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Hub Cat posted:Sounds like Objects in Space? A real early access disappointment if there ever was one That's the one! I think there were other "Newbie traps" that I'm basically wired to look for. Like the tutorial zones charging you an arm and a leg for docking and jump gates while the rest of the map it was dirt cheap. But that doesn't count because you can just max out a loan for a jump drive to run memorized free trade routes, duh. But it was really, REALLY loving cool when the moment to moment gameplay was able to breathe. It just had a lot of pacing issues with the main reason I zipped around sucking up free trade cash was because strings to the cool NPC given missions were basically throwing money into a fire, and I wouldn't have enough time to chase down the cool missions if I didn't optimize trade TM. "Okay, I'll take your salvage job." "Don't forget you need to eject your upgraded cargo pods into the empty depths of space to pick up the salvage!" "Yeah sure, I'm back." "Here is two dollars! Would you like to go on a cool isolated trip finding the trail of a dying ship and find the lone survivor to judge if you should send him to jail or let him live with his guilt?" "gently caress yeah!... Just as soon as I run some free trades to restock my ammo." Then you zero emissions drift past space cops spawned to know your position surrounding your launch because they are still not allowed to lock torpedoes on you and you feel cool again  But yeah, if I remember right I think one of the last patches the dev made was "So everyone is mad the cooler plot missions expire too quick to enjoy? Well now the world events happen even faster and they end sooner!" or something along those lines  But I might be mixing that up with another dimly remembered game.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:22
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:So, Battlefield 2042 feels okay. It's a Battlefield game. The map they're running the open beta with is so goddamn boring though. ... There's no way to kick hackers. On your team, on the enemy team... nada. I thought TF2 had it bad.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:32
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Sunless Seas was also another early access game where the hard core players turned the game into a punishing grind for newbies, especially as it became clear that they were playing with an economy broken by exploits from earlier releases that made the later waves of content much easier to navigate. Also, the dev decided to make a narrative heavy trading game that was built around being punishing and 'get gud', even though no player who likes narrative or trading is looking for brutally difficult combat or failure spirals. You can see the same dynamic happening with Vagrus: The Riven Realms, where the dev absolutely refuses to have a story mode for their story game.
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Oct 9, 2021 04:25
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Unlucky7 posted:I thought Darkest Dungeon was considered to be in a good place overall currently. I'd love to hear if there was anything of note about DD's development other than the corpse thing. People lost their fuckin' minds about that one single change despite it being completely fair and reasonable. (And they subsequently let you toggle them off if it really bothered you that much.) All of the stuff in DD that comes off as obnoxious to me is from the DLCs anyway. But even then, it's in the same ballpark as XCOM 2 where WotC adds 50 new ways for things to go horribly wrong too.
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Oct 9, 2021 04:54
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I'm playing the Overload DLC levels and man, it's such a shame that game sold so poorly and the studio closed. I wonder if it would have done better had it released a little later, in the midst of this new boomer shooter wave.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:31
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I played Mafia definitive edition and I have mixed feelings about it. I've only played the original once actually but it's always been one of the top games for me. It just captures the time period perfectly and the semi-realism made many missions incredibly difficult but also rewarding. The Definitive Edition has a cover system, (a small amount of) regenerating health, frequent autosaves and they've cut much of the driving between places and stealing cars as a side mission. It's more streamlined, for better and for worse. The difficulty is still there, especially on the higher settings, it never feels like you're fully stocked up on ammo and things like grenades are hard to come by. It's also not just about popping out of cover to shoot people. Enemies have good aim if you expose yourself for too long and will flush you out using Molotovs and grenades. They've still kept the atmosphere and a lot of the cutscenes and dialogue has been expanded upon. Together with the updated graphics including great facial animation, it gives the characters more depth. Especially Tommy's relationship to his wife and Paulie have been expanded. They also added stuff like radio news that flesh out the time period of prohibition era and pre-war America. On the other hand, the game feels shorter. I think all the missions from the original are there, but they've also had some changes, mostly a lot of the mundane tasks have been removed and the action has been upped. There are more car chases and waves of cops showing up by the late game, which is fun, gameplay is enjoyable, but it also sort of brings you out of the story. Surely, if you killed 20 police officers and blew up 5 cars full of gangsters in a single afternoon in 30's Chicago, things wouldn't "cool off"anytime soon? Gotta love the "boss battle" against an armored car in one mission though. Some cool details and reactivity that you only ever found in older games have also been removed in the streamlining of missions. To give an example, one time you track down a person to the airfield outside of town. In the original, you need to find him in one of the hangars and once there you need to find his family and then some documents in other parts of the airport. So the mission has multiple stages and it ties well into the story. In the DE, you simply get to the hangar and everything plays out in a cutscene. In the original, when you get to the hangar, there's a guy there calling the police. Kill him and nothing happens, let him make the call and squad cars full of cops show up later. Meanwhile, in the DE, you can stealth your way through but the game treats it like you killed all the enemies all the same. So overall i think they did the original justice and improved some aspects of it. But it would also sadden me if this edition became the "true" Mafia, when it's more of a reimagining rather than an update of the full game.
