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Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (PS5) by dkirschner (Apr 13th, 2026 at 09:37:34) |
Just a quick mid-point update for this one. Or, at least I think I'm around midpoint (40 hours, chapter 7, Costa del Sol). I forgot to add this a month ago when I began.
FF VII Rebirth improves on Remake in every way. It's bigger, funnier, more polished, has better pacing, and has way more systems. It even has a charming kind of open world (initially to my chagrin, as I had just come off an open-world game and chose this specifically because I thought it wasn't open-world).
Remake irritated me a bit because a lot of the new story, deeper character exploration, and overly long dungeons felt like padding. I don't find that here. All the main quest beats have been interesting so far, streamlined--no slogging it through the sewers this time. I suppose you could say that the open world is padding, but Ubisoft this is not. There are standard tasks and challenges in each of the game's zones, but this is carefully designed such that everything provides a reward and works toward something greater, namely, Chadley's research. But, this is how you level up your party more, get summons, find recipes, discover rare shops and items, and so on, and it is a joy to explore the world.
The side quests are also FAR more interesting and usually multi-step. I am doing one right now where Yuffie accidentally cloned an NPC in Costa del Sol. The NPC is this surfer dude bro who bought an old inn and is renovating it. So there are all these "bros" who recognize that they are bro-clones and are gathering supplies to improve the inn. You find some items for them (which involves finding and getting to the tops of ziplines), clear out some monsters, then find a unique recipe to craft a part they need. The NPC clones are funny and their asks are varied. Another one I recently did involves one of the many great mini-games, challenging gym rats to a sit-up competition (after clearing out some monsters for them). I have yet to beat the hardest sit-up challenge. It's 90 seconds of repeating a button pattern with increasing speed and precision, and I haven't made it to 30 seconds before messing up. It seems like you have to do it perfectly to win on hard.
I am finding Rebirth to be so CHARMING. It's funny. It's quirky. I am smiling a lot while playing. OH, and there is a card game, which is strategic and fun. Final Fantasy card games are always solid.
The only thing I dislike is how complicated the combat is. I have six characters right now (three in a party), each with a different play style and unique moves. Cloud is a melee fighter and can switch stances from "regular" to a slow and powerful one. Barrett is a ranged fighter and has an overcharge ability that builds up. Aerith has "wards" she can cast on the ground that give different buffs, as well as a little familiar she can summon. Etc., etc. Then, of course, they have weapon abilities and all the spells from materia. And there are like partner abilities (synergies). Skill trees. Blocking and countering mechanics. Air and ground combat. Summoning. Limit breaks. Special synergy abilities. And you can manually use each characters' abilities and control any of them, too. It's too much for me to keep track of! Combat is fun, but feels chaotic.
That's it for now. Looking forward to seeing where the story takes me, remembering nostalgic bits, and continuing to learn the combat.
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Farming Simulator 19 (PC) by jp (Apr 5th, 2026 at 14:38:00) |
This was sort of what I was expecting, but also not. I mean, I knew this wasn't farmville style farming, but I wasn't expecting as much technical detail as I found. Different machines, different phases, needing the right equipment, etc. It's pretty interesting and I was most surprised that you can (and probably should) hire people (NPCs) to do a lot of the "menial" labor - here mostly driving your machine down the field to either harvest, plow, etc. You kind of need to do this to save time, because with, say, three fields to work on you need to be moving from one to the next.
What I was most surprised by is that there's a whole town with locations you need to (slowly, AFAIK) travel between to deliver your crops (and buy stuff you need)! Driving my FIAT tractor at 25 mph down a lane, waiting for a train to pass, and trundling on, was not something I imagined would be important to this kind of game.
To be fair, there's a lot MORE to it that I have not experienced (livestock) and I stopped playing before delivering my first harvest - and I'll blame the tutorial here because it absolutely fell apart. I think I figured out a bunch of things, but this is definitely the sort of game you need to be reading guides/the manual/etc. in order to get the most of it?
