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1stGear posted:Kickstarter has really had the same ratio of good-to-poo poo games as the regular industry, its just more noticeable because straight-up shovelware produced traditionally tends to disappear while Kickstarters get to be a big public failure. Kickstarter games seem to be reversed to the usual, in a way. Usually big games are acclaimed while cancelled projects/shovelware fall into obscurity, but with Kickstarter the decent-sized failures are really noticeable, if only briefly, while the successes just slide quietly into home without much fanfare. As to good Kickstarter games, I'll add FTL to the pile if nobody else will.
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Sep 20, 2014 02:34
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:I really liked what I played of Expeditions: Conquistador. Haven't gotten terribly far in it but the ten or so hours I've played were a very quality game. I had no idea it even was a Kickstarter project until a while after I had bought it on Steam, though, so I guess it's probably not too high-profile. Yeah, this is more or less the thing with successful Kickstarter games; if you turn up after the fact, you won't even notice that a game was funded by Kickstarter. But if it fails, you'll sure as gently caress find out.
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Sep 20, 2014 03:12
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For once I'd just like to see a loot-based game that gives you ways to extend the 'lifespan' of your gear. If you get a really good weapon early in Borderlands 2 (which I did, with my assassin getting a purple-rank rapid-fire sniper rifle with incendiary bullets), then you're probably going to feel weaker and weaker as you level up and that gear doesn't hold up, and you don't get a good replacement. It doesn't have to be that it's always just as useful, either, I could see great value in having a way to expend some resources to make your old weapon a little bit better as a band-aid solution while you look for a good replacement. EDIT: My avatar, of course, reminded me that City of Heroes had enhancements to powers that depreciated over time, eventually becoming completely useless as you outlevelled them. But at lest that was pretty obvious, enhancements were common enough that you could grab replacements, and later high-end enhancements scaled with your level. The same can't be said about guns that don't suck in Borderlands. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 02:03 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 02:01
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scarycave posted:Tingle isn't in Hyrule Warriors. What the gently caress, this is literally the only time where I'd actually WANT Tingle.
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Oct 3, 2014 12:37
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Smash Bros 3DS is loving amazing, except for the fact that there's no online Smash Run. I was really looking forward to that, and it never occurred to me that it wouldn't be online just because it seems like such a natural pick for online play.
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Oct 4, 2014 04:15
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WEEDLORD CHEETO posted:Wait what? Is it only local? That's loving idiotic + a real let-down. Good job Nintendo. Yeah, Smash Run can only be played either solo against CPU or in local groups. I can sort of see the reasoning, because it's heavily based on customization, and their ruling is 'no customization in online play'. Additionally, since customization in Smash 4 is based predominantly on equipment you get throughout the game, it'd lead to a situation where you need to grind to do well in a fighting game, and that's just kind of wrong. It still really sucks that they apparently couldn't make it work, since it's pretty much the best multiplayer mode ever. And this might just be my preference, or just me not being able to find an option somewhere in the game, but I feel like the camera is zoomed out just a little too far. I can follow what's going on for the most part, but the 3DS' screen isn't big enough for me to be able to tell if I'm getting fiddly bits like air-dodging right, or how exactly I'm supposed to be using some of the more complicated new characters like Palutena.
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Oct 4, 2014 15:01
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scarycave posted:Smash Run in general feels pretty rushed imo. No difficulty settings, match options, or really anything else besides music. I think the variety is supposed to come from it being so customizable. Even just playing the same character, you're gonna approach it differently if you spec for speed vs. raw attack power. Don't spec for defense, though. Especially if you're like me and try to make characters better at their initial strengths, so you just end up with a Bowser that can barely move and gets hit so often his extra defense doesn't matter.
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Oct 7, 2014 01:23
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The only good fishing minigame was in Ocarina of Time. And it was mostly great because there wasn't much in the way of rewards (meaning you could skip it pretty safely), and also there was in-built cheating.
