I played a little bit of 1 but not too much, so I can’t really tell what’s new aside from the yokai shift stuff. I was debating messing around with onyomi magic or ninjutsu build at first but there’s enough going on with just a straight-laced spear and sword character that I decided not to so I don’t get overwhelmed. It’s nice every now and then to dive into a really dense game like this and let it wash over you.
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tell me more about nioh 2, loved the first but haven’t really heard much about this one
i fixed retroarch so i can get back into gorgeous panzer dragoon saga
think genealogy of the holy war might be my second “fire emblem generally sucks, however…” after three houses
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I find this interesting because my session tonight was Oops All Twists. One I found mildly interesting but in the context of wrapping every pop-culture-sci-fi story at once I find I don’t like the characters nearly as much as I would like to, the ignorance of setting also gets to me, and it is so scatter shot that I forget the motivation and what was happening.
Like it actually seems designed that you sit down and burn through it because playing two hours a night I havs to go “so that girl was trying to find that girl but she was over there and he doesn’t remember that he likes her but she is from this place.”
It is very very pleasant by the standards of Visual Novel StoryTelling so that is keeping me. It was clearly supposed to be a Vita game the game so cleanly beautiful breaks into 15 minute chunks with save anywhere and the complete clean separation of story/video game/glossary.
Also every theory I concoct for how this all ties together makes me mad.
I am still playing it so I am the fool (it really is very easy to play 12 minutes at a time.)
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Hello @Victor. I blame you for getting hooked again.
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There’s a new mechanic where you minor spoiler: take the “soul cores” of enemies and use them to power up your guardian spirits and unlock additional movesets that consume a new bar. Early in game, they get really tutorial heavy with some of this and lead you to think you must absolutely use and master these abilities. In reality, you can mostly ignore them and play it just like Nioh 1 if you want to.
It has the same issue 1 had with way too many gear drops to sort through, so just decide ahead of time that you won’t be OCD about every single item you pick up. Unless you enjoy that sort of thing! Use the filters, equip what lends itself to your play style (I was an Axe/Spear/Odachi (preferably with an elemental or living weapon property) user with a really light armor set), and sell/store the rest of the stuff.
The core gameplay is as fantastic as it was in part 1. There are a lot of cheap enemy placements. Consider the enemy sensor ability either through gear, accessories, or guardian spirit absolutely essential.
Extra fluff in the game outside the main story is pretty fun, but eventually I give up on this stuff when it gets to the point of like “Remember that really hard boss you beat? What if you had to fight it while also fighting that OTHER really hard boss you beat!”
The game is still heavily obsessed with cats, downright goofy in a lot of enemy/character designs, and somehow still borderline horror feeling. It’s a really odd place to be, and I love it for that! I think the series will end up being among my favorites after I have more time to think about it.
Thanks for asking me to reflect on it! I didn’t even realize I had this much appreciation for it!
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for the first time in a couple of months, i’ve pulled myself away from apex to dive into something else: morrowind, giving it my first real try. as strange as it is i’ve found that every time i get into a major depressive episode i start getting urges to play some bethesda wrpg and this time is no different.
i’m going in knowing as little as possible; i don’t really know how anything works and i’m enjoying keeping it that way. i visited a friend last night who really likes morrowind and loves doing early game-breaking stuff and minmaxing things and he kept trying to tell me ways i could break it and i had to keep telling him shutupshutupshutupshutup!! because i don’t wanna know how to break the game! i will discover more and more the ways to do it as it goes along and it will feel like an earned journey; my favorite thing about the game so far is that it’s not an immediate power fantasy.
i’m keeping a little notebook on the desk in front of me while i play and writing down what i’ve done and what i have to do in there. i know the game has a journal feature, and i fall back on it when i need to but i find it a lot more engaging to write my own.
a few fond memories so far:
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during the main story quest i was asked to go to a particular dungeon and find a dwemer puzzle box for someone. as i was exploring the dungeon i came across a room with a lava pit at the bottom and a ramp up to a broken bridge with a room i couldn’t reach on the other side. i saved on the bridge and tried a few different times to make the leap but realized i either needed to be able to levitate or i needed to have a much higher acrobatics stat to make the jump. during my waffling about as i was accepting defeat, i realized i could jump onto the railing…then onto the lower tier of a lamp on the railing…then the top of the lamp…and that gave me enough height to start with that i just barely cleared the gap. i cheered a little, both at my own creativity and at the willingness of this game to allow me to find my own solution to a problem. the best part was the puzzle box wasn’t even in that room!
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while walking from one town to another i found a little door stuck into the side of a hill so i walked inside, the game telling me it was some sort of ancestral tomb. descending the steps, i turn a corner and am ambushed by a ghost. i swing my blade to no avail, the game telling me my weapon won’t work. cheekily i decide to fight fire with fire and summon my own ghost. immediately the enemy ghost casts a spell…and suddenly my ghost turns around and starts attacking me too. laughing at their spiritual comradery, i run back up the stairs into the safety of the open air.
- helping a merchant from one town to another with the promise of receiving the “boots of blinding speed”; we reach the town and i receive the boots and put them on. suddenly i’m extremely fast but also my entire screen is black. they’re true to their namesake to a degree i had not expected and i laugh out loud. a bit later in another town i see that i can ask people about the merchant i encountered and everyone tells me “she makes the worst equipment and everyone hates her so much for it there’s a price on her head” and i laugh again.
i dunno how long my infatuation with this game will last but this is definitely, after a dozen hours or so, one of those experiences that i’m glad i’ve saved for a rainy day. looking forward to seeing what other memorable experiences the adventures of Kind One the Smilebringer will hold for me.
