What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year

[Aotrs Commander]

Psst! Guys, guys guys...!

Call me crazy, but I think might be winning a bit!

Spoiler: Civ 4, Caveman to Cosmos, 20% of time (turn 1600)

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So I MIGHT have expected C2C to be way more difficult than it is. A little bit. But sod it, I'mma do this anyway, for the laughs. (And in all seriousness, game with only very mild annoyance is what I need right now.)

(Also, I set leaders to be independant of nations



Without EVEN a great general attached, these guys have been working for the better part of twenty thousand years..



And a special mention to Tuozin's own division of the Shark Punching Centre:


The giraffe archers (I HAVE GIRAFFE ARCHERS) just recently upgraded to GIRAFFE CURASSIERS BECAUSE THEY HAVE GUNS NOW) and Derpy's Mammoths (I HAVE MAMMOTHS WITH BALLISTAS one tech away from becoming MAMMOTHS WITH CANNONS, BEST CIV GAME EVER) have spent several thousands of years honing their skills by bombarding that school of Hammerhead sharks.

(Since they are immune to be attacked by sea unit because they can't get to them.)

Also, I Did A Whoops. By getting to the Rennaissence, now the barbarians have musketeers (HOW I DON'T EVEN QUITE HAVE THEM YET), Dido, leader of the Mayans, got a bit killed.


(And as I basically just carried on the turn, this immediately happened, HAHAHAHAHAHA!)


(Montezeuma is the Worst Japanese Leader Ever. This comes after not merely being content in picking a fight with the global super-power (he lost, shocker) and losing half his cities, and being so Bad At Ruler the Mongols have become a rebel power three times now, and on the third time, they actually stuck around...)

[Yora]

I find it best to think of Cyberpunk as a circa 2017 game that just got hung up due to it's crazy huge scope.

As a launch title for the PS4, this game would have lived up to everyone's hype. 7 years later there's lots of whining and complaining. But given the whole scope of the game, I think most people who gave it terrible user reviews on day 1 and 2 didn't even make it out of the prolog chapter. There simply wasn't enough time to actually get a good look at the game as a whole.
Bt when you see things like "Gun gameplay is bad compare to other shooters (it feels like a downgraded borderlands); 2/10", it does explain quite a lot. And I don't know what to make of "Sure, the game looks nice and the missions I've played so far have been very good. But that is about where the good parts end. 4/10"

There might be a great educational story about realistic marketing in all of this.

[Cespenar]

I'd rate it higher than that, particularly in the writing department, although this might be just because I don't generally like Bioware's or Obsidian's writing styles. Something about Bioware always feels very self-consciously YA to me, in the sense that everybody seems to have an emotional age of about 17. Which is fine for the 17 year olds and in small doses, but wears me out pretty quick. Obsidian just need an editor who wields the power of the delete key with unflagging determination.

Eh, I'll give you that about Bioware when it comes to their main plots, but they do way better jobs on their side quests and companion character arcs, and so forth. Though the thing is, they usually don't fall under a certain quality. Wasteland 3, on the other hand, seems to have a decent, average plotline, but its side characters read and sound so cringy that they look like they're written by a 17 year old and voice acted by the same dude, his little brother, and their mother.

There might be a great educational story about realistic marketing in all of this.

Though there might not be one as well, because while the feedback is patchy and whatnot, the studio probably can't hear them over all the money they're making. And unlike a one-sided affair like No Man's Sky, this one seems to be mostly on the players.

[warty goblin]

Eh, I'll give you that about Bioware when it comes to their main plots, but they do way better jobs on their side quests and companion character arcs, and so forth. Though the thing is, they usually don't fall under a certain quality. Wasteland 3, on the other hand, seems to have a decent, average plotline, but its side characters read and sound so cringy that they look like they're written by a 17 year old and voice acted by the same dude, his little brother, and their mother.

That's kinda the charm though. A game where you run around shooting giant mutant frogs is inherently kinda immature teenage nonsense. Might as well own it.

Granted, the last two Bioware games I played were Andromeda and Anthem, which in terms of writing were extremely mediocre and violently incompetent, respectively. Like I know not expect a lot from the story in a live service game, but introducing your main villain in a flashback cutscene where one NPC is narrating something another NPC whom you haven't even met once told him is just shockingly bad.

Though there might not be one as well, because while the feedback is patchy and whatnot, the studio probably can't hear them over all the money they're making. And unlike a one-sided affair like No Man's Sky, this one seems to be mostly on the players.

