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Decided to knock out a few smaller games while waiting for FF7 Rebirth to come out. The Expanse: A Telltale Series - This was a game I was interested in as both a fan of The Expanse and of the old Telltale games, and it really delivered on both fronts. It felt a bit shorter than the other Telltale games I remember, but it had a good story and plenty of good old-fashioned Telltale choice-based gameplay. If you're a fan of those older games then this is a pretty easy recommend. South of the Circle - Intrigued me with its art style, and finally went on a deep enough sale that I went for it. Ultimately I'd say it was a competent walking simulator, but the story was only okay and the game kind of presents itself as a "choices matter" kind of game and that's not really the case. In fact I was kind of insulted at the way they handled your choices after asking you to make them constantly throughout. Very short game as well. Worth trying for the right (very low) price, but hardly a strong recommend. Eternights - I'm not knowledgeable enough about JRPGs to know how common the Persona formula of "you have x number of days to accomplish this task, and all other time will be spent hanging out with your friends" is, but Eternights is essentially that on a much smaller scale than the one Persona game I've played. It wasn't bad, but it mostly just made me want to play Persona 5 again. Haven - Free on PS+ and I played it on a goon recommendation, really loved it. Mostly a game where you fly around exploring the world, engaging in light combat, and enjoying some surprisingly well-done vignettes about the relationship of the two main characters. The vibe is extremely chill, the performances are very good, and the story is engaging. Strong recommend for this one. Fort Solis - This is basically just an interactive movie, but I have to say it's an interesting one. I laughed when I read that the major update they patched in was to increase the walking speed, because yeah you're basically just doing a lot of walking. There are some QTE sections that are honestly pretty tricky, but they don't really seem to affect anything so it's mostly just annoying to have a random button pop up on the screen for half a second before you've failed it. Another very short game, but one I'd recommend for the right price (much cheaper than what it's currently selling for).
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Feb 24, 2024 19:11
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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - Got this as a free download code included with the new CPU I purchased a few months ago, doubt I would have bought it at its $70 launch price otherwise. You can easily look at this as Far Cry: Avatar, but it's probably the best Far Cry game in that case. Closest to Far Cry Primal, you'll be using various bows and arrows almost exclusively for the entire game. There are assault rifles and shotguns with similar scaling but they're not really well suited to the kind of stealthing around and hitting weakspots you're doing the majority of the time, I used them once or twice and otherwise ignored them entirely through to the final mission. Shooting some rear end in a top hat mouthing off about how "the only good blue is a dead blue" with an arrow the size of a small tree never really got old and had a more visceral satisfaction than the more pincushion feeling hits from a Far Cry game. They succeeded in making humans feel small in weak in comparison to you, needing various classes of exosuit to have any chance in combat. Far Cry maps are already sizeable but this feels much larger, enough so that flying around on your Ikran is always an integral part of the experience and necessary to travel larger distances in reasonable amounts of time. As a Ubisoft game the huge map is of course littered with collectibles, mostly plants that increase max health or give skill points. They went a bit overboard dotting research stations every 500 meters which mostly serve as fast travel points, I'd guess there are about 100 of them total and they're all unlocked with the same brainless hacking minigame that shows up in various other places. The Na'vi villages are similarly numerous and have their own associated quests of bringing specific resources but it seemed like more effort to complete them all than it was worth. There are also totems you have to view from specific angles (unlocks crafting recipes, worth doing), plants which only open up after touching four satellite plants (their contents are garbage), and sites where you meditate and play a minigame to memorize the landscape (long and boring enough that they included an autocomplete setting in the options, was slightly stunned when I finished them all and got literally nothing), plus a few other categories which I played the whole game and somehow managed to never find. Mainline Far Cry games tend to have an obnoxious sense of humor at their core, that's thankfully absent here outside of maybe one slightly quirky character in the resistance. Nothing like those two idiots in the drug tent in Far Cry 4, the primary story and sidequests are mostly played straight and I never found them grating. You're fighting Captain Planet villains in a stunning open world, there's always an inherent satisfaction in wiping out one of their pollution factories and watching all the dead vegetation spring back to life as the planet reclaims the site. I'm not really a graphics snob these days but if you have a computer powerful enough to run it this might be worth grabbing just for the spectacle.      