The other game that I played today that has some promise is Mineko’s Night Market. It’s probably the most charming game I’ve tried since Stardew Valley. The demo is very brief, but the writing was funny and the gameplay struck a nice balance between being laid back while still keeping things moving right along. And there’s lots of cute cats, so what’s not to like?
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Support a good cause, make a statement, and get games, comics and other cool stuff!
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I want to ask about this:
but don’t want to stomp all over 1000YearBan’s new topic with video game chatter.
@ghostbloke, did you just finish the Radical Dreamers edition of Chrono Cross, or did you just finish the text-based interlude between Trigger and Cross called Radical Dreamers? I didn’t know that Radical Dreamers was a thing until just now when I googled it because of your music post. And then I was trying to read this article
while also trying to not read it because I didn’t want spoilers about Chrono Cross, which I’ve yet to play. Chrono Trigger might be my favorite game of all time, but Cross came out right as I was starting a years long hiatus from video games and I never got back to playing it. Seems like it might be a good time to!
But what’s the deal with Radical Dreamers, is there an actual text-based game packaged with this edition of Chrono Cross? I’m confused!
ETA: The description in the Steam store just answered my question:
“Players can experience the story that went on to become the basis for CHRONO CROSS in an audio novel format.”
I’m curious about your overall impressions of the game, though! I’m pretty excited to check this out.
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There’s been some talk here about the Divinity Original Sin Series and Pillars of Eternity. I just finished Divinity Original Sin (well, I stopped at the last battle since it was hard and I got bored). And I just started playing Pillars of Eternity II. Both are really great games if you love the CRPG style.
What I liked about DOS was its game mechanics. The puzzles were a lot of fun, especially since the puzzles are non-linear, require interacting with the environment in strange ways and have many ways of solving them.
PoE, on the other hand, has phenomenal writing. All the characters (both NPCs and PCs) feel so fully fleshed out with back stories and conversations that are so immersive. The world building is incredible. The game is less about puzzles and more of an interactive story with some nice fight scenes.
Both games are great, IMO.
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Radical Dreamers is a text adventure originally only made available through the Satellaview (a Super Famicom satellite modem for a game download service in Japan). There has been a ROM around for quite some time (so you can find some resources for it online which use terms from the fan translation), but it was finally officially released by Square-Enix in the Radical Dreamers edition of Chrono Cross.
Similar to Chrono Trigger, there are 6 additional endings you can get after you complete the game the first time. Also similar to Chrono Trigger, some of those endings are just a bit different, some are completely off-the-wall, but since text is so much easier to change the story changes on the lead up to them. I quite enjoyed the ride.
While I still haven’t completed Chrono Cross on my own, I have watched a playthrough before and there were some bits of that game which I really didn’t enjoy. Radical Dreamers, I think, will help me keep from taking Chrono Cross too seriously, because it’s just a fun romp through Viper Manor. It’s interesting to see how ideas were developed after it into what appeared in Chrono Cross, but I’m also impressed by some of the things that come through so clearly in Radical Dreamers. The battle theme was basically already there, so is Kid’s personality. I do wish that this release included a sound test/music player so I could freely listen to the songs in Radical Dreamers, but “Far Promise” plays on the game’s title screen.
On the subject of the full release, there are also four other songs which play in the loader, but you don’t get to pick which plays. One of them is a new song in Irish Gaelic, “Dreams of the Past, Memories of My Soul.”
There are also new arrangements of “Scars of Time,” “Fossil Valley,” and “Sailing (Another World).” I think the launcher’s credits screen might also play another new arrangement, but I’m not certain. Also in the launcher, there is an option for “classic” or “new” graphics when playing either game, which AustinSV goes into in this video. As for the frame rate fluctuation in Chrono Cross, that doesn’t bother me, and I was happy to have a slow setting during the dragon feeding minigame in Viper Manor. I haven’t made use of speed-up or any of the other additions, but the new character models and portraits look good to me.
ETA
I’ve read the article and also thought a bit more about my response. First, I’d like to clarify that, while I wrote “text adventure,” this was meant to be played on a Super Famicom/SNES controller. Other than naming the main character, you don’t enter text. Instead, you will make choices between options presented on the screen to you in text. Sometimes, as during a battle, you will only have a limited time to make a choice before something happens, anyway. That can be a little less time than I would like, but I also found it amusing that this comes up in Chrono Cross. When the party enters Viper Manor in that game, there are guards outside of a treasure room who give you a list of responses to pick from for a password, but if you don’t pick one they eventually take your silence as the correct answer.
Second, I think that the IGN article might create expectations about Radical Dreamers more firmly creating ties between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Personally, I think that the re-releases of Chrono Trigger have done that more than Radical Dreamers. I still think Radical Dreamers is entertaining, but you probably shouldn’t go into it expecting the secrets of the universe to be immediately revealed.