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Oct 9, 2021 08:15
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Tried the Growing Up demo, which I guess is a sort of VN + lifesim + choice & consequence narrative adventure that takes you from birth to adulthood. There's some nice art and the central concept is pretty interesting, although I felt strangely bad at it. The demo only lets you play up to age 6 but I kinda just wanna fast forward to the teenage years to listen to Black Flag and rebel against my well-meaning yet ultimately ineffective parents.
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Oct 9, 2021 09:28
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exquisite tea posted:Tried the Growing Up demo, which I guess is a sort of VN + lifesim + choice & consequence narrative adventure that takes you from birth to adulthood. There's some nice art and the central concept is pretty interesting, although I felt strangely bad at it. The demo only lets you play up to age 6 but I kinda just wanna fast forward to the teenage years to listen to Black Flag and rebel against my well-meaning yet ultimately ineffective parents. I think in an ideal place, those life sim games should kinda be failing upwards like that. Also I appreciated the music, there were some nice chill vocal tracks in there.
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Oct 9, 2021 10:50
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John Murdoch posted:I'd love to hear if there was anything of note about DD's development other than the corpse thing. People lost their fuckin' minds about that one single change despite it being completely fair and reasonable. (And they subsequently let you toggle them off if it really bothered you that much.) As someone who only played it post-release and dropped it fairly quickly: It was just too drat long. Like, I'd done a fair couple of expeditions, built up a squad and a half to high level, killed three or four bosses. Then I went to the guy who keeps track of your overall progress and was surprised to see that apparently I'd only just about finished about 10% of the game. Now, presumably a fair bit of that content would be optional, but I had no way of telling how much would be optional and how much part of the main story. And frankly the gameplay was already starting to wear thin for me at that point. In the context of EA, I could see it working well: Your players finish what content is there, put the game down for a few weeks/months, and when the next update includes a new dungeon they'll pick up and go through just the new content. But when you pick up the game as a whole thing after release for the first time, the sheer amount of stuff in there feels overwhelming and kinda kills the pacing. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 10:55
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Hey I still listen to Black Flag. Just the early stuff though
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Oct 9, 2021 10:55
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Perestroika posted:As someone who only played it post-release and dropped it fairly quickly: It was just too drat long. Like, I'd done a fair couple of expeditions, built up a squad and a half to high level, killed three or four bosses. Then I went to the guy who keeps track of your overall progress and was surprised to see that apparently I'd only just about finished about 10% of the game. Now, presumably a fair bit of that content would be optional, but I had no way of telling how much would be optional and how much part of the main story. And frankly the gameplay was already starting to wear thin for me at that point. Darkest Dungeon is the prime example of a game that wants to waste your time. You don't just have to level up your party to get to the end game... but even if you do it flawlessly, with no hiccups, eventually your party will simply refuse to go on further missions, so in order to progress, you need to keep training new and new crew members until they too refuse to do anything and so on until you get sick of it. What a terrible piece of poo poo.
