games you played today chronicles X: ten things I played about you

King of Posters King of Posters 2000
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The news youve all been waiting for I gained like 2 levels and was able to fight off those doll bastards relatively painlessly

Major ludonarrative dissonance in getting my ass handed to me by a bunch of children’s toys so badly that I had to go outside and slaughter lizards for an hour to increase my power levels, and then shortly after that absolutely annihilate Golbez (first form) without breaking a sweat. I mean maybe it’s not so dissonant because Lydia’s return is supposed to make that much easier, but still

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Accidental Michael Keaton Purchase is not the worst thing anyone can do with Fortnite*

*I’ve not played Fortnite

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I beat Arkham Origins. Wild that this is the only game in the entire series with good boss fights. The final fight with Bane is still incredibly nerve wracking, though part of it (the constant threat of “if you don’t beat him soon he’ll be invincible”) is, I think, more of a narrative pressure thing than something that could actually happen.

Cleaned up a few side missions (they’re all mercifully shorter than the ones in City, with a few more pointers so you can actually find them), then went into the Mr. Freeze DLC, which is also actually pretty good.

I think I get it, I remember why I prefer this one to the others, lower production values and extra jank and everything. City is still better, sure, but this one…it’s got something to it.

That jank is no joke though. I did a dive bomb from up high between two goons, and one stumbled backwards, clipped a wall, flew like two hundred feet into the air and landed, unconscious. A bug, or a power of the Bat, who can say…

Edit: This DLC has thrown the biggest curve ball I can think of in the history of these games - putting a dude in body armor in one of the “sneak around and knock out every dude” areas. Can’t sneak up on him and knock him out, he’s wearing armor. Can’t string him up, he’s wearing armor. Gotta, I guess, make a lot of noise, stun him, beat the shit out of him, then knock him out, and try not to get gunned down by ten dudes.

I’ve done this before! I think! I’m pretty sure I beat this DLC on PS3. Just wracking my brain…how do I get past this guy’s carapace…

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Okay, 50-ish hours more of play time on this and I think I have finally hit the wall where I can’t be bothered anymore.

Summary

I almost rage quit and deleted everything while trying to do the breakthrough to ‘Reborn’, which is cultivation level 9 of 10. This one requires you to go to 5 different places and pass some challenges, one of which being a cave with Too Many Monkeys. you have to try to keep killing the monkeys to prevent more than 50 appearing otherwise you fail. At this point it became clear that I hadn’t been using one of the few ‘correct builds’ and my high pressure water beam attack wasn’t going to cut it, basically making it impossible.

I decided to make one last ditch attempt before throwing in the towel, which involved taking back my Bagua Jade half (which lets you summon whoever you give it to) from my sworn sister (who tried to guilt trip me for it: “I guess you have someone more important than me now”) and giving it to someone in a higher level. To do this they need to have some bond with you, so I basically tried my best to convince some guy to marry me and when that failed, asked him to be my Dad and then my Master. He was just like “No, and can you please stop asking”.
I ended up giving it to my apprentice and luckily her AOE attacks were just enough to barely scrape through the monkey onslaught.

I do find it funny that my journey to becoming a supposedly genetically superior form of being was almost completely thwarted by monkeys though.

The actual breakthrough process after that is currently bugged on Switch so the only way to complete it without crashing is to switch the language to Chinese. As a result I have no idea what destiny I got and I can’t check because they mapped the same button for the info popup to the one that brings up some other window and if you do this you get stuck in the menu and have to quit and reload the game.

I then almost perma-quit the game on a big story related boss that has a real bullshit three phase setup, where the first phase you just have to survive but this usually ends up depleting most of your healing items. The second phase has a giant axe and shield that you have to kill at almost the same time, otherwise they will heal back to full health. They are so far apart that doing this is extremely difficult and their attacks are pretty much impossible to dodge. The third phase is thankfully pretty easy but by then you’re at pretty much zero healing items. You pretty much have to be at the maximum cultivation level with the best maxed out skills you can find.

After this I reached the final area where the big mountain that marks the endgame is found. I went down a well and triggered an event where you find a developer working on bugfixes. I think this would have been the perfect place for the game to crash and corrupt my save. It would kind of sum up the game perfectly.

Instead, I am basically stuck on a boss that looks like a developer self-insert whose attack patterns are impossible for my slow character to dodge and has too much HP for me to kill before I am wiped out. Because I am at the max level, the only real way to gain stats is to grind more Mind Skills, but I don’t see that giving me enough of a boost to get through this without spending another 50 hours completely changing my character to the Correct Build.

Looking at the rest of the game online seems to indicate it only gets more frustrating from here. Also watching some videos online they basically say “recommended attack stat for this boss is at least 15K”. Mine is around 8000, and again I am at the max level so I have no idea how to get even close to that.

So unless I decide to come back to this for some Good Ol’ Grinding sometime down the track, I think my cultivator is going to have to just forget about immortality and settle for a lifespan of around 1000 years. Let’s not get too greedy. Her legacy is being a ‘Wind Enthusiast’ who shoots high pressure water beams that turn people into chickens, can summon frogs and eats her own poop.