The players expecting the game to be literally everything, yeah that's silly. Hiding the apparently wretched state of the game on last gen consoles is pretty clearly just a jerk move though.

[factotum]

I'm curious--has anyone played the updated version of Dragon Quest XI that came out recently? Is it worth playing?

[Cespenar]

That's kinda the charm though. A game where you run around shooting giant mutant frogs is inherently kinda immature teenage nonsense. Might as well own it.

Eh, I'd maintain that you can still do good schlock and bad schlock. But this devolves into a matter of tastes, I think, so no need to go any deeper than this.

Also, admittedly, I'm still playing, so there's that.

The players expecting the game to be literally everything, yeah that's silly. Hiding the apparently wretched state of the game on last gen consoles is pretty clearly just a jerk move though.

People apparently actively compare it to GTA 5 and call out how it sucks at being GTA, which is pretty wondrous. Can't really argue about the consoles part, though.

[warty goblin]

Eh, I'd maintain that you can still do good schlock and bad schlock. But this devolves into a matter of tastes, I think, so no need to go any deeper than this.

Also, admittedly, I'm still playing, so there's that.

It's honestly not quite to my taste either, mostly because it's ultraviolence sits in this weird uncanny valley, where the world is believable enough its unsettling, but not mature enough do make the gore mean anything. It either needs to be less gory, resort to gore less often and with greater impact, or just go full farce with it.

People apparently actively compare it to GTA 5 and call out how it sucks at being GTA, which is pretty wondrous. Can't really argue about the consoles part, though.

Yeah, that I don't get. Witcher 3 used it's open world very well to evoke the setting through art design and background for the quests, but it wasn't really meaningfully interactive in terms of gameplay mechanics. Basically it was really pretty set dressing with the occasional random encounter with murderous fish people. Basically an open world designed like a very big level, instead of a playground for Open World Hijinks. Which I really loved, and I'm very happy with Cyberpunk doing the same thing.

(I prefer Witcher 3's wield, simply because I find rural spaces more interesting than urban ones. But the sense of place they achieve in Cyberpunk is amazing)

[Aotrs Commander]

Well, I bunged those two Dreamfall games on my Gog wishlist and they came up today on sale, so that was well timed, less than a tenner for both.

Still can't quite decide on Tropico 6 even at half price - still leavin' Wasteland 3 for the moment...

[Zevox]

I wrapped up playing Infamous: Second Son - and its big DLC story, First Light. It was shorter than I remembered, just as fun as I remembered, and had a better story than I remembered. It's no masterpiece, mind you, but there's a definite emotional resonance to it that a lot of games often fail to achieve. I particularly liked replaying First Light; I guess the devs realized what the best power set from the game was, since they chose to focus on Fetch and gave her an expanded array of abilities with her Neon powers than Delsin had with his copy of them.

It does leave me wondering why they haven't done anything with the series since then, though. I was half expecting they might be saving the series to be a launch title for the next Playstation again, but here we are with the PS5 out, and nope, nothing. Oh well.

[DeadMech]

It's been awhile since I checked in here.Recently I bought the yogscast jingle jam charity bundle. I've only touched two games out of it so far.

Colony Survival is what I've spent most of my gaming time playing. It's a colony building game played in a minecraft like world. With one of those hi def texture packs that doesn't quite look right for the voxel environment... but I enjoy it. I'm at the stage now where I can start setting up new splinter colonies in new biomes to gather new materials. So I've been focusing on my starting colony setting up a trader that'll supply the new one with building materials and some food and luxury items to give it a boost.Trying to get it overproducing so that it can feed the new one for a bit

My colony isn't terribly pretty right now. By feeding and giving luxury items to your colonists you earn points you can spend on minor upgrades including the total spawn safe area of the colony. I've just about maxed that out and once I do I can set up the permanent walls and shooting gallery maze to protect against zombies and begin redoing my farm plots and such. Right now I'm thinking about setting the farms lands towards the front of my colony towards the lake and building a nice little castle towards the back since it sits up on a small hill.

Among Us had a random pet pack in the bundle so I've been playing a bit of that though I'd been planning to give that a go for awhile. It's quite fun for the most part. Playing with randoms always carries certain detrimental impacts. You know how it is. Some people taking the game way too seriously and raging. Some people not taking it at all serious and deliberately throwing rounds to troll. Truly a salt mine.

