On further review, I’m sad Helldivers 2 is not top-down.
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cleaning up backlog of games I put on hold for years, this tile Star Ocean 1R.
Getting back into it, not knowing what i was up to, so of course I had to check out which skills i was learning (because THAT is what you do in SOs, yeah 
)
Well, there is that Contraband special skill where you can craft items of somewhat legit nature, so of course i went leveling for a bit, unlocked lv 10 of that skill, and started creating… didn’t notice that there is a reason that the ‘bounced check’ item sells for -1 credits, because as long as you have that in your inventory, it drains $$$ from your purse. Don’t know how many i’ve lost that way, maybe up to 100k or so?
Laughed so hard at this, and kudos to tri-Ace for coming up with that idea.
Of course, then i had to break that door wide open, luckily you can sell ‘forged document’ for 65k, some stock options for 13k, and … yeah, am past the first million now, guess i won’t need to pay attention to prices anymore in this game.
6 Likes
I’m sucked into Helldivers 2.
It’s rare to play a co-op shooter that has this much going on, which isn’t really a super high bar, but they did a really good job of making every mission feel like a desperate struggle behind enemy lines and also trudging through the wilderness with your homies. Anti-armor is vitally important because you have to strip the armor of large enemies before your guns can hurt them. There’s two-player weapons - one player as gunner, one player as loader. The third-person perspective means there’s less teamkilling from accidental fire and turrets, but that doesn’t mean some guy won’t drop a cluster bomb on your head 6 times a mission. You can get backblasted by a rocket launcher and ragdoll, or dive off a cliff and bonk your head so bad you die.
What really drew me in is every mission has way more stuff to do than the first game. In Helldivers, you mostly just go between your primary objectives and then extract. In Helldivers 2, you are directly incentivized to do secondary objectives, and maps have around 8-10 “minor locations” which are essentially treasure chests of supplies and progression resources like warbonds, requisition, and “super credits”.
Main noticeable differences from the first game - besides the perspective - are no vehicles, only two enemy factions (fairly sure they are planning to unveil one, maybe two more over the course of the “war effort”, since the bugs are the main front but the terminator robots are advancing on the other side), and “warbonds”. Warbonds in particular I think are a bit controversial, as they are reminiscent of battle passes, though they last forever and you progress them through medals instead of XP tiers. It’s clear Sony wants this to be a service game, at least for a bit, which tbh I don’t mind much because the first game was very similar in scope.
My friend refunded it because he thought it was too grindy, but personally I think it’s fine. I get something new after every operation, sometimes after every mission, and you get a lot more resources if you take the time to hunt them down. That said, I’m still using mostly default gear for my standard loadout still, with only my stratagems being different, so I think you can get by with just the basics for a long time. Better to play well than to use all your fancy new toys. Pubbies tend to get lost in the sauce with this and do shit like throw 350mm area barrages on top of pinpoint targets, blanketing the field in randomly explosions and killing their teammates lol
Verdict: Game’s good. 12 hours in 2 days and I’m still really happy with it. Besides the technical issues (which are mostly impacting my friends, I’ve only had one crash the entire time) I think it’s a pretty good launch for a game like this, especially comparing it to something like Darktide’s launch in 2022, which was so bad it took them a year to fix the game to be reasonably interesting.
9 Likes
The thing I find striking about Helldivers 2 is the similarity to MGS5’s basic controls (I’ve only watched not played). Kinda surprised more games didn’t take MGS5’s popularity and run with it.
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i know metal gear survive sucked, but konami should have kept taking swings at making games with the mgsv engine till one hit
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people are really blown away by games where you can lay on your back and shoot because they’ve never played mgs5, or a tactical shooter before apparently
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anyway helldivers 2 looks real ugly and i have a hard time caring that they just put more random ubisoft objectives on the map to make you feel like you’re doing more stuff while it’s exactly like the first game and your ultimate goal is to make a bar go up over and over again. also the ironic fascist parody aesthetic or whatever is so boring, men need to stop thinking starship troopers is the coolest thing they’ve ever seen imo, like really it’s not 2004 anymore and it’s almost a sign of stupidity to me now instead
asking gamers to operate a recoilless rifle good is a recipe for disaster, i couldn’t even get men to clear backblast in fucking arma or want to carry the shells because it’s too heavy :(( like lol at doing that in the game where people teamkill for fun.
