Welcome to the BigNerdSam Media Thread for 2024, mirrored from my Twitter and BlueSky pages. Unlike the two platforms, the statements here will be as in-depth as I can manage against massive time gaps and the differences between tweeting on the phone and blogging on a keyboard.
Incidentally 2024 is now the introduction of me using the 1992 Gamepro Scoring System instead of a single 10-point scale. None of these ratings have the facade or implication of professionalism, this is all in good fun.
Please enjoy my mid taste.
Too sick and tired to use the full Gamepro PSD for the ratings so take my comfort game rating of 🙂👍 from an Image search.
There's not a lot of combat mechanics and picking things up is too high-risk for me, so this is just a comfort game for me. END TWEET
Yeah I wrote that... three days before writing this now and I am now on the last recovery from one hell of a flu. The first sentence is invalid now since I made the proper Gamepro card, so it gets the strikethroughs.
I got the platinum trophy in this because, after years of talking about how good the original PS Vita version of Gravity Rush was, I felt obligated to get the platinum in the PS4 version. It was a really fun time, my only real problem with the game is that, as much as it wanted to have combat, the combat itself is simple and braindead to the point of giving me the feeling of wishing I could just one-hit-kill smaller enemies instead of engaging with them.
I've heard so much about this game and never thought to look right at it, and now that I've played it I strongly suggest playing it.
The worst it got was that I needed a guide to figure out what I needed to do to do damage to the final boss. END TWEET
I started the game up and fully expected to play like a late Mana or a proto-Kingdom Hearts, instead I got a Goemon game where I had to consider what time it was before doing the next step in the questline or if it was the day of the week where the Pawn Shop was closed. I really enjoyed this game and I'm standing by what I wrote in the Gamepro Card: Square-Enix is criminals until they put this game out on literally any modern platform. I'm just stuck seething until either Playstation puts out a PS1 port of the game or Square-Enix does a straight upscale port like Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy VIII.
You'd think that they would be more mindful about the message, but no just put the Suicide Hotline number on the boot screen and post the LTG clip. END TWEET
I'm no expert on discussing suicide, I still laugh at the Filthy Frank clip about it, but I'm pretty sure that there are more appropriate messages than what this game and The Medium try to share using this very sensitive topic. Like yeah, Silent Hill 2 has a suicide ending, but it handles driving a whole car into a lake with more grace than fetishizing artists dying young.
Prior to this my only experience with Ghost in the Shell was Stand Alone Complex.
That was a really nice watch, though I guess I'm immune to the scale of the story's existential, transhumanist navel-gazing at this point. Cool cyber-gore though. END TWEET
I changed up the Gamepro Card to be used for movies. I might change some if I read share a manga on here. Anyways: Ghost in the Shell was a fun watch for when it's past midnight and you can't sleep because of a combined Gout flare and congested head cold while all of your devices are out of battery. I don't have a whole lot else to say that can't be gleamed from what everyone has ever said about Ghost in the Shell.
Watching some RPG streamers made me want to play this game again, except I know better than to engage with FF2 honestly: I farmed for Toad and ground that spell until everyone had Genji Gear and dual Masamunes.
Also finally beat Soul of Rebirth. END TWEET
Final Fantasy II's leveling system was designed similarly to how leveling works in a Bethesda game: the more Firion uses swords the more hits he will be able to do with them. The reason I find you do not do purely scale spells and attacks like this is because I spent most of my time with FF2 holding down fast forward and using Cursor Memory to cast attack, healing, and debuff spells on my party over and over again until they were capped out and their stats were too high to fear anything less than the final boss, which was still a problem even with my game breaking.
So when I watch a travel doc/glorified vlog, I kind of expect there to be a little bit more travel than driving to a retro shop and buying a bunch of games.
Instead just look at a collection, get some shallow trivia, and dread the fate of that dog. END TWEET
I hate this thing that insultingly insinuates that it is a film. You should watch it. This is not a travel vlog like the tweets claimed, this guy doesn't even travel. He tried to get a guy in Florida to send a game to him. Dread the fate of that dog with me.