Ray tracing doesn't always do much for a game if the art style isn't designed around showcasing it, here it made for a consistently stunning experience. The forests are full of bioluminescent plants of various colors with light that bleeds out and provides a dull glow to the surrounding fog and landscape. The upper plains in particular have bioluminescent grass which isn't noticeable during the day, but at night you can see it light up with different patches being brighter or dimmer as the wind sweeps across and agitates it. I played Cyberpunk right before this and while that has its own style of visual splendor I think this ultimately looks better overall. I'm running a 7950x and RTX 3070 and was able to max out every single setting (including a graciously added option to extend the object draw distance which you don't see too often), once I also added the dlssg-to-fsr3 mod to give myself frame generation capability when I'm not supposed to have it I was getting something like 70+ FPS consistently. There's kind of a ceiling for how good Ubisoft games can be but this was towards the top. It certainly falls prey to the same formulaic game design tendencies but those are still relatively solid as long as you don't drag them out too much. The scale is large enough that it's more of a daunting replay consideration than a Far Cry but I can see going back to it after considerable time has passed. I'm guessing my playtime was something like 40-50 hours, I don't know if Ubisoft Connect keeps track of it somewhere but I can't find it. I ended up doing nearly everything, getting all the research stations and health ups wasn't really necessary but the world is beautiful enough that I liked having an excuse to spend more time in it. Full price is still a hard sell just because the $70 price point does me psychic damage, if you see it a few months down the line at a heavy discount I'd recommend this over any Far Cry. 8/10 NoEyedSquareGuy fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Feb 25, 2024 |
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Feb 25, 2024 10:15
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Snake Maze posted:making my dad mad by printing out some 20 page breeding guide from Gamefaqs Bonus points if they stage an intervention because they don't know what they're looking at
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Feb 25, 2024 14:12
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Punished Ape posted:Bonus points if they stage an intervention because they don't know what they're looking at Sudden memories of my brother giving me a leery look when I was like 12 and showed him Creatures in the store, because the box mentioned the norns reproducing in the game.
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Feb 25, 2024 17:46
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I beat Etrian Odyssey HD last night. This is yet another game on my surprising adventure into JRPGs over the past few years. I've been on vacation the past couple weeks with my Steam Deck, which has kept me from progressing on the main game I had been playing, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. That game runs on Steam Deck, but it isn't happy about it, and chugs enough that I didn't really want to work through the story on it. My first thought was to try to find some kind of chill grinding game to serve me for a few weeks. I was already playing Great Ace Attorney 2 in addition to LADIW (still two cases left!), so I figured I'd go for something that didn't have a lot of story. I first tried to play WitchSpring R, which a friend recommended to me as an Atelier-style crafting game, but the combat in that is unfortunately brain-dead easy (they're apparently patching in a hard mode this year!). I wanted something chill, but I also didn't really want to spend so much time in turn-based combat that was so simple. So, inspired by my desire for more interesting combat mechanics, I made a hard swerve into EO. This series had always fascinated me from well afar - as someone who never really played JRPGs growing up, I still remember reading about "the weird dungeon mapping game" on websites back in the day. The remasters of 1-3 were on sale on Steam ($20 a pop instead of the normal $40, which is pretty overpriced - pretty sure these games were $35 on DS originally?), so I took the plunge on 1. The thing with EO1 that I discovered was that it's a lot simpler than 2 and 3. There are fewer classes to choose from, and there's two classes (medic and protector) that you more or less have to have in your party, unless you've mastered the mechanics and are doing a challenge run (and love to grind for healing items). I was okay with this because I tend to have a problem of getting overwhelmed in systems-heavy games - it's hard to turn off the part of my brain that wants to go look up the most optimal way to play something, rather than discover it myself. So having