Cinco Paus: I scored a new best of 379 points in 16 games. I really wanted to crack 400. It would have put me in the top 100 (I counted) and that arbitrary milestone seemed like it would mean something to me. Failure in this game will always make me feel stupid.
Yeah like shrug said eventually you have a couple you like and youâll just always go there to do everything you want (thereâs a great place in Skellige where both an armorer and a blacksmith are right next to a fast travel sign). Same with herbalists, who I didnât give a shit about in the beginning but eventually realized that when youâve built up enough monstercruft you can stand there and buy the random herbs you need and do alchemy in the same interface and you can level your potions/oils/whatnots in bulk.
Old Manâs Journey is the prettiest story book Iâve played in a while
Dat ass
Spent a solid 20 or so scrubbing an SFC with rubbing alcohol, which got its cart slot working real solid real smooth no prob. Then I played
Super Family Tennis / Smash Tennis - Namco, 1993
This game is very good. Cool stages with little background gimmicks; you can play in a snow resort indoor exercise area, there is a balcony above that spectators can watch you from and also see out onto the slopes below - sometimes a waitress walks by and trips and spills all her shit, damn girl watch out. Released mid-cycle, but has the cute early 16bit sprite thing going on. Interlaced hi-res mode menus. Hidden story mode. Snappy physics, reminds me of Capcom Sports Jam. Was apparently released in EU but never here in the US, had never heard of it before.
Best: Sweet ass variable over the top reverb for the sound effects and narrator, based on the stage.
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That opening music gives me VIDEOBALL feels.
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played a bit of demonâs in rpcs3
it crashed a bunch and is it really demonâs if there arenât any âthis is harsh. evaluate meâ messages but still impressed with the emulation
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i got to the final boss of ys origin, and suddenly itâs a danmaku game!
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illusions of gaia update: the china level is at the great wall and has generic terracotta warriors, snakes, and fire (?) as bad guys and the europe level has spiders, psychotic laser skulls, and weird flute demons this is the greatest game of all time
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I frigginâ love Illusion of Gaia
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Bought Agents of MAYHEM because it was on sale for 4 bucks on PSN. Itâs a game, I guess. Open world stuff doesnât seem like a really good match for GI-JOE.
Online SFA3 while laying in bed with my Switch is pretty cool.
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I never managed to finish it. Even making up a team full of Saints Row folks, it just feels so, I dunno. Empty and kinda slapdash.
The writing, too. Woof.
That said, anyone eyeballing it I guess should go for the slightly more expensive version ($7?), since the DLC characters are alright but grossly overpriced on their own.
I figured most of the saints row dev team must have left given how much emptier it seemed but I never cross referenced mobygames or anything
Thumper is Satanâs Bop It.
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Pretty sure Steve Jaros bailed to Valve after Saints Row IV. Seeing as he was lead on 3 and 4âŚyeah it kinda makes sense.
That said, Iâm also pretty sure most of the AoM team was fired shortly after the game came out. Volition apparently has a reputation for hiring promising Chicago developers/artists/etc. from nearby universities and grinding them to a pulp.
But yeah itâs weird that they promised Neo Seoul as this sorta cyberpunk character of its own, and itâs just sorta there.
Itâs kind of odd that they decided to put a cyberpunk urban area front-and-center here. When I think about GI-JOE itâs all wilderness stuff- deserts and jungles and snowy forests and the like, with maybe the occasional racist depiction of a middle-eastern town.
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Good read.
I loved Tesla Coils, even if they were expensive, power-hungry and vulnerable, because zapping your enemies was the coolest thing in the world.
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still know my way around dobuita after about 15 years.
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Returning to the Central Americas, letâs take a look at the Aztecs and how to play an impactful game with them. They are the strongest start in this morass of tribal pre-Feudal nations due to having a gold mine in their capital, really strong national traditions (10% infantry combat ability!), and their leader is already a godly military general. The unique mechanic for them is their religion: Nahuatl. Thereâs a Doom counter running from 0 to 100, increasing every year by the number of provinces you have and reduced by 20% for each of the five religious reforms youâve made. There are scaling effects that really arenât noticeable if youâre playing quickly except if you reach 100. 100 is bad. REALLY bad.
When you reach 100 Doom, both your ruler and heir are sacrificed to the gods and replaced with a 0/0/0 ruler, destabilizing the country. All monarch power (admin, diplo and military power) is erased, any vassals are released as independent and if you had any reforms up to two are also taken away. You really want to avoid getting to this point. Fortunately there are ways to mitigate Doom!