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Oct 15, 2014 10:23
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WEEDLORD CHEETO posted:To be fair, at the end you discover that the Christians were mostly pretty good guys and it was the Muslims who were secretly headed by evil cackling villains and tricking you all along, and you help the Crusaders right the wrongs you perpetrated, so it's mostly wholesome overall rear end Creed 2 was literally about killing the Pope and finding out that the entirety of Christianity is a lie built on alien mind-control technology, so yeah, I can understand it being important there, too. And if they actually did anything controversial with 3 it would've required some sort of disclaimer, but they apparently didn't. Byzantine posted:The lovely ancient aliens reveal was very offensive Seriously, jesus christ. I don't know how far that ruined the first rear end Creed game, but I played 2, and the game coincidentally turned to complete garbage right around when it turned up. And then that part of things kept getting more and more spotlight as I played, and kept derailing my Suave Italian Douchebag Simulator. I didn't even mind the real-world segments, since it was basically just the conspiratorial parts of Deus Ex, but the alien mind control technology was right out.
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Oct 16, 2014 03:06
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I still think that in terms of having allies that are actually competent, Freespace did it best. Your wingmates aren't perfect, and they don't know how to use the game's mechanics as well as someone who's gone through all the tutorials, but they're good enough that, at the very least, they can shoot things down and give you breathing room when needed. It's also not a game that something can 'steal content' from you in; if the objective is to take down the big honkin' spaceship, it's not the game's fault that you didn't.
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Oct 19, 2014 09:04
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My Lovely Horse posted:I got a Wii U recently, and it really drags Okami down that it's not on that. Here's the perfect hardware finally but no one's going to port it again. Wonderful 101's on the WiiU, and uses the gamepad pretty much perfectly for the same ways Okami would.
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Oct 20, 2014 10:52
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Anatharon posted:The existence of Borderlands as a popular franchise vexes me to no end. It gets adapting the appealof Diablo into another genre right, at the expense of not really getting anything else right.
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Oct 24, 2014 07:24
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Captain Lavender posted:Dark Souls is my favorite game, and I was so excited for Dark Souls 2. But this screenshot shows what's dragging it down for me: Forest of the Giants is just a weirdly lovely outlier for Dark Souls 2. The rest of the game is great, and hell, the later parts of the Forest are great, but it just doesn't start well at all. I suppose it's good that the area is technically optional; there's two ways to get to the Lost Bastille and the first Great Soul, and you could instead go to Heide's Tower of Flame. I'd say you probably shouldn't, because there's better stuff in the Forest, but you can.
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Oct 25, 2014 02:17
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Like I brought up in the little things thread, I played Mega Man X for the first time. And it's great, so much so that I'm probably going to play X2 soon (and then maybe continue on the series until I reach the one that Inafune wanted to end on; that was 4, right?). The only thing I can complain about is something that really annoyed me; the boss weaknesses made no sense. This is my first Mega Man game that wasn't a Battle Network, so I have no idea if this is just an accepted conceit, but any attempts at logical deduction of who was weak to what fell apart after 'Chill Penguin's weak to Flame Wave'. Sting Chameleon is weak to Boomer Kuwanger's weapon, and Storm Eagle is weak to Sting Chameleon's, and gently caress if I know why because neither 'boomerang beats camouflage beats bird' nor 'bug beats lizard beats bird' make any sense. Why is an armadillo weak to electricity? Why is a dog that shoots ice weak to it? Why is loving everything weak to Rolling Shield? None of this makes any logical sense, and I have no idea how they decided on weaknesses or how they expected us to figure it out. Again, maybe this is just a concession of the series, maybe weaknesses never tried to make realistic sense and I'm a fool for trying to apply it. But I was just left a bit lost and confused after every single attempt at logic I used to deduce who might be weak to what failed.