a more or less designated "best team" did make it easier on me. What didn't make it easy on me was how the skill trees work in this game. Every time you level a character, you get a skill point you can use on their skill tree. This doesn't just unlock new skills, but also levels skills - all skills have 10 levels. So for example, you've got like a Fire 1 spell that you can level up to 10, or a Fire 2 or Fire 3 skill you can unlock and level up. The MP resource (TP) matters a lot in this game, so often there is a good reason to level up a lower-powered skill that is cheaper. This is a fine and good system on paper. The problem is, the game does not show you the numbers happening behind the scenes. There's a single line of text that will say, for example, "Damage Up" when you upgrade your Fire 1 spell from level 1 to 2, but it won't show you how much. It also won't help you figure out the relative power of Fire 1 vs Fire 2. This makes it impossible to figure out a good build on your own. And the game has a brutal respec penalty - your character loses 5 levels (10 in the original!), and while grinding isn't hard, it certainly takes a long time. So, the solution for this is... to use the screenshot LP of this game (https://lparchive.org/Etrian-Odyssey/), which contains class guides and skill tables. I'm not kidding when I say this LP appears to be the only place you can find these numbers online - if you look it up on Google, you'll see tons of people linking to this Let's Play. You'd think there would have been a GameFAQs guide or a circa-2007 Prima strategy guide or something, but apparently not? The class guides ended up more or less telling me how to build my guys, which did sorta kill the build aspect of this game for me, which was a bummer. I wish this game had free respecs, and unfortunately, this same lack of detail and respec penalty carries into 2 and 3. I'm not sure if the 3DS games (4, 5, Untold, Untold 2, Nexus, Persona Q, Persona Q2, holy poo poo there are like 10 of these games huh??) fix either of these problems. I did end up doing a little bit of build customization to adjust for some of the changes in HD, so it wasn't entirely just following the guides, but this game has so many trap skills even after the HD bugfixes that if I'd tried to do my builds blind I probably would have had to do a respec on a couple characters to beat the last couple dungeons. Now, I did really enjoy the combat in this game. I was really surprised that this game does not have visible turn order - my last two JRPGs being Octopath Traveller II and LADIW, I had gotten used to turn order as a core aspect of combat strategy. And, well, in EO, it absolutely is a core aspect of combat strategy, but you have to more or less memorize the rules around it. Different characters and enemies have different base speeds, but also tons of skills have speed modifiers - for example, party heals and party buffs will almost always be at the end of a turn by default, while items are almost always at the start of a turn. This was a pretty fun thing to learn and practice, and added a lot of character to enemies - "ah, poo poo, these wolves are the fast ones, I gotta pop a heal item on this turn in case this low-HP character gets hit first," etc. I should point out, for those who played the original EO but haven't seen the HD version, there are two key differences with Etrian Odyssey HD versus the original: 1. The game has a persistent quicksave slot you can use at any time in a dungeon. In the original of 1, there was no quick save, while in 2 and 3, there was the quick save that a lot of portable RPGs of the time had: you could quick save at any time, but it would kick you back to the main menu, and loading your quick save would delete it. This prevented you from actually loading a quick save after a game over. In the HD remakes, your quicksave can actually be loaded after a game over. In a game where your dungeon delves can represent 30+ minutes of work, that is a massive change. It also removes the boss run problem. 2. The medic's Healing Touch ability was massively buffed. This is an out-of-combat only healing ability. I swear to god this none of this is a typo: in the original, after leveling up Healing Touch to level 10, you'd spend 6 TP on a 40% party heal. In HD, leveling up Healing Touch to 5 will give you a 100% heal for 1TP. So, combine those two things and you can imagine how I played the back half of this game, after unlocking Healing Touch: quicksave after every fight, do the dumbest/fastest strategy in each fight using the least TP, and then heal up. Doesn't matter if everyone has 30HP leaving every random encounter, it's just 1TP to heal! Much cheaper than if they actually used their 4-8TP skills to do the fight efficiently. Revives are pretty cheap, and even if I totally gently caress up and get a party wipe, I can just load the quicksave. This seems like a pretty massive shift in how I ended up experiencing this game compared to the originals. Like, imagine just adding a quicksave ability to Dark Souls. It's a very different vibe! But hey, the back half of this game gets weird and mean. Now's a good time to get to the third major aspect of this game, the maps. I loved the mapping - it's a little awkward to get used to on a gamepad (you use