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Oct 9, 2021 11:00
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steinrokkan posted:Darkest Dungeon is the prime example of a game that wants to waste your time. You don't just have to level up your party to get to the end game... but even if you do it flawlessly, with no hiccups, eventually your party will simply refuse to go on further missions, so in order to progress, you need to keep training new and new crew members until they too refuse to do anything and so on until you get sick of it. What a terrible piece of poo poo. And then if you lose a party member, that's fine, just grind up another one to replace them. If you're some kind of masochist and are doing the challenge where only a certain number of characters can die, lmao, the last boss instakills two guys as a standard move gg Darkest Dungeon is stylistically great and there's some nice juicy meat in the combat, but my god is the metagame atrocious.
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Oct 9, 2021 12:37
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wow, i find Darkest Dungeon to be totally fun and not grindy at all... what a world!
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Oct 9, 2021 12:42
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Worth noting that something they eventually added post-release is Radiant mode which is identical in most ways to the normal difficulty except all the really grindy poo poo is removed or reduced.
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Oct 9, 2021 12:50
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John Murdoch posted:Worth noting that something they eventually added post-release is Radiant mode which is identical in most ways to the normal difficulty except all the really grindy poo poo is removed or reduced. yeah, Radiant makes it a lot easier to learn the game
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Oct 9, 2021 12:59
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John Murdoch posted:Worth noting that something they eventually added post-release is Radiant mode which is identical in most ways to the normal difficulty except all the really grindy poo poo is removed or reduced. It is better, but it doesn’t remove entirely the fundamental flaw that it’s literally just an XP grind with good combat. There’s no real external pressure, just mechanics intended to delay the advancement of a core group of units. That certainly suits some but not others.
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Oct 9, 2021 13:33
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i normally hate grindy games so the fact that i love Darkest Dungeon must speak to some level of non-grindiness. at the very least, i think maybe we have very different definitions of grind. DD is set up so that no two runs are ever the same unless you deliberately make them the same, so running dungeons over and over didn't track to me as "grinding", but rather, "playing the game"  anyone have any beginner's guide or whatever for Tangledeep? i am extremely familiar with roguelikes, i can ascend in NetHack pretty easily and have even won ADOM once (  ) so i just need to know the stuff that's... different or whatever, i guess?
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Oct 9, 2021 13:43
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:It is better, but it doesn’t remove entirely the fundamental flaw that it’s literally just an XP grind with good combat. There’s no real external pressure, just mechanics intended to delay the advancement of a core group of units. That certainly suits some but not others. Is that all that different from XCOM, though?
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Oct 9, 2021 14:01
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John Murdoch posted:Is that all that different from XCOM, though? Very. The alien threat is constantly escalating, and if you waste forces you lose. First reboot XCOM has a big problem where there is zero incentive to train a B-Team, so if you lose any members of your main squad you're pretty much hosed, XCOM 2 gets around that by introducing the fatigue system first seen in Long War, and is far more flexible thanks to the Avatar Project ticker, but original X-Com basically forced you to remain on a certain curve or else the aliens win. It alleviated some of the issues by allowing (heck, forcing) you to use sheer force of numbers and establishing firing lines of rookies. Simone Magus posted:i normally hate grindy games so the fact that i love Darkest Dungeon must speak to some level of non-grindiness. at the very least, i think maybe we have very different definitions of grind. DD is set up so that no two runs are ever the same unless you deliberately make them the same, so running dungeons over and over didn't track to me as "grinding", but rather, "playing the game" I think the difference in perception comes down to, grinding dungeons is the game in Darkest Dungeon. I'd much rather have something pressing me to progress, otherwise it's just like climbing a ladder and occasionally getting punted down a few steps to me.
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Oct 9, 2021 14:58
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Has anybody been able to get an 8Bitdo Pro 2 controller working with Blade of Darkness? I wanted to try the demo but none of my controller options work, even when enabling Steam input. In fact the game won't even recognize my keyboard.
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Oct 9, 2021 15:26
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Is it just me or UNSIGHTED is really, punishingly, hard?
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Oct 9, 2021 15:56
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Romanging SaGa 2 is 60% off, but it's sitting at Mixed reviews. The recent ones seem to be better, though. What's does the goonmind think?
