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you're not, the front half of the thread is filled with people picking apart about why earlier versions of MQ was full of unfair horseshit and Quackles keeping detailed notes how exact he has to be beating bosses.
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Jan 14, 2021 05:05
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Robindaybird posted:you're not, the front half of the thread is filled with people picking apart about why earlier versions of MQ was full of unfair horseshit and Quackles keeping detailed notes how exact he has to be beating bosses. BTW, now that we're coming up on Dry Dry Ruins - I'm setting things up so that having the Jr. Emblem on lowers poison damage taken during the game. Also, Kooper is getting Fire Shell as his Super move, so he'll be able to smoke (literally) Pokey Mummies. A damage buff we've made to Fire Flowers also neatly handles them, if you upgrade someone else.
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Jan 14, 2021 05:12
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JustJeff88 posted:Well, that's certainly a firm answer to my question. As Robindaybird pointed out you're not. The reason is some combination of the perils of being overly familiar with the base game, making certain assumptions about the value and quality of difficulty, and related to the first making certain assumptions about who the intended player will be. To the first point and last point Master Quest was created from the point of view of someone who was extremely familiar with the original Paper Mario and knew all of the best strategies and had memorized all the various gimmicks and mechanical interactions of the game. If you look at a lot of similar "Hardtype" mods for games you often get examples where the modder specifically called out and removed certain strategies that were incredibly obviously overpowered. The classic strategy in Paper Mario 64 was usually Charge Up and Power Bounce, sometimes with things like Critical Rush, which let you effortlessly deal a frankly ridiculous amount of damage. Master Quest nerfed this interaction, which is completely justifiable, but the trick is that I am certain there are huge number of players the game who never came upon this interaction in their personal playthroughs. And that's the thing, the creator and the target audience for the mod are people that have already played through this game forward and backward and have an encyclopedic knowledge of it and know all the best strategies of the base game already and have an invested dedication in smashing their head against the wall until they find a place where it gives. Related with that is a problem of perspective, i.e. the perils I mentioned above. If you know a game incredibly well and you assume that the game will only be played by other people who know the game incredibly well and the people who are generally going to be helping out with the project and doing beta tests are also people who know the game incredibly well, you are going to have problems balancing the difficulty for the general public (if you even care, more on that below). If you want a real sense of a game's difficulty you need to get input and feedback from people with a wide range of skills in that game and that genre. Listening only to the most proficient and most experienced people is how we got trainwrecks like the base version of FFT 1.3 which not only required a lot of grinding but also grinding in a very very VERY specific way, the hellscape of Pokémon Reborn with such enjoyable nightmares as T H E B L A C K H O L E, and in actual commercial release land X-COM Terror from the Deep where the devs responded to feedback from all the crazy people who said the original X-COM wasn't hard enough. Related to all that is an assumption that difficulty equals quality. You may or may not be aware of the ongoing stupid backlash that comes to the fore when someone has the sheer, unbelievable, inconceivable gall to suggest that maybe, just maybe it wouldn't be a truly horrifically awful thing if there was some kind of difficulty selection in a Fromsoft videogame. Any time there is ever reporting or speculation on the idea of an easy mode in a Souls adjacent game you will inevitably find a number of small people who are apoplectic with rage at the very concept of it. The reason is inevitably in large part pride and lovely gatekeeping, but also part of that is assuming that the difficulty is somehow inherent in the quality of those games. The mistake is believing that the Souls games and their offshoots are good BECAUSE they are hard. I think it's actually the other way around, the games are good enough that they can get away with being as hard as they are. But it is a very common mistake, there is a genuine belief that making a thing harder makes something better, and if not that then there is a kind of fragile pride in having done such a hard thing and being angry and fearful and resentful that someone else will reach similar achievements more easily and that somehow makes what you've done less good even if you did it on the harder difficulty because... Well I probably don't have to tell you that there are a lot of gamers in the world who are sad fragile angry losers, right? So we have a game made by someone who knows Paper Mario inside and out, generally assuming it will be played by other people who know Paper Mario inside and out, in a culture that broadly overvalues difficulty and overestimates the value of completing superduper hard content and you get something like Master Quest 1.0. Moreover, Thamz made no secret, as was mentioned elsewhere, that he had specifically created much of the hack just for really talented Paper Mario streamers to struggle with. And so there you go, a Romhack made by an extremely experienced player to only be played by other extremely experienced players and designed to make those extremely experienced players struggle and curse and suffer. Frankly, it's amazing that Master Quest 1.0 was as functional and well-designed as it was.
