I finished custom robo arena last week, it's quite a great game for how obscure it is

the story is fairly engaging at first, but after a rather cliche villain reveal and a pretty rushed-feeling endgame, it kinda loses steam

there's quite a bit of sidecontent and postgame to enjoy in the form of battles with special objectives (like achieving combos with a given amount of damage) and rematches with like a dozen story characters, locked behind requirements that you're likely to satisfy without even realizing if you naturally experiment with a lot of parts during the main story

that said, the postgame doesn't really have much (in the way of story) beyond the new fights and the ability to buy illegal and military parts (which you can't use in many places but they're fun to collect regardless)

but while the plot doesn't always shine, the gameplay absolutely does, the battles are really a lot of fun thanks to both the solid gameplay mechanics and the sheer variety of different guns, bombs, robos and whatnot you can use

the controls are really streamlined, you don't need any more than 5 buttons excluding the d-pad, and it makes picking up the game really easy as a beginner (while mastering it remains quite hard cause the skill ceiling is driven WAY up thanks to mechanics like several different blast types for explosions, the plethora of combos exclusive to certain combinations of parts...)

oh yeah also you can pose your robos in like dozens of dioramas for each of your saved builds and I spent more time on that than I'd like to admit, it's surprisingly fun even if the touch controls are inherently imprecise

I actually liked the game enough to bother beginning to check out the rest of the franchise (expect me to write more about it)

#driftiniplays #customroboarena

I spent pretty much the entirety of yesterday starting a new playthrough of custom robo arena

I had been playing it as a kid but I never finished it, so a year or two ago I started a fresh save to try and actually finish the game, except I had dropped it again

now we're at the 3rd playthrough and I hope this is gonna be the one I'll finish

some of the dialogues are quite darker than I remember (one kid in particular mentioning he lives in a district crawling with criminality, and a few days later saying his dad got beat up and his mother is afraid of going out, ON A DS GAME)

#driftiniplays #customroboarena

last night I played SULFUR for a couple hours, I gotta say.. it's kinda surprisingly good???

it's a roguelike fps with a little bit of exploration, a little bit of scavenging/crafting/cooking, solid gunplay, weapon customization with attachments, enchantments and so-called oils and a very distinct artstyle

it's on sale rn, 19€ is quite a good price to get the game at

#driftiniplays #sulfur

a couple weeks ago I played the ultrakill demo, after about uhhh 3 years of saying to myself over and over again that I'd eventually play the game

my impressions were pretty good, probably no better than that only because I haven't really got the hang of the gameplay just yet

speaking of the gameplay, ultrakill is the first game I've ever played that feels like it's raising my blood pressure at least threefold at all times (reminder that I only played the DEMO with seemingly 1% of all the wild shit you can do further into the full game's campaign)

I might?? actually buy the full thing, that pressure thing is probably the biggest one holding me back rn lol

anyway I found it pretty insane for being made by a one-man-team, I have no idea what kinda blood rituals you need to do to achieve a mere fraction of the power of hakita, zun or the likes

#driftiniplays #ultrakill

last night I started playing azure sheep, it seems pretty good for its time (2001) even though it overuses useless corridors in level design, and stretches the idea of making you go through background locations from hl1 pretty thin

oh also at a certain point, azure sheep introduces its biggest gimmick, being an npc companion you gotta drag behind you for.. most of the foreseeable campaign apparently

now just stop and take a moment to imagine how hl1 would be like if you had to drag around a barney for the whole latter half of the campaign, with the shit pathfinding of goldsrc, awful accuracy, friendly fire and whatnot

if the thought of that seems awful, yeah that's pretty much how it seems azure sheep's latter half is gonna be like

I might actually drop the mod out of frustration cause I wasted time for like 1h yesterday trying to make my companion not get herself killed by 3 vortigaunts in a point where I was supposed to rely on her to progress (and had no weapons)

#driftiniplays #halflife

last night I played paranoia which I can confidently best describe as goldsrc slavjank

to put it briefly, you play as a spetsnaz tasked with clearing out a group of terrorists who took hostages in a building, but around the midpoint of the (1h30m-ish) campaign the game turns more to a scifi horror mood.. and that's where the game lost me tbh

at the beginning paranoia seems to present itself as a realistic-ish fps with some interesting mechanics (more like gimmicks really) like being able to manually flip up or down your helmet's face shield, slow pacing, and while the gameplay isn't exactly great and the gunplay has a long way to go, I kinda enjoyed that part because of those unusual quirks

then comes that horror part and the game completely shits the bed, between zombies that take like 50 knife swings to kill (and you WILL use the knife cause you'll be out of ammo) and whose ai you'll have to cheese to keep progressing in the campaign, and an ai companion who will give you a game over if he gets himself killed (very easy when new enemy soldiers come in and your weapons' accuracy sucks)

the endgame is nothing too insane, you pretty much just shoot 3 rockets at a helicopter and it's over

I don't think playing the game is really worth it, but at the same time I do respect it to some level because there was definitely some love put into the project, there are some neat things they managed to implement in goldsrc like texture materials, a hl2-ish flashlight (without dynamic shadows obv) and the game really doesn't feel like a half life mod or something like that

oh also it is still an indie fps made in 2009 so it's probably pretty insane the devs managed to make this in the first place

#driftiniplays

over the past couple days I played and finished opposing force for the first time, I think it brings a bunch of QOL and cool features like

• actually useful allies (medics & engineers)
• a melee that doesn't suck (wrench altfire my beloved)
• rope physics in goldsrc??????
• barnacle grappling
• nv goggles much more useful than the world's tiniest flashlight
• a much better replacement for alien grunts (not a fan of the pit drones and shock roaches though)

the problem is that many of these cool features just aren't capitalized on enough, barnacle grappling remains nothing more than a gimmick, engineers probably bust like 3 doors at most in the whole campaign

another issue with opfor is how it retreads old ground (the pit worm is nearly identical to hl1's tentacles and barely adds anything new to distinguish itself) and how surprisingly short it is (it felt?)

that's a shame cause what is there is mostly quite great, I really like the location design and the gameplay is just as fun (if not more than) the base game, not to mention hard mode didn't feel tedious at all (enemies still did feel like they were tanking too much damage from weapons like the smg but it's not as bad as I remember hl1 being)

#driftiniplays #halflife