The same thing sort of happened to me. I got a good bit into what I guess would be the post game and I had no real grasp on how deep it was gonna go and hence with no real goal to work towards or idea how much I had left in front of me my desire to press forward just kinda evaporated. Coulda been ten levels left, coulda been a hundred, and I’d rather not risk growing to hate the game to find out.
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There’s some great academic research on the migration of Uru players to other large-scale multiplayer projects like Second Life where they were somewhat like refugees searching for a home once the game was closed down. They even got treated like unwanted immigrants in Second Life.
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i changed my mind, 7th guest is a bad game lol
i do enjoy the transitions and some of the acting is hilarious and the music is pretty dank but holy shit that thing is a terrible slog
i give it credit for having some nice brain teaser puzzles including a few chess puzzles, thumbs up on those, but yeah this game is fucked to actually play
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I finished Banner Saga 1
You see, what happened was the quest item that I needed to use on the boss was buried in the techniques menu, whereas I was just using regular attack lol oops
Compared to Organ Trail and Hyperspace Deliver Service, I like this more as far as the travelling from point a to b genre goes
The battle system is still poorly thought out but I made it fun
*** on the Ebert scale
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My first and only encounter with SMT directly was Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. I found it to be a dull and inflexible affair that never really got going and I dropped off it after I think the second dungeon. By the great wisdom of SB have been steered towards playing SMT3: Nocturne which I had very little knowledge of going in but was intrigued by.
So far I’m really enjoying it but I am surprised by what I am enjoying as it’s calling to mind a lot of things I used to enjoy about games that don’t really get from them any more. Having just come off Pokémon Shield there are a lot of superficial similarities but I think the distinction is in both how chance operates as well as how planning and world navigation are much more built into Nocturne’s fabric. I eventually rage quit Shield because I was frustrated by having to basically do constant knowledge checks regarding immunity and weaknesses and Nocturne is similar in this respect but it just has a lot more going on aesthetically and systems wise.
I was initially hesitant to fuse demons since I generally hate losing anything permanently in games but I think I am being interpellated by the demon world’s highly transactional nature. Although I may lose progress, resources, and Demons, it all balances out with some faith and planning. Again, in Pokémon, I had planned out what types and which specific Pokémon I would like to get, after that it is basically an inevitability that is only mitigated by the chance of the Pokémon appearing or being caught. With Nocturne I feel like I am still in the stage where the possibilities for Demons are endless and despite my current plans to acquire certain Demons once I reach level 18 to 20 (currently 16) I don’t know what else might be in the mix at that stage which is tantalising. All my best laid plans could go out the window which is a thrill.
The most specific pleasure I feel like I’ve missed is something you saw a lot on the PS2 which is the frequent use of maps, particularly in corridor heavy level designs. They are almost honest in how corridor heavy they are. Constantly reorienting myself with the map making sure that every step taken as accounting for all options and that I am not risking things unnecessarily is a pleasure that I don’t really get from a lot of recent games, even ones where reading a map is an explicit mechanical focus. It’s not hard to read the Nocturne map, it’s just what it means with respect to the degree that chance and chaos play a role in my encountering things. What phase is Kagutsuchi in? Where was the last healing station? What stats and abilities should I prioritise going forward given how this area is turning out to be? I like that grinding doesn’t really seem to be that useful and that the game privileges knowledge but in a way that is more involved than Pokémon (not just specifically Pokémon but it’s the most recent thing I played). It’s making me think a lot more about the utility of engaging with battles at all, what I can extract from them other than XP and money?
I think I’ve longed for a JRPG where status effects and weakness knowledge leads to more than just extra damage and I’m surprised I never realise that this game basically makes a core part of its turn-based system. It adds to the chaos but it’s a strangely fair chaos if you’re paying attention.
I also have a fetish for deserts in videogames and the overworld is providing me sustenance.
I just met matador and I’m deep in the fusion obsession.
I have also been using Guilty Gear Strive as a guinea pig for testing more ergonomic control schemes to get me back into action/fighting games. Early tests are good although I do have to play for very short periods. I mostly used Potemkin since he is the least input dense and I like characters that feel heavy. With the right keyboard setup I can generally do very basic combos and even Roman cancel in a practical way. I can reliably do well online around floor five although I realise the ranking in this game seems to be extremely skewed towards new and intermediate players. It’s kind of encouraging honestly since I’ve never been more than intermediate and having a glut of matchmaking occur between people who have learned the game only halfway is actually quite appealing.
The only anime fighter I ever got pretty good at for an intermediate player was the early versions of Blazblue up until Continuum Shift. I played some Xrd but otherwise have little experience with GG. This generally does a pretty good job of providing the player with the information they need and it’s the fighting game I’ve enjoyed most since Tekken 7. Potemkin Bustering Axl players is one of the few times I was madly gesturing in celebration in the last couple of years.
Related/unrelated rant: I was mainly using strive as a guinea pig for seeing how feasible keyboard would be for getting back on the saddle with Melee, my fighter of choice. Not only are there more than double the buttons required I basically have to have space for two wsad layouts (one for control stick and one for C stick) I also have to to have two separate modifier buttons that, when held, change how far the sticks are ‘moved’ (modifier toggles between extreme and slight pushing of an analogue stick). I also have a split keyboard which means that some recommended key layouts are not possible. Not only is this a challenge for relearning muscle memory but it’s just horribly uncomfortable on a keyboard (better than a GameCube controller where my right hand is responsible for almost everything but still). I’m probably going to be investing in a hit box of some kind but to be honest playing strive is making me think that I can just play a fighting game without having to sift through and relearn custom hardware. I can comfortably keep all of my fingers and thumbs on critical inputs in Strive(!)
