Projects like these are why I see myself drifting farther and farther from the console space.
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I think I had the worst possible new player experience in Helldivers 2. after waiting a day for the servers to open up (at 1am) my friend is online but they are only playing on the hardest difficulty level and are all level 25+. At this difficulty level I am constantly tripping over the new controls, trying to acclimate myself to the UI, etc. I feel like the dumbest person alive while getting endlessly swarmed with bugs and enemies I don’t have the firepower to deal with. I was shouting things like “how do I heal??? how do I use grenades???” I did play the tutorial, 2 days ago, and vaguely remember some of the controls. Also the starter weapons are adequate for this level, almost, in a skilled players hands. But I had not unlocked anything yet. In the first mission I died after our overship left so I couldn’t be revived in the last minute and a half before extraction. In the second mission I spent most of it hauling a box around with only my pistol going “where the fuck do i put this box?” while going to another point on the map, doing that objective, then finally walking over to another area to finally put the box in the slot, completing the objective. Then the game crashed and we didn’t get any xp for the mission. The final mission was around 2am and I had been so totally gassed by the waves of enemies I was just done with it. I died after spawning inside an enemy and there were no revives left, so I slammed Alt-F4 because I don’t give a shit about XP or leveling anymore.
This game does some really clever things, like activating abilities uses a sequence of d-pad inputs to “dial in” something. I could see memorizing these and then deploying them super fast, at some point. The aiming reticle is really good, you have your main forward vector and the actual barrel of the gun’s vector shows up on the UI, so if you time the swing just right you can one shot enemies while running or in motion.
The Ammo system is different. I don’t think you have a count for how many bullets you have, or if you did I missed it. You don’t auto reload. If you reload mid-mag you lose those bullets. You need to call in regular resupply drops because enemies don’t drop bullets. This is a lot to keep in mind and was partially the reason I got so frustrated, I kept running out of ammo, I kept reloading at the wrong time, I couldn’t tell how much ammo I had. I don’t think it’s a bad idea.
I was constantly opening the “pause” menu instead of the map, because controller designers stopped calling the buttons “start” and “select” and instead replaced them with STUPID FUCKING ICONS. Wow what does a box inside another box mean? “Share” ??? “Social” ??? “Back” ???. What does three horizontal lines mean??? “Menu?” why not just print the word “Menu” on it you fucking fuckface. In the biz, that icon is called the “Hamburger” because it looks like a hamburger, but is the universal icon for “menu” “sometimes”. Icons were a mistake.
The game absolutely rips off Starship Troopers but you know that was a good movie and there’s a lot worse stuff to totally rip off. It does feel like a kind of Warhammer 40 meets Verhoeven, when do you ever get to shoot flamethrowing robots with sawblade arms?
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I’m well convinced I should wait on this one. It sounds interesting with some problems like the icon stuff, and similar to issues with Helldivers 1.
Thanks for the breakdown!
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i keep reading this thread title as “nonbinary express”. would love to see that film
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this is because helldivers was originally a magicka sequel!
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I think it’s a neat game, I think if I played at the difficulty level I’m supposed to it’d be a lot chiller, but finding matches is hard because the servers are so full.
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Halo thought of the day:
I am through most of mission 8 (Two Betrayals, although I’ve only been betrayed once so far so I assume the ending of the mission doesn’t go great for me) and I think the game has just about edged beyond what I am capable of dealing with well. I’m getting butchered rather frequently and it feels like I progress to a checkpoint (when they bother to trigger, those tiny “popcorn” enemies play havoc with some of them) as much due to good luck as anything. I am much worse at dealing with the Flood than the Covenant as they just hit like a truck, a single mistake at full health/shield dropping me down to a sliver in a second.
Having the Flood and Covenant battle each other and then me when noticed is a neat set-up but I generally pair a different pair of weapons to deal with one or the other (plasma something for covenant, shotgun for flood, either paired with my trust pistol) so I always feel at a bit of a disadvantage against one or the other, and in general just a ton is being thrown my way now. I also just don’t have a good feel for how to deal with the Flood, with the Covenant I generally defer to having to clear out an area but the Flood sometimes seems to just spawn endlessly sometimes, but if I press forward it feels like it blows up in my face fairly frequently.
Also while this tour through these locations feels abridged compared to the first one when I saw the return of those circular rooms I nearly cried.
EDIT: Fun fact: I was only a few minutes from the end of the mission when I stopped last time. I do not recall a second betrayal which has me a bit nervous looking ahead.