the right stick and shoulder triggers), but filling in a map in full was a really fun experience. What I did not love was the actual exploring. This game has a lot of hidden walls and shortcuts, so you basically have to strafe along walls and see if it lets you press A on them to find shortcuts. This isn't fun! I don't know if this gets better in future games, or if this is a core mechanic. Some of the maps do have fun mechanics - levels with moving platforms that take you to other parts of the map, or pitfalls that require keeping in mind the floor below to try to figure out how to find the right pit for where you're trying to go - but the hidden passage stuff just objectively sucks. I do love the FOE mechanic, where hard enemies show up patroling the maps. It's fun to have to run away from them and then slowly get powerful enough to defeat them without thinking about it. I also like how different FOEs have different patroling mechanics you have to learn (some just stand between you and some hard bonus area, some patrol on a set pattern, some will drop everything to chase you, etc). Other miscellaneous thoughts: music is great, the graphics are whatever but I do like the character portraits (I really wish they had different variants for e.g. taking damage or casting a big skill or something), the story was fine I guess (weirdly dark). This ended up being about a 40 hour game, ignoring most of the harder side quests and the postgame dungeon. I considered doing the postgame - it does seem to be a very sizable chunk of content, a sixth dungeon plus a lot of bonus areas in earlier dungeons - but oh my god reading about the mechanics it seems deeply unpleasant, so I'm happy to set this down after credits rolled. My plan is to pick up 2 and 3 when they go on sale and keep working on this series. Unfortunately I don't think those games solve my biggest issues with the game (opaque builds, expensive respecs, annoying shortcut discovery), but it sounds like the 3DS games are a lot more polished and slightly friendlier , so hopefully those will also come to Steam soon. Definitely do not regret my time with this game. It seems like if you're only going to play one of these remastered games, EO3 is the one to play, but I think I'm now interested enough to go through both 2 and 3. The quicksaves do make this a much easier game to just grind than I imagine the originals were - it brings it down to "normal JRPG" vibes instead of having the level of stress that a hard run-based game does. I'm also wondering what other systems-heavy JRPGs might be up my alley if I got into this. Maybe like SMT4 or 5? abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Feb 25, 2024 |
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Feb 25, 2024 18:00
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Just finished Sunblaze, a very good little 2D platformer. It's clearly inspired by Celeste, but it does a good job of being its own thing and not just a copy. Every room in the game is exactly one screen large, but there can be a lot of difficulty packed into that one screen. There's an interesting variety of mechanics throughout the game, and some optional collectables for extra challenge. If you pick up all the collectables in a chapter you unlock its hard mode -- these are only 12 screens long, but quite difficult, and they have some extra mechanics not found in the main game. The game also has a cute story about a girl who wants to be a superhero just like her dad. The dad jokes are appropriately terrible. You can pet the cat.
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Feb 25, 2024 22:24
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Just beat Arcade Paradise again. It may very easily be my personal favorite small game. I just keep coming back to it. Great on the steam deck.
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Feb 26, 2024 15:30
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The Red Dead Redemption remaster was on a small sale recently and I was weak and picked it up. Beelined the ending so I could do all the sidequests in postgame (except for I Know You, which doesn’t carry over) and had a great time. I think it kind of felt like the gaming equivalent of going to Five Guys for a burger. It was satisfying, well made, exactly what I wanted, and I paid way too much money for it.
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Feb 26, 2024 21:22
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I just beat Alan Wake's American Nightmare on my way to finally playing Alan Wake 2. The improved combat was fun even if I wasn't as into the more pulpy tone it took compared to the original. I also found it helpful to keep in mind that it was originally an XBLA release developed in 8 months, as there's some (admittedly creative and narratively justified) reuse of assets and locations. The main draw, however, was to see and hear Ilkka Villi and Matthew Poretta having the joint time of their lives playing Alan and Mr Scratch off each other, which was great throughout. Between this game and the original my Alan Wake-loving friend who's never seen Twin Peaks is now sick of me texting him every time I notice a reference to it. But an ambiguous ending that doesn't get picked up until many years later? Very Twin Peaks.