Obviously Melee wasn’t designed with this many potential inputs in mind (wave dashing, SHFFLing, SDI etc) but my feeling at the moment is that the game could just benefit from being completely redesigned from the ground up to lower the number of inputs without compromising options. Like would it really be that bad if SHFFLing, or wavelanding or whatever could be partially macro’d? I know we’d be talking about building a completely new game from the ground up at that point but my fingers don’t care, why should I be trying to figure out an ergonomic way to get injured hands to make more than five-ten inputs per second? I want to play with friends but there’s just an absurd amount of inputs and dexterity required even to be an intermediate player. At least, until I’ve recovered, I’ll continue to Strive.
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I understand this completely but you have to look at it from my perspective
I’m trying my hardest to not shitpost “oh, yeah, Sakurai did that a few times” and I think I’m failing
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Yeah, this is the thing. I don’t want Ultimate or whatever else, I want Melee. I just don’t want to make musculo-skeletal compromises and be physically kept from enjoying the game if I can help it. It’s just frustrating that the solution is to learn some sort of adhoc spaghetti fingers cockpit than have the game loosen the input barriers a little.
I will check back in on it once I’ve healed further and/or gotten a more ergonomic controller.
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I think that people whose primary experience of these games involved playing with their friends who were, like, invested in winning but not to the point of looking up strategies are always going to be kind of confused by perspectives like “wavedashing gave me an RSI what is wrong with the developers” because I have personally never made it all the way through an explanation of what wave dashing is
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To be fair the input-dense nature of Melee is mostly a product of its community more than anything, although I wouldn’t ask what’s wrong with them. Well, not about this anyway.
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yeah, I think overall a lot of these games have become more accommodating recently of competitive scenes many of them arguably never wanted (see my comment about how VF really being all there was moving the needle in meaningful ways for the period roughly between 2001 and 2016) and melee obviously sticks out as being like, genuinely unpleasant to play at a high level
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it’s snaking for platformers
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It’s basically the same input as a roll, (L+direction) but you have press jump first, and you want to angle the direction slightly down into the platform you’re standing on. It’s technically an air dodge that gets canceled by ground contact.
It’s one of the fastest movement options on the ground for most characters, doesn’t make you invincible, also doesn’t affect the direction your character is facing so you can use them offensively or defensively.
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is this what you wanted felix
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i have like a visceral reaction to people explaining smash now after watching that 2.5 hour video of that schizophrenic smash player calling the other guy a mix of hitler and light yagami but taking 30 min breaks to explain why his way of teching is better
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Celeste’s wavedash requires you to press jump again as you hit the ground, is that not needed in Smash?
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didn’t you play Celeste, felix
same shit except you have to break your hands to do it
shit’s hilarious though, especially if you’re playing a low friction character like Luigi
still highly amused that Kazuya’s trailer showed him doing KBDs and wavedashing like mad, whoever cut that knew what they were doing
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you’re only jumping again if you’re doing another wavedash
quick, dirty example:
short hop>dodge-down right>short hop>dodge-down right
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L-cancelling is probably the only thing that melee could stand to automate, otherwise the entire problem around macros/automations for melee is that melee is a much more analog game than people give it credit for
for something like teching or SDI it’s not a given that you want to SDI all the time because maybe the mindgame is that they think you’re going to SDI in a direction when you won’t, maybe you’ll purposefully miss a tech to screw up their rhythm in the combo, maybe you know that they know that you’re going to miss the tech so you DI differently, etc.
and even given all of this stuff, it’s not just the fact that you’re performing the action, it’s how much you’re performing it as well - so much of captain falcon’s recovery is about being able to space yourself after his up b in a way that removes edgeguarding possibilities from a lot of the characters, but to do so it’s not just that you hit up b, it’s that you hit up b, wait half a second, then move toward the stage, and THEN you can get into mixup opportunities with this timing
I actually think the closest game to melee in terms of how difficult it is to automate is actually rocket league - so much of what makes rocket league compelling is that it’s NOT FIFA - your player doesn’t “possess” the ball and your actions don’t change based on possession state, you can do all of the stuff all of the time, and player skill is expressed through the finesse and control they have of the analog nature of “I have to hit the ball with this car”
maybe another example of something similar is actually umvc3 - it’s not as “analog” of a game as melee in that you can’t make an aerial attack more or less effective based on how you perform it, but umvc3 has 1. a relatively generous input buffer that allows people to get into it with relatively low dexterity and 2. an enormous number of characters and character interactions that functionally make the game analog, since often times not even the player understands the interaction specifically. dual kevin (he played deadpool/dante/hawkeye) had this mixup that was simply calling dante assist while sliding under with deadpool, and it might as well have been a coin flip that neither player could call
and the thing is - both rocket league and umvc3 ended up having very, very high dexterity skill checks but both are still pretty enjoyable games even at a lower level because there are ways for player expression to happen that aren’t dexterity-based, and I actually think melee is pretty similar in that regard
I guess the tl;dr is play samus? i kind of forgot what my point was here
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play Link
real talk, a friend of a friend was physically disabled and couldn’t do a lot of the movement tech including wavedashing but he had a sick Link
and now Link is a real character people hate because he’s a zoner in Ult
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