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Road Redemption (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 25th, 2026 at 10:00:19) |
This was actually great! I was skeptical because I'd never heard of this random Epic freebie and because of low-ish reviews. It's like a spiritual successor to Road Rash, which I loved as a kid. It was nostalgic playing this, remembering being 10 years old, kicking other bikers and whipping them with a chain, that straightforward racing violence.
Road Redemption channels the same energy. You play as a member of the Jackals biker gang, and the game is basically you progressing, in rogue-lite fashion (which was a surprise), through three other biker gangs' territories, racing them to kill an assassin with a huge bounty on their head. You get there first, your gang gets the cash.
You choose a motorcycle and a rider. The default motorcycle is actually the best through the entire campaign, perhaps until you unlock some others late in the skill tree, but at that point I had beaten it already. Riders have different bonuses, penalties, and weapons. Once I unlocked the one that gives bonus money and experience and gives you a heavy melee weapon to start, at the cost of 50% health, I kept him the entire time. Once you learn how to play well, you won't miss the health.
You have four weapon types: sword, other melee, gun, and explosive. Sword is a sword. There is only one, but it can be upgraded for more damage (as all weapons can). The point of the sword is to attack enemies who don't have a helmet. You decapitate them, which is endlessly entertaining. If you get a sword kill, you get double cash (and maybe double nitro). "Other melee" is a heavy weapon and a long-range weapon, which you can cycle between. Once I started using the rider who starts with a heavy weapon, I never used the long-range one again because, around then, I had learned how to avoid damage, so I didn't need the protective range; I could get up close with the wrench or the bat with spikes on it. Guns include a pistol, a shotgun, a grappling hook (slows enemies down?), and a machine gun (the best). Some levels feature a lot of ammo pickups. On those levels, you can go crazy with guns, which is fun. Then, explosives include mines that you drop in the road, C4 that you attach to enemies (endlessly entertaining watching them blow up), and like a grenade launcher or something that I never really used because you get access to it in the final area.
The key to using all the weapons well is memorizing where they are on the D pad and learning to see which one you have equipped at any given time without ever looking at the weapon selector icons. There is a lot going on in Road Redemption, and if you are busy looking at the bottom lefthand corner of your screen choosing weapons, you will (a) get annihilated by other bikers, (b) get annihilated by oncoming traffic, or (c) otherwise run off the road.
Enemies are no joke, especially later on. The first gang is easy. They are slow to attack and don't have special gear. Lop their heads off with the sword, or bash them with other melee weapons. By the end of the first area, I believe you also have a gun and some C4. In the second area, enemies are more aggressive and have more weapons. A slip-up here can end your run. By the third area, they are vicious, some have extra armor, and there are various types who come out in force to annoy you, such as the mine dropping guy and the "shield" guy who blocks all melee attacks. You have to shoot him, blow him up, or kick him (kick with B, endlessly entertaining) into oncoming traffic/into a light post/off a cliff/etc. Once you get good at dispatching enemies and avoiding damage, you will be golden. When you kill an enemy, you get cash, nitro, and health, so killing more enemies if you can is always a good thing.
Each gang's area has maybe like 6 or 7 levels. Levels are randomly generated and can vary among objective type. In some, you have to place third or better. In some, you have to kill x targets. Some are a time trial. In some, you just have to survive till the finish. At the end of each gang's area is a "boss fight" where you have to kill one especially tough enemy, and then after that is a "rooftop escape" where you flee that gang's territory and go to the next gang's territory. The bosses are easy enough, usually just heavily armored. I fought the last boss two times. The first time I got to them was after like 3 or so hours of gameplay. I got my ass handed to me, then didn't see them again until nearly 5.5 hours, at which point I handed their ass to them.
