26 reviews liked by cleobirdwell


A "rougelike" DLC story for a game that uses that genre in the loosest definition possible.

For brevity sake, check out my review on the base game as this DLC isn't about doing things radically different or new.(https://backloggd.com/u/AlphaOne2/review/971762/) The rougelike is really just randomly generated dungeoneering, with a slightly harsher punishment for death where you lose a lot (or all, depending on difficulty) of your earned force. In case you didn't read the old review or forgot, force is used to progress through the game's skill tree. You earn a looooooot of stat ups using it, and you also use it for unlocking new spells and valuable items. Regardless, everything else you earned prior to death is kept, hence rougelike being a poor descriptor.

Just like the base game, this DLC wants you to become absurdly powerful. Like, the most overpowered character you can possibly be. Able to cast magic that starts as standard fireballs, and end with summoning lasers so large it kills hundreds of enemies off screen as all their loot gets magnetized towards you. All the other progression systems are here as well (equipment leveling, crafting and upgrading, magic leveling, item trading, and so forth). One of the more notable additions is the style system. Think more of a class system in other RPGs, but they don't change your playstyle too much in comparison. Each style comes with their own passive bonuses and one unique skill that's on a short cooldown. A magician can recover the magic meter on the spot, or a samurai will do a iaido slash as the demon gets cut in half a second later, or a assassin will teleport behind the enemy and stab them in the back. They aren't a game changer, but it is fun experimenting with them as leveling up styles will also earn permanent stat ups.

How are the random dungeon exactly? Crude and sloppy, but admittedly pretty fun. Namely due to the enemy placement. Each stratum has 9 floors. Early in the stratum enemies are relatively straight forward and spaced fairly normally. But by floor 6 the dev just seemed to not care anymore and will just randomly place twenty high level monsters in a room that attack the very instant you enter their domain. Doubly worst if these monsters can inflict debilitating status ailments like paralyze or webbed. It's actually comical how little restraint these monster closets get the further you get into the game, and they aren't rare by any means. You start getting into the habit of holding down to immediately readying your shield anytime you enter a new room, cause there's a high likelihood you'll get sucker punched by a horde of photo-shopped monsters on the otherside.
At the same time, this actually makes it pretty fun. There's a great satisfaction overcoming something so blatantly unfair and unhinged, and being rewarded with gold, loot, experience a plenty that hits me in the dopamine tenfold. And even though I played this game on hard, I never died from these relentless ambushes. Certainly came close, but you have plenty of tools to conquer these ridiculous enemy layouts. Magic gives you invincibility frames, which combined with how absurdly busted some spells are makes these things both unfair but also not frustrating.

I am a little disappointed with the lack of new in this DLC. The enemies and many boss fights are recycled from the base game, and the story doesn't go nearly as hard as it either. Though the game does warn that this DLC has massive spoilers if you hadn't played the original, so I unfortunately can't recommend this if it were standalone. This DLC is more of a abridged retelling of the base game, but as a dungeon crawler with a different main character. Again, do not expect anything truly unique.

And you know, if I ever get the hankering for Astlibra Revision again I think I might play this instead. With the nature of the random dungeons, you are experiencing more of forward momentum during your grinding sessions as you descend further down; whereas grinding in the original has you walk back and forth between the same exact areas over and over. Not to mention this is 20 hours versus 50 hours. The DLC is lengthy but not too obscene as the base game, if you feel like replaying it from start to end.

Plus now you can dress up your main character and that shit is a plus in any game ever.

To say that the movement in Pseudoregalia does all the heavy lifting would be at least slightly disingenuous, but it cannot be downplayed how smooth and expressive the traversal is. The depth at play here is one thing; there's so many advanced techniques and interesting ways to progress through rooms that one could get it in their head that they're sequence breaking. Hell, they might be.

But what really solidifies this as a must-play - the true testament to how wonderfully designed this package is - is how much the rooms and map compliment said movement.

Pseudoregalia expects the player to explore, but more than that it expects the player to invent. Once all the abilities are unlocked, there's no need to take intended paths through its interconnected areas. Players forge their own paths by chaining wall-kicks, canceling ground pounds and maybe even learning how busted side-flips are. Nothing feels out of reach, and everything feels within the realm of possibility when it comes to level layouts.

This game isn't perfect. There's no map system (it's coming in an update), the game is relatively short, and aside from two specific encounters combat isn't particularly engaging. Sore spots, for sure. One could even make the argument that the low polygon count and low resolution textures make the game a bit bland looking, though I'd counter that with it being part of the N64-inspired charm. It truly doesn't matter anyway. To say these blemishes take away from the joy of playing... That's more than slightly disingenuous.

This game is a masterfully tight and well-crafted experience. It's a blast to control and a joy to discover. Absolutely worth the play whether or not you're planning on jacking off to the goat lady.

Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?

Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.

