on a space-limited cartridge. Drawing and storing stuff is expensive.
And what’s even more unexpected, that they kept that feature over all those years.
Completed ArmA 3.
At one point you’re just let loose on an island and asked to wreak havok, picking your insertion point and striking enemy bases.
NATO forces finally appear. They don’t know anything about any captain Miller, it seems.
I don’t know why “Air Superiority” mission gave me more grief, that all the other missions combined. The support APCs got stuck. My AT soldier wouldn’t attack enemy APC, so I had to literally shoot him to get the rocket launcher and blow it myself. Another soldier got stuck in a building, so I couldn’t “evacuate the team”. Had to go back and shoot the bastard. And on top of that, enemies were sniping me like never before.
“Preventive Diplomacy” is designed to be that cool mission, when you’re finally given a powerful antipersonel rifle, you can call in a chopper, you have an armed UAV and artillery support, and your task is to stop enemy counteroffencive. But nobody explains you how to use the antipersonel rifle: it doesn’t shoot where you want it to shoot at 300m, as marksman rifles do. Your chopper doesn’t do much and gets downed by a random jeep. Artillery is pretty random as well, and UAV shoots in the wrong direction half of the time, and is too hard to control. Luckily, not only your APC gets stuck. Most of the enemy APCs got stuck in buildings as well. A major disappointment: explosion that downs a building (yes, the engine supports that) does nothing to a jeep behind it.
Last mission, “Game Over”, could be good: you are again let loose on an island trying to evacuate. You roam gathering weapons, finding vehicles with some gas left, and there are a bunch of optional missions to help soldiers in trouble.
What could go wrong? There’s no “save” option. If you die, you die. In a mission where you literally have to travel kilometers alone, and in a game where you die from a single shot, that’s not a good idea. But that’s not all! At one point, you get a truck, and try to rescue a squad stuck in a swamp. What could go wrong? Mines. The swamp is mined.
In that mission, you need to know exactly what you’re doing. Went to the helipad. There’s no helicopter. Went to nearby port. There were no boats there. Found a gunboat along the coast.
Loaded in. There was no fuel.
Finally, found a Zodiac near the next port.
There are a few missions that let ArmA mechanics really shine, I think. First, you get beached with just a pistol, even without a map, and need to cross a warzone. I ended up finding a machine gun, eliminating a landing helicopter crew, and even finding a map along the way.
In another mission, you’re tasked with setting an ambush, but you’re not told how or where exactly, just the route of the convoy. I ended up blocking a road with my jeep, then setting a couple of charges in the bushes. Front APC tries to pass, gets blown, blocks the convoy, I shoot the truck driver, others hammer the closing APC. All that without any scripts.
Speaking of scripts and blowing things up. In another mission, you’re tasked with stealing a fuel truck. Once you do, Miller the SAS operative contacts you, and asks you instead of delivering it to the rebels, to let one of his men use it to blow an enemy general. If you agree, you can see the entire plan unfold. They could just end the mission there, but they actually decide to script everything, just in case someone like me decide to see the thing go boom.
At one point, you need to choose whether you want to sabotage a repair depot or a helicopter, but you can’t do both. I decided to go for the helicopter, because they are much more annoying. You are expected to lure it with a smoke grenade, then blow it once it lands. But I threw the smoke into the woods by mistake, it tried to land there, and blew itself.
The game uses a very unique control scheme. So unique, in fact, that at first I thought I had issues with my controls. It differentiates between a short press and a long press, for example. So a short RMB press brings up the iron sights, as you’d expect. But a long RMB press zooms in without the sights, apparently simulating a soldier looking into the distance. There are also a lot of combinations using key modifiers: to switch between two types of optics you need Ctrl+RMB. That’s a short RMB, long RMB will do the weird zoom.
Another issue is how realistic drones are. First, you need to assemble your drone. Then you connect to it from your tablet. Then once you finally connected to it, it controls like a helicopter. Meaning that to fly forward, you need to pitch, not able to see much in front of you.
