Games You Played Today Oratorio Tangram

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I played EOU2: Fafnir Knight all weekend. I had an itch to play another dungeon crawler, and I was pleased to find that by now theyā€™ve fixed almost all the problems I had with the first EOs (I only played EO1 and EO2, and then no further than the 2nd stratum before getting sick of them). The ā€œNormalā€ difficulty level reduces endless grinding without trivializing the combat and the one-retry system means that you no longer lose progress from getting blindsided by events or unknown mechanics. And the fights and party specs have more decisions than before, with in-battle enemy weakness reference sheets, Force/Break timing, Grimoire acquisition and loadouts, and the Beast/Sovereign classes being more nuanced tank/buffer classes than Knight/Bard. So I no longer feel like Iā€™m just mindlessly selecting the same actions over and over every battle. I recommend it to anyone else who hasnā€™t touched the series in a while.

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Is that one of the ones where you get to pick either to play with or without a story at the start? Which path are you taking?

I think I found how to consume Tropico 4 properly: play only a single scenario from the Modern Times campaign per day. That way the 1/2 to an hour long endeavours donā€™t pall and you can still get challenged by what gets thrown at you (nearly failed the one tracking the Canned Index; I had to quickly brand some of my soldiers as heathens at the whims of the other world powers before it dropped too low).

I did notice theyā€™ve started re-using islands. :thinking:

Yep. I chose without a story because I wanted to choose my own party composition and because I would probably mash through the story dialogue as fast as possible anyway (the writing doesnā€™t seem especially inspired). So far, the only problem Iā€™ve had with it is that I wasnā€™t given the Force/Break tutorial so I wasnā€™t utilizing my Breaks until I figured it out the end of the second stratum. Iā€™m probably missing out on a few story quests there are plenty enough quests anyway.

beat pokemon white (good!), tried playing dragon quest iv, couldnā€™t get into it, started playing gran turismo 3 and ended up getting sucked into gran turismo 1

just got all gold on the b license test which is like fucked up hard iā€™ve never gotten all golds on a license test and iā€™m STOKED

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Aw, thatā€™s a shame about DQIV. Itā€™s probably one of my favorites in the series, next to 3 and 8
Plus it features the character that spawned the Mystery Dungeon series!

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Dragon Quest
Saved the princess.

I feel like this game and III both have sort of weird story/motivation issues.
Once my guy kills a dragon and saves the princess, why does he want to go on and kill the Dragonlord?

The trick is to never bring the princess back, elope together and have the Dragonlord slaying be a honeymoon adventure.

should I take a break from 7th Dragon 3 and touch my psp again?

Playing almost nothing but Hearthstone right now. The new expansion has really slowed the metagame down for once, so itā€™s nice that games go a little longer. That being said, Iā€™m not really making any progress on the ladder. Still pretty fun, though.

i canā€™t help myself and got a 56:03 in shadow tower with terrible luck
sub-56 would just need better luck (lost 45 seconds on bow drop RNG). sub-55 is definitely possible with the current strat. sub-54 would require ridiculous RNG and consistently near-perfect execution

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I havenā€™t played any games except 15 minutes of Cyber Knight 2.

But Iā€™m also using Idlemaster to get all my Steam card drops, so in a sense, Iā€™m playing games 24/7.

also did you know you can quick sell cards using a chrome extension??? thatā€™s the only reason Iā€™m getting these cards. gonna get my $10 or whatever

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Some good things about DQI and DQIII

Dragon Quest I
is very carefully designed to guide the player through everything naturally and it is god-damn game design magic. The updated American NES version graphics are very charming and well done.

Dragon Quest III
is an exceptionally crafted prequel. It takes small throw-away lines from DQI and shapes narrative around them subtly to create hints of profundity and suggest that DQI is immensely deep and like, maybe you should play it with imagination.
I canā€™t think of a better prequel for anything in any medium.

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I played Let It Die solidly for several days! Itā€™s a long time since i was so absorbed in a game. This is the first time iā€™ve played a free-to-play game and felt that i should give the developers money.

Iā€™m now having to reconcile my belief that i never wanted to play a violent videogame ever again with my desire to constantly play a violent videogame. Shadow of Mordor was free for a weekend on Steam a few weeks ago, and i turned it off after 15 minutes because it was too violent, and i didnā€™t want to play a character having his bloody revenge on orcs. I played it so little i canā€™t even really compare what the two games are doing differently.

Itā€™s obviously a difference of presentation & tone. SoM wants me to take it seriously, so i do and therefore donā€™t want to play? If the story is serious, so is the violence? Iā€™m not especially enjoying the violence in LID but it doesnā€™t bother me either. The things iā€™m enjoying are exploring the tower, collecting treasure, and finding out how things work. Itā€™s tempting to suggest that the focus isnā€™t violence, which is true to an extent but itā€™s also true that a large amount of the mechanical challenge comes from fights, and probably half the time iā€™m spending in the game is spent fighting.

Overall iā€™m struggling to see what the difference is, why i had to turn one off straight away and iā€™ve been playing the other constantly. Perhaps i just hadnā€™t appreciated that changes in context and tone could make such a difference to wanting to play a game.

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(This post has taken me about a week to write, and iā€™m now starting to find some of the edges of LID. A reduction in the rate of discovery seems to have also produced a slight increase in my disquiet with the violence.)

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I kinda feel the same way sometimes. I love games that celebrate violence like Doom/nuDoom(earlier versions of Brutal Doom), Mad World, Anarchy Reigns or Saints Row but then I look at something like Mortal Kombat X and I get completely turned away from it. Tone and style help a lot to sell this the right way for me. I also have difficulty articulating my aversion to one display of violence over another. Modern MK I feel is maybe to sadistic to try and sell itā€™s over the top violence with its realistic style. Just feels like a big clash when it has all other kinds of comic book style action going on with its characters.

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God I love the comic book style action and characters in MK, but the way that stuff is treated just feels exploitative in all the worst ways.

it probably helps that let it die is one of the most visually beautiful games. and even though itā€™s very silly, the world is so fleshed out and real-feeling, too.
like, i can totally believe in this huge tower made of an entire cityā€™s wreckage, and the horrible, tortured humans, psuedohumans and former humans that live in it.

is there a way to replay the tutorial of let it die if you played it for like an hour at launch and havenā€™t touched it since

I thought Idlemaster died? It stopped working for me and then I saw all these threads that said the devs stopped supporting it and it got killed by a Steam update or something.