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Sonic the Hedgehog: Pocket Adventure (NGPC, in Mednafen)
Went and read the manual and ah, those yellow diamonds/squares you find while playing must be unlocks for puzzle pieces in the puzzle “Room.” Someone at SNK in this era must have liked tile puzzles, they went nuts with 'em in the bonus game in KOF 2000. … I like them too. ^_ ^
The NGP/C saves to flash RAM that’s dumped as part of the ROM–and I must have played through the whole game before, that’s how there were so many puzzle pieces in the Puzzle room–I’d collected them back in the day–and I found that if I go to CONTINUE, I can pick stages right up to the final stage–which is good because fooling around after recording, I OF COURSE accidentally overwrote the quicksave I made at the end of this session with one sitting on the main menu. ; D
So, thank goodness for the NGP/C’s really slick save structure! ^ _^
…It is kind of spooky that I have absolutely no recollection of playing through the game before though. = oo But if I’d read my 2004 notes carefully I’d have noticed I referred to “one of the later boss battles.” ; D
Wait how the heck did I get by the Sonic 2-style Metal Sonic memorization battle without save states to abuse?? : P Man yeah I guess I just suck at that now. Or hm maybe more like there ARE infinite continues, at least from some stage start point shortly before that? I mean I did seem to get a +Continue item in this session, so… Heck I don’t know. : P
Anyway it’s supposedly Sonic 2-inspired stages and Sonic 3-but-8-bit music. They took some of my least-favorite Sonic 2 bits, like that Metal Sonic thing, and the pinball and underwater and biplane riding and airship settings. ; P And there’s a verrry nebulous hitbox fight vs Knuckles that made me go look up a FAQ just to figure out where and when I was supposed to hit him without being hit (flashes of final Sonic 2 boss fight that I bailed on…).
On the plus side, the graphics–particularly the speed of them–and the sounds are good, particularly considering it’s on a tiny little NGPC; the minigames are not horrible, bucking the Sonic 2, CD, and 3 trend, and it may be the best Sonic physics I’ve played so far. This was end-phase original SNK. Some of the team members–well, at least Sonic The Hedgehog Pocket Adventure credits (Neo Geo Pocket Color, 1999) - MobyGames the lead planner, Yukihiro Higashi, went on to join SF, FF, AoF, & KOF co-creator Takashi Nishiyama when he left SNK the next year, 2000, to start a company that would soon be renamed Dimps (“Digital Multi-Platforms”) Dimps - Wikipedia ; Higashi would be on the Dimps teams who would make the three Sonic Advance games on GBA, and the Sonic 4 games–not to mention various Sonic games on DS and 3DS.
It’s pretty short–after a little over an hour, I’ve got just three stages to go, the stage select tells me.
Made myself a little taskbar icon: 
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naturally hit the 80+ stat thresholds hunting for dragon doors (only found the ones on floors 1 and 3 but I’ve had my fill of wandering these corridors hugging walls)
was baffled I wasn’t seeing a magic attack from the Moonlight sword then. equipped different rings…turns out it just requires a much longer delay between sword swing and magic cast than the other sword >:[
gonna kick the final boss’s ass tomorrow
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Feeling a bit cold on Like A Dragon 2: Yakuza 8: Infinite Wealth coming into chapter 5. Combat feels a bit crumply and I can’t get @Tuxedo’s pachinko comparison out of my head. Weirdly I’m finding the location kinda makes it feel like a sidegame somehow. I miss the narrow streets.
A lot of what I’ve seen is pretty interesting and the story is elaborate enough to keep me strung along but I feel like this game has more baggage than most. The combat not really providing much to look forward to is hurting it a lot for me. I’ll still finish it since I like these characters but it’s heading to the back of the queue when that dang Square Enix game comes out.
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Is SEGA supporting the yakuza / gambling industry now? = o
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I think the idea is that Infinite Wealth’s combat doesn’t often amount to much more than setting up pins to attack and then just seeing enemies collapse on to each other in a very indirectly controllable way. Broader strategy like using abilities, elemental weaknesses, chains, buffs etc. doesn’t really come into it except in bosses and even then you can kinda heal your way out of most situations. I thought the additional movement control was kinda neat but it just means you can choose the direction of the bowling/pachinko ball, not what it does when it’s let loose
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Final Fight 2 (SFC)
Maki playthrough
Ah, 2 is pretty dull, and even Maki in her “this is how female ninjas dressed historically right?” Mai Shiranui-rip-off costume (Mai first appeared in Fatal Fury 2, 1992; Maki first appeared in THIS FF2, Final Fight 2, in 1993) doesn’t liven it up. I forgot how long it is! Too much standing in different brown rooms with your back to one mostly identical wall while 1-3 NPCs sort of mill around you, punctuated by a few really annoying bosses–“Rolent” and the UK clown–who take ages to get a hit in on. Some gross backgrounds and downright bad at times music.