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Oct 28, 2014 02:37
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FutureCop posted:Did they ever explain why they brought lifegems in? Like you said, the estus flask in Dark Souls really gave the game an excellent sense of tension and dread with managing your health, but with Dark Souls 2 they made the same mistake as Demons' Souls, where once you get a near unlimited supply of grass/lifegems, it kills the tension. I didn't use lifegems on principle, but I wonder if there was an official reason reason for it; perhaps making the game more accessible to newer players? I think they did it to bridge the gap for the now-fewer estus flasks. They went Metroidvania for their estus buffs, rather than the more structured style from Dark Souls. I like that style, but it was very harsh at first; one weak estus flask is NOT enough. So lifegems were probably a way to lessen that blow while still making it a significant handicap; you can resort to lifegems instead of estus, but they're just not as good, and you don't have easily replenished supplies of them like you do estus. So, at least early-game when you don't have many, it becomes a significant choice: do you use an estus and risk not having one when you really need it, or do you use a lifegem and risk running out of something you don't have a reliable supply of? I agree that they probably should have dropped off as you continued through the game and estus became more plentiful, but they had a place early on when you barely even had any of either.
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Nov 4, 2014 01:22
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Dark Souls 2 does have some issues with bosses, but I think the good ones more than make up for the bad ones. The derivative bosses can suck, and there's nothing quite reaching the heights of Smough and Ornstein, but I start forgiving it when it whipped out things like the Executioner's Chariot, the Skeleton Lords, the Old Iron King, and the Duke's Dear Freyja. Not all of them are immaculately designed, but they're still great fun. What I take issue with in Dark Souls 2 is actually the level design. Something understated that I really enjoyed from DS1 is that each area is different. When you go through the Undead Burg/undead Parish you mostly see the same stuff; human-sized zombie enemies, maybe a little taller, charging you up-front with some meager ranged support. It's simple, but it works, and you start getting used to it. But then, you go to Darkroot, and things change; suddenly things aren't fighting you up-front, the enemies are stealthy. They aren't hitting you with a lot of kind-of-damaging attacks, they're aiming to hit you once and make it count. It's harder not because it's just straight-up more difficult, it's harder because you're facing something entirely different. And that continues throughout the game. Nothing else hits you with poisons like the Depths and Blighttown do. You're never as wary of attacks coming from any angle, and striking right past your defenses, as you are when you're in New Londo. The rest of the game has traps, but nothing relies so much on them as Sen's Fortress. Every area in Dark Souls throws a different pitch, and even the ones that are similar don't play exactly the same game (the Duke's Archives may have the same melee-with-ranged-accompaniment as the Burg, but the magic damage, the staircases and the vertically-aligned rooms changes your approach completely). Dark Souls 2 has much more issues with that. Some areas have variation: Heide's Tower has the giants, and the Iron Keep's a great melding of traps and lethal foes. But a lot of the areas struggle immensely with the idea of breaking from the Undead Burg model of 'human-sized enemies charging you in melee with ranged accompaniment'. A lot of the settings can very, and I think it's a gorgeous game, but half the areas feel exactly the same to fight through.
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Nov 4, 2014 06:10
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GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:While I agree with most of what you have to say, the Old Iron King is just straight up the balrog, with a random instant death pit in the middle of the arena that he can knock you into with one hit. He's terrible. Yeah, and the Duke's Dear Freyja is effectively Shelob. I wasn't talking about the visual design, I was talking about how they played. And for better or worse, nothing else in the game quite plays like the Old Iron King.
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Nov 5, 2014 02:35
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StandardVC10 posted:Persona 3: It's very annoying how you have to constantly re-roll to get the skills you want when you're doing the 4-, 5-, or 6-persona fusions. When the pool of possible skills is that high I'd really rather they just let me pick rather than wade through all the iterations where my level-76 death god has lovely early-game skills like Cleave and Bufu. Yeah, this is something that Atlus only learned recently. They did learn it, though; SMTIV lets you choose every single one of your demon's skills. In a way, I actually don't like this, because it compounds with the Demon Whisper system to mean my fighting style is very homogenous. Since the PC learns skills from his demons, and they get strengthened as you level up more demons with those same spells, I'm finding myself just having a very uniform fighting style across my team.
