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Hello Thread! 1) Glad to see a new thread immediately devolve into genre definitions 2 pages in, gave me a chuckle 2) Dark souls is just a bad Severance: Blade of Darkness rip off. Ergo, Hollow Knight is Conan-themed. 3) More seriously, are there any classic Castlevania games that are playable on the PC (and more importantly, *worth* going back to as a new player)? The only one I ever touched was Aria of Sorrow ages ago, which I enjoyed. 4) Likewise, Is Metroid: Samus Returns (2017) playable on PC? I loved all 2d Metroids (Fusion being the lowest point imo?) and have just heard of this title from wikipedia.
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Jan 29, 2023 09:23
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RC Cola posted:Beat steamworld Dig and steamworld Dig 2. Highly recommend. I played/completed Steamworld Dig back in 2014 for 5.7 hours, and remember nothing of it other than it was 'meh' and I was really bored and desperate. Something about gemstones as you go down? Anyways, I assume the sequel is very different?
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Feb 27, 2023 21:44
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I think most titles since have been a bit more careful about sequence breaking, with very locked down movement patterns and any 'breaks' being very intentional. I can't think of any breaks off of the top of my head that aren't either condoned, or involve some very buggy behavior. For a similar-yet-different idea, where the sequence breaking comes from hindsight and/or acquired player skills, there's TUNIC which hides cleverly evil shortcuts in plain sight. But that's not a 'vania.
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Feb 28, 2023 09:20
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I think Super Metroid lent into the "more is more" philosophy (probably as a consequence of the SNES upgrade) which was funny when toggling various suit/gun upgrades, but made the movement too... technical? Like have you ever felt the need to moonwalk backwards while aiming diagonally upwards while shooting missiles? Well, you can!! The silver lining from that is Samus and her suit feels more like an human-shaped tank rather than a platforming acrobat, so pulling off small hops to dodge shots feels a bit more like an accomplishment. Very small silver lining, I know. Later titles undid a lot of the surplus nuanced controls, which is fine.
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Mar 3, 2023 02:39
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Kassad posted:Blasphemous 2 : Blaspheme Harder Oh good, it has damage number popups, that's always a good sign. Sarcasm aside, if they avoid any design pratfalls for release this time around, it's almost assuredly printing money so good on them.
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Apr 20, 2023 01:12
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BurningBeard posted:Wasn't sure if it was just me or the game. I heard it got updated and really wanted to get into it. What got added and changed? Ignoring the DLC, the major changes was how some of the missions/plot had missable content (which sucked) so they mostly fixed that, and they added in a secondary fast travel system since the first was a little too onerous. The difficulty felt fine, apart from insta-death pits which are unpopular nowadays. As for dying, all you had to do was make it to the spot where you died to restore yourself, or use a $ currency that's plentiful and expendable at an awkward prayer location. Any comparisons to Souls-games always amuse me; it makes me think the speaker is telling more about themselves than the title in question. Again, they could do nothing but rehash the first game and it'll be great and make a billion bucks, but boy howdy do damage number popups give me the willies, they're almost invariably attached to a shoddy system.
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Apr 20, 2023 02:16
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That reminds me, I played Aria of Sorrow (on an emulator, shh!) ages ago and really enjoyed it. Steam has an "Advance Collection" with a few other GBA titles, is it worth getting or did I like play the best of the bunch?
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May 17, 2023 09:12
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Play AM2R, aka Another Metroid 2 Remake, it's on the PC for free. It's favors backporting good features over fidelity to the gameboy original, and that's totally fine. It's a good romp, go for it.
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Jul 5, 2023 14:27
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:Blasphemous is best when it isn’t trying too hard to be dark souls. The lore and “penitent one” talk comes across as juvenile. Dang, I thought I was in the Unpopular Opinions thread for a moment. Most of Blasphemous's hook comes from the Catholicism dialed up to eleven, I take it you weren't raised in a place where it was omnipresent and colours everything. I'm glad they're making a sequel, I'm sure it'll be mechanically better while keeping the right "lore", as you put it. edit: Holy crap the thread got a burst of activity from this lol, super beaten. Serephina fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 04:54
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edit: Removed a lovely post. Please stop comparing everything to dark souls, that's all I ask.