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Feb 26, 2024 23:56
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Party Boat posted:I just beat Alan Wake's American Nightmare on my way to finally playing Alan Wake 2. The improved combat was fun even if I wasn't as into the more pulpy tone it took compared to the original. I also found it helpful to keep in mind that it was originally an XBLA release developed in 8 months, as there's some (admittedly creative and narratively justified) reuse of assets and locations. I never got into that back in the day, but I watched a chunk of a playthrough after finishing Alan Wake II. The mechanics and interface looked like a solid step forward from the original, which was on the clunky side. But yeah, the actors were the best part, I'm glad it managed to hit that part of the Remedy charm even though it was a smaller production. Kinda wish I'd checked it out sooner, it fit into the sequel a lot more than I ever expected.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:49
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Just beat Ace Combat 7 again on a replay. It's quite remarkable how despite being a flight sim, usually a fairly impersonal genre, it manages to have a surprisingly fun and engaging story and presentation. That moment in the second to last mission when the boss' shields drop and the soundtrack's vocals kick in is one of my top 10 moments in any game ever. 
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Feb 27, 2024 11:35
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Just beat Octopath Traveler 2. Really solid and fun jrpg with good stories and gameplay. Ive not played octopath 1 but from what ive seen of it the improvements in 2 are many. Started with Thronè, the thief cause i love stealing and taking things, which thankfully the game is full of crap to steal. the little micro stories you can find by stealing from an npc are interesting. there was a woman in the slums that says "you must be hungry, have some bread" and when you steal from her she has loaf of bread, loaf of bread, bottle of poison dust.
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Feb 27, 2024 23:22
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Perestroika posted:Just beat Ace Combat 7 again on a replay. It's quite remarkable how despite being a flight sim, usually a fairly impersonal genre, it manages to have a surprisingly fun and engaging story and presentation. That moment in the second to last mission when the boss' shields drop and the soundtrack's vocals kick in is one of my top 10 moments in any game ever. Ace Combat is the number one series that I have to thank my friend for suggesting it to me: I thought it was totally out of left field and not gonna gel with me at all, just like you say, but lo and behold, the story and combat scenarios you go through are just incredible. Nothing beats the missions where you need to fly through a tunnel or a trench: hell, even if the objective ain't there, I need to fly through any tunnel I see for the kicks.
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Feb 28, 2024 00:52
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In an effort to get achievements out of the Capcom Beat Em Up Bundle, I beat Captain Commando last night. Marvel Vs Capcom did a lot to spruce up the character because the original game is boring as hell. In the same vein, in order to further my progress in the Castlevania Advance Collection, I finished Castlevania: Circle of the Moon over the weekend. This one I had a lot of nostalgia for, as it was one of the first games I bought with my GBA back in the day. The controls are way too stiff, but having that rewind feature baked into the game gave me a neat way to quickly farm for cards.
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Feb 28, 2024 02:19
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Beat Steelrising today. Honestly not the worst Soulsborne I've played by any stretch, but it might have been the easiest. I think the most I died against any boss was four times; I struggled far more with getting lost while backtracking for side quests than I did against any combat encounter. If I had to rate it, I think I'd give it a 6/10. Controlling Aegis felt fine, but map design was all over the place, enemies were kinda samey, the game is incredibly easy to cheese (you probably shouldn't be able to freeze enemies in a Soulsborne), and while I get why French developers would think setting the game in Revolutionary France was a good idea, in the end I don't think it added much to the game. Most of the supporting cast are historical figures from the time, and as I remember them, most of them are gigantic assholes I don't want to talk to (and do they talk!). Honestly, it kinda feels like a rush job, I know it came out before Lies of P did, but it feels like they saw the announcement of LoP, went "yeah we can do that," and threw it together in a few months. There's stuff that can be built on (I like the traversal/exploration upgrades), but the elemental system needed better balance than what was in the final game, the enemy AI is pretty dumb (and broken, there were multiple instances of enemies outright not attacking me even when attacked) and I would have liked more aesthetic variety. If Spiders ever comes back to this setting I would like them to bake the game for a while longer
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Feb 29, 2024 04:26
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i beat resident evil 8. funniest game i've played in a long time. the action is pretty good and it's a pretty and cinematic game but honestly the comedy is what carries it. ethan is funny as hell. i wish they never explained why he can get ground into paste and be fine two seconds later. i don't need wile e coyote's backstory and i don't need ethan's. i just want to laugh at him going 'what the hell is going oooooon' while he slips and trips and gets owned by everyone. i also beat shiren 6 (at least the story dungeon, but the game tells you explicitly 'the real adventure starts here' once you do). excellent game. very excited to delve into the post-game. if you are at all interested in turn-based roguelikes, play this game. if you are interested in games with mechanically deep and wide systems that interact internally in approx. ten million ways, play this game.