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Nov 6, 2014 10:11
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Alteisen posted:See I'm that idiot that likes to play pet classes in MMO's, I enjoy going through the game with my menagerie of zoo animals, they even have amusing descriptions when you recruit some, like so: Yep, there's your problem. Pet classes are loving hard, apparently. You can't just have them, they need special care to work out. If you don't given them that, they'll either end up way too strong, or (more likely) really bad. City of Heroes had the mother of all pet classes. gently caress all you pet classes that are basically just a DPS/support class with a single pet, Masterminds trade in all their direct influence on a fight for having six pets, making them basically a whole team unto themselves. Masterminds were loving awesome. But the problem was that the game really wasn't designed for them; they were a hack job coding-wise from the outset. The longer the game went, and the more they added to the game, the more tenuous the house of cards that was Masterminds got. The AI started breaking, the devs couldn't really fix anything about them without breaking something else, and making powersets for Masterminds became more intensive than creating powersets for any other class. In the meantime, we had new content coming out, and since the Masterminds played so radically different from the rest of the game they got hosed pretty badly; AoE stuffgot pretty heavy in the later years of the game, so their pets died by the dozen. Things got really bad when they released the post-levelling 'Incarnate' content. First, the buffs that the early Incarnate powers worked from didn't actually get applied to pets, so while every other class got sizeable buffs Masterminds got little to nothing, and became more of a liability for the team than an asset. THEN, when the multi-team content came out, it used a 'participation' algorithm that judged how useful you were to the team and rewarded you accordingly. It turned out to be keyed off of quantity of powers used, and didn't count anything pets did; since some Masterminds were all pet, they got treated like leechers. So, yeah. Pet classes suck to play as if the devs aren't trying their utmost to make them work.
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Nov 8, 2014 08:29
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FactsAreUseless posted:Final Fantasy XII had a fishing minigame, but I don't think anybody knew it was there. You had to do it to get the super-secret ultimate best weapon (along with a bunch of other crap). FFXII had a lot of things nobody knew was there. I remember once hearing the theory that nobody had ever actually beaten it; while surely an exaggeration, it seemed like a pretty legit thought process at the time. I mean, have you ever met anyone who beat FFXII? I specifically set out to beat it just so I didn't have a non-completed Final Fantasy game on my conscience. But while I know for a fact that I did complete FFXII, I don't remember a thing about the final stretch of the game, the entire final dungeon beign a big blank in my mind. So I can't present any proof that I did beat that thing.
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Nov 11, 2014 13:08
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Who What Now posted:Jesus Christ, Five Nights at Freddy's 2, could you maybe give me a little bit of time to get acquainted with you before Zerg rushing me with 11 killer robots? Wait, isn't the first one like, a month old? How the gently caress is there a sequel?
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Nov 13, 2014 09:37
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Are there any Ubisoft games (Rayman excluded) that aren't incestuously made? It seems their every major release has the same DNA: skill trees that hardly impact gameplay, a non-customisable DudeBro protagonist in a shallow sandbox that barely lets you influence the story, mandatory Uplay, egregious amounts of DLC and collectibles coming out of your ears. It really isn't necessary to ram so much optional content onto a disc as most players get bored of open-world box-ticking by the three-quarter mark. Heroes of Might and Magic VI had Uplay, but it didn't have any of the rest! Shame that, as a HoMM game, it was pretty crap. I only played V before it, but VI was in a weird position where it was trying too hard in some places (the army-specific special abilities were more just annoying and intrusive than actually beneficial) and not hard enough in others (there was just no joy in putting together an awesome city stronghold, no hero skills were massive game-changers like some good ones in V were). I also felt like it was too insistent about making me complete maps quickly, but that might just be because I'm way more patient about my warmongering than they are, it's not an intrinsic flaw in the game. Can I ask if there are any strategy games that are more patient like that, and okay with me taking my time to build up as much as I want? Civilization and XCOM are very different types of strategy game, but I like their pacing.
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Nov 16, 2014 01:30
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Nuebot posted:It looks like someone's emulating a GBA game and maximized their window. Well, that is literally the aesthetic they were going with. I'm not against it, myself; in a gaming landscape full of 8-bit and the occasional SNES throwbacks, a direction more in-keeping with something a bit more modern, and in fact something that I grew up with, is very welcome to me.