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Oct 9, 2021 16:10
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i think it's weird the g is capitalized
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Oct 9, 2021 16:13
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Bought Control on sale. Whoever decided that game needed upgrade systems needs to get shoved off a cliff.
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Oct 9, 2021 16:13
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lunar detritus posted:Is it just me or UNSIGHTED is really, punishingly, hard? It's just you Really, though, I think it's got that character-action feel where if you win a fight, you were slick and badass and feel like a god, but if you hosed up a little, you probably hosed up a lot - it's not hard to absolutely clown on a fight with, like, two guys with swords and a rock monster and make them eat poo poo in fifteen seconds, but it's also not hard to eat poo poo yourself and die in ten. Personally, I didn't find the game to be HARD as such, but there were definitely a couple 'normal' fights that took me three or four tries to Get Good
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Oct 9, 2021 16:43
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John Lee posted:Personally, I didn't find the game to be HARD as such, but there were definitely a couple 'normal' fights that took me three or four tries to Get Good I feel it'd be less salty if those three or four tries didn't require backtracking multiple screens (in a game with a time limit) every time I fail. 
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Oct 9, 2021 16:56
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John Murdoch posted:I'd love to hear if there was anything of note about DD's development other than the corpse thing. People lost their fuckin' minds about that one single change despite it being completely fair and reasonable. (And they subsequently let you toggle them off if it really bothered you that much.) i think the early access stuff is why the gameplay loop doesn't make much sense - it massively rewards knowledge of its systems and enemies but won't give that information to you without sacrificing your characters. which you then need to individually train and gear up again with gold, plus it takes way too long and gets really boring. so you look at a wiki instead to save yourself the headache, but that makes playing the game kinda pointless. i was not a fan. xcom has free level-ups and you only need to buy a piece of gear once to unlock it permanently for everyone.
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Oct 9, 2021 18:13
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Foul Fowl posted:i think the early access stuff is why the gameplay loop doesn't make much sense - it massively rewards knowledge of its systems and enemies but won't give that information to you without sacrificing your characters. which you then need to individually train and gear up again with gold, plus it takes way too long and gets really boring. so you look at a wiki instead to save yourself the headache, but that makes playing the game kinda pointless. i was not a fan. xcom has free level-ups and you only need to buy a piece of gear once to unlock it permanently for everyone. This is exactly why I couldn't get into Darkest Dungeon. I'm all for tons of traps and curios and failure spirals, I love them, but the gameplay loop of DD outside of the combat was no more exciting than cross-referencing spreadsheets. "Okay is this the one that curses me or the one that gives me treasure? And what was the item I need to use to unlock it again? Better check Column C" Additionally I hated the entire town system because it felt like it was supposed to be a big part of the game but there was nothing fun or exciting to do there, even upgrading characters and their gear was as boring as possible. I would have rather just had a simple text menu for all of the same systems so I could waste less time there. The combat was fun until you figured out whatever character combo could effortlessly waltz through whatever zone you were doing. 4 Graverobbers with 0 torches could beat pretty much anything though  e: In general I love random failure spirals in games because otherwise once you get good at the game, it becomes totally static. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 18:36
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Just a friendly reminder to the thread to clean/blow out your case/gfx card/power supply to prevent a potential catastrophe. We're getting cold up here in Canuckistan, so figured I'd clean mine out as well.
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Oct 9, 2021 18:42
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deep dish peat moss posted:The combat was fun until you figured out whatever character combo could effortlessly waltz through whatever zone you were doing. 4 Graverobbers with 0 torches could beat pretty much anything though It sounds like what you're looking for is... the veteran/champion level dungeons in Darkest Dungeon?  I don't really mean to sass you because it's completely understandable you'd dislike a game after playing hours of content you aren't enjoying, but Darkest Dungeon will absolutely randomly gently caress you over really hard in champion level dungeons.
