October 2019 TR - Is That A Nightmare In Your Pocket...?

[opa]

Noise- You mentioned it looks good on the game pad but how does revelations look on a tv screen? I may grab it if I see a cheap copy.

SotN: I think 20 years is way past the spoiler tag limit. I knew going in that halfway through the game you go through the castle upside down. I beat Richter and got an ending so I knew I did something wrong. Apparently I was supposed to grab a few items so I could do the Richter fight correctly. After a couple of more boss fights and some backtracking I fought Richter again and now I'm in the upside down castle. I think the castle is wonderfully designed but part of me feels just flipping the world to extend the game is kinda lazy.

[noiseredux]

Noise- You mentioned it looks good on the game pad but how does revelations look on a tv screen? I may grab it if I see a cheap copy.

not sure - I was playing on Gamepad to keep in spirit of the thread. But if I get a chance tonight, I'll try to fire it up on TV just to get a feel for it visually.

[Sarge]

Belmont's Revenge is as good as Castlevania: The Adventure is bad. Easily the best Castlevania game on the system, and it comes surprisingly close to the level of the other main entries in the series.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Belmont's Revenge is as good as Castlevania: The Adventure is bad. Easily the best Castlevania game on the system, and it comes surprisingly close to the level of the other main entries in the series.

+1

Belmont’s Revenge is really solid. The third game, Castlevania Letends is very, very OK, and it tells the thrilling origin story of the Castlevania sub-weapons.... ...Seriously...that’s the actual story.

I’m still plugging through Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. The 2.5D remake of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is good. It plays almost exactly like the original game, but it seems a little easier. There also seem to be more secrets and unlockables. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is the best of the classic Castlevania games; so, that’s fine with me. I expect to get through it soon, and I plan on going for 100% completion. This will result (already has resulted) in me unlocking the original version of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, which renders the remake unnecessary, and I wonder why, if Konami was including the original version on the disc anyway, why it went to the trouble of remaking the game in the first place. I’m pretty sure everyone would have enjoyed the game just as much if it included only the original version of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.

[Sarge]

It also plays with expectations in a few spots, too. I think I remember getting trolled by a door where you rescue one of the maidens. You have to reveal a secret area and go into that door instead.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Re: corpse party game overs

That's what made me quit. Some of the death scenes are so long and drawn out it was faster to close and restart the game than clicking through the scene. Very frustrating; especially dodging those darn ghosts.

Yeah, it wouldn't be AS much of an issue if they could be skipped if you've seen them before, but you can't. How a VN came to PSP in like 2006 with no text skip features of any kind is an incredible mystery to me.

Are all versions of Corpse Party fairly similar? I have the GOG.com version.

The GOG version is the same game with the graphics slightly updated (and I mean very slightly, from the looks of things). It seems to be very similar graphically to the 3DS version, but the GOG version apparently has a little bit of content from Book of Shadows (the sequel) as well as some "PC-exclusive content" whatever that means. It quite mercifully and smartly advertises on the GOG page that this version has a text-skip feature, so that isn't SO bad in that regard at least (although it wouldn't count for this month's TR). All the other writing is still as bad, but at least you can skip it if you don't wanna read it, presumably (although why are you even playing the game if that's your goal?)

[Nemoide]

Made some more progress in The New Addams Family Series...

I first encountered the game mentioned as a title that pushed the limits of the GBC here on this site. As a life-long fan of both The Addams Family and adventure games, I knew I'd have to seek out a copy, though I never once encountered one in the wild or found an American copy on eBay. If this game actually had a US release, it's probably one of the rarest on the system. So I ended up getting a European copy.