And I was wrong about weapon accuracy. You can be extremely accurate if you stabilize your rifle against cover.
The only way I can summarize the story is “nothing goes according to plan”.
NATO forces are cut off on an “definitely not Greek” island.
We try to capture a communication station – but the equipment is fried.
We try to get ammunition from local guerillas – but the dump is blown.
We stage a naval assault in order to assassinate enemy general – we do assassinate an officer, but not the right one.
We try to establish a beachhead – and get pushed back by enemy helicopters. Enemy soldiers are parachuting from hellos around us. And if all that wasn’t enough: as we try to retreat on a speedboat, it gets blown up.
Generally I like fabric and foam mouse mats. And for years I’ve been using Razer Goliathus mouse mat. But I decided it’s finally time to replace it. The problem is, though, that the fashion has moved on, and now all mouse mats are huge. My Goliathus was 26×21. The Gigantus Medium is 36×28. And the Pro Type mat is the same, just in different color, as far as I can understand. It’s twice the size I need.
I don’t want RGB, I don’t want a mat that covers my entire desk, I just want a small mouse mat. How hard can it be?!
I remember ArmA games since the times they were still called Operation Flashpont. The original game was so realistic, you could finish one of the missions by just sitting at the back of a truck. And of course everyone remembers the mission when you needed to get back to your squad through occupied territory (the After Montignac mission).
ArmA 3 is not that far away from its roots. You’re more of a witness than an actor, really. Your teammates are more than capable to handle most of the situations themselves. It’s almost impossible to hit anyone farther than 100m. One hit, and you’re dead. I had to limp 100m once to grab a medkit from a body of a soldier I killed in a duel.
One thing that this game gets right is weapon stability. You rarely can hit anything standing. But if you go prone and deploy a bipod (there’s a special command for that), you’re golden.
One major beef I have with the engine, is that it doesn’t handle eye contact at all. Which is not rare, but would help so much with the immersion.
Speaking of immersion, I was completely blown away by Staff Sergeant Adams getting blown on a random mine in the forest. I thought it will be a “Captain Price” kind of character. But I guess this is war.
Completed Sanitarium.
Switching to a four-handed goat-legged Conan-like creature that fights giant cybernetic insects was certainly an inventive moment.
The music puzzle completely trashed me, though. I figured out that the children are singing the six notes you need to input. But for the life of me, I couldn’t repeat it.
Funnily enough, most of the walkthroughs get this part wrong as well.
Besides that, though, I managed to beat the game without looking into the guide. Which is an achievement for the game designers. Usually get get stuck in point’n’click adventures early on.
Interesting retrospective. I didn’t know that the GameCube version of Bloody Roar looked better than Bloody Roar 4 for PS2, and that they scrapped some characters after Bloody Roar 1.
Completed Bravely Default.
Stopped playing it before thinking that the worst part was having to beat the same 4 bosses 5 times each was boring. How naive I was.
The final two bosses are a complete nightmare. First comes Airy’s 3rd form. Here’s a good explanation why Airy is so bad.
She can wipe the entire party with the best equipment in a single turn. She lowers resistances of the entire party, then immediately deals maximum damage to everyone. People mostly beat her by exploiting one of the game mechanics. I managed to do it only by spamming Giant Draft consumables, and lots of luck.
Then comes Ouroboros, which does basically the same, but his Disaster attack simply penetrates immunities, without any explanation. Again, you just need to be lucky and hope he casts Divergence instead, which “just” disables a character for 2 turns.
My guess is that the game authors either expected players to buy limit breakers with real money (Pay2Win scheme) or to exploit the social element and summon overpowered friends (that’s why Divergence stills allow you to “Summon friend”). But since I have 0 friends, I had to go the hard way.
