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Philippe
Aug 9, 2013

(she/her)
They took a look at the skill tree in Origins (the worst feature of that game) and thought: "How can we make this worse?" I'm not even sure if you get anything from leveling up on its own. It's difficult to get an overview of things, and the skills you unlock seem situational and bleh.

While we're at it, the unlockable superpowers are also boring and uninspired, and you can't see all of them. It would have been better if they functioned like in Odyssey, so you got perk points by reading books that you could allocate as you wished. As it is, you have to have a guide open to see where the ones you want are, and ignore the rest.

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Vandar
Sep 14, 2007

Isn't That Right, Chairman?



Going from Odyssey's simple and satisfying skill tree to one that's as bloated and badly designed as the one in Valhalla is absolutely mind-boggling. There's so much giant empty space and having fog of war on a skill tree is ridiculous and what the hell none of these nodes feel good or satisfying to take. :psyduck:

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Woke up with The Surge thoughts in my usual long-winded fashion so buckle up:

1) I happened across a random Steam forum thread where a developer explained how parrying actually works. It turns out there is no discrete "parry" mechanic...instead perfectly timing your block simply multiplies your defense value by five for the purposes of determining if you get a free block stun. :psyduck: I see what they're going for, getting to the "beefy heavy armor dudes are so beefy and heavy poo poo bounces off them better than it would a fast and dodgy one" in a slightly indirect way, but there's two really obvious problems here: One, whether or not parrying affects any given attack is now an arbitrary check between your variable defense rating and I guess the strength of the enemy's attack. Two, blocking is already 100% effective against most attacks, so it creates a weird stunted design space where parrying becomes the only difference between those two build extremes. Dark Souls can rely on shields being a discrete piece of equipment with their own unique stats (stability, damage absorption, and parry speed) but The Surge lacks all of that.

2) As a sort of extension to this, I was also looking into build advice (all of which is minimal and poorly written, because there's a dearth of info on this game out there and what is available is split across a bunch of equally annoying sources) and I think I've come to the conclusion that the way armor sets are designed makes no sense. They've fallen into the trap of making your armor options work backwards or at least unintuitively. Very broadly, light armor will reduce your stamina costs and also give you more attack speed. Heavy armor will increase your stamina costs and reduce your attack speed, but also boost your impact value (basically how effective your weapon is at staggering enemies). Unsurprisingly, medium armor tends to be somewhere inbetween, giving a variable amount of each positive/negative. The end result of all of this is that combining heavy weapons with heavy armor is pretty much the single worst possible thing you could do. At best, you can pump up your impact value to absurd levels, but as previously mentioned ITT the combat tends to feel non-deterministic even at the best of times so making a giant hammer that's already rated at very high impact even better at that is largely pointless considering all of the other negatives you're eating in exchange...including slower attack speed that's partly negating the benefit of the impact bonus! Instead, why not make heavy weapons attack faster and offset their stamina costs and give lighter weapons the punch they normally lack?

What makes this even worse is that for one, the armor scale is about on the same level as later souls games: Theoretically heavier armor might allow you take one extra hit or knock off a bit more chip damage, but things that are designed to just loving kill you will still just loving kill you. And for two, heavier armor costs more core energy, which is your catch-all equipment limit...which means heavy armor sets struggle to find space for, say, extra healing items or health boosts or stamina boosts or pretty much literally anything that might help offset their penalties and limitations. Meanwhile, light armor sets are so cheap on energy that you can pile on the highest tier health boosts and other bonuses and just rely on dodging and normal blocking, which you'd probably be doing even if you were wearing heavy armor anyway.