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Jan 14, 2021 05:56
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Reminder to that paper mario was built primarily as a successor to Super Mario RPG, and many of the key parts of it do come from that game in regards to timed hits and blocking. While they had to avoid copyright in a number of places you can see how its a spiritual sequel in a ton of spots. And never forget that RPG was insanely easy. And the hardmode Armageddon hack which much like this added tons of new content to the game suffered from the same issues of you must play it this exact way or its impossible. Its sad that some of the best ways to improve on some of these old games and add touches that add more and improve on areas are form people that want to make the game into a personal ball grinder. Thamz was pretty blatant that part of it for him was just making it so streamers couldn't do anything but the exact way he wanted and only rely on luck to win, regardless of the ability to actually play the game in a way that fit with the way paper mario really was. Random damage and the massive gated boss fights out of nowhere are a great example. TBH doing an LP of Armageddon and how its changed through the years and what's been added would be a good idea when there's time. They actually did the same as Q did and released a jr mode that is much more reasonable and possible. And one of the newer earthbound hardmode hacks is about to release a brand new update that massively changes the game but is more balanced to not be ball crushing hard, including adding in different ways to collect the song stone melodies and increasing the difficulty if you go to areas early or later.
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Jan 14, 2021 11:57
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I probably wouldn't ever LP Super Mario RPG Armageddon (this has been a trip and I don't think I could repeat it). I might play that game someday, though.
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Jan 14, 2021 12:19
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Oh god, SMRPG: Armageddon! I nearly forgot that existed, but I played the hell out of it back in the day (I think I played v7 and v8?). I should look that up at some point and see if it's still being updated. There are a lot of interesting aspects of that one for the purposes of this conversation, honestly. I'm pretty sure Dark Kefka (I think that was his name?) had priorities other than straight difficulty, and they led to the hack getting easier but more interesting every update. (He was a big Final Fantasy fan and loved its big numbers/9999s everywhere aesthetic, and changed around a lot of the formulae for Mario RPG to make it work similarly, but that doesn't necessarily create difficulty, just stat inflation and occasionally gear-quality gates. He also introduced a lot of really cool custom content, but it wasn't necessarily designed to be hard first and foremost. That's not to say it wasn't difficult, but it ended up being more balanced than you might expect, I liked it a lot better than most of its contemporaries in difficulty hacks.) The main game, while hard, was also more or less choose your own difficulty since you could always level up more. And then the endgame/postgame turned into an interesting sort of open world Metroidvania thing, a whole bunch of superbosses became available at once and the trick was figuring out which ones you could beat with your current stats/equipment/etc, they each gave new equipment that would then enable you to beat more of them, etc (and interestingly, Smithy was on par difficulty wise with these, so it wasn't exactly a postgame). I remember him admitting at one point that he designed a lot of bosses without knowing if they were possible to beat or having an intended strategy in mind, he just went with what he thought was cool (or finding ways to port things from other games he liked, a lot of the bosses were from Final Fantasy or Pokemon and who knows what else). The thing that surprised me about that was that it so often worked out well for him: you can easily imagine that leading to just impossible content, but somehow it didn't most of the time (although I definitely remember one or two bosses that were basically solved by a single person and nobody else could get past; I think there was one boss I just couldn't beat in the last version I played, but someone had managed it), I think he had decent instincts that kept him in check. There's probably a lot more I could be saying about it. I don't remember it feeling as punishing as Master Quest, but I think that's at least partially because it had been in earlier versions and it got toned down because the creator got more interested in adding custom content?
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Jan 14, 2021 12:49
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Part of the problem with X-COM TftD was that nobody at the time had realised that difficulty modes didn't work in UFO: Enemy Unknown, since the game would immediately set itself to easy no matter what you picked. The players thought hard mode was piss so asked for the sequel to be harder, the devs knew how hard hard mode was supposed to be and made Terror harder than that.
