Wish I liked Treasure shmups but I have a mental block or something that prevents me from enjoying them. They all feel like awkward tedious slow bullshit. I’m fine dying repeatedly in most games but something about Treasure shmups just infuriates me almost immediately.
It’s like they played Gradius and got a kick out of that door that closes on you at the end and thought “hey it would be cool if we made shmups where we just repeat that same antagonistic interaction with the player over and over again”.
there’s a free weekend for the jon bernthal ghost recon and I’m told they made the game better. no more leveling up guns, you just pick one you like, no more bullet sponge level 80 enemies you can just shoot any of them in the head, there’s an ‘immersive mode’ where you need night vision to see at night and whatnot etc.
i don’t know if other people know this but - he’s a Trump guy! like i have heard that he absolutely voted for Trump from someone else who knows him. and certainly not the only big indie person name who is (there’s another one i won’t say because it was like thirdhand gossip). also Jason used to follow me on twitter for a long time… lord knows why… though i was never friends with him or anything like that. he’s more just a person i have interacted with a handful of times in person at games events.
i did have a long frustrating hour-long debate with him in person at Indiecade in LA one year about why the American criminal justice system is broken, which was… interesting. he didn’t seem to understand that systems that are fair in theory are not actually fair at all in practice. typical Ayn Rand-brain bullshit i guess. this is what happens when you are so sequestered in tech world bullshit you never have to surround yourself with anyone who might challenge your beliefs. anyway tl;dr he is a very bizarre person in general and the reactionary beliefs seem to match up well with a lot of that. it is funny that Jason Rohrer is the arty indie guy of note who gets an art exhibit of his work and all of that given his reactionary tendencies, though… very apt for that whole world.
im currently explaining bdsm to stalin and hes doing the whole IIF SOMEONE TRIES TO STICK NEEDLES INTO MY DICK WE’RE GONNA HAVE A FIGHT thing hahahhahha
oh my god its family guy tier we are dying, the horror
Still plugging away at Vantage Master Online. I just unlocked Phase 6 of the scenario mode, which is the last stages of the game. Unlike the previous phases, which unlock sets of 5-ish levels each, this one forces you to do each stage in order. With how hard the rest of the game has been, this isn’t really a huge deal, since I wasn’t doing a lot of skipping around. Each stage gets you a level, which means more stats, more mana and new units, all of which seem kind of vital to me.
This stage was such a huge bottleneck for me I gave up on the game for a week or so, but my drive to keep going ended up being stronger… There’s two things here on stage 21, Forest’s Giant Trees. The enemy master is a Spirit, a class that can move 2 squares further than my Knight, on top of just having enough of a speed advantage to squeeze in an extra summon here and there. I had about 3-5 false starts on this stage until a refined opener and the AI’s greed made me able to win with a 5 turn Tarbss (the sunfish guys) rush. Water units are kind of like ships in any other strategy game where they are largely super weak (they either move half speed on land tiles or not at all) unless there’s a lot of water, in which case they instantly become top tier.
This last third of VMO’s scenario mode is really putting me to the test on its mechanics. I don’t want to get overly detailed on the specifics, but the more I play it the more this game feels very… “fundamental-based”, maybe? Like the elemental resistances/weaknesses are such a huge factor that every unit ends up having a very specific location in the food chain that changes only based on terrain (ie. is there water? are there walls to block ranged attacks?), and success hinges on being aware of that food chain and playing into it, rather than coming up with unorthodox straegies. As the demand for correct play becomes higher, I’m really starting to run into the downsides of the Knight, the master class that I got from the personality quiz at the start. It trades speed and magic power for strength and defense, which I’m starting to think is a bad trade. Since attacking with a master means you aren’t summoning that turn, you’re sacrificing a long-term advantage for short term gain. Coupled with the fact that the only win/loss condition is one master getting knocked down to 0HP, you’re only ever attacking once you’re pushing a strong lead, and a lead is harder to make if you’re slower, and summoning less as a result.
Apologies for the mini blogpost in the middle of this thread, I’ve just been thinking a lot about this game… Despite how challenging I make it sound, I think Vantage Master Online strikes a really good balance between a small and rigid scope and just enough dynamism (like units that perform better depending on time of day) to make it interesting to figure out, and with it being free I’d highly recommend it as a sort of “learning game” for the turn-based strategy genre.
What has been remarkable about the 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim Discourse is everyone is so self-protective about spoiling it for others. Which I find fascinating being 7 hours in.
I could compare it to the non-linear piecemeal narrative of Siren but Siren had characters there were not all either Japanese or high school students. And you are jumping around so much narratively and there is so much not-specified-in-this-post weirdness That I can’t tell you who half the characters are. Then it locks you off from the ones you are becoming invested in so you can begin to learn 10 minutes of someone else’s story and have to try and go is that contacted to that or before or oh here is a giant index that just tells me what I just saw but maybe somewhere in there is something?
Oh i can pay to unlock an entry about Yakisoba Pan? Sign me up.
Then the sword of World War 2 Is hanging over all of this and if you’ve been paying attention to me you know I’m intrigued by War Shit at this point.
I felt similarly about getting the Knight! Also I think if you name certain classes specific names you can get Falcom crossover characters like Adol or Dela Delon.
I just started this last night as well! Finished all the Prologues so I can choose mode and difficulty, etc. The Secrets section says you can unlock entries by completing story events, by winning them in battle, or by paying mystery points or whatever—if the list shows a mystery point cost to unlock something, you HAVE to pay to unlock that, right? I didn’t want to pay for something I could unlock just by playing the game, but the big numeric gaps between listed entries makes me think this isn’t a danger.