Serephina fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Jul 16, 2023 |
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Jul 16, 2023 04:01
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Martman posted:whoa dude. no need to bring quest 64 into this, it was a civil discussion I played an hour or two of Quest64 over at a friends house. I liked it!
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Jul 18, 2023 05:27
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Uh, I'm not sure about the DLC areas, but I got the original 'good' ending by accidentally clowning on every boss. First run near the 1.0 release I did the whole 'git gud with the sword' thing, and for my second (successful) run I told myself I'd focus more on spells, and so for bosses I'd equip all the +spell dmg stuff and use the most expensive spell which shoots a huge vertical ray into the sky. It jaw-droppingly took around 40% of a bosses hp off per cast, at least. I, uh, may not have learnt how to fight the final few bosses 'properly'.
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Aug 1, 2023 01:16
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Edit: removing me being puzzled by the simplest platform ever. Blasphemous 2 is great fun. Less fluffy/grim than the previous one, but the weapons are cool and things are a bit more cleanly done. Serephina fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 03:52
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Yea, I got the double-jump as my first boss fight. I refused to give up, probably took a few hours and I had to swap weapons to the censer since that mofo had so much goddamn hp. By the time I bothered to do the 2nd and 3rd mandatory bosses, I obliterated them on my first try, no healing potions needed - those extra upgrades are fierce. ----- Unrelated, but something I see a lot in both metroidvanias and even other platformers (like Tomb Raider etc) is the painfully obvious signposting about "you don't have this ability yet, come back later". Like man, try to put a bit of mystery to it or something, like the movement skills are organic and the hurdles blend into the background. Various games' double jumps are ok about this, but literally everything else is a neon coloured doodad or barrier that screams "come back when you have the McGuffin".
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Sep 6, 2023 06:23
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Oh Jesus Christ the penultimate (?) boss of Blasphemous 2 has an intro speech, which he repeats on retries, and has another upon entering his second form. It's unskippable.
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Sep 7, 2023 14:23
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Spermanent Record posted:Felt more like a 2D Zelda. So like, the good ones?
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Sep 19, 2023 11:06
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It's curious that people are citing the walk-around-a-lot as a flaw in a MV, to me that's once of the most crucial parts of the games. Like, I spent a lot of time wandering around Super Metroid unspoilered, I like how it reinforces your familiarity with areas and so when something clicks you immediately know where to go experiment with it. So for Blasphemous 2, I actually felt it was too streamlined. Like I knew what I was supposed to be doing in every area (get to the boss), the path was mostly linear with any revisitation being by my own choice when hunting cherubs in the post-game. I actually felt there was too many fast travel options in patched B1 and B2! I had missed a few obvious things as I never walked past a few rooms a second time ever, oops. ------ On a slightly different topic, people cite Dark Souls influences everywhere, so I just played the first two games a few months ago and I gotta say I'm actually delighted to see the bloodstain mechanic and walk-back-to-the-boss runs trickle across all genres. It's like when bottomless pits started being non-fatal however many decades ago; it's just a straight up improvement that I'm glad to see widely adopted.
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Sep 22, 2023 00:10
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Fusion gets no credit with me for absolutely anything; locking the player into sectors that had to be solved corridor-style-linearly is the antithesis of why I play Metroid, and the awkward love story was just salt on the wound.
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Oct 2, 2023 11:43
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They very may have well been! But I can't recall any of that, as all the good had been soured and overruled by the overall experience. I know it's a pretty pretentious thing to call stuff "ruined", but sometimes things are more or less than the sum of their parts. A an example of this going the other way was Zero Mission, which had a much-lambasted stealth section at the end, which didn't bother me as it was five minutes long in an otherwise amazing game and liberating epilogue.
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Oct 2, 2023 11:58
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Props for having a trailer that's almost pure gameplay footage, at the very least. That still image make him look like he's tucked his nose in beneath his collar like some sort of turtle tho, ho ho ho. Serephina fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Nov 16, 2023 |
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Nov 16, 2023 03:20
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Gave it a whirl, died a bunch on the tutorial boss. Me sucking aside, the very brief content I saw seemed less influenced and more copy & paste. I had a good laugh when the explanation for the starting classes just popped up a bunch of numbers, drat.