I'm not gonna tell you all anything you probably don't already know about the game. It's fun, it's cheap. I feel like I get chosen to play impostor far too rarely. Which is a shame because playing impostor takes more practice and is more enjoyable for me than playing crewmate. Though that's not a terrible experience in itself. I feel like most public lobbies could stand to have a longer discussion period before the voting.

My friend has a let's play channel and it occurs to me that I've never mentioned it before today. I'm in quite a few of the videos so maybe I should mention that? Mostly the Super Metroid videos but other stuff as well. We've not been able to sit down and do a recording session of that lately, distracted with our halloween project and various one offs. And covid restrictions mean we won't be able to meet in person to do more recording for awhile sadly. Only accidentally doxed myself a couple times. >_>

I was super nervous and unhappy about hearing my own voice recorded when we started but all this time later it feels allot more natural and I'm enjoying it with our 10 viewers. Because of work schedules we only get to meet and record once every two weeks. I think the last thing we recorded was a session of Super Mario 35. It's not up yet. Kinda fun. Ended the play session scoring a 3rd place finish. I used to play Super Mario bros as a kid so I still have the muscle memory buried within me even if I don't personally own a switch. I'm really not a fan of it's controller. Pretty fun time though.

[Kitten Champion]

I wrapped up playing Infamous: Second Son - and its big DLC story, First Light. It was shorter than I remembered, just as fun as I remembered, and had a better story than I remembered. It's no masterpiece, mind you, but there's a definite emotional resonance to it than a lot of games often fail to achieve. I particularly liked replaying First Light; I guess the devs realized what the best power set from the game was, since they chose to focus on Fetch and gave her an expanded array of abilities with her Neon powers than Delsin had with his copy of them.

It does leave me wondering why they haven't done anything with the series since then, though. I was half expecting they might be saving the series to be a launch title for the next Playstation again, but here we are with the PS5 out, and nope, nothing. Oh well.

Sucker Punch released Ghost of Tsushima just this summer and they're still working on subsequent material for it, a launch title would probably be impossible unless I'm dramatically underestimating the size of the studio.

Though, whether they'll return to the Infamous universe at any point I don't know. Maybe with the Spider-Man/Miles Morales game and their own Avengers title Sony's less inclined to push them into more superhero stuff? I don't know obviously, but that doesn't seem implausible to me.

[Dire_Flumph]

I wrapped up playing Infamous: Second Son - and its big DLC story, First Light. It was shorter than I remembered, just as fun as I remembered, and had a better story than I remembered. It's no masterpiece, mind you, but there's a definite emotional resonance to it than a lot of games often fail to achieve. I particularly liked replaying First Light; I guess the devs realized what the best power set from the game was, since they chose to focus on Fetch and gave her an expanded array of abilities with her Neon powers than Delsin had with his copy of them.

It does leave me wondering why they haven't done anything with the series since then, though. I was half expecting they might be saving the series to be a launch title for the next Playstation again, but here we are with the PS5 out, and nope, nothing. Oh well.

I'd completely forgotten I never got around to playing First Light. I'll have to get right on that, I enjoyed the series up to that point.

Thank you for reminding me! And an open world game being short isn't a huge drawback in my book. I enjoyed AC: Odyssey more than any other entry I'd played in awhile, but that killed my desire to play another one for some time.

[Zevox]

Sucker Punch released Ghost of Tsushima just this summer and they're still working on subsequent material for it, a launch title would probably be impossible unless I'm dramatically underestimating the size of the studio.

Though, whether they'll return to the Infamous universe at any point I don't know. Maybe with the Spider-Man/Miles Morales game and their own Avengers title Sony's less inclined to push them into more superhero stuff? I don't know obviously, but that doesn't seem implausible to me.

Oh, Ghost of Tsushima is the same guys? Huh, well, I guess that does explain what they've been doing since Second Son. Bit of a pity, since that didn't interest me at all but a new Infamous might, but oh well, not like it's a franchise I was a massive fan of or anything. Though I would find it strange for a fairly successful and well-received franchise to just be randomly dropped forever like that.

[Rynjin]

Sucker Punch is the kind of developer that really kind of floats under the radar, so it's no surprise that you didn't connect the studios. They seem to make everybody's "second favorite" games, like Sly Cooper and Infamous. Even Ghost of Tsushima was (sadly, IMO) overshadowed by the subsequent release of The Last of Us 2.

