very good TV, got it because it was the top rec on rtings for “budget gaming tv”
it doesn’t have 120Hz, but it does have VRR, HDR10 and low latency
busted out my MiSTer over the weekend, and wow - playing PS1 games on the huge screen was a blast
gave R4 some time to get a better comparison with RR2 - really really interesting comparison! R4 is way more concerned with vibe and everything is hyped up way more. RR2 is just like, ehh here’s a bunch of sick races, have fun. the difficulty is better balanced in R4 - in RR2 the first half of the game is way too easy, it doesn’t start getting really hard until the EX Tour, and the Max Tour is stupidly unfair lol
drifting is way more difficult in R4 compared to RR2. it’s harder to sustain long drifts, exiting is way more finicky, and you don’t “lock” as hard to the track angle.
R4’s presentation is clearly superior, and the audio mix is slightly better (though the PSP game does have adjustable audio levels). really perfect mix between the engine/sfx and the music in R4, not sure how they were able to get everything to sit together so well aurally
there are only 56 events because the final tour (Max Tour) only has 8 events, rather than 16. this doesn’t matter, though, because these events are so difficult you’ll be glad there are only 8 stops on the pain tour lol
calling back to some discussion about sony’s pricing model for playstation these days, i’ve found this site to be exceedingly useful at papering over the UX gaps in the PSN store, as well as keeping track of sale prices for games
I’m nearing the same point in Sekiro where I gave up on it the first time around. I’m not quite there, but I’m close. For a while I was thinking I was doing a much better job this go-round of picking up on the game’s combat rhythms. But as I get a little deeper, I’m realizing I’m in a near-identical pattern of briefly tweaking my approach to combat in a way that finally helps me scrape through a boss encounter but doesn’t actually improve my overall skill at the game’s combat. I’ll be to Genichiro soon—a boss encounter I tried 3-8 times a night for two or three weeks a few years back before giving up—so I’ll soon find out if I’m actually any better.
The coworker who convinced me to try Sekiro is still disappointed in me for giving up on Genichiro. I haven’t been on a project with him for a year or so now, but on the occasion I talk to him he still tries to give me tips in hopes that I’ll try again.
But I’m glad he wore down my resolve when I hadn’t planned to play the game at all, as I felt like I got my money’s worth playing as much as I did. It’s a beautiful game. If they ever patch in the ability to summon another player, I’ll pick it back up immediately. But of course that’s very unlikely.
I have two recent and relevant anecdotes about Sekiro
My dad has been playing the game since Christmas. He’s been stuck on Genichiro for about 6 hours in-game and he having an absolutely amazing time. In constant child like glee after figuring out how to correctly handle another attack pattern. I pointed out how much he was spamming the attack button and how it kept getting him into bad situations and he had a eureka moment. Every third conversation is about how much “his game has improved” from fighting the boss over and over again, as if he’s a rookie tennis player. He hasn’t enjoyed a game this much since Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden 2 almost 2 decades ago now.
I’m wrapping up my second run through of sekiro now. The first time I played it in 2020 I quit very early on, against some random two health bar mook. I didn’t even get to Genny the first time. I feel like Sekiro, more than most action games, leaned far towards being more about rhythm as opposed to action. Each attack pattern has around 1.5 correct answers and it’s mostly about having that answer beaten into you over time. Unlike something like God hand or devil may cry where player expression is really high, or the other souls games where there is RPG mechanics galore, I always felt like every fight in Sekiro was figuring out the rhythm of the parry and when to dodge, and then there wasn’t really much left past that point. I throw a lot of shurikens but it’s mostly because throwing shurikens is fun as opposed to some core necessity.
Against the mid to end game bosses you get to swing your sword maybe 2 times a minute. You lose a lot of player agency as the fights go on and become more punishing. It’s really fun to press the button at the right time over and over again, but that’s the only way to play as the game goes on. Thinking back, I figured out very little tech on a boss by boss basis, most of the fights were straight forward R1 → R1 → R1 → … → L1 for about 6 minutes until the boss keeled over and died, from exhaustion more than anything else. Of course there’s obscure tech with random items and specific prosthetic tools but with how much I died per boss, it felt untenable to use any resource except my time.
I’m not a souls guy but what I played of dark souls and blood borne didn’t feel like this. That being said I’ve only gotten to the 2/3rds and 1/3rd mark of each game respectively so I might be talking through all sorts of hats.
I’m not sure if this is what you want but I saw some PvP through this on youtube. It says it has co-op functionality so maybe if you own the game on PC it’ll be what you’re looking for.
finished dds1… ig as a semi-sequel to maybeee the Best Videogame Yet Made its not quite as good… but i think i liked it more than any other game in the series ive played except strange journey which i like about the same. it really does feel like half a game cause ig it kind of is… like the last dungeon feels like other smt game midgame content (including a villain who is introduced approximately 20 hours in).
ig my main problem is basically i just think it’s a little simple compared to nocturne (even easier than nocturne normal which regardless of difficulty still tends to force you to actually engage with a lot of systems like buffs and debuffs and has tons of reflect phys bosses!!)
