What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[LibraryOgre]

Slightly abbreviated the main title to fit the rest in.

Incidentally, I now expect everyone to address me as "Eternal Champion", as dictated by Uriel Septim VII, Emperor of Tamriel.

[MCerberus]

This is the most obscure reference I think I've ever convinced anyone was a good idea.

[Razade]

Picked up Persona 5 Royal. Haven't touched it yet, of course, because of work and other projects but looking forward to it. Haven't made any ground on the end of Trials of Mana either for the same reason. Hoping next week I can actually use my weekend to dig into these games.

[Rynjin]

This is the most obscure reference I think I've ever convinced anyone was a good idea.

Mind explaining the joke?

[Eldan]

I assumed it's the movie title "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"?

[Kantaki]

Playing Animal Crossing New Horizons.
The island life is oddly relaxing, considering I'm running around doing stuff the whole time.

[Resileaf]

After having completed a campaign on hard with every playable faction in Rome: Total War, I've moved on to do the same in the Barbarian Invasion expansion.

[MCerberus]

I assumed it's the movie title "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"?

Folklore in Missouri says that quote originated from a newspaper (so don't believe it), and it was a novel before a movie.

[Starbuck_II]

Blackguards 2:
The hardest missions so far are Escaping after meeting the dwarf (enemies keep pouring in and you supposed to run) and so far fighting the Druid boss.
Bought it previously, but never played till now during home for a while.

Wish they made conditions for victory/failure clear, they don't tell you there is a turn limit for running away.
Shadow Clone is best spell every (if your mage is archer/warrior sub) because the clone is a meatshield and can fight if you can (seems to hit harder since your likely slide some points of your weapon skill slider to defense, they seem all offense).

FF7 Remake:
I play sporadically. Love the fighting style.
Love seeing how different and the same everything feels.

[Zevox]

So, I started up playing Sekiro. It's... frustrating, at times. There's something about the way attacks animate that feels like it's making it harder for me to judge the timing of defensive actions - or perhaps it's just that parrying is so important, and the timing it requires is really precise. Also, those attacks where you get a red symbol flashed at you throw me off - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order did the same thing, but in that game those were simply unblockable attacks you had to dodge, where in this one they could be that, or a sweeping attack you're expected to jump over, or a thrust attack you can do a special counter against. So, old habits take over and I often just dodge to the side immediately when I see that, but that just gets me hit when it's the sweeping attack, which it often seems to be in this early part of the game.

Still, I guess I'm starting to get the hang of it. It took me probably a half-dozen or more tries to beat the first mini-boss of the game, but I just faced what I think is the first real boss (big guy on a horse protecting the castle gates) and beat him on the first try. ...and then I proceeded to take three tries to beat a mini-boss that comes shortly after him, the flaming bulll, so yeah, no getting cocky.

Honestly, a lot of the time, it feels more like a stealth game than an action game. You can get free one-shot kills on enemies you sneak up on, and combat is very dangerous, with even easy enemies being deadly in large numbers, so you're very incentivized to do that a lot. Which is not exactly what I was hoping for out of the game, but oh well. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, being as it's from the makers of Dark Souls - they seem to like making games where cautious play is the way to go if you want to win.

Actually, between all the stealth and the grappling hook arm that gets all kinds of attachments (which is kind of cool at least), the game kind of reminds me of a Batman: Arkham game, but with swords. And deadlier enemies.

[Anteros]

So, I started up playing Sekiro. It's... frustrating, at times. There's something about the way attacks animate that feels like it's making it harder for me to judge the timing of defensive actions - or perhaps it's just that parrying is so important, and the timing it requires is really precise. Also, those attacks where you get a red symbol flashed at you throw me off - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order did the same thing, but in that game those were simply unblockable attacks you had to dodge, where in this one they could be that, or a sweeping attack you're expected to jump over, or a thrust attack you can do a special counter against. So, old habits take over and I often just dodge to the side immediately when I see that, but that just gets me hit when it's the sweeping attack, which it often seems to be in this early part of the game.

Still, I guess I'm starting to get the hang of it. It took me probably a half-dozen or more tries to beat the first mini-boss of the game, but I just faced what I think is the first real boss (big guy on a horse protecting the castle gates) and beat him on the first try. ...and then I proceeded to take three tries to beat a mini-boss that comes shortly after him, the flaming bulll, so yeah, no getting cocky.

Honestly, a lot of the time, it feels more like a stealth game than an action game. You can get free one-shot kills on enemies you sneak up on, and combat is very dangerous, with even easy enemies being deadly in large numbers, so you're very incentivized to do that a lot. Which is not exactly what I was hoping for out of the game, but oh well. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, being as it's from the makers of Dark Souls - they seem to like making games where cautious play is the way to go if you want to win.

Actually, between all the stealth and the grappling hook arm that gets all kinds of attachments (which is kind of cool at least), the game kind of reminds me of a Batman: Arkham game, but with swords. And deadlier enemies.

Yeah, I found the bull to be a lot harder than the horse boss. I died a lot more than 3 times to him on my first run too, so you're doing better than I did. The thing about Sekiro is that it basically plays the opposite of a normal Souls game so your instincts play against you. It takes some getting used to. The best thing to do in any fight is always to close with the opponent and strike them or parry. As opposed to a Souls game where you normally want to dodge and wait for a window to hit, dodging is almost always the wrong decision in Sekiro. Even if dodging works you're letting the enemy refill their posture, where parrying, jumping, or mikiri countering continues to build it.


FF7 Remake:
I play sporadically. Love the fighting style.
Love seeing how different and the same everything feels.

I'm trying to like it, but I'm having a hard time getting invested. I like the combat, but the story pacing feels really slow. You can absolutely tell that they stretched 5 hours of content into 40. It's well done, and very polished, but there's really only so far you can stretch that story out before I get bored.

[tonberrian]

Just had the easiest Avenger Defense mission in XCOM 2 I've ever experienced. For one thing i've been grinding away for a while with the best of everything trying to get the alien rulers to finally die, so my soldiers are all amazing, but apparently the turrets have Squadsight and two attacks per round (thanks to the engineer)? Which made it hilarious when the Archon King showed up - he was so far away he couldn't see anyone, but my Reaper snuck up to the pillar and saw him. Now he couldn't see the Turrets, and ruler reactions no longer trigger if the ruler can't see the actor, so he only moved on successful shots against him, creeping across from the very back corner of the map as the turrets ground his health to bits. He did retreat again, but now he's got less than a quarter of his health and he didn't even attack this time. And the turrets and a sharpshooter made quick work of the spike as well.

It was weird though that it even happened. I did do the Guerrilla Op that was supposed to stop the UFO from tracking me, and I never got anything to say that the dark event happened, just Central telling me there was a UFO out there...

[Silverraptor]

Just had the easiest Avenger Defense mission in XCOM 2 I've ever experienced. For one thing i've been grinding away for a while with the best of everything trying to get the alien rulers to finally die, so my soldiers are all amazing, but apparently the turrets have Squadsight and two attacks per round (thanks to the engineer)? Which made it hilarious when the Archon King showed up - he was so far away he couldn't see anyone, but my Reaper snuck up to the pillar and saw him. Now he couldn't see the Turrets, and ruler reactions no longer trigger if the ruler can't see the actor, so he only moved on successful shots against him, creeping across from the very back corner of the map as the turrets ground his health to bits. He did retreat again, but now he's got less than a quarter of his health and he didn't even attack this time. And the turrets and a sharpshooter made quick work of the spike as well.

It was weird though that it even happened. I did do the Guerrilla Op that was supposed to stop the UFO from tracking me, and I never got anything to say that the dark event happened, just Central telling me there was a UFO out there...

My Avenger defense mission was over an hour of reinforcements being brought in every turn, having me dispatch them and then a new wave of reinforcements come in. So I was essentially stuck in place until I finally got a lucky sight on the spike to snipe it. I even recorded and posted the whole mission. That sure was a grind...

[Anteros]

Well, my 0 death run of Sekiro was a failure. I died on the second fight against Father Owl. I couldn't remember the proper counter to his firecrackers until it was too late.

Oh well. I'll go ahead and finish the game. Maybe I'll go for another 0 death run at some point in the future.

[Erloas]

Well they just added Mechwarrior 5 to MS Gamepass so I'm installing that now. But I'm so not used to new games and how much space they take up, my SSD is practically full already. I should pick up another, but they seem to have went up in price since I bought mine 6 months ago.

[Sermil]

I'm playing Kingdom Rush, the old tower defense game, on PC. Weird for me since I tend to go for the long, involved, thoughtful games. Even weirder 'cause I'm playing on the easiest difficulty level, which isn't something I usually do. But sometimes, you just need to turn your brain off and watch things explode a lot.

[warty goblin]

Well they just added Mechwarrior 5 to MS Gamepass so I'm installing that now. But I'm so not used to new games and how much space they take up, my SSD is practically full already. I should pick up another, but they seem to have went up in price since I bought mine 6 months ago.

Mechwarrior 5 is a game I mostly really like. Story's that perfect videogame combination of paper thin and completely unobtrusive, some merciful human being in the interface department decided to let you ignore the giant, exquisitely rendered hanger with different stations for everything, and just let you do 99% of what you want to do by going straight to the menu, and stuff blow up real good. It sort of ends up feeling like Mount and Blade, except you control a strange cross between a tank and a battleship, and quite frequently get to walk through buildings. Only real downside is that it probably goes too long, and there isn't really enough mission variety to support that length. Getting new mechs is great fun, and the random mission generator is one of the better exemplars of its type, but boy are there a lot of missions to grind through so you can get the necessary cash. Either that or I just suck.

Just don't do the defense missions. The game is at its best when you are blowing everything up; as such, keeping the bad people from blowing stuff up is an unnatural perversion. Base destruction missions are a blast, particularly once you figure out you can hit buildings from way outside reticule range, so long as you know how to angle your shots. Nothing like delivering high explosive death from 14km away.

[Triaxx]

I'm waiting for the rest of my new PC to show up before giving MW5 another try. I keep getting sucked back into Battletech at the moment to fulfill my giant robot stomping, but MW5 is definitely waiting.

Of course so is X4:Foundations a game I've been ready to play for a while, that my PC just can't quite keep running. 2GB VRAM sounds excessive until it's not.

[Brookshw]

Trials of Mana, I remember the originally fondly and look forward to the nostalgia.

[warty goblin]

Had another fun morning messing around in Gears Tactics. The game does an exquisite job of making the tactical battles feel juuust this side of completely overwhelming. In part this is because I'm more used to XCOM, where having 10 enemies on screen is a complete death sentence, whereas in Gears its Tuesday morning as normal. But the game also just plain throws stuff at you constantly; we're talking entire enemy squads dropping in as reinforcements every other turn or so, so if you aren't killing 4+ enemies per turn, you're totally hosed.

Fortunately there's heavies camping out on overwatch. With a bit of careful placement, you can injure/interrupt/kill 3+ enemies in a single turn. It's a thing of beauty.

[Zevox]

@ Anteros - Don't worry about spoilers for Sekiro on my account. It doesn't exactly seem like a game where the story is all that important. Though I do at least appreciate that it has a clearer narrative than the Dark Souls games (and what I played of Bloodborne), so I'm not just wandering around fighting with no idea why my character is doing that in-game.

Anyway, progress report there: going well. I've taken down a couple more major bosses: Lady Butterfly and Genchiro. Lady Butterfly was a good fight, but only took three tries to handle, not that tough. Genchiro was considerably harder and I did not count how many tries it took - definitely double-digits though. Surprised me that the bastard actually needed three deathblows to finish off, though ironically, I feel like his last phase was easier than his second. He did kill me a couple of times where I got there, but eventually I finished him pretty quickly in that phase (on the third or fourth time getting to it I think) after getting the hang of the Lightning Counter thing, which is crazy effective on him. Actually, it was only my second try before I started to get through his first deathblow, so it really was that second one that gave me a lot of trouble I guess. And that started to get easier after I figured out the option select (to use a fighting game term) to beat both his thrust and sweep follow-ups to the jump attack: his the dodge button immediately as if to mabari counter, and it'll catch the thrust if he does that, but the sweep is slow enough that the dodge will end in time for you to jump it if he's not doing the thrust. Wish the bastard would lay off the bow though, that thing was probably the biggest problem I had fighting him overall, with how many different timings he has to fire it, and the fact that parrying its shots doesn't affect his posture at all, so he buys himself time to recover when he does it.

Anyway, damn good fight, liked that one.

[Antonok]

I got extremely lucky yesterday that the square enix store still had Dragon Quest XI on sale for half off (missed the steam sale) so that's likely to consume the next couple weeks.

Not very far yet and taking my time with it. Haven't played a DQ game in years so want to take it slow and enjoy it.

[Anteros]

@ Anteros - Don't worry about spoilers for Sekiro on my account. It doesn't exactly seem like a game where the story is all that important. Though I do at least appreciate that it has a clearer narrative than the Dark Souls games (and what I played of Bloodborne), so I'm not just wandering around fighting with no idea why my character is doing that in-game.

Anyway, progress report there: going well. I've taken down a couple more major bosses: Lady Butterfly and Genchiro. Lady Butterfly was a good fight, but only took three tries to handle, not that tough. Genchiro was considerably harder and I did not count how many tries it took - definitely double-digits though. Surprised me that the bastard actually needed three deathblows to finish off, though ironically, I feel like his last phase was easier than his second. He did kill me a couple of times where I got there, but eventually I finished him pretty quickly in that phase (on the third or fourth time getting to it I think) after getting the hang of the Lightning Counter thing, which is crazy effective on him. Actually, it was only my second try before I started to get through his first deathblow, so it really was that second one that gave me a lot of trouble I guess. And that started to get easier after I figured out the option select (to use a fighting game term) to beat both his thrust and sweep follow-ups to the jump attack: his the dodge button immediately as if to mabari counter, and it'll catch the thrust if he does that, but the sweep is slow enough that the dodge will end in time for you to jump it if he's not doing the thrust. Wish the bastard would lay off the bow though, that thing was probably the biggest problem I had fighting him overall, with how many different timings he has to fire it, and the fact that parrying its shots doesn't affect his posture at all, so he buys himself time to recover when he does it.

Anyway, damn good fight, liked that one.

That's interesting. Most people I know had a far harder time with Butterfly than Genichiro. I personally think he's the easiest boss. Mostly because Genichiro is so ridiculously punishable once you have his combos down. His long combo into a sweep is basically suicide by the time I've parried it, jumped on him, and thrown an ichimonji double after the jump. It fills the whole bar. I'm interested in what you think of the other bosses.

Since you don't care about spoilers, I'll tell you theres 4 possible endings total. The point of no return for unlocking certain endings is when you beat the boss to get the dragon's tears. When you start seeing a lot of lightning you're there, so make sure you have everything done before you beat it. You can miss a whole boss and 2 mini bosses if you don't eavesdrop on certain people. There's also a missable optional boss at the very end of the game.

[Rodin]

I'm another that had a far harder time with Genichiro than Butterfly. I think this is because Genichiro is a "final exam" kind of boss. If you've absorbed what the game is trying to tell you about how to play he becomes easy. If you don't, well, here's your chance to learn. He's the gatekeeper to much scarier bosses later in the game.

His third phase is definitely easier than his second. I took this to be deliberate - he's a bit unhinged at that point and has become reckless with his attacks. It makes him more dangerous if you just scraped through the second phase but way easier if you already had his patterns down.

[Zevox]

That's interesting. Most people I know had a far harder time with Butterfly than Genichiro. I personally think he's the easiest boss. Mostly because Genichiro is so ridiculously punishable once you have his combos down. His long combo into a sweep is basically suicide by the time I've parried it, jumped on him, and thrown an ichimonji double after the jump. It fills the whole bar. I'm interested in what you think of the other bosses.

Since you don't care about spoilers, I'll tell you theres 4 possible endings total. The point of no return for unlocking certain endings is when you beat the boss to get the dragon's tears. When you start seeing a lot of lightning you're there, so make sure you have everything done before you beat it. You can miss a whole boss and 2 mini bosses if you don't eavesdrop on certain people. There's also a missable optional boss at the very end of the game.
Really? My understanding was that Genichiro is one of, if not the, most infamous boss of the game. As someone who hadn't played it I'd nonetheless seen people talk online about how hard he was by name, whereas, aside from the final boss, I don't know if I ever saw other specific bosses mentioned, just the game's difficulty in general.

And by "long combo into a sweep" you mean that ~7 or 8 hit sequence he does that ends in a rather delayed final attack? (Last attack didn't look like a sweep to me, more like an uppercut-style slash.) Parrying most or all of that certainly was one of the ways I built a lot of posture damage on him, but even a few of those didn't fill his bar completely, and it took a number of tries to get all of those in a row down. (Also, don't know what an "ichimonji double" is, nor why you'd jump on him there - aside from sweeps and to Lightning Counter, I haven't really used jumping in combat so far.) If he'd ever done several of those in a row it would've been easier, but after dealing with that he tended to start using his bow again, which as I mentioned was kind of a problem for me.

As for Lady Butterfly, the big thing that probably made her a lot easier is that she has a glaring weakness to shuriken, since she jumps around so much. Easy to knock her out of the skies with those for big posture damage and an opening to strike her a couple of times for free. Becomes harder to do so in part 2 when she's conjuring those spirits, though, which was why it took me a few tries to get her.

[Lord Raziere]

well Genichiro and Butterfly were both hard and took many deaths to take down for me, but I would say Genichiro is harder, because Butterfly doesn't have his mix-up game that he has going on, Butterfly can be knocked down off perches with shuriken, and generally as long as you keep running in circles around Butterfly and hitting her, you will probably win.

with Genichiro, its more complex and you have to constantly parry more while mixing it up with other ways to counter, plus the third phase despite its ease can still kill you if your tired from the other two. I know that Genichiro was one of the hardest fights in a videogame I ever faced and made feel tired and victorious afterwards while Butterfly while hard got predictable enough that I figured out a method that consistently works. I can't say the same for Genichiro, my victory over him was probably half luck and adrenaline while I was in the zone.

[Cespenar]

I think a big difference between people could be that Butterfly is accessible very early on, and for a wide period of time; while upon reaching Genichiro you're almost guaranteed to have a certain amount of in-game experience, along with other more tangible bonuses.

For example, I sorta got spoiled by a friend that Butterfly was a pretty tough boss, so I flat out didn't try it until I got far into the game. As a result, beat her in far less tries than I beat Genichiro. If I had done it the other way, I suspect I'd have had completely the opposite results.

[Lord Raziere]

No I beat Butterfly before I beat Genichiro. he is harder, even with more upgrades, those don't matter as much as people think.

[zlefin]

This is the most obscure reference I think I've ever convinced anyone was a good idea.

what's it a reference to?


might as well say something else on topic. Finally won a game of ftl, but I'd mostly stopped playing and it was jsut one last game that was going very well.
Was playing ToME, but been getting out of it as I feel I've largely played it out.

reminds me, I gotta get back to all those VasantJ minigames (a long series of funny online games).

[Zevox]

Fair bit of Sekiro progress today. Went through the mountain temple, defeated the four monkeys "boss fight" (does it even qualify as a boss? The game treats it like one, but it sure doesn't feel like one...) and got the Mortal Blade. Then went down into the Sunken Valley and beat the Giant Ape - that one took a couple of tries, but entirely for his first phase. His attacks in that phase are so erratic and fast that parrying them was almost impossible, and he's so quick that keeping up offense is difficult, so it was only remembering that the Firecracker tool is very effective on animals that let me deal with that. Strangely, that second phase where he goes undead on you and starts swinging a sword was easier, and I beat that in one try - albeit barely, as I was out of healing by the time that I did and was expecting to need another try.

Left off at the start of the Ashina Depths (just past the giant underground snake), so I guess that's up next.

[Anteros]

Really? My understanding was that Genichiro is one of, if not the, most infamous boss of the game. As someone who hadn't played it I'd nonetheless seen people talk online about how hard he was by name, whereas, aside from the final boss, I don't know if I ever saw other specific bosses mentioned, just the game's difficulty in general.

And by "long combo into a sweep" you mean that ~7 or 8 hit sequence he does that ends in a rather delayed final attack? (Last attack didn't look like a sweep to me, more like an uppercut-style slash.) Parrying most or all of that certainly was one of the ways I built a lot of posture damage on him, but even a few of those didn't fill his bar completely, and it took a number of tries to get all of those in a row down. (Also, don't know what an "ichimonji double" is, nor why you'd jump on him there - aside from sweeps and to Lightning Counter, I haven't really used jumping in combat so far.) If he'd ever done several of those in a row it would've been easier, but after dealing with that he tended to start using his bow again, which as I mentioned was kind of a problem for me.

As for Lady Butterfly, the big thing that probably made her a lot easier is that she has a glaring weakness to shuriken, since she jumps around so much. Easy to knock her out of the skies with those for big posture damage and an opening to strike her a couple of times for free. Becomes harder to do so in part 2 when she's conjuring those spirits, though, which was why it took me a few tries to get her.

I think the main reason my friends and I had such an issue with Butterfly is the fact that we fought her with no prayer beads and 2 heal charges. You pretty much have to be perfect. Despite Raziere saying it doesn't matter, you can basically quadruple your damage and increase your life by almost 10x by the end of the game. It makes a huge difference when you fight her.

Ichimonji double is a sword technique you can get when you unlock the ashina skill tree by doing the rat quest for an npc near where you fight the horse boss. It's widely considered to be the best skill tree in the game, so it's worth going back for if you missed it.

You jump on enemies during their sweep attacks for enormous posture damage. This is why Genichiro is so easy once you learn him because it's really easy to bait out his thrust or sweep attacks. If you parry every hit of his long combo he will always follow up with one of them. I can literally kill him in under 15 seconds per life bar consistently.

I also agree that the first phase of the ape is a lot harder than the second. Outside of getting surprised by his scream attack the first time you shouldn't really die to phase 2. He's ridiculously easy to parry, and he doesn't do his run and grab attack with the ridiculous hitbox.

[Zevox]

I think the main reason my friends and I had such an issue with Butterfly is the fact that we fought her with no prayer beads and 2 heal charges. You pretty much have to be perfect. Despite Raziere saying it doesn't matter, you can basically quadruple your damage and increase your life by almost 10x by the end of the game. It makes a huge difference when you fight her.
Maybe. I didn't have much more than that, though - just one prayer bead necklace and one attack up from the horseman boss (forget how many healing gord uses I had).


Ichimonji double is a sword technique you can get when you unlock the ashina skill tree by doing the rat quest for an npc near where you fight the horse boss. It's widely considered to be the best skill tree in the game, so it's worth going back for if you missed it.
Oh, no, I've got that skill tree. I've mostly used it for the passives, though - pretty sure it's the one that gave me the passives that let me heal and recover posture when I get a deathblow, which are probably the best upgrades I've bought. I haven't used the special moves (and only bought the one that you have to buy to get anything else from the tree). My special move of choice for most of the game has been the leaping strike from the first skill tree. It may be no stinger (bit on the slow side and all), but an advancing strike like that is still pretty handy.


You jump on enemies during their sweep attacks for enormous posture damage. This is why Genichiro is so easy once you learn him because it's really easy to bait out his thrust or sweep attacks. If you parry every hit of his long combo he will always follow up with one of them. I can literally kill him in under 15 seconds per life bar consistently.
Really? Huh, now I'm wondering if the game mentioned that when it talked about sweeps back at the start and I missed the "jump on them" part, or if it really just said to jump the attack and didn't mention that part. Because I had no idea that would do anything.

Though I think that either you're misremembering when he does his red attacks, or maybe he changes that on higher difficulties/New Game+ or something, because he never did those are the long combo sequence for me. They were always a follow-up to his jump attack.

[Anteros]

Maybe. I didn't have much more than that, though - just one prayer bead necklace and one attack up from the horseman boss (forget how many healing gord uses I had).


Oh, no, I've got that skill tree. I've mostly used it for the passives, though - pretty sure it's the one that gave me the passives that let me heal and recover posture when I get a deathblow, which are probably the best upgrades I've bought. I haven't used the special moves (and only bought the one that you have to buy to get anything else from the tree). My special move of choice for most of the game has been the leaping strike from the first skill tree. It may be no stinger (bit on the slow side and all), but an advancing strike like that is still pretty handy.


Really? Huh, now I'm wondering if the game mentioned that when it talked about sweeps back at the start and I missed the "jump on them" part, or if it really just said to jump the attack and didn't mention that part. Because I had no idea that would do anything.

Though I think that either you're misremembering when he does his red attacks, or maybe he changes that on higher difficulties/New Game+ or something, because he never did those are the long combo sequence for me. They were always a follow-up to his jump attack.

What he does is based on how much of his pattern you parry. If you parry every single hit (not block) he will do a red attack, which gives you a great chance to damage him. Lots of bosses in the game offer high risk/high reward situations like that as a reward for parrying over blocking.

Also, something I don't think the game tells you. Your posture will never break on a parry, even if it's full.

[Zevox]

What he does is based on how much of his pattern you parry. If you parry every single hit (not block) he will do a red attack, which gives you a great chance to damage him. Lots of bosses in the game offer high risk/high reward situations like that as a reward for parrying over blocking.

Also, something I don't think the game tells you. Your posture will never break on a parry, even if it's full.
Huh - guess I never full parried the whole sequence, then. Thought I must have somewhere in there, it felt like I was after a certain point, but it can be hard to tell blocks from parries sometimes, so I guess I must've been blocking one at some point.

And yeah, I kind of figured that last part. I don't know if that mini-boss before Genichiro would even be able beatable if that weren't the case - I actually took way more tries fighting him than I probably should have because I saw how much posture damage he was doing even on deflects and thought there must be something else I'm supposed to do against him, since at the time I didn't think deflect would prevent posture break. Wound up just going back to deflecting as much as possible after everything else was obviously failing, and that of course worked after a few tries.

Progress today: beat the second fight with the giant/undead ape... and his friend, annoyingly enough. Lucky thing that one is a lot weaker and less aggressive than the first form of the original fight, otherwise I don't know if that 2-on-1 would have been possible. Took 3 tries again, seems to be a recurring number for me against major bosses that aren't Genichiro or the horseman. Saved at the statue after the house where I killed a guy who was filling the area with mist... I really don't know why they even made him take two deathblows, since he literally did not put up a fight at all. Might as well have let the sneak attack just do him in and not pretend he was a boss.

Also, god do I hate those shadowy bird-men enemies. Acrobatic shuriken-spamming bastards...

[Cygnia]

So, finally starting "Gris" -- and it took me a while to figure out the controls on my PC. Gorgeous art work, loving the music so far.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

I've been playing some Rocket League, which is nice because it's 4 person local, letting my whole family play at once on the same device.

Haven't really had time for much with end of the semester and finals, but once that's done I'm going back to Sekiro and Devil May Cry 5, the last two games I was playing. I've barely even started Sekiro, but I've beaten DMC V on the harder of the two starting difficulties. I have to say, I really hate the auto-targeting system V has; I much preferred how the DMC reboot let you control the direction of distance-covering moves with the analog stick instead of always shooting you towards either the enemy you were already attacking or the closest enemy (because that's what I want when activating a big lunge; to be right next to where I started:smallannoyed:).

Maybe I'll also finish up Subnautica. I love the game, but I've had recurring problems with the game losing my saves. Most recently, it apparently had some sort of connection problem when booting up and wasn't displaying my saved game at all, which was... disheartening. I don't think I love the game enough to play through the entire thing again with no guarantee that it won't lose all my progress a few hours from beating it. But hey, maybe it'll be there the next time I boot it up. Also, my sister's played through to even further than I had (which is how I know I'm so close to the endgame) and hasn't had any problems with lost progress, so I don't think it's a widespread phenomenon; technology just hates me sometimes.