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It is funny to know how badly you can bust Morrowind open but actually doing all of that stuff in practice always kills the interest for me really fast, and once you’ve done it you kind of have to come up with roleplay reasons for yourself to not stumble into the myriad ways to become game-breakingly overpowered in an hour.
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With my wife using the living room TV today I was forced to take a break from Like a Dragon so I played Steam Library Roulette and settled upon JYDGE, an unsophisticated top-down shooter with mouse aim. I’ll be honest, for some reason outside of FPS games I find keyboard and mouse controls utterly repulsive.
It’s an amateurish Judge Dredd homage although I do appreciate that the player character design leans hard into the “Judge” part, with a Tactical Wig and a rifle that looks like a comically large gavel (and is somehow a lever-action? despite being full-auto? I digress).
For whatever reason, every letter U in the game is replaced with a Y, at least for anything being given the proper noun treatment. “Jydge”, “byllets”, etc. I chuckled once and then it kinda got tired.
Utterly unremarkable, I decided to move on after about 20 minutes of play and a few levels completed.
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I see you are a power player.
I am discerning from this image and the one time I watched 2-3 minutes of a vid of someone’s gameplay that the big brain strat is to keep things separate?
Also…traffic lights seem to just make things worse?
Yeah, I think you can get pretty far by keeping things separate and reducing the number of intersections in straightaways. I usually avoid stoplights but I need to experiment with them more. I think they make four way intersections flow more efficiently but i rarely make four way intersections to begin with. I gotta work hard to break 3,000!
i cleared shiren 5! all i want to do now is play mystery dungeons
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Good news is there’s something like 20 more dungeons in the postgame! Some of them have really wacky rulesets but they’re fun.
Obviously because there’s only room for one powergamer on Vvardenfell.
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I’ve never actually been good at fighting games, having neither the motor nor impulse control they require, but playing single-player Super Street Fighter II Turbo on the Switch is frustrating in a really specific way I most associate with bowling, where the game progression involves:
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Trying to figure out what works for me
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Finding something that seems to do the job but not figuring out quite why or what precisely it involves
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Attempting to replicate it with some success until it for some reason stops working / I am unable to keep executing it
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Do the whole thing again
Given how visiting bowling alleys with grandma was one of the key ways I first engaged with the original Street Fighter II, I can’t say this isn’t appropriate. Still, it is exceedingly frustrating, because the process often takes the form of me doing very well in one round and then terribly in the other two, which makes me miss KOF’s one-round-per-character progression (I don’t know what the bowling equivalent of that would be). On the other hand I feel it’s doing a solid job of using negative reinforcement to force me to actually consider all the buttons and how to use them. But good god, I hate Dee Jay and I don’t want to hate Dee Jay, why do I keep having to fight Dee Jay.
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the panzer dragoon remake is bad
and the switch version has some c64 tier loading times
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re: shiren 5, i’m reaching the point where the night mechanic kicks in and then i just get one shotted by everything
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Started DQ11, which I bought with my credit card reward points
I generally don’t like big JRPG towns, it’s just more to scour. However, the castle town was neat, and I just checked out maybe half of it before triggering more story
Found the escape sequence to be pretty superfluous and underwhelming. Just a chore!
I really wanted that 3DS version when that came out like 5 years ago :’(
I hope this isn’t their FF9, in that I will play through it multiple times and still feel zero love for it
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The Last Remnant has the best ceilings
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VALHEIM
Last week this game outsold Nioh 2 and all purchases made within China on steam. It was an itch io alpha a few years ago. Now early access.
- PS1 graphics with fancy lighting and particle effects. Entire game is like 1 gig
- Not optimized, FPS drops at dawn/dusk, high variance in procedurally generated maps
It’s an open world survivor game you can solo or have 10-15 people on a server. Pretty much all the servers are private / passworded. If they aren’t, you can run thru and dismantle anything, log, and take everything to your home server. PvP can exist but has to be enabled.
Picking things up is gratifying. Press a button to dislodge, then wait a moment within range of the object and it will zap into your inventory. You have to collect a lot of small things to build medium things to unlock big things. You make coal when you accidentally burn your food. The eating system is cool.
It scales quickly. On a community server you can hop right into the first boss (lightning stag with metal music). There are multiple biomes and you have to build ships to transport metal you get from dungeons and stuff, but you can (eventually) build portals for fast travel. Sailing is interesting. Trees you chop down can fall on you. You have to kill animals. You’re a Viking. Female characters can’t have beards. Your hair color slider is “blondeness.” Death is punishing but generally not frustrating. The game’s been out a week or so and people just figured out what happens when you reach the edge of the map.
I recommended it as someone who likes to hit things and pick up stuff in video games. Idgaf about building things but the process is flexible (with some physics limitations) enough that I enjoy it. Like, you want a fire pit near your bed, but, if you don’t make a hole in your roof, it will fill with smoke, and if the fire’s uncovered, it’ll go out in the rain. That’s fun. I think the biggest appeal is the experience is challenging without being irritating. Progression feels rewarding. The game’s intended for co-op, holler if you’re looking for more blondes.
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