This is the only racing game I know of that has incorporated a theme, in this case the idea of a “turning point” and implementing it into all these different aspects to create a unified and beautifully made game. The gameplay is centered around drifting around corners and turns; the managers you meet are in what can be called turning points in their lives and as the Prix progresses move on from the past and towards the future; the final race of the Grand Prix takes place on the last day of 1999, the literal turning point between two millenniums; and of course this being the last Ridge Racer on the PS1, serving as a turning point for the series. The fact that this game released with a 60 FPS version of Ridge Racer 1 to show how far the series has come on the same platform really ties everything together as well. Overall a phenomenal title and my favorite racer. also has good music.

this is a soulless husk of a game that i paid 48 real, hard earned dollars for and i have to live with that for the rest of my life. i could have bought food with that money. i could have been at the club

The annual Backloggd Barbie: Explorer speedrun 10 dollars cash prize challenge official results:

1st - Vee NEW WORLD RECORD TIME : 2 hours 43 minutes
2nd - MagneticBurn: Gave up on the third level
3rd - Me: Gave up on the second level
4th - Lena: Gave up on the first level
5th - Jumbo Josh

Some ingame events are based on the moon phase

Not some ingame moon

The fucking real life moon

Such an utterly deranged schizo mechanic deserves 4 stars

Thank you Kira Miyazaki truely Kino Field

Wish I didn't feel totally bitter about how the 'R' games are handled - the one-dimensional kid-proofed characters, the stock 3d look that clashes with the otherwise great 2d art, the continued lack of content variety that all the 5th and 6th gen games had, the weird e-sportsy vibe despite being a PARTY game, and abysmally unfinished story modes.

And goddamn that story mode, we're talking a game that's not even undercooked - they never started cooking at ALL. They go for a weird BOTW/Frontiers-esque content structure with open areas and skrunkos to collect, and mix it up with these tower defense sections. But there's no level design! At all!! Just endless roads of blocks to destroy and a few cannons!!! When you do the tower defense missions on the attacker's side, they all end in 20 seconds! And the AI in the defender's side missions literally cannot put up a fight! I cheesed through the entire game by putting conveyor belts in front of destructible blocks, and not once did the AI think to stand 1 tile lower and lay a bomb. This is internal mockup levels of un-done.

And they do a boss rush in a game with only 3 non-final bosses!! The only saving grace is the villain of all things, who's one of the only villains in a kid's game i can think of whose master plan is to kill himself?????

Bomberman was up there with Sonic and Mega Man as my favorite franchises in childhood. Sonic's been in a rough state for a while but the projects are ambitious often enough for gems to come out now and then - Mania, Frontiers and the racing trilogy are all winners in my book. Mega Man is dead again after being resurrected once (11 was FIVE years ago now????), but at least Capcom is doing due diligence with all these high-polished collections and a fairly respected gacha. Bomberman can't even get oil in the pan, man, they breathed life back into this series with a fucking porn game, these 2 console titles pale in comparison to the old stuff, they axed their battle royale into a side mode when it made zero money, and they don't even have the decency to re-release the older titles. Is a Hero port too big of an ask? Can even one of the 16-bit games appear on NSO??

I'm glad the series is back in any form at all, but I feel so bitter these projects can't get as much budget behind them as those GameCube games did. When it comes to disappointing, Konami never disappoints.

I've been trying to get to this review, but every time I start it, I think about eating handfuls of delicious Pikmin and I get too distracted. I like to imagine myself lying flat on my belly with my mouth open, hundreds of Pikmin lined up and marching right down my gullet. As you can imagine, it's hard to write a review with such decadent fantasies dancing through my mind.

If I could, I would shrink myself down to Pikmin size, and like Captain Olimar, I would gain their trust. There are so many Pikmin that they would never notice one or two of their own missing. Rather than satiate myself on many Pikmin, I can gorge myself on one. A plump Pikmin roasting over an open fire, filling my nose with such smells, my ears with the gentle crackles and pops of its searing flesh... Ah, a delight for the senses.

By the time my many crimes are exposed it will be too late. My belly will have popped, come undone like some flimsy seam on an old overworn shirt, and they will have to roll my bloated form into the autopsy room. "Cause of death: overconsumption of Pikmin," they'll note. "At least the bastard died with a smile."

i purposefully added this game on igvn igbd igdb what the fuck just to talk about how you cum on enemies

the version says 0.49 but im pretty sure the developer isn't gonna update the game any time soon and if he does it's probably gonna be another release entirely and anyway hes busy with furry porn on his patreon so it's fine I can put this as completed

so you know im furry trash and this is the ultimate confirmation

this game is a shoot shoot gamey game like megaman but instead of a robot twink you play as a horny fox whose projectiles are cumshots and that is exploring a sauna where everyone's naked and weirdly aroused

the game is pretty simple but I was not expecting how fun it was to just roam around the controls are tight as hell and while the projectiles ballistic is weird since youre gonna shoot from a really low point (the knotty dick if you didnt get it) some flying enemies are gonna be kind of hard to shoot down but nothing that crazy

you get your upgrades at the end of each levels either for your health or for your damage and something that I really liked was the fact that you can put different tails up your ass so that your charged cumshots will have different shapes or trajectories thats fun as hell it's not explicitly said that they're butt plugs but come on just look at the game

also after you kill the enemies you can exploit their junks for masturbatory purposes like either fuck the lizards brains out or jump on tanukis humongous dicks so either way you can have your fun with them

so that's the meat of the game nothing more nothing less and you can actually get pretty OP if you play long enough like I did 3 consequent playthroughs and I felt like a bukkake king filling the entire thermae up

the final boss is obviously the shark (TITLE DROP !!!!!!) and after the battle ends you get one of 2 sex scenes whether you beat the crap out of him or get owned and so youre left with a top or bottom animation and thats it that's the end of the game have fun

i prefer the bottom one honestly you get to see the sharks double dick creampie-ing you so yeah but they're both good on their own

this review was better in my head I don't think anyone is gonna play this but I had to talk about this or I was gonna explode

also yeah in the cover he got his dick out and the pixel art is really good might i say