3) Totally unrelated to all of the above, the R&D section is hot garbage. The first half over-relies on enemies you already got sick of leading up to it. These are flamethrower guys that are tedious to fight because at a distance they flame you, up close they flame the ground around them, and if you do initiate a combo against them they have a retaliatory knee strike to break you out of it after two hits. Their actual weakness is that their flamethrowers run out of ammo, at which point, regardless of what is going on around them, they will take a knee and fuss with their weapon to reload it. Obviously this only happens once they've used 3-4 flame attacks. Their other weakness is ostensibly their slow turn speed making them wide open to attacks from behind, but R&D is full of tight quarters where that's not always an option. There's also the second variant of the same enemy, a toxic gas grenade launcher guy. These guys are pathetic because it takes them forever to shoot and they arc their grenades at where you were standing rather than where you are standing. (There's also multiple ways to just...not take damage from toxic gas.) The actual reason why they exist is because the flamethrower guys can then ignite the gas...if these two things randomly combine together, because encounters are literally just built such that there will be one of each vaguely near each other, but not actually designed to directly interact or cooperate. As an added gently caress you, the labs are full of enclosures that when broken flood the nearby radius with the same toxic gas for a time.

The entire area is built out of small discrete rooms over-stuffed with enemies which then connect to the next small discrete room via a maintenance tunnel, which makes the layout insanely confusing and repetitive. At one point, there are two signs pointing to the ops room (read: bonfire) that are straight-up wrong. They point back to the central room where ops is, yes, but you're like 2-3 stories up from it with no direct way back down. This is especially infuriating because if you push forward through the very next section...there's a direct shortcut back to the main room and ops. (Normally these signs are incredibly useful because the map design is so overly twisty and interconnected.)

There's an optional bit of loot that requires you to power up a door first. Standard thing seen all throughout the game. But because whoever designed this particular area was a sadist and an rear end in a top hat, the power switch is located across an easily fumbled jump. If you miss the jump (and you will) you have to circle back through a full 1/5th of the level or so, taking three different long elevator rides back up.

This route includes a shortcut that shows how badly shortcuts are handled in this game: For some reason they hate the idea of shortcuts making your life easier, or at least too much easier. So about half the time you unlock a shortcut, there's at least one enemy standing immediately on either side of it to slow you down. In this case, this "shortcut" is a side room containing yet another pair of flamethrower/grenade guys, a bunch of glass enclosures to break, and for shits and giggles a robot enemy. It connects back to the main route through the level via a tiny, cramped passageway that is guaranteed to be blocked by an enemy regardless of which direction you going through it.

The final chunk of the level introduces a new humanoid robot enemy which are the first ones to really take advantage of the targeting system. They shrug off attacks to armored sections much, much more and also severing parts does something. Albeit in a very annoying way. See, every time you kill one it will drop dead and then come back to life five seconds later. So on the one hand, I do like that severing their limbs or bisecting them tends to render them largely helpless crawling zombies when they revive. For some reason taking off their head makes them slightly clumsier/blind, but also turns then into martial arts champions. But on the other hand, this means you have to kill every one of them twice which is tedious.

The "boss" of the area is a souped-up version of one of these things and as the final gently caress you cherry on top, I've run into a bug where even though I've chopped its head off (multiple times, even) and literally see the head part get added to my inventory, I still haven't unlocked the schematic to actually make the head piece. I'm pretty sure it's a bug somehow related to the revival mechanic.

The plot of the area, such as it is, is also terrible. You're supposed to be headed towards your objective, but for no real reason the path collapses and drops you into R&D instead. There's a crazy dude in charge of the place who thinks you're from management, come to inspect his work and/or assassinate him based on nothing. Once you finally reach him, he freaks out and pushes the "unleash all of the monsters!!!" emergency button that comes stock with every shady disaster factory. This then triggers a security alert which makes security barge in...conveniently unlocking the door out of the sector and back to the defacto hub area. Your new objective after that is to sneak into the security sector and steal a rig with security clearance...this is only possible because when the security alert triggered they also unlocked the door to that sector so they could all run out into the rest of the game world and I guess they just didn't feel like closing it again. :bang: The player character has no meaningful input in this entire process beyond murdering enemies standing between plot point A and plot point B.

John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 09:57 on Jun 13, 2021

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

May I recommend skipping ahead to The Surge 2? It is better in every way.

Vic
Nov 26, 2009

malae fidei cum XI_XXVI_MMIX
That post should be a DLC

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

Vic posted:

That post should be a DLC

Bonus complaint: The final boss of the CREO World DLC has an attack where he powers up a pointless damage aura and meanders towards you and all you have to do is hold down the run button and move away from him. However, if you have the audacity to be attacking the boss when he starts it up, you'll get caught inside the hitbox and are guaranteed to be killed by it with no recourse. :thumbsup:

Lunar Suite
Jun 5, 2011

If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.
Oh yeah those oxygen flowers are super plentiful in Below Zero. I guess to give an alternative to having vehicles?