What happened between 3 and 5.5 hours that changed the last boss difficulty? I learned how to play better sure (Don't ride right next to enemies! Use "A" to block! Swerve to enemies and attack, swerve away, swerve back and attack, swerve away! Slow down or speed up [and save nitro to do this] if you get stuck in a pack! Or just put some C4 on someone and watch the pack explode!). But I also dumped tons of experience points into the persistent skill tree, so I had more health, more ammo, more damage resistance, more money (you can purchase items after every race), started with better weapons, etc., etc.
After you beat the game, there is a campaign + mode and a campaign ++ mode, which I can only assume is horrifically difficult. This was definitely fun, a straightforward callback to Road Rash, and it scratched that Burnout itch too. I love vehicular destruction. And I got my completion in for March! Back to Divinity: Original Sin II, which I might be able to finish in April.
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The Falconeer (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 22nd, 2026 at 16:40:50) |
This is an aerial combat game. Admittedly not my favorite genre, but The Falconeer won a BAFTA, despite receiving lukewarm reviews, and I got it for free or in a Humble Bundle, so I decided to try it out. It apparently had a remaster, so I was hoping that whatever issues it previously had would be remedied. It nails a visual style and commits to political-military worldbuilding, which I respect. Unfortunately, that’s about all it nails.
The amount of things the game doesn’t bother to explain to you is perplexing. It begins with a prologue and combat tutorial, the first and last thing the game explains. I appreciate figuring things out on my own, to an extent. When I decided to quit, I noticed some text on the menu screen that said I’d leveled up and saw that I was level 3. There are levels? Are there experience points, too? What do the levels do? Do they improve my stats? The stats are AG, SPD, ENG, HP, RGN, DMG, and ROF. What do these mean? Some I can interpret—SPD must be speed, for example—but others, I am at a loss. ENG? What is this? English? Engineering? What is AG? Agility? What does that do? There is no tutorial for this, no tooltips.
I also discovered shops. What is the point of shops? I played an hour without buying anything and it didn’t hamper my mission success. Do I have to buy things? What are these different categories of things I can buy? I stumbled upon an inventory of sorts, I think. Do I equip things? Some things are damaged. Can I repair them? Speaking of the difficulty, it seems to be random. There are skull icons indicating difficulty of each mission. In the hour I played, these ranged from 1 skull to like 6 skulls (out of 10?). I didn’t notice a difference. It would go like 1, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 5, 1. What does the difficulty mean? Why was there a “6” difficulty mission 15 minutes into the game? And why was it easy? Why are enemy names re-used over and over? I killed the same named enemies, blew up their falcons, sank their ships, and yet they continued reappearing. What is the point of the shrines? Are a lot of the open world locations just places to discover, but you can’t interact with them? What’s the point?
Related, the story is a dense political-military slog. There are a bunch of different factions, or countries, or organizations, and they are all fighting, allying, betraying. Some guy keeps barking orders at me to take main missions. I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t really care. It seems like the developers built a neat world here, but the narrative isn’t presented in an interesting way, and exploring the world on your falcon is boring, too. There’s a big map, but there’s nothing to do. The open world is empty, just an expanse of sea with islands and cities here and there, and various shrines and other “open world” boxes to tick off, but there isn’t much substance to any of it.
The controls are a hot mess, too. You can fast-travel immediately, which begs the question of why there is an open world at all, especially since there is not much to do it in. Actually, fast travel only works sometimes, though I cannot discern when or why. Sometimes, you can press “A” to fast travel and sometimes it doesn’t work. Other times you press “A” to fast travel, and the fast travel indicator doesn’t appear, yet you will fast travel anyway. In missions, you press “A” to target enemies. Sometimes “A” will target them and other times it won’t. It was very irritating. Occasionally, in combat the camera swings up for no apparent reason or the bird ascends, which is disorienting.
I gather I am not the only one turned off by all these issues. On Steam, 57.8% of players completed the prologue. Then just 10.6% completed the first chapter! That’s a huge attrition rate. Then nearly half of those bailed before completing the second chapter, which just 5.9% of players did! It looks like it’s not until the third chapter that players committed to finishing (4.7% in chapter 3, 4.3% in chapter 4, and 4.2% completed the epilogue).
