I’m a dumb idiot and I like the stuff they’re doing
I dig the deck building stuff, I like the more scavenge-oriented map flow and I was big into the difficulty, even on the lowest setting. you couldn’t fire all willy nilly because bullets would go through 5 walls and hit an alarm door or a shrieker and now you have to spend resources doing a horde. the game wasn’t all “fucking blitz through the level” like L4D turned into
now? it’s nothing, it’s not even a introduction that you can step off of to the next difficulty up
also I believe them at face value about their plans for DLC seeing as campaign has you unlocking cards but even in the beta, everything is unlocked for versus play from the get go
Hey this Like A Dragon is pretty good. Dissappointed in myself how often I am reading subtitles. Got midway through chapter 2 before getting too tired but at almost exactly 90 minutes stumbled into a save point. Pretty good way to shake up the standards of Ryu Ga Gotoku.
Definitely would play the sequel in English. JRPG item names are like the quickest way for me to get tired and bored in Japanese. I instantly feel like I should have the strategy guide around.
I won’t, because having not one, but two, this-character-goes-down-and-it’s-Game Over units in your party is some grade A horse shit. Especially on Casual Mode where nobody dies permanently! And one of them is a frontline battler too! Ugh. You can’t make me accept that.
It was okay while it lasted but I’m too old to replay 25 minute battles just because one character gets ganked at the very end.
I really hate the deck theme. I hate that every fucking game is a deck builder with cards even when it makes no sense to theme it that way.
Take B4B. Player cards are basically perks and stats, run cards are just modifiers. WHY DO THEY HAVE TO BE THEMED AS CARDS? It takes what should be portrayed as multiple systems and needlessly condenses them down into one.
It implies a depth akin to deckbuilding - especially with the way cards have categories that stack up when you play them - but this is a horde shooter and “action deckbuilder” is a very crowded genre. Adding a light run-based progression layer to a run is fine, but did it really have to be cards? It’s so lazy.
The addition of currency (for a shop between levels) and four different ammo types (ugh) and Warzone attachment rarities (WHY) just feels like yeah. Fuck it. Everything and the kitchen sink baby. Fuck having a coherent game with interesting decisions and risks. We want you to be a loot vacuum slurping up detritus constantly so the lizard brain is appeased.
I didn’t play the alpha, so I can’t really compare, but this beta is super cynical design by numbers stuff. There’s a lot of competition in horde shooters now and B4B is functionally less fun to me than L4D2, a game that released a decade ago.
Ugh. I want to like it but it’s so fucking repellant.
Oh and I liked evolve a lot as a concept, but it has the literal same problem of “progression sucks and the messaging around it is bad”
B4B legitimizes the exaggerated soul vs soulless meme by standing in such cynical contrast to the thing it deliberately compares itself with. I knew this game was not something to put much faith in when they signalled the bankruptcy of their narrative vision with this trailer, complete with the boot stompin soundtrack that’s plagued game trailers since Borderlands put cage the elephant in their’s, and this triple times ironic *record scratch* yep, that’s me! character narration.
Replayed and cleared Blaster Master Zero 3 in about half the time as my first playthrough.
Scattered Notes
You get an upgrade to your counter move (in the overhead segments) that allows you to retaliate right after taking contact damage from an enemy. Doing this recovers the life/weapon level you lose from taking the hit. This is very useful and easily abusable, but somehow I had no idea this even existed during my first playthrough.
At one point I was able to chain this move repeatedly to clear out a whole room of enemies (I still don’t get how that happened).
A new feature to this game is consumable health upgrades (in addition to the usual permanent health upgrades). These act as shields for your tank and your little guy. They add 4 health units and you can have up to 4 of them. The pickups respawn after some time (or some other condition idk). For the overhead segments, the shields also prevent your gun from de-leveling. In practice, this (combined with previous point) basically meant that I never had to worry about my gun level for my second playthrough.
Apparently the radio-chatter requirement for the good ending seems to only be needed for your first playthrough (speedrunners rejoice).
I didn’t notice this until the very end of my first playthrough, but the dark world dungeons are procedurally generated from prefab parts (speedrunners despair).
A few random cutscenes are unskippable for some reason. One of them is one of the gross horny ones (zero stars).
One of the cutscenes in the bonus area is apparently missing a segment unless you retry and watch the cutscene again. I’m not sure if this is a bug or (given the context/content of the scene) an attempt at a post-Undertale-ism.
My video game internet exposure is so siloed that I hadn’t seen this but it’s a rich vein of “me: smells good” antipathy to observe coupled with “wah no! kotaku can’t say it sucks - people worked hard to make it suck!”
not games related but this video for Rollin’ is like a weird cursed object that will never leave my mind because: a) after a long debate about what was the worst hit song ever (I suggested “Rockstar” by Nickelback), one of my friends declared “Rollin” the worst hit song ever and he drove Fred Durst saying “keep on rollin baby” at the beginning of the video into my head forever and b) part of this was filmed on top of the twin towers and the video apparently won an MTV video award on Sept 6th, 2001 (and the band apparently received a thank you letter from the World Trade Center on September 10th).
Obviously I can’t play yakuza like a dragon until I play every dragon quest game, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m in the middle of II right now. so far, they seem less like games and more like tools to develop future personality disorders in young children. just what kind of human are you trying to birth yuji horii?
I beat this game within 22 hours of making that post. It was a really good time. I used to think Dark Souls 3 was “whatever” but now I think “it’s a great game if you get the spiked mace off the plump pyromaidens and dump all your points into strength.”
Anyway I started totally legitimately acquired Sekiro immediate after and I’m def Nelson Muntz in this video, feel free to put me in a home as long as I can play Fromsoft and Cave games, that’s probably the best life I could hope for.