Inspector Gesicht
Oct 26, 2012

500 Zeus a body.


The Surge 1 would be ripe for a mod which changes nothing but fudges the numbers, so those random dogs don't swipe 90% of your health in one hit. Surge 2 was aces so they can only go up from here.

Philippe
Aug 9, 2013

(she/her)

John Murdoch posted:

Woke up with The Surge thoughts in my usual long-winded fashion so buckle up:

I've never been as lost as I was when I played the Surge 1. Everything looks the same and it's impossible to tell directions.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

The Lone Badger posted:

May I recommend skipping ahead to The Surge 2? It is better in every way.

Yeah, but I don't already own The Surge 2 with all of its DLC.

I do however have Lords of the Fallen. :unsmigghh:

JackSplater
Nov 20, 2014

Metal Coat? It's already active?!

Lunar Suite posted:

Oh yeah those oxygen flowers are super plentiful in Below Zero. I guess to give an alternative to having vehicles?

"We removed the Seashark to replace it with this larger, ungainly Seatruck. Oh, our playtesters can't get through our maze of caves to get things they need because we designed them for the small and nimble Seashark? Uhh...."

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.

That strikes me as considerably more than "little" and straight into "this game sucks" territory,.

serefin99
Apr 15, 2016

Mikoooon~
Your lovely shrine maiden fox wife, Tamamo no Mae, is here to help!

Vandar posted:

There's so much giant empty space and having fog of war on a skill tree is ridiculous and what the hell none of these nodes feel good or satisfying to take.

What the gently caress? Rule number 1 of a skill tree is that you let the player see ALL their options, even the ones they can't actually grab yet. Because nobody loving plays an RPG and goes "oh boi, 12% faster movement speed!" but they do go "oh, I can eventually revive once per combat for free AND do a poo poo ton of damage to all enemies when I do? gently caress yeah!"

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


They took out most of the fun supernatural abilities from Odyssey and replaced them with boring "realistic" ones so hiding the skill tree from view was the only way you could potentially make it seem exciting.

Philippe
Aug 9, 2013

(she/her)

serefin99 posted:

What the gently caress? Rule number 1 of a skill tree is that you let the player see ALL their options, even the ones they can't actually grab yet. Because nobody loving plays an RPG and goes "oh boi, 12% faster movement speed!" but they do go "oh, I can eventually revive once per combat for free AND do a poo poo ton of damage to all enemies when I do? gently caress yeah!"

It's also something that sucks about Sekiro.

With regard to AC Valhalla, I think you can see the central skill (the skill tree is built up like a bunch of constellations, where each constellation has a central skill like being able to poison corpses or sprint through breakable objects), but not the path to get there. It's just overdesigned, and like all other systems it is slightly too complicated to bother with.

Philippe has a new favorite as of 13:23 on Jun 13, 2021

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

JackSplater posted:

"We removed the Seashark to replace it with this larger, ungainly Seatruck. Oh, our playtesters can't get through our maze of caves to get things they need because we designed them for the small and nimble Seashark? Uhh...."

Seamoth. But the Seatruck rules, Im pretty sure they wanted people getting out of their vehicle more often to explore rather than always staying in your vehicle. Plus you can attach a bunch of modules to it to make it close to a mobile base without actually being a Cyclops.

Also that big Surge post brought back so many memories of how R&D absolutely sucks poo poo. I played it in 2018 and I still remember that lovely jump you described to get some loot that, if you missed, forced you all the way around. What a pointless, boring area. What sucks is that entering it seems kind of neat, walking into an big entry lobby while the face of CREO speaks from a huge tv above, there's a lot of stuff to see and it's pretty cool looking. But the rest of the area? Tiny corridors, rooms filled with aggravating flame/gas encounters, a literal maze to walk around in, those reviving enemies. Ugh.