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Jan 14, 2021 13:39
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Thank you for the insight, everyone. It has been illuminating. It's a moot point since my only copy of Paper Mario is on the Wii U Virtual Console, but part of me wishes that I could LP the game in this thread from the point of a pat amateur, with Quackles' permission of course, while he's away building a better paper tomorrow. It would be an amusing contrast from watching an expert try to break down a brutal hardmode mod.
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Jan 14, 2021 15:40
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If there actually is a Jr. version of SMRPG Armageddon with all the "content" it has, I'd be super interested in checking it out. That's one of the games I actually know pretty back and forth and I've optimized it quite well.
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Jan 14, 2021 16:16
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Quackles posted:I probably wouldn't ever LP Super Mario RPG Armageddon (this has been a trip and I don't think I could repeat it). I might play that game someday, though.
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Jan 14, 2021 18:54
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Another argument I've heard for insane difficulty is this: "Not all movies are supposed to be fun; Requiem for a Dream tries to make the viewer sad and angry. My game is also not supposed to be fun; it's designed to make the player sad and angry. This is my artistic vision, and the ability to endure suffering is one of the skills I'm testing - pain tolerance is as important as reflexes and strategy." It's been made by a lot of romhackers, but you also hear it from dev-teams making all-new games. To paraphrase an interview by the Dark Souls folks: "A theme of the setting is misery. The player's avatar is miserable. If the player is not miserable, that's a failure of immersion. The guide NPC in Dark Souls 2 literally says 'seek misery' every time you talk to her!" Which is fair, honestly. Pathologic, for example, is only good because it's brutally un-fun. But the trick is that you know that going in. When romhackers try to do this, they often base their games in settings that aren't supposed to be challenging, and whose overall design doesn't signpost their intended brutal experience. If Master Quest 1.0 had signposted itself better, I think it would have received less backlash (and less attention period). Imagine if starting a New Game loaded you into a end-game save with stock mechanics and demanded that you beat final Bowser in two turns before it would drop you into the MQ Prologue. Or imagine if the game was invite-only and you had to perform the Badge Duplication Glitch on stream to get a code. Or even if the download page was just gated behind a multiple-choice quiz about obscure game mechanics ("What Power Bounce cap modifier do Jungle Fuzzies have?"), and you had to get it perfect to unlock the download. I think this is why most games built to this philosophy from the ground up unfairly kill the player early on. The first few screens of I Wanna Be The Guy make it very, very clear that this is a game about getting angry, not a game about enjoying yourself. Sorites fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jan 14, 2021 |
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Jan 14, 2021 19:29
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Getting Over Master Quest, With Bennett Quackles.
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Jan 14, 2021 20:25
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To be fair to the fans not wanting multiple difficulty modes, some of that comes with a genuine concern that trying to balance the game once is already taxing enough and trying to cater to multiple audiences might cause resource distribution issues and compromise the overall quality of the product. And being good at games might not be the world's most impressive skill, but it's still drat impressive to be able to achieve the level of split-second decision making/precision/tactics/strategy/what have you that the top-level players exhibit so I also understand the feeling that lowering the bar cheapens genuine effort. When I was a youngling I definitely did my share of using Game Genie codes to trivialize Super Mario World because until I buckled down and got gud I definitely lacked the wherewithal to make it very far past Donut Plains, but now I'm perfectly content to watch livestreams of games if I wanted to see content of games I know I wouldn't get past myself. If SMW had an "automatically clears the level for you" feature like that...uh...one Mario platformer that I can't remember off the top of my head, I definitely would have used it first if I lost patience for finishing a level myself, but on replay I'd probably only use it as a tutorial because I would still want the thrill of personally overcoming that challenge. I've also experienced the "this is bullshit difficulty" experience for both officially published games and fanhacks, and for both my general attitude tends to be "I definitely don't agree with this design philosophy but if somebody else out there likes it I'm not going to begrudge them for being the kind of masochist it takes to enjoy this sort of thing". 