Played on Normal difficulty. I used an infinite lives cheat in Mesen (DDCE-1D6B, for the SFC version) 'cause I didn’t want to stress about possibly running low on lives/continues and having to resort to boring save scumming like I did in my Carlos playthrough. ": P
Tiny taskbar Makis: 
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Halo thought of the day:
Mission 9 (Keyes) feels like a summary of my experience with the game itself, minus vehicles as there are none here. There are stretches where it clicks and I feel like I have a grasp on things and it goes well and is enjoyable. In this mission’s case it was mainly the indoors (well technically in-ship) sections, which by being focused on hallways for the most part let me keep most of the action in front of me and sort of set the terms of engagement. For the most part the second half of this mission went rather well, no major issues, all was well.
The thing is there was the part of the mission in the middle where you get dumped outside of the ship and I legit had to load up a vid to see what I was doing wrong as it was just an utter slog of a mess. It didn’t really help as watching people who are good at Halo makes the whole thing seem like they’re playing a different game (they dive right in and are death incarnate ruining things, I dive in and get swamped from all sides and die rapidly), but mainly it felt like the game punished me not for my mediocre at best gunplay but for my failure to be psychic and know when I have to clear a section out to trigger a checkpoint and when enemies will spawn forever unless I go 60% of the way down a cavern.
There was one bit right after an area where enemies will seemingly spawn endlessly where there is a checkpoint before the next encounter but won’t register unless you stop far enough along so that more enemies won’t spawn back there, and then make sure to finish all the lil popcorn flood enemies (if one was chilling a while away the checkpoint wouldn’t register) and then you’ll get the checkpoint. Then if you clear out the next set of enemies (which will respawn endlessly if you back away too far) which will trigger another checkpoint except I’m not sure it will if the prior one didn’t. I know these details as I kept passing them, dying and getting launched back several encounters, which resulted in me tossing profanity at everything, loading up a youtube vid and having one LPer thankfully say where you have to stand for the spawning to stop and finally I got a checkpoint.
Oh yeah, I think like 75% of the stage is reused from an earlier one, so that also sums things up as well.
I think I’d enjoy this game more if so much of my mental energy wasn’t spent on having to figure out how the checkpoints work or the vagaries of “here they spend endlessly, over there they just spawn for a while”. I think I’d still have some issues as I’m just low on certain skills this game requires and I have low patience for pacing slowed by going through the same rooms several times in a row, but there are all these metagame issues that have popped up since the Floor emerged that have been an anchor on my enjoyment. Hilariously when it just works I more often than not do okay! When I can just go from one encounter to the next, get past it however I manage and have the game just accept it I’m generally having a good time, and it feels like such a simple thing to ask for and yet…
Next mission is I believe the last one and I am scared as I haven’t had to touch the Warthog in ages >_>
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nobody tell them
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my one beef with Mafia 3 is that the most emotionally wrought character moments are delivered like this
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try playing the rebalanced hack
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Yes
I was initially perplexed by how attacks often don’t go the way I set them up and how imprecise AoE feel compared to like Chrono Trigger (people in range aren’t even highlighted!) but the uncertainty is the point. It’s a pachinko
I’m afraid that the Yakuza series is now / always has been an Ubisoft lawnmower simulator, for sigma males (derogatory)
In stark contrast to LAD I went through all the optional bosses in Crystal Project on hard mode, and it took me like 8 hours over one week to get a working strategy on the last 2. I used every dirty trick and it felt really great
The first boss kept reviving his two allies at full HP and my team couldn’t survive all three attacking in a row.
Our strategy :
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Spam the blue magic « MP sickle » to reduce the boss’s MP to 0 so it would stop being able to resurrect its allies
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Right before the boss is going to resurrect its allies with his full HP (+7000HP) spell, use a garbage +10 HP phoenix down on them instead, then kill them in one hit immediately afterwards
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Ask this guy :
To reduce the HP of all but 1 team members to critical range, so my tank could protect them for the whole battle (the aegis job passive is auto-cover critical HP allies) and I could stack all defense / healing on her and ignore it on everybody else
- use these negative statuses : bleed, poison, daze, stun, burn, power down, sleep, silence
The other boss fight was against a rival team of 4 other adventurers. The leader could remove my allies from the battle entirely one by one, and she was protected on the very first turn by her friend.
After trying countless strategies I gave my warlock every +int item, changed her stats to go for max int, gave her the exclusive armor that allows spamming doublecast, and a passive ability from the weaver that allowed her to act first. She opened the battle by spamming Doublecast + Blaze + Doublecast + Blaze + Doublecast + Blaze etc until the enemy leader was dead before anyone else could get a turn, it took her whole MP bar
Incredible game
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cowards
GET READY TO GET GOOD
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