I finished up Mass Effect 3 today.
I have no idea how that ending caused such a dramatic widespread freak out. It was fine if unremarkable, kinda like the endings in the previous two Mass Effects?
To be fair, it is probably my fault for naming the child Franono.
I havenât met those other characters yet though, so I canât really speak to their deviousness
which color ending did you get
the simple 2000 series lives on through schoolgirl zombie hunter. itâs even developed by tamsoft and published by d3p!
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how many âcarbosâ does RAGE 2 have
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Man Iâve been on a pop punk kick this morning so I am ideally primed to pick up on what Id is putting down here
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could be good
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i got freakin banned from dark souls 3 (this is a thing that can happen, apparently) so iâve been dipping into (new) xcom again.
i finished enemy within a while ago and it was nice so i decided to give it another spin in classic+ironman mode and damn it is pretty brutal. iâm not sure what i think of it, i kinda appreciate how it makes you really think about every game mechanic so you donât get destroyed but it also introduces so much meaningless decision fatigue.
like youâll spend entire minutes per turn to spread out your squad in the most optimal way possible and take shots efficiently to account for possible unseen alien squads spotting you on the next turn, only to have some low key enemy land a <10% shot, critting your squad leader through a wall and making the entire squad panic and get themselves killed.
also thereâs a fair amount of weird jank (inconsistencies in the flanking mechanic, unpredictable lines of sight, etc) that doesnât pair well with the âevery action mattersâ intended platonic ideal.
but hey itâs pretty cool to watch a slight misfortune snowball into a global catastrophe (missions fail, worldwide panic spreads, increasingly harder missions become even harder from the lack of good soldiers to replace your dead ones) and you have to play super defensively and prioritize upgrades that help in worst case situations which hey fits the alien invasion disaster theme.
after a bunch of restarts iâm close to month 3 without any failed missions or total party kills, thatâs the furthest iâve made it thus far. iâm also playing with training roulette on (semi random skill trees) so my hopes rest on getting a sniper with the anti-mech skill soon.
i canât get over the generic-ass alien designs and extremely cliche characters though, everything feels so bland in this otherwise good worldwide disaster simulator.
they fixed the design a bit in XCom 2 but the complexity and decision fatigue get to be way too much, I think classic enemy within (+ the DLC missions) was probably them at their best
nu xcom is mostly trivialized when you realize that all you need to do is use up your grenades in 90% of encounters because they have a 100% hit rate and can kill multiple enemies in range in a single action.
Which becomes somewhat ludicrous, these soldiers never firing their guns and just lobbing grenades with pinpoint accuracy.
I honestly kind of hate the game, classic difficulty is an absurdity that is beaten by doing something absurd.
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I mean, that stops working shortly into the game because grenades donât scale very well, but yes, guaranteed damage is the answer in every situation as it is in any game with % to hit
this sounds like you only played EU and quit early on
it is kind of a lousy flawed design that proves very brittle when all the pieces donât line up right (which is why XCom 2 didnât really fix much imo) but EW + classic pretty much works the whole way through
why did you get banned from dark souls 3?
last thing i remember was asking some invader i met for a spare silvercat ring, which they kindly gave me, along with some fat stacks of souls. maybe i shouldnât have picked up those fat stacks.
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some of the cutscenes recycle the menu music from oneechanbara vortex lol
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as if Pillars 2 didnât make a substantially stronger first impression than the original, it also makes an even better second impression. the first three characters to join you are all human, and two of them are returning allies from the first game, and the first main dungeon area is a very meandering Infinity Engine thing; itâs not bad (the visual design is pretty good and the dialogue is above average and the combat is so much better with the AI scripting that it doesnât overstay its welcome or anything), but it gives the impression that the game is only going to be decent enough
then when you get your ship and sail to the first really big city you recruit a full party of demihumans (who you would have to be very boring not to use, theyâre all much more interesting than the Pillars 1 roster and they have cool multiclass configurations like Barbarian / Cipher), each of whom loosely represents one of the factions trying to colonize the archipelago where the game takes place, or not colonize it, or just be a pirate and fuck everybody, and the writing is actually pretty faithful to each of their individual interests
also that city has like four little mini-dungeons sprawling off of it in various directions (all of them optional as far as I could tell) and they were all surprisingly good and one of them just ended in a genuinely dynamic and interesting bossfight that required me to manually override my own AI configurations in ways I hadnât yet considered just enough to be interesting rather than feeling like I was working against the game. I even had to think about which buffs I was bringing into the fight! so I guess thatâs a strong recommendation for playing on the second-highest difficulty too.
compared to the first game which I quit about two hours in when your Rasputin-looking priest ally joins you at the side of a road for no reason at all and then you have to go fight a bunch of skeletons by manually casting the same buff every encounter in this bland blue-grey landscape on the way to god knows what, I donât think this one is getting nearly the credit it should for how much itâs improved.
I hate when every outlet reviews these like âwell, yeah, if itâs your thing then itâs your thingâ when itâs actually the difference between a C-grade and an A-grade traditional CRPG
one of my allies revealed after I had developed a positive enough relationship with them that theyâd been hiding a magical amulet in their ass for our first five hours of game time together but now they wanted me to have it
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also, having the world map be loosely inspired by sunless sea was such a good gosh darned idea. It has a real sense of place! No games have world maps worth a damn anymore and this one is strikingly successful! And even the random âencountersâ are interesting!
my ranger lady thinks Iâm playing a heterosexual woman because I fucked the fish man though 
ď¸
I think it was an oversight to not give me a âwho wouldnât fuck the fish manâ dialogue option
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Pillars of Accidentally Saying Something Racist While Trying To Persuade Your Allies That You Are Canonically Bisexual
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minish cap is really mediocre outside of the spritework
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