[Erloas]

Well I just finished Wasteland 3. It was good, though there were a few major events that I'm not sure what caused them. I'm not sure, at least for me, that there is a whole lot of replay value, as I covered most of the build types and I'm not likely to make any major differences in how I do several of the big pieces. (but that isn't any different than any other games I play). The game both felt a bit short but also like it kept going. I'm not sure how that is possible, being contradictory.

Not sure what I'm going to play next. Might go back to finish Gears Tactics, but might need a completely different type of game for a while, not sure. I've got Gamepass, so there are plenty of options.

[Rodin]

I've been sinking my nostalgia fangs into the Saga (Final Fantasy Legend) Collection for Switch. The collection is extremely faithful to the originals, all the way down to maintaining the typos from the original translation. There are a few minor changes, like Redbull -> Redhorn for some reason and the O-bake randomly getting renamed entirely instead of removing the hyphen. I don't quite understand why these changes were made when more obvious errors were left in.

The best feature is a "speed up" mode that lets you run the game faster. It helps a lot when traveling the overworld.

Gameplay wise they've mostly held up better than I expected. Saga 1 was always a bit rough, and the dungeon crawling is pretty bad by today's standards. However, the combat is still pretty unique. Saga 3 has the best dungeon crawling, but the combat was starting to ape more traditional JRPGs and it feels worse for it. Saga 2 is where it's at - decent dungeon crawling, a more refined combat system than Saga 1, and a punishingly hard difficulty level. The potential for random enemy groups to outnumber you 4-1 and obliterate you is something that you don't see much these days. I love it.

[Eldan]

Second attempt at Frostpunk, this time with some idea of what I'm doing. Knowing how much colder the weather gets later, rushing tech development and heat upgrades really paid off. Also turned out food was considerably less important than I thought and I built about half as many hunters as in my first attempt, where half the city froze to death. 20 days in, economy seems stable, everyone is warm and fed and I have the coal storage to turn up the heat another level if it should get even colder. I'm expecting some new kind of catastrophe soon, otherwise, I'm not really sure what the last three tiers of the tech tree are for.

[Rynjin]

I've been sinking my nostalgia fangs into the Saga (Final Fantasy Legend) Collection for Switch. The collection is extremely faithful to the originals, all the way down to maintaining the typos from the original translation. There are a few minor changes, like Redbull -> Redhorn for some reason and the O-bake randomly getting renamed entirely instead of removing the hyphen. I don't quite understand why these changes were made when more obvious errors were left in.

The best feature is a "speed up" mode that lets you run the game faster. It helps a lot when traveling the overworld.

Gameplay wise they've mostly held up better than I expected. Saga 1 was always a bit rough, and the dungeon crawling is pretty bad by today's standards. However, the combat is still pretty unique. Saga 3 has the best dungeon crawling, but the combat was starting to ape more traditional JRPGs and it feels worse for it. Saga 2 is where it's at - decent dungeon crawling, a more refined combat system than Saga 1, and a punishingly hard difficulty level. The potential for random enemy groups to outnumber you 4-1 and obliterate you is something that you don't see much these days. I love it.

Saga 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I used to play and beat it on every road trip I had as a kid on up through young adulthood when I was moving states a lot.

It's so... breakable (monsters and robots, baby!), and overall very fun. Plus the music is great (probably because half of it sounds like it was ripped off of popular songs).

[Cespenar]

It's honestly not quite to my taste either, mostly because it's ultraviolence sits in this weird uncanny valley, where the world is believable enough its unsettling, but not mature enough do make the gore mean anything. It either needs to be less gory, resort to gore less often and with greater impact, or just go full farce with it.

True. Out of the those, I think they needed to go less wacky and gory, so that the pockets of wack and gore had better effect, but it was just a mish-mash instead. For example, I'm in Denver right now, and in 10 minutes of gameplay it goes from political, to wacky, to gory, back to political. I'm not even sure what was the main intention at all.

And honestly the general political/logistical bits aren't that bad -- they obviously put some thought into the power balances: who controls the oil, the electricity, the transportation, etc. but the whole lack of tone really hurts the game.

Yeah, that I don't get. Witcher 3 used it's open world very well to evoke the setting through art design and background for the quests, but it wasn't really meaningfully interactive in terms of gameplay mechanics. Basically it was really pretty set dressing with the occasional random encounter with murderous fish people. Basically an open world designed like a very big level, instead of a playground for Open World Hijinks. Which I really loved, and I'm very happy with Cyberpunk doing the same thing.

