I’m playing DMCV even though I don’t like the combat or the characters or the story or the controls or the level design or that this game feels 10 years out of place
5 Likes
played gitarooman for the first time since the mid-00s. u-1 and kirah playing the legendary theme together is so romantic and cool 
7 Likes
I ended up avoiding CK3 for a little while because I felt like I was going to bungle the inevitable brother vs brother warfare but it actually wasn’t that bad. There was a war of succession announced almost the same week as the death of our dad and my brother did have a stronger military but after countless saves and reloads I figured out how to actually wage war strategically in this game and I managed to cement my position as high king of Ireland. I also ended up moving the capital from munster to Dublin which severely upset the previous holder of Dublin but it’s not like he could do anything by virtue of being in prison for the succession war thing.
I really like the arc I’ve been getting so far where the moment I pop into a new heir, everyone in the country seems to hate my guts but eventually thinks I’m the best king ever by the end of the reign. I’m slowly paving over this hearts-and-minds narrative by enacting succession laws that guarantee both that my heirs will be immediately more accepted on ascending to the throne and also that there is a hard cap to how much you can really like a person who holds absolute authority over you. At least now my vassals will stop having wars against one another within the kingdom…
6 Likes
I recently bounded off it for like the…3rd time? I still plan to complete it one day but if you put the game down for a week, you just kind of forget everything. In terms of art direction, tone, pacing, it’s everything I want, but I never feel like I’m engaging with its systems fully and it becomes kind of a slog. I find myself just sticking to the one or two combos I know and then feeling bad about myself for not being better.
1 Like
goofing around in dragon’s dogma again and i gotta say i do find it infinitely charming whenever you walk past the pub in the city and one of your npc followers says “this fabled inn attracts travellers from all over the country… each bearing their own tales” and then when you try going in and talking to people are every response is just someone saying “THESE ARE HARD TIMES INDEED” in a slightly different put-upon-peasant voice. i love it. re4 weapons dealer guy extrapolated into a whole fantasy race / worthy successor to all those nes action games with talking-to-people segments where there are 30 different guys wandering around but they each just say things like “‘FOOD’ GOES IN THE ‘TOILET’” or “WHAT?! I’LL KILL YOU.”
25 Likes
KOF XV might have the easiest final boss in the series? I didn’t have any real problems with it, anyway.
Still getting a feel for it. I guess I’m rusty outside of my usual mainstays of Mai, Yuri, Terry, and a few others.
I dunno! Kinda torn on it. I never had much of an issue with the way XIV looked, so this one being more visually consistent is nice, I guess. But I miss the huge cast of weirdos from that game, too.
No Team Korea…what kind of KOF is this 
2 Likes
I’m really liking Iris and the Giant, thanks for the recommandation. I’m probably too impatient for the puzzle roguelike aspect to 100% work for me, but the mood is very affecting.
1 Like
I checked back in with Hitman 3 and I’m having a hard time clicking with it. Admittedly, I’m only on the Paris level, but my first attempts to tackle the scenario without mission stories were failures. For those that haven’t played yet, “mission stories” are basically waypoints you can follow with generalized directions on what to do to eliminate the targets. The Paris map is massive (to me at least) and trying to beat the level without mission stories was difficult because the map is divided into specific zones where you stumble on multiple stories. You can wander into one story unknowingly and then hit a wall, only to wander some more and enter a new story and not know it. Along the way you’ll collect items connected to those stories but have no idea how to implement them. So it’s really in your best interest to just stick to one story and follow the generalized instruction, because doing anything else becomes time consuming and frustrating.
I’ll continue playing to see if I can have a breakthrough but I do feel like past titles were a little less restrictive when it comes to improvisation? I fully admit, it’s possible I’m just a newb and suck but I don’t see the point in playing if the best solution to each map is just going to be spoon-fed to me.
1 Like
Considering all the games I’ve really enjoyed that I’ve dropped unceremoniously at some point, I can’t believe i finished HZD
I think I was really looking to find out how to connect with it/fending off future allegations that I just didn’t give it enough of a fair shake or didn’t get to the point where it all fell into place. By the time credits rolled, I actively hated the game
Sounds like the new one would kill me
2 Likes
I try to do at least my first run through or two of a level blind. No shame in walking out of Paris with half the crowd dead or anything. That’s learning!
