I got House of Necrosis and beat it same week, now working on the postgame dungeon.
It’s pretty easy as long as you’re carefully monitoring your progress, because you basically always have a “rescue crystal” that resets the run but sends you back to base with all the items you have on you. As such it’s mainly about playing smart and finding gear with the right combination of affixes that suit your playstyle. I quite like that every monster has a spell you can learn permanently which can be used once per run; adds a little collecting minigame to playing AND gives you a wide selection of one-shot helpers to deal with impossible situations.
My issue was more with the other side of the gate, Ramza was fine but the 4 weak monsters team got to fight 6 people at immediate or turn 2 range. The trick to that battle is to equip lightning equipment, which monsters can’t use.
Anyway, cockatrice and red+blue chocobo carried me until Chapter 4, then I got a huge roster upgrade with Dragon Reis + a behemoth king, and immediately after a tiamat, which is maybe not quite Orlandu-tier but close. So the rest of the game shouldn’t be an issue
I have lost respect for every monster type I haven’t mentioned here. They’re so bad
Playing Dragon Quest 3 remake and I’m at the pyramid. It’s been so long since I played this I forgot it’s just the basement where you can’t use magic so my dumb ass explored the whole place and got all the way to the boss fight using only physical attacks and abilities to heal during battle after running out of medicinal herbs lol. I was down one party member too so the battle started off wrong but realized I could use magic when zin worked but it wasn’t long before I just gave up and let my party wipe.
I was level 15-16 when I started and gained a level while in so while it was a bit tough but possible with no magic it should be more than doable with magic and not needing to grind another level out. Though that will likely happen during the attempt. I also forgot to get the golden claws while I was there so I would have been going back anyway.
Still a really fun game, I’m using the hero, two monster wranglers and a gadabout (so I can switch to Sage when the time comes). I don’t know why I picked two monster wranglers. You really only need one to catch monsters but I read they were real heavy hitters in the later game so I guess I was thinking about that. I think I’ll switch one of them to something else. Maybe a priest so I can switch them to a warrior after learning all their priest spells. I don’t know something basic like that.Tell me your favorite Dragon Quest 3 job combos.
I had no interest in engaging with Bloodstained’s crafting mechanic during a regular playthrough, being both entirely optional and the game being perfectly beatable without it. Randomizer mode, however, completely upends the logic of what creates what, with some absolutely nuts effects.
Some highlights:
Getting four copies of the most powerful sword by disassembling a single item.
Having to disassemble my way into getting two rare weapons so I can turn them into a normally common armor. Making things worse is that somehow, the game doesn’t actually acknowledge that I have a certain weapon, even though I have multiple copies.
While the food creation isn’t randomized, the availability of items is, meaning that one ends up having to do workarounds in order to get basic items. I can’t get milk or flour in the wild; every time I need them I end up having to disassembling something else, like cheese or cake.
Being forced to disassemble pie crust into its base ingredients so I could then recreate the pie crust, solely so I can buy it at the store. This also means I have a source for cookies, which I can’t make any other way and is the thing I actually wanted in the first place.
so, a friend (and former IC/SB poster, dmauro) was in town for the weekend and came by. we were able to get some game time in together tonight and played through the game in 2-player mode.
unlike most beat’em ups (in my experience), the game is actually a lot easier with two people. it helps that he’s good at beat’em ups, too, of course, but it felt real good and simple to gang up together on enemies and just take them out. this is really a great game to play with someone, if you have the opportunity. just very satisfying and not really frustrating in any perceivable way. even if it felt a bit easier, it was a fun time and he felt impressed with the experience.
sadly, I must report that there is no fight at the end between Billy and Jimmy. whoever lands the last hit on Willy “wins” and rescues Marion. maybe that’s how it should work, thematically and in terms of story, but I was really hoping we’d get to go head to head.
at the very least, i’m happy i’ve now played through this version of the game in every conceivable configuration.
play Double Dragon One. if you like it, consider donating $$, if you can
Tried out the demo of Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era but the graphics and the UX made me a bit miserable. Absolutely no idea what I’m looking at half of the time. Looks like the few Warcraft maps I made as a kid by randomly scattering crap around.
