match of the millenium and the ngpc last blade game are more feature-rich than most modern console fighting games
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Running through the NES Castlevania using save states. I admire the level design in this. And even though it can be incredibly frustrating and plainly unfair, I have played enough to appreciate that you can still do a lot of nimble stuff when you stop just holding forward and jump at all times but actually learn to like back-jump or bullet-hell dodge by just walking a little left or right. I hate but really admire how almost all this game’s difficulty is in learning how to fight beings gifted with diagonal or vertical movement. It’s like playing out a drama where the forces of 2D must battle beings from the third dimension, somehow…
I am stubbornly trying to kill Death now in a savestate where I can only get hit twice. I’ve come pretty close a few times!!
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i hadn’t beaten CV1 until this past year (played it many times before, though), and for me, the real key is in figuring out optimal sub-weapon usage. i think this is true for most CV classic games, but later titles give you more wiggle room. in hard mode, especially, i sometimes found it necessary to have the pocketwatch because the extra enemies made getting through the area actually impossible at times with the enemy spawns lol.
in most scenarios, it’s possible to just completely obliterate a boss without taking damage if you have the right sub-weapon and have it fully powered up (or at least level II) for Death, especially. i generally stick with holy water or crosses, though, and level them up asap as soon as i grab one.
the other thing is then resisting the urge to mindlessly whip every candle you see because you’ll accidentally lose your fully powered-up sub-weapon lol.
11 Likes
My time with Paper Mario has started to sour a bit as the 6th chapter is this obnoxious flower place which is basically a central hub with six hallways arranged around it that you keep having to go down and back repeatedly. So far I think I went down one to grab a seed and a red berry which I used to get soil and a yellow berry which let me get a blue berry which let me go to a dead end as I missed a room at the end of the yellow path, which when talking to someone there let me talk to the person at the end of the blue path but I had to go talk to I think the one who gave me the soil, which let me get something from the person at the end of the blue path to give to a person at the end of the yellow path to raise the water level nearby.
*takes a breath
…anyways this opened up a new path, at the end the literal sun was gloomy and wouldn’t help me, got into a mid-boss battle on the way back to get a new teammate, got back to the central hub and still had more hallways to backtrack down so I called it a night. I’ve actually leveled up enough to the degree that I’m barely getting any XP from these battles here (I did not grind at any point in the game FWIW) which has made it even more of a drag, just a bizarre design step-back from the rest of the game that give serious “shit we are getting close to the end and are a bit short on material, just stretch this out as much as we can” energy.
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omg Dracula has a second phase??? No!
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paper Mario is the king of backtracking and fetch quests and they know it. each game gets increasingly cheekier about them
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OH! So i’ve been doing about a game a day this month.
Then I’ve done a pud on 'em.
This first one on the CHAMELEON is here: Backlog Attack: The Chameleon by Godamn Milkman Emediated
Then there’s a billion more. I’ll put up a spreadsheet eventually, but thought I’d share for those who care.
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still having a blast with forza horizon 4, I wish every aaa game was this generally devil may care about the whole prospect of playing a video game. like yes game I am the best gamer ever thank you for noticing 
feel good vibes all around. the actual racing is a bit frustrating but that’s what you get for taking a party game seriously innit.
stellar game for wandering around in pretty cars taking photos of the sunset
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Deadlock sure is a game
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this could be put on the back of the box of this game/this is the essence of this series, yes! 
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get a hot hatch and the Lego expansion, absolute paradise
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My “hot living room Steam Deck dabbling” goes on.
Got full mastery on Hokkaido (still a great level), and maybe have been selling Miami from Hitman 2 short. There’s a lot of very frustrating time-specific tasks, since the race that the level centers around will end about 10-15 minutes in, so I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pull off the “disqualify the target, knock out the rival racer, and then celebrate the win as him” task. Still, got my 20/20, I’m good. Holding off on the next level (set in the South American jungle) because it’s very frustrating, and without AC I think the context will make my brain melt.
Anyway, today I decided to boot up the ironically forgotten The Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, the game they kinda snuck out there to coincide with the Gyllenhaal movie. I had tried it before on my PC but it has a ton of graphical glitches, but weirdly enough it runs perfectly fine on the Steam Deck.
It’s…not bad? I never played Warrior Within or The Twin Thrones or whatever it was called, but this is alright. Combat is bland, maybe slightly better than Sands of Time, but I’m enjoying the puzzles, and other than the Prince having a weirdly boxy looking face, the game looks great.
I’m piling up partially played games over here, but I appreciate this thing making my backlog more…accessible? Palatable? Easier to access? Sure, one of those.