The saddest part, is there is no character development in the game. Best way to demonstrate it, is that there’s a dialogue at the very end, where each character tells what they plan to do once this is all over. The village boy plans to return to his village. The priestess plans to go back to her temple. There was some romantic innuendo, but it all gets discarded. It is as if the game couldn’t decide whether it’s intended for children or adults. There are some adult themes, but then in the end, everything becomes inconsequential, and everyone basically return to where they’re started. Even the Final Fantasy X trick they tried to pull, where Tiz apparently dies without others noticing gets dismissed after a few moments .
I’m hardly a sinophile, but having a sci-fi that isn’t US-focused is somewhat refreshing. It starts in ’67 in China during the Cultural Revolution, when 14 year old girls offed most of the professors, those that didn’t commit suicide themselves. So the Chinese military has to resort to employing undergrads in their projects.
Some fifty years later, and Chinese professors start to commit suicides en-masse again. This time because their worldview of fundamental physics collapses around them.
The chapters dedicated to a communist labor camp were interesting. The chapters of the Universe sending countdown to a particular scientist and the video game based on Warring Kingdoms were boring as hell.
Although I’m not sure I’m gonna try it, I think that Keychron Q0 may be a better solution than Razer OrbWeaver/Tartarus.
https://www.keychron.com/pages/keychron-q0-customizable-mechanical-number-pad
Tartarus has 4 rows of keys, while I think that 6 rows, as the regular keyboard, is the most comfortable.
Another game from my childhood I only read about, but never played.
Always thought it’s an adventure, due to isometric perspective and walkthrough mentioning some fights. There are fights, but even if you get killed, you just thrown back a bit.
So this is really a point’n’click with an isometric perspective.
Something I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid, because most of the games I played then were rips: the voice acting is truly horrible. I ended up just turning sound off.
As far as story goes, our character wakes up after a car crash in a gothic asylum.
He’s then quickly teleported to village full of deformed children. Turns out a meteorite landed there some time ago, and gave conscience to some kind of a plant life, which calls herself Mother. Mother killed all the adults, and began transforming the kids into plants. We burn the monster using a generator. Very Tommyknockers.
As most point’and’click games go, there’s some degree of pixel hunting. I was pretty smug with myself for the first hour or so, until I had to find a stone, which was undistinguishable from the background.
Completed Arkham Knight.
There’s an interesting episode inside Joker’s head, which starts as a TPS, then becomes FPS. A welcome change of pace.
I was about to compliment the game for letting me finish it without the need to farm boring sidemissions… but no. You need to complete enough sidemissions to get to the true ending. At first I was almost ready to do it, although it would be quite boring. But then it turned out that the sidemissions aren’t highlighted on the map.
There are some bonus missions where you get to fight Killer Croc, Mad Hatter and some others. But those aren’t counted to the Knightfall Protocol progression 🤷♂️
Truly enjoyed the atmosphere and aesthetics of it all. Watched it almost in one go.
This is not the first time Edgar Allan Poe is made into a character. But Harry Melling is mostly comedic, as is Gillian Anderson.
Christian Bale is fantastic, as usual. Full range of emotions. And it’s interesting how he and Melling switch roles from one scene to another.
“Lenore” is a real poem by Poe, by the way.
The boss fight with Arkham Knight is… a set of races. Not kidding. You need to race and excavator through tunnel obstacles three times. Luckily, it isn’t very hard, otherwise I’d be mad.
Oh, and that’s after you beat him in… a sneak tank battle. Yes, you need to sneak on his megatank multiple times 🤷♂️
There is literally a teary episode where Batmobile is torn by an excavator. Which is not issue, we get a spare half an hour later, just in different color.
Then there’s a second phase, where Knight tries to snipe you, while you sneak up to him. Four times, no less.
A few notes:
The purpose of this hat is literally to face-lift.
Woman was considered appropriate if her cleavage wasn’t lower than her armpit.
Confessors were handed manuals listing various sexual deviations. That didn’t give anyone any ideas, I’m sure.