One thing I recommend (if you don’t want to follow one of the Mission Stories) is to just watch the paths the targets follow. Dahlia has a pretty short loop upstairs, while Viktor has a longer loop downstairs. Both of them have a moment or two in their routes that leave themselves (or their companions) vulnerable, so anything you can do to get closer to them is gonna help.
There’s also a few ways to get them into the same room, but not without risk.
Anyway, good luck!
1 Like
Dynamite Headdy kicks sugar in my eyes, plunges popsicles into my eardrums, cotton candyfies the contents of my cranium with a conveyor belt of shamelessly sadistic showboatery and I love it because I’m sick in the headd. Mouth agape at 3am playing this pseudo 3D setpiece: attacking that battery pack while shifting from foreground to background, the multi-parallax artifically flavoured blue sky cyclorama, the little angel (?) freaks that crop up and yell “Target!”
Bit of a gruelty streak to it (playing the World version) and I’m leaning on save states (Mega Drive mini) but I just wanna see what’s for dessert and gulp it down with my digits.
9 Likes
i saw someone the other day say that dynamite headdy’s secret bonus points are the ancestors of modern day achievements
4 Likes
Yea I did manage to do a blind run where I climbed up a drainage pipe to the top level, incapacitated a guard and had access to every room on the third level, but wasn’t able to isolate Dahlia after following her around during the loop. I guess that’s my problem but I really couldn’t find an opening, so I’m hoping on future playthroughs I’ll learn more about the flow of the game and teach myself how to actually separate the guards from target and etc.
1 Like
Unspoil this if you want a hint, but: Dahlia always goes out to the balcony to sip from a champagne glass. If you can get a hold of a waiter outfit, or one like it, you can poison it, and she’ll head off to the restroom. Her room is a restricted area, but there’s a roundabout way to getting to her bathroom unseen if you do a little shimmying.
As for Viktor, he and his bodyguard will always pass through the kitchen, where his bodyguard will always eat from one of the sushi plates. Same idea applies there (there’s also like three boxes of rat poison in this room, too).
3 Likes
I sure have been playing some of that Final Fantasy Fourteen
4 Likes
Gonna add some general Hitman tips that I don’t think are too spoiler-y, but I’ll obscure them anyhow:
1) Coins are broken, in that once the AI sees one, it’s all they have their focus on til they pick it up. Exploit that!
2) Unless you’re going through a frisk zone, it’s always worth picking up whatever small guns you can. They’re not quite as effective as coins in capturing attention, but a guard that sees one on the ground will make it their whole thing to pick up a gun and walk half way across the map to a storage box to put it away (just make sure you drop them from the menu, and don’t equip them, unless you’re in some sort of security outfit). This is great for guards stationed at doors, but it also works pretty well if you just sorta shake a pistol loose in front of your target, who will have their bodyguard pick it up and wander off, leaving them right there for ya.
3) Accident kills are neat in that they don’t count if the body is found. So if you can drop something on someone, or drown them or electrocute them or fatally poison them, you can hustle on out of there without much issue.
4 Likes
I’d always thought of the unlockable badges in Turok: Rage Wars, myself.
Still plugging away at Tactics Ogre (snes).
It’s suprisingly breezy and the emphasis on speed and positioning is a welcome change from the skill-fest of late FFT maps. Its a more elegant design.
I’ve had a few characters die but I mostly just tried to roll with it. Training replacements isn’t so bad and this way I have a full team of characters from the X-files which is kind of rad. Skinner is a beast.
I love that the shop inventory has very slowly expanded but the options remain incredibly limited. The weapons I treasure most are those rare drops from enemies, but characters can still get by with a simple short bow in a pinch.
It sounds like everything good about this game was decimated in the psp port but when i’m done here I’ll probably check it out.
9 Likes
2 Likes
I was really excited to get the Electrocution Cellphone trap item from the Hitman 2 DLC because it combines all those overpowered qualities at once. I salivated at the idea of casually dropping it in front of the target in the middle of a crowd, having them pick it up and die, and this meeting all the Silent Assassin rules.
So I did all the quest requirements documented on the wiki to get one from the bank level. But then mysteriously I didn’t get one. I looked closer and found further text on the wiki: “Removed in Hitman 3. The only item which has ever been removed from the game”
6 Likes