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The impression I got from the First Twisted Metal is that things you expect to do in such a game just can't be done, or almost can't be done. You can't ambush enemies when they have their rear of flank facing you and do a hit and run, enemies are almost always facing you no matter what. You can't dodge their attack efficiently. Basically, the whole idea of hurting them while avoiding getting hurt in turn doesn't seem to work. All you can do most of the time is to trade damage, hence speed and handling barely matters. I've played the second game myself and it is fun. One major criticism I have though is that a lot of the cars are heavily balanced towards being AI opponents. Twister and Grasshopper are both fragile and tend to damage themselves a lot with their specials. That's not a problem when they are AI opponents, they still do the job of whittling the player armor down just fine, but if you try to play as them it's another matter entirely. Spectre has a gimmick that's of a major concern when he's an opponent, but not very helpful as a player. I won't go into details since the LP hasn't shown him yet.
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Jun 5, 2019 19:46
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Crystalgate posted:One major criticism I have though is that a lot of the cars are heavily balanced towards being AI opponents. Twister and Grasshopper are both fragile and tend to damage themselves a lot with their specials. That's not a problem when they are AI opponents, they still do the job of whittling the player armor down just fine, but if you try to play as them it's another matter entirely. This succinctly describes my nightmare of the past few days. Grasshopper is up next and I had to unlearn the basic fundamental concept of playing Twisted Metal to get anything done with that car. It's really cool and worth showing off, but they did not consider the implications of actually making people use some of these vehicles. I also had two successful runs get corrupted but that's not the game's fault, just my increasingly bad luck (got a good run all set now though, the next video will be going up some time tomorrow) Crystalgate posted:Spectre has a gimmick that's of a major concern when he's an opponent, but not very helpful as a player. I won't go into details since the LP hasn't shown him yet. Spectre's one of the five cars I won't be playing in the LP so you're safe to go to town on how he plays.
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Jun 6, 2019 03:05
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Spectre's special is a homing missile that goes trough any terrain (except destructible terrain) and will loop around for another go if you dodge it. Heck, it will loop around for a third, fourth, fifth and so on go if you keep dodging it. Unless it by accident slams into another opponent or a destructible terrain, you really need to block it with a shield. To compensate, the special is rather weak. This is a bit annoying, but it does have a certain tactical implication when fighting him. If for example one of your opponents is Axel, but he is far away from you, you're safe from him for the moment and can concentrate on something else like collecting pickups or taking another enemy out. Not so much with Spectre. I've at times heard him fire his special, then nothing happened for quite a while until suddenly the missile appeared out of a wall and slammed into me. If he's out of sight, you cannot predict when his missile will hit you and blocking with the shield will be a guess work. Further, hit and run tactics, which work just fine against Axel, will prompt Spectre to fire more specials and if he fires them while you're in the run phase of the strategy, you won't see when the missiles are going to hit you. However, he is fragile and his specials are weak, so what does work well is to go up close and slug it out until you destroy him as soon as you have the ammunition for it (or you have a car that can easily ram him to death). So, the way he works does change what tactics are good against him compared to other opponents, but since his specials aren't that strong, it's nevertheless not too punishing to approach him the wrong way. The problem is that when you play as him, what you got is a special that's weak. The whole "track the enemy trough walls to the end of the world" gimmick of you specials is not very useful, the enemies don't try to dodge your attacks to begin with. Further, the player has to output for more damage than AI opponents do, so even though you can fire your special at any time and it will just fine seek out an enemy at the other side of the map, dealing chip damage isn't that useful. All the gimmick is really useful for is very boring cheese tactics against bosses. I have a brother who wanted to get Spectre's ending, but didn't have the skill to kill the last opponent with him. What he did was to find a way to stay out of the boss' way infinitely and fire the special one after another until it finally took said boss out. IIRC, he needed more than twenty minutes to get the job done. I then avoided using Spectre. Spectre also has some trolling potential in co-op. His special will always track player 1, so player 2 can troll player 1 by staying close to Spectre and prompt him into firing specials.