(I prefer Witcher 3's wield, simply because I find rural spaces more interesting than urban ones. But the sense of place they achieve in Cyberpunk is amazing)

I think W3's wilderness would have been increased in quality greatly if they just scattered the enemies a little more loosely. But that's just nitpicking now. And besides, when you looked at Witcher 3, it was obvious that it was a default RPG first, and an open-world-whatever second (or third). Similar to Cyberpunk.

[GloatingSwine]

Cyberpunk feels much more like an open world game than an RPG to me.

The "open world" stuff, side gigs and world encounters and stuff are much higher density and much less bespoke in design and less involved than the side quests in Witcher 3. There's a lot of it, but it generally boils down to a few broad types of mission (steal a thing, rescue a person, kill a person, kill all the people) repeated in different layouts against different opposition.

Meanwhile the RPG part has missions and narrative that are great, but don't actually care about the open world bit of the game. When I went and did the mission wherey you had to buy a drone off a gang the fact that I had a bodycount of several hundred of their goons from hoovering up the open world dots did not factor into the conversation at all, positively or negatively.

It feels much more like an open world dot tidier, and not at the apex of that genre either (that's Horizon: Zero Dawn for reference).

[warty goblin]

It feels much more like an open world dot tidier, and not at the apex of that genre either (that's Horizon: Zero Dawn for reference).

I should try Horizon again, my initial impression was positive...and also that between playing 2013 Tomb Raider twice, Shadow of the Tomb Raider once though, and part of Rise of the Tomb Raider, I'd kinda already played it. Or a version of it that had levels. I like games with levels.

Which weirdly may be why Cyberpunk is working pretty well for me. I don't really think of it as an open world game, or really as an RPG. I think of it as an action game with one very large level.

So I meander around as the world swirls indifferently around me. I basically never open the world map, or use the fast travel, or cars. I'm usually headed to the next objective, but tend to take a lot of detours, and I don't pay a lot if attention to what the objective actually of. No, I just walk places, pausing occasionally to shoot gangsters in the face.

Also I switched the difficulty back up to hard, which feels about right at the moment. I expect as soon as I grind up the latest batch of guns into gun bits so my surviving guns gun harder, it'll probably start to feel easy again.

In the distant past a game called Two Worlds 2 had a system where you upgraded weapons by stacking duplicates. So two iron swords becomes one improved iron sword. This was roundly mocked at the time as being completely ridiculous.

Now it's like 35% of every game; we just turn everything into "crafting mats" first.

[Zevox]

Sucker Punch is the kind of developer that really kind of floats under the radar, so it's no surprise that you didn't connect the studios. They seem to make everybody's "second favorite" games, like Sly Cooper and Infamous. Even Ghost of Tsushima was (sadly, IMO) overshadowed by the subsequent release of The Last of Us 2.

Oh dang, they did Sly Cooper too? Screw InFamous and Ghost of Tsushima then, get them working on that again. There's never enough 3D platformers not named Mario being made these days, and I certainly liked the Sly games.

[GloatingSwine]

Oh dang, they did Sly Cooper too? Screw InFamous and Ghost of Tsushima then, get them working on that again. There's never enough 3D platformers not named Mario being made these days, and I certainly liked the Sly games.

Sly 2 is the best Assassin's Creed.

[DeadMech]

Spent last night playing Rise of Industry. It's another game from the yogscast jingle jam charity bundle. Picture open transport tycoon deluxe except fully in 3d. Actually I don't think that's the most favorable comparison considering openTTD is both free and the gold standard of the genre.

Not that RoI isn't a good game and different in key ways. You generate yourself a map and pick a region in it to start. There may be static resource nodes on the map that you can build a building on to gather resources. And those building will dispatch trucks automatically to drive down roads you set down once you tell it where to send it's resources. Usually a shop in town. Overtime you will research new things to collect or higher tier items to use those resources to craft in factories you set down.

The margins starting out a quite tight so it's difficult. I almost went bankrupt in my first map accidentally buying one too many things. Got hit with a sudden high interest emergency loan that I managed to bounce back from by taking a lower interest loan to pay it off. Consolidate that debt. Things were going positive but slow so I saved and made a new map to try some new stuff out without having to wait.

