hi there, i’m new (but not really; lurked a lot on Select Button I ~10 years ago)
i’m playing mother 3, i’m in chapter 5, good stuff
18 Likes
Because of a fuckup at one of the local Fred Meyer stores, I got Metroid: The Return of Samus for really cheap.
I actually really like it though? As an adaption of Metroid II, it’s an enourmpus failure for sure. But I’ve decided to take it as a sort of Nintendo endorsed Metroid fangame.
I really like how the areas actually involve running around and trying to find stuff, rather than just being totally funneled through one route. And the enemy design feels pretty clever on occasion. While a little simplistic, I do like how it puts you in situations where you have to manage your various special powers to survive.
It’s not half as interesting as the original Metroid II, but it’s still one of the more solid metroidvanias I’ve played in ages.
4 Likes
proud member of the “get ass kicked by marina in fighters” club
4 Likes
After several failed attempts at various stages, dropping it for a while to play other things, then getting back to it because fuck this game I did a couple reworks of the start. Notably I gave my national ideas a real shakedown for more military strength and key boosts when we hit certain pivot points (missionary strength bonus for when the colonizers start coming en masse, for example). I also tried a different set of idea groups after Exploration (which is pretty mandatory if you’re planning on taking over two continents for yourself) to get the snowball moving faster.
Thus the last remaining colony of Norse-believing Yucatecans in the world bullied their way through the Aztecs and became shrewd investors of the numerous gold mines instead of runaway inflators that the Central Africans generally become (Economic Ideas are: have money to make more money). Instead of colonizing the worthless lands nearby, exploration was focused on the wealth that is the Caribbean islands. There was a certain brilliance in patiently letting the European colonizers take that other land, turn it over to colonial governors, and then grab it for ourselves when the time was ripe. After all, it sounds so strange to the other side of the world that there’s growing empire of… something in the jungles that they chalk it up to fever or hallucinogens.
So Ideas Guy popped first. Once you’re the one producing shedloads of valuable goods that Europe wants and can channel the trade down avenues where you can scoop up the majority, you can barely keep up on building more manufactories and production to make you more money. It snowballs out of control to where I built the Panama canal without really considering 30k a loss. For comparison, I started the game with 0.4 ducat profit per month and ran negative if I had an army going 100%.
First Come, First Serve had a couple iterations of play. I realized that fighting the Europeans directly was costly so you wanted to encourage them to build in areas that could eventually form colonial nations. There’s a quirk in the logic where if you are native to the area and attack the colonial nation, they do not get to call in their ruling country. However, there were a couple spots in North and South America that are colonizable but are not part of these areas, typically isolated islands like the Galapagos and the Falklands. You will want to eventually take time away from the really valuable provinces early on to nab those for yourself, reducing the chance of direct war when you’re not prepared to deal with it.
Secondly is the culture and religion clash. Both play into how badly newly conquered provinces will revolt and require you to station an army nearby waiting to mop up rebels. There’s almost no way of picking a culture that won’t be accepted by an eventual colonizer so screw that, adapt for the early game and become some Central American type. It makes early game conquering a lot smoother and bonus, one of the goals of the Reformation Age is to unify your culture group.
As for religion, Catholicism is pretty much the intuitive one due to the colonizers being primarily that. Sometimes Protestants sneak in and Reformed tends to sit quietly in Germany (although this game Austria picked it up and rammed through France!). However, I wanted to also complete a third achievement For Odin: “using up to 200 points and 5 provinces, take over Britain and Scandinavia and convert it all to Norse.” On one hand it makes conversion of the other pagans pretty quick and painless. On the other, you need a boost to your preaching strength if you want to convert Christians and there will be a lot of provinces like that. Fortunately there’s the Religious Idea Group for just such an occasion!