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Jun 6, 2019 08:54
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Update: Grasshopper in Paris / Hammerhead's ending Crystalgate posted:All the gimmick is really useful for is very boring cheese tactics against bosses. I have a brother who wanted to get Spectre's ending, but didn't have the skill to kill the last opponent with him. What he did was to find a way to stay out of the boss' way infinitely and fire the special one after another until it finally took said boss out. IIRC, he needed more than twenty minutes to get the job done. I then avoided using Spectre. There's a bunch of ways to break the game for easy unintended victories that are excruciatingly boring. Paris has one of the more obvious ones if you just camp the upper level and fire missiles on the enemies below. Spectre almost seems like the developer's answer to the issue
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Jun 6, 2019 23:10
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I won't go into my endless vs. matches with friends in TM2, because the epic battle stories could last for hours. HOURS. I will say this though: gently caress their nerfing of Hammerhead. Dude was untouchable in TM1. And then....just....... 
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Jun 7, 2019 06:16
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Compare Hammerhead's stats to Mr Slam's. Even taking into account that the special stat is often inaccurate, Hammmerhead's stats are just poor. Granted, not as poor as Grashopper's, that vehicle is basically scrap.
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Jun 7, 2019 09:15
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I'm all for bringing Hammerhead down a few notches, I had to fight the thing and it was like a miniboss in every level it showed up. The vehicle balance throughout TM2 is weirdly terrible though, all it would've taken was an extra point on a stat or two to make the worst vehicles on par with the good ones
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Jun 7, 2019 15:33
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One thing I'll say for Hammerhead's ending is that its a perfect stoner ending for the monkey paw wish. It's just so stupidly amusing.
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Jun 8, 2019 16:59
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Fiendly posted:Thanks for the well wishes. I have a plan that could result in two updates a week starting next week, now let's see how many seconds it takes after posting this for that to cease to be true. ...and then I got super sick. My voice did come back though, so I might still get two videos out this week, and there's not much of the game left after that. I'm definitely getting at least one out, and it's longer and more eventful than the rest have been. Update:  Shadow in Amazonia + Minion in Moscow
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Jun 14, 2019 00:21
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So two points about minion. 1. In the fight in Amazonia against him, when he chased you down in the tunnel and you were waiting for him on the other side, that would have been a great time to use the rolling bombs you picked up in the tunnel. They wouldn't have killed him, but it sure would have helped knock a bit of life off. 2nd, as I posted before the energy attacks really are OP in this game. We already have a built in temporary invincibility, healing and ammo, how much more OP do you need? How about the ability to fire Minion's special. That's right, in a bit of a switch from the last game, rather than minion getting access to everyone's special, everyone gets access to his. As far as I'm aware, the computer never uses it. Really, I think the only energy weapon it ever uses is the freeze and maybe the jump. In the right hands though, that's enough. Also, I think there's one other bit to that special in that for Warthog, I think it fires just three power missiles in the red white and blue colors, but I think Minion's fires one each of a Fire Missile, Power Missile and Homing missile, but I could be off on that one.
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Jun 14, 2019 03:05
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Shadow is one of the better vehicles. I would say that he is the only really good low armor vehicle. The point of faster speed diminishes greatly past Shadow's speed. Faster vehicles don't really use their speed to pursue you efficiently when AI controlled anyway. Heck, a very high speed will get you in trouble as often as it gets you out of trouble. It seems to me that when they rate special on the character screen, they rate power and nothing else. Mr. Grimm's special is rated higher than Shadow's. I think that it does more damage hit for hit, but Shadow's special has a big area of effect and recharges much faster. Heck, I think it even recharges more than twice as fast. So in practice Shadow's special ends up dealing more than twice the damage Mr. Grimm's does despite the latter having a higher rated special. Anyway, I'm not surprised the comic tries too hard to be edgy. Trying too hard to be edgy described Twisted Metal as a whole. I didn't play the second game for the story though (and I haven't played the first one at all nor see any reason to do so).
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Jun 14, 2019 17:57
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That brought back a lot of memories of Shadow, I'm pretty sure it was my favorite car because of that special.
