i don’t think i’ve gotten this mechanic to actually work successfully yet. i don’t know what attacks i’m supposed to be parrying, at what range, etc. and every time i try to experiment i just run out of all my bullets immediately
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A great enemy to test this on I think are the brick trolls you can find on the Yharnam Bridge and in an area just underneath the bridge (there are two brick trolls down there). They have very obvious, long windups that with very little practice I bet you can learn to reliably parry. Enemies with rapid attacks are also good, just because they have so many attacks that shooting them at any time is likely to occur at the “end” of one of their many attack animation cycles.
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These are the only enemies in any FromSoftware game that I was ever able to parry.
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close range, generally. it can be really hard to tell and fishing for parries is often an exercise in frustration at first. imo the blunderbuss is somewhat of a trap because while it does have that wide spread it has a slower recovery than the pistol and can make capitalizing on parries more challenging unless you space well
seconding practicing on the brick trolls, then werewolves once those guys are down if you feel like it. they’re scary as fuck but you can bait their lunges for a parry once you get the hang of it
what starting weapon did you pick? the threaded cane (while really fun) is a lot harder to use effectively
something that took me a long time to get used to re: aggression in this that isn’t present in sekiro is the regain system. after you’re hit you can immediately counterattack to regenerate some of your orange health before the bar fully depletes. my number one bloodborne tip is to practice suppressing your souls reflexes when getting smacked and try swinging through it with R1s instead of dodging out unless its a hit you know is gonna knock you over
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getting in on this Bloodborne tips line to add that “builds” arent really diverse in BB and you benefit a lot from dumping most of your early levels into Vitality (Endurance/stamina on the other hand is much less important)
Also the game does have something of a rough starting area gated by a difficult boss, it does open up and also sorta chill out on you once you get into the cathedral ward – lot more quiet stretches and you’re less overwhelmed by enemy numbers for a bit
Fun fact there’s a somewhat opaque limb breaking/mending mechanic for the bigger beast bosses and theyll sometimes even be opened up for a crit, a proto version of Elden Ring’s posture break. If you notice the cleric beast stagger, and then later do some kind of “heal” animation, that’s this mechanic at play
Seek paleblood to transcend the hunt!! yknow, if all else fails
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my friends and i loved GH/RB in high school. I suspect i’d be more lukewarm on them now but it was fun for a bit. i mostly did vocals anyway which is just karaoke with a fail condition
thats how Neil Cicierega/Lemon Demon did the Mouth Sounds albums!!
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Millions of nongamers were trojan horsed by ‘guitar music’ into filling their homes with boutique gaming toys to play knockoffs of Konami arcade’s Simon + Shmups + beat recognition + karaoke but u don’t have to sing if u don’t want to & in the process tons of stems were publically released & archived.
This is a classic gaming win.
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Was only a couple years ago I bought an expensive plastic instrument peripheral to play Taiko No Tatsujin. I’m always late to these gaming fad things
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forget how I did it, think there was a lot of thinning the herd then dodging past stragglers to get some swipes in. if you time a R2 just right you can interrupt the teleport, but I wouldn’t rely on that. the crystal rain gave me more than my fair share of woes
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My chalice dungeon tip is never set foot into a chalice dungeon
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yeah in phase 1 i can do this consistently with charged attacks from the tontirus, i can take off at least 40% health before the first teleport, it’s a lot dicier once it starts fighting back
i’m glad to be doing an arcane build first (i’m told arcane-scaling gems drop at the verrrry bottom) because there’s no way i could stomach this grind a second time barring a remaster with active multiplayer. most of the loot is key items that just let you do more chalice dungeons!
my faint praise is that getting as far into them as early as i did has given me basically infinite quicksilver bullets and more than enough of every consumable and also kept my hands busy as i listened to sean mctiernan talk about books. also the parallels between the enemies down there and on the surface are kind of neat. i also encountered one (1) randomly placed shop where i could buy poisoned throwing knives and slightly variant versions of the beast cutter
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i had an alright time attempting chalices alongside the story last time i played but once it gets to like the fuckin Utz layer or whatever and suddenly everything can two-shot you it loses a little sheen. youre meant to get into new game+ and really pump your levels after a certain point (chalices don’t scale w/ NG+ level) but i was like, “for some so-so procgen presets and occasionally a new boss fight?? hard pass”
It is the only practical way to get those shitty Diablo ass randomly generated blood gems (which none the less can make you VERY powerful in the main game if you get a couple decent ones). But you mainly get those from doing random dungeons not the presets. and like… it’s still farming thru procgen dungeons… not the classiest content From has ever had in their games lol. and yeah the loot being mostly chalice coupons you spend to unlock more chalice coupons is deflating in a series with overall great intentional item placement
But hey, it taught them how to make simple dungeons out of recycled assets and those got surprisingly good in Elden Ring
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I picked up Recursive Ruin in the Steam sale. I think I learned about it from ellaguro’s post a while back.
I’d forgotten anything I heard or read about it, though, and just remembered that it sounded like something worth trying. The parts in the apartment are kind of tedious. Like almost all modern video games, this one could use a lot less talking. And I can’t help wondering whether the tragic backstory is actually supposed to be funny in places.