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Jan 14, 2021 20:39
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dotchan posted:To be fair to the fans not wanting multiple difficulty modes, some of that comes with a genuine concern that trying to balance the game once is already taxing enough and trying to cater to multiple audiences might cause resource distribution issues and compromise the overall quality of the product. Yes, this is often an excuse that I've seen used. It's a curious excuse as well, because many people who make this argument also deny that a simple numerical adjustments could create a functional and effective easy mode and that an easy mode would necessarily take resources away from game developments and couldn't be as simple as just tweaking some numbers. The most recent hullabaloo I saw regarding Sekiro I encountered someone who refused to even consider that something as simple as "you have more health and deal more damage" could POSSIBLY be a functional and effective easy mode, even though it would be. I pointed out that this is how SMT has been doing easy modes for years without problems, but no, this person was quite willing to die on that hill. quote:And being good at games might not be the world's most impressive skill, but it's still drat impressive to be able to achieve the level of split-second decision making/precision/tactics/strategy/what have you that the top-level players exhibit so I also understand the feeling that lowering the bar cheapens genuine effort. I've also seen this one too, and it is much more nakedly gatekeeping. I will be blunt with my perspective here: being able to play through a game on an easy mode does not cheapen the skill required to play on a harder difficulty in any way. I've seen this come up again and again and it baffles me. How does someone playing through a Fire Emblem game on Easy or Casual "cheapen" someone else playing through the game on Lunatic/Reverse/Merciless/Maddening? How does someone playing through Persona on Safe take away from someone beating it and all the bonus bosses on Merciless? What does it matter to you if someone else plays through Kingdom Hearts 2.5 on Beginner if you can clear Data Org on Critical LV1? If you can beat Devil May Cry on DMD difficulty with all S-ranks is your pride in your accomplishment so fragile that you feel threatened by someone who can only squeak by on Human difficulty who averages a B-rank? quote:When I was a youngling I definitely did my share of using Game Genie codes to trivialize Super Mario World because until I buckled down and got gud I definitely lacked the wherewithal to make it very far past Donut Plains, but now I'm perfectly content to watch livestreams of games if I wanted to see content of games I know I wouldn't get past myself. If SMW had an "automatically clears the level for you" feature like that...uh...one Mario platformer that I can't remember off the top of my head, I definitely would have used it first if I lost patience for finishing a level myself, but on replay I'd probably only use it as a tutorial because I would still want the thrill of personally overcoming that challenge. Why do you think your experience is that different from anyone else's? People who talk about having easier difficulty options/accessibility options on harder games do not and never have argued is that using these options must be MANDATORY. Even Nintendo with the invincible Tanuki Suit you're talking about made it completely optional, if you don't want to use it you don't HAVE to use it, but people with certain disabilities or complete newcomers to the hobby have an option they can choose to use. Both Hades and Control recently came with a whole option menu of different ways you can make the game easier for yourself that were all entirely optional. You talk here about using a Game Genie until you had enough practice with the game to get better at it and that's exactly what these kind of easy mode/accessibility options are designed to be. The only difference here is that you can find them natively in the game instead of needing to use a third-party tool. It's no different from using training wheels on a bicycle. The assumption is that with enough practice most people will be able to move on to riding a bike without them and probably will. Meanwhile, for the minority that can't for whatever reason having accessibility options means that they can still enjoy this hobby, at no cost to you.
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Jan 14, 2021 21:25
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Omnicrom posted:Why do you think your experience is that different from anyone else's? People who talk about having easier difficulty options/accessibility options on harder games do not and never have argued is that using these options must be MANDATORY. I think it's a 'deliver us from temptation' kind of thing. If the option is there, I might be tempted to us use it - but I don't want to use, so it's better if the hard mode is mandatory. That way, I'll get the most out of the experience. I don't feel this way about most things, but I can see why people do. I wish Skyrim didn't have such a powerful dev console, because I've definitely felt like I cheated myself by using it to skip quests. I've wished the game had forced me to complete them the intended way. Where I get off these people's boat is that they think "Having an easy mode ruins it for me, so surely it would ruin it for everyone. I had a great time with the game, and everyone is just like me, so everyone should experience it just the way I did." quote:Souls-like games - easy mode - just change the numbers? The best counter-argument I've heard here is that the intended experience is for you to die quickly and kill slowly. "This is a giant monster; it just doesn't make sense that you could hurt it much, and it just doesn't make sense that you could survive its grab attack. Those outcomes are unacceptable." Lore-driven thinking seems pretty common among these folks. They are, after all, super-fans. "That's Ar'gr'ar'r the Elephant-Dragon! Having her take more than 1% damage from a spear attack would be completely canon-breaking; it would invalidate the Legend of the Hundred and One Spears!" If this is a starting assumption then a good easy mode would have to be achieved by changing frame data, attack speeds, enemy placement, etcetera. Sorites fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jan 14, 2021 |
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Jan 14, 2021 21:54
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I agree that gatekeeping is elitist and annoying, but so what? They can have their circle of friends with their membership requirements, I can have mine.