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Jun 15, 2019 05:44
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Update: Axel in New York CzarChasm posted:2nd, as I posted before the energy attacks really are OP in this game. We already have a built in temporary invincibility, healing and ammo, how much more OP do you need? How about the ability to fire Minion's special. I'm still getting to showing off more energy moves (I guess I used the jump pretty well this video at least), but the Minion's special energy attack is definitely next. It's the perfect supplement to vehicles that have bad or situational specials, and it woulda made my Grasshopper run a lot easier if it weren't a spoiler (although I actually just didn't think of using it at the time) Crystalgate posted:Shadow is one of the better vehicles. I would say that he is the only really good low armor vehicle. Thumper's also quite good, if only because his special has the highest potential damage of any attack in the game, roughly triple what a direct hit from Shadow's special can do. Special ratings do seem to boil down to nothing more than "how much damage it does per use," and even that isn't particularly consistent. Crystalgate posted:Anyway, I'm not surprised the comic tries too hard to be edgy. Trying too hard to be edgy described Twisted Metal as a whole. Yup, see the ending of this update's video for a shining example. The comic is only notable for going above and beyond, they cranked up the edgy factor for Twisted Metal: Black to stay as offensive to 2000s sensibilities as they were in the 90s, yet every horrible thing that happens in Black also happens in the 16 pages of that comic. It's just a hyper-concentrated injection of mindlessly awful trash, for the kids!
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Jun 15, 2019 14:14
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Oh yeah, for some reason I thought Thumper had 3 armor and therefore didn't categorize him as a low armor vehicle. I also used to fight enemies at a greater distance than you do, which makes him less appealing to me. He is however indeed good.
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Jun 15, 2019 16:28
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Crystalgate posted:Shadow is one of the better vehicles. I would say that he is the only really good low armor vehicle. High risk, high reward!
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Jun 17, 2019 03:53
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Update: Twister in Antarctica / Warthog's ending Mr.Flibble posted:Twister is quite powerful if you play her the right way, run the hell away until you build a few specials, try to find some enemies close to each other ,next to a wall, or just by themselves, and twist them to death. This video is exhibit B, I don't have the kind of patience to set up the special for hitting multiple enemies into walls, but it still gets the job done here, I just needed a little extra power to get through
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Jun 22, 2019 05:00
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Warthog has one of the most boring characters, but the vehicle is very good. It has high armor, a good, but not spectacular, special and blocks relative little view for being a high armored vehicle. I take out the enemies at a greater distance than Friendly does, so for that gameplay Warthog is great. He is probably less great if you prefer to fight up close and aggressive, but he will still be good since he has a high armor. Anyway, one good tactic in Antarctic is to freeze an enemy and then bump them off the level with ricochets. The ricochets have a good puchback.
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Jun 22, 2019 08:46
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Warthog was one of my favorite vehicles. He also plays really well up close because his high armor means ramming is a valid strategy for him.
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Jun 22, 2019 15:06
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Crystalgate posted:Anyway, one good tactic in Antarctic is to freeze an enemy and then bump them off the level with ricochets. The ricochets have a good puchback. I tried using ricochets and freeze shots separately to drown people, but it never ocurred to me to use both in tandem. garthoneeye posted:Warthog was one of my favorite vehicles. He also plays really well up close because his high armor means ramming is a valid strategy for him. Yep, Warthog's perfectly viable in every situation, and that too is super boring. I'd rather play an awful vehicle like Grasshopper than ol' reliable Warthog. It's also one of the only hold-overs from the first game to not have its special overhauled, since almost every special in the first game was "a missile but..." and that was pretty dull
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Jun 22, 2019 20:05
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Update: Outlaw 2 in Holland / Spectre's ending sorry i missed a week, but i'm sure sgdq kept everyone busy
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Jul 2, 2019 01:24
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You know I was wondering why Outlaw's special in TM1 seemed so much worse than I remembered, guess I had confused it with Outlaw 2. Surprisingly powerful special for how easy it is to hit with.
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Jul 6, 2019 05:10
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Looking forward to the next level and the fact that you are probably going to show off my favorite ending. I'm going off of memory and trying to recall if we have one contestant left or if we have two. Yes, I could look it up, but that feels like cheating.
