I don’t think so, but it’s been a while. I know when you hit “new game” it shows four sprites for colored flames on a totally black background and then they disappear one-by-one with a repeated sound effect for each, and I can’t come up with a reason why that wouldn’t be easier to render than any part of the gameplay but that’s the one place where I was guaranteed to notice, the flame sprites start moving especially slowly and sometimes even lag behind the audio. Every so often I’ll give it another go to see if any updates (wine or drivers) have improved that, and at one point it did get a decent bit better but still noticeable and still led to some latency in actual gameplay here and there, so I just use that as my test for if it’s playable for me yet.

For so many games wine works amazingly well, just looking at the graphics I find it so weird it chooses to crap out on this one.

Carrion is probably only like ten hours worth of gameplay, but it’s absolutely spectacular and if it had been significantly longer I think it might have started to get stale rather than being truly memorable. You play as an amorphous monster and start the game by escaping from your containment tank at a research facility. The core mechanics are barely explained to the player, if at all, so each new game mechanic is introduced alongside a puzzle that more or less amounts to understanding how to apply it in-game. I’m aware there are console versions of this game too, but the fluid feel of how your creature moves is such a huge part of enjoying the game that I have a lot of trouble imagining a gamepad could get that down anywhere near as well as using the mouse+keyboard. I love the touch that you grow with higher hp and movement becomes much more cumbersome, but you can get back to the more fluid movement by shedding hp. Also the map design is great, it’s highly nonlinear and very easy to get lost. The only actual complaint I have is I didn’t like hearing all the terrified screams from the researchers, but it’s hard for me to picture a way around that without breaking the immersion.

Eastward is pixel graphics but when I tried it with wine I had some minor framerate issues, it can handle integrated graphics but how well will depend on how good your pc is. I played it on switch originally. I think the gameplay is enjoyable and done well, but it’s not the reason you play the game and is not a game for someone who skips past dialogue whenever possible. I am not that someone though, and Eastward is one of my absolute favorite games I’ve ever played. The pixel art is gorgeous, characters and npcs have personalities you get attached to, soundtrack is both great music and matches the atmosphere, it’s something special. The writing and dialogue are just wonderful, and combined with the pixel art there’s so much emotion packed into it. At times it is uplifting and heartwarming, at other times unsettling and creepy. The change in tone when stumbling upon the factory in Greenberg caught me completely off-guard, just amazing. Only complaint was I spent most of the game excited to find out how they would tie all the loose-ends together and that never happened, there was a lot more left up to interpretation than I was expecting, which made the ending a massive disappointment for me.

Fallow is another short game that I personally really liked even though I didn’t really understand it. There’s not even a lot of gameplay in it, it creates a beautifully creepy atmosphere and the game is more or less that you sit in that and absorb it. It was an experience of observing a different world and trying to comprehend how that world works. I can’t even tell if it was intentional that I didn’t get it or if I’m just bad at media interpretation, but there’s emotion in it either way.

Monster Sanctuary is a monster-taming game with a wholly uninspired story and mediocre pixel art, and both those issues made me give up on it after just a couple hours initially, but when I eventually gave it a second chance the gameplay itself is really engaging and well-designed. It’s something I’ve come back to a few times since then just because of that. There’s a lot of depth to it and it’s fun to experiment with.

Animal Well seems right up my alley but running on wine my cpu inexplicably struggles way more than games with similar graphics. The performance issues are preventing me from getting deep into it.

Absolutely loved those games. I never played all the way through 2, but I beat the first game, including wobblewok and milked 3 for more playtime than anyone should reasonably put into any videogame. I am still mourning the loss of ykw3 pvp. It was almost dead for basically the full run, but it was such good shit that I’d just hop on and leave it searching for a battle and do something else and usually someone else would get on an hour or so later. Might have been the most fun I’ve had playing any game. I hit S+ but was stuck there for the last couple years before nintendo shut down the pvp. I almost 100%ed that game, the only things I couldn’t get done were getting to S++ on ranked battles, getting the last orignyan voice that was a prize for reaching S++, and getting the trophy for finding pandanoko or starry noko in the VIP room (very rare streetpass, almost impossible to get legitimately without living in downtown Tokyo to be nearby a lot of people who have the game).

Here’s the hexbear post I made on yo-kai a year ago.

I loved how weird Hazy Lane was, amazing feature. I think the infinite tunnel in 2 was essentially the same thing, but I never did much of that one.

Also one time I was trying to look up how a game mechanic worked and I stumbled on a twitter post that was like five months old about being really impressed with a creative strategy someone used in pvp and they gave a screenshot of my profile and finding that might be the biggest high I’ve ever gotten from a video game.

Will you all stop bragging and just explain the damn thing?

Traffikrab is definitely a great design.

A couple years back I went through a binge of three different indie monster-tamers on my switch. I thought Cassette Beasts was the least interesting. I was engaged enough to more or less 100% it (pre-dlc), but then I dropped it and barely thought much of it afterwards.

I remember Nexomon Extinction had meh gameplay, but the artwork was pretty, and the story, characters, and dialogue were all really engaging and often funny and kept you moving. Monster Sanctuary was basically the exact opposite, where the plot was totally forgettable and the art was mediocre, but the game mechanics were really well-thought out and fun. I still come back to that one periodically. Cassette Beasts was basically in the middle of these two extremes, it did everything well, but there weren’t any aspects of the game that went far enough beyond “done well” to stand out as memorable.

I wish Eastward had made more of an attempt to tie the plot together. I spent the entire game excited to see how all the details relate and then it just ended with almost no clear explanations at all.

Good song. Murderous from the same album is really good too.

That’s why you open a window with less embarrassing porn and leave it running in the background.

Weepinbell

Not hornyposting at all when I say I need to see the american pikachu-redesign tiger with huge breasts and all the other design proposals from the american staff. Those sketches are historical artifacts and someone needs to dig them up and put them in a museum.

Somehow this album still hasn’t really clicked with me beyond the first couple minutes of this one song. There’s like a point where you switch from “I enjoy this” to “I understand this” and for whatever reason I made that leap for all of their first six albums (through Deliverance) and then nothing afterwards. MAYH and Blackwater Park are spectacular and “Deliverance” is one of the best metal songs of all time.

Damn it seems kind of weird that people are upset over this one thing in particular, but on the other hand I can’t think of any good examples of video games that were not historically accurate and no one got upset so it’s probably pretty normal and also I think the fact that the year of high school I missed was the one where history class is devoted to samurai means I don’t have a good handle on how much this inaccuracy destroys the immersion for a normal person.

Huge discography so I definitely haven’t heard all of their stuff, but Brute is my favorite KMFDM.

I’m guessing this game is just trending in general but I literally found out about the assassination attempt when I saw a torrent site put this on freeleech like an hour after the news.