The puzzles themselves are decent, and the main draw is the kaleidoscopic world. I kind of wish that instead of geometric shapes they messed with a realistic-looking world in that way. Maybe they will later in the game, but I doubt it.
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Unless my memory is faulty here I recall that parrying required items to attempt, so practicing is actually potentially the wrong course of action? I recall I got to a boss early on that was apparently the “can you parry” check boss that I was stuck on for ages as I couldn’t, and got so low that i had to stop even trying. I think i got to the point I waited until the second phase of said fight before attempting a single parry, and if it missed not daring to waste another attempt.
I actually think despite its rep Bloodborne is the weakest Souls-adjacent game as an actual game, people wanted something that wasn’t another Souls so they forgave some rather iffy design decisions.
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You can tap up on the D-pad to sacrifice a little HP for +5 “blood bullets” that get tacked on to your quicksilver bullets tally, and the brick trolls drop 2-3 blood vials very commonly – so spending a little blood for a parry is a viable tactic with them
I do think reverting to consumable heals after they came up with something as elegant as estus flasks was a weird move. though you end up dumping a lot more souls (“blood echoes” whatever lol) into items because level ups are expensive and frankly boring… the RPG mechanics & economy are probably the weakest part of Bloodborne overall, they feel kinda vestigial
I really adore BB but i dont feel like it totally “clicked” with me until my most recent playthrough (3rd overall, 2nd time doing the Old Hunters stuff too). It does have a weird rhythm to its combat, and a sense that its very confidently trying to do stuff that nonetheless chafes against the Souls Formula theyd established
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Personally I find it was a problem in Elden Ring when you get to the far end of the game they start getting sparse and the rewards less interesting. I would’ve liked some form of dungeon that shuffled around and had some farmable resource if only to have a spot to be a dungeon freak when I got tired of trying to go forward.
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i think with these kinds of games i’m not looking to enjoy them in a sense of a conventional game but more it’s a window into another world that i don’t fully understand/might be cringey in some ways in execution but is nonetheless kind of memorable. it feels like every year i judge for festivals there’s at least one new game i play like that (this year it was that Tenebris Pictura game i played at sbcon). that’s sort of what makes it worth it to me. i’m not sure i’d recommend anyone paying full price for these kinds of games unless they’re adventurous and have disposable income though.
i’d thought of doing a youtube series where i only talk about this specific kind of game because i already have like 5 or so games that come to mind immediately. if i have the time and energy to some time in the future maybe i’d do it, but it’s def low on the list.
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DROD: TCB day 18
Good news: my notion for how that puzzle had to be solved was the right one, and once the how was worked out the optimization but fortunately wasn’t all that bad.
Bad news: yesterday I stopped right before another room (oddly enough the last one in this area besides the above) that just wrecked me. Once you step into the room you are on the upper part of a floating platform with a clone on the lower part (clones are the ones where you press Tab to switch between the two, with the enemies only focusing on one at a time) with the room hard split horizontally down the center of the room/platformer via two rows of one ways arrows preventing anything from crossing. There are spawning enemies that can attack from above or below and it is a lot of managing their regular attacks via switching between both clones/sides while gradually edging the platform from the right to the left.
I managed this, seemed primed to clear out the rest of the room but there was an issue: to get to where the enemies are located on the top part I have to step in from above via a single path which has two eyeballs the will attack and kill you the moment you step through from opposite sides, not enough time to switch to the other clone and pull their attention away. Now I spent a while working this out, there were those enemies with the eye beams that freeze me but which do not affect these eyes (I made sure of this). There is a mirror block on the bottom half but it can’t be moved up top so I tried to see if there was a way to reflect said eye beam so that it would ricochet to the eyes and maybe being hit at a different angle would do something (mirrors can reflect but not ricochet these beams).
I was short on ideas, feeling like I was clearly missing a mechanic somewhere. I abandoned this room and went back to try out the room from yesterday which as noted my idea worked. I was complaining how I was hard stuck to my friend who is also playing through the game (they are right near the end game but are waiting for me to catch up) and loaded it up to take a look at something, I believe I wanted to see the exact angle one of the eyes was facing and if it was perhaps inverted compared to what I initially thought. It was not, but I did notice something else: the line of force arrows separating the upper and lower halves of the room? On of them in the very middle is very nondescriptly facing the opposite direction than the others. That means I can force the mirror block up top and use that to draw an eye away via reflection shenanigans, but ultimately I felt that was a rather cheap “gotcha” that didn’t really reward clever thinking but instead asked you to basically pick the one hidden detail that’s not right.
Coulda played more but that put a bit of a sour taste in my mouth so called it an early day. Well that and the first screen of the next area had a lot of gel in it, not gonna rush into that.
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Guitar Hero is like Monopoly. All normies owns(ed) it and they have all for unknown reasons convinced themselves that they think it’s fun and they drag it out for every party or family function and by the second song everyone is staring listlessly at the tv and idly swirling their drinks and the last person who played kind of limply holds the plastic nega-guitar out to everyone around him, saying, “hey so… does anyone else want to play…?”
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after dozens of attempts, i have beaten megadrive undeadline on normal difficulty. 1cc is still elusive, as i reached the final stage deathless but still managed to run through every life before having to continue and use a fresh supply of bombs. this game is unspeakably sick and also incredibly dumb mechanically.
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