Gran Turismo 4: I played gt3 a bunch as a kid, and having recently figured out how to play PlayStation 2 games by entirely legal means, i wanted to finally upgrade.
I thought I was good at Gran Turismo, but I now remember that what I always did in GT3 was immediately do the easy speedway endurance event that gave you the Formula 1 car that let you break every race. GT4, for a while, expects you to actually drive good. This is hard! You have to brake to go around corners! Who does that??
Anyway I was making no headway in any of the races I could enter and getting real mad at videogames. But it turns out there is a supercar you can unlock early with a little Persistence. and now I no longer need to think. Don't gotta worry about crashing into every hairpin when you're doing 200mph between corners.
I like that the license tests at one point are going to expect me to drive around the entire fucking Nürburgring without crashing. I don't think so, GT4.
Uru: Ages Beyond Myst: I have noticed that Myst seems to be the official videogame of Cohost, and it inspired me to keep playing through all the Myst games, a project I started a couple of years ago. Myst 1 is charming; Riven is finely-crafted and still looks fantastic; Myst 3 has some cool locations and Brad Dourif. Uru was up next.
Uru is very cool and interesting! I like that it digs into the colonialism themes that were there in the first Myst, although i think maybe it could dig a little deeper. It's also very janky! This is because it is a 3D puzzle-platformer with tank controls, either a first-person camera or a third-person camera with fixed perspectives in random locations (as the player chooses; neither are 100% helpful), and a physics engine that is tied to the framerate, such that if you are playing on modern hardware, your guy will occasionally fall through the platform you want to land on. Very much a product of its time, in terms of gameplay, when devs were still working out how best to let players move through 3D spaces.
I was writing a longer post about Uru which i may still post (I still have two expansion packs to play), but this about covers it, really. Cool game.
Anchorhead: Very slowly working through this big classic text adventure for the first time. It's very good so far, although I know enough about the central mystery to know that I can't recommend it without some major content warnings that would by their very presence spoil the mystery. I can't yet comment on how it deals with the whole Baggage that comes with Lovecraft stuff, but so far it seems much more daring and much less racist.
The actual gameplay is smoother than I expected. I won't say i'm a seasoned text adventurer, but I think I'm lightly salted at least. I know enough to look in places that a less experienced player might not check at first, so I think I've found a few important and revealing documents before I'm supposed to. This is fine because it makes me feel clever. I am aware that the game gets much rougher later on and that I might be able to make the game unwinnable if I'm not careful right now. This is why i have kept 84 save files and counting.
(btw I'm playing the original freeware version, but I may buy the recent illustrated edition when I can, even if I won't replay the game for a while. I like Michael Gentry's product and I want 'em to have a little walkin' around money)
Secret of Mana: Been playing the Switch rerelease of this, though I haven't touched it in a while (writing this to shame myself into going back to it). I think I'm in the early midgame. This is the first time I've played this, though I used to watch my brother rent it from blockbuster and play the first bit I think.
It is, of course, rather good - there's a reason why it's so beloved. But what I did play as a kid was Secret of Evermore, the weird American B-movie-themed game made with the same engine, and I think I strongly prefer Evermore so far! I think Evermore looks prettier, its signposting is a lot clearer, I prefer its boss design (although Mana's Wall Face boss was an absolute banger), and I'm getting a little annoyed with the janky AI in Mana in a way I don't recall feeling in Evermore. Maybe it's just the childhood nostalgia talking; maybe it's an unfair comparison since Evermore was released much later when devs probably had a better idea of how to use the SNES.
Still, though, I am liking Mana. It's still very playable, and it's got charm in spades. Obsessed with the way the merchants move. Why do they do that. I love it