I’d like Metal Max 2: Reloaded (and probably 3, as well) more they could consolidate all of the NPCs down a bit. You have human equipment NPCs, tank equipment NPCs, tank rental NPCs, tank repair NPCs, tank restocking NPCs, item shop NPCs, stamp shop NPCs, save NPCs, and NPCs for the sidequest shit. I might be missing one or two. It’s excessive considering you go to a lot of them frequently. Oh yeah, there’s also an NPC for reviving from the dead, NPC for curing specific status effects, and then the NPC for the inns.
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I remember being very confused by that convention when I first encountered it in like, PSP sequels to otherwise decent RPGs, the weirdly dull expectation that you were gonna get your weapons from the same weapons guy for a whole game. I think I eventually rationalized it away as a monster hunter convention that was done far more carelessly elsewhere or something like that, but I inherently distrust a lot of those rote JRPG mechanics that were subtly canonized sometime around 2004 when the genre was moribund
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Super Mario 3D World is amazing. Fully in awe of Mario’s complete transformation into sub verbal baby adult. How is he so cute. Why is this four foot tall middle aged man in overalls shouting gibberish the most appealing cartoon character ever made
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Glad The Switch is working out.
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Playing one of those new lego games because it was part of PS+, and managed to create a corrupted save file in the first room in the game. They just give kids any kind of trash these days, huh.
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Btw with the thread limit being approached i vote that the next title be
Games You Played Today (Taylor’s Version)
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A friend in elementary school posited that the super mario brothers were just kids pretending to be adults (and that nintendo couldn’t fool him). You were right Billy. You were right all along.
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The game has something you can get for your tank in like, the second town, that will allow your tank to auto-travel back to anywhere you’ve already been (which, at that point, is 2 cities), so I assume there are some other quality of life things in the game that will allow you to access some of these NPCs from a single point or menu vs. having to run around town.
Tank rental fees are absurd. They take “a percentage” of your winnings from every battle which winds up being like, 75% to 100% depending on how much you won from the battle, and the game doesn’t let you buy them at this stage, instead just giving you a vague, “You can’t buy tanks until you use them more” – what is “more”? Is “more” some value I have to meet, or is “more” when I reach a specific town? Like, the game seems to want you to use these classes that aren’t particularly effective in battle offensively, so punishing me by eating the majority of my winnings from battle for using the system that gets around their weaknesses is frustrating, especially early on. I don’t think all 3 party members need to be in vehicles right now, but it looks funnier on the map when you have cars following you around.
The Dandy Highwayman who we’re all too scared to mention that spends his cash on looking flash and grabbing our attention? Maybe your friend threw his safety overboard and joined Adam Ant’s Insect Nation.
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The Lego games, from my experience, have always been insanely buggy with exactly this sort of thing happening on a semi-regular basis – I’ve soft-locked and hard-locked a bunch of them, not sure if it’s an engine issue, a QA issue, or a “we gotta ship, fuck QA” issue.
I’m never going to blame QA in these situations. I was able to free Lex Luther from his prison of sliding into a wall, eternally, after a second reset by disabling the pop-up help videos from the game’s options menu. I’m going to guess those are a feature added late in development which were mandated by the licenser.
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Oh to be clear, I worked in game QA for over a decade, by “QA issue” I mean not spending enough resources on it.
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I’ve played quite a bit of The Void Rains Upon Her Heart now. Although you are expected to repeat the encounters (at least if you care about unlocking more things), the game does throw in variety. You frequently face new bosses and even new levels that come up as surprises.
There are nearly 500 Steam achievements, and each one corresponds to something you unlock within the game.
I’ve hit a few places where placeholder text explains that there will be more content there when the game comes out of early access.
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I’ve also been playing Spiritfarer. I like the style a lot and even the busywork parts are fun. At least initially. I think I would like to see more of the game, but I’m kind of losing interest in constantly watering plants, fishing, cooking, etc. There is a local co-op mode and I think that would probably make those tasks more compelling.
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IIRC I bought some really cheap used Lego game for Wii U in order to hack it by loading a save from the internet that cracks it wide open.
LEGO Indiana Jones for the Wii was like this!
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That might’ve been it! I hacked the Wii mode of the Wii U now that I think about it.
thank you lego indiana jones
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Only reason I own that game, and I only hacked the Wii so that I could get the waggle out of Donkey Kong Country Returns. Worth every penny.
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Feels fitting that Lego games prove themselves to be useful outside of their originally intended purposes
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Monster Sanctuary is deeply fucking disappointing so far. It’s the kind of bullshit i fall for hook line and/or sinker: what if Metroidvania + Pokemon + actual interesting mechanics for said pokemon?
But in reality it’s the worst of all worlds.
The “metroidvania” part is dull dull dull. You get new abilities by hatching new monsters, but they’re all lock-and-key type stuff. This one can slash vines. This one can activate water orbs. This one lets you hover, but not for very long. So it basically just ends up being “go to the place you couldn’t go to before” and requires no critical thinking.
The “pokemon” part has many problems:
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The mons are totally lacking the charm of Pokemon. I know that “that’s just a bird” is a common and old criticism of pokemon, but c’mon. This is just a bird:
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The type matchups matter almost zero. This is one of the key parts of pokemon, and the way that you make decisions about who to use, what moves they have, etc. But in this game it’s pretty minimal, at least so far. I haven’t met anything with a resistance to normal attacks, so I just use those. On the other hand, elemental resistances are very powerful,. while the weaknesses are not so powerful, so I just avoid having elemental attacks.
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The game is built on skill trees and strategy with the unfortunate side-effect of meaning that you can develop a really great strategy and just use that all of the time. So far, my strategy is to buff my whole party with increased crit chance and strength, and use my one party member who already has a high crit chance + bleed on crits to give massive damage in a single attack. Very effective so far, and I have not lost a single mon even to bosses
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The battles are slow as shit because it’s always 3v3, and the pixel art is Too Nice so you have to see all these Animations. To be fair, you can speed up the battles, so that is nice, but it still feels bleh.
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The writing is wooden. Every NPC could be replaced with a fucking sign. I hate it so much. It has all the charm of a bag of kindling.
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All the 'mons can be equipped with 1 weapon and 3 accessories. You walk around with a party of 6 at all times, so that’s 24 pieces of equipment to keep track of. Ugh!!!
Anyway I might play more of this game but about 3 hours in I think I’m done. What a bummer.
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I like this part of RPG party management, but I can see how it negatively affects a more tedious game
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