[Anteros]

I've been playing some Rocket League, which is nice because it's 4 person local, letting my whole family play at once on the same device.

Haven't really had time for much with end of the semester and finals, but once that's done I'm going back to Sekiro and Devil May Cry 5, the last two games I was playing. I've barely even started Sekiro, but I've beaten DMC V on the harder of the two starting difficulties. I have to say, I really hate the auto-targeting system V has; I much preferred how the DMC reboot let you control the direction of distance-covering moves with the analog stick instead of always shooting you towards either the enemy you were already attacking or the closest enemy (because that's what I want when activating a big lunge; to be right next to where I started:smallannoyed:).

Maybe I'll also finish up Subnautica. I love the game, but I've had recurring problems with the game losing my saves. Most recently, it apparently had some sort of connection problem when booting up and wasn't displaying my saved game at all, which was... disheartening. I don't think I love the game enough to play through the entire thing again with no guarantee that it won't lose all my progress a few hours from beating it. But hey, maybe it'll be there the next time I boot it up. Also, my sister's played through to even further than I had (which is how I know I'm so close to the endgame) and hasn't had any problems with lost progress, so I don't think it's a widespread phenomenon; technology just hates me sometimes.

Are you playing Subnautica on console? It's my understanding that the console version has a problem with losing saves. The pc version is a little more stable.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Are you playing Subnautica on console? It's my understanding that the console version has a problem with losing saves. The pc version is a little more stable.

Yeah, Xbox. So was my sister, but maybe she's just lucky. I might be able to access it via PC through Windows 10, though I have no idea whether my save would actually carry over, now that I think about it...

[Eldan]

I've also played Subnautica a bit recently. I find it quite relaxing, except for those times something I can't see comes up behind me and one-shots me when I dive too deep. I suppose I'll find out how to get around that eventually.

[IthilanorStPete]

I've also played Subnautica a bit recently. I find it quite relaxing, except for those times something I can't see comes up behind me and one-shots me when I dive too deep. I suppose I'll find out how to get around that eventually.

The vehicles are probably the best protection; first the Seamoth, then the Cyclops. Also helps to know where the leviathans are so you can avoid them.

[Triaxx]

Also understanding you start in the south east of the map is handy.

[Man_Over_Game]

I've been playing a bit of Stardew Valley. I was surprised to know that there was actual combat in it! It's simple but stressful enough to be a half-way decent action portion of a Harvest Moon game.

So far, the game feels pretty fun, although there's a large number of complaints I have on it:

You can only talk to villagers once or twice in a day. Further attempts don't do anything.

There's no functional use for your pet. While they track how affectionate they are of you, and you can water their bowl for more affection, there is no reward or use for doing so from what I've come to understand.
The game doesn't give a lot of knowledge on certain plants, and has kind of a toxic way of punishing ignorance. For example, you can purchase Strawberry Seeds at the first Festival, but you're already halfway in the season by that point, and Strawberries take a while to make a profit off of, and plants die between seasons. So the only real way of using them is to buy them a full year beforehand, and that's a terrible mechanic for a player's first season.
Crafting seems quite limited.
Friendship is developed in the terrible Harvest Moon method, where you have to give gifts to people who don't care about you, until they eventually like you enough to marry you. What's worse is that the game only tells you if they like/dislike something if you've already given the item.
Villagers move around, and there's no indicator where they are through the day. This is a big problem when you have a timed quest and doors lock after a certain hour.
The controller controls are pretty terrible, as you have your directional pads and joystick be redundant, and you have two buttons to use to shuffle between tool pages (forward, back), when you only have a max of 3 tool pages to shuffle through. This wouldn't be a big deal if they had managed to include things like your map or crafting page on the controls rather than shuffling through your pause menu.
Directions are pretty poor. While the village is pretty, it has a lot of dead ends and wonky paths that are ignored by the map to make the map look functional and pretty. Just because the map shows you can go directly south doesn't actually mean you can without first going northeast to the bridge in the river, etc.


Just a bunch of dumb issues. I've been looking into mods that improve on these, but I haven't found many that actually solve problems, especially related to pets. Mostly just reskins or some extra content that someone thought was cool.

[warty goblin]

Been messing about in Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnaughts again, since I finished The Rules of the Game, Andrew Gordon's 600 page examination of the Battle of Jutland, with a lengthy detour into the weirdness of late Victorian England.

As of the last patch, they added flash fires in turrets. While their graphical damage models don't allow for ships to actually blow in half, if a flash fire reaches the magazine, it will sink the ship in spectacular fashion. The turret is launched way up into the air, and a giant blast of flame comes roaring out of the barbette. The chances of this happening are effected by your choice of propellant, as well as how much you armor your ship, so you can certainly minimize the odds of one of your ships turning into a giant naval blowtorch, but the potential is always there. In a game that's already most about things not happening (the shell not hitting, the ship not sinking) this adds another exciting layer of non-event, punctuated by a n occasional and very, very dramatic event.

[Zevox]

So, Sekiro progress. Doesn't feel like I've explored much more of the game in the last couple of days, but that's because it's mostly been boss-fighting and backtracking.

Moved further into the area I was in and beat the Corrupted Monk boss, took around four or five tries IIRC. Tougher than the average boss before him, but not by much. Got the plot item he was guarding, went back... and found out I had to re-do the castle area. Kind of annoying, especially with all of the new, much tougher enemies lurking around it (good gods those purple-cloak ninjas[?] are a pain, especially if there's more than one). More importantly, the new boss fight up top of the castle was a bit challenging, but fun. I noticed that Owl didn't do any red attacks in that fight, which made for a fun dynamic compared to other boss fights, since you're usually safer against him since everything can be blocked/parried, but he gives you fewer big openings since you generally get big rewards for appropriately countering those red attacks. Felt appropriate for him. I think he took 5 or 6 tries? Wasn't counting the total closely, but I remember I only needed one additional try after the first time I got through his first deathblow, he didn't really get harder in phase 2 so much as slightly more annoying with the smoke bomb move.

After that, though, oh boy. Well, let's just say that since I don't know when I might re-play the game, I decided to use guides to find out how to unlock all of these different endings I hear it has. And despite the purported "best" ending not requiring it, I went to that second Hirata Estate Memory. Just getting through that was pretty tough (see also: purple-cloak ninjas), but the boss fight with Owl at the end, holy cow. Toughest fight since Genichiro, quite possibly tougher than him. No idea how many times I died, like with Genichiro I just stopped counting after a certain point. Like Genichiro, he really just forces you to learn how he fights and how to counter him extremely well, because he punishes any mistakes brutally, which I appreciate. I actually had no less than two runs where I had him just a hit/parry or two away from posture break on his second deathblow, only to die, which was frustrating, but made finally finishing him off tonight very sweet.

So, I should now have those extra ending options locked in, and not too much more to go. Looking forward to seeing the remaining boss fights, this game's had some good ones.

[Garlic-bread]

Currently playing Gwent, but recently bought Skyrim on sale only for 3 dang euros, so gonna game whenever I find time and inspiration >:D

[Eldan]

The vehicles are probably the best protection; first the Seamoth, then the Cyclops. Also helps to know where the leviathans are so you can avoid them.

The seamoth helps a lot, but more as a mobile air tank refiller than anything else so far. Just got all the parts of the Cyclops by randomly bumbling around the map, but that seems to require several of those damn fangs that are almost impossible to get. I'd produce them via console, except that I can't seem to open the console on my keyboard with any key combination.

[IthilanorStPete]

The seamoth helps a lot, but more as a mobile air tank refiller than anything else so far. Just got all the parts of the Cyclops by randomly bumbling around the map, but that seems to require several of those damn fangs that are almost impossible to get. I'd produce them via console, except that I can't seem to open the console on my keyboard with any key combination.

You can farm fangs by tossing a few scrap metal objects into the kelp forest, near stalkers. The stalkers will pick up and carry around the scrap, and there's a chance for their teeth to break off so you can collect every time they do.

[Triaxx]

About halfway between the pod site and the Aurora crash is a tiny keep forest pocket. It's set in a valley, and so at the bottom of that is almost always a few teeth.

[Starbuck_II]

Finished Blackguard 2 and now trying to finish Solasta demo (dled but never beat yet)
Deep Spiders kicked my butt.

Going to try again later.

[Anteros]

You can make a scanner room it's definitely worth it for hard to find stuff like the teeth. Chances are that there are hundreds of them around you, but actually finding them is a pain.

[Zevox]

Pretty sure I'm at Sekiro's endgame, now. Went through the Divine Realm today - have to say, I like the level design on it, fun sort of obstacle course to traverse, and I particularly like how bright and colorful it is, which is a great change compared to basically all of Dark Souls and Bloodborne (or what I played of that, at least, I never did finish Bloodborne). I can say that about other areas in the game too, but it really stands out in the Divine Realm.

The second Corrupted Monk boss fight was surprisingly a lot easier than the first despite her having three deathblows instead of one. Probably in part because of already having the timing down on parrying her attacks and the general idea of her patterns from the previous fight, but I think she also just wasn't regaining posture anywhere near as fast as in the other fight, so it was a lot easier to get through those deathblows. I almost took that one down on the first try, and only didn't on the second because my house had a power flicker and my PS4 turned off in the middle of that final life bar. Guess it's a good sign that I'm learning enough from these fights to make a repeat a lot easier despite the few extra curve balls they threw in.

And the Divine Dragon fight was fun. Relatively easy, but fun. They did a really good job on making that thing look good and feel like a superior being, even though it wasn't actually as dangerous as most of the game's other bosses (I assume because it's benevolent and doesn't want to be, it's just testing you or some such?). That kind of flashiness is something the game could do with a bit more of, I think.

[Eldan]

You can make a scanner room it's definitely worth it for hard to find stuff like the teeth. Chances are that there are hundreds of them around you, but actually finding them is a pain.

Good point. I had a scanner room for ages, never thought to use it for that. Thanks.

[tonberrian]

Playing FF12: Zodiac Age on the Switch. Having a lot of fun, been a while since I played FF12.

[Balmas]

Just started playing through Morrowind again, this time as an Altmer born under the sign of the Apprentice. Nonesuch the Nonce shall spear, burn, or sneak past every enemy in Vvardenfell.

Probably going to be doing Tribunal for the first time, but I'm debating when to jump in since I don't actually know what story beats / level requirements exist.

[Corlindale]

As usual, I find myself gravitating back towards Tales of Maj'Eyal despite the hundreds of other games in my library.

I've been diving more into the Embers of Rage campaign lately. I never got very far into it earlier, but decided now was a good time since a recent patch added some interesting new stuff for it. For example, I just managed to unlock the new Technomancer class evolution (sort of like a D&D prestige class) for the Archmage class. It seemed pretty fun, but unfortunately I managed to commit suicide quite spectacularly with one of my newfound technomancer abilities. I had gotten used to being pretty reckless with my fire spells because I was almost immune to self-inflicted fire damage, but it had slipped my mind that the galvanic rods from the techomancy tree actually deal a combination of fire and lighting damage... so I guess you can figure out what happened. Oh well, at least it's thematically fitting that playing with magitech experiments can be pretty dangerous.

I did mange to unlock the use of Rogue classes in the Embers campaign along the way, though, so now I'm testing out a Rogue using a combination of throwing daggers and poison. Seems very efficient so far, but we'll see what happens at higher levels. Hoping to unlock the new Annihilator class this time around.

[Eldan]

Just started playing through Morrowind again, this time as an Altmer born under the sign of the Apprentice. Nonesuch the Nonce shall spear, burn, or sneak past every enemy in Vvardenfell.

Probably going to be doing Tribunal for the first time, but I'm debating when to jump in since I don't actually know what story beats / level requirements exist.

The numbers going around were L15 for Tribunal and L30 for Bloodmoon.
Don't activate Tribunal before you're high level enough and want to deal with it. The beginning of Tribunal is an utter pain if you aren't prepared and don't want to immediately deal with it.

[Anteros]

The numbers going around were L15 for Tribunal and L30 for Bloodmoon.
Don't activate Tribunal before you're high level enough and want to deal with it. The beginning of Tribunal is an utter pain if you aren't prepared and don't want to immediately deal with it.

Alternatively, it's free high level armor that you can wear or sell for huge profits early. Kinda breaks the game though if you do.

[Eldan]

If you manage to defeat those enemies. The first few times they showed up for me I died, because I was like level 3 with no equipment.

[Cespenar]

Tribunal can get pretty bonkers if you go before ~L20. The assassins are... manageable, but then there are the goblins, the "comic relief" wood elf in the city who is tougher than Almalexia, etc.

[LibraryOgre]

The numbers going around were L15 for Tribunal and L30 for Bloodmoon.
Don't activate Tribunal before you're high level enough and want to deal with it. The beginning of Tribunal is an utter pain if you aren't prepared and don't want to immediately deal with it.

This is why I have Conjuration early. Daedric Dagger covers a multitude of sins.

[Zevox]

Sekiro beaten! Have to say, that was a pretty darn good final boss fight. And I guess since it is the final boss, I'll go ahead and put that part in spoilers.
The rematch with Genichiro was fun, though a lot easier than I remember him being in the mid-game. Which isn't to say that I didn't have some attempts where I screwed up and died to him, but I did beat him on the first try, and later after a few runs of dying to Isshin I was even getting some runs where I got past him without taking any damage at all. Probably helps that I've had all those attack ups since the original fight I guess, but it probably also just reflects me getting better at the game over time.

As for Isshin himself, I was a little surprised by how relatively easy his first phase is - I actually did get past it on the first attempt, and rarely lost to it in subsequent ones. That second phase makes up for though, because damn, once he pulls that spear and gun from straight out of nowhere, he becomes a terror. The second phase was the majority of my deaths, without question - and I'm not sure how many of those I had, lost count. The most annoying part though was that he would sometimes do two leaping attacks in a row, and for some reason when he jumped for the second my lock-on just stopped working and the camera didn't follow him into the air, so I could not see what he was doing to time a parry or dodge. That just ticked me off, feels like a bug that needs fixing.

The third phase is kind of a blessing in disguise after the second, since it's just the second plus the lightning move - and like with Genichiro's final phase earlier, Lightning Counter is easy and effective. I actually beat him on a run where I wasn't expecting to (had to use a resurrection early against phase 1 Isshin, then another in phase 2) because he basically spammed that lightning move. Started the phase doing it twice in a row, then did one normal sequence of attacks, then did it twice in a row again. Lightning countered all four, and between that, quick hits while he was shocked, and some parries on the regular strikes, dude was done in probably under a minute after I hit that phase.

Honestly, after all of that, I'm not sure who the hardest boss in the game was. In terms of number of deaths I had against them it's likely that mid-game Genichiro and Hirata Estate Owl take the cake, but Isshin is really rough, and if he hadn't been stupid enough to spam lightning like that I might easily have wracked up enough deaths against him to rival those two. Owl is probably at least somewhat harder than Genichiro even accounting for how much more health/healing/attack you have when you reach him, so I guess it's between him and Isshin, but it's really hard for me to pick there.

Oh, and I also did kill the Demon of Hatred bonus boss. Also tough, but partially just because he's that rare boss that you want to treat more like a Dark Souls boss and dodge instead of going for parries. Had to learn that and figure out which dodge/jump/run directions were good when, which is a big change compared to most of the other bosses in the game (I think the Giant Ape, when not undead, is the only other one like that). Still probably harder than most of the game's bosses, but not as much as I would've expected for a special end-game bonus boss.
Oh, and is it just me, or is that "best ending" basically sequel bait? Sure feels like it to me. Not that that's a complaint, mind you, I'd take a sequel to this.

Honestly, Sekiro is hands-down my favorite FromSoft/"Souls" game at this point. I think it's a lot more fun that Dark Souls (1 and 2, I never played 3), or what I played of Bloodborne (didn't finish it), and it earns its reputation for difficulty much more than I feel Dark Souls ever did. Gameplay-wise I think the fighting style it encourages is a lot more fun than the slow-paced, overly-cautious "dodge everything and whittle the enemy's health down with stray hits when you can get them" style of Dark Souls, and the stealth approach to non-boss enemies is fun to have as another way to play that helps make the difficulty more tolerable early on and ease what could be some absolutely nutty fights later on. It's also a lot more visually pleasing, with some areas like the Fountainhead Palace or Senpou Temple being actually colorful and beautiful to see, as opposed to drab darkness of absolutely everything in the other FromSoft games. And wow, does it make a big difference in my personal enjoyment that it actually has a clear narrative, and I know what I'm doing and why at any given point in the game.

I feel like gameplay-wise my only complaint is the "seals" mechanic that limits the use of tools and some special moves - it felt very restrictive in some cases, and basically completely scared me off using any special moves that had it attached, since I felt like tools were almost certainly the best use of those. Granted, some tools should definitely have a limitation like that attached (Firecracker would be way too good if it were unlimited, for an obvious one), but I question whether it's necessary on the special moves, which tend to pay for power by being slow, or even some of the weaker tools (would unlimited shurikens break anything? They're handy, sure, certainly my most-used tool, but I'm not seeing a way they'd be OP if they were free). Or perhaps the number of seals you get should just be bigger - I was very put off when I purchased an upgrade to my maximum early on, and found it to be only a +1. I was expecting like a +3 or +5 per upgrade when I first saw that, but +1 is barely even noteworthy, not all worth the skill points compared to other upgrades you can buy.

But yeah, that criticism aside really good game, definitely enjoyed it. Part of me is even tempted to start a New Game+ run to see one of those alternate endings (probably the "Side with Owl" ending), but I've had Persona 5 Royal waiting around for too long now, and while I needed that action game intermission between RPGs, I think it's time to get started stealing some hearts once again.

[Balmas]

This is why I have Conjuration early. Daedric Dagger covers a multitude of sins.

Yep. Bound Dagger lasts until you hit Balmora, at which point you buy Levitate and Bound Spear and don't look back.

Seriously, the ability to sit just out of range and either hit them with his pointy stick or spam fireballs has saved Nonesuch more than a few times so far. Currently, alchemy and speechcraft have gotten him to level 20ish, and he's working through the Mage's Guild questline.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I'm currently splitting my time between grinding Mastery Rank in Warframe and trying to reach at least basic competency at strategy in Stellaris.

While trying VERY HARD to resist impulse-buying Surviving Mars and Age of Wonders: Planetfall on Steam Sale...

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I've also played Subnautica a bit recently. I find it quite relaxing, except for those times something I can't see comes up behind me and one-shots me when I dive too deep. I suppose I'll find out how to get around that eventually.

Keep your ears open while you dive. The various monsters have their own cries, and the Reapers in particular have two: one is the ‘this is my turf, player character, stay on your toes’ call which lets you know when they’re nearby. The other is the ‘I see you player character, and I’MMA EAT YOU!!!’ roar. Hopefully you don’t hear that one as much. :smalltongue:

Re: Seamoth, there’s an upgrade later on that zaps anything nearby at the push of a button. I don’t recommend going into Leviathan territory without it.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Keep your ears open while you dive. The various monsters have their own cries, and the Reapers in particular have two: one is the ‘this is my turf, player character, stay on your toes’ call which lets you know when they’re nearby. The other is the ‘I see you player character, and I’MMA EAT YOU!!!’ roar. Hopefully you don’t hear that one as much. :smalltongue:

Re: Seamoth, there’s an upgrade later on that zaps anything nearby at the push of a button. I don’t recommend going into Leviathan territory without it.

Also, those marker buoy things are your friends. They're super cheap to make (one titanium and one copper) and let you permanently tag a spot so you can return to it later or just keep your bearings more easily.

Between using those to avoid leviathan territories and the Seamoth I haven't been eaten by anything in my playthrough. (Still managed to drown a couple of times, though).

[warty goblin]

I'm currently splitting my time between grinding Mastery Rank in Warframe and trying to reach at least basic competency at strategy in Stellaris.

While trying VERY HARD to resist impulse-buying Surviving Mars and Age of Wonders: Planetfall on Steam Sale...

Surviving Mars is a decent-to-good city builder, but safely skippable unless the genre and theme are super appealing to you. Planetfall is excellent, and keeps getting better. I'm not quite sure it's up to AoW 3's level yet, but fully patched and DLC'd AoW 3 is so completely excellent that's a super-high bar to clear, and it's getting closer all the time.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Also, those marker buoy things are your friends. They're super cheap to make (one titanium and one copper) and let you permanently tag a spot so you can return to it later or just keep your bearings more easily.

Also also, you can customize the beacon icon colors (for example I made all my base beacons orange so they stick out more, made my vehicles green, and normal points of interest blue) and turn them on and off if your surroundings start getting too busy.

[LibraryOgre]

Realized I had been avoiding Daggerfall because I hated the interface, so I downloaded Daggerfall Unity. I've been really enjoying it, though the dungeons remain a total pain in the ass. You think Skyrim's donuts are annoying? Try wandering a Daggerfall dungeon for a while, looking for a person.

Currently, beelining through the Mage's Guild. Then I will do Stendarr, because someone has to take them seriously in Tamriel, since Bethesda refuses to.

[Anteros]

Surviving Mars is a decent-to-good city builder, but safely skippable unless the genre and theme are super appealing to you. Planetfall is excellent, and keeps getting better. I'm not quite sure it's up to AoW 3's level yet, but fully patched and DLC'd AoW 3 is so completely excellent that's a super-high bar to clear, and it's getting closer all the time.

Planetfall just seemed like AoW3 but less complex to me. I did a few of the campaigns, but I already have a few hundred hours in AoW3, and there wasn't enough new in Planetfall to keep me invested.


Also, those marker buoy things are your friends. They're super cheap to make (one titanium and one copper) and let you permanently tag a spot so you can return to it later or just keep your bearings more easily.

Between using those to avoid leviathan territories and the Seamoth I haven't been eaten by anything in my playthrough. (Still managed to drown a couple of times, though).

I hate carrying Beacons, or anything that eats inventory space. I usually use the Beacons that you get naturally, and the compass to navigate. Then again, I have a pretty good memory for where things are in the game, so I mostly don't need them. If I do need to mark something I like to use scanner rooms and cameras. They're a little more expensive, but they're just so incredibly useful once you have the hud upgrade for the scanner room. It trivializes the grind aspect of the game, and also can be used to mark leviathans.

[Eldan]

Also, those marker buoy things are your friends. They're super cheap to make (one titanium and one copper) and let you permanently tag a spot so you can return to it later or just keep your bearings more easily.

Between using those to avoid leviathan territories and the Seamoth I haven't been eaten by anything in my playthrough. (Still managed to drown a couple of times, though).

I know beacons are theoretically a thing, but I now have a quite substantial base, a cyclops and a seamoth, and I still haven't found a blueprint for a beacon. I'm mostly making improvised beacons by dropping cameras everywhere right now.

[Anteros]

I know beacons are theoretically a thing, but I now have a quite substantial base, a cyclops and a seamoth, and I still haven't found a blueprint for a beacon. I'm mostly making improvised beacons by dropping cameras everywhere right now.

The blueprint for them is very easy to find in the shallows by wreckage sitesif you want it. Spoiler tags in case you want to find it naturally.


I'm trying to get into MHW Iceborne. There's a really good game buried in here, but Capcom makes you jump through so many tedious hoops to get to it that it's almost not worth it. No one cares about your awful bare bones plot Capcom, just let me hunt monsters. At least let me skip cutscenes, and stop with the boring hour long fetch/escort quests.

[Cespenar]

So, I've been playing Trails of Cold Steel 3, the umpteenth game of the "Trails" series, and it's proving to be just as fun as its predecessors still. It's surprising how little recognition the series gets, though, as it's the best written (and best translated, which is pretty key in my opinion) JRPG I've ever seen.

I mean, apart from fixing the eternal problem of "what is everyone doing while the protagonists are wandering around", it's tackling quite heavy subjects of nationalism and politics with more poise than most. Sure, it's covered in a shonen anime veneer, and does occasionally resort to that sort of campiness, but those moments are then often drowned by the sheer quality of the game's worldbuilding and plot.

The only other "downside" would be that its plot has accrued so much so far that it would probably do no good for a newcomer to jump in midway. So the best place to start would be Trails in the Sky 1, which is 5-6(?) games back.

[Sermil]

So, I've been playing Trails of Cold Steel 3, the umpteenth game of the "Trails" series, and it's proving to be just as fun as its predecessors still. It's surprising how little recognition the series gets, though, as it's the best written (and best translated, which is pretty key in my opinion) JRPG I've ever seen.


Eh...

I played Trails of Cold Steel 1, and generally enjoyed it. It was kinda fun, kinda silly. A little light romance, some good battles, but nothing heavy. The villains were all Team-Rocket-level; they make lots of grand speeches and have complex plans that seem designed to allow the hero to step in and stop them, and then they disappear in a puff of smoke despite there being no other teleport magic in the game. Every time the hero gets in over his head, someone way more competent swoops in and protects him. But it's OK -- they're just high-school students, of course there are more-competent adults around protecting them, of course the serious villains of the world aren't going to bother them, of course things are never that serious or dangerous. I liked it.

And then I played Trails of Cold Steel 2. Ugh. The same over-the-top silly villains, the same way-more-competent protectors always showing up at exactly the right moment -- but now set against the backdrop of a civil war. A horrible civil war, which by all rights should have been killings thousands of people. Tens of thousands. People should have been **** starving in the streets, with atrocities and dead bodies around every corner. Entire neighborhoods bombed out. That's a civil war. That's what it really looks like. Putting the cartoonish villains with nonsense plans against that backdrop... the tonal whiplash was just too much. I have zero interest in playing any more of that series.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Surviving Mars is a decent-to-good city builder, but safely skippable unless the genre and theme are super appealing to you. Planetfall is excellent, and keeps getting better. I'm not quite sure it's up to AoW 3's level yet, but fully patched and DLC'd AoW 3 is so completely excellent that's a super-high bar to clear, and it's getting closer all the time.
*shrug* Well, the sale's over now, so it's a moot point anyway, but I'll keep your recommendation of Planetfall in mind for the next Steam Sale that rolls around, especially as it appears it's not quite "done" yet, with one last DLC forthcoming. Thanks for the recommendation! :smallsmile:

[Anteros]

Sekiro beaten! Have to say, that was a pretty darn good final boss fight. And I guess since it is the final boss, I'll go ahead and put that part in spoilers.
The rematch with Genichiro was fun, though a lot easier than I remember him being in the mid-game. Which isn't to say that I didn't have some attempts where I screwed up and died to him, but I did beat him on the first try, and later after a few runs of dying to Isshin I was even getting some runs where I got past him without taking any damage at all. Probably helps that I've had all those attack ups since the original fight I guess, but it probably also just reflects me getting better at the game over time.

As for Isshin himself, I was a little surprised by how relatively easy his first phase is - I actually did get past it on the first attempt, and rarely lost to it in subsequent ones. That second phase makes up for though, because damn, once he pulls that spear and gun from straight out of nowhere, he becomes a terror. The second phase was the majority of my deaths, without question - and I'm not sure how many of those I had, lost count. The most annoying part though was that he would sometimes do two leaping attacks in a row, and for some reason when he jumped for the second my lock-on just stopped working and the camera didn't follow him into the air, so I could not see what he was doing to time a parry or dodge. That just ticked me off, feels like a bug that needs fixing.