Photux
Sep 3, 2012

Funny then, that such darkness gives me hope

Morpheus posted:

Seamoth. But the Seatruck rules, Im pretty sure they wanted people getting out of their vehicle more often to explore rather than always staying in your vehicle. Plus you can attach a bunch of modules to it to make it close to a mobile base without actually being a Cyclops.

The Seatruck is boring, definitely not anywhere as cool as the Cyclops. The Cyclops felt really different to pilot, and you had so much to do when you were using it. Multiple speed settings that make different amounts of noise, external cameras to supplement your view, sonar and torpedoes. When it gets damaged you have to run around putting out fires, or swim around fixing hull breaches, or peel lava slugs off the hull. It was a totally different experience than the Seamoth. I had fun managing its systems, using silent running to sneak past leviathans or decoys and flank speed to outrun them. In contrast, the Seatruck is exactly like the Seamoth, except it can have a fabricator and carry the Prawn suit. When in the deep caverns, my Seatruck strategy for dealing with the constant leviathan presence was to get attacked constantly and just hop out and repair the Seatruck every 60 seconds. Unlike the Cyclops, the Seatruck didn't have any interesting ways to deal with them or interesting consequences of getting damaged by them.

Vandar
Sep 14, 2007

Isn't That Right, Chairman?



serefin99 posted:

What the gently caress? Rule number 1 of a skill tree is that you let the player see ALL their options, even the ones they can't actually grab yet. Because nobody loving plays an RPG and goes "oh boi, 12% faster movement speed!" but they do go "oh, I can eventually revive once per combat for free AND do a poo poo ton of damage to all enemies when I do? gently caress yeah!"

Yeah it's totally bullshit. You can see the major nodes on the skill tree at all times, but everything surrounding them and everything connected to them is covered up until you get closer to them, so you have no idea what else you're getting into on your way to those nodes.

exquisite tea posted:

They took out most of the fun supernatural abilities from Odyssey and replaced them with boring "realistic" ones so hiding the skill tree from view was the only way you could potentially make it seem exciting.

Kassandra's skill tree turned her into a living demi-god. Eivor's skill tree is just boring as gently caress in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly enjoying the game so far, other than a few minor things, but goddamn the skill tree is absolutely horrid in every way.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
A minor correction: There was no bug and I'm actually just a dumbass. I thought the item I kept passing over in my inventory was the chest piece and the head was just inexplicably not dropping, when it fact that was the head piece all along and I just forgot to ever grab the chest armor. Mainly because this set only drops off of the one single enemy at the end of R&D so you have to intentionally respawn it and go back for each individual piece, a process so boring my ADHD brain immediately failed to recall which pieces I already had. (There was also still some legit weirdness going on with when the pop-up for new items would appear as I was clearing R&D, I didn't make that up.)

Plus as yet another general gripe the the UI is also not the best so it was easy to miss that I was mistaking a helmet for a chest plate the whole time... Everything just gets dumped in a big grid and while there are sorting options, they're all sort of blunt and basic and largely unhelpful. By default items are sorted alphabetically by name...in a game where every item is some made-up sci-fi nonsense. You can sort weapons by name, by most recently acquired, upgrade tier, damage...but you can't sort them by type. :psyduck: I thought I had finally found an amazingly useful implant to help my stamina recovery because the main data area plainly says "Stamina Recovery: +50%" except nope the tiny text underneath then explains it's one of those dime a dozen stupid RPG items that only kicks in while you're at low health. (At this point I'm not sure if I ever am going to actually change my armor because that stamina recovery set bonus is just so ridiculously good compared to everything else. There's a reason Demon's Souls made the ring that does the same thing the reward for beating the bonus boss...)

BiggerBoat posted:

That strikes me as considerably more than "little" and straight into "this game sucks" territory,.

Eh, I'm not gonna claim the game is secretly amazing despite all that but it's not complete poo poo either. It's a weirdly compelling cross between Dark Souls and Dead Space...but it also has like, all of the worst, most janky parts of Control pasted on top. The most frustrating thing is that Deck 13 are clearly not untalented - the game looks fantastic and the animations are genuinely top notch, but the design is all the gently caress over the place.