Could this be a hidden gem? I still have a ways to go, but I can confirm: not it is not.
This game suffers from some bad adventure-game logic. Not as bad as the oldest games, where you can lose the game if you fail to pick up some important item in the beginning or if you use an item when you're not supposed to: instead you are frustratingly bound by the tracks the developers set you on. For example, you might find an item you'll need to progress, but the game won't let you pick it up until you've talked to another member of the family and you won't be able to do THAT until you've talked to some other member of the family. The game seems pretty tightly confined, so a lot of it just involves walking back and forth to see if something allows you to progress and do something else.
I also encountered a frustrating action sequence in the backyard swamp. You have to avoid dangers (ranging from crocodiles to random insects) and it's all based on obnoxious timing. Pugsley Addams jumps about as effectively as he would in real life, so I died QUITE A LOT just trying to jump over a small bug or trying to make it to the other side of a pond (both result in death, but thankfully there are infinite lives). Do all that and you can find some wood-eating bugs to put in a can, but you can't get farther because you can't cross the swamp. So you go back through the action sequence and use the wood-bugs on a branch you can't break on your own... but they fly away. So you have to go BACK through the action-sequence and get more, go back to the branch and figure out how to make it work. THEN you get to go a little further and come to another dead end, which requires you to go back AGAIN and talk to Fester (thankfully this time the game returns you to that dead end and back to the house automatically.
In the end you'd have go through that frustrating bug-dodging action sequence AT LEAST six times.

The whole experience has been pretty annoying. But I'm still committed to trying to beat it!

[noiseredux]

Resident Evil Revelations cont'd...

Episode 2 switches things up a bit initially. It starts out in some snowy area and you control Chris and his new partner Jessica. This part was... okay. There's a bunch of zombified wolves to manage. And luckily, it was a brief section.

Then, back to the ship! If I didn't mention earlier, the ship section has you controlling Jill and she's such an awesome badass in this game. I was thinking about this, and I think if I had to pick a favorite protagonist from all the RE games, I'd have to go with Jill "The Master Of Unlocking" Valentine. I mean, Chris and Leon are cool and all, but Jill is just the best. To me, she's sort of the face of classic RE.

Anyway, I digress. This section of the ship was AWESOME. It's the guest rooms area and as such, resembles a spooky mansion A LOT. I absolutely loved this section because it meshed the feel of Spencer Mansion with a boat. There's different guest rooms that feel like you're in that big haunted house, but then you've got these portal windows and you can see the fog and rain from the sea out there. Really a great setting that this game has.

I would normally hate this kind of section, though. It's one of those sections in games where your character is held captive and stripped of all weapons and items. Those tend to bug me. But hey, I got a little better at evasion because of it and met up with Jill's partner Parker and we found our weapon stash. So now we're armed to the teeth for Episode 3.

Y'know what? So far, I'm absolutely loving this game the same way I did Revelations 2. I honestly don't know what the critical consensus is on these spinoffs, but my guess is that they're deemed "pretty good." For me, I think they're "pretty great."

[PartridgeSenpai]

Chapter 4 out of 5 of Corpse Party finished.

I do gotta say that the overall story is slowly making up for several past sins. Not nearly all of them, mind you, but it's slowly fixing the larger narrative logical inconsistencies that it seemed to be pushing quite so hard in the first two chapters. It's still not perfect, but chapters 3 and 4 have much more consistent tones and far less bullshit action sections and awful sexualization of minors parts as the first two chapters do by a long shot. Those moments do still happen, just more few and far between (and the overall pacing is still a bit too drawn out, largely due to how tough it can be to tell where to go leaving you wandering around everywhere hunting for a way forward). It certainly is strange to see how hard the game has front-loaded the worst aspects/areas of its design though. Granted, as I go on, it seems I'm also getting closer to content that was in the original PC-98 game, so perhaps that's to blame for the improvement in general quality of things.

It's still the worst game I've played this year, but I don't hate it quite as vehemently as I did when I started, which is a positive thing I guess?

[Nemoide]

I finished The New Addams Family Series!
It was short but OBNOXIOUSLY padded. The last third of the game has you playing as Wednesday, which is a nice change of pace, the house is the same but items and descriptions are different. The bulk of my time with her was figuring out how to get a Halloween-land to celebrate Halloween: totally appropriate for October! Unfortunately this is where the weaknesses of the game's design are on FULL DISPLAY. You need to do a number of things in the EXACT RIGHT ORDER (eg, you have to use an axe on a padlock, but the game won't let you do that until you've mixed other items elsewhere) and it involves a LOT of backtracking through "action sequences." Thankfully they're easier than the ones in the beginning of the game, but they're still essentially pointless and just serve to make backtracking take longer than it otherwise would.

Anyway, it's definitely an Addams Family game. Unfortunately, there are some seriously bad incarnations of The Addams Family and this game is one of them.