Nintendo Quest is a biopic of a toy collector who's only understanding of value is the average value of an item's ebay listing. I want to trap him in an evil version of Game Center CX where he needs to beat every game he collected in this sham of a quest. This hate is ascending into a level where I need to stop thinking about this and get into Tekken.
A friend is in a Tekken hole and I was stunned to learn that this was on a 3DS Tekken game with full 3D.
Who crammed Tekken into someone trying to recall Project A-Ko on Ambien? Someone clearly had a script that got hastily rewritten in one night. END TWEET
So this is more of a film than Nintendo Quest was. There is a plot and characters.
Don't watch it. It was a waste of time and a waste of a Project A-Ko Fanfic. The movie starts with a Tekken story scene, then it goes off the rails into a Project A-Ko/Sukeban Deca story, then it falls into an anime highschool romcom before remembering that it's a Tekken story, then it becomes a Highschool Anime again, then it rushes a Tekken ending like the final is due in half an hour.
Why was Nina Williams even there????
I needed to keep the Vanillaware itch fed after that 5 hour Unicorn Overlord demo.
A beautiful game that I played on the Hard Mode, meaning I had to fight very aggressive and evasive enemies that could dizzy you from off-screen.
Great game. END TWEET
To my understanding the PS4 version defaults to a modern game mode where enemies and bosses have more health, but normal attacks do not consume POW and you can combo through the game, while the Classic mode reverts to the original PS2 gameplay and health meters. Personally, I really like the feeling of comboing an enemy into the air and keeping it in the air until I get tired and wiff an input.
Also I had to know: I comboed a bear until the meter maxed out on 999 hits.
Anyways, Odin Sphere is a very beautiful game and it is greatly enhanced by knowing what Der Ring des Nibelungen is alongside the general premise of Ragnarok. To my knowledge the Pooka are not in the Wagner's play and I cannot watch a 16 hour long performance to check.
I've heard that audio of the Riddler yelling so much that, when I finally heard it, I just broke.
Really nice to have the movie transition of Batman the Vigilante into Batman the Hero. It would be really cool if we had this creative understanding on Superman. END TWEET
Again, this is a really good film as it plays up Batman going from straight-unhinged vigilante billionaire into Batman as a heroic figure managing to save people after getting played by the Riddler for a few hours. Also the contrast between decently modern computers to Gotham's archaic architecture, infrastructure, and tools is just really nice to see from an artistic standpoint.
The only things that didn't age well are some parts of Midgar arbitrarily deciding which way is up and the game wasting time while battles stream in.
Giving Barret Cover and Counter Attack materia is the funniest build I've seen, it kills entire bosses. END TWEET
So from here I realized that I have not updated the media thread in months, I've had a myriad of tasks I had to do and a depressive episode to conquer, but now I"m back with some writings.
I first played Final Fantasy VII's old, old, old PC version, barely remembered anytrhing, and only got back into it during all of the promotional leadup to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I have no intention of playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I just realized that I only remembered the events of Disc 1, the ending half of Disc 2, and Wutai. Incidentally I first tried to play the Nintendo Switch rerelease, but the UI uses such an ugly pixel smear to try and modernize the interface that I switched to emulating the PS1 original, someone on a Discord wanted to know if I was playing the retranslation and no I will defend the Woolsey Translations until we're speaking Al Bhed.
The original FF7 aged pretty well after Midgar, when I imagine the design team realized that they shouldn't tilt the cardinal directions of the D-Pad to fit whatever orientation the room is in. After that it was a long playthrough of "Oh, this was that event" and "wait isn't the Huge Materia questline just the Triforce Quest?" Incidentally i also used this playthrough to clear Fort Condor, what in the hell allowed them to put those flags when they did?
Since online for the 3DS is officially shut down (save for updates and Pokemon transfer apps) I went through some old games I just never beat and played through Fairune.
I kind of expected bump combat and not crash-through and kill while solving a cool puzzle. END TWEET
So Fairune kind of has bump combat, the way it works according to my doodle memory is that you collide with an enemy and depending on your level the enemy will take damage and you will lose health if its level is equal to or greater than yours. In reality Fairune is a top-down adventure game where you solve item puzzles until the game ends in a shmup boss like DMC 1. It's very charming and I've been meaning to pick up its proper rerelease.