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Nov 17, 2014 13:06
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Doctor Bishop posted:After finally managing to play far enough into Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to get to any of the dungeons past the Great Deku Tree, I have to say that the dungeons are what drag this game down for me. Seriously, the dungeons in Ocarina of Time just have this air of dankness and oppression to them that just progressively sucks the enjoyment out of the game as you realize that each dungeon is just going to be worse than the last and that this is what you can look forward to for the rest of the game. I don't mind OoT's dungeons, but they're definitely very blatantly dungeons. They either didn't know how to make them seem like a viable non-dungeon setting, or just weren't trying to, because you're right that all of them feel like Evil Dungeons With Evil Things In Them, with the setting itself feeling like it doesn't serve any other purpose. They learned by Wind Waker how to make a dungeon feel like something else, and do fairly well in that, but the N64 Zeldas suffer a bit from it. OoT still has some nice settings in the form of Jabu-Jabu's Belly and the Spirit Temple, and Majora's Mask has some great 'sub-dungeons' like the Skulltula Houses, the Pirate's Fortress and Ikana Castle, but for the most part they're fairly transparently dungeon-y.
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Dec 5, 2014 10:41
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RyokoTK posted:I dunno, I kinda like how menacing the OOT dungeons feel. I think it's probably a result of the N64 not having a ton of graphical fidelity, but the dungeons definitely had an air of "there's evil monsters here, watch out" and that was great to me. I think the complaint is more that, unlike the other 3D Zeldas, there's no other 'reason' for the dungeons. There's no other logic to the existence of these places, they exist only to be filled with evil monsters. Even the ones that are built with a bit of visual direction (Jabu-Jabu's Belly does the whole innards thing pretty well, the Forest Temple has a nice sort of mansion feel to it, the Spirit Temple tries to be a holy site) don't really make sense. They look like what they're supposed to be, but they don't feel like it. Compare with Twilight Princess. Twilight Princess isn't a fantastic Zelda, I actually think it's worse than OoT, but it as the first one that really tried to have dungeons make aesthetic sense, and do it well. You've got the Goron Mines, the Snowpeak Ruins, City in the Sky, Palace of Twilight and Hyrule Castle, all of which at least try to be something other than a hive of evil monsters, places that try to look like where people might live, or work. Even the more transparent dungeons have other things going on with them; the Forest Temple's overrun with benign wildlife as well, and the Arbiter's Ground makes quite a point of it being a crumbling ruin of a place that was already dangerous.
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Dec 6, 2014 00:27
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TheSpiritFox posted:Also the goron mines are dungeon-y as all hell and you can only convince yourself otherwise because they keep you entertained enough to not really think too hard about the fact that certain doors in the goron mines can only be reached by wearing metal shoes which a goron cannot wear. Because that totally seems like a place gorons can and did work. Totally. I'll grant you that I might be being a bit unfair to OoT (it's still a fantastic game, and the fact the dungeons don't make in-universe sense is honestly very minor), but that actually did make sense. The game made a very, very big point of demonstrating that the Iron Boots made you as heavy as a Goron. The Gorons don't need the Iron Boots to use those switches, because they're already heavy dudes. I wanted to use an example earlier than Twilight Princess, but the two 3D Zeldas between OoT and TP were Majora's Mask and Wind Waker, both of which had very low dungeon counts. They showed the willingness to hve more in-world-logical dungeons, with MM's sub-dungeons and a couple of Wind Waker's early ones, but they didn't have many in the first place. We can compare a couple of MM's sub-dungeons, though; really the only reason Ikana Castle isn't the best dungeon in that game is because it's technically not a dungeon.