The third phase is kind of a blessing in disguise after the second, since it's just the second plus the lightning move - and like with Genichiro's final phase earlier, Lightning Counter is easy and effective. I actually beat him on a run where I wasn't expecting to (had to use a resurrection early against phase 1 Isshin, then another in phase 2) because he basically spammed that lightning move. Started the phase doing it twice in a row, then did one normal sequence of attacks, then did it twice in a row again. Lightning countered all four, and between that, quick hits while he was shocked, and some parries on the regular strikes, dude was done in probably under a minute after I hit that phase.

Honestly, after all of that, I'm not sure who the hardest boss in the game was. In terms of number of deaths I had against them it's likely that mid-game Genichiro and Hirata Estate Owl take the cake, but Isshin is really rough, and if he hadn't been stupid enough to spam lightning like that I might easily have wracked up enough deaths against him to rival those two. Owl is probably at least somewhat harder than Genichiro even accounting for how much more health/healing/attack you have when you reach him, so I guess it's between him and Isshin, but it's really hard for me to pick there.

Oh, and I also did kill the Demon of Hatred bonus boss. Also tough, but partially just because he's that rare boss that you want to treat more like a Dark Souls boss and dodge instead of going for parries. Had to learn that and figure out which dodge/jump/run directions were good when, which is a big change compared to most of the other bosses in the game (I think the Giant Ape, when not undead, is the only other one like that). Still probably harder than most of the game's bosses, but not as much as I would've expected for a special end-game bonus boss.
Oh, and is it just me, or is that "best ending" basically sequel bait? Sure feels like it to me. Not that that's a complaint, mind you, I'd take a sequel to this.

Honestly, Sekiro is hands-down my favorite FromSoft/"Souls" game at this point. I think it's a lot more fun that Dark Souls (1 and 2, I never played 3), or what I played of Bloodborne (didn't finish it), and it earns its reputation for difficulty much more than I feel Dark Souls ever did. Gameplay-wise I think the fighting style it encourages is a lot more fun than the slow-paced, overly-cautious "dodge everything and whittle the enemy's health down with stray hits when you can get them" style of Dark Souls, and the stealth approach to non-boss enemies is fun to have as another way to play that helps make the difficulty more tolerable early on and ease what could be some absolutely nutty fights later on. It's also a lot more visually pleasing, with some areas like the Fountainhead Palace or Senpou Temple being actually colorful and beautiful to see, as opposed to drab darkness of absolutely everything in the other FromSoft games. And wow, does it make a big difference in my personal enjoyment that it actually has a clear narrative, and I know what I'm doing and why at any given point in the game.

I feel like gameplay-wise my only complaint is the "seals" mechanic that limits the use of tools and some special moves - it felt very restrictive in some cases, and basically completely scared me off using any special moves that had it attached, since I felt like tools were almost certainly the best use of those. Granted, some tools should definitely have a limitation like that attached (Firecracker would be way too good if it were unlimited, for an obvious one), but I question whether it's necessary on the special moves, which tend to pay for power by being slow, or even some of the weaker tools (would unlimited shurikens break anything? They're handy, sure, certainly my most-used tool, but I'm not seeing a way they'd be OP if they were free). Or perhaps the number of seals you get should just be bigger - I was very put off when I purchased an upgrade to my maximum early on, and found it to be only a +1. I was expecting like a +3 or +5 per upgrade when I first saw that, but +1 is barely even noteworthy, not all worth the skill points compared to other upgrades you can buy.

But yeah, that criticism aside really good game, definitely enjoyed it. Part of me is even tempted to start a New Game+ run to see one of those alternate endings (probably the "Side with Owl" ending), but I've had Persona 5 Royal waiting around for too long now, and while I needed that action game intermission between RPGs, I think it's time to get started stealing some hearts once again.

If you try Sekiro on new game plus make sure you return the charm to Kuro when you get the chance. Being unable to block and forced to parry changes difficulty dramatically. It's more satisfying in my opinion.

[Cespenar]

And then I played Trails of Cold Steel 2. Ugh. The same over-the-top silly villains, the same way-more-competent protectors always showing up at exactly the right moment -- but now set against the backdrop of a civil war. A horrible civil war, which by all rights should have been killings thousands of people. Tens of thousands. People should have been **** starving in the streets, with atrocities and dead bodies around every corner. Entire neighborhoods bombed out. That's a civil war. That's what it really looks like. Putting the cartoonish villains with nonsense plans against that backdrop... the tonal whiplash was just too much. I have zero interest in playing any more of that series.

Eh, I mean, "correct", but grossly unfair. Though it's obvious that even war games don't handle war to such a degree. I can barely think of... maybe Spec Ops: The Line and a few indie games that sort of do it well, and expecting that from a JRPG with a shonen chassis is, as I said, grossly unfair.

Also, while the villains, yes, put on garish clothes and take on bombastically translated nicknames; they have much more complex motives and relations than 90% of the RPGs out there. There are, like at least 6-7 factions, with maybe a hundred named characters at clash with one another, and everyone's actions can be traced (if you're so inclined) during any time period of the stupidly dense timeline of the game. Juggling such an amount of characters, their actions and consequences alone is a feat I've rarely (if ever) seen in a game, and if the cost to that is them shouting out the name of their ultimate attack, I think I can make do with that.

Even the setting alone: being naive and idealistic military academy students in an aggressive and invading country. Compare that with the black and white morality of RPGs that we enjoyed despite lacking such distinctions.

[endoperez]

Subnautica, huh?

I have the hardest time stocking up on Copper, so I've been very wary of using beacons. I've had to give up on some of my earlier beacons, collecting them and moving them elsewhere, instead of just leaving them be. I've been taking a bit of a break now, but I think Copper is still the resource I'm happiest to see.

I had both Seamoth and Cyclops way, WAY longer than I had Scanner Room. I was surprised at how easy it was to make the vehicles, I felt like I got them super early and very easily. That might be because I had a proverbial fallen tooth factory right next to my life pod, though. The seafloor was so full of them I thought they were supposed to be an early game resource with tons of uses!
You know how the things like to play with the metal scrap, floating scrap up and letting it fall back down? Whenever they're doing that, they're dropping teeth. It might be hard to see that in the kelp forests, but if you have one in the sandy areas, just go below there and you'll find lots of teeth. At least I did - theoretically it's possible the game is only doing the tooth generation check if you're able to see them or are otherwise close enough, so if you don't have any near your base, and they only occassionally generate teeth, they might be more rare.

[Anteros]

Cold Steel just seems like too much of an investment to me. There are so many games, and the cost of even the earliest and most outdated ones in the series is sky high. At this point, the games would have to be really excellent to be worth it...and given the fact that it looks like it plays like a dating sim with scantily clad schoolgirls and emo edgelords it doesn't seem like something I'd ever be interested in even as someone who likes JRPGs.


Subnautica, huh?

I have the hardest time stocking up on Copper, so I've been very wary of using beacons. I've had to give up on some of my earlier beacons, collecting them and moving them elsewhere, instead of just leaving them be. I've been taking a bit of a break now, but I think Copper is still the resource I'm happiest to see.

I had both Seamoth and Cyclops way, WAY longer than I had Scanner Room. I was surprised at how easy it was to make the vehicles, I felt like I got them super early and very easily. That might be because I had a proverbial fallen tooth factory right next to my life pod, though. The seafloor was so full of them I thought they were supposed to be an early game resource with tons of uses!
You know how the things like to play with the metal scrap, floating scrap up and letting it fall back down? Whenever they're doing that, they're dropping teeth. It might be hard to see that in the kelp forests, but if you have one in the sandy areas, just go below there and you'll find lots of teeth. At least I did - theoretically it's possible the game is only doing the tooth generation check if you're able to see them or are otherwise close enough, so if you don't have any near your base, and they only occassionally generate teeth, they might be more rare.

The scanner room is available super early, so it sounds like that's just a luck thing on your part. Most people should unlock the scanner room at the same time as the seamoth and laser cutter...well before the cyclops. You may have just had unlucky blueprint spawns though since they're somewhat random. I had a run once where it took me hours to find the laser cutter blueprint even though I know what biome they spawn in because almost all of them had spawned inside wrecks that I needed the cutter to get into. I've played the game probably 10 times or so though and only had that problem once.

[Lynam III]

Cold Steel just seems like too much of an investment to me. There are so many games, and the cost of even the earliest and most outdated ones in the series is sky high. At this point, the games would have to be really excellent to be worth it...and given the fact that it looks like it plays like a dating sim with scantily clad schoolgirls and emo edgelords it doesn't seem like something I'd ever be interested in even as someone who likes JRPGs.


Sir, this is Japan.

[Cespenar]

Cold Steel just seems like too much of an investment to me. There are so many games, and the cost of even the earliest and most outdated ones in the series is sky high. At this point, the games would have to be really excellent to be worth it...and given the fact that it looks like it plays like a dating sim with scantily clad schoolgirls and emo edgelords it doesn't seem like something I'd ever be interested in even as someone who likes JRPGs.

More like, it looks like a dating sim (at very first glimpse, maybe), but its plot runs like a political drama series, dotted with some shonen moments. I'd prefer it that way rather than it looking grim and gritty, and playing nothing like it.

For people who absolutely detest shonen tropes and anything close to it, though, I'd admit that it's not a game for them.

[DaedalusMkV]

Eh, I mean, "correct", but grossly unfair. Though it's obvious that even war games don't handle war to such a degree. I can barely think of... maybe Spec Ops: The Line and a few indie games that sort of do it well, and expecting that from a JRPG with a shonen chassis is, as I said, grossly unfair.

Also, while the villains, yes, put on garish clothes and take on bombastically translated nicknames; they have much more complex motives and relations than 90% of the RPGs out there. There are, like at least 6-7 factions, with maybe a hundred named characters at clash with one another, and everyone's actions can be traced (if you're so inclined) during any time period of the stupidly dense timeline of the game. Juggling such an amount of characters, their actions and consequences alone is a feat I've rarely (if ever) seen in a game, and if the cost to that is them shouting out the name of their ultimate attack, I think I can make do with that.

Even the setting alone: being naive and idealistic military academy students in an aggressive and invading country. Compare that with the black and white morality of RPGs that we enjoyed despite lacking such distinctions.

Speaking as someone who's played quite a bit of it, the Trails series is kind of a weird one and I totally understand Sermil's gripe (if not necessarily the degree to which it turned him off the game). Trails has this weird mismatch between setting and story that causes me plenty of cognitive dissonance as well. It has a nuanced and gritty setting filled with realpolitik where wars ravage countries, but within the story of the games a single terrorist dying in a mech's reactor explosion is treated as a terrible failure on the part of the main characters and causes angst in the hero for the rest of the game. Fie and Laura can present themes on the difficulty of bringing a martial arts tradition into modern warfare and reconciling different views of what it means to be a soldier, and then less than an hour later go 'hehe, look at Laura, she can't even use a vacuum cleaner despite being a woman! So funny!'

This is a series where half of the protagonists have parents or friends killed by the ravages of war in their backstory, yet a large-scale artillery strike on a major city somehow doesn't kill anybody. I do quite like the series, myself, but I can totally see how the inconsistency of how the setting and characters are presented and what actually happens in the story turning someone off. Trails has spectacular worldbuilding and a dedication to exploring and developing characters that any other game would never bother to present beyond a cardboard cutout that's almost unique outside of print literature (and rare even there), but the actual plot is a bit childish on a not-infrequent basis. Again, in a series which features multiple large-scale military conflicts, Cold Steel manages, what, 3 actual on-screen deaths (it doesn't count if they don't stay dead) in games 1-3? And I'm counting Gideon in that number!

[Anteros]

More like, it looks like a dating sim (at very first glimpse, maybe), but its plot runs like a political drama series, dotted with some shonen moments. I'd prefer it that way rather than it looking grim and gritty, and playing nothing like it.


There's a whole lot of other options besides those two though. I'd prefer neither of them personally.

[Zevox]

If you try Sekiro on new game plus make sure you return the charm to Kuro when you get the chance. Being unable to block and forced to parry changes difficulty dramatically. It's more satisfying in my opinion.
If I were starting New Game+ now I might try that, but I feel like it might be a bad idea when I come back to it sometime later. Seems like the type of thing I'd want to do while I'm "in practice" at the game, so to speak.

[Anteros]

If I were starting New Game+ now I might try that, but I feel like it might be a bad idea when I come back to it sometime later. Seems like the type of thing I'd want to do while I'm "in practice" at the game, so to speak.

The muscle memory comes back a lot faster than you'd think, but I get your point.

[Rynjin]

IME being "out of practice" is the best way to start those kinds of challenges; you'll have an easier time unlearning habits you formed in the first, normal playthrough.

[Triaxx]

Honestly the two last things I found in Subnautica were the Scanner Room and the Cyclops the first time around. I beat the game before I found the Cyclops.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Honestly the two last things I found in Subnautica were the Scanner Room and the Cyclops the first time around. I beat the game before I found the Cyclops.

That's legitimately impressive. EDIT: Hang on, gonna spoiler this for minor endgame content.

Did you explore the lava caverns by building new bases to act as recharge points?

[Sermil]

Eh, I mean, "correct", but grossly unfair. Though it's obvious that even war games don't handle war to such a degree. I can barely think of... maybe Spec Ops: The Line and a few indie games that sort of do it well, and expecting that from a JRPG with a shonen chassis is, as I said, grossly unfair.


Except that half the time Trails wants you to take it super-seriously, and the other half, it's ridiculous. I didn't object to Red Alert 2 or Advance Wars, because those know they are silly and never try to be serious.


Also, while the villains, yes, put on garish clothes and take on bombastically translated nicknames; they have much more complex motives and relations than 90% of the RPGs out there.


Really? One of the primary antagonists of Trails of Cold Steel II is Bleublanc a.k.a. Phantom Thief B. Who constantly gives the heroes clues so that they can figure out what he is about to steal. Can you see, say, Michael Corleone carefully giving the FBI clues that he was about to kill Sollozzo? Just so he can "feel superior" about it? No, of course not. Michael Corleone is in a serious (if somewhat melodramatic) work of fiction. I'm sorry, Bleublanc is an Adam-West-Batman villain, not a villain in a serious work of fiction.

And can you really tell me what Ouroboros' big plan IS? Not even the fan wiki can do that. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the writers have no idea what Ouroboros' "master plan" is either; they just do whatever they need to move the plot along. And this is main antagonist group of the whole series.

Again, if Trails had been willing to just be silly and lean into the silly, I would have been fine with that. I was fine with Bleublanc in Trails of Cold Steel 1. The problem was that ToCS2 kept claiming to be deep and realistic, but then they have these 0-death wars and over-the-top villains and that's not how real life works. It's the contrast between the attempt to be serious and the inability to actually do it that soured me.

[Knaight]

I broke my rule on no entertainment spending in quarantine a bit for Tametsi, on the basis of it being one dollar and "Hexcells but meaner" being basically a perfect pitch to me.

It's Hexcells but meaner, so I'm happy with it. Plus, mean as it is it's still no late series DROD game or Spacechem.

[Anteros]

Honestly the two last things I found in Subnautica were the Scanner Room and the Cyclops the first time around. I beat the game before I found the Cyclops.

That's a real shame. I'd consider those 2 things to he the best upgrades in the game. It's a completely different experience without them.

The Cyclops in particular...what other open world game gives you a mobile base that you can build inside?

[Triaxx]

Yeah, I built multiple bases, but also never worked out I could build thermal generators down there, so I had long tubes running to the surface for solar power.

[Eldan]

Honestly the two last things I found in Subnautica were the Scanner Room and the Cyclops the first time around. I beat the game before I found the Cyclops.

I now have a prawn suit, two or three bases, a cyclops and a seamoth, but still no beacons. There don't seem to be any that I can find. I'm still dropping cameras at interesting points and then writing a list of what each camera signifies.

[IthilanorStPete]

Didn't find nuclear power either, I take it? That's what I use for my deep sea base.

[Triaxx]

I found it, but kept getting eaten by leviathans. After about my third seamoth I decided the game was telling me something.

[Cespenar]

There's a whole lot of other options besides those two though. I'd prefer neither of them personally.

I mean, I'm open to better RPG suggestions at this point (at all times, actually), no sarcasm. I praised Trails' horn because it simply does things that other games don't, not because it's immaculate.


Except that half the time Trails wants you to take it super-seriously, and the other half, it's ridiculous. I didn't object to Red Alert 2 or Advance Wars, because those know they are silly and never try to be serious.



Really? One of the primary antagonists of Trails of Cold Steel II is Bleublanc a.k.a. Phantom Thief B. Who constantly gives the heroes clues so that they can figure out what he is about to steal. Can you see, say, Michael Corleone carefully giving the FBI clues that he was about to kill Sollozzo? Just so he can "feel superior" about it? No, of course not. Michael Corleone is in a serious (if somewhat melodramatic) work of fiction. I'm sorry, Bleublanc is an Adam-West-Batman villain, not a villain in a serious work of fiction.

And can you really tell me what Ouroboros' big plan IS? Not even the fan wiki can do that. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the writers have no idea what Ouroboros' "master plan" is either; they just do whatever they need to move the plot along. And this is main antagonist group of the whole series.

Again, if Trails had been willing to just be silly and lean into the silly, I would have been fine with that. I was fine with Bleublanc in Trails of Cold Steel 1. The problem was that ToCS2 kept claiming to be deep and realistic, but then they have these 0-death wars and over-the-top villains and that's not how real life works. It's the contrast between the attempt to be serious and the inability to actually do it that soured me.

I think it's sort of a perspective issue. While I didn't object to Red Alert 2 or Advance Wars as well, I wouldn't really hold them up to any sort of pedestal either. Middling expectation, middling standards. If, however, ToCS's serious bits ends up in you holding its shonen-y bits to quality standards that no game is being held to, you may see that as tonal clash, but I see that as those serious bits really succeeding at what they do.

I suppose another difference is that I (unfortunately :P) watch "some" amount of anime and can sort of "accept" the shonen parts as a whole package.

[Zevox]

So, I've been playing Persona 5 Royal for the past few days. And dang, with me not having re-played P5 since it came out, I keep second-guessing whether things in it are new additions or if I've just forgotten them. I mean, they clearly added new story scenes throughout with the new girl, but didn't just stop there as there's new content for characters besides her. I'm 90+% positive the grappling hook is new, for instance... but maybe I just forgot? Or what about Baton Pass giving you a 0 sp/hp cost move if you pass it through the whole team? Or being able to see a shadow's personality type before you try to speak to it?

At the least, I'm completely sure that Will Seeds in the Palaces are new - kind of feels like they were added to make one-day runs of Palaces more feasible, since it felt like I found one in Kamoshida's Palace every time I was running low on sp and considering backing out at the next safe room. Which is kind of nice, especially since new social links will mean time is even tighter to max things out than before - and I know I missed maxing at least one social link (the fortune teller) the first time I played, possibly another that I'm forgetting.

Also, I'll just say... damn, it is one thing to remember how captivating this game's opening is, it's another to re-play it again. I am so looking forward to kicking Shadow Kamoshida's ass.

Speaking of ass-kicking, I'm also back on Dragonball FighterZ... not that I'd stopped for long, but still. Ultra Instinct Goku just released, and since I bought the full season pass this time (had a rather generous PSN gift card from the holidays, decided I may as well), I tried him out, and he's actually rather fun. He gets a lot more defensive options than anyone else in that game, and some of them are just darn cool - "dodging" attacks with his unique counter stance that causes him to slip behind enemies no matter where they are on the screen is pretty awesome when you pull it off, especially against beams or other projectiles the opponent throws from full screen. Also, his level 3 super just looks sick, and he has a Captain Commando assist, so yeah, awesome. Still trying to decide on his teammates though - pretty sure I want Goku Black (my preferred beam assist character and the only other "Goku" that I play), but the third team member is harder to nail down. Currently using Vegito for his tracking C assist (and because he was on the team I was playing before UI Goku dropped), but I feel like there has to be someone else who can fill his role while benefiting more from UI Goku's assist.

[Anteros]

Didn't find nuclear power either, I take it? That's what I use for my deep sea base.

I just used a bioreactor with one lantern tree in a pot. Enough infinite power to make Palpatine jealous.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

I just used a bioreactor with one lantern tree in a pot. Enough infinite power to make Palpatine jealous.

Yeah, the lantern tree is a bit OP, being a perfect source for the bioreactor, food, and to a lesser extent water.

[Lord Raziere]

Speaking of ass-kicking, I'm also back on Dragonball FighterZ... not that I'd stopped for long, but still. Ultra Instinct Goku just released, and since I bought the full season pass this time (had a rather generous PSN gift card from the holidays, decided I may as well), I tried him out, and he's actually rather fun. He gets a lot more defensive options than anyone else in that game, and some of them are just darn cool - "dodging" attacks with his unique counter stance that causes him to slip behind enemies no matter where they are on the screen is pretty awesome when you pull it off, especially against beams or other projectiles the opponent throws from full screen. Also, his level 3 super just looks sick, and he has a Captain Commando assist, so yeah, awesome. Still trying to decide on his teammates though - pretty sure I want Goku Black (my preferred beam assist character and the only other "Goku" that I play), but the third team member is harder to nail down. Currently using Vegito for his tracking C assist (and because he was on the team I was playing before UI Goku dropped), but I feel like there has to be someone else who can fill his role while benefiting more from UI Goku's assist.

Checked out UI Goku. fooling around with him made me figure out how to counter with his quarter-circle G and by extension, figure out how quarter circle G's and quarter circles in general work for keyboard. he is capable of a lot of stuff and is very much a counterplay character thats all about interrupting the foes stuff with your own. which I found more fun than I was expecting him to be, I can tell with practice one could probably pull off his counters and just style on everyone. like UI Goku is basically for nothing BUT pulling off the fancy stuff. a team of Vegito, Gogeta and UI Goku would just be incredibly extra for days.

also came on after gone for months and just got a bunch of zeni so I spent it all on capsules to get all the stuff I possibly could. now I have like....all the things.

[IthilanorStPete]

Yeah, the lantern tree is a bit OP, being a perfect source for the bioreactor, food, and to a lesser extent water.

Huh, I never thought to grab that. Looking at the wiki, makes sense, though.

...I like my giant aquarium alien containment tank full of peepers for food, though, it's neat. :smalltongue:

[Anteros]

I'm trying to get into Terraria. I like it, but the difficulty levels are frustrating to me. There's either basically no consequence to dying at all on softcore, or way too much penalty on other modes. Obviously I'm not ready for Hardcore since I keep dying, but the middle difficulty makes you drop everything when you die. It's a decent mechanic in theory, but in reality it leads to these 20+minute corpse runs where you have no gear and are just hoping the thing that killed you in the first place left your corpse alone so you can get your stuff and not die instantly when you get there.

I eventually started keeping a backup set of gear so I could fight my way to the first...but then your inventory is full of duplicate stuff when you finally manage to get your gear, and you basically have to go back and unload it anyway. It just leads to a lot of boring walking back and forth through areas you've already explored. I just wish there was a difficulty mode with some sort of punishment for dying that didn't involve a lot of mindless timesink.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

That's a real shame. I'd consider those 2 things to he the best upgrades in the game. It's a completely different experience without them.

The Cyclops in particular...what other open world game gives you a mobile base that you can build inside?

Steering the thing is like trying to drive a building though. :smallannoyed:

[Triaxx]

I played a lot of X3, so it's nicely responsive to me.

[Cespenar]

I'm trying to get into Terraria. I like it, but the difficulty levels are frustrating to me. There's either basically no consequence to dying at all on softcore, or way too much penalty on other modes. Obviously I'm not ready for Hardcore since I keep dying, but the middle difficulty makes you drop everything when you die. It's a decent mechanic in theory, but in reality it leads to these 20+minute corpse runs where you have no gear and are just hoping the thing that killed you in the first place left your corpse alone so you can get your stuff and not die instantly when you get there.

I eventually started keeping a backup set of gear so I could fight my way to the first...but then your inventory is full of duplicate stuff when you finally manage to get your gear, and you basically have to go back and unload it anyway. It just leads tentendo a lot of boring walking back and forth through areas you've already explored. I just wish there was a difficulty mode with some sort of punishment for dying that didn't involve a lot of mindless timesink.

I agree -- me and my friend eventually turned to softcore (double-entendres ahoy :P) because of that, and our quality of life skyrocketed.

[Eldan]

If anything, the various cameras make it easier than various space games I've played (flashbacks to Elite Dangerous *shudder*)

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Steering the thing is like trying to drive a building though. :smallannoyed:

You're not wrong, but the sonar upgrade is a fantastic quality of life upgrade on that front. Burns through power relatively quickly, but you really only need to pulse it to get a good feel for your surroundings and figure out where you will and won't fit.

Honestly, I kind of like that it feels so ponderous. Makes me feel like I'm actually driving something huge and impressive.

[Zevox]

Checked out UI Goku. fooling around with him made me figure out how to counter with his quarter-circle G and by extension, figure out how quarter circle G's and quarter circles in general work for keyboard. he is capable of a lot of stuff and is very much a counterplay character thats all about interrupting the foes stuff with your own. which I found more fun than I was expecting him to be, I can tell with practice one could probably pull off his counters and just style on everyone. like UI Goku is basically for nothing BUT pulling off the fancy stuff. a team of Vegito, Gogeta and UI Goku would just be incredibly extra for days.
Quarter-circle G? Not familiar with keyboard commands, but I assume that G is the heavy + ki blast macro, to do his counter super? I actually forget that thing exists a lot of the time, since UI Goku just has so many reversal options it never feels like I need to spend the full bar on it. Just hold light + medium as you recover from a hit to get an invincible teleport-punch, or he has his quarter-circle back + heavy flip attack that's full invincible and leads to a combo for only half a bar, or his down down + ki blast energy pillar special that's also invincible and doesn't cost any meter. All crazy punishable on block of course, but they'd be broken as hell if they weren't.


also came on after gone for months and just got a bunch of zeni so I spent it all on capsules to get all the stuff I possibly could. now I have like....all the things.
Yeah, they just gave out 5 million zeni to all players to celebrate the game reaching 5 million copies sold, and that is pretty much enough to clean out the original store I'm fairly sure. I'd already done that over the course of the past two years of playing, so I spent it on some of the new BGMs they added in the new section of the store. Everything in there is crazy expensive though, so still don't have near all of that. Plus I feel like I need to keep a reserve around so that I can buy up capsules when the remaining new characters drop and get all of their alternate colors (and other assorted things that I won't use, but I want those colors).

Speaking of, in case you're not aware, it's possible that we know who the remaining 3 DLC characters that are coming to season 3 are. There's different levels of confidence for these, but supposedly datamining fond dialogue lines that have been added for existing characters that implies they'll be Omega Shenron, Master Roshi, and Radditz. Shenron seems to be the one we're most sure of, I haven't seen anyone challenge the legitimacy of that datamine, while there's some dispute over the validity of the Roshi and Radditz one. Still, seems pretty plausible to me. I don't know about Shenron, never watched GT, but if Radditz does come I might try out a full Saiyan Saga villains team (supposedly Base Vegeta is crazy strong this season), or if Roshi comes maybe I could do an all-human team - I already like playing Videl and Yamcha, but the only other fully normal human in the game at this point is Krillin, and I do not like him.