Morpheus posted:

Also that big Surge post brought back so many memories of how R&D absolutely sucks poo poo. I played it in 2018 and I still remember that lovely jump you described to get some loot that, if you missed, forced you all the way around. What a pointless, boring area. What sucks is that entering it seems kind of neat, walking into an big entry lobby while the face of CREO speaks from a huge tv above, there's a lot of stuff to see and it's pretty cool looking. But the rest of the area? Tiny corridors, rooms filled with aggravating flame/gas encounters, a literal maze to walk around in, those reviving enemies. Ugh.

Yes, exactly! The lobby is such a cool area and the fact that you can even bust open one of the display cases and yoink the weapon inside is good stuff. And then the entire rest of the area is a chore. I wonder if they were trying to go for almost a Fort Frolic type of thing, but just...horribly failed at it.

I didn't even think about until now, but its position in the game is even redundant. Immediately preceding it you had to take a detour to go to a toxic hazard-filled lab complex, while dealing with a different rogue scientist, in order to get a thingy that lets your drone open specific locks. And just like how R&D gets raided by the (overpowered) security enemies at the end, the Biolabs sector gets overrun by the flamethrower guys once you complete it. Same exact structure. You needed to meet both scientists eventually for plot reasons, but still...

John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 17:00 on Jun 13, 2021

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Vandar posted:

The skill tree in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is one of the worst designed things I’ve ever seen in a game.

How about Nioh 1:


Clever readers will notice, that none of these are labelled, or even have icons hinting at what they do, so there's no way to tell what is available without scrolling through the entire drat thing.

Also, several of them are Passive skills, which apply to whatever weapon you're using. And most passive skills are extremely powerful, so you have to drop loads of points into the Active skills of weapons that you don't want in order to get to the useful ones.

Vandar
Sep 14, 2007

Isn't That Right, Chairman?



Nioh's is bad but at least it doesn't have fog of war covering it.

Evilreaver
Feb 26, 2007

GEORGE IS GETTIN' AUGMENTED!
Dinosaur Gum

Strom Cuzewon posted:

How about Nioh 1:


Clever readers will notice, that none of these are labelled, or even have icons hinting at what they do, so there's no way to tell what is available without scrolling through the entire drat thing.

Also, several of them are Passive skills, which apply to whatever weapon you're using. And most passive skills are extremely powerful, so you have to drop loads of points into the Active skills of weapons that you don't want in order to get to the useful ones.

The absolute worst tech tree I've encountered has been Astroneer, a Factorio-like game.


-You navigate by 'page 1-4', 'category up/down' and 'item left/right'. Nothing is labeled, and the groupings are inconsistent, so if you find something you want, good luck finding it again later.
-Pages are the size of the item, not the tech level or anything like that
-Categories (the column on the left) show 2 items at a time, but can contain 7+, making it even more annoying to find what you want.
-Everything is purchasable at the start and the items that amount to progression are shotgunned all over the tree. Again, everything is pretty much unlabeled except for its name (not purpose/use/cost/etc) so you kinda gotta guess.
-It's impossible to read those icons for size/utility. Really easy to unlock something and find out it's totally useless, or requires an ingredient you can't get, or doesn't produce the item you were hoping for.

christmas boots
Oct 15, 2012

To these sing-alongs 🎤of siren 🧜🏻‍♀️songs
To oohs😮 to ahhs😱 to 👏big👏applause👏
With all of my 😡anger I scream🤬 and shout📢
🇺🇸America🦅, I love you 🥰but you're freaking 💦me 😳out
Biscuit Hider
Skill trees are definitely a place where aesthetics should be an afterthought imo. I’ll take a boring flowchart that tells me what I need to know over a stylized menu that obscures it any day

Philippe
Aug 9, 2013

(she/her)
In Odyssey, you could see what abilities you could unlock, what the first tier of ability did, and if it needed another ability as a prerequisite. It owned.

Unrelated to skill trees and sphere grids and what have you, the fact that you can talk to people who are sleeping in Elder Scrolls and Fallout games and turn in quests to them is very funny to me but doesn't make any sense at all.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



I think CP2077 takes the cake for me in terms of bad presentation of skills and perks, just a ton of icons vomited over about a dozen separate tabs. I got so sick of trying to keep any plan in mind while paging through them that I eventually just dumped points into whatever power I saw first on leveling up. And that's only part of what made the game feel like an HD rerelease of something from 15 years ago!