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Jul 8, 2019 15:07
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Hope this was worth the wait, I think the level's too hard to be fun myself, but I am glad to be wrapping up TM2 Update:  Roadkill in Hong Kong And of course, with another game down, it's time for another... Interlude  The developers of the first two TM games wouldn't get another shot at the series for nearly five years after TM2, but they came back strong with Twisted Metal: Black, a side story for the characters that ties in to the canon they'd established. If you missed my Let's Play of Black, this is the best time to catch up, but be aware that this is the "darker and edgier" installment that sometimes goes too far for some people's tastes, so be sure to heed the content warnings before proceeding. Let's Play Twisted Metal: Black - Content Warnings: Extreme violence and gore, child death, self harm, suicide, mutilation, cannibalism If that seems unappealing for any reason, I've also made a short video showing just the one relevant moment that ties Black into the greater Twisted Metal plot, Minion's ending, and I'll be spoiling this plot point in the first video of Head On anyway. EDIT: If you do want to take this time to go through the Black LP, don't worry too much about falling behind on Head On, I'll have the first video live pretty soon but after that, updates are gonna be real slow due to me having to beat the entire game with a character before I can do their video (turns out passwords are really convenient for this kind of LP but we're done with those now). For what it's worth, all of Black (and Lost) is open to discussion without spoiler tags in this thread from here on. Fiendly fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Jul 11, 2019 |
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Jul 11, 2019 01:27
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I never knew about the train bonus thing! There's always something to find out. Speaking of the subway the one thing you didn't mention is that if you go into the subway while fighting Dark Tooth, perhaps hoping he can't follow you because of his size, you'll discover he indeed can't enter but what he will do is choose an entrance and throw an endless series of his giant ricochet bombs through the tunnel.
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Jul 11, 2019 02:32
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Kibayasu posted:I never knew about the train bonus thing! There's always something to find out. Speaking of the subway the one thing you didn't mention is that if you go into the subway while fighting Dark Tooth, perhaps hoping he can't follow you because of his size, you'll discover he indeed can't enter but what he will do is choose an entrance and throw an endless series of his giant ricochet bombs through the tunnel. Yep, definitely tried that, it's a nightmare to get out of the subway once the bombs start coming. Dark Tooth does a ton of impossible things including outright teleporting to get into the temple and catch up if you try to run away, so there's no way to be safe (though ricochet bombs bounce off of the subway train so you could last a decent while riding on top of one) Just for the hell of it, I'll also link a couple videos I made of a Twisted Metal-like game Incognito made after Black, War of the Monsters. Agamo showcase Preytor showcase I was gonna do an LP of this game after I did Black because the presentation is amazing (great cutscenes, animations, visual designs and B-movie tributes), but the gameplay is just... kinda bad, so I ditched that idea. You can still see some of what's so cool about it with these videos, though.
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Jul 11, 2019 03:33
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Ahaha, the visual of Dark Tooth barreling around corners on two wheels with the giant flaming clown head spiraling around made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it as a kid in 1997, and it still makes me laugh now. Speaking of which, did anyone else who was a kid in the 90s make up their own Twisted Metal games using their Hot Wheels cars? My roster included a Sharkuiser and a jacked up Cheesasaurus Rex truck.
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Jul 11, 2019 05:40
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Truman Sticks posted:Ahaha, the visual of Dark Tooth barreling around corners on two wheels with the giant flaming clown head spiraling around made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it as a kid in 1997, and it still makes me laugh now. No, but a buddy of mine and I tried to come up with a few characters of our own. Since we already had Needles Kane and whatever sweettooth's name was (and Marcus as his brother) we decided why not a sister, Nova Kane, who would be a dentist who was opposed to Sweet Tooth giving out ice cream to all the kids. This was before he was so over the top psycho. We decided that she should have either a giant drill like Auger from TM3, or a giant needle that fired like a mortar and woul pin you in place for a few seconds, like the ice missile.
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Jul 12, 2019 03:13
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Fiendly posted:
As someone who unashamedly loves this game; Black really should've raised some red flags to me about the type of person David Jaffe was. It wasn't until God of War (3, in particular) that was clear the dude had issues he should've addressed. Tactless Ogre fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Jul 15, 2019 |
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Jul 15, 2019 11:52
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Tactless Ogre posted:As someone who unashamedly loved this game; Black really should've raised some red flags to me about the type of person David Jaffe was. It wasn't until God of War (3, in particular) that I had to admit the dude had issues he should've addressed. To his credit, Jaffe was completely uninvolved with the GoW series by the third game, but that does little to mitigate the fact that he's the ultimate edgelord. I can't deny my own edgelord tendencies after the stuff I've filled my channel with, and I can't even begin to handle TM2012, which is by far the worst in the series in terms of story (could still make a good LP for poo poo-talking the game).
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Jul 15, 2019 14:21
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Was going to ask about TM 2012 as I'd never seen anything about it other than Sweet Tooth transforms into a full battle mech. Saw a vid of someone playing a single level and it seemed chaotic in a bad way. Like if you suddenly turned the latest GTA into Twisted Metal with all the generic traffic and pedestrians. Also seems like the gameplay got complicated and weird.