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Dec 6, 2014 04:45
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im pooping! posted:Seriously the Assassin's Creed wiki sucks, it's either the people who contribute literally have nothing to say, or there's some sperglord editing everything so it's literally a list of the objectives you read in the game. No analysis, no history, nothing. It's total garbage and not useful at all. Funny, because I looked at it while playing rear end Creed 2 and it was useless in the opposite way. I was trying to get the location of an Assassin's Tomb on a building in Venice, and I got given 'here's five paragraphs on the real-world history of this building, mostly copy-pasted from Wikipedia', no mention of the tomb at all. It having a tomb is literally the only reason for the building to be in the game at all, too, so there's not even any talk about the story or anything. Just a historical infodump that neglected the one crucial fact about the building within the game's context. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 00:21 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 00:18
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Alteisen posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOYJVmFUFg4#t=142 This game exists. Somebody thought this was a good idea, wrote it, still thought it was a good idea, and presumably then sent it to other people, who also thought it was a good idea. In 2014. I could believe this sounding like a good idea in 90s RPGs when nobody knew any better. I could believe it in the early 00s, when this kind of character and humor was popular. But someone decided to write that this year. God damnit, Bioware, I don't even understand you.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:49
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For elf titties.
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Aphrodite posted:Actually you forgot a step. Oh, I assumed that the base idea was a romanceable character. Like, they went in from the outset with the knowledge that 'yeah, there's gonna be sex scenes with this one'. It's like the asari from Mass Effect; you can't tell me that they weren't designed with the romance option as a primary element of the concept. Honestly, it doesn't matter if the character was romanceable from initial planning, or if they decided she'd be romanceable later on. Both are pretty shameful. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 15:49 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 15:46
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Kalos posted:Yeah, it's not a First Person Shooter, it's jut a first person game where most of what you do is shooting. Toootally different. It's honestly sort of a good point. Not every game that's in first-person, and involves shooting, can rightly be called a 'first-person shooter'. Fallout 3/New Vegas is an RPG that happens to have guns as its primary weapons. The Metroid Primes are pretty classic Metroid action-adventure games, regardless of the fact that you're in first-person during it. That's not to say FPSes aren't a genre in and of themselves; there's plenty of games that are all about the shooting. But, just as having platforming segments doesn't make a game a platformer, and just as the occasional puzzle doesn't make one a puzzle game, being in first-person while shooting a gun doesn't make it an FPS.
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Dec 15, 2014 14:38
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I'm reminded of the game Mars: War Logs which is a cross between the Witcher and Dune and mixed with utter dogshit. Like the Witcher you can block and dodge roll, but for some reason blocking is completely useless unless you invest points into the skill. It seems counter-productive to expect players to invest in a useless skill in the promise that it will reach a point of actual usefulness. Another bad idea is locking off a third of the skill tree until the player finishes Act 1 of 3. The whole game feels like a mish-mash of every modern RPG mechanic made by people who don't understand how to make an RPG within their budget. Mars: War Logs is let down by the massive dissonance between budget and ambition. It wanted to be a big Bioware-style open-world RPG with heavy moral choices and deep consequences. But that poo poo's expensive, so it falls short in pretty much every field. I still say that, if you gave it the budget of a modern Bioware game, it'd be better than anything they made since the original Mass Effect.
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Dec 16, 2014 04:28
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Screaming Idiot posted:or I know this is a bit of a poor defense, but it came up in Chip Cheezum's LP. Every single main member of the Wonderful Ones is a cheesy cliche, it's not just Pink. Red is the straight-faced, truth-and-justice hero type, Blue is a cocky, selfish lone wolf, Green is a snobby Frenchman, White is a proverb-spouting ninja. Saying that Pink is bad because she's 'dipping into stereotypes' is disingenuous, because it's not like she's the only character that does. But, the issue that does come up is that everyone else plays with that cliche they started with. White's proverbs are completely irrelevant and nobody's got time for them, Green is a fat child who's snobby about fast food, Red and Blue are fully-rounded characters with pathos and all. The problem with Pink is that they don't really do anything to play with expectations, to make her character anything more. She's just 'The Girl', played straight. It's not as bad as it could've been, frankly. The two other main female characters get arguably more screentime than Pink and are far more impressive with it, and Pink gets some nice moments every so often despite her character being a bit too by-the-book (and, yes, arguably offensive). That doesn't excuse it, and Platinum's history with female characters is pretty shonky regardless, but it could've been far worse.