An island map so I could try make everything in one hub put it all on boats and float it to a dock and warehouse connected to a town. Turns out the margins on the produces I was able to set down around the warehouse of my remote hub weren't high enough to make up the maintenance costs of the two warehouses and docks. A bit disappointing. In the settings you can turn down the building maintenance and vehicle dispatch costs but perhaps that sort of advanced transport is more for later tier items. Or maybe I just needed to fit in a couple more industries. I saved there to maybe pick up later once I better understand the game systems.

Made a third map. Nice flat land and picked one of the smaller towns in a region without any special resources except fish as my starting place. Focused on building various farms to feed and grow the town. Experimenting with layouts and starting to terraform water sources since farms consume an ungodly amount of water deliveries.... and this has been my most successful run yet. Almost amassed enough money to buy permits to move into a second region which will give me access to gas, oil, and copper or coal and iron depending which way I go. Probably copper because at some point the town will grow large enough to offer to build a third shop that takes new items if you then feed it certain higher tier construction materials that include copper pipes.

[Zevox]

So the big Sephiroth presentation for Smash was today, and while his release date was announced as the 22nd, he is functionally available right now. If you've bought the full DLC pass or if you buy him individually (Challenger Pack 8, if they haven't updated it to identify him yet - they hadn't when I bought it just after the presentation), there is currently a special boss fight event available on the game's main menu where you can fight him, and if you win, you unlock him early. Given the fight has selectable difficulties that include an "easy" one and lets you try as many times as you like, that shouldn't be a problem for anyone. His spirit board and the new Mii Fighter costumes (Aerith, Tifa, Barrett, Geno, and the Chocobo hat) are apparently waiting for that official release day, but Sephiroth himself and his Classic mode are playable immediately.

I've only goofed around with him in training mode and played his Classic mode, but so far, he seems fun. I like his oddball side special, it reminds me of Vergil's Crown of Swords from UMvC3. His up air and up smash cover absolutely immense areas, holy crap. Does seem to have a lot of recovery on most of his moves though, so he may take a lot of getting used to.

Sly 2 is the best Assassin's Creed.

I honestly don't see that much in the way of similarity between them. Also, personally I liked Thieves in Time the best, though 2 is a close second.

[Razade]

So the big Sephiroth presentation for Smash was today, and while his release date was announced as the 22nd, he is functionally available right now. If you've bought the full DLC pass or if you buy him individually (Challenger Pack 8, if they haven't updated it to identify him yet - they hadn't when I bought it just after the presentation), there is currently a special boss fight event available on the game's main menu where you can fight him, and if you win, you unlock him early. Given the fight has selectable difficulties that include an "easy" one and lets you try as many times as you like, that shouldn't be a problem for anyone. His spirit board and the new Mii Fighter costumes (Aerith, Tifa, Barrett, Geno, and the Chocobo hat) are apparently waiting for that official release day, but Sephiroth himself and his Classic mode are playable immediately.

I've only goofed around with him in training mode and played his Classic mode, but so far, he seems fun. I like his oddball side special, it reminds me of Vergil's Crown of Swords from UMvC3. His up air and up smash cover absolutely immense areas, holy crap. Does seem to have a lot of recovery on most of his moves though, so he may take a lot of getting used to.

He's pretty fun and the challenge was, in degrees, fun to frustrating. There's literally no reason to do it on the highest difficulty other than bragging right. I say that to say I beat it on the highest difficulty and the other two. I went through the pain to make sure it didn't actually get you anything. It'd have been nice if they'd given some gold or tickets or something. All you get is a fancy checkmark on it.

[Man_Over_Game]

So the big Sephiroth presentation for Smash was today, and while his release date was announced as the 22nd, he is functionally available right now. If you've bought the full DLC pass or if you buy him individually (Challenger Pack 8, if they haven't updated it to identify him yet - they hadn't when I bought it just after the presentation), there is currently a special boss fight event available on the game's main menu where you can fight him, and if you win, you unlock him early. Given the fight has selectable difficulties that include an "easy" one and lets you try as many times as you like, that shouldn't be a problem for anyone. His spirit board and the new Mii Fighter costumes (Aerith, Tifa, Barrett, Geno, and the Chocobo hat) are apparently waiting for that official release day, but Sephiroth himself and his Classic mode are playable immediately.

I've only goofed around with him in training mode and played his Classic mode, but so far, he seems fun. I like his oddball side special, it reminds me of Vergil's Crown of Swords from UMvC3. His up air and up smash cover absolutely immense areas, holy crap. Does seem to have a lot of recovery on most of his moves though, so he may take a lot of getting used to.

