Games You Played Today: 358 Threads Over 2

finally playing Unite instead of training horses or whatever it is I do

this seems like a way saner mobile/portable MOBA experience than Wild Rift or Arena of Valor, which try to split the difference between “hey you got some time to kill where ever” and “so you want a real fat MOBA huh”

you just fuckin go in and press buttons and 90% of the time it feels like an endless team fight but they shoved in enough crap on the map for organized and high level play to do things

I’m a big fan of the devs looking at HotS and stealing the throw pit and putting it dead center of the map

1 Like

okay, i looked it up better this time, and the answer is too funny not to post here

In BMZ1 you get the good ending by getting 100%. In BMZ2 you just need to revisit all the friends you made. In BMZ3 you need to (a) switch back and forth between dimensions enough times (not entirely sure of this but it’s what people are saying) and then (b) exhaust the pause-screen-discussions with your belligerent co-pilot until you get one where he asks “so are you okay with this inter-dimensional travel stuff?” and Jason replies “yeah my body’s used to it by now”. So all I needed to do was go to the pause menu and press the select button like 3 times and mash through some text, then fight the normal final boss again to unlock to secret final area.

Anyhow the secret final area is a great sendoff to the trilogy and the ending is somehow even cornier than I expected.

6 Likes

eyeballing Wigglytuff’s kit in Unite and seeing them labeled as a support and going “but are they really?”

I’m going to get really drunk one day and put in five bucks and buy Wigglytuff and commit ranked terrorism by instalocking jungle Wigglytuff every game

6 Likes

whereas “graphics sauna” is just combining my favourite things

1 Like

“PC radiator hot tub” - no, too linus tech tips

GPU kotatsu - that’s the stuff, three syllables each, mwah

6 Likes

Wigglytuff might be the most fun Pokemon in the game, and she has a pretty high skill cap. I tanked my winrate while learning her, but my last few games have been absolute massacres.

You want to take Dazzling Gleam and Rollout. I think the other two moves (Double Slap and Sing) are traps.

Dazzling Gleam does a surprising amount of burst damage, but only if you hit the second hit! Make sure the manually target this to where your enemies are GOING to be. Double Slap is more effective early and is easier to hit with, but falls off in the late game. It scales by getting more slaps, but since each slap’s damage is reduced by defense and defense scales up as the game goes on, it seems to fall off pretty hard.

Rollout is a knockup and defense and escape and damage and it might be the best move in the game. You stay in Rollout for a set amount of time, but that time resets whenever you hit a wall. Hitting walls also resets your Dazzling Gleam cooldown so she can do a surprising amount of damage in a very short time. The simple “combo” is to start with Dazzling Gleam, then rollout into an enemy while hitting a wall (bonus points if you can bounce back into them) and then Dazzling Gleam them again. Mix in a few auto attacks in there, because her autos “spin” Pokemon around which is sort of like a ministun. If they have the audacity to attack back, they’ll also get charmed for a bit which is even more stun.

There are a decent number of “hallways” on the map, and hallways are your best friend with Wigglytuff. If you angle precisely you can pinball back and forth 7+ times. This is INSANE. I’ve literally killed opposing Pokemon from full health in ONE use of Rollout. And if the hallway is tight enough, they will be chain stunned the entire time and unable to make any sort of counter-play. The more opposing Pokemon are present, the better it becomes.

Both bot and top lane have sets of parallel walls that are great for this (the bottom walls and the rocks above Dreadnaw are even better for this since they’re tighter). The hallways into the center of the map are also perfect. You can hide in a bush, wait for opposing Pokemon to pass you, and then decimate them. Be patient! You don’t want to take the first Rollout available to you, you want to get a perfect Rollout. Take a little more timing aiming and waiting for the enemies to line up perfectly.

It also works great in the Zapdos pit – I’ve stolen Zapdos with a well-timed rollout that bounced 4 times in the pit, knocked up the entire enemy team up and did enough damage to finish Zapdos off.

When retreating, wait for the chasing Pokemon to catch up with you, and THEN use Rollout to get away. You want to hit them with the knockup while simultaneously getting as far away as possible. Rollout has a shield, so you can survive longer than you think you can. Even if there are no hallways, try to hit a wall at a shallow angle near the end of the move, as this will effectively double the distance that rollout travels.

Oh also it’s VERY important to know that you can cancel Rollout by pressing the button again while it’s active. It has some input lag on it so you need to do it a bit presciently to get the best results. If you don’t do this, you can end up miles away from a fight when you hit a bad angle and pinball to an entirely different part of the map.

EDIT: forgot to talk about Sing. It’s not a bad move, but Rollout it ain’t.

5 Likes

My wife has been playing The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, and having seen the fan translation played on 3DS before it’s really striking me how much its excellent soundtrack is really unleashed by being put on the hi-fi speakers we use for our TV rather than the (comparatively) tinny little things in the 3DS

So glad this finally got the international release it deserved, and hope it’s received well in general. I feel like they’ve struck a surprisingly good balance between keeping some critical Japanese names while also maintaining the series’ trademark pun count. Some bonus content from around the original Japanese launches of the games being included and localised is a delightful addition, too

And I’m very curious about the legal situation which means the Japanese audio can quite clearly say “Sherlock Holmes” while the captions insist on “Herlock Sholmes” and this somehow gets them off the hook from the Conan Doyle estate lmao

Also the game is localised in British English, thank you Capcom, thank you :relaxed:

5 Likes

As per usual the game that I wind up playing most of the time is Football Manager 2021 – I’ve finally hit my stride with a save, that being taking over Fredrikstad at the lowest level of Norwegian football – started off with an undefeated season and then another promotion in my second season. Now dealing with financial instability by having a team increasingly consisting of teenagers coming out of the club’s academy system, I finished a point off the top last season (we outperformed where we should be statistically though so I expect to drop back) and won the Norwegian Super Cup against Fotballklubben Bodø/Glimt at their stadium with two goals in injury time.