Anyway, For Odin had a bit of a wrinkle in that Great Britain had it’s wooden wall already built by the time I was looking across the ocean. There’s something draining about seeing 100 heavy ships on their roster compared to your puny 20 that worked just fine for every other war. Being richer than the pope helped in the construction of a fleet to rival theirs, however. I started that program while I had a fortunate war with Scandinavia while they were getting their stuffing punched out of them by Russia. I got to grab up the entirety of what is Denmark in reality, providing an easy base to plan war and ferry troops to.
Then that one war happened. An alliance with Austria sometimes gets me involved in odd fights like half of Europe fighting the other half. This time Great Britain intervened and I unleashed my own modern fleet and superior human tactics of only committing enough ships that can actually deal damage and rotating in a fresh set once the first was looking somewhat tattered. It was a still a heavy (heh) cost but victory was secured, a foothold was established on the British Isles and I no longer needed that navy to get at Britain.
Which was good because Great Britain’s AI is “BOTES, BOTES, BOTES” set on repeat and had an even larger heavy ship number by the time I fought them again.
There was also the tiny problem of the end time rapidly approaching and if I fought ‘normally’ I would not complete the task. My last set of wars started with me smashing Great Britain while Austria dealt with their European allies and only being able to grab a fourth of their land. What I had to do was core that land while frantically dealing with overextension and when it completed, break truce (-5 stability and war exhaustion along with aggressive expansion diplomatic maluses on countries that care, in other words a heavy penalty to do once let alone repeatedly) and fight them again. And repeat.
And found a lonely country to start a war on while I was telling the Englishmen the virtues of the Norse religion. This was to prevent countries that were really, really angry at me (going above 50 is typically bad, I was 50-150) from forming a coalition or an agreement that, if I was to start a war with someone they would all pile on OR just start a war with you anyway.
This is a lot of words about a dumb game.
6 Likes
Hell yes EU4 rules
counter strike isn’t about being good, it’s about betting that everyone else is worse
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tried playing a ps2 game from the makers of tenchu entitled kamiwaza. it’s also a stealth game set in olden days japan, but you’re a thief that doesn’t kill, and of course you also don’t have all the skills and tools of a ninja, either.
unfortunately, rather than a simple tenchu-like structure with seperate stages, after a couple of introductory missions it becomes this kind of open world thing and i don’t know what to do or where to go.
some jp literate person please play this and post about it
3 Likes
that sounds cool
Pyre.
- Absorb exposition, make a minor decision, play a Rite basketball match, repeat. Season with item- and experience-based progression systems. I like this loop a lot.
- Rites are awkward, same as everyone says. There are 3-on-1 challenges that work a lot better, but they’re rare.
- The big twist: your major objective comes at the expense of the conclusion of the little stories you come across along the way. You have to win the Rites, but the players you’ve invested the most into will gradually be taken from you, meaning the stories they were a part of fall apart and disappear. This is simultaneously a fascinating narrative choice and a source of frustration for players who regret their choices.
- My Surface struggles more with this than it does with some 3D action games.
quick pillars 2 impressions:
- they drop way too much backstory on you immediately with the expectation that you played the first game to which this is a direct sequel; however, almost all of it is intelligible based on the first ~4 hours of the first one, which is all I played. without that it would be a problem.
- the party AI scripting is as good as FFXII or DAO and makes the combat actually decent and playable, which is great
- so far I don’t have strong opinions about the writing, but it’s not nearly as immediately cloying and generic as the first one was
so far seems fairly decent!
2 Likes
What is this unthinkable false equivalency
I’m just talking about the AI customization, which was “mostly satisfying” in both cases
I understood, and: no
regardless I have played some more of pillars 2 and I can confirm it is a-OK
if anything it’s way too easy? like I’m just mopping the floor with most of the encounters on veteran difficulty?
I just got a full party though and the game hasn’t done any of the things its precedessor did to make me question why I’d put time into it in the first place so I’m giving this a solid comfort-food rec
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also truly this is not so bad
like there are lots of reasons that this game is kind of lame but
this part of it is fine
I played Hiveswap Act 1 and had a great time.
1 Like
I started FF13 and didn’t really enjoy it.