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Nov 16, 2023 09:16
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Are you telling me that games that slavishly ape successful titles are just cargo-culting, and not carefully refined labours of vision and skill? Shocking!
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Nov 20, 2023 02:40
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DS1&2 had a persistent map that you traversed and could revisit areas in (for not much reason save maybe a secret powerup), but the shortcuts where just doors with keys you found. If Zelda1 wasn't a 2d metroidvania (lol), then DS isn't a 3d one. edit: This is in no way a defense of the game, if we want to call it a rehash of another IP with a dimension chopped off to save on assets and plumb a different market, then by all means it's a 2d Dark Souls! Serephina fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 06:56
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The only enduring effect your initial choice has is how that weapon will unlock its higher tier perks first, over the other two. By the end of the game they've all evened out. Do note that some perk picks apply to all weapons, not just the one they're attached to. Things with quite vague phrasing like "base weapon damage up", without using the weapon's proper name, are global buffs. So it's worth perusing the sword upgrades even if you never plan on using it.
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Nov 24, 2023 01:34
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Yea, don't be afraid to spend money on purging guilt. The first time you do it it might feel like a bitter pill, but it turns out that they quickly give you more money than you can use and I only felt the need to purge guilt like 3-4 times over the entire playthrough. And to reiterate, it will accumulate via chip damage despite getting back your ghost every time. I was confused too.
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Nov 24, 2023 22:35
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It's one of those things that sounds terrible on paper, but it turns out the execution is perfectly fine. It's only even brought up since it's so dang subtle that people only notice it after a long period of time (or dying 20x on the same boss). The currency you get just for walking around far, far outstrips it; it's mostly there as a guarantee that the player will visit the confessor to kick off his storyline. There's also a charm to equip that stops it, if the psychic toll was becoming overwhelming.
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Nov 25, 2023 06:50
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I also went through all of Blasphemous2 without ever thinking of even trying to parry a boss's attack, in hindsight I really shoulda tried that on both Eviterno and the spinning-top boss who gave you double-jump. I cheesed Eviterno with the time stop flask upgrade combined with the summonable ghost-dude, seeing how he was the pinnacle fight of both games I kinda wish I'd 'learnt him proper'.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:56
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I was really not feeling Xanthiom Zero, after 45 minutes it just felt like a very by-the-book clone of Metroid, but more primitive and with clunkier controls/physics. Was gonna refund it as I do for anything that can't captivate me within two hours, but when I got to Steam's refund prompt for $1.47 I just couldn't do it, felt like such a goddamn cheapskate. I might let them have the money out of a mix of pity and respect, really should be supporting fully realised games that cost less than a pack of mints. Serephina fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 02:27
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The Spanish voicepack was recorded post-release only once the sales rolled in, they wisely knew that their audience was English speakers and clearly had an indie budget. I'd take a break before considering Blasphemous 2, but do let us know how you feel about it when you get there.
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Jan 12, 2024 02:11
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God, Death's Door, what a total waste of a premise/aesthetic. Yes, ravens working in the afterlife, very Grim Fandango, now let's never mention it again after the first two minutes. Christ.
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Jan 30, 2024 01:32
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Kheldarn posted:The Difficult and Souls-Like tags on Steam keep me away from Hollow Knight. I had a long rant about that tag, prior to playing the Souls games. After binging DS1-3 in the past two years, I can now revise my opinion to... a long rant still, those comparisons are goddamn stupid. It basically boils down to a bunch of morons who've played only a single video game in their life seeing the save/heal/respawn mechanic and hooting like a bunch of monkeys. They are nothing alike.
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Mar 4, 2024 00:03
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Min reqs of twelve gigs of ram sure is a thing, boy howdy!
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Apr 2, 2024 15:44
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Good news! They patched in a second, much more fine-grained fast travel system that unlocks sometime around midgame, since while I liked the fog doors apparently most players don't enjoy backtracking as much as myself and the devs do, lol. Keep upgrading with those MacGuffins, and it'll show up.
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May 9, 2024 02:21
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