Sounds a lot like his Dissidia 012 implementation: Powerful, quick, wide swings, and devastating recovery times if you attack randomly.



I was goofing around, looking to see what free games were on the Switch, and I found this game called Spellbreak. It's basically Fortnite with wizards. However, unlike Fortnite, it uses a sorta class system, where you pick one out of 6 elements to specialize in, and you can find a support element as a pickup as you play in the run.

The elements each have their own unique playstyles, and they have unique interactions with other elements. For example, Ice gives you a charged ice arrow that leaves an ice slick underneath its path as your main attack, and your CD attack is an ice storm centered around you that freezes enemies. Some cool stuff you can do includes:

• Freezing a poison cloud (from the poison element) turns it into a solid block.
• Shooting fire at the ice slick creates a steam burst, which can be used to hide in and deals immediate splash damage.
• Breaking up the ice slick with an earth slam turns it into an ice fog that freezes players (including yourself).

Not to mention that players can slide on the ice slick to get a speed boost. So I run around, riding my ice rails and shooting off into the distance to extend them while I ride at high speed. When I see a badguy, I snipe them then use an earth slam (if I have Earth as my support) to break up the slick, deal more damage and freeze my target in place for a second shot.

Or I use my ice slick to run up to the target, throw out my Ice Storm, and then use the CD power on my support Earth element to throw an ice boulder (which happens when you throw a boulder through an ice storm) and follow up with more earth slams (which are better in close range).

You pick a class before each match, so you can mix it up. Earth is a tank (Gain armor each time you earth slam), Wind fights in the air (shooting downwards with your wind bullets pushes you into the air, and your tornado CD ability is a jump pad for you but pulls in everyone else), Poison uses stealth (touching your poison fog CD ability makes you dash and turn invisible), Ice is a mobile archer, Lighting is single-target damage and Fire is AoE damage.

The only real difference between your main element and your support element is that you can't swap out your main element, and your main gets mechanical upgrades the more the storm shrinks (for example, one upgrade causes me to hover and maintain my momentum while aiming my ice shot while in the air, and another causes nearby enemies to be highlighted to me while I'm charging).

It's been pretty damn fun so far.

[Sermil]

Cave Story+, since it was free on Epic a few weeks ago.

Finally, finally finished the

Spoiler: End game

Show

Misery boss fight with 4 health... and they throw you straight into a harder boss fight (The Doctor) with no save point and no chance to regen health... Seriously?

[Zevox]

Sounds a lot like his Dissidia 012 implementation: Powerful, quick, wide swings, and devastating recovery times if you attack randomly.

Eh, not exactly. Aside from his jab and nair, I wouldn't call his attacks quick - they're not super slow, like a Ganondorf or anything (except for his neutral special, Flare, anyway), but they're definitely below average in startup. Powerful and wide swings though, absolutely. He's a bit of a glass canon type - below average weight (though not a true light-weight like a Pikachu or ZSS - actually have to correct myself on that, turns out his weight is identical to Pikachu's, much to my surprise), actually only average-ish speed, but huge swings that deal pretty solid damage and knockback. I'd say his playstyle probably falls into the zoning category, just one that depends on his huge sword rather than projectiles to do the space control. If you can predict where your opponent wants to go, he's more than capable of putting a big, dangerous attack there, but if you can't, he could leave himself wide open when whiffing a lot of his attacks. Kind of like Byleth, except more so.

Though his neutral special is way better than Byleth's. Flare is a pretty solid zoning tool on its own, and at full charge Gigaflare is an amazing edgeguard tool. Lingers for a while, deals massive damage and knockback, covers an immense area, and it feels amazing to land. Very fun move to have in your pocket, and very dangerous to anyone that can't mix up their recovery timing (though Sephiroth himself thankfully can). I did notice that Megaflare, the mid-charge version, seems to have an inordinately long recovery that can get you punished even when the opponent is a surprising distance away when you throw it, though. Which is weird, because I'd expect that on the full-charge Gigaflare if any, but instead it has the fastest recovery.

[LibraryOgre]

Had to console command around a problem in Oblivion, but have finished the Theives guild, and am now working on Fighter's and Dark Brotherhood. I think the Dark Brotherhood questline is going to scar Cana a bit... she was ok with the Morag Tong, but the Dark Brotherhood had her make friends who accepted her as family, then murder them.