2 Likes
Continuing to gawk at the 60’s architecture inbetween killing racists. Civilians actually call the cops on you if you steal a car, this is something that I think is in other games but I feel like this is the one time I’ve seen it so codified with the game’s design. It makes sense because whatever car you drive ends up being “persistent” to your character in between missions.
The cars handle and sound like 60’s and 50’s cars, without actually being 50s or 60s cars. That is: land yachts. The sound the suspension makes when going over bumps feels correct. All the cars are huge, this feels almost like Driver 1 or 2 in terms of the caliber of cars.
Guns have this imprecise-ness to them where they feel like you’re hurling bullets into a general direction rather than memorizing the bullet spread pattern to better get headshots in an esports game. This adds a bit of chaotic fun to them. I feel like I should be doing more missions stealthily but it seems like going loud for every mission is what the game is built around.
The map is huge. I went for a drive and it took a significant amount of time to reach the other end of the map, and every neighborhood is teeming with unseen detail and explore-able buildings.
12 Likes
they also barely respond to auto theft calls in delray hollow because there’s too many of Those People there lol. that game is full of sooo many evil details, when the italian fucks make you visit them at the country club at the beginning almost every white woman is clutching their purse when lincoln walks by like you’re a mugger
9 Likes
also lol at all the missions where you get to lynch white racists they fuckin own hahahahaha. it’s so dope when you string up the SOUTHERN UNION DIXIE BOYS up from the fuckin ferris wheel as a lesson to the rest. i will never forget rocking up to the klan rally with a m60 and killing literally every one of those bed sheet wearing motherfuckers while they ran away in terror. lincoln clay using his evil phoenix program cia skills to engage in terror tactics against the southern racist underground is extremely funny and good, to me.
11 Likes
Foamstars is like if I tried to write down what Splatoon is like but both of my hands are broken and the entire time I played it felt like a fever dream, and then a team of highly skilled and amoral bootleggers churned that out and handed it off to Sony before scurrying off and ducking down and hold their hands to their ears, as if they gave PS+ subs a lit bomb
I’m playing this and the feeling I get is what I think normal people got when they tried Balan Wonderworld
banger soundtrack though
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The devs of Mafia 3 had a particularly winning combination: ex-lucasarts devs + cynical czechs who made the first two Mafia games
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I need to find the person who did the vehicle handling and camera because I need to know their secrets
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I maintain that game is hella good if you’re careful enough to play it in such a way you don’t burn yourself out. It’s crazy because there’s some insane shit you can miss if you don’t thoroughly clear out the rackets, like the fucking supermarket basement slave auctions the southern union guys hold in frisco fields, which I would have felt completely terrible about not dismantling
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Big Mafia III liker here too. I never got bored of the rinse-and-repeat stealth gameplay since the game kept offering cool environments to do it in, and because I got to do it in the outfit that makes Clay look like a Black Panther.
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I did not like how you could tell lincoln clay’s default outfit was supposed to be that m65 field jacket that comes down to his thighs because then when you’d switch to anything else you could see how flat his ass is. inexcusable when he is so muscularly defined in every other way!
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so does Helldivers 2 still use GameGuard, an admittedly weird ideological line in the sand for someone whose computer has several Chinese phone games installed on it?
yeah?
damn shame about it being good then
3 Likes
Messing around with Puddle Knights, a kinda clever little puzzle game that hinges around maneuvering some knights with long capes around so that said capes cover mud puddles, so some fancy royal folks can make it through the levels unsullied.
Second set of levels so far introduces an extra knight to the mix, who can tear off little perforated pieces of the other knight’s cape by standing in it (or, for a single knight with an extremely long cape, they can walk onto the end of their own to tear it). Level I just did had you juggling two knights back and forth across a large mud field, getting the royal across it one square at a time.
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i successfully hacked the Vita and now things work except for the things that don’t
i think it’s cute that most of the homebrew stuff i’m interested in requires owning legit copies of the PC or android versions of the games and then extracting their data. why isn’t it all together from the start? are we doing piracy or not here, people?
9 Likes
people are desperately afraid they might get in trouble
1 Like