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I was considering the Pinball FX subscription since I actively play the previous one a lot. I finally saw the price today, and holy hell, they really think highly of themselves. $14.99/month, and it doesn’t even get you all the tables only 70/86. With all the other subscription services that get you far more for the same or less, who is their target audience? I’ll just keep playing my old version.
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Autonauts is a game that I have a little over 400 hrs on. It is basically a crafting and building game - you are dropped, alone, on a planet and you have to build a colony. You cut down trees, mine rocks, create tools and work tables that let you gather new resources and build new tools and machines. Rinse and repeat. Pretty standard stuff.
What makes Autonauts different, and what I think might appeal to some here is that you can immediately start building robots (initially out of wood, with an acorn for a brain, as you do. The developers are Scottish, so I am assuming the joke is intentional) and set them to automating all of your tasks. At the start you use a very simple to understand “Watch me” mechanic to create a program for a robot and, as you get more comfortable, you can engage with a simple scripting language that allows you to hand code your bots. The scripting language includes commands for detecting things in the environment, picking up and dropping things, monitoring the environment, and conditionals and control structures that allow you do automate increasingly complicated tasks. Your robots however have limited memory capacity so initially you will have to keep things tight. As you progress you can build robots with more capacity.
So you are building, programming, managing and, very importantly, debugging dozens or hundreds of little robots. As you progress through the game you gain additional capabilities that make it easier to manage the bots, share code between them (initially you have to transfer programs between bots via sneaker net, later there is a central repository for your programs). You can have robots running materials to robots that are building things, robots that build buildings, robots that clear terrain for you, robots that bring materials back and store them, and robots roaming the map looking for robots that have run out of power and need to be wound up again.
Everything can be automated and it’s extremely satisfying to watch your clockwork army going about their duties. It is also extremely satisfying to see that you have made a terrible mistake and now your supply chain is falling apart and it’s all crumbling to dust!
Of course, you are not doing all of this for yourself - you have an infinite supply of freeze dried baby colonists! You, I dunno…hatch? reconstitute? those once the colony is able to support them and the progression in the game is tied to improving their lives - housing, feeding, clothing and educating them. As you provide for more of their needs the level of your civilization goes up until they transcend. Your colonists don’t build or gather anything - they are literally babies that become bigger (much bigger) babies as they advance. They do however, generate Wuv (say it a few times) as you care for them which you gather up and put into machines to generate research.
There is no external conflict in the game - no enemies, no competition for resources, just you against your ability to code your bots and plan your supply chains. You can mess things up, but you can always eventually recover.
For people that enjoy the challenge of managing a complex system made of many smaller, individually understandable, interlocking parts, it’s a rare delight
So, if you are a person that believe “It’s not a game if you can’t lose”, then it’s not going to appeal. But do check out Autonauts vs Piratebots, which is the same game, but focused on fighting off Piratebot raiders, expanding your territory and defeating pirate bases across the map, eventually confronting the Dread Pirate Robot himself. The change in victory conditions and the addition of enemies make it an entirely different experience.
It’s a mouse and keyboard game - no controller support. It is playable on Steamdeck, but using the mouse and keyboard emulation, mapping keys to the Steamdeck buttons, While it is low poly 3d it does need a degree of graphics oomph - GeForce GTX 970 (4096 MB) or Radeon R9 270X (2048 MB) recommended. It won’t run well at all on a non-gaming laptop.
Both Autonauts and Autonauts vs Piratebots are on Steam for $19.99 each or in a bundle for $29.98. I have gotten a lot more pleasure over the years out of it than that.
Oh FUCK! It’s on the Switch!!! For only $9.99 through March 3rd, with, I, assume controller support that will roll back into the PC version at some point. Goodbye. It’s been really nice knowing all of you.
ETA: All of the edits are for typos, grammar, so forth. That’s a lotta typing I can mess up
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Just a heads up that the developer has links to a Russian oligarch and Gazprom and “doesn’t talk about politics” make of that what you will. It’s too bad because I love immersive sims and I love Soviet aesthetic
Ugh
ETA:
“Additionally, racist imagery has been found among the cartoons that play in the game’s save rooms.”
“Straight up based the sex slave robots design off of Yulia Tymoshenko”
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PSVR2 waiting at the mailbox. Guess there’s some Call of the Mountain and No Man’s Sky in my future.
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I am curious - how much space do you have for your play area? I ask because apparently if you do not have space for “room scale” - about 6.5’ square of completely empty space - the system will not allow you to even launch a game that requires “room scale”.
What I am curious about is whether or not the store prevents you from purchasing them…
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Good question. Our room is a bit tight, hopefully not too tight. My concern right now is lighting, as I’ve seen “well lit” room, and oh boy, our house is anything but that.