I managed to beat Fairune 1 without looking up a guide, but I needed a guide for Fairune 2 because the maps are just so big and I struggled to find the two puzzle tiles I missed the environmental hints to.
I'm gonna need to pick up more Skipmore games though. END TWEET
Fairune 2 has more zones and bigger maps, meaning it became much easier to just get lost in it while also appreciating some art design features like how the linear paths of the water world still look like the shallow ruins of a temple or the monster shrines almost looking like ancient shrines and temples celebrating what I think I remember being called a "maramo". It's a really nice game and I can recommend it and possibly the other games Skipmore has put out: it's simple but charming.
I bumbled into this expecting 3DS launch slop and got one of the last good racing games.
There are some portable game problems: the lead car in late races will wind up 1/2 the track ahead and everyone spreads out super-wide because of 3DS rendering limits. END TWEET
I still turn this game on months later just to have a casual race and drift around. Ridge Racer 3D is really great, we need Ridge Racer to come back, Ridge Racer 8 may be the video game that saves the industry or condemns mankind to a great extinction event.
"Hey Sam, we need to test this controller setup."
"Oh, okay, what do we have?"
"Well Strider 2 is right there."
"Is Strider 2 two-player?"
"Who cares, it's Strider 2." [statement was complimentary]END TWEET
So I couldn't get into Strider 2 at first because it just felt much looser than I expected from an arcade platformer, but playing it beside a friend made me realize that the ideal way to play Strider 2 is to just rush through it while mashing attack to slice apart every single enemy I come across. Honestly my least favorite enemy to deal with was the gravity orb because it changed which way was up and down on the D-pad, I sure hope that thing doesn't show up in another Strider game, I say updating this page after playing Strider 2014.
Watching a retro streamer play DS games when I see this banger.
Half the missions are completed by launching my car in the air, launch the other cars so high in the air they explode, or by bowling with a bulldozer.
We need to go back. END TWEET
You need to understand, this game is supreme jank and it rocks it simply from what is obviously a programmer messing up the physics and being told "no this saves the project" and keeping it in. This game did not do well because it was a racing game on the Nintendo DS and the cars steer either not at all or so tight it can be a tourniquet, drifting in faster cars often resulting in the car turning into a tumble dryer. This game gets a maxed out fun ranking because the sheer chaos of the broken physics is fed by the cars violently exploding so hard it sends various props in the level flying into outerspace.
Incidentally this game has an inconsistent crash on the Mountain map if you're loading from an SD card: do not ask how I know that, you know how I know that.
Hey man I like being able to take my time and enjoy Tuliyollal until the Catastrophies occur. Lemme Chill in Brazil.
Also Viper just clicks in my brain and Pictomancer's gonna need a chart.
AL BHED: E ruba Zalrd'c eh YnlyteuhEND TWEET
Since FFXIV is an MMO, I've been playing this game for days since its soft launch in late June and official release in July. I have some more things to say about the current state of the game.
First off: Wuk Lamat is a good character, she has a nice arc, she interacts with the player character and the rest of the cast pretty well even if the story pushes them back into effectively being commentators. I'm glad that when they talked about criticisms about FFXIV Dawntrail Creative Unit III's big takeaway was "people did not like that the scions had such a passive role and we understand." Personally I wish we got more Erenville content and more Estinien being a tourist.
Design-wise I like how much more active some of the fights are though I keep dying to the Level 95 Duty's first boss when I do a melee DPS burst because I forget that it has a danmaku attack. Taking my time leveling all of the other jobs I feel like a lot of jobs are lacking tangible progression before their Level 100 actions like Paladin, Red Mage, White mage, and Scholar. Dungeonwise I kinda wish that they were more willing to play with more unique and potentially annoying dungeon mechanics, I recently ran the updated Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak and not having to do the keys and explosive pots down the poison hallway really took away from the duty's atmosphere as a dungeon. Now the most unique thing about some dungeons is that the level 99 duty's very start has a 80% deathrate from either a tank forgetting their cooldowns or the healer making a mistake.