My final assessment of this game is that it is to grinding what The Witness is to maze puzzles. Any possible permutation of grinding has been carefully considered and implemented in all it’s many variations.

Also not really sure who thinks it’s a good idea to put 20+ second cooldown timers on healing items and dodge moves. Xuan Yuan Sword 7 does this on items too and it is a super baffling design decision.

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I finally reached all current goals on Pokemon Sleep until they add a new island.

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Swinging in hard with

the FINAL spreadsheet for my August VG backlog attack.

31 entries, 1 wrap up. so 32 podcasts as well.

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Second night in a row in Outlaws I’ve spent putting off going to Tatooine in favor of screwing around with odd job contracts from Danka and the Crimson Dawn lady.

The rapid fire upgrade for the blaster is pretty good. Basically turns it into an assault rifle. Combat is a bit better as a result.

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873

I’d try this when I can pirate it.

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that’s not a thing anymore on any game expensive enough worth putting copy protection on

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875

It will probably be 60% off by Black Friday.

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well I guess sometimes they get updated to be without denuvo later on

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why did it take me over an hour to get a piece of fish

why did it take me over an hour to get a piece of fish…

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why does every single item in order of ecclesia have a fucking 1% drop rate igarashi you fucking fraud. and why are all of these items utterly essential so as to not immediately get killed in one-hit by the next boss. why are these “levels” such fucking dogshit THEY’RE JUST A STRAIGHT LINE!!!

who actually made all those good castlevania games because it clearly wasn’t you iga you keiji inafune with a better hat motherfucker

i’m mad now. haven’t played order of ecclesia in over a decade and in the intervening years i forgot this game was shit straight from an ass.

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I quit it when it came out for the same reason. Losing a random drop cuz I died was incredibly obnoxious and I can’t think of many similar games that do that. Or at least not any that are actually good.

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At least in other CV games, a long, tedious grind like that will get you something cool, like a game-breaking weapon (example: the Crissagraem in SOTN). Here it’s just like, here’s some meat you can give to a guy who will then use it to make better healing items. But he won’t GIVE you a healing item, he will instead give you the OPPORTUNITY to spend money in the shop for a better healing item. Such a waste of time.

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Isn’t the drop rate in Dawn of Sorrow in particular super bugged? I remember just kinda not bothering with a lot of the souls, just grabbed a few that worked and hoped for the best.

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it’s that your character is incomplete before midgame. my impatience with this game precisely reflected my impatience to climb out of the state of abjection i found myself in in 2022 and 2023. of course this gradual return to adequacy is necessary after wolf failed at his one job, lost a limb in the process, and was tossed into a pit to die of depression. in circumstances like those you have to be careful, focus on the basics, and try to avoid strong expectations

i ended up grinding in the ashina reservoir until i had mastered the ashina skill tree, apart from the final skill. the trick to beating the spear miniboss was to not fixate on trying to mikiri counter him, despite his being a spear guy. i reached the top of ashina castle but haven’t fought genichiro yet, instead branching out to explore alternate paths. now that i have 5 gourds, the game feels more than fair.

in my last session i got to the gun fort and fought the centipede guy that the game springs on you in a closet-sized arena. initially intimidating, but all you have to do is deflect his predictable flurry of attacks and then mario stomp him in response to his unblockable and he dies easily. i think my ideal souls boss is basically a mannequin that pops out at you in a haunted house

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continuing my peg mission (finally). i coulda sworn i had already written about ff9 but i guess not??? anyway that means that i actually have quite a bit to cover:

final fantasy ix (psx on 3ds)
mannnnnnnn i would be down w faifan 9 if its pacing were a little different. the presentation is so good. it is fucking crazy how good this game looks. like literally nothing else on the psx looks like this it’s incredible. and the vibes are wonderful! each town and setpiece is such a treat to explore! i love dagger and vivi (peak character design) and the rat girl (peak character design)! monkeyboy is okay too but fsr he feels slightly too adolescent, in like, , , too real a way idk. anyway w/e the game presents really well, but it plays just sooooooo slowwwww. it’s wayyy too slow for such a simple battle system. like ff7 i think can get away with having a relatively simple set of systems because the plot is moving along at such a pace. but ff9 is taking its sweet time which means both the plot and the grind are keeping you in the same place. it’s exhausting!
i played for uhhh idk how many hours. a lot! i just checked hltb and it reckons the game is only like 40-50 hours long but for reasons i’ll get into i don’t trust that one bit.
anyway i should look into one of those “half the encounters double the xp” mods for this game or just accept that i don’t have infinite time and look at a longplay… :frowning:

crimson shroud (threeds)
great name for a game i just don’t wanna play.
yasumi matsuno returns to deliver yet another game that’s real cool on paper but kinda laborious in practice. at first blush crim shrou has everything i want out of a jrpg: it’s short (7 hours!), has weird combat (turns out: not that weird), and weird presentation. however, i just found the opening hours so railroaded (and narratively uninspired) that i lost all interest. it felt less like an rpg and more like a choose-your-own-adventure. i didn’t feel like i was exploring in any sense; the spaces were limited and the systems even more so. i wish i’d written this earlier so that my impressions were less abstract and i could point to specifics but wcyd. i’d love to hear from someone who enjoyed this that it gets real good later on but i don’t see myself going back to check.