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Feb 29, 2024 12:22
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Finished up Raging Loop last night; the base game and some post-game extra sidestories they added in. There's an additional mode toggle where you get additional dialogues/information in some scenes (it shows what characters are thinking, which you wouldn't normally be able to see and/or would be incredibly spoilery on a first run); I'll probably pick and choose a few points to see those but don't expect I'll run through them all since that'd basically amount to most of a full replay. It's a pretty interesting visual novel. The general conceit is that the main character gets lost in the mountains and stumbles into a village that is on the verge of repeating a periodic supernatural tradition, the Feast of the Yomi-Purge. Effectively, several of the villagers become replaced by werewolves and start murdering people each night, and the humans have to figure out who the wolves are and lynch them before everyone dies. It's a Werewolf/Mafia (or Among Us, I suppose) scenario, complicated by the fact that the main character realizes after dying horribly that he's also stuck in a time loop. From there, it's fairly standard visual novel flowcharting, moving through the story, dying and unlocking new route keys from making incorrect (or correct choices), and so forth. It's kind of reminiscent of Virtue's Last Reward, albeit much more linear; it's as much about the social dynamics and political maneuvering as the murders themselves. The game does get very exposition dumpy in the last act, and it doesn't quite stick the landing, but it still works well, with some characters who are much more in-depth than you'd think from their tropes and a main character who's far smarter than he seems at first. Worth a look if you like VNs and horror games.
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Feb 29, 2024 17:06
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Ufouria: The Saga 2 Ufouria 2 priomises at once to be a remake and a sequel to a cute not well-known Metroidvania from 1991. And... It's neither, actually. I'm a little confused about what this game is trying to be, but I believe the answer to its strange nature is simple: developers had basically no budget. Ufouria 2 feels like a sequel to Kirby's Dream Land 3 with incrimental gameplay. You have a hub which leads into multiple levels, some splitting into a few more, and throughout you basically just collect coins and cans. Doing that will stock vending machines allowing you to buy more collectibles and upgrades. This game is short if you beeline the story and grindy otherwise, asking you to go through the same levels again and again. Granted, levels are somewhat random: taking pre-made chunks and rearranging them, but that doesn't make them feel that different on each time you enter. What saves this game is its absolutely amazing atmosphere: cute graphics mixed with a lot of 4koma-like dialogue really make this game better than its gameplay would. It's a cute title, but I wouldn't recommend buying it at asking price. My adventure was over at around 3 hours, and even if I were to grind out the last things I doubt I haven't seen much. Even going through the game normally it falls apart in the last 20% or so by reusing levels and for whatever reason presenting them as new. It's charming, and I've enjoyed my time with it, but it is a mess.