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Jan 15, 2021 01:19
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dotchan posted:I agree that gatekeeping is elitist and annoying, but so what? They can have their circle of friends with their membership requirements, I can have mine. The problem is that these noxious loudmouths are not live and let live kind of people. It's not that you can have your membership requirements and they can have theirs, no they want to enforce their assumptions about membership on you and me and everyone else. That's the problem with this kind of gatekeeping and why it is bad for video games in general. By loudly and aggressively filling the airwaves with rage and hate at the concept of any sort of difficulty adjustment or gameplay accommodation you've got a surefire way to turn away possible future fans, ostracize people with handicaps, and create an incredibly toxic atmosphere. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but videogame culture is septic already and does not need this kind of gatekeeping behavior because it only ever makes things worse. Indeed, an important way to get rid of these noxious jerks is to marginalize them and the way you do that is by pointedly ignoring them and moving past them. Having a difficulty adjustments/accessibility features are a ready and viable way of doing that both because you are ignoring the loud, angry losers who rage and hate at the idea of extending a bridge to the rest of the world, and because you are extending a bridge the rest the world and inviting them in to try in complete defiance of those loud, angry losers. So to put it another way, until someone can actually point to a real instance where having an easy mode ruined the game somehow, I am firmly of the stance that accessibility options are always for the better. Not because I need them, probably not because you need them, but because someone out there probably does need them and will appreciate them and because someone else out there who is overall just the worst will throw a fit that people aren't letting them be the one true arbiter of what is TRUE GAMING. I'm cool with the first person being able to give a game a try and want the best for them, and the second person can go gently caress themselves. Mind you I have no idea about you personally or where you fall on the spectrum. And I don't necessarily think that Thamz was explicitly aiming to barr the gates from newcomers for reasons of toxic elitism either. I think they wanted to make a more challenging version of Paper Mario and grief some streamers without giving much regard to the average player who might be interested in Master Quest. But even trying to loop around back to the game I'm still way off topic so I think it's about time to table this discussion.
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Jan 15, 2021 01:49
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I bounced off of Super Mario RPG rather hard; I don't know why. All of the Paper Mario RPGs look fun to me, even the 3DS one that most don't seem to think much of.Omnicrom posted:The problem is that these noxious loudmouths are not live and let live kind of people. It's not that you can have your membership requirements and they can have theirs, no they want to enforce their assumptions about membership on you and me and everyone else. That's the problem with this kind of gatekeeping and why it is bad for video games in general. By loudly and aggressively filling the airwaves with rage and hate at the concept of any sort of difficulty adjustment or gameplay accommodation you've got a surefire way to turn away possible future fans, ostracize people with handicaps, and create an incredibly toxic atmosphere. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but videogame culture is septic already and does not need this kind of gatekeeping behavior because it only ever makes things worse. I just wanted to say that i agree with this wholeheartedly. I've been put off a number of very hard games, Demons' "where do I put the apostrophe?" Souls being an example, and I really resent people who try to keep me or anyone from having difficulty scaling when it costs them nothing. They remade the aformentioned game on PS5 and I think that they added an easier mode, but I have no intention of buying a new console even if I could find one of those. Games are supposed to be fun. In multiplayer games there needs to be an even field and the same rules for all, but in single-player games people should play as they wish. Not long ago, I replayed a Genesis/Mega Drive game that I really enjoyed in my youth that has a very annoying and strict time limit in missions. It does make the game harder, but for me it makes the game much less fun because I can't explore the huge maps and look for secrets. So, I used a cheat to get rid of the time limit. I realise that such difficulty contrivances were common in older games to pad out the play time because early cartridges couldn't hold much content, but I enjoyed the game much more without it. I didn't put anyone off or cheat to get a higher score on the worldwide rankings or whatever, so bollocks to anyone who doesn't like it.