culdcept revolt (threeds again)
el em ay oh this ain’t a peg it’s a fuckn board game with terrible anime dialogue between battles.
cool game to tell your coworker that you’re playing but otherwise who cares man. u can’t trick me into playing board games by putting em on a handheld.

shin megami tensei: devil survivor: overclocked (only played 3ds pegs this time round huh)
speaking of c-grade anime dialogue! lmao. this game owns, but its plot and dialogue are fucking abysmal. like look man atlus games have never wowed me with their writing but at least the translations seemed like, , , competent. this time round i really felt like a lot of the dialogue was translated with no knowledge of its context; heaps of non sequiturs and awkward responses. i don’t think the writing would have been that much better if this hadn’t been the case but it made the whole thing feel particularly slapdash.
anyway i beat the heck outa this game – this is the first smt i’ve ever finished! mostly due to sunk cost fallacy. it took me a whopping 90 hours to complete! hltb told me it was only 50~ hours long! fucken, what’d i do wrong??? my suspicion is that i spent a unusually long time putting my team together and doing complicated demon ability inheritance bullshit; i definitely spent a long time just looking through available demons and working out how i could pass abilities up in the best way rather than “playing the game” (personally i would consider pondering the demon spreadsheets a nontrivial part of what it means to play smt but w/e). also i bet the clear times people enter are based on their save files rather than the system times (which would put me at 70-ish hours) which artificially shrinks the play-time but whatever who cares.
unfortunately i really don’t feel like i have a huge amount to say about this one. it had the right combat structure to really grab me (tactics without noodly equipment management bullshit), real nice graphics, and pretty slick pacing, despite the terrible writing. that’s all it takes i guess. that and spite determination.
the final fight is some bullshit boss-rush followed by a pokemon style “do you have a wide enough mix of abilities to target all the elemental weaknesses” gimmick which like, ok. not interesting but idk what i expected cos i’ve never seen the end of a smt before so maybe that’s normal; seems kinda lazy imo (another win for yokai watch 2).
biiiiiiiig shrug.

and that’s it for now! i’m definitely taking a break for a bit; smt really took the wind out of my sails, even tho i had a good time. but when i come back we’ll be in for some weirdo shit: i’m thinking either the last story, nepheshel, hybrid heaven, or koudelka. i’m leaning towards short, so probably nepheshel, but we’ll see…
:sleeping:

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The final Mr. Freeze fight in Arkham Origins is so irritating. He summons waves of armed goons at you that you have to take out in a small, circular area, and your best bet is to take them on from up high…but Mr. Freeze is up there and he’ll zap ya and render the perch points unusable.

I’ve done this before! I can do it again! Batman please set me free from the clutches of, uh, Batman. I need to do something other than Batman…but I gotta see this Batman through…

Also did a side mission that bugged in a really weird way, and the solution is “just go to this spot on the map and hit a button, there’s no way to do it right once it bugs, it’ll just mark it complete.”

Will I be free from the clutches of Batman? Will I wind up installing Arkham Knight? Well, maybe. But then I think about how all but one boss fight in that game involve using the shitty Batmobile tank and…nah. No thanks.

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Also after reading the list by @Rudie I got Bernband running on Steam Deck and it’s pretty cool. I gotta spend a little more time in it, but it’s very cool to play a game that’s just a small slice of a little of a world.

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Little Goody Two Shoes has a nice mix of things going on. It’s like a mini life sim, dating sim, indie horror packaged with a clean 90s Shoujou look. The dresses are poofy, the hair is lavish, and the outline of your eyes sometimes extends some way past the edge of your face. The pastoral Bavarian fairytale setting gives way to a tense game of balancing chores and hunger while fending off the religious superstition about you possibly being the local witch. This is also wrapped up in an explicit set of potential yuri romances you can pursue. The romance being so prominently front and centre alongside the No More Heroes-esque odd job minigames and conservative suspicion gives everything an additional sense of tension, snatching short pleasures of life amidst labour and normative village life.

So far, I’ve made it to the first night and dream sequence. Each day is segmented into 6 chunks you ‘spend’ doing chores or hanging with your girls. The dream sequences imply some sort of horror underlying the recent storm and rumours about the witch. The game is up front early on that there are ten or so endings and you should save often to see what can happen but not sure how quick a route will be. I suppose you could neglect work and starve to pursue romance, or be a real Goody Two Shoes and embody a puritan work ethic by doing nothing but toil.

The game is exceptionally pretty and has lots of nice UI conceits making use of skeuomorphic metaphors like dioramas you play the various arcade-style job minigames through, or lockets and clockwork amusements for the menus and time progressing. The opening alone is a gorgeous sequence. There’s lots of border ornamentation and ‘la la la’ helping the visuals and music sing as one and it manages a remarkably confident vision of playing as a good little girl who doesn’t really act like the one that society craves. A unique little game I’m surprised hasn’t had more attention.

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