[Lord Raziere]

Quarter-circle G? Not familiar with keyboard commands, but I assume that G is the heavy + ki blast macro, to do his counter super? I actually forget that thing exists a lot of the time, since UI Goku just has so many reversal options it never feels like I need to spend the full bar on it. Just hold light + medium as you recover from a hit to get an invincible teleport-punch, or he has his quarter-circle back + heavy flip attack that's full invincible and leads to a combo for only half a bar, or his down down + ki blast energy pillar special that's also invincible and doesn't cost any meter. All crazy punishable on block of course, but they'd be broken as hell if they weren't.

well I can't really say the actual button on the screen, because I have to memorize it by my keyboard commands and my mind can't connect the two if I want to do it well because I have no controller. so thats how I have to remember it. I basically have to play Fighter Z by putting my hands on the WASD and UHJK keys, with the WASD keys being the movement and the UHJK keys being the buttons, H is my simple combo attack, U is my y-combo, J is for ki blasts and K is for b button stuff? Y and L keys are for switching characters, the I key is for the big specials, G is for charging forward. I don't know how to sparking and thus don't use it.


Speaking of, in case you're not aware, it's possible that we know who the remaining 3 DLC characters that are coming to season 3 are. There's different levels of confidence for these, but supposedly datamining fond dialogue lines that have been added for existing characters that implies they'll be Omega Shenron, Master Roshi, and Radditz. Shenron seems to be the one we're most sure of, I haven't seen anyone challenge the legitimacy of that datamine, while there's some dispute over the validity of the Roshi and Radditz one. Still, seems pretty plausible to me. I don't know about Shenron, never watched GT, but if Radditz does come I might try out a full Saiyan Saga villains team (supposedly Base Vegeta is crazy strong this season), or if Roshi comes maybe I could do an all-human team - I already like playing Videl and Yamcha, but the only other fully normal human in the game at this point is Krillin, and I do not like him.

yeah those all seem like they could happen. Omega Shenron he won't standout amid all the other "powerful" characters on the roster he is just there for GT representation he's meh, but Raditz would complete the saiyan saga set nicely and Roshi is exactly the kind character I think they should put in. he could provide a unique playstyle based off being an old master showing up the young 'uns, he could do evil containment wave as a special, and he'd just be different and interesting in a way others would not, and I hope these are true because Shenron? probably inevitable, but mechanically I don't see how he'd standout? Raditz they probably could do something interesting with him, but Roshi? he'd be the gold, I hope he specifically is real for mechanical reasons. but Raditz would be nice for lore reasons.

like there is very little characters left as alternatives. we could have Dabura. he has a sword, stone spit, those could be interesting. we could have Tao Pai Pai maybe do something with his thrown column and being like, associated with Tien in some way I forget, TFS has said they'd want Mighty Mask/Garlic Junior/Pilaf in a robo suit, but none of those are going to happen I just don't see any of those making the cut they just don't have enough to make a moveset out of it, Super 17 is not happening, Baby would just be a Vegeta clone, no one wants GT Pan or General Rildo, Slug and Turles are too similar to Piccolo while they already have a better evil clone of Goku with Goku Black, Android 20 could be interesting have an energy drain counter and summon 19 as partner like Videl does with gohan, and past that I don't think anyone has enough popularity or staying power to make an effort for. but they could go for something completely unexpected like Chi-Chi which would be out of nowhere and hilarious, or they could go for another tournament of power character like Ribrianne or destruction god Toppo or the U9 wolves, so in order of most likely:

1-Omega Shenron (practically guaranteed given all the other characters they have being evil and powerful)
2-Raditz (makes sense to round out the saiyan saga roster which is the direction they seemed to go with those eras of vegeta and goku)
3-Master Roshi (would be great to have, could do great things with him, would round out team human)
4-Dabura (has an interesting set of moves he can use, has the same evil coolness that omega Shenron has)
5-Android 20 (would complete the android set given that he is relevant to the games storyline a bit and just think: mother, father son team with 16 and 21, and 19 as assist/partner character like 18 or videl)
6-any other character (they haven't done any OG Dragon Ball representation or at least not much, they have done tournament of power characters like Jiren, Kefla and UI Goku, Android 17 on his own but those are the top of they are the most likely to do ever, but there is five other characters above whatever tournament of power character they pull out, I don't see them choosing Ribrianne or any other character from ToP over Roshi or Raditz. like there is a lot of ToP representation you can do, but arcsys is taking quality over quantity with this and they're not likely to go for a character people don't even know or remember, and I doubt they're going to draw from the manga arc which isn't finished. and if they were going to do an Angel character, it would be Whis and they'd already would've done it along with Beerus same with the Kais and Shin. they're pretty consistent about going for characters they can make an actual moveset from their source, and Kais and angels simply don't fight enough despite being powerful

like you can do interesting stuff with someone like Ribrianne, she lasted long enough in ToP to do a lot of things that one could a make a fighter out of in Fighter Z and be an interesting addition to the roster, the question is if anyone likes her enough to want a fat magical girl parody to be in their Dragon Ball fighter game.

Finally there is always the old Hercule lethal joke character standby that has been done by other Dragon Ball games in the past, but if that was going to be done, again they would've have already done it.)

[Anteros]

You're not wrong, but the sonar upgrade is a fantastic quality of life upgrade on that front. Burns through power relatively quickly, but you really only need to pulse it to get a good feel for your surroundings and figure out where you will and won't fit.

Honestly, I kind of like that it feels so ponderous. Makes me feel like I'm actually driving something huge and impressive.

Same. The Cyclops is a massive beast of a ship and I like that it feels like it.

I used an editor for Terraria to make my character softcore since restarting seemed like a hassle. It's a lot better. Mediumcore doesn't seem to add much besides tedium.

I refuse to buy the DBZ game unless they add the champ.

[Zevox]

well I can't really say the actual button on the screen, because I have to memorize it by my keyboard commands and my mind can't connect the two if I want to do it well because I have no controller. so thats how I have to remember it. I basically have to play Fighter Z by putting my hands on the WASD and UHJK keys, with the WASD keys being the movement and the UHJK keys being the buttons, H is my simple combo attack, U is my y-combo, J is for ki blasts and K is for b button stuff? Y and L keys are for switching characters, the I key is for the big specials, G is for charging forward. I don't know how to sparking and thus don't use it.
If by "charging forward" you mean the homing dash, then yeah, quarter-circle + G would be UI Goku's counter super. It goes:

Light attack: Your fast close moves, also the three-hit auto-combo that goes into homing dash, and auto-combos in the air. I'm pretty sure this is what you mean by "simple combo attack."
Medium attack: Slightly slower but usually further reaching than lights, also does an auto-combo on the ground, but it's usually just a couple of hits into a super. I think this is what you mean by "y-combo" (though I don't know why you call it that).
Heavy attack: The big attacks that cause a brief camera zoom-in on hit and send the opponent flying, and you homing dash after them if you press the button a second time after the hit. I can only guess this is what you mean by "b button stuff."
Ki blast: self-explanatory, the fourth main button.
Light + Medium: Dragon Rush, aka the game's universal throw attack. Also used for most supers in combination with a quarter-circle forward or back.
Medium + Heavy: Vanish attack, the one-bar universal special move that teleports behind the opponent and kicks them across the screen.
Heavy + Ki Blast: Homing Dash, the move where you surround yourself in an energy aura and fly at the enemy no matter where they are. Also used for supers, though whether they're different from or the same as the Light + Medium ones varies from character to character.
Light + Ki Blast: Ki Charge, aka the "shout and power up" move that nobody uses because it's terrible, but has to be in the game because it's Dragon Ball.

Character-switching is the two assist buttons. Sparking Blast is done with all four the main buttons simultaneously (or a one-button macro of that - I set mine to R2 on my PS4 controller).

You should be able to change your controls around as you wish - I mean, I can do it on the PS4, and it seems like it would be that much more important to have that functionality on a PC for the keyboard, so I can't imagine they left it out. Set one-button Sparking Blast, or Vanish, etc to whatever works for you.


yeah those all seem like they could happen. Omega Shenron he won't standout amid all the other "powerful" characters on the roster he is just there for GT representation he's meh, but Raditz would complete the saiyan saga set nicely and Roshi is exactly the kind character I think they should put in. he could provide a unique playstyle based off being an old master showing up the young 'uns, he could do evil containment wave as a special, and he'd just be different and interesting in a way others would not, and I hope these are true because Shenron? probably inevitable, but mechanically I don't see how he'd standout? Raditz they probably could do something interesting with him, but Roshi? he'd be the gold, I hope he specifically is real for mechanical reasons. but Raditz would be nice for lore reasons.

like there is very little characters left as alternatives. we could have Dabura. he has a sword, stone spit, those could be interesting. we could have Tao Pai Pai maybe do something with his thrown column and being like, associated with Tien in some way I forget, TFS has said they'd want Mighty Mask/Garlic Junior/Pilaf in a robo suit, but none of those are going to happen I just don't see any of those making the cut they just don't have enough to make a moveset out of it, Super 17 is not happening, Baby would just be a Vegeta clone, no one wants GT Pan or General Rildo, Slug and Turles are too similar to Piccolo while they already have a better evil clone of Goku with Goku Black, Android 20 could be interesting have an energy drain counter and summon 19 as partner like Videl does with gohan, and past that I don't think anyone has enough popularity or staying power to make an effort for. but they could go for something completely unexpected like Chi-Chi which would be out of nowhere and hilarious, or they could go for another tournament of power character like Ribrianne or destruction god Toppo or the U9 wolves, so in order of most likely:

1-Omega Shenron (practically guaranteed given all the other characters they have being evil and powerful)
2-Raditz (makes sense to round out the saiyan saga roster which is the direction they seemed to go with those eras of vegeta and goku)
3-Master Roshi (would be great to have, could do great things with him, would round out team human)
4-Dabura (has an interesting set of moves he can use, has the same evil coolness that omega Shenron has)
5-Android 20 (would complete the android set given that he is relevant to the games storyline a bit and just think: mother, father son team with 16 and 21, and 19 as assist/partner character like 18 or videl)
6-any other character (they haven't done any OG Dragon Ball representation or at least not much, they have done tournament of power characters like Jiren, Kefla and UI Goku, Android 17 on his own but those are the top of they are the most likely to do ever, but there is five other characters above whatever tournament of power character they pull out, I don't see them choosing Ribrianne or any other character from ToP over Roshi or Raditz. like there is a lot of ToP representation you can do, but arcsys is taking quality over quantity with this and they're not likely to go for a character people don't even know or remember, and I doubt they're going to draw from the manga arc which isn't finished. and if they were going to do an Angel character, it would be Whis and they'd already would've done it along with Beerus same with the Kais and Shin. they're pretty consistent about going for characters they can make an actual moveset from their source, and Kais and angels simply don't fight enough despite being powerful

like you can do interesting stuff with someone like Ribrianne, she lasted long enough in ToP to do a lot of things that one could a make a fighter out of in Fighter Z and be an interesting addition to the roster, the question is if anyone likes her enough to want a fat magical girl parody to be in their Dragon Ball fighter game.

Finally there is always the old Hercule lethal joke character standby that has been done by other Dragon Ball games in the past, but if that was going to be done, again they would've have already done it.)
Well, I'll say this much: FighterZ appears to focus mostly on DBZ, and secondarily on Super when picking its characters. From that perspective, I'd agree that they're running low on options from Z. They've basically got all of the real big names already, and the next best choices are the tertiary/minor antagonists of each arc: Radditz from the Saiyan Saga, Zarbon and Dodoria from the Freeza Saga, Androids 19 and 20 from the Android Saga, and Dabura (and maybe Babidi? Eh...) from the Buu Saga. Beyond that they'd have to go dipping into minor supporting characters like Nail or Pikkon, or a joke choice like Hercule. Or more alternate versions of existing characters I guess, like other forms of Freeza or Cell, or more Gokus or Vegetas, but there's only so much that anyone would want of those, and I think the three Vegetas, five Gokus, and two Buus that we already have is about there already. Super I'm not terribly familiar with since I haven't watched it, but my impression has been that Kefla and UI Goku were the last two big names that people were asking for from that, and we just got them.

GT I really can't say much about as, again, I haven't seen it, but from seeing others talk about it Omega Shenron and Baby are the only two anyone seems to credit as a real possibility. At least since we got SSB Gogeta and Kid GT Goku with the SS4 super, anyway, before that there were people saying they'd like to see SS4 Gogeta or SS4 Goku.

The movies I've only seen the Abridged versions of (so haven't seen any that Abridged didn't do), but my impression was that they covered the popular picks from there in season 1 of the DLC, when we got Bardock, Broly, and Cooler. But then they added Janemba in season 2, and I'd legitimately never heard of him before he was leaked for that, so I guess they could always surprise me there.

Then you've got original Dragon Ball, and... eh. Since we got Kid Goku from GT with the power pole, I don't think they'll be doing an original Kid Goku. I could see King Piccolo being an option, assuming they could make him play differently from Z Piccolo. And otherwise, well, there's Roshi, and that's about it. Everybody else from there that isn't in yet can't even do energy stuff IIRC, and with Homing Dash and Vanish being core mechanics to the game, you really need some passing amount of that to seem plausible (which is why I think they've never done Hercule). Even Videl is stretching it a bit as-is, since Vanish is a bit weird on her, but least Gohan taught her enough that you could see her learning to do something like that.

I know one Youtuber that I follow legitimately wants Bulma in a Mech and/or Turles (entirely because he's the only Saiyan who's not already in who could plausibly have a super involving turning into an Oozaru), but I'm pretty sure even he knows those aren't likely to actually happen.

[MCerberus]

I play the division off and on to collect stuff and unlock classes and such. Every time I'm reminded of just how much better the story would be if it would step back and embrace just how messed up the setting is. I mean by the second half of Division 2, the SHD
Are officially rogue. They've turned against the remnant government in order to ensure the broad-spectrum antiviral can't be used as a political tool. You are part of a populist terrorist movement actively at war with what is essentially the US army.

And they do nothing with the concept. They just say you're the good guy and add in audio logs about the people you're fighting kicking puppies. Then the expansion happens and

All of the safeguards on your tech is deactivated. Agents can no longer be locked out by being designated rogue. Everyone's concern about sociopaths with limitless power is happening. Everything the civilians, army and responder remnant, and even some Division agents worried about HAPPENED.

I'm just screaming at the writers how rich and amazing a setting they made is and all they do is assure you you're the good guy over and over again as you preemptively raid the headquarters of someone who was planning on getting revenge for the death of their daughter.

[Lord Raziere]

ah, thanks on the sparking tip.

As for characters:
yeeeeah, both Z and OG Dragon Ball are limited in options and the roster is full of clones already, and don't forget the two gohans. like maybe you could make a pre-final form freeza one if you stretch it, but why would you? or Imperfect Cell if you want? maybe super buu? but.....no.

so anything after these final season 3 characters would basically default to Super, and if they did a Season 4 well....they'd basically have to start drawing on semi-minor characters from the U6 tournament and tournament of power who were good enough to be notable in some manner beyond being some random one-off ability. the characters I'd see being likely for that would be:

1. God of Destruction Toppo
2. Ribrianne
3. Dyspo
4. Trio De Dangers
5. Frost
6. maybe Catopesla if he is incredibly lucky.

with Aniraza, Auta Magetta and Botamo not being viable due either being large or having weird mechanics that don't match up to the fighting system, while Universe 4 is made of nothing but tricksters who also don't work with the fighting system, Universe 10 is not notable enough, nor is Universe 3 to be honest, Universe 9 died before it ever got going, and half the Universe 11 team got taken out by Kale without fusion in one episode so that tells you all you need to know about important they were. Universe 2 aside from Ribrianne was also filled with nothing but one offs. Cabba is just another smol saiyan, which between kid Gohan, Gotenks, Kid goku, we don't need.

so if there was a season four, it would be going to probably be about the ToP, and it would probably be the last one, because it would consist of "those guys who didn't make it to the final fight but we're kind of quirky and powerful enough to be relevant for more than two seconds". IE scrapping the bottom of the barrel. I doubt that'll happen. Season 3's probably the last. I doubt they're going to bother with Tournament of Power runner ups beyond Kefla. they already put in UI Goku, so they're probably done with that. its probably going to be Omega Shenron, Raditz and Roshi as the leaks say or two other Z characters that would make sense, then that will be it.

[warty goblin]

So Maneater just came out. You play as steadily mutating shark on a one-fish quest to improve the human gene pool by eating horrible reality TV show characters. Also everything and everyone else you catch sight of. Sometimes the pesky humans will take refuge on the beach, so you jump out of the water and flop around eating gormless morons. Look, you're a shark, when you're a biological torpedo with a front-mounted chipper-shredder, everything is meat confetti, whether it knows it or not.


This is very much a B action game. I love B grade action games. The graphics are pretty good, the gore is suitably ridiculous, the controls get the job done. Just lean back, grab that controller, turn off the brain, and bite a fishing boat to death.

[endoperez]

I tried Terraria, but it turns out it's not my thing.

It's not enough of a roguelike for it to be a streamlined challenge on that front, and the type of exploration and discovery you do isn't enough to keep my interest. It seems to be a combination of procedurally generated levels, roguelite-inspired "descent into the depths" type of thing with some danger management, and weak-to-strong progression through equipment.

Except, as was mentioned, losing all your equipment and having to backtrack is boring, and in softcore, having to backtrack is also boring. There's probably a way to build bases where you respawn, but they should either be limited to the ground areas, or if they aren't, I have a feeling the game wouldn't have much challenge.

Too many of the game mechanics aren't easily discovered in the game itself. I see something called demonite that my current pickaxe doesn't break - what type of pickaxe do I need? Check wiki. How to grow things on dirt you built? Check wiki. And so on. If I have to check a wiki, the game doesn't feel like exploration to me.


I also tried Factorio. I appreciate it for what it does, but it seems too tedious for me. I wouldn't mind planning out different base layouts if it was feasible to do that in-game, but the combination of time limits, incoming enemies, and lack of easily accessible layout plans makes that a bit too tedious. When it'd be simpler to do the plans on grid paper, I think there's something lacking in the game. As I mentioned in a different thread, Mindustry (https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry), a much simpler game, scratches the same itch but makes the conveyor belt management etc. much more palatable to me. I'm interested to see what the genre will look like in 5-6 years, though.

I tried Poker Quest (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1184820/Poker_Quest/), available on Steam and online. A roguelite with "deck-building" elements, with the gimmick being that the randomness is generated by drawing cards from a normal deck of playing cards. Your hero has items, some of which work better with pairs, others with cards of the same suite, or with a flush or royal flush, etc. The items basically change which cards and card combinations are preferable, so they're your "deck-building" or "character customization".

A nice little game, but it's Early Access and still needs lots more polish.
With care, it might become something like Dicey Dungeons, a charming roguelike with an interesting twist. It's not there yet, though.

I've tried Rimworld and a few Rimworld clones, but it looks like I'm not currently in the mood for games like this. I did enjoy Dwarf Fortress back when I played it, so I'm not sure why they don't draw me in - seems like they should.

I'm trying out Witcher 3 - interesting storytelling, but I'm not the biggest fan of action games, so I'm not as enthusiastic about it as many others seem to be.

I gave Ni no Kuni a try, but it was too simple and childish for me. The combat system is a bore and doesn't have any challenge, and I already gave the game quite some time and got the second party member.


I would like to find some game to sink my teeth in, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for, exactly. Probably a turn-based RPG of some sort. Maybe Dragon Quest XI? Or Ori and the Will of the Wisps, or perhaps I should wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong.

[MCerberus]

So Maneater just came out. You play as steadily mutating shark on a one-fish quest to improve the human gene pool by eating horrible reality TV show characters. Also everything and everyone else you catch sight of. Sometimes the pesky humans will take refuge on the beach, so you jump out of the water and flop around eating gormless morons. Look, you're a shark, when you're a biological torpedo with a front-mounted chipper-shredder, everything is meat confetti, whether it knows it or not.


This is very much a B action game. I love B grade action games. The graphics are pretty good, the gore is suitably ridiculous, the controls get the job done. Just lean back, grab that controller, turn off the brain, and bite a fishing boat to death.

I respect Tripwire. Their games always make a very specific promise to users and they always keep it.

[warty goblin]

I respect Tripwire. Their games always make a very specific promise to users and they always keep it.

The fact that this is the same company that made Red Orchestra is sort of a mindscrew. From counting bullets in your K-98 to flopping your shark across a golf course so you can hide in the water hazard and eat people. Bit of a genre shift.

Also this might be the most cheerfully misanthropic game I've played since Saints Row.

[MCerberus]

The fact that this is the same company that made Red Orchestra is sort of a mindscrew. From counting bullets in your K-98 to flopping your shark across a golf course so you can hide in the water hazard and eat people. Bit of a genre shift.

Also this might be the most cheerfully misanthropic game I've played since Saints Row.

It makes more sense if you remember that last year the Killing Floor Christmas featured Gary Busy.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

I would like to find some game to sink my teeth in, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for, exactly. Probably a turn-based RPG of some sort. Maybe Dragon Quest XI? Or Ori and the Will of the Wisps, or perhaps I should wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong.

I'm a huge fan of Divinity: Original Sin II. I've often seen it described as the closest a video game can come to D&D, and it's a lot of fun. Character generation is surprisingly in depth, combat is tactical, your build choices are very impactful, and the story is quite good, with a lot of potential side-stories. Plus you can play couch co-op if you want.

[Balmas]

My only real complaint with the cyclops was that it only has one docking bay. That means that if you want to move bases, it's always a four-trip journey in the slowest vehicle in the game: Go to the new base site, drop off PRAWN, go back to old base, pick up seamoth, go to new base, drop off seamoth, reequip PRAWN in cyclops.

[Kantaki]

Started Terraria on Switch yesterday.
So many deaths just until I got a house build and basic armor...
Next I start exploring. To my right is a desert.
I immediately get ganked by the critters.
So left I go. After an icefield I find... Another desert.:smallannoyed:
Obviously I need some massive upgrades before going anywhere.
All I find is enough iron for a sword.:smallsigh:
When I try it out I get murdered by a antlion out of nowhere.
Worse, it follows me home.
I start cursing the game and plink the thing to death.
It drops one of its jaws. Which is a pretty decent weapon compared to what I got. Auto-swing alone makes it a upgrade even before the higher damage.
Immediately all is forgiven.:smallbiggrin:

[Zevox]

As for characters:
yeeeeah, both Z and OG Dragon Ball are limited in options and the roster is full of clones already, and don't forget the two gohans.
Clones has the wrong connotation, as it implies that they have the same moves, too. The closest thing to a clone in DBFZ would maybe be SSB Vegeta, who has the same normals as SS Vegeta and several of his specials are just variations on SS Vegeta's, but even he has some new specials and supers, and plays differently (and sadly much worse) than his SS counterpart. The two Gohans have almost nothing in common besides the lightning legs special move - and the general fact that they're aggressive rushdown characters, but so is most of the cast really, since that's just the style of play the the game lends itself to.


so anything after these final season 3 characters would basically default to Super, and if they did a Season 4 well....they'd basically have to start drawing on semi-minor characters from the U6 tournament and tournament of power who were good enough to be notable in some manner beyond being some random one-off ability.
Eh, not necessarily - there's still those other remaining tertiary villains I listed from Z they could dig into, and assorted movie villains, if Super doesn't have any remaining standouts.


so if there was a season four, it would be going to probably be about the ToP, and it would probably be the last one, because it would consist of "those guys who didn't make it to the final fight but we're kind of quirky and powerful enough to be relevant for more than two seconds". IE scrapping the bottom of the barrel. I doubt that'll happen. Season 3's probably the last. I doubt they're going to bother with Tournament of Power runner ups beyond Kefla. they already put in UI Goku, so they're probably done with that. its probably going to be Omega Shenron, Raditz and Roshi as the leaks say or two other Z characters that would make sense, then that will be it.
Perhaps - though with a game this successful I think a sequel at some point is basically inevitable. Though I had thought that they'd save adding extra assists to everyone for that, and instead they added it for free in season 3, so eh. Still, a sequel would also help in the character area, since it would open them up to make more original characters like Android 21 for whatever story they decided to go for with it.


I would like to find some game to sink my teeth in, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for, exactly. Probably a turn-based RPG of some sort. Maybe Dragon Quest XI?
I can wholeheartedly recommend Dragon Quest 11, as long as you don't mind your JRPGs old-school. It's one of the best examples of that style of game around - the story's hardly the deepest, but it's fun and has some genuine surprises in it, and the gameplay is good, if very old-fashioned and largely straightforward.

Also, if you haven't tried the Persona games yet, can't recommend those highly enough. Persona 3 and 4 are not readily available on modern systems at this point sadly*, but Persona 5 Royal just hit the PS5, which just makes an already great game even better.

*Note to Atlus: make a Persona Collection for PS4 and/or PS5 that includes Persona 4 Golden and some version of Persona 3 (FES, Portable, or some new Definitive Edition that includes all of Portable's new content and adds back the parts that were removed due to PSP limitations). It's a little sad that those haven't ever been re-released outside of the PSP/Vita versions.

[Triaxx]

On Factorio, a lot of people play with enemies disabled. That way they can just focus on the base building aspects, without those time limits you mentioned. That said, personally I find that intensely boring, so it's not for everyone.

[Anteros]

Started Terraria on Switch yesterday.
So many deaths just until I got a house build and basic armor...
Next I start exploring. To my right is a desert.
I immediately get ganked by the critters.
So left I go. After an icefield I find... Another desert.:smallannoyed:
Obviously I need some massive upgrades before going anywhere.
All I find is enough iron for a sword.:smallsigh:
When I try it out I get murdered by a antlion out of nowhere.
Worse, it follows me home.
I start cursing the game and plink the thing to death.
It drops one of its jaws. Which is a pretty decent weapon compared to what I got. Auto-swing alone makes it a upgrade even before the higher damage.
Immediately all is forgiven.:smallbiggrin:

How are the controls on switch? I'm wary of console controls in general for games like this, and I don't like the Switch's controls in general, but I have thought about picking it up since it's the kind of game that benefits from being able to pick it up and put it down easily on the go.

[endoperez]

Started Terraria on Switch yesterday.

[DESERTS AND ANTLIONS]


I went down about as much as I went sideways. There aren't that many enemies down there, and you can always build a wall between you and them if you do find enemies. I didn't encounter the desert though, if it's full of sand that could be super annoying. It did look like once you go down for long enough, you'll start finding some big threatening things, which would require rather high-end equipment to face in a fair fight.

Did you notice that snow blocks can be transformed into snowballs? It's not a great ranged weapon, but since snow is plentiful, you can have enough snowballs to never run out of them, so that's a plus.



On Factorio, a lot of people play with enemies disabled. That way they can just focus on the base building aspects, without those time limits you mentioned. That said, personally I find that intensely boring, so it's not for everyone.

That's what I tried at first. It was indeed boring, the primary challenge was optimizing the factory systems. And, again, the game doesn't have tool for optimizing the systems. No proper plans or blueprints, no way to mark full mining areas at first and then fill them in bit by bit later, etc.

I might enjoy the planning if I had proper tools, but it looked like the best way to plan would be grid paper, and that's not my thing. Again, I enjoyed factory and conveyor belt planning much more in Mindustry, even though the game itself is more limited. in Mindustry, you place the buildings first, but your character only starts building them and spending resources once you are near it. that means you can plan out the whole mining area and its belt systems at first, spending only time (instead of resources), and then move in and build them when needed.

That change along makes planning things out rather pleasant. Especially the planning of conveyor belts is much easier when you can just drag them into place, fix them if you made mistakes, and only start placing the pieces afterwards. Doing the same in Factorio is such a chore in comparison.

