… did they really put dodonpachi dai-ou-jou on a general audience top 100 list?! in the top 20!!! mind blown

Elementary school ystael spent a lot of time on Pinball Construction Set on the C64. I think I always turned the physics up to max speed minimum friction, so scoring on my tables was more about flailing and blind luck.

My favorite C64 game, though, was one I didn’t get to play often because I had to borrow it from a friend. (Didn’t know about cracking yet.) That was Ultimate Wizard. The platform physics were kind of terrible compared to Mario, but I loved the way each level was a tiny puzzle-maze, with different treasures moving different blocks when you grabbed them, and one magic spell - just one on each level, out of ten or so - to help you deal with the enemies. And my favorite thing in every game: a level editor! No, my levels weren’t good, they were awful. But I loved laying out the little bricks and skulls and fires anyway.

Put a shocking amount of time into Unicorn Overlord last week.

I think they executed the cross between Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle very well. Squad composition makes up for the lack of individual customization that is typical of the FE lineage of strategy RPGs (as opposed to the FFT/Tactics Ogre line). The overworld management is a fun exploration side activity that isn’t as time-consuming as Three Houses’s social stuff. Basiscape brought its usual excellent soundtrack, and Vanillaware their usual impressively detailed art. Plot is whatever, I don’t play these games for the plot, I play them to make anime sprites stab each other so numbers go up. So, yeah, it’s fun.

(No, I don’t actually like Disgaea that much, mostly because “figuring out how to break the game is the game” doesn’t appeal to me.)

Was hoping someone would mention Shadow Hearts and Wild Arms! The PS2 truly was the janky AA JRPG console of all time. Also don’t forget

• Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
• Digital Devil Saga 1-2
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
• Stella Deus
• Magna Carta: Tears of Blood On second thought do forget this one

Baba Is You is fantastic, and I think its difficulty curve is much, much more reasonable in the beginning than Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I haven’t finished it, but I didn’t utterly bounce off it either.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

I play a lot of puzzle games. Some of them are pretty hard (the later levels of Tametsi take quite a while to crack).

But this one is on a completely different level. If there is a more brutally punishing sokoban-family game on existence, I have no idea what it might be.

Stephen, if he exists, is most likely condemned to roll sausages eternally in hell, for the sin of making this game.

Old, but I think at least inspired or adjacent: Apparat Organ Quartet - Romantika

OK, that’s what I had kind of feared. Thank you!

Not like it will be such a hardship to finally finish it - just have to resist the temptation to play Monster Hunter instead :)

I enjoyed the first game very much but never finished it because I was distracted by some other shiny object. How much does 2 spoil the first game’s plot?

Monster Hunter World is five years old and holds up great.

• bask in the sun halfway up the Ancient Forest with a Tobi-Kadachi (giant white electric flying squirrelsnake; chill until you hit it)

• climb up to the top of the Coral Highlands cat colony and watch the sky jellyfish float by in the sunset

• share a hot spring with snow monkeys in the Hoarfrost Reach

They did a great job of making the maps feel like a living system that goes on while you’re not there. (Sadly, this is much less true of the newest MH game, Rise, where the maps are full of traversal puzzles but the wildlife pretty much all exists only to attack you.)

There’s always Super Hexagon!

I’m surprised not to see any of the Monster Hunter games yet! Maybe that’s because most MH soundtracks are more a collection of individual themes than a unified soundtrack for a world, but a lot of those tracks are pretty great.

I don’t know whether it is considered polite to link to youtube recordings of tracks here. My particular favorites from World are all zone themes: “Rulers of the Wildspire”, “Dancer in the Coral Highlands”, “Roars across the Hinterlands”. You hear these tunes a lot - whenever you’re fighting something in that zone that doesn’t have its own theme - so they’d better be good. Fortunately almost all of them live up to that standard!

This is a story skip. Many forms of character progress in FFXIV are gated by that individual character completing the main storyline quests.

A story skip boosts the character to the beginning of the current expansion tier, so it is not possible to use this mechanic to compete with standard players on current content. I think the intended use case is alt characters (which are less necessary in FFXIV because you can play all jobs on one character, but many players still have them).

If you are looking for “learn fight, get better, epic win” without much of a death penalty, maybe look at Monster Hunter?

It’s not the same as a Souls game - not much world exploration, not much plot, zero gothiness - but it is 3D Fantasy Boss Fights: The Game. With 14 genuinely different weapon classes to choose from.

And if you faint three times and fail the quest, all you’ve lost are the consumables you spent on the attempt. (If you give up early and bail, you haven’t even lost that.)