Was it whenever there was a bunch of the “blight” or whatever you want to call it on the screen?
I think maybe that and also when the camera lowered to show the horizon during sequences where I could still control the character. But it’s been a few years since my first playthrough. Last night it played pretty consistently at 30ish fps with some minor stutters. I did install an update before launching though, and I only played for about an hour in the opening areas.
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I picked up Ace Combat 7 on sale. I’ve never played any of these, and my videogame airplane experience is limited to Star Fox 64, so there’s quite a learning curve! I definitely feel like I don’t know what I’m doing at all, but somehow I’ve managed to make it to Mission 6 on normal difficulty (though 5 took me 2 hours). Even though I might as well be someone’s pet Shih Tzu in that cockpit, the game is really fun! It seems to be completely oriented around big adrenaline action set pieces in beautiful landscapes. The story is almost completely inscrutable, but I guess there’s some charm in it.
I think I’m too scared to even touch the VR missions. When I tried to play Wipeout VR it wiped me out. I was sick all day! Piloting vehicles in VR might be too much for me.
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Feeling pretty ambivalent about RPGs lately, so I decided to finally play Christine Love’s Get in the Car, Loser! to try to clarify some of these feelings and see how she approaches the genre.
I’ve been following a lot of her dev commentary on Twitter, so I figured I’d like it—and I do! I’m also surprised by just how confused I’ve been by basically everything. Not necessarily in a bad way, but I went in expecting something closer to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and this is a lot weirder than that.
Your party has a collection of abilities granted by the items they’ve equipped. These abilities are arranged into sets; a set contains one ability per character. During combat, one set will be loaded at a time, and you can use one, some, or all of your characters’ abilities in that set in real time, putting those abilities on cool down. However, you can then switch to the next set to immediately continue acting; when you’re on the last set and you switch, Grace does a flashy attack with her sword and puts the enemy into an extended stagger state, causing other attacks to do bonus damage.
All of this is happening very quickly. Faster than ATB in a non-XIII Final Fantasy; it almost feels closer to MMO combat, with its emphasis on DPS, taunts, and the use of temporary healing to absorb enemy hits. Many of the enemies have healing abilities that will outpace your damage if you aren’t jamming on these buttons as fast as you can.
Progression is handled by upgrading your collection of gewgaws, which is accomplished by sacrificing unused items. Once everybody has three upgraded charms equipped, you can start buying the next tier of charms, most of which are approximately the same price. I’m sure it makes a difference, but honestly I’m so preoccupied managing cooldowns in combat that I haven’t been paying any attention to whether numbers are going up.
All of which is to say that if you haven’t played it, you should; you can get the main game for free, while the DLC pack (“Battle on the Big Boardwalk”) is on sale until December 1. I was concerned that the game design I was kicking around might be treading in similar territory, but I am now certain there’s no danger whatsoever of that being the case, and if anything I’m still being too predictable in my design sensibility.
EDIT: Agh, can’t believe I didn’t notice before: it’s Final Fantasy XIII, rendered in a flavor I find far more palatable.
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Had basically the same experience – think the game is very cool and I’m absolute ass at it.
Also yes I played Wipeout in VR with all the assists off and felt perfectly fine but the VR missions in Ace Combat made me feel sick the rest of the day. Could have something to do with not yet having an intuitive sense of how the plane controls. Tried to follow a target by looking around in the cockpit while turning and that was a big mistake.
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Update: I just figured out I could use L1 and R1 to turn left and right, which has increased my power level immensely (upgrading me from Shih-Tzu to Cockpit Spaniel). Mission 6 is still kicking my ass though.
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the pressure sensitive buttons on ps2 ace combats (the ones I have) KILLS MY HANDS because old ps2 pressure sensitivity SUCKS 20 years later and you have to mega press the button. I can’t play for more than an hour and I suck so bad that’s how long it takes me to beat a level if I’m lucky so I haven’t really been able to play ace combat and I hate it. the story is so fucking ridiculous, and it feels SO GOOD to not die. ah well
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YS 8 STILL ISNT FUCKING DONE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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did you turn off the “assist mode”? I played for a while before I realized I wasn’t using the ‘real’ control scheme
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finished Circle of the Moon (good game)
my favorite moment was getting the Last (and only) Key, opening the door leading to the final boss, and hearing the music switch to the Sinking Old Sanctuary yet again
might as well have hit me with a freight train right there
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Yeah, I also started with the assist mode, but then I watched an Ace Combat 101 YouTube video that convinced me to switch to real controls. It turns out the real controls are not actually appreciably harder to use than the beginner ones!
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It also reminded me of Valkyrie Profile a little bit, but only in the way that party members are mapped to specific face buttons and you can combo if you time their attacks well. In practice the flow ends up being very different since your combos in VP are limited by number of attacks each character’s weapon has while in GITCL they’re functionally infinite if you manage your cooldowns right.
Keeping your rank up to make sure you’re doing enough damage is important but I definitely found myself holding on to some older equipment just because the attacks they provided didn’t have equivalents at the rank I was meant to be at. At first it’s a little sad to figure out a really good setup and have to abandon it an hour later but the combo building stuff is both forgiving enough and has enough potential depth to it to make those forced reconfigurations a big part of the fun.
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Sounds a lot like the combat in Indivisible which was too much with not enough visual reminders of what was what. Tiring game to play.
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interesting fact that ps2 games were the highest form of art human beings achieved before annihilating their own biosphere
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I’ve never played Indivisible myself, but it looks like it’s inspired by VP too, so there’s probably a comparison to be made. I can see how that style of combat system can be tiring if it doesn’t click or isn’t tuned well, but I liked both VP1 and GITCL a lot.
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Jak X is really cheugy and makes me appreciate how thankfully anti topological most contemporary racing games are however it (inadvertently) has a surprisingly good ending for the series, especially after the bum note 3 tried to close on. On the other hand playing any game with a hot coffee reference in 2021 should come with solar glasses.
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yeah the indivisible combat is absolutely based on valkyrie profile and I’m surprised there aren’t more games that do it
Playing Harmony of Dissonance immediately after Circle of the Moon, I spent almost the entire game playing under the assumption that you eventually get an upgrade to push all these boxes around.
No, it turns out you have that ability innately — it’s just that the one-second activation delay was enough to convince me otherwise. I wasted, like, an hour of my time exploring because of this.
(If it weren’t for the four day weekend I’m pretty sure I would not have the patience for this game’s map design (a pity, because almost everything else is aces).)
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I am glad you got through Jak X without your save being corrupted, which is sadly common and is what ended my run in the game. I just watched the cinematics afterwards and yeah, the story was a bit better as a coda than I’d have expected.
There was some minor Ys talk on these forums recently so I decided to join in by starting The Ark of Napishtim. In the first half hour it seems fine, although it seems to lack a bit of the combat depth that Oath in Felghana had. Time will tell if that ends up making a difference or not.
Also does like every other Ys game start with you waking up after a shipwreck? If I were Adol I’d never step onto a boat again with this luck.
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Oh I did this really cool trick called Playing The Ps4 Port because that’s on there for some reason while all the original ratchet and clank remasters are left to rot on the PS3 to hawk the shitty looking reboot.