Below is literally the first screencap of III I grabbed off Google. Your castle is massive, the colors are popping, the roads are used to guide your attention, the forests do that too while enhancing the fantasy of governing a coherent space, the lumber mill has tree stumps next to it so you immediately know what it is, same with ore pit which has a huge cart full of ore next to it so it’s impossible to confuse for anything else, the structures with beneficial effects have friendly shapes and glowy VFX so you know they’re good for you (unlike every risk and reward thing, these immediately look hostile), and so on. It’s like a trashy fantasy book cover, but it understands the value of an instantly understandable cartoonish shorthand. It shouldn’t be this hard to equal!
The Olden era community seems enamored with surface level III and V fanservice and jumps at everyone who says “hey this is kinda ugly”. Oh well. You no longer build by going into the town hall and browsing through large icons of potential constructions, you press a mobile-style abstract Construct button and pick a small icon from a tech tree. A lot of stuff I expected to be explained with a right mouse button click is completely non-interactive. In the screenshot below, only two or three buildings are interactable in any way, and the huge castle is NOT one of them so good luck guessing which ones are these whenever you first enter a new castle.
The mage guild is no longer a building displaying arcane scrolls when you get inside its halls but something you build so that you can unlock nodes in a generic looking skill tree. Some of the ideas on how to evolve the mechanics seem legitimately interesting but the devs seem completely uninterested in these little joyful details building a perspective of a fantasy lord, the experience is closer to tapping at my smartphone screen and trying to figure out League of Legends: Wild Rift. Not my cup of tea!
Someone less lazy than me should write something about how the rise of a dedicated class of “UX designer” specialists in games has resulted in worse UIs across the board
there was that super funny moment when Elden Ring and the second Horizon game came out where UX designers on twitter were openly despairing about Elden Ring’s success. I think that was pretty illustrative of the point, but yes someone should codify it more substantially.
When I was very young, I thought I was bad at videogames. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s kind of fucked up to grow up in a house where the games are Q*Bert and Keen 4.
Played Lego Voyagers with a friend. Not very challenging (The game is obviously intended for individuals much younger than us, so this is not surprising or an issue). The music, aesthetics, and general vibe was lovely! And the “story” that was narrated was simple, but cute and more emotional than one may expect from a Lego game.
If there’s any parents out there who are looking for a cooperative game that two siblings can play together, I absolutely recommend this. Also a good game to play with your child, though you’ll probably end up taking a back seat in terms of problem solving and logic, and let your little one do the thinking and just give you directions in that case, since as I mentioned you’d probably breeze through it before they had a chance to do their own thinking.
If it helps/makes a difference at all in terms of who will be playing the red brick and who will be playing the blue brick, the blue brick is the one that “grows up” and becomes an astronaut, while the red one helps them train and sends them off.
My quest to find a soulslike that doesn’t wear out my patience at the first boss encounter continues unfulfilled. Lies of P is the latest one I’ve bounced off of. Too bad I really digged the look of the protagonist and probably could have got on board with its vibe which felt very Dishonored.
I liked the AE86 as my first car, but going to the 180SX felt pretty bad, it was definitely a boat. took a lot of playing with settings after every upgrade to get it manageable. by the time it was fully upgraded for the level available to me when the car was relevant it finally felt pretty ok, but god damn after I beat whatever level that was to unlock the next tier of cars I moved to the RX-8 and that car feels way, way better. probably gonna get an S2000 as well even though they’re the same tier just because it’s an S2000.
Played some Inertial Drift. I can’t believe I slept on this game. All timer of a control setup, you use the right stick to control the angle of the drift. But each car has slightly different ways to initiate the drift. There’s also four intensities of steering depending on which stick is activated and whether the brakes or gas is pressed. setting my brain on fire with how good it is. The game is really trying to be Indie Ridge Racer Type 4 in it’s music and presentation too, which is nice to see.