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seeing everyone talk about Deadlock all of a sudden and getting serious “Squidward watching Spongebob and Patrick frolic” vibes
I feel like Valve owes me an invite as one of the 50 people who don’t hate Battleborn
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That was the first game I thought about when I was reading about Deadlock and I wondered how that one had fared
1 Like
they quietly shutdown the Battleborn servers in '21
also the game was always online so even if you own it, on a disc, you cannot play the campaign
which was… not bad but also not good
the problem with the game’s multiplayer was that it’s a MOBA-ass MOBA but there’s no onboarding to this effect so it it just presents itself as a hero shooter
you may remember the game came out within weeks of Overwatch, which isn’t about pushing lanes or leveling up or having a TTK longer than a few seconds
okay, actually it does try to tutorialize the MOBA thing because the entire campaign is self-contained story missions in the sense that there is overarching, serialized story in a mostly linear order but you start every mission at level 1, so you’re rebuilding your character every mission
they probably could have gotten away with this if missions were actually thinly disguised multiplayer maps with a “push your dudes into the enemy base” design instead of “no we’re making an actual (hobby grade) campaign with level design and narrative”
also they nerfed the lucha guy from the alpha so he couldn’t run around maps doing random dives and ganks and generally be a menace and I took this personally
6 Likes
its been kinda funny to watch forza reviews on youtube (yes i watch reviews of games I’m already playing, what of it) and see them all complaining about how horizon 4 doesn’t have good physics and no story. like folks are we playing these games for the same reason? character development? I went in expecting potato chips and got a thoughtfully curated charcuterie board plus trail mix, I guess they went in expecting a roast beef sandwich
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yeah, for real. the narrative framing devices in most of these are awful anyway, Horizon 4’s being, essentially, “Britain is both quaint and loudly tacky, enjoy” is about the best they’ve ever been.
And similarly, Forza physics are like, notably not perfect, but if you compare to what else is out there, they are both very deep and very enjoyable
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The horizon games are cool! My biggest complaint is that they put so much licencing that they feel very temporal since they have to shut the game down after a few years. I never got to see Horizon 1 which takes place in my home state and I’d love to see how they brought all that into a game.
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I think my biggest problem with Deadlock is the same fundamental problem all mobas have: once you’re behind there’s very few ways to get back to an equal footing with your enemy. You have to memorize what each ability does and I kept hitting Q (melee) instead of 1 (ability) for like half the match. The game makes you pick 3 heros and then gives you a random one, so I got one I had never used before and was fighting in my lane with someone who was much more experienced, so I got behind pretty quickly. This also meant that I felt like we were just going to lose and the rest of the match was already decided.
The other fundamental problem mobas have is how much knowledge a person has to maintain to get an edge over a player. Upgrade order - multiple hero abilities - counterpicks - all the mechanics that are happening at once. I keep wondering how this is fun. Deadlock seems simplified enough that deep knowledge isn’t needed yet. And that’s part of the draw - it’s so new that a meta hasn’t quite developed yet and there’s still time to try and learn things before hyper optimized strategies get calcified. Playing a new match with a new hero I felt like the weak link on my team. I loathe that this is every single multiplayer game now - an inscrutable hobby controlled by a single company.
I but like the movement and shooting. The setting is really fun. The characters are all pretty neat. These are the things drawing me to the game more than the mechanics. Maybe it’ll keep me engaged enough to keep playing.
2 Likes
Been playing a lot of Deadlock the past two months (6 matches a day almost every day lol) and while “you’re behind and you’ll always be behind” is true sometimes, it’s not true as often as you think it is. Unless the enemy player is REALLY far ahead, like double or triple your net worth (5k vs 12k, for example), you can easily swing things back in your favor by taking towers, doing the spirit jar, or winning a teamfight. AP matters as much or more than net worth because it makes your skills a lot better, for example. And if you group with your team to gank solo-laners, you can quickly get back whatever net worth you’re behind on. I get ruined by the occasional complete stomp where there’s nothing I can do, but I’ve won games where we were down 20k net worth at 15m. Sometimes all it takes is one or two good fights.
There’s definitely a lot of mechanics going on, like most MOBAs. If you’re feeling out of your depth, I recc going to the Watch tab and just watching a game with one of your selected characters and seeing how they play the match-up. Very useful for learning. There’s also public builds (in the shop, at the top right, click “Browse Builds”) that often include laning and build order advice.
Deadlock’s great! I know people are shitting on it because it’s “derivative” or whatever, but it’s the first hybrid-action MOBA i’ve played that is like… actually an action game through and through, unlike Smite or Predecessor or whatever. The MOBA strategy part is important, but so is movement tech, hitting headshots, etc.
Also if you see me playing feel free to hit me up for team-up 
6 Likes