I'm not claiming that Mindustry is better in all ways, though. The tower defense gameplay with ever-increasing waves you can't properly stop gets old faster than Factorio's hives you can destroy, etc, the tech tree and processed components are much fewer, energy management is much simpler, etc. I got tired of Mindustry relatively fast, but enjoyed the planning much more than I did Factorio's. Factorio has much more depth.



I'm a huge fan of Divinity: Original Sin II. I've often seen it described as the closest a video game can come to D&D, and it's a lot of fun. Character generation is surprisingly in depth, combat is tactical, your build choices are very impactful, and the story is quite good, with a lot of potential side-stories. Plus you can play couch co-op if you want.

How does it compare to the first Divinity: Original Sin? I played that, and enjoyed the mechanics of the combat, but at some point the story got a bit stale, so I never finished it.




I can wholeheartedly recommend Dragon Quest 11, as long as you don't mind your JRPGs old-school. It's one of the best examples of that style of game around - the story's hardly the deepest, but it's fun and has some genuine surprises in it, and the gameplay is good, if very old-fashioned and largely straightforward.

Also, if you haven't tried the Persona games yet, can't recommend those highly enough. Persona 3 and 4 are not readily available on modern systems at this point sadly*, but Persona 5 Royal just hit the PS5, which just makes an already great game even better.

*Note to Atlus: make a Persona Collection for PS4 and/or PS5 that includes Persona 4 Golden and some version of Persona 3 (FES, Portable, or some new Definitive Edition that includes all of Portable's new content and adds back the parts that were removed due to PSP limitations). It's a little sad that those haven't ever been re-released outside of the PSP/Vita versions.

Okay, good to know! Dragon Quest XI and Divinity OS 2 are the most likely candidates for now. They're two very different games, so hopefully one of them works!

I haven't tried the Persona games. I used to be a bit of a purist, thinking all game series must always be played in order, starting from the earliest installment. Now that I've given up on that notion, I could give Persona 5 a try once I get a chance. For now, though, I'm PC only.

[Anteros]

How does it compare to the first Divinity: Original Sin? I played that, and enjoyed the mechanics of the combat, but at some point the story got a bit stale, so I never finished it.


The mechanics are a lot deeper than the first one. It's pretty much objectively better mechanics-wise. The story is more fleshed out, and has a much more serious tone than the first one...whether that's an improvement is up to personal tastes. At the end of the day, it's still standard CRPG fare. I don't think the story or characters are anything special, but they're not bad. The true strengths of the game are the tactical combat, and the sheer amount of versatility it offers the player in how to approach different situations.

[Triaxx]

You can import blueprints other people have made, but mostly you've got to make your own. As for the mining, hold shift. It'll then drag a ghost blueprint you can fill in later. Personally I prefer the challenge of doing things from scratch, and honestly I find that while you can just plonk down someone's pre-made malls (where you can shop for all the stuff it builds), I prefer to build everything from scratch and then make tweaks later. Perfect pre-mades which take no work just clicking down blueprints seems like the least interesting way possible to play the game.

Then again I went modded about half-way through my first playthrough and never looked back like I do most games that allow modding.

[Kantaki]

How are the controls on switch? I'm wary of console controls in general for games like this, and I don't like the Switch's controls in general, but I have thought about picking it up since it's the kind of game that benefits from being able to pick it up and put it down easily on the go.

Well, I think the controls are alright.
But then I've never had a problem with the controller.
Worst case you can customize the controls to whatever suits you best or. Or anoys you least as the case may be:smalltongue:.


I went down about as much as I went sideways. There aren't that many enemies down there, and you can always build a wall between you and them if you do find enemies. I didn't encounter the desert though, if it's full of sand that could be super annoying. It did look like once you go down for long enough, you'll start finding some big threatening things, which would require rather high-end equipment to face in a fair fight.

Did you notice that snow blocks can be transformed into snowballs? It's not a great ranged weapon, but since snow is plentiful, you can have enough snowballs to never run out of them, so that's a plus.

Snowballs would've been a good idea, yes.:smallbiggrin:
But going underground didn't help, beyond picking up a neat sword with projectile.
Higher up I can't dig because sand and because monsters in my tunnels- including those accursed antlions -and deeper down, where I can tunnel, there's... more friggin antlions.:smallannoyed:

Mind you, now that I have a good weapon- still only wood armor though:smallsigh: -traveling around's much easier.

[Zevox]

I haven't tried the Persona games. I used to be a bit of a purist, thinking all game series must always be played in order, starting from the earliest installment. Now that I've given up on that notion, I could give Persona 5 a try once I get a chance. For now, though, I'm PC only.
There are certainly series where I'd recommend doing that, but Persona is definitely not one of them*. Each is entirely independent of the other story-wise, and contains only easter-egg style references to its predecessors at most. Plus Persona 1 and 2 in particular are somewhat different from what their successors became, and have not aged as well. I wasn't even able to finish P1&2 when I tried them, so I wouldn't even actually recommend those.

*At least the mainline games. The spin-offs do want you to have played the mainline games they're based on first, generally speaking.

But yeah, PC only does put a damper on that, as apparently the only title from it ever released for PC is the very first - and even that surprised me when I looked it up just now. The series is basically exclusive to Sony systems, aside from a few spin-offs on Nintendo ones.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've recently started The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, because I needed something to play on the train to and from work in these difficult times and I've never played it.

It's cute, and I'm really enjoying the attempts to use size as the version of Seasons/Ages from the Oracle games, but unfortunately either everything plays the same with a different enemy set or I'm seemingly locked out of any item other than the sword and can't go across textured ground, which in itself wouldn't be annoying if shrinking down was as quick as returning to normal size (a one second animation, compared to shrinking being a longer animation followed by a short cut scene).

But apart from that one niggle it's mostly amazing. Even running through the first dungeon without the spin attack was fun, and as I've looked up the number of sword techniques you can learn (eight, apparently) I've got hope that this might make the combat slightly more complex than other 2D Zeldas. The new way the sword slashes is also great, it doesn't feel quite as wide as it did in ALBW (which is good, to me that game felt like the swing was too wide), but manages to avoid the problem from the Links Awakening-based games of cutting off one diagonal from sword slashes.

So yeah, while it might not be as good as Oracle of Seasons (in my mind the best 2D Zelda, even better than ALttP due to it's items) it's certainly looking to be one great little game. And while dungeons are clearly designed to be completed in one sitting at least I can save in the middle of them (I'm looking at you A Link Between Worlds! Making me trek back to the exit to save when my bus journey finishes is not nice).

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Started playing Okami again, and this time I'm intent on finishing. I think I'm actually closer to the end than I thought I was, though.

[Corlindale]

Still playing Tales of Maj'Eyal. My desert island game if there ever was one.

My Rogue died a sad death due to lack of proper defenses, but he got far enough to unlock the use of any class in Embers of Rage, which meant I got to take the all-powerful force of nature that is the Oozemancer for a spin. Not only did he unlock the new Annihilator class, but I also finally managed to beat the Embers of Rage campaign with him. I've found that Oozemancer is a pretty good class for a fairly careless player like me, because it's easy to stack health regen and you can have a ton of passive defenses that trigger automatically when bad stuff happens.

A fun ride, though the final boss was a bit of an anticlimax (not particularly dangerous, but a regenerating hp sponge, so kind of a war of attrition). I did like the Lovecraftian flavour of the final sections, also because the "horror" monster type in this game actually has some really terrifying stuff.

Haven't tried out the Annihilator yet, currently toying around with a Cultist of Entropy back in the main game. Still haven't wrapped my head around it, it seems like a very, very complex class.

[Cygnia]

Still playing "Gris", though I'm trying to get used to the double-jump mechanic on my keyboard. Index finger is a bit tender from tapping and holding my space bar. :smallyuk:

Steam had a sale, so I picked up the rebooted "Shadowgate" (released in 2014) for nostalgia feels.

[Rakaydos]

Just finished my second playthrough of Hollow knight. First time though, I explored, got 102%, and beat Radience. This time, 37%, 11 hours (minus a few minutes) to beat Hollow Knight, and wow, he's a different prospect when you arnt loaded to the gills, dont have Shade Cloak, and cant just power past him to get the full heal before Radience. It took half a dozen attempts or so before i actually got the hang of his healing windows and evasion patterns.

Watcher knights was the other road block that kept me away from the Speedrun 1 achievement. After a dozen tried, I left, got an extra mask, got the fireball upgrade (after a half dozen tries at least), THEN came back and took a half dozen tries to beat the 5 watchers.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Been puttering around in the deeper regions of Subnautica, and it's like the devs discovered I wanted to build an enormous glass bridge and decided to put all the materials I need in the deepest, most inaccessible places imaginable. :smalltongue:

I also had a very scary moment today; I had spotted a bit of Magnetite, glanced around to make sure no monsters were nearby, hopped out of my Prawn suit, grabbed it aaaand there was a Leviathan right behind my Prawn. :smalleek:

I don't remember it being this cloudy this deep back in early access. :smallyuk: Still not sure why the thing didn't kill me right there.

[Triaxx]

Prawn's absurdly tough, and can easily survive an encounter with a Leviathan.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Prawn's absurdly tough, and can easily survive an encounter with a Leviathan.

I should clarify: I had left the Prawn suit (I had the drill arm and the grappling hook arm equipped on it, which makes picking up the single unit not-harvested-with-drill-arm resources...problematic).

So it was just my reinforced dive suit vs. enormous sea monster...and the latter didn't even take a swing at me. :smallconfused:

[Triaxx]

Hmm... Tired brain added words.

Yeah, they seem far less attracted to you in your suit than they do in your big metal machines. Presumably because you make less noise.

[Silverraptor]

Last Oasis certainly has potential. Just got out of the noob zone. Can't wait to see where it goes from here.

[endoperez]

GOG has Divinity II OS on sale, so I went for that. I like optimizing my tactics and so on, and Dragon Quest XI's old school design won't allow too much of that.

While I was at it, I grabbed Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3. HOMM 2 is a bit more dated than I remembered, but we'll see how well it keeps up, and HOMM 3 afterwards. I don't think I've ever actually played the third one.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Just started playing Lara Croft: Guardian of Light with my sister, and so far I'm impressed. Fun puzzles, fun combat, and I'm always happy to see anything local co-op.

[Zevox]

Persona 5 Royal has been monopolizing my free time. It's rather addictive, honestly - much like a good Civilization game, except replace "one more turn" with "one more day." And that's despite me having played the original Persona 5 before. I'm already in between the third and fourth Palaces.

Have to say, I'm impressed by how much they added. Not just the new characters and their social links, but so many new events and scenes for them, a whole new area with new ways to spend your time, new additions to the Palaces, new stuff for Mementos, new books that give new bonuses when read, Akechi's social link being completely changed - it feels like it might be an even bigger batch of additions to the game than the alternate female lead in P3P, and that was chock full of subtle changes to the writing on top of the more obvious changes. Atlus continues to show what high-quality work they do with this series. I love it.

It's great reliving the early parts of the game, too. The whole opening centered around Kamoshida, the reveals about Madarame and Yusuke, Makoto's development from tool of Kobayakawa's to her having the best damn Awakening scene in the game, the setup for Futaba's Palace - all great stuff. A pity that some of the later parts of the game aren't as strong - or at least, I didn't feel that they were the first time around. Who knows, maybe I'll change my mind on this re-play.

[Eldan]

GOG has Divinity II OS on sale, so I went for that. I like optimizing my tactics and so on, and Dragon Quest XI's old school design won't allow too much of that.

While I was at it, I grabbed Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3. HOMM 2 is a bit more dated than I remembered, but we'll see how well it keeps up, and HOMM 3 afterwards. I don't think I've ever actually played the third one.

You're in for a treat then. HOMM3 is still seen by many as the best. At least by a certain kind of nerdy neckbeard, I mean connaisseur.

[Anteros]

I actually prefer HOMM II. It has a much stronger campaign, and I just like the art style and music better. 3 is probably more balanced though.

[Gnoman]

I wasn't even able to finish P1&2 when I tried them, so I wouldn't even actually recommend those.

I was 6 hours into Innocent Sin when my save got corrupted somehow. Most recent backup was two hours earlier. Haven't had the heart to go back and try to continue, even though I was enjoying it.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Are Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War or Inquisitor: Martyr any good, since they're on sale this weekend, or am I better off just reinstalling Dawn of War for a 40k fix?

[IthilanorStPete]

Are Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War or Inquisitor: Martyr any good, since they're on sale this weekend, or am I better off just reinstalling Dawn of War for a 40k fix?

Gladius is decent, it's a fun Civ-like game with no diplomacy, only war. Biggest problem I have with it is that the weapons tend to feel a little limp; I don't expect a squad of Guardsmen with lasguns to do much, but when it takes a Basilisk five turns to kill something, it feels a little underpowered.

[warty goblin]

Gladius is decent, it's a fun Civ-like game with no diplomacy, only war. Biggest problem I have with it is that the weapons tend to feel a little limp; I don't expect a squad of Guardsmen with lasguns to do much, but when it takes a Basilisk five turns to kill something, it feels a little underpowered.

I substantially prefer Gladius to all the hex based Civ games, it's a really excellent and smart design.

Dropping diplomacy is a solid move, not just for lore reasons (my space fascists are going to negotiate with demon-possessed traitors why?) but I think it elevates the rest of the game. Gladius is basically a turn based RTS, so all a diplomacy system would do is make the combat easier by allowing you to concentrate forces. As it is, you are quite often fighting a multiple front war. Also diplomacy with AI players in games like this is usually boring as mud, and exists of pretty much nothing but gaming the system.

The real cleverness of the game is what it does with cities though. In your standard 4X, cities do one thing at a time, and the game compensates by letting you build lots of them, leading to micro hell in the late game. In Gladius, you need specific buildings to produce different sorts of units (tank factories make tanks) and each building has a separate production queue. So your city can be building a new building, the barracks producing infantry, and the vehicle depot spitting out more tanks all at the same time. To prevent micro hell, there are substantial costs for building new cities; you'll probably get like 2 or 3 max in most games.

It also helps that the AI, while not brilliant, is at least competent at both the strategy and the unit shuffling tactics game.

I highly recommend Gladius. Most of the DLC is good too, particularly the ones that add new races to the game, as they are generally very distinct from each other. Even if you don't want to play as a race, fighting them can be super fun.

Recommending Inquisitor is tricky. On the one hand, the game has a ton of really unique ideas in it, and is easily the most inventive ARPG I've played in years. The downside is that the game is rife with things that work, but don't necessarily work together, or feel like they aren't working quite right somehow.

The biggest weirdness is how good (in a slightly janky way) the base combat is, which comes at the expense of boring, samey loot. Basically your character doesn't have active skills; those are entirely determined by the type of weapon you have equipped. So oasguns have a set of 4 abilities, boltgins have 4 entirely different skills, and so on. This means that weapon types are fantastically differentiated from each other, and generally feel great to use. Seriously, this game has the best Bolters of anything ever.

The downside is that finding new guns isn't all that exciting, because a new shotgun will pretty much always gave the same skills as the old shotgun, just with different stat bonuses. Personally I think it's a trade well worth making, because having a lot of fun combat options I easily change between is more interesting to me than a high variance on the output of the RNG.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

So I decided to actually get in gear and make some main quest progress in Subnautica.


I got to the Active Lava Zone alien facility. Saw a little robot thing, wasn't in the mood to be ambushed later, punted it out into the lava with the Repulsion gun.

Not long after the PDA tells me how everything here is non-hostile.


Now I feel kind of bad.

As I side note, is anyone else a little creeped out by the fact that

The aliens that destroyed 4546B's biosphere have apparently been to Earth before?

[Triaxx]

The game isn't entirely correct. Those things have attacked me before.

Destroying the Biosphere wasn't intentional. On the other hand, it would make a few legends more interesting.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

The game isn't entirely correct. Those things have attacked me before.

Me too, which was why I punted it in the first place. It's just in that area that they're not dangerous, so far as I can tell.

And despite the PDA data entry saying I should take one with me for $$$ for Alterra, it doesn't seem to be possible to pick them up. :smalltongue:

[PoeticallyPsyco]

And despite the PDA data entry saying I should take one with me for $$$ for Alterra, it doesn't seem to be possible to pick them up. :smalltongue:

Given that you owe them the full price of every resource you use throughout the game, getting any kind of money out of Alterra seems like rather a lost cause.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I
I highly recommend Gladius. Most of the DLC is good too, particularly the ones that add new races to the game, as they are generally very distinct from each other. Even if you don't want to play as a race, fighting them can be super fun.
Well, I picked up Gladius and all its DLC at half-price and after giving it a few hours I gotta say you were right! I'm really enjoying it and I've only done the tutorial. It just kinda sucked me in and before I knew it I'd played much longer than I intended to on a work night. Thanks for the recommendation, warty goblin! :smallbiggrin:

[LibraryOgre]

I haven't been able to settle. I've been bopping between Icewind Dale 2, Pool of Radiance, and trying to get myself started on Dark Sun: Shattered Lands.

[Anteros]

Given that you owe them the full price of every resource you use throughout the game, getting any kind of money out of Alterra seems like rather a lost cause.

I dunno. By the end of the game your character has access to some pretty valuable info that Alterra wants. The Degasi's fate for one, but more importantly the existence of a **** ton of advanced alien tech, other sapient races, and how to cure a potentially devastating pandemic that would open up a lot of alien worlds that would be otherwise closed to them. A smart person would smash their pda before leaving and bring just enough evidence of their claims to make them valuable.

[warty goblin]

Well, I picked up Gladius and all its DLC at half-price and after giving it a few hours I gotta say you were right! I'm really enjoying it and I've only done the tutorial. It just kinda sucked me in and before I knew it I'd played much longer than I intended to on a work night. Thanks for the recommendation, warty goblin! :smallbiggrin:

Glad you're enjoying it! I recommend starting with Space Marines or Imperial Guard, as they're a bit easier in general to get to grips with. Tyrannids are really fun, but also kinda tricky to do well with, since they lack ranged options and you need to manage Synapse units. This makes particularly the early game kinda rough. Tau are also a very effective faction, just so long as you can keep the nasty dudes with chainswords at a safe and plasma-incinerated distance.

[Zevox]

So, I'm on the fifth Palace in Persona 5 Royal now, and... yeah, I can see why I had the recollection of Futaba's Palace being sort of the end of the game's high points.

The whole period of Morgana leaving the group in frustration due to starting to feel useless after Futaba joined was just kind of annoying. For no good reason you lose the ability to do anything at night without him, and your days for around a week straight are taken up with story events that mostly amount to the group trying to find him and convince him to come back. While there's certainly some value to Morgana's development there, it really didn't need to be married to such a lengthy and complete disruption of your ability to do anything. And sure, in the process you meet Haru and get her father's Palace started, and there's some quality there, but even that feels a little off. Unlike every Palace up until now, for instance, it never shows the group figuring out what Okumura's distortion is - it's skipped over both for Morgana when he enters on his own, and the rest of the group when they do. And despite the amount of in-game time it takes, marrying it to that incident with Morgana somehow manages to make Haru's introduction and the setup for her father's Palace feel rushed compared to prior Palaces. And the way that Haru is sort of half-awakened when you meet her kind of denies her a proper Awakening scene, for the sake of... what, the added mystery when you first run into her? Eh...

Moreover though, there's just a fairly big problem with how Okumura himself is handled as a villain. Unlike everyone else so far, you don't get to see much of his abuses in the real world. You do get to see him treating Haru herself like a tool with that arranged marriage she's being forced into, and that's certainly some powerful stuff, but his Palace focuses on his abuses of his workers and how that fuels his political ambitions, and you never see any of that in the real world directly. Sure, by that point you know that what the Palace shows pretty accurately resembles what the ruler is up to in the real world, but still, moments like finding that conveyor belt dumping the bodies of burned-out robots representing his workers into an incinerator to fuel the Palace would be so much more powerful if you'd, say, had to investigate Big Bang Burger in advance, or had a school trip to one of his factories, and found out about the workers being forced to work unpaid overtime or having crazy short lunch breaks, like other parts of the Palace imply are also happening. Or, alternatively, the Palace could've had at least one portion that did emphasize his treatment of Haru specifically, rather than everything being so focused on his businesses - as-is there's that mini-boss fight with the cognitive version of her fiance, and that's it.

All of it just kind of leaves this part of the game vaguely unsatisfying compared to the first four Palaces, and if memory serves that continues on through the end from here. I was hoping that a re-run years after having played the game the first time might lead me to be happier with this part of the game, but so far, not so, sadly. Maybe things will improve as I hit parts that are more changed - I know there's a whole additional section that's been added to the game after the original ending, so I have some hopes for that, but we'll see.

[GloatingSwine]

So, I'm on the fifth Palace in Persona 5 Royal now, and... yeah, I can see why I had the recollection of Futaba's Palace being sort of the end of the game's high points.


After Okamura is when things kind of get personal anyway. It shifts from being about righting wrongs on behalf of others and more to defending yourself. So that's sort of where the robin hood shenanigans fade into the background anyway

[Anonymouswizard]

So I picked up Neverwinter Nights 2 Complete (because my laptop has no CD drive and I only own the original) and Kult: Heretic Kingdoms on GoG this weekend (along with The Age of Decadance and Titan Quest Anniversary Edition, although I've not played either yet), and have started both of them

With NWN 2 I decided to try to finish the Original Campaign again, and remembered it kind of expected you to go for a Charisma-focused class and so I rolled up a half-Drow Bard with +10 Bluff and +11 Diplomacy at 1st level. Not sure if I'm going to stick with it, I'm considering going Duellist later to be a better warrior (although with STR 8 and DEX 14 I'm not sure I'll be great either way), but I'm currently just pumping that Diplomacy and Perform as high as I can. I forgot how much I actually enjoy the tutorial in this game, with the rewards for actually completing it (an item that lets you cast CLW twice a day, and a cloak that gives you +1 Charisma) actually being useful.

Kult was more of a mized bag. I do like how, unlike other 'fixed character RPGs' I've played the main character is a woman, and it's certainly fun to play, but man it feels like the game expects me to know what I wat to specialise in before I've tried it out, and I just died on the second combat because An enemy was attacking me from offscreen while I was flinging fireballs at the two near me. I'll come back to it in two weeks, but I'm uninstalling it to give Titan Quest a go.

[LibraryOgre]

With NWN 2 I decided to try to finish the Original Campaign again, and remembered it kind of expected you to go for a Charisma-focused class and so I rolled up a half-Drow Bard with +10 Bluff and +11 Diplomacy at 1st level. Not sure if I'm going to stick with it, I'm considering going Duellist later to be a better warrior (although with STR 8 and DEX 14 I'm not sure I'll be great either way), but I'm currently just pumping that Diplomacy and Perform as high as I can. I forgot how much I actually enjoy the tutorial in this game, with the rewards for actually completing it (an item that lets you cast CLW twice a day, and a cloak that gives you +1 Charisma) actually being useful.


Bard is pretty much the ultimate Protagonist Class. Able to do most everything "well-enough", but excelling at talking and leading.

[Zevox]

After Okamura is when things kind of get personal anyway. It shifts from being about righting wrongs on behalf of others and more to defending yourself. So that's sort of where the robin hood shenanigans fade into the background anyway
That's certainly true of Sae's Palace and the events surrounding it, but not quite so much Shido. And then of course once you reach the bottom of Mementos things escalate and it turns into a save the world situation, as it often does at the end of a Persona game.

[Anteros]

Bard is pretty much the ultimate Protagonist Class. Able to do most everything "well-enough", but excelling at talking and leading.

I find that you can play any class you want in these games as long as you're willing to put all your skill points into diplomacy. It's an annoying pigeonhole, but I tend to mostly play fighters in these games, so I don't need those skill points for anything useful anyway.

[Anonymouswizard]

I find that you can play any class you want in these games as long as you're willing to put all your skill points into diplomacy. It's an annoying pigeonhole, but I tend to mostly play fighters in these games, so I don't need those skill points for anything useful anyway.

Yeah, the biggest class tiering elements are 1) does this class have Diplomacy as a class skill, and 2) does this class fill a particular niche. NWN2 just adds in some parts that benefit from having ranks in Perform as well, making Bards a little bit better than normal, and makes Resting easy enough that having a dedicated healer isn't essential.

Although thinking about it, I might restart and do a Bard/Swashbuckler build, dropping Pickpocket and the like and just focusing on keeping Bluff, Diplomacy, and Perform at max.

[LibraryOgre]

Yeah, the biggest class tiering elements are 1) does this class have Diplomacy as a class skill, and 2) does this class fill a particular niche. NWN2 just adds in some parts that benefit from having ranks in Perform as well, making Bards a little bit better than normal, and makes Resting easy enough that having a dedicated healer isn't essential.

Although thinking about it, I might restart and do a Bard/Swashbuckler build, dropping Pickpocket and the like and just focusing on keeping Bluff, Diplomacy, and Perform at max.

My NWN2 version tends to be Bard 7 (to get the Regeneration aura)/ Dragon Disciple.

[Rynjin]

Friend got me to play Dungeons and Dragons Online while most of the content is free.

It's...interesting for an MMO. It plays more like an old single player RPG like Riven or something than an MMO. It's pretty fun.

[Silverraptor]

Friend got me to play Dungeons and Dragons Online while most of the content is free.

It's...interesting for an MMO. It plays more like an old single player RPG like Riven or something than an MMO. It's pretty fun.

Yeah, it's certainly interesting.

[Anonymouswizard]

My NWN2 version tends to be Bard 7 (to get the Regeneration aura)/ Dragon Disciple.

I'm not a fan of Dragon Disciple from a conceptual level, although I do like most of the prestige classes in NWN 2. However, unlike the Divine Champion it's not mostly thematicaly redundant with a base class introduced in the base game (it seems to exist to allow NLG types to access some Paladin abilities).

Looking at the classes, it seems like the build I want is either Bard 7/Swashbuckler X, or Bard 1/Swashbuckler X, depending on if I want the regeneration song or just the attack bonus and Perform skill. I certainly want a build along the lines of STR 8/DEX 16/CON 12/INT 14/WIS 8/CHA 14 though, with extra points being pumped into INT or Cha to bring them up to 16. I'm not really interested in most of the other Bard songs, although it does leave the KC with a problem against undead and constructs I think it'll be enjoyable.

[Lord Raziere]

Been playing Shantae and the seven sirens. unlike the last game which was more straight platformer, this a metroidvania, and I have to constantly find my way around. thankfully I can grind out all my upgrades and health items by killing little snakes aside from health which I need squids for. been liking the animations and character art and my experience in playing Half genie hero kinda helps with playing this one in many ways as I know what I need to get for Shantae to be strong. the controls are about the same as are many of the enemies, been liking it, its real fun. like just changing from a level to a metroidvania changes the challenge involved while the gamplay remains the same. I pretty much have to hunt for everything and explore around, its probably the new thing thats finally gonna hold my focus.

[Cygnia]

Needed to give my fingers a rest from "Gris", so I binged "Shadowgate 2014" on apprentice level. Well, that was a fun couple of hours...

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I dunno. By the end of the game your character has access to some pretty valuable info that Alterra wants. The Degasi's fate for one, but more importantly the existence of a **** ton of advanced alien tech, other sapient races, and how to cure a potentially devastating pandemic that would open up a lot of alien worlds that would be otherwise closed to them. A smart person would smash their pda before leaving and bring just enough evidence of their claims to make them valuable.