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Jan 15, 2021 02:24
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When it comes to video games, and especially when it comes to indie games or fanworks such as romhacks, I think it is important to keep Neil Gaiman’s old line in mind. It’s unfortunate when people make games I don’t want to play, and there are certainly many games out there that I’m interested in but are too hard for me to really enjoy. But it isn’t a moral failing in the part of those artists and creators not to have instead made a game I would have enjoyed more.
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Jan 15, 2021 06:32
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The thing that made the souls games "good hard" was that they offered very clear teaching and feedback that was delivered through an explicitly intentional failure mechanism. So the saying goes, if something killed you, you had warning and/or you were intended to be able to learn from even a single failure and not have the same problem again. The body collection element reinforced that (along with other things, with caveats and limitations, [soulsborne essay goes here]). Hardtype mods are built on a different framework because they almost never communicate their mechanical challenge or solutions to that challenge, and assume prior knowledge of base game systems. Failure is a normal game's failure, with all the punishment that implies, even though it's treated as if it's an appropriate teaching tool. As mods, they often don't have the same toolset for teaching and asset design, and the people doing the design work struggle to distinguish what is "obvious" for their audience from what is obscure. And that's a best-case scenario not considering all the worse thought processes, gatekeeping, pain-modeled gameplay design that can also come out. People get fixated on the rut of grind or luck based or outlier hypothetical events and then seem to dwell on the appeal of making players enact them.
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Jan 15, 2021 08:00
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my playing the game my way does not in any way affect you or your experience of the game. because, newsflash, if I'm cheating in a singleplayer game I'm not going to talk about it unless the developers made it intentionally obnoxious. see for instance Doom 2016 and Duke Nukem Forever. the former requires stupid shenanigans to enable the in-game cheats because gently caress you, the latter requires you to beat the game to unlock the in-game cheats. in both cases this assholery means I can't play them myself. no, we're not going to play the "brainstorm how to make these games playable for Aerdan without cheating" game, either. because the resulting games wouldn't be fun for you, and it's unfair of me to demand that my experience be the experience everyone gets. and yet I'm supposed to entertain this statement inverted for dipshits who get their jollies from grinding their faces off on belt sanders? there's no one true way to enjoy a game and anyone who wants to act like there is can get the gently caress out of gaming.
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Jan 15, 2021 11:19
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http://ngplus.net/index.php?/files/file/51-super-mario-rpg-armageddon/ is the OG hard mode hack http://ngplus.net/index.php?/files/file/41-super-mario-rpg-armageddon-content-mode/ is the easier mode like master quest jr. If you look on the site they have the entire mechanic section and new additions. It is really interesting how over the last couple years its gone from an insane hardmode hack to a very detailed and well done hack that adds tons of new content. When mother2 deluxe releases I can post a link here too, its along the same lines of coming from a legit hardmode addition to earthbound to now being extremely welldone with tons of new additions.
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Jan 15, 2021 15:05
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Thanks for the links! Hopefully trying it out blind to a lot of its changes with the content mode version won't be a terrible mistake.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:40
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I don't think you should have problems, from what I remember. I haven't played this version, though.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:58
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Is content mode still harder than base SMRPG? Like, is it aiming to be reasonable, but still not the piss easy of SMRPG originally or the stupid difficulty of the original hack, or is it aiming to be same difficulty as the original material?
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Jan 20, 2021 22:41
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After having played Armageddon Content Mode up to Barrel Volcano so far, I can say that yes it's aiming to be harder. But it's hard for maybe the wrong reasons. It all goes down to one simple change they made - timing. Timing now matters so much more than it did before. Physical attacks require two timings and if you don't nail them both your damage is piss poor. It gets multiplied by like, 12x or something ridiculous like that. Defense also cuts damage a lot more than before, and spells that aren't AOE can be guarded as well, making it more important than ever. This wouldn't be so bad if the timings themselves weren't also made tighter, with reduced frame windows for getting things timed correctly and even tighter windows for better performances. Even familiar spells that don't have the weird double timing can still feel like you're nailing them only about 1/3 as often as before. And when the penalty for missing a timing is almost like missing entirely, your actions feel wasted and it's not great. But other than that it's perfectly fair and well-designed and has a lot of neat ideas. I'll maybe write something more detailed later about that part, once I have the full context of postgame challenges.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:53
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 Fun fact: Even in the base game of SMRPG there was a (I think 1-frame) window to block an attack perfectly and take 0 damage, but making that quasi-required is not good design.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:56
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Alxprit posted:But other than that it's perfectly fair and well-designed and has a lot of neat ideas. I'll maybe write something more detailed later about that part, once I have the full context of postgame challenges. (also I'm running it on a 3ds  so it lags and that doesn't help)
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Jan 20, 2021 22:58
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I won't lie, I've been abusing the hell out of snes9x's Braid-style rewind to nail timings every time just because I want to see what kind of weird cringy stuff is hiding in the endgame.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:59
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DACK FAYDEN posted:(also I'm running it on a 3ds I recommend SNES emulating only on a New 3DS. I was able to play SMRPG Master Quest (a difficulty hack that bumps up the stats but does almost nothing else) without much issue, but I know old 3DSes can't really take it.