Any adjacent country to yours can be declared on using the Flower Wars Casus Belli. During this war occupying provinces and killing men will reduce Doom directly. Additionally, you will be able to vassalize any of the Central American countries (theyâre small enough) without costing diplo points. Once they are a subject you can sacrifice their ruler or heir for another method of doom reduction. Essentially, being Nahuatl incentivizes being at war at all times.
Now you want vassals because in order to enact a religious reform you need at least five, along with positive stability and less than 50 Doom. You want these five reforms because they all give some real tasty bonuses (5% discipline! -0.05 monthly war exhaustion!) that are maintained as long as you stay Nahuatl. Once a reform is chosen, you lose all vassals (along with having a treaty with them for several years), you lose one stability, and you add 25 Doom to your counter. Once you have all 5 reforms and thereâs a country bordering yours with the Feudalism institution (typically one of the European colonizers), you can fully reform. This gets you 80% of that bordering countryâs tech levels and permanently disabling the Doom mechanic. Thus if you want to stay relevant in the world you want to do this as quickly as possible.
Doing it quickly means playing in a way that isnât typical to the usual EUIV country. You can vassalize a country once and improve relations with them to the point where they will help out offensively in wars. But you canât repeat that after a reform due to the growing relation penalties on top of the aggressive expansion from vassalizing four other countries. This also means you cannot rely on their armies at all; vassals that hate you will not move their armies for anything except to protect their own country. Youâre going to be doing this fighting mostly by yourself. You can ally other countries early on but again the relation penalties will stack up to the point where they will break the alliance. Itâs still worth it because allies donât pick up relation penalties from aggressive expansion as quickly and they could potentially help in the first wars of religious reform where youâll be on closer to equal footing with your enemy. Eventually, however, everyone in Central America is going to hate you. To solve this, youâre just going to have to eat everyone.
As well, treaties are more of a speed bump than a barrier for war. Since reforming means you jump close to another countryâs tech level, any levels you have prior to this are absolutely meaningless. You already have to pay 50% extra per tech level at the start, which only increases once Renaissance and then Colonization institutions are founded. Youâre better off accumulating monarch points to âpayâ for breaking treaties, which the game penalizes you for with a -5 stability loss (but you canât go below -3, so declare most wars at -2) and an equal amount of war exhaustion. Admin points pay for stability increase, while diplo points pay for war exhaustion reduction. If youâre finding that youâre still bumping against the cap, start developing provinces so theyâll produce more cash for you later on!
With all that in mind, youâre going to be playing as the meanest, cruelest prophet-king around. Anytime you vassalize a country, rip out as much cash from them as you can and destroy their army if it wonât kill your own manpower to do so. The inevitable next war with them is going to be much easier if theyâre in debt and have not enough men left to fight! Because of how Doom accumulates, be careful of what provinces you take while doing religious reforms. Early on you want to take any province with a fort as they take a non-trivial time to siege down. Later, with more reforms reducing Doom accumulation, you can can focus on reducing countries to single provinces or cutting them off from the mayans who will take advantage of the constant fighting. Sacrifice your subjects rulers/heirs whenever possible. Once you have five vassals, pay to stabilize your country to +1, reform, then turn around and declare on one of those former subjects instantly, treaty be damned.
Once you start you canât stop due to a thing originally called BAD BOY in EU3. If enough countries around you lose their treaties and have 50+ aggressive expansion generated from you, theyâll coalition into a massive ALL vs YOU alliance. If you declare a war the coalition will also join in against you. If you donât declare war and they have the numbers to crush you, theyâll declare war instead! You can work around this by juggling treaties, keeping the number of countries available for coalitioning below the critical number of 5 (artificial restriction in the AI). This means you can slow down after all the reforms and only start wars as soon as the first treaty drops rather than eating the stability/war exhaustion penalty like you were before. Then itâs just a matter of slowly collecting all of Central America under Aztec and waiting for the colonizers to drop by.
Of course, the colonizers could be uncooperative and stay in terra incognita out of direct contact from you while knowing that you exist. They might also start a war for your rich provinces without having an visible adjacent colony because theyâre across the water in the Caribbean. Donât panic, with the gold mines and enemy peace deals you should have lots of ducats to pay them off. And whatâs more, you could let them land first to conquer a single province before signing the peace deal. Then you can hand them the province (they wonât take it otherwise) and whatever else to get them to fuck off for several years, leaving you fulfilling the requirements for religious reform! You become demi-Aztec with a click of a button on track towards super-Aztec, savior of the New World.
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