Games You Played Today VI (III in the west)

Another neat tale in the JP difficulty to NA difficulty ledger is DMC3. Back when capcom had a community blog they asked their community that played DMC3 at trade shows if it needed to be harder and given the types of people that would even bother to have an opinion on that small sample said yes. Also anyone that was regularly viewing and posting on that site would also be a very skewed polling sample full of maniacs. That’s the spoken word story why JP Normal became US Easy etc.

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too late now - i’m pretty far into the game so i’m not going to replay. what are the differences? i’ve heard working designs made a lot of games harder than the originals?

i assume the tone of this was changed for the American version… lmao

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yeah basically any WD localization makes things more expensive and bosses take many, many more hits

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I think that “it cuts off your health regen” is kind of silly for a game where combat is so disincentivized. I didn’t get into a single violent confrontation the entirety of my first case, it seems trivially easy to not do so, so I think it’s fair to say that eating/drinking is pretty useless. I mean, how many of us can go 3 days without eating or drinking anything?

That’s kinda what I mean about it needing more… I guess one might call them “survival mechanics” but I prefer to think of “Sims mechanics” because that’s more accurate to me. You gotta take care of yourself! Right now the only one that really matters is showering, since you can get real stinky.

Great game with lots of promise, but it’s full of confused half-constructed mechanics like this that could use fleshing out. Plus it needs an expansion of social actions, so you can develop relationships with people that pay dividends in the future, like striking up a friendship with the government file clerk or something.

This is actually easily my favorite part of how the game presents itself, because indulging in your intuitive hunches is very useful! For example, in the tutorial case, I scanned the note left for me for fingerprints. Then, near the end of the case, I fingerprinted the second victim and found that THEY left the note for me. With the emails between her and the first victim, as well as between the first victim and killer, I was able to build a coherent motive! That’s insanely cool.

It really rewards you for having an eye for detail and not letting any little bit of information slip through your fingers. The downside is that the game only has a few ways of teasing that stuff - usually fingerprints or leaving lots of [item] around a scene or apartment - so it falls a little flat after a few cases.

This is absolutely my #1 most desired feature for sure, the fact that you can’t seems like a major oversight. That or they just didn’t have time to put it in before EA launch bc it’s a very complicated feature.

Yeah! I’m really excited to see how it develops. As is, it’s a pretty solid 10-12 hours of fun, but I can’t wait to see how it complicates further. Just hoping they don’t cave and add guns. If anything I think you shouldn’t be able to attack people at all.

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If I recall the WD version of Alundra gives all the enemies nearly double health which seems to mean you’ll do more whacking then you should need to do. I got through 90% of the game last time I played it not knowing there is an Un-WD patch. Its still plenty playable, I really like the challenge level. I don’t know if its easier with the patch or just less annoying. I have the un-WD patch version on my RetroPi but haven’t done more than boot it.

Its a fun time and I wish more stuff would steal from it.

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currently my opinion of Star Rail has landed in a weird place where I think the part where they’re trying to make Persona The Phone App is bad but the part where they let the combat run wild in either of the challenge modes (one is a roguelite-thing and the other is a “solve thess fights clearly meant to make you pull more characters” type gauntlet) is good

I also thought the party building was shallow but now I see it’s actually pretty receptive to absolutely idiot, headass ideas and I’m here for it (sadly no comps reach the idiocy of some of the shit you can do in Genshin)

excited to keep punching entertainment out of the exploitive gambling app and posting about it to all the people who care here (hopefully that’s none of you)

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If I had just a little bit more time and energy for gaming these days I’d maybe be giving this game a longer look.

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I know I posted the exact math somewhere, it makes the game much more playable. The biggest one is the basic slime goes from like 7 hits to 3. I just grabbed the unworking designs patched rom and then renamed my save files and it worked.

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Final Fantasy (NES)

Clean cart, can’t get a clean dump. Finally had to order isopropyl alcohol and a game bit driver.

Update: isopropyl applied, still no dice, drat. Game bit works good though and I’ve found a beat-up (yet “tested and working”) cart cheap on eBay, so if that one works I can swap the nice cart case from this one onto that one and it’ll look nice buried in my cupboard. : D

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70 hours into Persona 5 Royal, I just found out that if you don’t max out the bond with the school councillor, you miss out on the entire 3rd semester and the new party member.
I’m up to August and he’s on rank 2 lol whoops

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I don’t know anything about the story of P5. But how do they explain a bunch of students missing an entire semester? Just curious.

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well, the game ends (3rd semester is extra content in Royal)

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comically on-brand for persona to make sure you’re not so antisocial you dip from the counselor’s office while being a nominally nonconformist mind heist vigilante

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you actually need a maxed out bond with 3 specific characters, which includes the counselor

spoilers for the secret ending:

the school counselor is a new character in Royal, along with the red-haired girl Kasumi, and if you max out both of them, along with Akechi (the main rival in the game), you get a special bonus dungeon/sequence wherein essentially by helping the counselor do his research (by going to see him for sessions) you inadvertently help him become the new demiurge of the world after you destroy the old demiurge.

he creates a world where people have any desires they want filled so there is (supposedly) no more suffering and no more competition between individuals. this started with the new character, Kasumi, who is actually only convinced that she is Kasumi, who was actually her dead sister (the living sister was the counselor’s first victim), and then goes on a mass scale once he understands more about Mementos- Morgana becomes human, Akechi survives the end of the game instead of dying, etc. etc. so the bonus ending, if anything, makes a mess of things more than the original

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I think I read it’s only Maruki that you need to max out for the 3rd semester to unlock, but I guess you need the other 2 for the ending. I already maxed the social link for Kasumi because I figured that was probably how you get her to become playable, so kind of a bummer that’s only for the extra semester

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these games don’t already give you enough days to simulate you all want a whole nother semester

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yeah when my wife was playing this last year i kept waiting to see when Kasumi joined (i’ve only played through Vanilla P5 myself) and was disappointed when it didn’t happen because she didn’t get the extra semester.

she then started a New Game+ and got it the 2nd time around because we just looked at a guide

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Yeah 70 hours to get through the 1st semester makes the prospect of a 3rd seem more like a threat than a reward. Would have been better to squeeze the new content into the rest of the game, but I guess it’s already pretty overstuffed

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Looked through all the free games I got from Epic over the last couple years to find one that’d be a decent workout for my PC and ended up on Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (an only 5 1/2 year old triple A game is brand new by my PC gaming standards). I remember none of the story from any of the prior Dishonored games so hopefully that isn’t an issue, dipping my toes into the first section and everything runs smooth on ultra. Unfortunately there’s no way to make it state things in PS terms so I keep doing the wrong thing when it tells me to do something with the trigger vs the bumper, fortunately it hasn’t resulted in any unintended murders just yet.

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REDFALL is strange. Arkane made a Far Cry with just enough of their old style shining through to remind me that they probably should have made another immersive sim. There’s a gun loot/scrap cycle but at a rate of like 1/10 of a Borderlands. Resources are in big flashing bags and crates so you never have to go through anyone’s drawers and there’s like, 1-2 Story Flesh-Out Notes per main mission.

The vampire enemies are weirdly vocal. Imagine you’re Far-Crying in a quaint New England town and keep hearing THE BLOOD TRANCE CALLS TO ME and SOON YOUR BLOOD SHALL BE DRUNK… BY ME! so you look around and spot two vamps just hanging out on the roof of a house serenading the empty air with songs of BLOOD: I LOVE IT! No idea you’re there. They just want to speechify re: blood.

So it’s far better than any actual Far Cry, is what I’m saying.

Worth the month of gamepass anyway.

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