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Jan 20, 2021 23:00
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If I remember right, some emulators had real problems with it, certain areas/mechanics absolutely broke zsnes (granted, a lot of things break zsnes, I don't recommend using it any more in general) and I think they recommended only using snes9x (I don't think any testing was done in other emulators). I'm not sure what you're capable of using on the 3ds, but it might be worth restarting on PC if you're already having problems? I forgot about the double-timing but that's definitely a thing. I will say that, as I recall, a lot of the late-game/endgame weapons end up being easier to time consistently than the earlier ones, so it kind of gets more forgiving as you go on (at least on the attack). Also, on defence, perfect timing no longer blocks all damage (I think that change was made between version 7.7 and 8.0), I think normal blocking cuts damage to 50% and perfect blocking is 25% or something like that; even on the hard version of the hack I remember being fine as long as I could get the 50% blocks most of the time? I do remember some spells (in particular, Peach's ultimate) being completely useless without timing but doing insane damage if you get it; those are probably worth practising, unfortunately. (That said, that particular spell had decent audio cues so I didn't find it that hard to figure out.) Defence is the most important stat for survivability because the formula was changed to be multiplicative rather than additive; every point of defence matters, and the difference between squishy mage and tank in this is 2-3 points (you can see this if you look at the characters' base stats).
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Jan 20, 2021 23:52
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Explopyro posted:as I recall, a lot of the late-game/endgame weapons end up being easier to time consistently than the earlier ones, so it kind of gets more forgiving as you go on (at least on the attack). ... that's completely absurd please tell me they didn't do that intentionally.
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Jan 20, 2021 23:57
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Quackles posted:I recommend SNES emulating only on a New 3DS. I was able to play SMRPG Master Quest (a difficulty hack that bumps up the stats but does almost nothing else) without much issue, but I know old 3DSes can't really take it. Having tried this, I would agree. If you don't have a New 3DS you don't have one, but if you do I recommend it.
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Jan 21, 2021 02:27
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Supremezero posted:... that's completely absurd please tell me they didn't do that intentionally. I don't think so? That was just how it felt to me. (It might have been something to do with the fact that a lot of the late-game weapon animations were new custom things, so it was clearer which parts of the animation and/or audio cues corresponded to the button presses?) I could be talking utter nonsense, it's been several years since I played the hack.
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Jan 21, 2021 02:28
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JustJeff88 posted:Having tried this, I would agree. If you don't have a New 3DS you don't have one, but if you do I recommend it. (sorry to derail this thread, obviously would rather hear about Paper Mario)
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Jan 21, 2021 17:49
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Yeah, I'm on new 3DS, I think it's just a poor choice of emulator. What's everyone's preferred one for SNES? If you can live without savestates etc. I think there's a SNES VC injector. Basically just uses the n3DS's built-in SNES emulation.
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Jan 21, 2021 17:56
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Mario RPG uses the SA1, which I don't think the VC emulator supports. snes9x_3ds is probably your best bet.
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Jan 21, 2021 18:07
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Yeah, I'm on new 3DS, I think it's just a poor choice of emulator. What's everyone's preferred one for SNES? I know SMRPG in particular is one of the more exacting games to run. SNES classic... I mean, what? Who would use endorse :files: on a dead gay comedy forum?
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Jan 21, 2021 19:23
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Last I've checked libretro for the 3DS was the general recommended general emulator that can run poo poo up to PSX games. Should do SNES very well.
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Jan 21, 2021 19:38
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I've always had the best luck with snesx regardless of platform
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Jan 21, 2021 23:44
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