Hello everyone. Hope the weekend has been good for you. This week I played more OG Rome Total War and Elden Ring Seemless co-op I hope everyone has a good week!

  • Demifriend [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    19 hours ago

    Mina the Hollower is kinda taking over my life. I played like 5 hours yesterday lol. Very good game so far and exactly my kind of thing. There’s a bunch of secrets and rewards for exploring and it’s been a lot of fun dissecting each area. And of course the sound track is excellent, everything Jake Kaufman composes is top quality.

    I also got to try Twinkle Star Sprites on Fightcade with my friend the other day. It’s a PvP shoot em up game where you shoot the enemies that appear on your side of the screen to launch attacks at your opponents side of the screen. There’s a bunch of different characters with different shot types and special moves, you can reflect your opponent’s attacks back at them, and you can even summon a boss monster to your opponent’s side of the screen. It’s really fun, it’s fast-paced but not too hectic and not too tricky to get the hang of. I definitely recommend giving it a try if you’ve got someone to play with.

      • Demifriend [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        Based off of what I’ve played so far, it can be kind of challenging. Not like brutally difficult, but definitely not easy either.

        Getting into details

        I’ve been able to beat most of the bosses I’ve faced so far in 2-3 tries, one took me several more tries but is optional. Some of the normal enemies can be punishing if you don’t understand their attack patterns, however they are all pretty straightforward so far so if you take it slow and focus carefully they aren’t too bad. It may get much more difficult later though, I haven’t gotten too far yet.

        It also has a slightly less punishing version of the Souls thing going on where you have a Spark item that is lost on death, and if you die again without recovering it you lose your Bones (XP/Money item). They do let you choose to bank your Bones on a level up so that saving them is a little less risky at least.

        The healing flask can be kind of tricky to use well. How it works is you have two parts to your health bar, the actual Health section in red, and orange Plasma that fills in the empty space when you hit enemies. When you use your heal flask, the Plasma is converted back into Health, which means you have to hit enemies when your Health isn’t full for your heal flask to actually do anything. It takes a good second for you to actually use the flask as well and you can get knocked out of the animation.

        All that being said, the game comes with a big list of modifiers you can toggle at any time to make the game play differently. Unfortunately activating the ones that make the game easier disables achievements, but if you can tolerate that you can significantly alter the experience if you like.

    • trompete [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      17 hours ago

      I really like the game so far. Some of the chiptunes I like, others have been getting on my nerves. The game boy color style graphics are also not the pinnacle of pixel art. But maybe don’t listen to me, I think Link’s Awakening DX looks worse than the grayscale GameBoy version, and that may be down to the fact that I never had a GBC and thus have no nostalgia for it.

      Anyway would recommend, but it does seem pretty long honestly. I played like 10 hours already and I only got 2 out of 6 (or was it 8?) thingies.

      • Demifriend [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        12 hours ago

        I’ve seen some others mention the length and yeah I get the same vibe, I’m at 6.7 hours in total and have only repaired 1 of the spark generators. I’m a pretty slow player in most games though. It’s probably gonna run a little long for my tastes but hopefully I don’t burn out before finishing it.

        • trompete [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          Movement and combat mechanics were a bit rough at first, but I got the hang of it after two hours or so, and now I think it’s real fun. I died a bunch at certain points, but it’s generally quick to get back and you just have to figure out what works and play deliberately. I guess combat difficulty seems around Hollow Knight for me (comparing the first half of Mina to the first half of HK); Dark Souls was way harder for me, though some people beat Dark Souls and then struggle with these 2D indies, for me it’s the opposite.

          You can change like two dozen individual difficulty settings. Like if you keep falling into pits you can disable damage from this specifically. I left everything on default.

          Hardest part so far is figuring out where to go, and how. The game kinda expects you to just figure shit out through experimenting and exploring. I already did tons of backtracking to find some path forward I might have missed. Haven’t had to look anything up yet, but it feels like I might have to do that at some point.