Alterra's top brass are people who helped invent EX: the Seamoth so yeah I thought it was at least worth a shot at trying. Might be worth a promotion if nothing else.
Regardless, my fellow Subnautica players, I require your input! One of my goals, in addition to 'build an enormous glass bridge' and 'find out how many Floaters it takes to ruin a Reaper's day' is to

Dissuade the Sea Crown from going extinct, seeing as it's a vital part of the reproductive cycle of the only creatures able to cure the super plague. Fortunately for 4546B's ecosystem, I can make a bunch of magic pots that will grow anything! :smallbiggrin:

To that end, I'm planting a bunch of the things in whatever biomes they naturally occur in. I was going to use the wiki to double-check this, but it doesn't mention the one in the Disease Research Facility, so I don't entirely trust it.

My question for you all is, where else does the Sea Crown grow? I know I saw one in the Red Kelp Plains and I believe there was one in the Bulb Zone too. I'm fine with putting a few in places they aren't already (I'm planning to put some in the Sparse Reed regardless, since I have to go there anyway, and likewise I might put some in that giant mushroom tree if I can find a bit of cave big enough for a foundation to hold the pots), but I'd like to hit all the biomes they've proven they can live in already.

[Anteros]

I think I've mostly found them in the Dunes in the past. Normally in areas where Reapers patrol. I feel like originally it was intended as a mechanic to make passive players finally face the Reapers after avoiding them all game.

I also tend to grab them when I see them and grow them. More because they're rare and pretty than for any altruistic reason though.

[Rodin]

Continuing to grind through Monster Hunter World. The game leaves me very conflicted. It has fantastic gameplay, but I've also never seen a game with such an unrelenting hatred for the player. Monsters that turn their entire body into one giant hurtbox. Those same monsters charging back and forth with the same move repeatedly. Flying monsters that never land, and become immune to the only way to force them down after a single shot. 5 or 6 different types of multi-second stun, all of which require different skills to resist. The worst UI I've ever seen in a AAA game.

I've been playing the game with my sister - her with the bow and me with a hammer. I've reached the point where I'll only play with her, because the combination mitigates a lot of the above issues and we can commiserate on the ones that we can't fix. It's still fun, but I have to shake my head and wonder what a more benevolent dev team could have come up with.

------

For single player I've picked up Monster Train. It's the closest to Slay the Spire that I've seen a game come. I don't think it has the same staying power, but it's still a very charming game that lets you pull off satisfyingly ridiculous combos. My favorite thus far is stacking damage shields to make a nigh-invulnerable tank.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I've put a few hours into Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War now, and I'm enjoying it, but I'm struggling even on Medium difficulty. I'm not sure if I'm taking too long to build up forces and send them out, meaning my enemies get too well-entrenched and have enough units fielded that they can win by attrition, or something. How do I efficiently build up resources and troops so I'm able to actually win fights, especially since to get the good stuff I need to wait FOREVER for the research to be done and the buildings to be built. Thanks for any advice you can offer! :smallredface:

[Zevox]

About a month further into Persona 5 Royal (end of October, though I include spoilers for even later in the game below):
I have to say, it is interesting playing through the game a second time and, knowing what's to come, understanding certain things that the characters didn't begin to grasp until this late in the game. The SIU Director's cryptic statements actually made sense, allowing me to see that they were starting to set us up as early as the Medjed incident right away; and in retrospect you can see all of the moments where Aketchi is manipulating both Sae and your group. Definitely good to play through the game again even if it was only to experience that - they did a good job seeding the whole series of twists that occur in October and November.

But... yeah, those little feelings of discontent continue. While the story leading from Okumura's death into Sae's Palace is well handled, goddamn does it take forever. More than half of the month of October is lost to days where you just have story events (plus the exams at school, but that's only four days); surely that could have been compressed a bit. Some of those days where the group was talking amongst themselves about their uncertainties in the wake of Okumura's death could have not prevented you from spending time on other things, or the events with Aketchi could've not been spread out over so many days; something, anything to not lock me out doing things for so long. I'm fine with some days being lost to story events, and I'm even fine with as many of them as there are in the beginning since they're introducing so many things to you there, but at this point you shouldn't be losing half a month like that. This is the first time I've not been able to go to Mementos in between Palaces, since I only had a couple of days where that was even possible, and on those days Haru would've been absent due to dealing with her father's funeral, and the group won't discuss new targets for Changes of Heart without everyone present.

And speaking of Palaces... Sae's. As a stage in a game, it's nice; thematically for her as a character, I don't get it. She's hyper competitive and a ladder-climber, so she sees the courthouse... as a casino? I mean, I knew that since I've played the game before, but it still seems awfully odd. Also, I'm not entirely clear on what's wrong with her per se - Aketchi claims she'd be willing to fabricate evidence to ensure the Phantom Thieves were punished if she catches you, but we've only got his word on that (which isn't worth much), and that doesn't really tie in with the whole casino thing either. Maybe it's deliberately supposed to be sketchy and unclear, considering the whole situation is Aketchi manipulating you into his trap, but still, I just can't figure out what they're going for with Sae's distortion.

And... yeah, Aketchi. Not looking forward to getting to his big moments again, that was kind of where I felt the game most dropped the ball the first time I played it. But I guess I'll save that for when I get there.

Will say at least, so far, I'm fairly pleased with how they integrated the new characters, Kasumi and Maruki, into the story. They are not just shoehorned into their own social links, there's new events with each of them all throughout the whole game. I've seen Kasumi's Awakening now too, which was decent - though I don't get why it included a Sailor Moon-style transformation sequence for her new outfit, when no other Awakening did anything like that. Also, I'm betting that Palace she accidentally ended up in for it was Doctor Maruki's, and is going to be the Palace (or one of the Palaces?) we deal with during the new semester. Hopefully that turns out to be a good addition. I am a bit disappointed that she doesn't join up after her Awakening, but I guess I'm not surprised - they'd need to rework literally every Phantom Thieves group scene in the game after that point to include her if they did that, and while her Awakening is in the last third or so of the game, that's still a lot of scenes to rework, on top of the new ones they're already adding to work her in.

[DaedalusMkV]

And speaking of Palaces... Sae's. As a stage in a game, it's nice; thematically for her as a character, I don't get it. She's hyper competitive and a ladder-climber, so she sees the courthouse... as a casino? I mean, I knew that since I've played the game before, but it still seems awfully odd. Also, I'm not entirely clear on what's wrong with her per se - Aketchi claims she'd be willing to fabricate evidence to ensure the Phantom Thieves were punished if she catches you, but we've only got his word on that (which isn't worth much), and that doesn't really tie in with the whole casino thing either. Maybe it's deliberately supposed to be sketchy and unclear, considering the whole situation is Aketchi manipulating you into his trap, but still, I just can't figure out what they're going for with Sae's distortion.


While I'm not an expert or anything, I do have a take on Sae's Palace. It's important to realize that she doesn't just see the courthouse as a casino; she sees it as a crooked casino where all the games are rigged in her favour, and that of the privileged few who get to cheat themselves. To Sae, the courthouse is a place where people wager their lives and livelihoods believing themselves to have a chance of victory, but in fact the rich and connected always win and the weak and poor always lose. She sees herself as a monster, who used her looks and her treasure (implied to be her father's casebook, which implies she maybe had some dirt on the police force she used to get into her profession) to achieve a position that guarantees her victory.

It's all a fairly straightforward metaphor to the Japanese court system. As a prosecutor, Sae is expected to have a perfect conviction rate, and the system is built from the ground up to ensure that. There are, relatively speaking, no innocent verdicts in the Japanese courts; a veteran prosecutor might have a single not-guilty verdict in their history, to go with a hundred convictions. Sae joined the prosecutors' office as a way to seek justice (in the same way that Makoto wants to join the police to do the same), as a way to honour her father's legacy, but once she got there she found there was no justice in it, only a system that presents the illusion of fairness and equality while actually being predetermined from the start. This is why she comes to see herself as a monster and her Palace takes shape.

Notably, she's also the only target in the game (except Futaba, and for similar reasons) who doesn't need to have her source of power stolen and a change of heart forced on her. Showing Sae that there is at least some justice in the world, that the underdog can win at least once in a while and that she isn't invincible because of the rigged system propping her up is enough to break her out of her twisted worldview and destroy her Palace. Because her distortion, like Futaba, doesn't present her as being better than the rest of humanity; she clearly sees herself as a horrible predator, something twisted and wrong from the very beginning (note how little Shadow Sae looks like the real thing, in comparison to most of the other bosses). Unlike, say, Kamoshida, her Palace doesn't exist for her own glorification. She's simply the corrupt manager of a corrupt casino, cheating the rules and ruining lives for somebody else's benefit because defeat is unthinkable.

[LibraryOgre]

So, been trying to convince myself to play Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

After you get done with the intro and the assassins, is there anywhere you can go IMMEDIATELY to sell all the stuff you have from killing your way through the assassins?

[warty goblin]

So, been trying to convince myself to play Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

After you get done with the intro and the assassins, is there anywhere you can go IMMEDIATELY to sell all the stuff you have from killing your way through the assassins?

Lemme guess, carrying too much? IIRC you can sell your stuff at the outpost you stop at right after the intro.

[Narkis]

So, been trying to convince myself to play Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

After you get done with the intro and the assassins, is there anywhere you can go IMMEDIATELY to sell all the stuff you have from killing your way through the assassins?

No, not immediately. There is some travel and a couple more fights before you get to the first merchant. I suppose it tries to teach you that the game is not Skyrim, and you should be leaving the worthless stuff behind. It'll save you a lot of frustration later on.

[factotum]

Well, I just tried (and failed) to play Yakuza 0. Couldn't get past the first boss even on easy mode. Also, the karaoke minigame in that is ludicrous--I think you need about seventeen fingers and ideally a spare brain or two to be able to hit the buttons as rapidly as it asks you to.

[Cespenar]

I've put a few hours into Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War now, and I'm enjoying it, but I'm struggling even on Medium difficulty. I'm not sure if I'm taking too long to build up forces and send them out, meaning my enemies get too well-entrenched and have enough units fielded that they can win by attrition, or something. How do I efficiently build up resources and troops so I'm able to actually win fights, especially since to get the good stuff I need to wait FOREVER for the research to be done and the buildings to be built. Thanks for any advice you can offer! :smallredface:

Just to note, the AI seemed pretty okay, even at Medium, to at least make the best of their units. They often pull back injured units and heal them, play back-and-forth with you, etc. So don't feel bad about not steamrolling through them.

Some stuff off the top of my head:

-Get up to multiple production lines in a city as fast as you can. That means building infantry producer/vehicle producer/hero producer etc. type buildings pretty early.
-Try to research techs relevant for the fewest types of units, rather than trying to unlock every unit ever. If you research both Assault and Devastator Marines, for example, you can't produce them at the same time, so your techs for them will be doubly useless.
-Try to spot your bottleneck resources early, and build their relevant buildings. For example, multiple heroes will cost a lot of influence. Multiple buildings will want a lot of energy. Multiple units will need requisitions. Etc.

[Zevox]

While I'm not an expert or anything, I do have a take on Sae's Palace. It's important to realize that she doesn't just see the courthouse as a casino; she sees it as a crooked casino where all the games are rigged in her favour, and that of the privileged few who get to cheat themselves. To Sae, the courthouse is a place where people wager their lives and livelihoods believing themselves to have a chance of victory, but in fact the rich and connected always win and the weak and poor always lose. She sees herself as a monster, who used her looks and her treasure (implied to be her father's casebook, which implies she maybe had some dirt on the police force she used to get into her profession) to achieve a position that guarantees her victory.

It's all a fairly straightforward metaphor to the Japanese court system. As a prosecutor, Sae is expected to have a perfect conviction rate, and the system is built from the ground up to ensure that. There are, relatively speaking, no innocent verdicts in the Japanese courts; a veteran prosecutor might have a single not-guilty verdict in their history, to go with a hundred convictions. Sae joined the prosecutors' office as a way to seek justice (in the same way that Makoto wants to join the police to do the same), as a way to honour her father's legacy, but once she got there she found there was no justice in it, only a system that presents the illusion of fairness and equality while actually being predetermined from the start. This is why she comes to see herself as a monster and her Palace takes shape.

Notably, she's also the only target in the game (except Futaba, and for similar reasons) who doesn't need to have her source of power stolen and a change of heart forced on her. Showing Sae that there is at least some justice in the world, that the underdog can win at least once in a while and that she isn't invincible because of the rigged system propping her up is enough to break her out of her twisted worldview and destroy her Palace. Because her distortion, like Futaba, doesn't present her as being better than the rest of humanity; she clearly sees herself as a horrible predator, something twisted and wrong from the very beginning (note how little Shadow Sae looks like the real thing, in comparison to most of the other bosses). Unlike, say, Kamoshida, her Palace doesn't exist for her own glorification. She's simply the corrupt manager of a corrupt casino, cheating the rules and ruining lives for somebody else's benefit because defeat is unthinkable.
Huh, I see. I've actually heard that criticism of the Japanese court system before, in connection to the Ace Attorney games. That helps put it into context and make everything make considerably more sense, thank you. Though I'm surprised the localization team didn't include something in the game to make that clearer, Persona's localization is normally pretty good about that sort of thing.

(Aside: technically, there's one other person in the game who don't need to have his desires stolen to have a change of heart, it's just not one of the Palace-having targets. Mishima, during his social link.)

[LibraryOgre]

Dove headfirst into Pathfinder: Kingmaker. A pretty good Baldur's Gate-Like game using Pathfinder rules and game world. I'm having fun, and finally got my barony settled, with a minimum of off-line help.

I find a couple things frustrating about it (aside from the usual things which are why I don't play Pathfinder on tabletop).

1) nowhere in game to look things up. Like, what do I need for two-weapon fighting? I had to start over and make an entirely new character to find that out, because there's not much opportunity to just peruse game information outside of character creation. yes, wikis and such are available, but it annoys me, nonetheless.

2) So, let's say you've played through the early game a couple of times, finding your feet. You start yet another game, and decide "Hey, I don't need tutorials." Then you get to the kingdom section.. and there's NOTHING.

3) Most of the portraits are pretty bad. You can't zoom in while fine-tuning your paper doll to see what you look like. I am old, my eyes are bad, let me zoom.

[Sermil]

Started a new game of Civ 6. Once again discovering I am horrible at being aggressive in Civilization games. I even deliberately chose Alexander, who is pretty much entirely aggression-focused, and still keep saying "Oh, but I need this one more thing for my city, then I'll start building up a decent military!"

I've been trying to bait the AI into attacking, but they haven't yet.

[Aotrs Commander]

Dove headfirst into Pathfinder: Kingmaker. A pretty good Baldur's Gate-Like game using Pathfinder rules and game world. I'm having fun, and finally got my barony settled, with a minimum of off-line help.

I find a couple things frustrating about it (aside from the usual things which are why I don't play Pathfinder on tabletop).

1) nowhere in game to look things up. Like, what do I need for two-weapon fighting? I had to start over and make an entirely new character to find that out, because there's not much opportunity to just peruse game information outside of character creation. yes, wikis and such are available, but it annoys me, nonetheless.

2) So, let's say you've played through the early game a couple of times, finding your feet. You start yet another game, and decide "Hey, I don't need tutorials." Then you get to the kingdom section.. and there's NOTHING.

3) Most of the portraits are pretty bad. You can't zoom in while fine-tuning your paper doll to see what you look like. I am old, my eyes are bad, let me zoom.

If you haven't tried it, the turn-based mod turns it into an absurdly close-to-TT experience (I turned it on after going "this is basically TBS already with a thin veneer of RTS" and never looked back.)



Had a go at Imperial Galactica 2 last night, in my endless search for Does Starships Better Than SotS.

Eh. It - very much like Space Emipires V - makes something on an effort to have ground combat, but it's more or less mono unit and very flat. The starship designs is also basically just a choice of "upgrade to guns you have2 with a couple of mnor choices (such as on the bigger ships, torpedoes or shields), but that's about it. I'll finish the game, but it's not wowing me.

The Search Continues.



The very best:
Sword of the Stars 1: Still the gold standard in starship design and combat, argueably the best way to apprroach research; but an aging interface and very bare-bones non-starship combat bits and can sometimes be very frustrating due to RNG. No ground combat at all, even attempted.
Stellaris: Better than Sword of the Stars 1 in every respect EXCEPT for starship design/combat; while the combat is better than the usual PDX GSG "two balls of numbers happen" it's still not very good, and the ship design system is still very shallow. Balls-of-numbers ground combat. And despite it all, my last playthrough of Stellaris kept making me go "I need to play SotS again after this."

The other best (In no particular order):
Sword of the Stars 2: Better than SotS in a couple of respectes, but very buggy and incomplete and you spend way too much time arsing about with space station upgrades. No ground combat at all, even attempted. But, of the games I have times logged for (SotS 1 is not on Steam), until I discovered PDX, had the highest logged time of any of my games, which isn't bad considering I bought it for, like, £3.
Star Wars: Empire at War: Managed good starship combat and the single best rendition of ground combat of anhy of the starship game to date. But, its Star Wars, so no ship design.
Master of Orion 3: Good ship design system, actually big and expansive enough that you can't do "tech-up until end-game," but the combat is a little bit bland (though it has a slightly better feel, to me, than some of the others of this ilk with arguably better graphics and small scale). Almost toob expansive for its own good. Music is paff (though no starship game I have yet encountered actually has GOOD music, sadly; nothing that sticks in my head longer than when the game is running, anyway). Balls-of-numbers ground combat, but at least where you can make a spirited attempt at a rock-paper-scissors tactics choice (so you have SOME input) and ground combat isn't over-and-done in one go.

The rest (in approximate order of being tried over the years):
Sins of a Solar Empire: No ship design, functional but only okay out-of-combat stuff; always felt it needed a story campaign, because otherwise I never found it had anything that held my attention.
Galactic Civilisations 1 & 2: Okay out-of-combat stuff (but now massively eclipsed by Stellaris, though), but again, combat is balls-of-numbers and the starship design is all aethetics, but little substance. And my enduing memory is always fracking about with tedious constructors and starbases. Not bothered to look into the 3rd installement.
Master of Orion 2: I played one game of this, I know, but couldn't tell you thing one about it, which shows how much impact this oft-heralded-classic had on me. Yes, that I think MoO3 is better (patched up to the heck, granted) is heresy.
Gratuitous Space Battles: Pretty starship battles, but getting basically everything at once meant that the various weapon systems were not clearly defined differences (e.g. between the big beams), no control, and there's nothing else to it.
Space Empires V: Good starship design, pretty good out-of-combat stuff, but again, RTS starship combat is mostly just "move blob to other blob" and ground combat, while present is also very flat and more or less monounit.
Star Ruler 2: Slightly novel starship design, but otherwise mediocre. (Can't remeber if there was ground combat.)
AI War: No starship design or ground combat (though hero-ships get some design), but the tactical combat is much cleverer (the game's AI is clever enough that it doesn't need micromanagement to the same level, because it's smart enough to having kiting as a full-on tactic. And there is base-building, functionally. Lots of engaging decision-making and planning. Pretty much unique in its approach, and probably one of the better entries; I likely will go back for at last a second game (and try Endless Spire) at some point (before I play the sequel). Problem tends to be you spend all you time zoomed out looking at the icons, not the ship graphics (aka the Supreme Commande Problem.)
Master of Orion (the new one): Also forgetable.
Endless Space 2: Played one game of it, didn't grab me. Higher production values than most of the rest, but again, starship combat is mediocre (no control, as I recall). (Can't even remember if there was ground combat, but don't think so; if there was, clearly didn't grab me.)
Polaris Sector: Very much enjoyed the novel ship design (and I recall the write-up of humans was HILARIOUS), but everything else is mediocre and the actual starship combat, despite being RTS, is again very flat. Don't remember the ground combat, but I think it was present, so it was probably ball-of-numbers.
Imperium Galactica 2: Very middle of the road in all aspects. Ground combat RTs is present, but basically monounit and flat.



On the fringes (no particular order):
Star Trek Armada 1&2: Okay, I guess. I think 1 was arguably better than 2, whuich seemed to be set so the combat happened too fast.
Homeworld 1/2 (Remastered Version): Good story, adquate starship combat, but never finished my playthrough of the second game because the saves on one mission (where it was "if you make a mistake, you are instantly screwed") was bugged so that if you reloaded, you were screwed.
Nexus Incident: Great game, excellent story, good starship combat, but it IS just the story campaign. Depressing it never got the sequel.


Not tried/discarded:
AI War 2: Expecting largely the same as AI War 1; kickstarted it, waiting until it's a bit more "done." It's not going anywhere, and they had my pennies from the start, so...

Aurura 4X: Doesn't have graphics. I want to see my starship battles, dammit. I know, I know, I'm being shallow, but it is what it is. But yeah, getting the lich who designs starships for an unliving to play a game (that is probably quite good, by all accounts) without seeing his pretty starship battles is kind of a big ask. (Also why I have never tried more than a cursory attempt at Dwarf Fortress, yes even with the graphics patches.)
Distant Star Universe: Don't like the looks of the top-down aesthetics, to be honest, nor did what I have seen from the starships shooting at each other make me think it looked particularly tactically interesting.



At this point, I think I nearly need Creative Assmebly to do "Total War In SPAAAAAACE" to get something of an improvement. Something done in that style (well, at least TWWH-style) with space battles as well as ground-combat would probably work quite well.

(The theorhetical standard of perfection would be something like "Stellaris-level out-of-combat (whether TBS or real-time), with SotS 1/2-level starship design and combat, married to Empire at War or better ground-battles (if RTS tactical) or any real credible attempt to do a better abstraction that involves actual stragegic positioning.")



Edit: On consideration, attempt at humour on Aurora 4X comment came across as churlish, given that is one gentleman's explicit hobby that he distributes for free to the internet, which I cannot fault on any level. Revised wording accordingly.

[factotum]

GalCiv3 has definitely improved the starbase thing, Aotrs Commander--you still have them, but they've streamlined the process of upgrading them massively. Ship construction is still purely cosmetic, though, you can put engines and guns wherever you like and it doesn't affect the capability of the ship at all.

[Sermil]

Aotrs Commander -

I actually found Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain fun back in the day, but I think I'm a minority opinion on that one.

It's under $2 right now on GOG if you want to try it.

[Erloas]

Started a new game of Civ 6. Once again discovering I am horrible at being aggressive in Civilization games. I even deliberately chose Alexander, who is pretty much entirely aggression-focused, and still keep saying "Oh, but I need this one more thing for my city, then I'll start building up a decent military!"

I've been trying to bait the AI into attacking, but they haven't yet.
I found that I just don't think the combat in Civ6 is that good, so it makes it very hard to be aggressive because it isn't fun. What I have found is effective is just to rush airplanes as fast as possible and bomb everything into submission, I can often take out cities' defenses faster than I can get people there to capture them.


If you haven't tried it, the turn-based mod turns it into an absurdly close-to-TT experience (I turned it on after going "this is basically TBS already with a thin veneer of RTS" and never looked back.)
I have found that to be the case with everything that is real-time-with pause style "we're trying to be turn based and real time at the same time." It was a bad design 20 years ago when they started trying it and it hasn't gotten any better.
It seems like the last few years the industry has finally started to accept that turn-based can be good and not everything has to be real-time.



I've been slowly playing Gears Tactics and dipped into Minecraft Dungeons a little bit. But considering that game time per week has been a few hours at most, I really just haven't made much progress. I think Minecraft Dungeons would be a lot better with more players but I don't have anyone to play with and with my rare play time I haven't tried to organize anything with friends or on forums.

[Sermil]

I found that I just don't think the combat in Civ6 is that good, so it makes it very hard to be aggressive because it isn't fun. What I have found is effective is just to rush airplanes as fast as possible and bomb everything into submission, I can often take out cities' defenses faster than I can get people there to capture them.


Well, I'm still in Medieval / early Renaissance, so rushing airplanes isn't an option quite yet. And Alexander's specials are so combat focused that I really need to be attacking if I want to win tech races.

But, stepping back, I've generally had that problem with every Civ game. I just want to tend my garden of cities, and can't bring myself to focus on military. But that means (a) I get bored because most of my games tend to follow the same path and (b) when I do want / need to go to war, I'm really bad at it and have no sense of what strength I need to capture a city or what units work well in what circumstances.

[warty goblin]

I found that I just don't think the combat in Civ6 is that good, so it makes it very hard to be aggressive because it isn't fun. What I have found is effective is just to rush airplanes as fast as possible and bomb everything into submission, I can often take out cities' defenses faster than I can get people there to capture them.

Question: was the combat in a Civ game every actually, you know, good? Stacks of Doom was unspectacular but mostly functional. But the 1UPT Civs have always been kinda bad. I actually quite like 1UPT hex-based wargames (witness my raving about Gladius, or my continued partisanship for Warlock: Master of the Arcane) but the Civ version has never felt like an actually good implementation of the concept. The most obvious problem is that the AI achieves a level of military incompetency seldom seen outside of a few of history's more snigger-inducing battles, but I think the issue is more fundamental. Basically a 1UPT hexgame is a rich and complete enough concept on its own that you can build an entire game around only the combat and a moderate to very light strategic layer for context. And when the combat is the focus, it's very satisfying, because moving the units and solving all the little tactical puzzles it creates is complex and rewarding. But in Civ a lot of the time you won't be fighting, yet you still need to deal with building and upgrading and leveling up all these little units all over the place. It's about 70% of the busywork, but most of the time there's no payoff for it. And when you do fight, the AI is spastic, or you've got a large tech advantage and can just steamroller everything anyway, making the infrequent reward for all that busywork rather... unrewarding.



I have found that to be the case with everything that is real-time-with pause style "we're trying to be turn based and real time at the same time." It was a bad design 20 years ago when they started trying it and it hasn't gotten any better.
It seems like the last few years the industry has finally started to accept that turn-based can be good and not everything has to be real-time.

I have liked a couple games that were RTP, mostly in spite of being RTP. I think one of the downsides is that it makes a certain sort of trash fight very fast, so the game can throw a lot of trash fights at you in the name of MOAR CONTENT. Now while I don't want every single fight in the game to be a tremendous challenge, the last thing I want is more autopilot trash mob fights. But outside of that RTP usually just turns into "it's turn based, but way less elegant" because you have to pause and micromanage everything all the time anyway.


I've been slowly playing Gears Tactics and dipped into Minecraft Dungeons a little bit. But considering that game time per week has been a few hours at most, I really just haven't made much progress. I think Minecraft Dungeons would be a lot better with more players but I don't have anyone to play with and with my rare play time I haven't tried to organize anything with friends or on forums.
Gears is very nice in small doses. I'm rather fond of running a mission over breakfast on the weekends.

[Rynjin]

Dove headfirst into Pathfinder: Kingmaker. A pretty good Baldur's Gate-Like game using Pathfinder rules and game world. I'm having fun, and finally got my barony settled, with a minimum of off-line help.

I find a couple things frustrating about it (aside from the usual things which are why I don't play Pathfinder on tabletop).

1) nowhere in game to look things up. Like, what do I need for two-weapon fighting? I had to start over and make an entirely new character to find that out, because there's not much opportunity to just peruse game information outside of character creation. yes, wikis and such are available, but it annoys me, nonetheless.

I think the devs have explicitly stated somewhere that they basically expect people to use the d20pfsrd site for stuff like this. It's...kind of funny, at least to me.




3) Most of the portraits are pretty bad. You can't zoom in while fine-tuning your paper doll to see what you look like. I am old, my eyes are bad, let me zoom.

You can actually upload your own portraits BTW. Or do you mean the character models?

[MCerberus]

I'm trying the new Legendary Lord the Warden in Total Warhammer 2, and I really just don't like the way the campaign is set up. Mostly this has to do with the old "Green tide" problem. Right now the dwarves seem to be losing their matchup in the mountains, and you're pretty much pressured into going for the neck of the two orc factions in the badlands leading to you being the target of 2-3 of the main greenskin factions. With the new Wargh! mechanic.