One of a very few reasons a lady could get a divorce was if her husband couldn’t perform in bed. He had to prove himself, in front of a few crones. Or maybe those were MILFs? Who knows.
Also, relatives witnessing consumation or at least hearing had similar purpose: so no side could break the marriage.
Illiterate didn’t mean “cannot read”. It meant “cannot read Latin”, which is a different thing, one must agree.
There are tons of minigames, most of them annoying. I already mentioned tank battles. There’s a variation where you need to hold off waves of enemy tanks. There are also car chases, where you need to shoot or ram jeeps and APCs. There are circuit races, where you need to ride on the walls and you can switch obstacles.
In this version, Jason Todd, the less successful Robin, is shot by Joker, not beaten to death. Doesn’t make much difference, really. And Joker is unreliable narrator anyway.
Speaking of unreliable narrators, one of the main themes is that Batman is constantly lying to everyone. When Barbara / Oracle gets kidnapped, he lies to Robin, who’s her boyfriend, about that. Then when Scarecrow forces her to commit suicide, he hides this from Robin as well. Finally, after all the Joker-pretenders get killed by Old-Man-pretender, he tricks Robin into a cell.
Slightly annoying that often there’s no indication what you need in order to start a mission. Some of the Riddler’s missions are available before you can bring the Batmobile to the island, for example.d
The game still crashes frequently, 7 years after the release. The only solution is to disable nVidia GameWorks completely.
I couldn’t understand why I have a feeling of dejavu from playing Arkham Knight. Did I already play it once? Then I remembered there was the Arkham Origins that I actually played, which was simply too boring.
The batmobile is a total car porn. Interesting that they added guidelines, like in many racing games nowadays. Jumping from roof to roof in a car is not my cup of tea, though.
“I need more tanks in my Batman game!” said no one ever. But still, here we are, with endless “tank” battles.
At first I thought it’s called “Arkham Knight” because Batman gets a new, armor-like suit. But turns out there’s also a villain that calls himself Arkham Knight. To add to the confusion, he also looks like a futuristic version of Batman.
Joker is back.
But not exactly. Although he died in the previous game, now he lives rent-free in Batman’s head. Something to do with Jokers blood turning others into Jokers, and Batman infected. And I’m not joking about that.
One interesting bit is that they recreate Joker shooting Oracle from “Killing Joke” comics.
Another Build Engine shooter that I never actually played.
There’s an opensource called Raze that allows to play it nicely on modern PCs.
I found Redneck Rampage to be less sleek than Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior or Blood.
For example, there are some weird decisions on the first level.
You need to blow a wall with explosives to progress. This isn’t a secret or anything. I guess if you run out of explosives, you just need to restart.
Then, there are two locked doors, but they aren’t color-coded, as far as I could tell, so after getting a key, you just need to check which door it opens. And the whole purpose of the first locked room is to store the key for the second one.
Then, you find your brother, but the level doesn’t end. The only way to complete it is to hit your brother with a crowbar. Not to shoot him, that’s a Game Over. Had to check the manual for that one. The end the second level, you don’t need to hit him, though. But you do need to hit him on the 3rd.
Combat is extremely random. Sometimes it would take a single shot from a shotgun to down an enemy. Sometimes it would take two.
One thing I didn’t see in other Build games: moveable crates. Sometimes you expect to push them to make a platform and progress further.
I finally finished reading 20th Century Boys. I thought I finished reading it, then I discovered there’s also 21th Century Boys, two more volumes that complete the manga properly.
That was one of the first mangas I’ve ever read. As early as 2003. When just 4 volumes were translated.
By the 16th volume or so, I felt that the author started to get tired of himself. Reuse of same poses, and same twists over an over again.
But still, it’s a classic.
Notice how almost every character gets a redemption arc in the end.
Even Number 13.
Even Sadakiyo.
Even Manjome.
It’s never late to say you’re sorry.