I then dipped into art of rally briefly before deciding that I’d gotten enough out of it for this point in time. I might reinstall once the Kenya update comes out with the new cars.

With Squingle coming out of beta, I checked it out last night and while it’s pretty good, I’m having some difficulty rotating the stages with the VR controllers, which feels pretty necessary for the kind-of fiddly control scheme and concept of the game (you’re moving spheres through a series of tubes, which feels very Fallopian). So I wind up doing a lot of shuffling around in a circle and craning my neck to get a better angle on what’s going on.

I warmed up for that by playing a few songs of Beat Saber, which is…fun enough, I guess? I haven’t found the happy medium between way too easy and way too hard yet, a problem that gets much worse when you start dipping into fan-made tracks.

Finally, I played a bit of Half-Life: Alyx, which is predictably mind-blowing at being at a level beyond any other VR game I’ve tried out. While you can “break” the immersion of the experience pretty easily, if you deliberately play the game the way that it seems to want to be played (insert several hundred pages of discourse on HL2’s design here), it’s incredibly intense, to the point where I could only play for a little bit before having to take a break – just seeing Combine that large and up-close and personal changes the dynamic completely.

8 Likes

More Hell Let Loose.

Crawled 100 metres along a dyke in Kursk to pop up from behind this decrepit fence and launch my Panzerschreck straight into the tracks of a Russian tank.

My body did not survive, but the cheers of my teammates roared in my headphones. A noble death.

5 Likes

I started and got halfway through Detention last night. Gosh, Red Candle have created some of the strongest horror stories in videogames from the past decade. They are immensely emotional and told in such a way that it is easy to involve yourself in their drama, supremely effective. While I thought Devotion’s presentation owed a distasteful amount of credit to those boring games by Blooper Team, I am finding myself liking the presentation a lot more in Detention. Which means, so far, I am like fully thrilled by the game. Extremely glad they got to sell these games.

7 Likes

finished cv 1 only by managing to get a save state in between dracula’s two forms, though in retrospect the second form is much easier. i just didn’t want to have to fight the first form ever again.

it’s a good game, but i think the last few bosses (frank, death, drac) really rely too much on unpredictable elements. with dracula in particular it is so devious because the fireball projectiles are relatively predictable, making you think it’s just a matter of mastering the timing, but then you still have to react on a split second if dracula happens to reappear in the middle of your path.

i mean i know i’m just saying shit that everyone else has known since they were 8 years old or whatever, but it’s still interesting to me

9 Likes

you just gotta neutch jump the fireballs

6 Likes

Explain pls!

Neutral, meaning, standing in place without moving

2 Likes

Ya I managed to get the hang of that part, the harder aspect was making the split second decision of whether to keep walking or turn around when Dracula is phasing in right on top of u

2 Likes

Warhammer Mechanicus has really cool music

Do not play with permadeath on. Not only do you lose your character, but the game will still deduct currency from you as if the character has been healed. Dumb!

Cool game so far but I’ll have to restart

That Dracula mention reminds me of one thesis I’ve been developing, that one of the big things that changed specifically in between early-NES games and late-NES games is that extremely strict timing-window execution barriers stopped being a thing (as least in terms of what’s necessary merely to win the game as opposed to speedrunning it). It’s partly that games getting more complicated inherently creates more options other than just training to develop athlete-level hand-eye coordination, but I also I’m pretty sure game designers must’ve started treating these instances as a “bug” that must be fixed in between 1985-1990

I first became aware of this not by playing them myself (my nostalgia obscures certain things from me), but from watching a young Twitch streamer (bananasaurus_rex), an expert in difficult platformers, play Mega Man 1 through 6 for the first time. A very strong reaction he had which surprised me is that Mega Man 2 is a bad game, and then when he moved on to Mega Man 3, he said “ah yes this game is way better, I would definitely rank this one above the previous one”. And it was basically because of instances of these execution barriers (usually related to some RNG scenario as with Dracula) and he was experienced enough to confidently determine “no, there is no way to approach this situation better, it’s just this tight, and also this is unacceptable in my opinion”. Whether we agree with his value judgment that this is indeed “unacceptable”, as opposed to valuing it for the experiential sharp-edge, I thought it was an interesting insight. (Personally I think even if we treat this as a flaw instead of an interesting quirk, Mega Man 2 regardless has to be considered the best in the series due to its inspired storytelling.)

Back to Castlevania, it may be one of the few exceptions to my claim that it almost no longer happened by 1990, because Castlevania 3 US arbitrarily cranked up the damage of everything. As originally designed and released in Japan though, I think my thesis applies to the series

6 Likes

i always thought megaman 2 was considered the easiest of the main series?

2 Likes

neutral, I have brain issues

4 Likes

Yeah, I’m relating this one streamer’s personal opinion. Bananasaurus_rex had no idea of the conventional wisdom on Megaman and wasn’t influenced by it, so he came up with his own ideas. Because he has beaten some of the world’s most difficult platformers, all of the NES Megamans struck him as close together in the same band of difficulty. And one of the things that makes him so good at platformers, I gather, is a sharp perspective on what tactic has the most generous timing windows of all the tactics available, and then he trains to improve his execution consistency on that tactic in particular, instead of wasting his time on the others. And he perceived that, regardless of the easiness of Megaman 2 in 95% of challenges which was irrelevant, there were a 5% of particular sections where the optimal tactic was extremely tight, and he felt this was a major problem.

6 Likes