On top of that you need to use an in-battle spell to capture agents and lords so you very rarely are able to auto-resolve

[Cespenar]

Well, I'm still in Medieval / early Renaissance, so rushing airplanes isn't an option quite yet. And Alexander's specials are so combat focused that I really need to be attacking if I want to win tech races.

But, stepping back, I've generally had that problem with every Civ game. I just want to tend my garden of cities, and can't bring myself to focus on military. But that means (a) I get bored because most of my games tend to follow the same path and (b) when I do want / need to go to war, I'm really bad at it and have no sense of what strength I need to capture a city or what units work well in what circumstances.

If you have a pretty good production base, why try to ascertain what amounts to a "proper military"? Just produce a lot of units, and if you overdo it, well, that's just investment for your next invasion.

You really can't learn the combat mechanics if you don't use them, after all.

[LibraryOgre]

You can actually upload your own portraits BTW. Or do you mean the character models?

Both. I combined the two complaints a bit.

[Narkis]

Both. I combined the two complaints a bit.

I agree about the portraits. Couldn't find anything that I thought would fit my main character, so I took a portrait from Icewind Dale and used this site (https://kingmaker-portraits.com/) to bring it to the proper size. After that it was just a matter of pasting the images to the proper folder, and the game points you to that from the in-game portrait browser.

[GloatingSwine]

I'm trying the new Legendary Lord the Warden in Total Warhammer 2, and I really just don't like the way the campaign is set up. Mostly this has to do with the old "Green tide" problem. Right now the dwarves seem to be losing their matchup in the mountains, and you're pretty much pressured into going for the neck of the two orc factions in the badlands leading to you being the target of 2-3 of the main greenskin factions. With the new Wargh! mechanic.

On top of that you need to use an in-battle spell to capture agents and lords so you very rarely are able to auto-resolve

The game has become much harder for the order factions in this patch. Vampire Counts and Skaven particularly have eaten all their wheaties and done their training montages and are ready to kick ass and take names.

(Greenskins too, but they usually get eaten by rats, at least in the south on Mortal Empires)

[Aotrs Commander]

Huh. So I picked through Imperium Galactica 2 for most of the day, hitting the top and working my way through the AI, finding one of the four story crystals (two remaining), pottered on for a bit and... Just sudden got a "you win!" screen, for no readily apparent reason. No idea, maybe all the other empires surrendered or something. No option to continue, no statistics (though at least the "you win" was a cutscene and not just a static image, SotS, lookin' at you).

*shrug*

Okay, then. Eh, it killed 10 hours.

I think, though, that kind of says it all. Ten hours, and I hit the top of the tech tree, my early-stage planets were at the point I was at the "might as well build defences, nothing else apart from manufacturing plants I can build and there's no point it making those when it's better concentrated onto the 200/250% prodyction worlds." So I've basically seen everything there was to see. I don't feel like there is any need to play the other races or the other two story campaigns (since the win conditions are apparently not tied to the story...) But that's rather short; most of the other 4X were at least 2-3 times that.

There's no real decision making (I mean, maxed-out the tech tree in ten hours...) until right at the top of the tech tree, since it has this thing where the smaller ships and tanks can only be fitted with more primitive systems (the laser guns and main guns being the sole exception). And those two systems are a straight progression. Maybe there's some depth in the diplomacy system (thought I doubt it), but as typical, I rarely bother with that beyond the basic.

There was a very small bit of depth in the ground combat, right at the end, when you had all the modules, it was worht building more than one type of tank so you could have the air strike module and the laser strike module, but that was about it. Still no real tactics in any of it, aside from "click on each enemy in turn."

So. Eh. It was an inoffensive ten hours. It's not BAD game or anything, it's just not a lot to it, and nothing to reallty raise it above the crowd. I'll say this; it has slightly above average presentation, in that the music is a bit more jolly than, sya MoO3 or SotS, and there's some attempt at immersion through some cutscenes (which I appreciate, and always have since Civ II, even if they are clunky).

I salute the attempt, but (as is often the case) I think it's a bit ambitious to what it can actually achieve; it's functional, but shallow.


Whelp, now the difficult decision as to what to play next...!

[Zevox]

I'm nearing the (original) end of Persona 5 Royal, now. December, just completed what was originally the final Palace.
So, I'll start with the big twists of Sae Niijima's Palace. Honestly, they're extremely well-executed - every question you could have with what happened how and when to lead to that outcome is answered, and it's pretty amazing to see how it all comes together. And hey, if they wanted to make you emotionally invested in taking down Akechi, goddamn is it effective at that, because it makes you hate that smug, murderous bastard.

But at the same time, I have to talk about Akechi... he is, in my opinion, the single biggest case of wasted potential in the game. When I first encountered him when first playing the game, I thought he was likely to be one of my favorite characters in the game, if not the series. Here was an well-meaning but intelligent character raising legitimate concerns and criticisms about what you're doing as the Phantom Thieves, which your group even seems to take pause over at first. And hey, he's on the game's cover art alongside the rest of the team, so presumably there will have to come a time when you and he will need to reconcile your differences, and the game will therefore address those concerns. And at first, when you get to Sae's Palace, it seems like that might just be about to happen. ...and then you get the reveal that no, Akechi is just very evil. He's the culprit behind the mental shutdowns/breakdowns. He's the one who murdered Haru's father after your group changed his heart. And he was only ever manipulating you into a trap with the intent of murdering Joker and making it look like a suicide. That, in itself, was such a letdown.

But then you meet up with him again in Shido's Palace, and oh lord. He's not just an evil, murderous villain, he goes straight-up psychotic, laughing like the Joker (DC's Clown Prince of Crime one) and cackling about he's going to kill you all. And the game really didn't need that - Akechi as an evil mastermind at least had some value, as much as it lost by reneging on the seeming promise of making the team confront his legitimate concerns about their methods; Akechi as a psychopath just cheapens him. And then they try to make you sympathize with him over the crappy life he'd had due to being the son of Shido and a prostitute, and his resulting daddy issues, but I am having none of that. He's an unrepentant mass murderer who killed one of my teammates' father and almost killed me, I do not care about how bad his childhood was. The one thing I found myself agreeing with him about at that point was that the team was stupid to be trying to offer to let him come with them - I remember that the first time around I was thinking that the game could straight-up lose me if that actually happened at that point, and I'm sure that the only reason I was more okay this time around is the knowledge that it doesn't. Akechi, thankfully, dies there. A much worse end to the character than I'd wanted, but the only one he deserved after everything the game ultimately did with him.

As for Shido, I recall feeling disappointed by him the first time around, but I will say that he did feel better to me this time. I can't pinpoint a reason, but I did get more satisfaction out of the buildup to taking him down and how it ultimately goes down than I did the first time I played. Still, I can't help but feel like he should have been more than he is. I think he probably spends a little too long in the background, and ends up feeling overshadowed by Akechi when he finally comes to the forefront of things after Sae's Palace. Despite being happier with his execution this time, there's no denying that I was far more emotionally invested in the final confrontation with Akechi than I was with Shido, and given Shido is the villain responsible for Joker's conviction on false charges and the guy that the game has been building up to since almost the beginning, he really should loom larger than he does there. You just don't achieve the same level of emotional connection with taking him down that you do with Kamoshida and Madarame in the early game, and if anyone should rival them in how much you want to take him out, it should be Shido.

Also, on a gameplay note, I have to say that I feel like the game's boss design for the Palace bosses went downhill after the first few. Kamoshida and especially Madarame were great; Kaneshiro is just sort of a slugfest in his first phase, but he's the first such boss fight in the game so that's okay, and the second phase is a little more interesting; but after that... eh. Cognitive Wakaba is just kind of meh (and easy after Futaba Awakens and starts reflecting her big attack back at her automatically). Okumura has a theoretically interesting and thematic gimmick, sending wave after wave of minions at you until he runs out and is then a complete pushover himself, but it drags on too long, the need to wipe out everyone in a wave in the same turn to prevent him from respawning them all gets annoying with the later (higher-health) waves, and the self-destructs that last couple are capable of can KO you outright and force you to re-do the whole fight, making it exponentially more tedious. Good idea in theory, execution needed some work. But that's at least more than I can say for Sae and Shido. Sae has that gimmick of figuring out how she's cheating and disrupting it at first, which is neat, but as soon as you do it becomes a straight-up slugfest from start to finish, and then Shido is nothing but a bunch of phases of straight-up slugfest. Sure, Shido's final phase should probably have been a slugfest like that, given his status as the big boss the game has built up to like that, but come on, do something more interesting with the earlier phases!

So, yeah, game's still really damn good on the whole, but I can see those weaknesses that made me feel like the latter parts weren't as good as the first half when I played it before, and playing it a second time hasn't changed my thoughts on that too much. On the upside, I've finished all of the social links with time to spare this time - first time around I missed finishing the last few ranks of Chihaya (the fortune teller/Fortune Arcana), and possibly Shinya (the gamer kid/Tower Arcana), can't remember for sure on him. Despite the addition of Kasumi, Maruki, and making Akechi's link mostly manual instead of automatic, still managed it this time, so yay for not missing anything! Just the bottom of Mementos to go, and then I'll see what the new extra semester is all about. Here's hoping that's good.

[Zombimode]

After having finished Pathfinder Kingmaker* I'm a bit undecisive. I really would like to start a Warhammer Total War campaign with Luthor Harkon, but the game is currently in a rather buggy state. It's best to wait for a patch to sort this out.

Until then I'm bouncing between
- my Medieval2 TW: Broken Crescent Omani campaign
- Halo 2
- Ghost of a Tale

Bouncing between games is not a state I'm particular comfortable with. Hmm, maybe I should take a break from gaming for a couple of weeks... :smallconfused:

*Kingmaker was quite exellent, in a cozy-comfort zone kind of way. It was also really long. To give you an impression: GoG clocked 100 hours more then it did for Witcher 3! Granted, my 260h Witcher 3 are almost pure game time, while the 360h hours Kingmaker include a large amount (like 30-40 hours) idle time, but still.

[Eldan]

Started playing Barotrauma with two friends. (And usually two bots). It's a lot of fun. I'd describe it as "more casual, less whacky Space Station 13". Given how much I love Space Station 13, that's not bad. For starters, I still need a Wiki to play SS13 after 5+ years of regular play. You are a submarine crew on the monster-infested oceans of the ice moon Europa, trying to dive for salvage or alien artefacts. Traitors onboard optional.

Using starter ships with small crew (we didn't want crews of mostly bots, the bots are pretty bad), we ended up crashing, drowning, burning, shooting each other and eaten by monsters and it was great, overall. Especially that time where I found the alien artefact, but ran out of air trying to drag it back to the submarine, so one of my friends had to start shuttling fresh air bottles through the labyrinthine ruins I was diving in, while the other one had to divide his time between manning the submarine's cannons and coming out to deal with monsters up close with harpoon gun when they tried to get into the ruin and eat the one carrying the air bottles. In the end, they had to carry my unconscious body out, but we all survived.

[Battleship789]

Aotrs Commander -

I actually found Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain fun back in the day, but I think I'm a minority opinion on that one.

It's under $2 right now on GOG if you want to try it.

I'll second Pax Imperia. I usually spend 75+% of my time in the spaceship building minigame, leaving the 4X stuff on the side (except to research new ship tech). Honestly, my dream game is Empire at War with a Pax Imperia-style ship building system (and revamped ground battles, which are easily the worst part of the EaW games).

As for games I'm playing, I'm slowly making my way through Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem (i.e. FE12), a Japanese-only DS entry in the series. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the game (chapter 17) and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. Story-wise it's incredibly forgettable, while the gameplay is generally better than the previous entry in the series (Shadow Dragon). However, almost every chapter consists of 4ish turns of barely surviving a few waves of super strong enemies (even the tankiest units I have rarely survive two hits and dodging is very unreliable) until basically every enemy on the map is dead, having committed suicide by main character and friends, followed by 15 turns of Marth running around to open chests while the rest of the party sit in a circle around the throne. The chapters where this doesn't occur are arguably worse because they still have the first 4 turns of frantic survival but also involve enemies that spawn on the enemy turn and then immediately charge me with their 10-12 movement (on maps that are around 25 tiles on a side) and/or clusters of enemies that refuse to move until you either attack them or place a unit in range of the entire group (which ends with your unit usually dying due to the enemy strength). Some of these problems are correctable on my part by using a guide and knowing how to manipulate the enemy AI, but it is still rather annoying.

Switching genres, I'm almost finished with a level one critical mode run of KH3 (the base game). The only thing left to do is defeat the secret boss (I've figured out the patterns for the first two phases but the third phase is going slowly because mistakes immediately kill you in the third phase and I'm too greedy/impatient during the first/second phases to reliably get back to the third phase) and then it's off to the DLC (which I haven't played before). Much like my original playthrough (also on critical, though not at level one), the first ~30 hours are the painful price you pay to experience the last 5 hours: a fantastic series of great boss fights. While I don't expect this to happen, I really wish that Square Enix would change the gameplay to just a string of human-sized boss fights, which are the best parts of the series. I'd also accept SE just copying most of the mechanics from the series and creating a new IP to use them in.

[zlefin]

@aotrscommander

I'm surprised you didn't like moo2; I found it to have the most interesting and complex ship design system of any of the space games I've played; lots of interesting things to try and tactics to use.

[Aotrs Commander]

Aotrs Commander -

I actually found Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain fun back in the day, but I think I'm a minority opinion on that one.

It's under $2 right now on GOG if you want to try it.


I'll second Pax Imperia. I usually spend 75+% of my time in the spaceship building minigame, leaving the 4X stuff on the side (except to research new ship tech). Honestly, my dream game is Empire at War with a Pax Imperia-style ship building system (and revamped ground battles, which are easily the worst part of the EaW games).


Well, for the princely sum of £1.25, I might as well. It only has to keep me occupied for a couple of hours at that sort of price to be worth it...

(Though I have now started BATTLETECH run, so it might be a while before I get to it...)

[Corvus]

Right now I'm bouncing around between Crusader Kings II and Monster Train while waiting for the release of Crusader Kings III and Cyberpunk 2077

[PraetorDragoon]

I grabbed the Heritor DLC for Age of Wonders Planetfall (and noticed too late I should have gotten the season pass so I could have gotten the new dlc as well. :smallsigh:) So now its time to get into it. Need to find a fun race + tech combo to feel comfortable with.

[Gnoman]

I've owned Middle Earth: Shadow of War for a while, so I decided to pick up and plow through Shadow Of Mordor first. The quality's there, but I've been finding the game distressingly easy (I'm still in what appears to be the first half of the game based on collectable numbers, hunting the warchiefs). I've already got max runes on all three weapons, and I've been resorting to dying on purpose just to have captains with decent levels (they seem to go up more if they manage to actually kill me).

[factotum]

Shadow of Mordor gets harder in the second half, when you start finding captains who have a *lot* of immunities.

[Lord Raziere]

Been playing more Shantae and the Seven Sirens, I think I'm getting pretty far in, got all the upgrades and potions, the dances, most of the fusion coins and money is basically useless to me now, I got a card to lower my prices at shops I consider it useless because I got 999 gems and nothing to spend them on. might spend it all on figuring out how to get that minigame heart squid. like if you know what your doing, its not hard to get money in this game or figure out how to make healing items nearly obsolete with the right monster cards, and I've never used a golden crab once. like I have infinite healing now, I've broken this game and can probably complete at it my leisure, the question is how much time do I want to spend hunting down random nuggets and heart squids to get more health and siren cards. been liking it, funny and cute as Shantae always is.

[Rynjin]

Got back into Dark Souls 3 with the Cinders mod. it's really good. Whole ton of viable builds that weren't really possible or fun before.

[LibraryOgre]

Still playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and flirting with the idea of restarting. I have character ideas I like the idea of, some of which would be cool but very difficult to start (Sensei Monk 2/Eccelisathurge X, specc'd as a summoner. Maybe throw in the wisdom-Sorcerer and go Mystic Theurge), some of which would be fun but difficult (Mad Dog Barbarian 1/ Archaeologist 6/Dragon Disciple 10; skills, fighting and big attributes, with a pet), but still chugging along with my Archaeologist/Dragon Disciple.

[NeoVid]

I've owned Middle Earth: Shadow of War for a while, so I decided to pick up and plow through Shadow Of Mordor first. The quality's there, but I've been finding the game distressingly easy (I'm still in what appears to be the first half of the game based on collectable numbers, hunting the warchiefs). I've already got max runes on all three weapons, and I've been resorting to dying on purpose just to have captains with decent levels (they seem to go up more if they manage to actually kill me).

One of my big issues with SoM was that it was more fun when you were weak and a couple of captains was a huge danger, later in the game and fully upgraded you can be an unstoppable force of destruction... But sometimes, you'll come up against an orc who is also one of those (https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/266086874796653481/B4DF70F1E740F37582961B95B607437AEA094FDE/). The sequel has difficulty settings and a bigger array of ways for orcs to counter what you can do, so it's a more satisfying challenge.

I hope I didn't sound too negative, as I like the original a lot, and since it's so short, running through it to make a Nemesis Forge with cool orcs to transfer to the sequel is very worth it. Incidentally, there's a very easy way to select which orcs in the Forge will be the ones transferred over to Shadow of War: Just keep Marking Target on the two you want until the icons move.

[factotum]

I have entirely the opposite viewpoint. I felt the second game wasn't as good as the first, simply because there were too many gosh-darned orcs to keep track of. The first game you had a nice number of them, and if the Nemesis system did its job properly there would be one or two that you absolutely grew to loathe--I remember one in my first playthrough who killed me at least four times, obviously getting more powerful and harder to kill each time. That didn't happen second time through, which is a shame.

Shadow of War? Gave up on it. Not only were the stealth elements conspicuously diminished in favour of the whole "war" thing--and I really liked the stealthy bits in the first game--but, as mentioned above, I didn't really get to "know" any of the orcs and never got that sense of personal hate.

[Eldan]

Been finding that I enjoy Subnautica a whole lot more with a map and a wiki to look up where to find which resources. (Not using the Wiki for anything else, just googling "Where to find Rubies Subnautica". Because there's only so many times I can blindly spiral around the map trying to find rare gems of some kind.

[factotum]

Been finding that I enjoy Subnautica a whole lot more with a map and a wiki to look up where to find which resources. (Not using the Wiki for anything else, just googling "Where to find Rubies Subnautica". Because there's only so many times I can blindly spiral around the map trying to find rare gems of some kind.

I just got into the habit of having the materials to build a scanner room base--from memory, that's a multipurpose room, a single passage, the scanner room, a hatch, and a bioreactor for power. All that fits easily into the storage of a Seamoth and you can quickly build it and see what's available in the local area, killing some fish for power if necessary. The annoying bit is getting all the blueprints required for that together, although I think the scanner room you find naturally if you're following the main story--bioreactor is more of a problem.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I just got into the habit of having the materials to build a scanner room base--from memory, that's a multipurpose room, a single passage, the scanner room, a hatch, and a bioreactor for power. All that fits easily into the storage of a Seamoth and you can quickly build it and see what's available in the local area, killing some fish for power if necessary. The annoying bit is getting all the blueprints required for that together, although I think the scanner room you find naturally if you're following the main story--bioreactor is more of a problem.

I think the passage is built into the scanner room/multipurpose room, because I seem to recall running into that when I built one of my deeper bases.

I also usually go with the thermal reactor, but the Magnetite is irritatingly sparse.

[Triaxx]

The best place for Magnetite is the Drill formations in the glowshroom cave.

[Gnoman]

One of my big issues with SoM was that it was more fun when you were weak and a couple of captains was a huge danger, later in the game and fully upgraded you can be an unstoppable force of destruction... But sometimes, you'll come up against an orc who is also one of those (https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/266086874796653481/B4DF70F1E740F37582961B95B607437AEA094FDE/). The sequel has difficulty settings and a bigger array of ways for orcs to counter what you can do, so it's a more satisfying challenge.

I hope I didn't sound too negative, as I like the original a lot, and since it's so short, running through it to make a Nemesis Forge with cool orcs to transfer to the sequel is very worth it. Incidentally, there's a very easy way to select which orcs in the Forge will be the ones transferred over to Shadow of War: Just keep Marking Target on the two you want until the icons move.

I had a Nemesis like that. Invulnerable to combat, invulnerable to stealth, immune to fire. Only could be damaged by arrows, which made him brutally hard until I got enough elf-shot to reliably take him on. He ruined everything whenever he showed up, and the only reason he didn't kill me a dozen times was that he had the "you ain't worth killing" trait. This was everything the Nemesis system was promised to me as. Sadly, after I killed him five times he stayed dead, and I haven't had a Nemesis since.

I'm pretty sure I'm about to move into the second half. Only one Warchief (apart from the double agent) is still alive.

[factotum]

I also usually go with the thermal reactor, but the Magnetite is irritatingly sparse.

Bioreactor is much easier to build, works anywhere that you can kill fish to feed into it (which, let's face it, is everywhere in Subnautica) and is thus a superior option, IMHO. Sure, it probably doesn't provide as much power as the thermal reactor does, but you're only powering a scanner room off it, it's not like you need a lot.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Bioreactor is much easier to build, works anywhere that you can kill fish to feed into it (which, let's face it, is everywhere in Subnautica) and is thus a superior option, IMHO. Sure, it probably doesn't provide as much power as the thermal reactor does, but you're only powering a scanner room off it, it's not like you need a lot.

But you have to keep feeding it, where the thermals are place and forget. I have one outpost that I have a bioreactor/scanner combo in, and at the most inconvenient times possible it lead to a constant steam of base has power/base lost power messages until I finally gave up and turned the stupid scanner off. :smallyuk:

I allow as it might be more viable if it was a main base that I spent most of my time in. Or maybe it’s the fuel; I was mostly using Lantern fruit since I could grow those inside the base and they doubled as food.

(As a side note, has anyone else almost accidentally commit suicide because they ended up eating a bunch of rotten Reginald they were trying to unload into the bioreactor? :smalltongue:)

[Triaxx]

Not me. I always do a stacked room with Alien Containment on the floor above that only fuels the reactor.

[factotum]

But you have to keep feeding it, where the thermals are place and forget. I have one outpost that I have a bioreactor/scanner combo in, and at the most inconvenient times possible it lead to a constant steam of base has power/base lost power messages until I finally gave up and turned the stupid scanner off. :smallyuk:

Remember, though, this is a *temporary* structure I put up to see if there's anything interesting in the surrounding area. If there isn't, it just gets deconstructed again--I don't build the thing and then leave it there, because once you've run a scan for a few minutes you'll see everything that there is to see in the list available in the scanner room, and most of the time there's just not anything interesting enough to bother leaving the thing there. Also, I don't leave the scanner running when I'm not actively looking for something, because that's just a waste of power whatever your power source is; plus, if you have the scanner HUD upgrade you'll get a load of annoying targets pinging on your screen.

[LibraryOgre]

Still playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and flirting with the idea of restarting. I have character ideas I like the idea of, some of which would be cool but very difficult to start (Sensei Monk 2/Eccelisathurge X, specc'd as a summoner. Maybe throw in the wisdom-Sorcerer and go Mystic Theurge), some of which would be fun but difficult (Mad Dog Barbarian 1/ Archaeologist 6/Dragon Disciple 10; skills, fighting and big attributes, with a pet), but still chugging along with my Archaeologist/Dragon Disciple.

I did restart with a Dwarf Mad Dog Barbarian/Archaeologist who will go Dragon Disciple. There's a pretty steep feat tax keeping my Leopard up to snuff (since Boon Companion adds 4 levels, it's basically every other feat), but the fact that she knocks people down all the time in combat is pretty cool... later game, I was struggling to figure out which feats I wanted, so it's going to work out.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Remember, though, this is a *temporary* structure I put up to see if there's anything interesting in the surrounding area. If there isn't, it just gets deconstructed again--I don't build the thing and then leave it there, because once you've run a scan for a few minutes you'll see everything that there is to see in the list available in the scanner room, and most of the time there's just not anything interesting enough to bother leaving the thing there. Also, I don't leave the scanner running when I'm not actively looking for something, because that's just a waste of power whatever your power source is; plus, if you have the scanner HUD upgrade you'll get a load of annoying targets pinging on your screen.

Ah, I had placed mine solely to keep track of Reapers in the vicinity, so turning it off wasn’t an option...until I figured out they never came close enough for me to care, but that was a while.

[SaintRidley]

Been doing a playthrough of Horizon: Zero Dawn on Ultra Hard and streaming it on twitch (twitch.tv/saintridley). It's been fun, if frustrating when I die in stupid ways. Next time I'm on I'll try my hand at getting to the DLC, which will surely result in me dying a lot just on entry.

[Narkis]

I've been playing some Command and Conquer: Remastered recently. The QoL improvements are great (queues!), the graphics are exactly how I remembered them with rose-tinted glasses, not as they really were. And the game is refreshingly tough, I've gotten my ass handed to me in missions I didn't remember giving me pause when I played as a kid. Either my memory is going, or I'm getting slow in my old age.

Mixed feelings about giving money to the company that killed Westwood and salted the franchise. But I'm having fun, at least.

[Rodin]

I've been playing some Command and Conquer: Remastered recently. The QoL improvements are great (queues!), the graphics are exactly how I remembered them with rose-tinted glasses, not as they really were. And the game is refreshingly tough, I've gotten my ass handed to me in missions I didn't remember giving me pause when I played as a kid. Either my memory is going, or I'm getting slow in my old age.

Mixed feelings about giving money to the company that killed Westwood and salted the franchise. But I'm having fun, at least.

I've been playing it too, and it's a lot of fun. A lot of love went into the remaster.

I had forgotten just how unfair Tiberium Dawn is. The enemy is always at least one tech tier above you, and the game often restricts you by taking away your construction yard or otherwise limits your resources.

And the balance! A lot of units are just worthless, infantry in particular. Red Alert did a much better job of making infantry valuable, but you're still encouraged to drop infantry once you start getting vehicles. At least they're better than the infantry units from Dune 2.

[Zombimode]

And the balance! A lot of units are just worthless, infantry in particular.

Infantry worthless? This certainly does not match my experience. In fact I found the basic rifleman to be the most powerful unit. Once APCs come available for GDI APC with Rifleman driving into the enemy's base to take out the MainBuilding was the only tactic I used (and needed).

A group of Rifleman makes short work of any building with a frightingly fast pace.


Ot topic: I've finally settled on Ghost of a Tale and I'm really enjoying it. It just took a couple of hourse to "build up steam".

[factotum]

The only problem I had with infantry in the Command and Conquer games (at least, the earlier ones that I've played) is that they were pants-on-head STUPID. I tell them to lie down and shoot at anything that comes, and they'll continue doing just that while an oncoming tank squishes them into paste rather than at least standing up and moving out of the way...

[Rodin]

Infantry worthless? This certainly does not match my experience. In fact I found the basic rifleman to be the most powerful unit. Once APCs come available for GDI APC with Rifleman driving into the enemy's base to take out the MainBuilding was the only tactic I used (and needed).

A group of Rifleman makes short work of any building with a frightingly fast pace.


Ot topic: I've finally settled on Ghost of a Tale and I'm really enjoying it. It just took a couple of hourse to "build up steam".

