Yeah it’s crazy how some very very early PS1 games look so similar to 16bit outings.

Worse, many of them look like 3DO games. Actually, 2D games on the PS1 do typically look a lot better than SNES and Genesis games. Pretty sure Rayman would look and sound much worse on either

The intro animation is easily the most memorable and well-made part of the entire game but it does set up expectations that the actual game just can’t live up to. The game’s beady-eyed chubby-looking little chibi sprites and the cutesy world they inhabit just don’t match the atmosphere and mood of the intro.

The studio behind the game, Media.Vision, had only made two games prior to Wild Arms, Crime Crackers and Gunners Heaven/Rapid Reload, both of which were early PS1 games. When I say early PS1, I mean early. Crime Crackers came out in 1994 and looked like this:

(It’s incredible how different stuff from the early years of the PS1 is from the later games I grew up with. It barely feels like it’s the same console- I recently flipped through a PS1 mag from 1996 and recognised basically none of the games being shown)

With that pedigree it makes sense Wild Arms didn’t quite measure up to RPGs from Square. I looked up what Media.Vision is up to these days and discovered they’ve been active ever since and actually worked on the Valkyria Chronicles series which I recently made a post about. Not the VC game I played but still, small world

“but they’ve been forced to do so because of the war started by the evil Rooskies”

Another person told me everything that happened in Ukraine since 2014 is good because even dying in a war is preferrable to living under a Russian puppet government like in Belarus

I had an acquaintance in real life tell me Russians were resorting to grabbing old Mosins out of museums to arm their soldiers in 2022

I’ve been playing through Wild Arms lately. It feels pretty antiquated compared to basically any of SquareSoft’s PS1 JRPG output, being essentially a standard tile-based top-down 16-bit RPG with 3D only being made use of in battles. It predated FF7 and playing it helps appreciate just how huge of a technical milestone that game was. Compared to games that looked like this

FF7’s cinematic camera angles, 3D character models and FMV cutscenes FF7 must’ve felt like it was from another universe. Even the 3D battles aren’t that impressive looking:

Though I will say that the battles do at least feature models with fully texture-mapped polygons as opposed to the flat shading FF7 mostly used.

Wild Arms feels and looks kind of basic and the storytelling and characterisation fall short even when compared to Square games from the previous generation, but the game has a quick, breezy pace to it that’s kept me weirdly hooked. You move from town to dungeon to boss and back again very quickly and there’s basically no annoying minigames or cryptic side content to slow you down. I actually played Wild Arms as a kid but I remember it much less clearly than Square’s PS1 JRPGs. Playing it now I realise I must’ve made it at least a decent ways in but I have no memories of specific plot beats, boss fights and events, which can probably be blamed on the basic presentation.

My main memory of the game was of its FMV intro animation and the incredible song that accompanies it

The vibe of the intro might make you think the game has a heavy spaghetti Western influence but aside from a few Western flourishes in the soundtrack, there being guns and one character wearing a duster and another being named Calamity Jane that’s not really the case- everything is fairly standard JRPG fantasy fare which feels like a missed opportunity.

I might check out Wild Arms 2 when I’m done with this

Halo 3 did have an XP system but it barely did anything. XP gained you rank that went from Private to Grand Marshal or whatever and it basically just showed how much you’d been playing the game. That was separate from the playlist-specific skill ranks that went from 1-50 IIRC. Halo 3’s customisation unlocks were almost entirely tied to achievements

Reach took those systems and made them much more involved and grindy while also adding way more cosmetic unlockables. I played Halo 3 purely because I thought it was fun but in Reach I spent hours in that stupid Gruntpocalypse Firefight playlist to grind for credits and XP for a specific helmet I wanted

I remember playing Halo 3 online for the first time and just having my mind blown by the fact that you could gain XP in a multiplayer shooter. But that’s an RPG thing!!!

Chinese Call of Duty

Chinese Wolfenstein

Didn’t Oda say he saw Nico Robin as Russian when he was asked what nationalities each of the main characters would be in some old SBS

IIRC he thought Luffy was Brazilian, Nami was Swedish, Sanji was French and Zoro was Japanese

The IA loaned digital copies of books they’d scanned. Only a certain amount of copies could be loaned at one time due to stupid copyright bullshit

During the pandemic they allowed unlimited copies to be loaned out at any time which made the copyright mafia big mad

The IA loaned digital copies of books they’d scanned. Only a certain amount of copies could be loaned at one time due to stupid copyright bullshit

During the pandemic they allowed unlimited copies to be loaned out at any time which made the copyright mafia big mad

that have said the IA was asking for trouble in removing restrictions from the lending library during the pandemic

That absolutely did put a huge target on their back though

It’s either that or small blobs of land with a single settlement on each like in classic JRPGs

There was a fourth one? I thought there was the first game, then two PSP sequels, the second of which they did not even bother to release outside of Japan

The conflict is called the Second Europan War

I did like the game but I couldn’t get fully invested into the story and characters

Note that the title says “hardcore gamer” and not “hardcore Fallout fan”

Lmao, everyone talking about how fucked Americans are in the head and how pathetic their home defense wet dreams are is buried in downvotes

It was one more Steam early access survival crafting game, though it made quite a big splash due to the novelty of having pokey men in it