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Oct 9, 2021 19:22
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Fat Samurai posted:Romanging SaGa 2 is 60% off, but it's sitting at Mixed reviews. The recent ones seem to be better, though. What's does the goonmind think? to say that SaGa games are an acquired taste is putting it mildly. 2 is a very good one and should be quite accessible though. i guess it's not the best but it's far from bad
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Oct 9, 2021 20:02
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Count Uvula posted:It sounds like what you're looking for is... the veteran/champion level dungeons in Darkest Dungeon? I haven't played it since before it left Early Access, I don't think those were a thing back then.. I couldn't bring myself to play it again but it's cool that they added that kind of stuff.
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Oct 9, 2021 20:25
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Re Anno Mutationem - devs have posted the demo is almost a year old and a lot of concerns have already been addressed. Better animations and cancelling, skill trees, more combos... Hopefully English localization is going to be good, but I'm pretty excited about this game.
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Oct 9, 2021 22:56
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I think Transiruby's going to be pretty cool; I've got hopes for Anno Mutationem too Justice Inc. seemed like a neat idea--cyberpunk robot attorney simulator--but navigating all the dialogue menus is slow and cumbersome, and also the very first thing you read is "EVERYONE IS MISERABLE BECAUSE OF UBI" lol
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Oct 9, 2021 23:10
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lunar detritus posted:Is it just me or UNSIGHTED is really, punishingly, hard? It had a weird inverted difficulty curve for me, kind of like Sekiro did, in that it has a very specific way it wants to be played and will absolutely slap you around until you get with it. Especially like 2 screens out of the village there's a couple of enemy types that will straight up 2-shot you if you flub while fighting them. Until you get into that Parry Meta, you're gonna get bopped pretty viciously. Weirdly, with the use of cogs I didn't find any of the bosses particularly murderous, but sometimes regular enemy packs will line up their timings JUST SO and it feels very overwhelming.
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Oct 9, 2021 23:12
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lunar detritus posted:Is it just me or UNSIGHTED is really, punishingly, hard? Unsighted will kill you pretty readily in a couple hits if you let your stamina drop or flub a parry. It gets much much easier as the game goes though and you unlock more chips. By the end of the game I could kill some bosses in two or three shots with a critical spin slash and most enemy packs could just be button mashed through.
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Oct 10, 2021 00:20
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Fat Samurai posted:Romanging SaGa 2 is 60% off, but it's sitting at Mixed reviews. The recent ones seem to be better, though. What's does the goonmind think? It's a very old school 16-bit era JRPG, but there's a lot of cool stuff in it if you can get past the interface and the way it looks. This page seems like it has a lot of good beginner advice. I'd probably give it a gander before getting too deep into it: https://saga.fandom.com/wiki/A_Beginner%27s_Guide_to_Romancing_Saga_2. I remember being very confused for the first hour or two about the structure of the game and how the characters work, but it's a unique and interesting game. Not very flashy and there isn't much to the story or characters though.
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Oct 10, 2021 00:32
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Tiramisu posted:Unsighted will kill you pretty readily in a couple hits if you let your stamina drop or flub a parry. It gets much much easier as the game goes though and you unlock more chips. By the end of the game I could kill some bosses in two or three shots with a critical spin slash and most enemy packs could just be button mashed through. I forgot the spin slash was even a thing until right now, I would briefly be reminded of it every time I looked at the chip screen and then immediately forget, and never used it beyond the intro. ...I wonder how badass my axe would have been?
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Oct 10, 2021 00:36
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I see Death's Door is on sale. I *think* people in here were talking about it a while back but I can't remember why. What do people think about the game? Is it like A Link to the Past? Also I've been playing Ring of Pain and I've concluded that I think I'm far too stupid to play card games. Between this, Slay the Spire and Monster Train, I feel like I'm quite the buffoon at card/deck games. I'm still having fun with the mechanics of Ring of Pain but yeah, I'm so bad at these card games.
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Oct 10, 2021 01:34
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Vasler posted:I see Death's Door is on sale. I *think* people in here were talking about it a while back but I can't remember why. Death's Door is good, a fun Zelda clone with a sense of humor. It's not as wide-open as LttP, but the balance of puzzles and combat is similar.
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Oct 10, 2021 01:39
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