I don’t think you actually have to do the minigames at Gold Saucer, you just have to go to every square. Still dumb and unnecessary but o well. I love minigames. I love Chadley. It’s a good game.
3 Likes
I gotta say Violet brought in more good new designs than many recent entries. I encourage rostering one. Espathra is the shit
3 Likes
Alien: Isolation (PS4): the more i play of this thing, the less i like it. as a matter of fact, i believe i’m going to have to double down on my earlier take and say That One IGN review, far from being overly harsh, was if anything not harsh enough (which is just God Hand all over again)
terrifying, forsooth. stressful, i’ll grant you, but then again so is trying to fill out a 27B-6 while nursing a raging hangover at ten in the morning on International Bring the Biggest Wasp Nest You Can Find to the Office Day
Edit: actually, forget IGN- just read Tom Chick’s review
and then read his review of Saints Row IV, while you’re at it
Edit#2: i had hoped to salvage something from this, but five or six deaths into my third or fourth attempt at the sixth mission- which, incidentally, is even worse than mission five- the end was already a forgone conclusion. the exploding gas main was merely the last straw
9 Likes
I don’t even know how many hours. I think about 20.
- Finished all except the post-game part of Path of the Titans
- Finished all except the fight against Cassiopea for the Team Star missions (including the fight against Clive)
- Have seven badges
Fights are suddenly harder than my team is prepared for. That’s kind of annoying. These games have always waited until the last minute to punish you for anything but it’s annoying that this game in particular is also doing it. Can still probably power through it by looking up opponent rosters ahead of time. And by having 70 revives.
7 Likes
25 posts were merged into an existing topic: Full-Life
Been playing Arc Raiders with friends. It feels really well designed and tooled. I’ve been bouncing around between extraction shooters with my friends for a while now ever since I stopped playing Tarkov. This is not Tarkov, whatsoever, but they are not trying to be Tarkov, and that’s a good thing. The gunplay is fun, sort of comparable to Hunt Showdown in that the weapons are all sort of awkward and clunky to use, and gunfights last quite a while on average. If anything I might say its better than Hunt Showdown, because in Hunt Showdown, you could still be one-shot head sniped without any counterplay other than just having been more careful, which I never jived with. In Arc Raiders, it looks like its impossible to get instantly knocked, and the weapons which can two-shot you have low rates of fire.
Anyways, my opinion on video games doesn’t actually matter, I know nothing. I mostly just came to say that so far, the most fun and engaging moments for me have been when my friends and I come across another team, propose over proximity chat that we just be chill and go about our ways, the other team ignores us and tries to kill us, and then we end up winning the gunfight and I get to stand over them while they crawl around while yelling “YOU SHOULD HAVE LISTENED WHEN WE OFFERED PEACE, DIPSHITS” over the voice before ending them.
5 Likes
This is a good point. The rise of HD-2D is probably to blame for the bloom though, and the bloom is botching the effect
Looking at something like Valkyrie Profile or Symphony of the Night or (surely) Moon on a CRT is a wonder while looking at Stray Children is downright unpleasant
I haven’t had the desire to go back to it in the last week at all…
3 Likes
25 hours exactly, at least per the emulator’s count. Actual in game time might be slightly less. All main plotlines complete. Penny defeated and talked to, Elite Four defeated, Nemona defeated. The only thing left is the area zero shenanigans, which I am half considering just because this game has been both easy and faster than expected.
I only lost once in the elite four, to the last of the steel team. After that I started unapoligetically using revive + rocky helmet + pp depletion attrition stats, switching out pokemon deliberately to entice depletion of super effective moves against those pokemon specifically. Ended up doing a depressing amount of the work this way but it’s done.
I am now, technically, done with my goal of completing every generation of mainline pokemon game before the next comes out. Thought about it and don’t actually want to do Crystal, Emerald, or Platinum as unlike White 2 they are sort of remasters and not new games.
I feel good. This shouldn’t make me proud in the same way that finishing a book does, but it did.
Also yes, Penny is good, sorry for being weird brained.
5 Likes
Area Zero got some cool Toby Fox music you may not want to miss (plus some extra character dialogue that may be of interest)
4 Likes
Something in another thread reminded me of Squishcraft. While going back to revisit it, I discover that there’s now a 1-room “sequel” called Slicecraft
This one is maybe a little ‘unfair’ in that the pivotal move you have to do to make the solution possible is kind of a strange edge-case based on pushing a block left and up at the same time that’s easy to doddle into by accident but not really something you can reason into. But it’s OK.
3 Likes
I went ahead and beat the post game content for Pokemon Violet. This is the first time I’ve done that since beating Red in Pokémon Silver. I’m glad I did because it was the best part of the game too. Not just in terms of plot or difficulty but the music and credits music were good too. Thank you for encouraging me.
27.1 hours.
5 Likes
I guess I see those games using bloom in kind of a cynical, showy way like “hey, look how MODERN and SHINY this looks compared to those dusty, old JRPGs you used to play!” whereas here it feels more like it’s being used in a deliberately woozy and disorienting way…
I will admit it is pretty severe. I was playing it the other night for a long period and was briefly convinced I was on the verge of a migraine… that being said, my sleep has been a bit haywire lately, so it’s hard to say how much of that was the game’s fault 
Will keep you posted on whether or not my eyes melt from the continued exposure 
4 Likes
Hd2ds short depth of field gives me eyestrain headaches after awhile. I keep accidentally trying to focus on the wrong objects with my eyes.
1 Like
I have surpassed 500 hours in Helldivers 2.
I’ve got about 2 hours in the piano learning app I downloaded last year.
10 Likes
I keep going back to Skatebird and I keep regretting it, am wondering if there’s anything new that will scratch the itch that the SSX games did back in the day
5 Likes
started playing obduction while sick and finished it today. didn’t care much for the environment at the start but it grew on me as i kept building a mental map of how to move around to do the things i needed to. cyan are still the best at making puzzles i understand. the only ones in adventure games to do it. very possible to just keep observing devices and work your way towards what you need to do about them.
on the negative side, there’s no reason for the game to take such resources that you need load times this long when moving between areas, especially egregious when puzzles require you to teleport back and forth. it does not look more beatiful than myst 5 in any way that matters, so like, i don’t feel particularly wowed by all these unreal engine effects and materials that require a 1 minute load when swapping areas on a steam deck. the fog and clouds are quite pretty in bug land, but i also doubt that is what the game spends all this time loading into memory when i go there (and the hub world does not have these kinds of effects and always take the longest to load).
8 Likes
The load times in obduction are notorious no matter the hardware, even their later games with higher system requirements don’t have that problem
3 Likes
i also started obduction recently, i think i maybe just don’t like this kind of game. it’s fine! it is probably just not for me… i think i was expecting it to be more like physics-oriented and involve an inventory with tools you can use to like do things with or something and not just a point and click myst style game where you also have the option to walk around and look at stuff if you feel like it. the third time i approached an item that looked like it was a tool i could use to accomplish some goal or another but it turned out it was either just a static immobile part of the scenery or something i could just arbitrarily rotate and then put down again i realized i was probably never going to finish the game
3 Likes
i appreciate the part about never carrying anything because then i know none of it matters. i will never have to wonder if i have the correct monkey in my pocket
5 Likes
Oh yeah like the last puzzle of Obduction was put there for the True Sickos.
better than the followup where Lenin and Henry Ford and Marie Carie team up to make a spaceship powered by AI that will solve all the world’s problems.
3 Likes