The Bill's Now Playing Video Game Thread (Now with Bames)

[THE KILL]

Played the new Ghosts'n Goblins on Switch for about fifteen hours and din't get past stage 4. It's fucking brutal, harder than any other G&G or Ghouls'n Ghosts game IMO, but it's great old school game design.

[Honky Kong 64]

Zelda Skyward Sword coming to the Switch and you can play it without the motion control bullshit? Any opinions on it? I can not stand Wii remote dick piss, so I gave it a hard pass then. Worth a look?

This might be my least favorite Zelda experience tbh.

[Eight Bit Alien]

It had one of the best stories, and some of the best music in the series... but I really wouldn't recommend it at all. It really was a very mixed bag. More than anything I found it a chore to get through... even though there was some brilliant shit in it. Maybe if they toned down the text box prompts from the Navi-sword character... but honestly the motion controls were baked so deeply into the game that I'm not sure what would happen if you took them out. All the combat was motion matching... the dungeon puzzles, the bird flight, the 'drone' beetle device.
I'd be curious to play that to see if it was cool or not, but I have fucking PTSD from that sword creature bothering me every 2 seconds....

[The Bill]

I signed up for this Xbox Game Pass for PC because it’s the only way to play Evil Within 1 in a proper first person. I forgot the first one was such a wannabe Resident Evil 4 meets SAW style body horror. Still, in first person it’s a much better game. And as a “first person shooter” it’s better than most modern FPS’ers.

[FVBTVS]

[abdominalpillaging]

I just converted my E-Swat arcade pcb to the Darksoft Sega System 16 multiboard. So after burning a fuckton of EEPROMS and swapping some stuff out I have all of the games running off 1 board. So the arcade versions of Shinobi, Golden Axe, Altered Beast, and so on. It's a cool little piece of kit.

[THE KILL]

That's so awesome, man. Now and again, I regret selling my Egret III... but arcade shit breaks too often. Btw have you tried Riot City? Is it any good?

[abdominalpillaging]

That's so awesome, man. Now and again, I regret selling my Egret III... but arcade shit breaks too often. Btw have you tried Riot City? Is it any good?

Damn I'd kill for an Egret, but then again I wouldn't have any room for it. One of these days I'll have the garage cleaned out enough for at least one candy cab though.

Initially I just ran through them all to make sure they were working. Riot City was one that stuck out enough that I'll go through it when I have some time. It wasn't great, but I wouldn't say it was bad either. There were a handful of games on there I'd never seen, like some obvious Contra inspired game and a vertical tank shmup. A huge amount of the System 16 stuff is weird sports games that used trackballs or other weird shit though.

[THE KILL]

That's so awesome, man. Now and again, I regret selling my Egret III... but arcade shit breaks too often. Btw have you tried Riot City? Is it any good?

Damn I'd kill for an Egret, but then again I wouldn't have any room for it. One of these days I'll have the garage cleaned out enough for at least one candy cab though.

Initially I just ran through them all to make sure they were working. Riot City was one that stuck out enough that I'll go through it when I have some time. It wasn't great, but I wouldn't say it was bad either. There were a handful of games on there I'd never seen, like some obvious Contra inspired game and a vertical tank shmup. A huge amount of the System 16 stuff is weird sports games that used trackballs or other weird shit though.

Thanks for you impressions on Riot City!

I just skimmed the System 16 list, and there's a boxing game in there (Heavyweight Champ) with a very interesting looking cab with custom controls:



Anyway, yeah any Egret is a wonderful machine, but in the end I didn't play it often enough that it was justified having one. Eventually, the screen broke (actually, it was the yoke, but you can't get a replacement for that so I would have had to buy a CRT, which would have cost me at least 600 Eurobucks with shipping to Germany) and I sold it for roughly what I paid for it 14 years ago. It's crazy how cheap even Egret IIs were, you could get one for under 1000 dollars in the 2000s when all the Japanese arcades were replacing their CRT cabs with LCD cabs.
Anyway, I'm often jealous of you Americans, seems like you can get classic arcade cabs for a couple of hundred bucks over there. If you want to get hold of an original Donkey Kong in Germany, you have to spend more like 2000 Euros... btw which cab are you running your System 16 pcb on?

[abdominalpillaging]

Most of the cheap ones in the states are usually just beat Dynamo cabs. If you want to put some work into one you could eventually find a Nintendo cab for cheap, but it would likely be beat as fuck.

I just do the supergun thing. Run it into an XRGB Framemeister and end up with a really good looking image on a flat screen. Or occasionally I'll pull out one of my PVMs and run it to that.

[spacehamster]

Just snagged the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn for 30 $bux on GOG... that was one of the games I liked but never finished a few years ago, and now I didn't want to go back to it because of the framerate, so, you know. Might give this another shot to pass the time until the Cyberpunk expansions come out.

[doomeddisciple]

I’m keen as for the new HDZ. I felt the first one dragged on a bit, but at the same time it was heaps of fun - the previews looked insane for the sequel.

[spacehamster]

Uh, yeah, also the PC version isn't really that much better than the PS4 version, but I was so late in the game when I quit that I basically don't remember anything, and I'm glad I started over... I got sucked right back in. I agree it dragged a bit story-wise, which is why I quit - I kind of felt like I already knew where it was going, and it just wouldn't get there. But just playing the damn game is so much fun.

[The Bill]

Uh, yeah, also the PC version isn't really that much better than the PS4 version, but I was so late in the game when I quit that I basically don't remember anything, and I'm glad I started over... I got sucked right back in. I agree it dragged a bit story-wise, which is why I quit - I kind of felt like I already knew where it was going, and it just wouldn't get there. But just playing the damn game is so much fun.

Yeah, it was fine enough but suffers from the plight most of new action games have. Open/sandbox level design, collecting crap to craft crap, and dumbass side quests. And if you can’t predict the ending and “swerve” then I suggest you just go back to only watching college football.

Restarted Metro 2033. Monsters are bigger damage sponges than I remember, but still probably better than any other first person shooter from that time forward that I can think of that’s not DOOM or Bioshock.