Philippe
Aug 9, 2013

(she/her)
It honestly makes the game feel more like a tabletop RPG, but not in a good way. I'm most of my through my second playthrough, and I haven't put perk points into any of the weapon skills, because they're either confusing or too small to matter. It's all percentages, and the weapons are segregated into different skills. The game showers you in guns like it's a Borderlands, but you're mostly incentivised to play as a sneaky hacker with a minor in necksnapping.

Philippe has a new favorite as of 20:37 on Jun 13, 2021

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



Philippe posted:

It honestly makes the game feel more like a tabletop RPG, but not in a good way.

I agree, my assumption was that they made that choice based on its background. But yeah, they managed to do it in a way that feels like the bad side of sourcebook design rather than thinking through how they could take better advantage of the medium to improve presentation.

mmj
Dec 22, 2006

I've always been a bit confrontational

Evilreaver posted:

The absolute worst tech tree I've encountered has been Astroneer, a Factorio-like game.


-You navigate by 'page 1-4', 'category up/down' and 'item left/right'. Nothing is labeled, and the groupings are inconsistent, so if you find something you want, good luck finding it again later.
-Pages are the size of the item, not the tech level or anything like that
-Categories (the column on the left) show 2 items at a time, but can contain 7+, making it even more annoying to find what you want.
-Everything is purchasable at the start and the items that amount to progression are shotgunned all over the tree. Again, everything is pretty much unlabeled except for its name (not purpose/use/cost/etc) so you kinda gotta guess.
-It's impossible to read those icons for size/utility. Really easy to unlock something and find out it's totally useless, or requires an ingredient you can't get, or doesn't produce the item you were hoping for.

This game was terrible. Only game I ever felt ripped off enough by to actually leave a bad review on steam.

sinburger
Sep 10, 2006

*hurk*

Philippe posted:

It's also something that sucks about Sekiro.



At least in Sekiro the skills generally have immediate utility.

Perestroika
Apr 8, 2010

Captain Hygiene posted:

I think CP2077 takes the cake for me in terms of bad presentation of skills and perks, just a ton of icons vomited over about a dozen separate tabs. I got so sick of trying to keep any plan in mind while paging through them that I eventually just dumped points into whatever power I saw first on leveling up. And that's only part of what made the game feel like an HD rerelease of something from 15 years ago!

Cyberpunk had one of the biggest perk disappointments I had in recent history, too. One of the earlier perks says you can throw knives. Since I was playing a fairly stealthy character, I went straight for that, figuring it would be a nice way to get stealth kills at range.

The trouble is, the knives you throw aren't like an expendable resource or simply on an ability on a cooldown. No, you need to actually find a regular weapon of the "knife" class, equip it, and then you can throw that. Those are fairly rare and not particularly cheap to buy. If you do throw one, it's permanently destroyed. If you want to throw several in a row, you need to throw, go into your inventory, equip the new one, close the inventory, then throw that (or alternatively take up several weapon slots with otherwise fairly useless knives). Finally, to add insult to injury, it does thoroughly mediocre damage that is easily outclassed by a simple pistol with a suppressor on it.

Triarii
Jun 14, 2003

Perestroika posted:

Finally, to add insult to injury, it does thoroughly mediocre damage that is easily outclassed by a simple pistol with a suppressor on it.

And my experience with silencers was that they were worse than useless. A silenced pistol headshot wouldn't even come close to killing an enemy, the whole area would immediately go on alert if you tried, and the silencer applies a damage penalty when not in stealth. It wasn't until I got the special silenced anti-material rifle (definitely a thing that makes sense) that I could start shooting enemies stealthily.

JackSplater
Nov 20, 2014

Metal Coat? It's already active?!

Morpheus posted:

Seamoth. But the Seatruck rules, Im pretty sure they wanted people getting out of their vehicle more often to explore rather than always staying in your vehicle. Plus you can attach a bunch of modules to it to make it close to a mobile base without actually being a Cyclops.

