instead of not playing ball x pit i finished ball x pit. i don’t have much i feel like saying about it?
actually i guess i kinda do. some gameplay spoilers
you get some good unlocks as you go on and every new character has a certain gimmick like one just plays the level and chooses power ups for you. another one has a big shield that acts like a paddle. there’s a character that shoots from the back that i was really trying to understand but then as you go you gain the ability to bring in another character to double up character gimmicks. so i found a good balance with that character and another one that makes it so balls just bounce when they reach the bottom of the screen. so if you get a lot of small balls and have a high crit rate you end up with a wild ball time.
i thought i would be way more into the town building stuff but i eventually just made it so my guys ping ponged off of whatever building i needed to build or upgrade and left everything disorganized. the readability of the structures was a bit tough to follow but maybe that’s because i was playing it on the switch 2 in handheld?
anyway now that i am done im just poking at a few other things but everything i thought was clicking doesn’t work out eventually for some reason.
Been spending a lot of time with the Playstation and its many great games, including and especially Final Fantasy Tactics. Timeless classic, goes without saying. But it’s also a danger game, because I see numbers going up, with a tangible reward associated with that, and now I can’t stop playing the game, and cannot stop thinking about playing the game when I am not playing the game. I am obsessed with character builds, and turning Ramza’s ragtag group of mercenaries into walking implements of devastation. Right now I have Ramza as a Squire/Geomancer, accompanied by a Chemist/Knight, a Monk/Thief, an Oracle/Samurai, and a Summoner/Calculator.
Anyways, I’m just trying to put off the inevitable: that fuckin Wiegraf fight. The 1-on-1 duel isn’t the hard part, but the follow up where he does summon magic that kills off the rest of my party. I am going to avoid that situation this time around.
Napple tale and Planet Laika are getting played? My unfinished fantasy world faves.
Laika is a fucking mood of its own. It will never leave you.
What if every element was off kilter in the exact same direction such that it all fits back together again. I had to take a break because it was getting to me. The abstract battle system is so fun.
Beware: There is a memory setting in some PSX emulators that will cause doors not to load properly resulting in an un-recoverable state. But I cannot recall what it is. Good Luck out there
Killed my first two Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus today with @Gimelrey. Going to try to leave it all uncommented upon until after I’ve beaten the whole game.
Also got to the part where you rally Steiner and Vivi in Final Fantasy IX on my 3DS so I guess I’m committing to that.
Played through a few hours of Septera Core and got disappointed that the fun, faux 90s anime pre-rendered art created by a 90s western studio was attached to a poorly presented story and crappy, shallow game play(FF4 style with long animations).
Planet Laika is sooo good! I played it one Christmas late at night by myself and felt like I was slowly losing touch with reality… I love the way it constantly toys with your expectations.
Small word of warning: there is a scene later that deals with some CSA stuff in ways that I found to be kinda brutal. Definitely feel like it’s a game that could use with a content warning of some kind because parts of it get super dark.
Last night after a 10 year hiatus (having been previously frustrated into walking away), I decided to face the bugbear in my backlog: Bloodborne. I played a bit last night, and picked a weirdo origin because I thought a firearms specialisation would amuse me. But the starting stats for Noble Scion are definitely Hard Mode for the unskilled like me.
I got frustrated again, uninstalled. Woke up this morning and reinstalled. Clearly a finesse build of any kind is not going to work for me, I need to go with brute force and probably a ton of vitality to make up for my boneheaded play.
Gascoigne is a big wall early in Bloodborne, and then the game becomes more manageable if you can get past him. Well, not that all of the bosses after him are strictly easier, but they’re not significantly harder and you have more practice and build options later. The next big difficulty spikes are in the later Chalice Dungeons and DLC, which you can both safely ignore if you’re not feeling it (I especially recommend ignoring the Chalice Dungeons)
He drove me away 10 years ago, though I’d managed to kill the Cleric Beast.
My dexterity, reaction times and vision have all faded since then so I was having trouble with the trash mobs. Again though because the extremely low starting vitality of Noble Scion meant every mistake was near-fatal, and the long windup on the transformed mode of the Threaded Cane meant I was making a lot of timing errors.
I think I’ll try again with Hunter’s Axe or Saw Blade. I used the latter in my first aborted playthrough a decade ago and it served me well enough. Also think I need to switch back to Blunderbuss, I find it hard to aim guns in this game so I need the spread.
One trick is to “create” extra time to react by taking note of a tell in their attack animations. Although the pacing is faster than the early Souls games, prior to the DLC, there’s still enough delay between the start of enemies’ animations and the hit for middle-aged reflexes to work fine, in my experience. (The other trick is to invest in VIT first but you’re already on top of that!)
As I recall, there’s no need to aim if you use the lock-on feature. Turning lock-on and off during a battle can be a distraction, but I found it a bit easier to do than account for the extra delay on the blunderbuss.
I remember practicing the guns a lot on the big ogre guys in the early game. Their gun-stun timing is particularly visible (it’s when their weapon is maximally behind them and their belly exposed) and they drop lots of blood vials, which I needed for all the Gascoigne attempts in any case. Maybe try both types of gun against those guys and see which one feels more reliable before deciding.
I’m not particularly great at Souls games but I remember I was using the cane and I beat Gascoigne on the second try without even finding the music box. I would recommend the cane
Unless your goal is to overcome the challenge of boss fights, I’d recommend summoning other players to help with them. Whenever I play a FromSoftware game I do the non-boss parts alone because I want them to be scary and then if a boss gives me trouble I don’t hesitate to get help.
Don’t listen to Felix. He is pretty good at Souls games, and also I’m pretty sure he played Bloodborne on launch week, when bosses sometimes had an AI glitch that made them way easier than intended.
For me it was Amelia that I beat on the second try due to the glitch. All she did was just repeatedly crawl on the floor towards me, like the mutant king in Demon’s Souls
I found Bloodborne very difficult at first but made it through. I tried all the starting weapons and I felt like the axe was by far the easiest to use well. I love the long range overhead strike on the transformed form. Later on I had a great time with the pizza cutter DLC weapon.
the threaded cane is a whip / dagger, something that does more stagger may make things easier. also the main thing bloodborne wants you to do is get in really close to enemies and dodge to the side when they lunge at you but that remains a challenge somehow all the way through to the end
somehow this is also me. just killed the cleric beast but really only because i used like 7 molotovs, yeah eat shit motherfucker. this other guy seems hard
