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Notes -
Still playing Silksong. Still getting rekt. I'm now stuck at the Last Judge, but at least there's more to explore now than when I was stuck on Moorwing. That was horrible hah.
Since I haven’t played silksong, I guess I’ll hijack this as a general video game thread.
Nebulous: Fleet Command is a sci-fi naval tactics game modeled after Cold War/modern hardware. You equip your fleet in the editor and then take that list into battles. Right now, that’s almost always 4v4 against other players, though a campaign mode is coming with the next big update.
I like you get to build towards a particular strategy and then try to play it out. I like that the micro has a relatively low floor; ships and weapons are unwieldy enough that you generally have to commit to your course of action. I think the visual design and the sound effects are great. And I particularly enjoy the existence of a game which cares about ELINT and RCS. For professional reasons, of course.
I just picked up a couple of games on the recommendation of people I work with: Hell Is Us and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge. TMNT is great, albeit pretty challenging (the third level is a huge difficulty spike and I got frustrated enough that I haven't played since). But difficulty aside it's exactly what you would want from a modern take on the TMNT arcade game of old. They added a decent bit more depth to the combat and a ton more characters to play (Splinter, April, Casey Jones, etc), plus the pixel art is beautiful.
Hell Is Us is... yeah IDK yet. My colleague pitched it to me as having a lot in common with the puzzle solving in Tomb Raider, but it doesn't quite feel to me like it has that vibe. There is puzzle solving, but so far the most prominent element has been the combat and the creepy supernatural horror atmosphere the monsters add. The basic premise is that your character is trying to navigate a world torn apart by religious civil war and see his parents, when he runs into the otherworldly monsters and... that's about it so far. I'm only 2 hours in, and the storytelling is very sparse. They seem to be going for a minimalist Souls approach to storytelling, which is very much not my jam. The game is also very proud to not have any sort of navigational aids - no markers, no map, just a compass you can consult to see which direction you're going. I can understand why they do that, but that is also not really my jam (in particular the lack of map, which I do not like at all). But all the same, I've been warming to it slowly and we'll see how it goes.
Though both of those games are getting set aside in a week, when Trails in the Sky 1st comes out. If you're unfamiliar with Trails, it's a moderately well known, long running JRPG series (like 12 or 13 games at this point) which is known for all the games having an interconnected plot. They have their smaller arcs so you can just play one arc without going balls deep, but it is kind of special to play since the very first game and see returning characters and plot threads from that far back. It's also unashamedly traditional JRPG fare, and it's become my Final Fantasy replacement for that reason (because FF is too busy trying to appeal to new audiences to bother making games their long time fans enjoy, and yes I'm bitter). Anyways, this game is a remake of the very first game in the series, and by the demo it looks to be a very faithful remake (exactly how I like them). So I'm looking forward to that one a lot, and all other games are going to get dropped when that comes out.
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