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Mar 1, 2024 14:49
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Vookatos posted:Ufouria: The Saga 2 Awman that's a shame. I'd still probably check it out for ten bucks though. Will just have to wait for a sale.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:14
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Finally beat Song of Horror. It was...eh. I played it over the course of a bunch of Thursdays, a couple hours at a time, with friends. It's an episodic game, and I think we would've appreciated it more if we had played it as such, rather than just going through the whole game in one go, as it became a little tiresome by the end, especially with a bit of a disappointing ending. Also a lot of the puzzles were just bad, including one that involved listening to drips to estimate an amount of liquid (which took us ages to do), or one involving piecing together a grainy photograph to look for details on it. There was also an annoying number of instant-kill places in the game, where you'd just be given a yes/no prompt that looks like any other yes/no prompt to get an item, and if you selected yes you'd die. A bathtub that looks like it's plugged up, release the plug? Death. A window is open, want to go through it? Death (you need to go out the other window). It also has an issue where, like most survival horror games, you're running back and forth to find keys and puzzle hints and whatnot, but in this one, various threats that start minigames to survive will pop up the more you're running around, so if you miss a piece of paper with a clue, or a key in another room, that's a greater chance you're going to run into something that will kill you if you don't pass the minigame. Anyway, it's a neat sort of idea for survival horror where you don't just rely on shooting things or using consumables to survive, but it could've used another pass of polish.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:45
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Ineffiable posted:Awman that's a shame. I'd still probably check it out for ten bucks though. Will just have to wait for a sale.
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Mar 1, 2024 16:51
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I essentially 'beat' Skull and Bones. It's a live service game so there will be more content, but not sure how much if any of that I will play. Beat the main story and pretty much maxed out my ship. Honestly, I liked it. I like boats and I like oceans. The best part was just exploring new areas and finding powerful enemies to fight, the sense of exploration as you explore the indies or the African coast and find new locations and environments was really great. The ocean looks pretty drat good too, in first person crossing the open sea for the first time, massive swells pounding your ship and a huge storm overhead, the sense of adventure was fabulous. That being said it's very shallow overall, and also very Ubisoft. The missions are pretty boring and generally all revolve around sinking certain ship(s), finding certain goods, attacking certain ports, and such things. It has very simple systems, and the story is not strong. I have a high tolerance for open world games but I know not everyone does. I had fun though, spent about 40 hours in it so I got my money's worth. It'll probably be on sale within a year or two, if you like sailing games I don't think it would be a bad purchase.
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Mar 2, 2024 04:30
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Play posted:Skull and Bones I've been curious if it has much of the feel of the ship sailing and combat in the AssCreed games. I loved those parts in Black Flag and Odyssey, and I could see myself grabbing this on sale if it scratches that gameplay itch, even with its troubled development.
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Mar 2, 2024 04:35
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It's an old game, but gently caress it, I've had kids so I'm years behind on my games. I just got 100% of the achievements in Dishonored (*not including DLC, gently caress the Dunwall City Trials). I popped like 7 achievements at once when I completed my stealth run and it gave me SO. MUCH. DOPAMINE.
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Mar 2, 2024 05:50
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neon white first game i impulse bought in a long time. might edit this to add some opinions but probably not
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Mar 2, 2024 06:44
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Captain Hygiene posted:I've been curious if it has much of the feel of the ship sailing and combat in the AssCreed games. I loved those parts in Black Flag and Odyssey, and I could see myself grabbing this on sale if it scratches that gameplay itch, even with its troubled development. It's a chill fun time, but man they messed up a lot. Only two real tiers of ship, on land stuff looks and feels and plays like crap, terrible unfinished story, bad endgame. Sounds like I hated it but I didn't, I can just objectively see that it sucks in a lot of ways. Actually sailing and exploring early on, plus the ship combat even if it can be gimmicky, is really fun for me. I never really played much of black flag so I'm not sure how it compares.
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Mar 2, 2024 08:35
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If memory serves this was a duke nukem forever-tier vaporware project that had gone through multiple rewrites and a development death march.
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Mar 2, 2024 08:52
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Beat Sekiro after never finishing it the first time round. Inner Ishin is a prick of a fight but very fair and awesome. The game in general is an absolute masterpiece of gameplay. Story isnt as interesting as some of the other fromsoft games but lord does it feel good when the combat clicks. Spuckuk fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Mar 2, 2024 |
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Mar 2, 2024 10:56
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Spuckuk posted:Beat Sekiro after never finishing it the first time round. masterpiece was the exact word I used when I finished it that combat man
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Mar 2, 2024 13:37
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I finished Like a Dragon Gaiden. Despite being a shorter side story of sorts I did most of the side content which I don't always do in Yakuza games, and the ending was moving. I've finished all the main Yakuza games and am now caught up to where Infinite Wealth kicks off, but I want to finish Lost Judgment first even though it's not really necessary.