Yeah, a lot of the skills in Sekiro are too situational for the average player to bother with, and it probably accidentally trains the player not to even bother with any of them by having basically all of the early skill tree be kind of meh. (One of the many ways Sekiro’s early game is counterproductive.)
But especially after you get into the middle of the skill tree, there are some other styles of attack than L1/R1 which are effective on most bosses. My style was to use double-ichimonji as my bread-and-butter posture attack, the hold-R1 thrust attack as my main health attack, and use my emblems on the firecrackers or umbrella. I’ve heard there’s another popular style that uses jump attacks as the main posture attack, and use their emblems on Mortal Draw as the main health attack.
double-ichimonji+firecrackers is how I beat sword saint isshin
the early skill tree is mostly a hidden tutorial layer: the early skills are dominated by the likes of mid-air combat, grappling attack and the mikiri counter, which are all designed to mitigate sticking points in early post-tutorial areas and just become additional verbs you use throughout the game. The mid-point skills are exactly the ones where they become about player expression rather than just teaching you the game’s language in a perhaps too obscure way.
I actually think sekiro’s got a lot more player expression than most folks give it credit for. Virtually every skill or tool is viable as the basis of its own playstyle. hand axe centric runs are interesting for how aggressive they are in a game already known for an aggressive playstyle, the shuriken is always practical for something, even if it isn’t immediately obvious (knocking lady butterfly out of the air when she jumps between wires was an early moment where the game made me feel clever for experimenting with the tools), etc.
Lady Butterfly Kunai is the only way I could stomach doing the 3-4 phases of the final Sekiro boss without having to completely redo the early phases again. The game’s very good at what it does but occasionally becomes too indulgent in what it asks of you.
I think finding the cheese is still a viable option in a lot of fights. Like that swordmaster, you can just roll to his right [i think] rather than deal with the parrying and get him stuck in an attack pattern loop. Real shinobi shit.
I used exclusively mortal draw once I got it! I didn’t find many windows for it on the harder bosses, mostly because I’d be broke on spirit emblems trying to work it in, but it made a lot of minibosses waaay easier.
I think I might just be ignorant as to what’s possible in the game since I just beat new game+ last night, where as this is definitely something that needs a few run throughs to appreciate properly. I got an outrageous dopamine hit this time through when I managed to beat butterfly in less than a minute with shurikens and snap seeds, but that was after fighting her a dozen times in gauntlet runs.
On my first playthrough I just didn’t have the resources to experiment like that for very long. I might have been trying to rush through the game too quickly and it painted my experience one way. I spent ages trying to make a spear and fistful of ash fighting style work but after I was dead broke I stopped bothering. I found the windows for using the skewering charge on Genichiro to do as much damage as possible but that didn’t matter so much if I got to do it 2 times per fight attempt, and most of the attempt was spent on getting through his rote patterns.
Like you said, the good old shurikens were always useful in every single fight, as was fire against animals, but the game telegraphs the use of those tools quite a lot more. I tried using the spear against everyone armored, and even unarmored, and got my ass kicked 85% of the time. The amount of times I got grabbed in 0.1 milliseconds by the ape and thrown to my death made figuring out how to dodge a much bigger priority than figuring out how to hurt.
The style I was going for is absolutely viable, but definitely not on a first run. If you can parry all their hits you can use whatever attack you’d like once there’s a window for it, axe or spear or ceramic shards even. I’m absolutely going to have my mind destroyed when I watch boss fight compilations later, but I’m not sure how easy it is to figure out the windows for these things on your own, at least on your first time through the game.
I loved Sekiro. The way it encourages you to keep up pressure, even when you can’t score actual damage really worked for me. The bosses felt intense even when I had to go through them a bunch of times (particularly Genichiro and the owl). Getting that bit further into the fight and getting to grips with attacks that previously felt unstoppable is a great feeling. Another game in this style would be my biggest wish for a future From game.
Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway (PS5) - by-the-numbers karting. very few original ideas. nearly everything in the game is analogous to something in mariokart wii… you’ve got the karts+bikes dichotomy, the ability to trick off jumps, 12 in a race, wide courses, and the powerslide charge boost mechanics are a pretty direct lift. so, while this game is very competent and handles well, the dearth of ideas hurts a lot. the rubber-banding is also extremely dumb and the assist characters don’t do the balancing any favors - i went online and someone was using some wild combination of assists that made them completely uncatchable after the first half a lap
tried this on the PS5 game trial… thanks for disabusing me of any likelihood i had of buying this shiny new kart racer lol. i might buy this for like 2.99 but that’s about as high as i’d go
i do appreciate that this game has auto-accelerate (yes!) and gyro support (yes!)… though the latter is yet another thing that makes it feel like mariokart wii lol
daphny didnt turn in the guy who murdered the tax collector so we got the ring, but then i mentioned i always knock his ass out whenever i play, so we went back to do that.
it turned out to be a really good idea cuz we got TRIPLE the rewards cuz we got the ring again and the reward money for killing his ass!! and now we can stuff his corpse full of drugs so arrille wont complain when we try to barter!!!
im just showing daphny the splendors of the game ive probably played more than any other in my life