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Dec 16, 2014 16:07
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I finished it a couple days ago, and Shin Megami Tensei IV, is a pretty great game. But, it reached a point where its own advancements in playability actually surpassed much of the trademark Megaten difficulty. For those who haven't played it, they've done away with fusion demons getting some random skills from their components; instead, you get to choose from every single skill that the component demons had. Additionally, the player character gets skills through the Demon Whisper system, where demons who've learned all their skills can teach him any one you want (with some exceptions). Conceptually these systems are just fine, but in practice--and especially in tandem--they really hurt the game's difficulty. A crucial, understated element of Megaten's difficulty is compromise; you will never be perfect. Your demons, and your player character, will have flaws. Maybe their stats are poo poo, maybe their skill selection is bad, maybe their weaknesses are too great. And while you could spend hours painstakingly engineering a perfect demon, the intention was always for you to just deal with it. And when you're facing Grand Lord Lightningfuck and realize that most of your heavy hitters are weak to electricity, and your player character might be resistant but he's sure as hell not gonna have the firepower to take it himself, that's when the real difficulty of the series comes. But SMTIV alleviates so much of that. It's so trivial to build exactly the moveset you want, and then fuse it onto a demon that can take what you're up against. The soul of the Megaten difficulty is still there, and you can really see it when you're caught off-guard and unable to compensate, but the game gives you so much aid that you rarely have that issue. And in a completely unrelated note, they brought on a new demon designer for IV. And while some of his designs aren't great (personally I think he did really well, although there's some misses), I think his greatest issue was taking some of them in a direction that just didn't work with the actual story. SMT's angels have always had some great mechanical looks to them, going along with Law's goal world often being sort of a 'perfect machine' utopia. SMTIV's story goes to loving town with it, introducing a potential Law-won world killed by religious Daleks, and the final dungeon being full of angels spouting divine ultimatums in an overtly robotic manner. But the new demon designer goes in a different way with the angels he got his hands on; his angels are actually organic, albeit in twisted, misshapen ways that come right out of the Old Testament. They look great, but with the story finally playing up the 'angels=machines' angle, they're actually letting it down.
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Dec 18, 2014 08:19
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Len posted:I installed Fallout New Vegas finally because I need something to play and goons are always gushing about it. I haven't played long but why is the move speed so atrociously slow? You might be either walking by default, or turned it on accidentally. Hit caps lock a couple times while moving, you might be able to figure that out. You also move slower when your legs are crippled, that might be happening.
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Dec 19, 2014 07:05
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Bravely Default is is great in a way that 'great' doesn't quite encompass, and is basically exactly what Square should have been making over the past 15-20 years. But I can already tell from very early in the game that the way it distributes XP, and especially Job Points, is going to lead to massive inequality. The whole system's basically just FFV's, only they've allowed themselves to use bigger numbers in their rewards. Bosses especially are great for that, they'll give you 90 JP when regular enemies are giving out 7 or 8. But those bosses can hurt, and if someone's dead at the end of a fight, they aren't gonna get any of that. That doesn't just lead to inequality, it's likely to lead to escalating inequality. When the only survivor of a boss fight is the knight that can tank hits like a champ, they're only going to get better at tanking hits like a champ. That means they'll get better at surviving those fights, which means they'll continue to monopolize the XP yield that lets them do so in the first place. It wasn't such a big deal in FFV, since a boss fight's AP yield could probably be made up in about three random encounters, but BD's boss rewards are a lot more lucrative in comparison to the random encounters. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 04:31 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 04:27