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Jul 16, 2019 18:31
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TM2012 is hard to get used to, hard to comprehend visually, the single player campaign is way too hard in some parts, and there are some baffling terrible design choices throughout, but overall, I think the gameplay is pretty good, occasionally great. It's also completely linear, you have to play the character stories in order, so there's no redundant gameplay required to show off everything so it's the easiest one to LP. The stories are super embarrassing and set any and all expectations super low from the jump, and that's by far the worst aspect of the game.
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Jul 16, 2019 20:05
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Twisted Metal: Head On After burning through two development studios and waiting nearly a decade, the original creators of Twisted Metal finally wrapped up the story of the series with Head On, the sequel to TM2. They also addressed the plot twist of Black and explored how it affects the mainline games... kinda. This is an often overlooked game with lots of good new ideas, lots of missteps, and lots of just stuff. It's crammed to the gills with things to do and see, and the Extra Twisted Edition we're playing adds even more, so we'll get to see the gameplay and stories of all eighteen vehicles, plus we'll take a look at some of the differences between this version and the one on the PSP. It's one last giant hurrah for Twisted Metal. Part 1: Sweet Tooth in Big Blue Stadium
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Jul 23, 2019 04:23
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This is something I haven't seen before so very much looking forward to more. I thought Sweet Tooth sounded familiar, so thanks for the note that it was Fred Tatasciore. He's a very prolific Voice Actor, usually plays big angry guys. Chances are that if you've played a Marvel game he's been the voice of Hulk.
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Jul 24, 2019 03:44
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This might sound odd, but I just spent 12 hours in the delivery room for the birth of my first child and I want to thank Fiendly for this LP and the one for Twisted Metal Black : Having your videos to watch made the long stretches of waiting (preceeding the brief moments of terror) tolerable. Unfortunately, my votes for 'Marcus' and 'Needles' as possible names for my new daughter were vetoed by her mom.
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Jul 24, 2019 19:39
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drat, that's, like, actually heartwarming. Happy to help, and congrats!
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Jul 24, 2019 22:47
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Update: Mr. Slam in Los Angeles
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Jul 31, 2019 13:24
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Yeah, the ending was not exactly clever and does not justify the time. As soon as reincarnation was mentioned, it wasn't exactly hard to see multiple ways it can go wrong. Heck, usually the idea with reincarnation is that you lose your memories of previous life. That said, Twisted Metal 2 is leaps and bounds better than the first one and Black and Head On both looks considerable better than the second one. Crystalgate fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Aug 1, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 17:01
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Oh man, I loved War of the Monsters when I was younger, though, yeah it's a little hard to revisit. The AI is too focused on getting health pickups, getting impaled by radio towers is obnoxious, the controls have aged poorly and so on. Still, when you adjust to the controls and learn the intricacies of gameplay it's alright. The levels are really vertical and there's a great sense of momentum in hitting a monster and watching them fly into a skyscraper which then promptly explodes. E: This is the only Twisted Metal I've never played and it looks like I've been missing out. That level seemed pretty interesting. Mantis42 fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 18:16
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Oddly, Jaffe has said TM1 has better gameplay than Black, and Head On doesn't even make his list because he didn't work on it. I think it's obvious the PS2 games are much better than the classic ones, but they're different enough that having your own preferences is understandable (not if you prefer TM1 though, that thing's a mess). The most unique thing about Head On is its accessibility, almost anyone can pick it up and perform pretty well even on the default difficulty, and can bump it all the way down to a new Super Easy mode if they just want to see the stories and enjoy the levels. Every previous game has one reasonably playable level followed by a huge difficulty spike that makes further progress very slow, so that's good work by the developers, but a little too late for it to matter, seems like they got hardly any new fans from this game.Mantis42 posted:War of the Monsters War of the Monsters plays so much better when you realize you're meant to time every button press carefully in response to what's going on rather than holding block and button mashing, but there's no incentive to learn the right timings because you can easily button mash through everything. Also the camera is really bad. It's unfortunate because the level and character designs are great, the animations are expertly crafted, and the plot is so absurd it feels like the final game of a trilogy that skipped the first two games. I might LP it someday, but it'd be such a chore to cover with the kind of detail I insist on that it's unappealing.
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Jul 31, 2019 23:03
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Now that Mr Slam has come and gone and looking at a few of the other characters I guess everyone was the winner of TM2 in their own version of it... or they just decided nuts to continuity and went with the rule of cool (also acceptable).
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Aug 6, 2019 06:16
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