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Mar 2, 2024 15:05
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To continue the Yakuza/LAD combo, I've just finished Yakuza Kiwami 2 AND Yakuza 3 Remastered. YK2 is easily one of the best game I've played, Y3R is... alright. There's some good bones but it feels janky throughout. Not to be a complete downer, I will say I definitely enjoyed it, especially the orphanage parts: taking care of the kids, helping them solve their problems, it was heartwarming in a way that I did not expect. The new characters grew on me, especially gramps/Rikiya, and I was devastated when the dumbass took a bullet for Kiryu. e: I immediately started Yakuza 4 and I'm shocked at how much better it feels/looks.
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Mar 2, 2024 16:17
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lordfrikk posted:To continue the Yakuza/LAD combo, I've just finished Yakuza Kiwami 2 AND Yakuza 3 Remastered. It's funny that you bring up Yakuza 3, as I was just listening to Pat describe it in the latest episode of Castle Superbeast as the oldest and worst one in the series that people can play easily now (since Kiwami 1 and 2 replace the originals now), but still being one of the most important because of the character beats it sets up for Kiryu for the rest of the series
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Mar 2, 2024 16:32
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Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 felt like the weakest in the series to me. Narratively they set up some important stuff but they tend to drag for large portions.
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Mar 2, 2024 17:07
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Punished Ape posted:Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 felt like the weakest in the series to me. Narratively they set up some important stuff but they tend to drag for large portions. 5 especially drags. Good lord does it overstay its welcome. Especially when you're almost done with the game and it pulls out a fifth protagonist out of nowhere! The fifth protagonist had a really great chapter of the story though, but I wish he'd taken the spot of another character. Like Saejima. I've never liked that guy.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:25
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I marathoned a bunch of the series a few years ago, going from 0 through the Kiwamis and then the regular numbered games starting with 3. I liked them all, but definitely found 3-5 tougher to get through, and 5 was what finally put the run on hiatus from which it still hasn't returned. I couldn't tell at the time how much was just fatigue from pushing through them too hard, but I'm not surprised to see folks complaining about those ones.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:50
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5 is a god tier Yakuza title but do not approach it if you’re fatigued. It is so much Yakuza. 3 is a little tough if you’re coming off of 0-2 but it’s functional and as has been said important for Kiryu’s arc. Personally I think 4 is the real stinker of the bunch. Still a pretty good game, but the plot is nonsense and only having a single location is a downer. It has some rough spots too.
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Mar 2, 2024 22:25
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4 was the "weakest" for me (still a great game!), but I'm still mad that 3 isn't just entirely Kiryu dadding about Okinawa and looking after the kids because that was the absolute best part of the game. I absolutely loving love Yakuza 5, it's incredible, but I can see how some people might not take to the development strategy of: "What should we include in this game?" "Yes."
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Mar 3, 2024 00:36
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Jerusalem posted:"What should we include in this game?" I think I get what you mean, though I don't think the "say yes to everything" thing works if it's not a yes/no question  Was it 5 or 4 that had the big reveal that Saejima's awesome sacrifice was just lol rubber bullets? I appreciate that Yakuza tries to tell the player that very few people actually die in the game, but give me a fuckin break. I think that's probably a universally loathed "reveal," though. Way to make an awesome character arc just silly and pointless and kind of sad for nothing 
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Mar 3, 2024 02:38
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I can't really comment on 4 overall, but "everybody split up and find an rear end to kick" was a great line that still sticks with me.
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Mar 3, 2024 02:45
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The spoilered reveal was in 4 and yeah, it was really goddamn stupid (and they repeat the same fakeout with the murdered superintendent showing up alive at the end because he ALSO switched out rubber bullets in the gun used to shoot him!) even for a series like Yakuza that frequently embraces utterly nonsensical plot points.
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Mar 3, 2024 02:52
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