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Red Minjo posted:Shin Megami Tensei 4 is, for the most part, a great game. But man, they toss a lot of chaff enemies at you. It was annoying enough in normal gameplay, trying to find out where such and such temple for a sidequest is, but after beating the final boss (neutral path), I had to go through battles with weak-rear end demons on the overworld and indoors areas before I got the last cutscenes and credits roll. I can understand not wanting to lock players out of finishing a few things before ending the game, but it really made the whole ending feel anticlimactic for me. My final battle should be with the level 99 cool guy, not some level 10 hee-hos! Estoma Sword helps a lot with that, but it's a second-quarter spell that stops appearing on demons at around level 35. And it's a spell that can't be carried on to you by Demon Whisper, so it becomes a massive chore to even have it. The neutral path kind of has something that bugged me about it, though. Not the structure of it gameplay-wise, but it really just drops something that should really be brought up. Isabeau's feelings for you grow over the course of the game, and it's fairly noticeable. In the Law and Chaos endings, it comes to quite a dramatic head; she calls you out on the side you've chosen, the deeds you've committed and the world you want to bring about, before admitting her feelings to you and committing suicide, refusing to let her blood be on your hands. On the neutral ending, you and her strike off on your own, though, she's a companion rather than an adversary. She's with you for literally the entire endgame, right by your side as you both go 'you know what, gently caress both these guys, we're doing our own poo poo'... and it never comes up. That tension, those growing feelings, just never get addressed. I'm not asking for a romantic subplot or an 'and also you get laid' part to the Neutral ending, but it really just doesn't feel right that her entire subplot doesn't even get a conclusion if you side with her. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 10:14 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 10:12
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I'm not going to hold Civilization: Beyond Earth's plain-ness against it. In doing so I'd be comparing it to post-expansion Civ V, and not only is that unfair, but it'd be selling short how Beyond Earth does make things unique. But the one thing I feel like I can confidently express disappointment in is the Harmony affinity. The idea with that is that you're integrating yourself into the planet's ecosystem, which in theory would lead to great interactions with the game's resources, especially the aliens. But despite all the flavor, units and buildings relating to Harmony learning to live with the aliens instead of against them, their actual interactions with the aliens are exactly as violent as anyone else's. In fact, they're kind of forced to be hypocrites, because the resource they have to get a lot of is Xenomass, which alien hives spawn on top of. For the affinity that's supposed to be all about being at peace with the environment and the wildlife, Harmony sure does a fuckload of killing aliens and stealing their land.
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Dec 28, 2014 15:42
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AngryRobotsInc posted:Ah, so they went with the SMT/Persona (some of them) method. Yet another thing SMTIV removed, but in that case I think it worked reasonably well. You can still keep fighting when you've lost your main character, but you lose a few pretty important support functions that it's implied he's doing.
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Jan 1, 2015 00:55
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Bravely Default tries to do a murder mystery for one of its sidequests. An assassin traps your party and a group of top commanders of an army you allied with, and begins picking people off one by one. You need to find out who it is and stop them to get out... and more importantly, earn the Ninja job. Unfortunately, it fucks it all up by having no actual gameplay, or mystery-solving, involved in the mystery; your job is to talk to everyone and let cutscenes happen until one of your party members figures it out. It's a shame, because they actually come up with a really good twist: it's the first victim, who nobody actually saw die, and whose body you never got a proper look at, because everyone thought it was a bit insensitive to treat someone who just died like that. The entire segment of the game around the fire crystal sort of bungles its sidequests, frankly, but that one's easily the worst.
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Jan 5, 2015 11:14
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scarycave posted:Yeah. It's no where near as enjoyable as the first two. It's pretty much Paper Mario, with all the best parts ripped out and shredded for good measure. Given this is Nintendo we're talking about, who are (perhaps hyperbolically) known for treading the same ground over and over again, I think we can respect the Paper Mario devs for constantly doing something new. ...But seriously, of any Nintendo series, Paper Mario is the one that really needs to go back to its roots, do those first two right again, and then just stick with it. We had two absolutely stellar games, that were at the same time simple and really intricate, propping up a fantastically charming world, which we then lost completely to experimentation. The world deserves another Thousand-Year Door, but we're not getting it, from Nintendo or anyone else. I feel much the same way about Megaman Battle Network; the thing dragging Battle Network down is that I can't throw money at anyone to get more games like it. At least with that, I've got six of them to go back to. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 13:26 on Jan 6, 2015 |
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Jan 6, 2015 13:24
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