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You can tell this one came out only a year after its predecessor, as Breath of Fire II is very similar to the series originator from 1993. This game improves on the first one in many ways: Better visuals, better music, better story and writing. And yet it doesn't quite reach for the top of its genre. A horrid encounter rate unfortunately drags this one down to another exercise in patience.

After a rough start with teaching myself game programming I spent many hours of 2017 and 2018 working on a Tohou clone based on this tutorial. Eventually I made it to the point where I could almost call the program a game: you could move a sprite, shoot bullets, destroy enemies that shoot their own bullets and so on. But there was a problem: this was my first C program that incorporated more than a main function, so my general programming skills with the language were really shallow at the time. Naturally my codebase reflected that. Working with the code I had written felt far from pleasant, especially because I had locked myself in. Had I continued working on the game without rewriting the entire thing there would have been little room for me to try out new things and more advanced concepts. So I started over with the goal to write a more general engine that I could use as the basis for future projects as well. That was back in march. Setting up the basics (input handling, rendering, framerate control etc.) took me a while, but now I finally reached the point where I could write a new scene management system. Here's the main portion of my old main() function:

It's april 2019 and a Sega Saturn controller fresh from the manufacture line makes it onto the market. Not an april fools joke. Disregarding that I may be wasting my money on a subpar junk controller I actually preordered this one. Just in case it's good, making sure I don't miss out. Now having tested this piece of modern retro hardware for a good hour there's nothing in the way of the me giving this a seal of approval.

For a 1993 release on the Super Nintendo the original Breath of Fire plays surprisingly archaic. The plot is simple to the point - the game's silent protagonist embarks on a journey to rescue his sister and save the world from evil emperor Zorgon. The journey itself consists mostly of sub plots. To be honest I forgot about Ryu's sister halfway through the game because it never mentions her again until the last act. Dialogue and character developments are kept to a minimum, and while the game's story elements have some neat moments it's hard to stay interested in the shallow story as a whole.

This should do...

Finally released roughly 4 years after the project got funded on Kickstarter Koji Igarashi's latest gothic action RPG is now on sale. I expected a classic Metroidvania game, hoped for a very good one and feared a terrible mess. The result has something of all these.

Although you can call me a fan of Atlus games, having played a good number of their games, this one went right past my radar. I only learned of this games' existance through accident while browsing an online import game store in 2016. The title and cover immediately appealed to me, and realizing it was a game produced by Atlus I bought it without thinking twice (the condition was great and it was only 20 bucks). When I got the game I shelved it, expecting it to be extraordinarily text heavy - and at the time I felt I should come back to this when I had improved my japanese - in the end it took me until 2019 to find the time to actually play it because I kept prioritizing fresh releases over my backlog. It turned out there was no reason to worry about the amount of text in Stella Deus, the game has comparatively few lines of text for an RPG.

Not many new announcements this year. Might just feel that way because nearly everything gets leaked these days of course. Microsoft showed lots of games, but none of them would convince me to purchase an X-Box. I doubt the new console can really display native 4K-HD 120FPS, and even if it could the "wow-effect" would be lost after a couple of hours anyways and games would play much like they did on 7th and 8th gen consoles. So I'm all "whatever" on all things Microsoft this time (but that's my usual reaction there).

Hee ho

Fixed. Textures also working.