I was just trying to knock something out in the next week so I could have a completion for March (because I’m in the middle of two long games), but this ended up being a retirement. I’ll have to pick something else to beat this week.
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Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS) by jp (Mar 21st, 2026 at 18:27:14) |
I don't know why I had this one sitting on my shelf for so long...but, I guess it was a good a time as any to try it out.
So here you're actually a vampire - but no powers (yet?), other than that it's a regular 2D Castlevania with items, and equipment, also levelling up, and backtracking and so on. I only recently unlocked the double jump, which helps - but overall I'm not super enthused by the game. I feel like the character takes too long to change direction, and that I get hit a lot in ways I felt weren't easy/possible to avoid. I don't mean when it's a boss and you're just learning what it's attacks are.
According to the savefile I'm over 20% though, and I'm pretty tired of it already. I'm maybe 5 hours in or so? It's hard to tell because when you die...well, all that time prior doesn't count.
The powers are pretty strange - so, sometimes, when you kill an enemy you get like a "spirit orb" or something that you can then equip as a power. They're all different - I like the ones that summon a monster-pal the best, but overall the system seems under-utilized? Maybe I just haven't been lucky enough to get any of the really cool monsters?
Touch screen interaction seems minimal - occasionally you'll run into a sealed room that shows a design and sometimes, after beating the boss that's usually behind that room, you have to trace the design yourself.
I did think it was funny that two NPCs set up "shop" in one of the early areas - so you can teleport back to their location (from special teleport rooms) to basically buy supplies and things. I should stock up on lots of health potions, but I'm probably not going to continue to play the game, so not seeing much point. I think I got the gist of it.
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Super Mario 64 (N64) by liddell0wnZ |
| Mario at his best... |
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most recent entry: Thursday 21 February, 2008
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Gamelog entry #2
Gameplay
The second half of playing this game was actually more fun then the first half. The missions are pretty similar but they get a whole lot harder. Even though it got somewhat frustrating at times, the game was still really fun. In fact I enjoyed this game so much I saw myself playing 2-3 hours straight rather than the preferred 45 minute period. The harder the levels got the more you needed to invest your mind into several problem solving skills such conquering larger foes, jumping over each platform as an obstacle course, and timing your jump just right so you could very last star. Even though the storyline wasn't very complex, as it follows the typical Mario saves Peach storyline, there were many in-game options that made the game hard to turn off.
People who watched me play the game pretty much played the game with me. Every fault or success the people watching me were pretty much 100% around me. Most people were shouting commands such as "jump on this" or "step on that", but the energy was very much there. There was a lot of social interactions between myself and the friends watching, but it was fun because it brought back the old Nintendo days. It's somewhat easier to play when you don't have a bunch of people watching you play, but it's pretty interesting to see how so many people can be fixated on the success or failure of a digital character.
Design
The biggest innovative element this game uses is of course the use of a digital Mario functioning in a digital world for the first time. Instead of simply jumping and shooting fireballs, now Mario can flip, hurdle, punch, and kick his way through his enemies. Being able to control a 3-D Mario is extremely fun because he can interact with more options in his world and you have more room to pull off difficult maneuvers. This game was definitely the best Mario game and most of its success should be attributed to the use of 3-D graphics.
One of the things I would add to the game itself to make it more enjoyable would be to implement more Mario characters from previous games. Even though Yoshi did make a brief appearance in the game, it could've been very interesting to see how it would be to control Yoshi as an alternate character. When the Nintendo DS came out, a new version Super Mario 64 was made for the new portable system. What the new game did was implement the ability to control other characters such as Yoshi and Luigi. I was really excited about this game and found that it was just as fun maybe even a little more fun than the original. The only problem I had with the original game was that it didn't have enough characters to control, however the release of the DS version fixed that problem. I can say with confidence that it is definitely one of the best games ever made for the Nintendo or any other system for that matter.
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