The mobile base idea was good in concept and not good in execution. You need an actual static base to make one, it's really awkward to maneuver with more than a couple of modules, the extra modules have to be connected in order to be used, the seatruck slows down a ton when you attach modules (in a game that's already much slower than its prequel), and it has no personality.

Opopanax
Aug 8, 2007

I HEX YE!!!


Playing through RE8 again and man, the Umbrella “reveal” has got to be the most disappointing wet fart of a storyline I’ve ever seen. There are all these old statues and murals around the village with the umbrella logo, and it seems to be teasing some ancient history of umbrella, but then you find out Spenser went to the village once and had a fling with 8’s big bad, and he used the symbol they saw around town when he made umbrella. That’s it, no other historical connection, he just saw a cool design and used it

Shiroc
May 16, 2009
Probation
Can't post for 10 hours!
I've been playing the remastered Spongebob Battle For Bikini Bottom. Its a perfectly pleasant version of a jank old platformer. The problem is that I keep reacting to the jokes very seriously with 'well that's just very monkeycheese lol random, isn't it?' as though I'm not playing a remade Spongebob Squarepants game from 2003.

Stexils
Jun 5, 2008

turns out whats dragging the games down are us gamers

christmas boots
Oct 15, 2012

To these sing-alongs 🎤of siren 🧜🏻‍♀️songs
To oohs😮 to ahhs😱 to 👏big👏applause👏
With all of my 😡anger I scream🤬 and shout📢
🇺🇸America🦅, I love you 🥰but you're freaking 💦me 😳out
Biscuit Hider

Shiroc posted:

I've been playing the remastered Spongebob Battle For Bikini Bottom. Its a perfectly pleasant version of a jank old platformer. The problem is that I keep reacting to the jokes very seriously with 'well that's just very monkeycheese lol random, isn't it?' as though I'm not playing a remade Spongebob Squarepants game from 2003.

You’re posting from the wrong account BioEnchanted

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

christmas boots posted:

You’re posting from the wrong account BioEnchanted

Nah if this was a BioEnchanted post it'd be like Spongebob SquarePants and the Golden Starfish, a game no one has ever heard of for the PS2 that only has thirty copies in existence.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Morpheus posted:

Nah if this was a BioEnchanted post it'd be like Spongebob SquarePants and the Golden Starfish, a game no one has ever heard of for the PS2 that only has thirty copies in existence.

AIoEnchanted posted:

I've been playing Spongebob SquarePants and the Golden Starfish, a game no one has ever heard of for the PS2 that only has thirty copies in existence. It's the first PS2 Spongebob game, and it's actually not half bad, with some good level design, interesting puzzle mechanics, and some fun boss fights. It's got some crude humor but the game itself is pretty solid. It's also got some decent graphics.

I beat the first and second levels, and it's a well done game with a lot of charm. There's something to be said for a game like this that's this solid and charming.

However, as a game that has the Spongebob license, the game is not a kids game. There's a lot of crude humor and innuendo, even to the point of Spongebob and Patrick making out with each other in a cutscene, and the bosses being based on dirty things. It's not a kids game.
EDIT: this might capture the bioenchanted spirit better

quote:

I've been playing Spongebob SquarePants and the Golden Starfish, a game no one has ever heard of for the PS2 that only has thirty copies in existence. It was given out by Burger King, and it's a pretty good game! You have to collect five golden starfish for the krabby patty, and you do this by exploring the deep sea. It was designed by a game company called Cryo, and it shows - it's got a lot of good design, and it's a very pretty game for a PS2 game. The controls are a little weird but it gets the job done.

The fight with the giant Seabeard is really neat, and it's a neat little game. The music is good and there are some great little details on the map to see. I like the mermaids. There is a lot of good game there despite it also being very flawed and glitchy, and I do wish that there was at least some kind of unlockable key or code to help people get their copies working on their PS2s.

Tunicate has a new favorite as of 05:18 on Jun 14, 2021

Byzantine
Sep 1, 2007


uncanny

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Evilreaver
Feb 26, 2007

GEORGE IS GETTIN' AUGMENTED!
Dinosaur Gum

Tunicate posted:

EDIT: this might capture the bioenchanted spirit better

The only difference is if Bioenchanted had posted it, the game would have then sprung into existence 20 years prior to the post

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