Maybe it was because I was playing Nod? No APC available to ferry units, meaning Minigunners were just tank tread fodder. Flamethrowers had such short range that they would often get outranged by the Minigunners and Grenadiers they're meant to counter, and building more than a couple meant that they would blow each other up because of how suicidally stupid they are. Rocket troops were useful-ish as anti-air/anti-armor up until you got access to Recon Bikes, which did everything Rocket Troops could do while also being several times faster and unsquishable by tanks. I found the Nod Buggies to be a superior choice for dealing with enemy infantry since there was no risk of a single grenade taking out an entire formation of dudes.

I'll freely admit that I'm not an RTS master though. I assume the balance is better for pro players that can actually get 20 flamethrower dudes to attack 20 different targets while socially distancing themselves.

Also, someone at Westwood really needed to be shown what a Minigun looks like. :smalltongue:

[Cespenar]

And the game is refreshingly tough, I've gotten my ass handed to me in missions I didn't remember giving me pause when I played as a kid. Either my memory is going, or I'm getting slow in my old age.

I think about that sometimes as well, and have arrived at the conclusion that "young-us"s probably thought that retrying missions a bunch of times was a normal thing.

[Zevox]

I've finally finished up Persona 5 Royal today.
Wow, what to say about it at this point? The original final boss, Yalabaoth, was a pretty good fight, and I think I enjoyed that climax to the game more the second time around than the first. I feel like I could see more what they were going for thematically at the end there than I did the first time, with the group now struggling against the wishes of the masses when once they'd become caught up in seeking their approval. Though that is just a touch undercut by a big moment of the ending involving Mishima abruptly getting the public on your side and the Phantom Thieves' approval meter on his website suddenly shooting up from near zero to 100%.

Then we hit the changes for Royal, and...well, let's just say I was pretty darn happy with them, right up until literally the last post-credits scene. All of the stuff with Akechi worked out fine, I felt - it gave you the chance to use him in combat for more than the brief time you got in Sae's Palace, while not changing his character and, ultimately, preserving his ending as having died in Shido's Palace. And then for some reason, they show him walking by your train as you're leaving for home. Goddamn it, that sucks. Having one of the game's worst villains, the only one who was a literal mass murderer, walking around free in the end is a terrible addition to its ending. At the least if they intended to still be alive they could've preserved the change where he turns himself in in order to testify against Shido - he hated his guts, so that actually made sense to me. If Maruki's changes to reality weren't necessary for him to survive, I don't think they'd be necessary for him to do that.

That aside, the new content was pretty darn good. Even though I saw Maruki being the owner of that new Palace coming, that was one part meta-knowledge (they added two new characters, one of whom joins the Phantom Thieves, and the two seem to be at least somewhat tied together - gee, I wonder what the other one's for?), and one part the Palace Ruler silhouette from Yoshizawa's Awakening, despite being intended to be a generic male one, somehow reminding me of Maruki. I did not at all see the twist with Kasumi - or rather, Sumire - coming, and it made for a very interesting storyline for her and companion for Maruki's story. And Maruki made for a pretty solid final opponent: someone who's completely well-intentioned and not in the slightest malicious or trying to cause any harm, but who is just taking use his power too far for you to ever accept. It even kind of touches on what I'd once hoped Akechi would, with the reveal that Maruki himself fully agrees with your actions as the Phantom Thieves. I do wish they'd had the party dwell on that a little more and consider what they think about the implications of that, but it still helps a lot, showing that there are steps too far for them in using their powers to try and improve the world. Gameplay-wise I really liked Maruki's Palace as well, and the actual boss fight with Maruki and his Persona was really good - though the additional ones after, when his Persona evolved, were much more mediocre. I wish that last one had been a real fight with some intricacies to when you could hurt the opponent and how rather than just a few rounds you need to survive for until Futaba finishes analyzing his weakness.

So, yeah, if I head-canon out that final tease of Akechi, great addition to the game. Persona 5 will never quite have the same place in my heart as Persona 3 and 4, but it's still among the best damn games I've ever played on the whole.
And that's that. It's almost a shame I just spent so long playing P5R, actually, as we just got the surprise announcement that Persona 4 Golden has finally been released from it's Vita prison and been put on something I could actually play it on, Steam. Given its age I don't think I'd even need to worry about my PC being able to handle it. But after just finishing another Persona game, I definitely need to play something else instead, so that's going on the back-burner for later in the year, the next time I feel like playing another big RPG.

[tonberrian]

And that's that. It's almost a shame I just spent so long playing P5R, actually, as we just got the surprise announcement that Persona 4 Golden has finally been released from it's Vita prison and been put on something I could actually play it on, Steam. Given its age I don't think I'd even need to worry about my PC being able to handle it. But after just finishing another Persona game, I definitely need to play something else instead, so that's going on the back-burner for later in the year, the next time I feel like playing another big RPG.

Apparently it runs pretty great on just dedicated graphics, let alone any reasonable stand-alone card. I'm picking it up for my brother for christmas, by then it should be on sale.

[SaintRidley]

Surprised myself and beat the daemonic Frostclaw (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/650434286) in the Frozen Wilds DLC for Horizon: Zero Dawn without dying.

[Anteros]

I think about that sometimes as well, and have arrived at the conclusion that "young-us"s probably thought that retrying missions a bunch of times was a normal thing.

Games have definitely gotten a lot more hand-holdy and easier in general since we were kids. It's the reason that "actually difficult" has taken off as a genre because most games lack any source of challenge whatsoever. And that can be fine. Sometimes I enjoy my interactive movies where I can relax and turn off my brain...but sometimes I also want to be challenged.

[Starbuck_II]

Played demo to Brigandine 2 on Switch.
Limited to Prince's campaign.
All classes have more abilities, abilities can level up now, different monsters (no pixies as monsters, now just Gremlins to fill that role)

Hydra replaced with Aqua snake (about the same otherwise).
You master a class at lv 6 instead of 5 now sadly, so harder to mix classes.
Fighter has actual abilities now (healing), Barbarian and Lancer gets +X% counter damage up, Cavalier can lower damage by half sometimes, etc.

Now when Questing, you can choose training mission instead (increase Exp/build up skil exp) instead of searching for monsters, items, and other Knights to join party.

Only get three months in Demo so unless you attack with 2 party team, you can't move more troops over to attack more than once before Demo over (After first time, I tried again, and actually one with a 2 party team vs their 3 person, lost all my monster units though).

Might get game when it comes out.

[factotum]

Apparently it runs pretty great on just dedicated graphics, let alone any reasonable stand-alone card. I'm picking it up for my brother for christmas, by then it should be on sale.

Why are you waiting for it to go on sale? It's pretty darned cheap anyway, and let's face it here, they're not going to do more ports like this if they find they just don't sell enough to make it worthwhile, so I bought it immediately. Haven't installed it yet, still going through a monster game of Stellaris, but it's definitely on my list to play soon.

[tonberrian]

Why are you waiting for it to go on sale? It's pretty darned cheap anyway, and let's face it here, they're not going to do more ports like this if they find they just don't sell enough to make it worthwhile, so I bought it immediately. Haven't installed it yet, still going through a monster game of Stellaris, but it's definitely on my list to play soon.

Because my brother is working on P5 Royal at the moment, don't want to overwhelm him with Persona. Personally, I've played the heck out of it when it was a Vita game. Now, they port Royal over? I'm all over that, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Currently playing through NWN 2. For as mediocre as NWN 1 was, in a lot of ways NWN 2 is worse - inventory, party aggressiveness, the right-click menu is gone, the map is too big. And then there's just all the unfixed bugs after all this time. Boy I hope BG3 has a toolset and is as open to modding as NWN1 was...

[Narkis]

Games have definitely gotten a lot more hand-holdy and easier in general since we were kids. It's the reason that "actually difficult" has taken off as a genre because most games lack any source of challenge whatsoever. And that can be fine. Sometimes I enjoy my interactive movies where I can relax and turn off my brain...but sometimes I also want to be challenged.

Indeed. Games have gotten significantly easier as a whole, and it's only getting worse. I really appreciate the Souls games existing, even if they're not for me, because they prove there's an audience for this stuff that's not satisfied by other games aiming at mass appeal. I've been hoping that something something similar happens with strategy games, but it doesn't seem likely when all major franchises keep moving in the opposite direction.

[Zombimode]

Have you tried the new* singleplayer campaigns and missions in the Age of Empires 2 Devinitive Edition release? I find them so hard even on normal difficulty that I actually feel a bit excluded from the game.

Challenge is good. But so is making difficulty settings customizable.

*by new I mean all content that was released after Age of Conquerors



Maybe it was because I was playing Nod? No APC available to ferry units, meaning Minigunners were just tank tread fodder. Flamethrowers had such short range that they would often get outranged by the Minigunners and Grenadiers they're meant to counter, and building more than a couple meant that they would blow each other up because of how suicidally stupid they are. Rocket troops were useful-ish as anti-air/anti-armor up until you got access to Recon Bikes, which did everything Rocket Troops could do while also being several times faster and unsquishable by tanks. I found the Nod Buggies to be a superior choice for dealing with enemy infantry since there was no risk of a single grenade taking out an entire formation of dudes.

You're correct. I was talking about the GDI campaign.
If I recall correctly (it's been about 7-6 years that I played Tiberian Dawn) I actually used the tech-tree in the NOD missions.

[Cespenar]

Games have definitely gotten a lot more hand-holdy and easier in general since we were kids. It's the reason that "actually difficult" has taken off as a genre because most games lack any source of challenge whatsoever. And that can be fine. Sometimes I enjoy my interactive movies where I can relax and turn off my brain...but sometimes I also want to be challenged.

I'm kinda torn on this, I mean, I share a similar sentiment on the "tutorials all the way to late-game" phenomena, the "on rails" shooters, the omnipresent quest markers... but in whole, even the most wide-appealing games have a "hardest" or whatever difficulty that can at least help the "easy games" part, if not the "hand holdy" part of the problem.

Also to continue being the devil's advocate, UX design has become pretty tough, especially now that the market share of gaming has skyrocketed. You have first-timer teenagers playing next to all-day-gaming teenagers next to veteran 30-somethings next to veteran 30-somethings with real life issues and a poor memory (:smalltongue:)... the list goes on.

I personally think the solution is more difficulty customization options, but who knows?


Indeed. Games have gotten significantly easier as a whole, and it's only getting worse. I really appreciate the Souls games existing, even if they're not for me, because they prove there's an audience for this stuff that's not satisfied by other games aiming at mass appeal. I've been hoping that something something similar happens with strategy games, but it doesn't seem likely when all major franchises keep moving in the opposite direction.

Eh. The Souls-like "genre" is now ironically riding the same popularity train that other mass appeal games rid before, though. There are more and more games being churned out with descriptors like "Dark Souls but X" and rarely anything to add. The alternative has become the mainstream, so to speak.


Have you tried the new* singleplayer campaigns and missions in the Age of Empires 2 Devinitive Edition release? I find them so hard even on normal difficulty that I actually feel a bit excluded from the game.

Yeah, they have actually cared enough to redo (and improve) the whole AI. Pretty commendable, really.

[zlefin]

Yeah, I like having games with hard options and settings at least. Another problem is that for strategy games; it tends to require good ai to make an interesting hard challenge; but doing good ai is hard. So you mostly just get piles of ai bonuses to compensate for a poor ai. The number of people who want a smart ai challenge and are willing to pay for it, are just too few to support the cost.

[Anteros]

Yeah, I like having games with hard options and settings at least. Another problem is that for strategy games; it tends to require good ai to make an interesting hard challenge; but doing good ai is hard. So you mostly just get piles of ai bonuses to compensate for a poor ai. The number of people who want a smart ai challenge and are willing to pay for it, are just too few to support the cost.

Actually creating smart AI is supposedly easier. The problem is creating AI that doesn't completely demolish the player while still challenging them.

The problem with difficulty sliders is that for a lot of games increased difficulty=numbers bloat. Making me tediously shoot a boss 500 times while they 1 shot me might be technically more difficult, but it's not in a satisfying way. Compared to something like Sekiro that's fine tuned to be difficult but satisfying when you master it, I much prefer the latter.

[Narkis]

Have you tried the new* singleplayer campaigns and missions in the Age of Empires 2 Devinitive Edition release? I find them so hard even on normal difficulty that I actually feel a bit excluded from the game.
When the two best examples from an entire genre are both remakes of games that first came out more than two decades ago, then we have a problem, don't we? Even if those games have gotten new content.

Still, thanks for the recommendation. I hadn't tried these new campaigns, I'll have to get around to that at some point.


Challenge is good. But so is making difficulty settings customizable.


I'm kinda torn on this, I mean, I share a similar sentiment on the "tutorials all the way to late-game" phenomena, the "on rails" shooters, the omnipresent quest markers... but in whole, even the most wide-appealing games have a "hardest" or whatever difficulty that can at least help the "easy games" part, if not the "hand holdy" part of the problem.

I personally think the solution is more difficulty customization options, but who knows?

Customizable difficulty can only get you so far when the base mechanics are getting streamlined and the AI is only getting worse. Civ, for example, has been upping the bonuses the AI gets in high difficulties with every game after 4, and they are still far, far less challenging than 4 was at a lower difficulty. And this is not an isolated example. I felt Command and Conquer on normal to be harder than any game I've played on the hardest difficulty in the past decade or so.


Eh. The Souls-like "genre" is now ironically riding the same popularity train that other mass appeal games rid before, though. There are more and more games being churned out with descriptors like "Dark Souls but X" and rarely anything to add. The alternative has become the mainstream, so to speak.
Eh, that's just marketing-speak. I was talking specifically about the Souls games themselves, not the imitators who wanted to ride on the name recognition.


The number of people who want a smart ai challenge and are willing to pay for it, are just too few to support the cost.

I'm sure the big game execs think this is the case, but I'm not convinced it's true. A properly hard strategy game would probably not make as much money as, say, Civ6 but I believe it could be profitable if costs were kept down by cutting on, say, graphics. Not everything has to be a blockbuster.

[Rodin]

Customizable difficulty can only get you so far when the base mechanics are getting streamlined and the AI is only getting worse. Civ, for example, has been upping the bonuses the AI gets in high difficulties with every game after 4, and they are still far, far less challenging than 4 was at a lower difficulty. And this is not an isolated example. I felt Command and Conquer on normal to be harder than any game I've played on the hardest difficulty in the past decade or so.


I don't think that's an example of good AI though. My experience with playing the game again is that it's still using the same format as Dune 2 and the original Warcraft. The enemy builds a mix of units and sends them at you. They sometimes target a random unit of yours, which means that once or twice a map they'll go for your harvester.

The AI doesn't react to your build and change up what it builds in response. It has very simple call and response behaviours that you can exploit, such as "send all available units to defend the harvester".

Command & Conquer is difficult because the AI starts with a fully built base, a bundle of cash, and is a couple tiers up the tech tree from your highest possible amount. I've had missions where I destroyed the enemy harvester 5 minutes in and they had enough money to keep fighting until I was smashing down their construction yard.

It's also difficult due to things we would call foul on today. I lost a mission of Red Alert because there was a V2 launcher hidden in the fog of war, and that launcher killed Tanya. Utterly unavoidable, instant fail condition. It was easy to go around once you knew it existed, but it was still a very cheap death. A similar thing happened during Tiberium Dawn - I lost a mission multiple times because it expected you to fly a transport helicopter through fog of war and land engineers next to an enemy outpost. The outpost was guarded by rocket troopers and grenadiers, all of whom were in the fog of war. It took me about 5 attempts to land the copter at a place where my men could disembark without getting blown up before they could sprint into the buildings.

Going back even further, Dune 2 had the Death Hand missile. Playing as Atreides you faced down two enemies that could fire them in the final mission. Where the missile landed was pure RNG, and if it hit your construction yard you basically lost the mission. The "standard" way to beat the mission was to save scum the missile launch. I did an Ironman attempt at that stage once - it was sheer hell. You had to survive long enough to get MCVs, then build additional construction yards to make sure you had redundancy. Losing half my base became commonplace, and I ran the entire map out of spice before I finally won.

We just used to accept those sorts of death as part of the game back then.

[Narkis]

I don't think that's an example of good AI though. My experience with playing the game again is that it's still using the same format as Dune 2 and the original Warcraft. The enemy builds a mix of units and sends them at you. They sometimes target a random unit of yours, which means that once or twice a map they'll go for your harvester.

The AI doesn't react to your build and change up what it builds in response. It has very simple call and response behaviours that you can exploit, such as "send all available units to defend the harvester".

Command & Conquer is difficult because the AI starts with a fully built base, a bundle of cash, and is a couple tiers up the tech tree from your highest possible amount. I've had missions where I destroyed the enemy harvester 5 minutes in and they had enough money to keep fighting until I was smashing down their construction yard.

It's also difficult due to things we would call foul on today. I lost a mission of Red Alert because there was a V2 launcher hidden in the fog of war, and that launcher killed Tanya. Utterly unavoidable, instant fail condition. It was easy to go around once you knew it existed, but it was still a very cheap death. A similar thing happened during Tiberium Dawn - I lost a mission multiple times because it expected you to fly a transport helicopter through fog of war and land engineers next to an enemy outpost. The outpost was guarded by rocket troopers and grenadiers, all of whom were in the fog of war. It took me about 5 attempts to land the copter at a place where my men could disembark without getting blown up before they could sprint into the buildings.

Going back even further, Dune 2 had the Death Hand missile. Playing as Atreides you faced down two enemies that could fire them in the final mission. Where the missile landed was pure RNG, and if it hit your construction yard you basically lost the mission. The "standard" way to beat the mission was to save scum the missile launch. I did an Ironman attempt at that stage once - it was sheer hell. You had to survive long enough to get MCVs, then build additional construction yards to make sure you had redundancy. Losing half my base became commonplace, and I ran the entire map out of spice before I finally won.

We just used to accept those sorts of death as part of the game back then.

Yeah, you're right. CnC's AI is definitely braindead, but it compensates by not being afraid to be unfair. This is missing from newer games where the AI is getting massive bonuses but always appears to be somewhat fair about it.

[warty goblin]

I rather wonder if one of the problems with making more modern games hard is because of the RPGification of everything. If the primary engagement loop of the game is based on letting you choose some new hunk of power every 10 minutes, is it any wonder things have gotten easier?

If the new power doesn't make the game easier, it isn't really empowering, and if you're not careful, you could go and invalidate somebody's playstyle or build, and then there will be 1000 YouTube videos about how the game is unbalanced trash. So the neex to empower the player all the time breaks the difficulty curve, and the need to let everybody play the game however they want means you can't have a level or area that hard counters something because somebody will have spent all their upgrade points on doing exactly that and nothing else.

I honestly wonder if a lot of samey open world game feel doesn't follow straight from just these two factors.

[Zevox]

Why are you waiting for it to go on sale? It's pretty darned cheap anyway, and let's face it here, they're not going to do more ports like this if they find they just don't sell enough to make it worthwhile, so I bought it immediately. Haven't installed it yet, still going through a monster game of Stellaris, but it's definitely on my list to play soon.
Yeah, while I'm not trying to encourage Steam releases specifically (would honestly rather have had it on Playstation if given the choice), I did the same. Actually, I bought the Digital Deluxe Edition despite not expecting to do anything with the digital artbook and soundtrack, just to give Atlus five more dollars for it. Hell, Persona 4's tied for my favorite game of all time (with Persona 3), I'm more than happy to reward them for that.

Though while I was at it, I also grabbed another steam game I've been meaning to try: Them's Fightin' Herds. AKA what happens when a fan-made My Little Pony fighting game morphs into its own thing after Hasbro slapped them with a cease & desist. And I have to say, definitely pretty nice. It's very obvious that it was made with the Skullgirls engine, as it has a very similar feel to that game despite being a strictly 1v1 fighter, but that's for the most part good by me. The characters are pretty, all pretty obvious which pony they're based on, and by and large good expies of them. And it's kind of fun to see some of the departures, like Oleander being Twilight but with a mild edgelord/Great Old One Warlock element to her. She's great as the tutorial narrator. Actually, the game's tutorial is just excellent, one of the best I've ever seen for the genre. It even teaches you some things you normally need to go looking around fighting game fan sites to learn about, like hitboxes and frame data.

You can really tell the game was made by a bunch of complete nerds, too (in the best way). There's so many references in the alternate color schemes for characters, and they even gave them fun names. For instance, the game's Rainbow Dash expy, a Dragon named Tianhuo, has a red-and-purple color scheme named "Welcome to Die (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdAmkx8eAos)." Or Oleander has a "demon girl" color scheme that resembles Raven of the Teen Titans, and the dark magic book she's carrying gets a red color scheme reminiscent of Trigon to go with it. Or the Pinkie Pie expy, a Llama named Paprika, has a color scheme called "Emperor" based off Kuzco from "The Emperor's New Groove." Arizona, the cow who serves as the Applejack expy, has one called "Milkpool" which colors her like Deadpool's costume. Pom, a Lamb who fill in Fluttershy's role, has "Good Morning Mayor," a color scheme based on Isabelle from Animal Crossing. And Velvet, a Deer who takes Rarity's place, has a color scheme called "VIP," pretty obviously based on the Velvet Room attendants from the Persona franchise.

Gameplay-wise, feels pretty solid to me so far, though I haven't taken it online yet. I keep hearing it has some of the best netcode around though (hell, that's the main reason it's at Evo this year, with the regular event canceled and online ones replacing it due to the pandemic), so here's hoping. I'm thinking I'll be playing either Tianhuo or Oleander - probably starting with the former and moving to the latter if the Dragon doesn't quite gel with me. From messing around in training mode though, damn, your options are pretty wide-open - it feels very Marvel vs Capcom that way, which is a good thing. It's overwhelming enough that I'm going to have to keep myself from trying to figure out optimal combos, or I'll never start playing online.

In the meantime, started on the story mode though, which is, well, different. Wasn't expecting to be moving around a sprite-based map talking to a ton of NPCs in a fighting game. The story doesn't seem like anything too special, but there's plenty of fun silliness along the way, so I'm okay with that. The battles seem fine so far, and I liked the way they turned the final round of the first fight with another proper character into a special event match of sorts, with Velvet surrounding herself in an icy tornado and throwing ice at you while you had to dash across the stage to get at her, that was fun. I am kind of worried about how I'll fare once I need to play either Paprika or Pom though, since both of those seem like characters I'll really struggle with.

All in all, really enjoying it. Don't know if I'll get as into it as I do ArcSys games, but seems like a great entry in the genre.

[Resileaf]

Playing Star Fox 1 on the SNES classic.

Those Route 3 levels are complete nonsense! Who thought they were good ideas in a game that lags so much?!

[oxybe]

Say what you will about Epic and Fortnite, but they know how to throw a party and make a spectacle out of it.

So season 2, chapter 2 or whatever they're calling it has finally ended, officially, earlier today after a couple pushbacks.

they warned us to login early for the sendoff and boy am glad i logged in earlier then the 30 min they recommended, as the servers were chock full very fast.

so you logged in sometimes between 2-3pm Atlantic time and there was only one game mode, a 50v50 first to like... 250 points but it kept going even past the point cap, they just wanted to fill up them servers.

everyone goes to "The agency" a large manor on an island surrounded by 5 underwater vents that houses a spy agency. not surprising since the theme of the season is basically spy v spy.

there is a large countdown timer being projected above the location by Midas, the leader of the agency and the lv100 battle pass skin.

then it happens: the countdown reaches 0 and the fountain in the center plaza of the agency building opens up as a huge Tesla coil topped with a plasma ball bursts through the floor and destroys the building. 5 lightning rod like things slowly reveal from vents and start zapping at the storm, pushing back and expanding the safe zone. it struggles, with the safe zone growing and shrinking as lightning cracks and eventually everything explodes.

all while this is going on the game's gravity is going bananas and we get flashes of being in an office and overhearing someone talking about a project, which ends up being a potentially alternate reality version of Jonesy, the blonde poster boy of fortnite.

Note: this alternate reality has been hinted at before. Drift, one of the characters/skins from... season 1 ch.5 i think, was suddenly teleported to fortnite land, if we go by what's hinted in the loading screens of thay chapter.

Once the dust settles, you're back on the battle bus, flying to the agency but instead of the storm's big purple death area, we now have a huge wall of water, as though the entire map has beed flooded noah 's arc style. it was a neat 10 min give or take long event.

and that's it. some stuff was hinted at, like during the flashes in the alternate reality uou could move around and i saw dossiers of Lynx, a catwoman like figure and skin, Midas, the agency's leader, and a third i didn't recognize. so these three may have a big role in the next chapter's meta-story.

I played a match proper and the new storm, that water wall, is danged imposing looking. the giant sharks swimming in it and the light devouring blue don't do it any favours towards making it an inviting swim.

we're gonna have to wait until Wednesday to see the ramifications and the start of chapter 3.

[factotum]

If the new power doesn't make the game easier, it isn't really empowering, and if you're not careful, you could go and invalidate somebody's playstyle or build, and then there will be 1000 YouTube videos about how the game is unbalanced trash.

There's an incredibly easy way to fix that--allow character respecs. Grim Dawn does this, which is a good thing, because the RPG system in that is super complicated and it's easy to end up with a trash build by mistake. And as long as a skill is fun to use and *somewhat* effective it doesn't need to be balanced against the others. I remember Diablo 2, where the Hammerdin (Paladin using Blessed Hammer as their prime skill) was acknowledged as one of the most powerful builds around, but I never got far with it because I just found aiming the damned hammer to be unfun, so I would use some other less powerful but more fun skill instead.

[Eldan]

Welp. Had a pretty epic time playing Subnautica this weekend. Super frustrating too. Finally built a Prawn suit, found the entry to the lost river, navigated it for quite some time (didn't find much like upgrades or resources, but the giant skeletons look very impressive, at least) and then... some **** of an enemy I didn't even see coming teleported me out of the prawn suit and killed me in like two shots before I could react.
So the prawn suit is... 900 meters below sea level in a cave I'm not even sure how to find the entrace of again. My seamoth goes to 300 meters and my Cyclops to 500.

Well, over the course of several hours of searching and escaping various leviathans by the skin of my teeth, I actually managed to somehow jiggle the Cyclops into a tiny cave entrance in the Grand Reef (no idea how I managed that, in retrospect. It looks much smaller than the sub), crash it into every cliff face that cave had to offer repeatedly, and somehow park it about 300 meters above the prawn suit, just barely under the ceiling of a cave and about 2 meters above crush depth. And then had to dive down with three air tanks, evading those same enemies and then bunny-hop the prawn up various cliffs. Died about six times again getting the prawn up to the cyclops, but since I respawned relatively close by, it was doable.

But yeah. Next I'm googling how to find weapons for my submarines and suits and how to build them before I go exploring again.

Seriously, though. It was fun to get back in, but enemies that teleport you out of your armored vehicles so you are completely defenceless strikes me as super frustrating game design.

[Anteros]

Still messing around with Terraria. It's a weird mix of extremely frustrating and fun. There's a lot of fun exploration and discovery to be had...but the game expects you to grind for literally dozens of hours to do some of it. I do enjoy difficulty in games, but I don't necessarily agree that timesinks=difficulty so I've resorted to cheating in a game for the first time I can remember. So far I haven't cheated for anything other than boss summoning items where you're expected to basically wait for hours for them to grow in the world naturally and then find them. In particular the plant boss where you're expected to find a bulb to summon him, build an enormous arena around the bulb, and then fight the boss. After about 3 repeats of this pattern I just can't be bothered to keep sinking hours into pixel hunting and building arenas.

Anyway...it's a good game, but I can only recommend it to someone who has a lot of time on their hands, or a willingness to cheat away some of the more boring/grindy aspects.