Been busy looking and the manual and charging the controllers so far. My wife has claimed the TV for Fallout 4 on the XBox, so it’ll be a while before I can do all the initial setup.
The manual is currently bugging me. Tells you how to take it off, but not a peep on how to put it on. I guess that’s all in the initial setup.
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Apparently they do some really cool stuff with their automated IPD detection so hopefully set up is a bit easier than it used to be and it won’t be nearly as big a hassle if multiple people are using it.
The space thing is an extra concern in this case because they auto detect everything in the room and won’t let you build a play space that impinges one inch into your sofa for example. Which honestly I think is the right thing to do - the only time I’ve ever had a really good room scale experience was the summer that I rented an extra garage in my apartment complex and ran an extension cord from the outlet on the ceiling that powered the garage opener. Anything I tried to do inside the house even if it technically met the requirements always ended up with me cluttering against a wall eventually. I have very long arms, Which I don’t think they account for.
I’m just hoping that if they were smart enough to know you can’t play the game they extended that knowledge out to the store.
Looking forward to your impressions once you’ve had a chance to fool around with it some!
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Preliminary:
Had some trouble getting it set up, screens wouldn’t turn on, tried it again and it was fine. Managed to tweak the play area for room scale, I had pretty much the exact amount, had to erase some of the wires to make it big enough.The play area is paintable after it fills out a base one for you.
Haven’t had a chance for VR VR yet, but holy shit, 10’ 4K screen.
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Oooooh! Does that mean the the screen dooring is not that bad? I have not really heard anyone talk about it, which I have been taking as a good sign
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It’s perfect AFAICT. Played a bit of AC:Odyssey and GoW:R just to see what that was like.
Then tried the Star Wars Demo and a little bit of Call of the Mountain. Just wandering around going “Holy shit” for now. Haven’t had any nausea, almost fell down a time or two just because of the differences, that won’t be an issue if you play sitting, of course.
One minor thing that made me think things weren’t compatible, but when you’re playing a non-VR game, you use the non-VR controllers, the VR ones don’t appear to sub in.
And Call of the Mountain lets you set left handed 
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Interesting - I wonder if that is because they want the same experience in and out of VR - like the haptics, control layout, etc? I never had one, but I know there were lots of games on the PSVR that only supported controller (mostly because the Move controllers were useless for regular games)
Is this your first headset?
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Yeah, first headset. I tend to stay behind the curve on computers, and won’t give money to Meta, so PC is generally out.The original PSVR seemed unlikely to work with out setup, so just punted on that one.
Further impressions, after a few hours of VR games, mostly just poking around rather than serious playing:
- It’s hot. Get pretty sweaty using it, both headset and controllers
- I really hope there’s a way to change global defaults for VR control like there is for some PS5 games. I had to change everything to smooth from teleport / snap turn to be comfortable.I really don’t understand how the teleport move stops nausea in some people
- Seated play area is too small. Leaning back in the chair or turning just a little was enough to get me the warning about leaving the play area.
- It’s very, very easy to reorient “front”, which I had to do many times as I got closer to obstacles
- Still having problems putting on the VR controllers. I tend to do the loop backwards and don’t position my fingers correctly for the L1/R1 buttons.
- My problem with standing / room scale VR isn’t so much nausea as balance. Going down hills in No Man’s Sky was disconcerting, almost fell a few times in it.
- It’s odd when someone talks to you IRL, you turn and there’s nobody there.
And last but not least:
I am REALLY REALLY glad when the cat rubbed up against my leg I was only in the tutorial of Resident Evil and not the main part.
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nearly step on cat
Barry: That was too close. You were almost a Jill sandwich.
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There is definitely a strange mix of “Virtual” and “Reality” in VR.
Got the “leaving play area” warning, needed to slide over so I wouldn’t punch the wall.
Look down, there’s a chasm there, brain goes “nope, not happening”.
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From my brief experience, I’m going to say they probably don’t. I actually did lose my roomscale set up at some point (lighting ? bug? Not sure), so it’s pretty flexible. Determining your setup is also slow as heck. When starting a game that uses roomscale, it says it has trouble finding it, but then it usually pops in after that warning. In my browsing of the store, I haven’t noticed anything that’s roomscale only, so it might not be a big deal for you.
Looks like I found another problem with VR that’s going to bite me, at least in games that require you to specify a dominant hand. I don’t really have one. That’s not to say I’m ambidextrous, just that the dominant hand changes based on the action. I throw left, bat right, write left, bowl left and from playing VR games, archery right, stab left, shoot right. For Call of the mountain, you can trivially pull with any hand, so no big deal. Resident evil sets stuff up in a dominant hand fashion, so there’s no real choice.
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