Ninja Gaiden Black: finally picked this back up after a couple of months and completed the fifth stage in a manner i could just about live with. for the moment. turns out the key to beating the giant man-eating land anemone was to just spam Flying Swallow on the tentacles. dove into chapter six immediately afterwards and yeesh- i still do not understand the combat at all.
Saints Row IV (360): it’s been so long, i can’t remember- is it normal for the framerate to be crap (esp. in the cutscenes)?
Some turn based thinkers that don’t require keyboard
Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate
Saw this for a few bucks and finally grabbed this. It’s fun and breezy for a traditional rogue, but the inventory system sucks. Despite this, I’ve gotten past the three first dungeons. I’ve yet to interact with any of the item fuckery (synthesis, the pots in the basement) and prob will forgo as long as possible if I continue. One of the reasons I usually get into a trad rogue is the wide options for how to play and this doesn’t seem to have that. Is there any character progression beyond equipment? Still, I enjoyed it as a “sit back with a controller” turn-based experience. Something to think about for when I make my rogue.
Metal Slug Tactics
Right trigger doesn’t seem to work (used two known good controllers) so I had to play with mouse. Kudos to the dev for making it playable with just mouse, but I was excited for more controller action. There are two “turn resets” per lebel, which made me wish for Tactical Breach Wizards full turn undo, at least while learning. Since success is based of of chaining reaction effects, it sucks that you cannot be sure in some cases what those effects will be exactly. For example, an area of effect attack hits two enemies that could trigger a “SYNC” attack from the same ally unit. You can’t be sure of which enemy will be attacks and you would need to reset THE ENTIRE TURN if it turns out the result would lead to a loss.
It took me a while to win a run on easy. I play a lot of tactical stuff and enjoy a good challenge but I did lose a few runs because of weirdness that I don’t think was well communicated. Maybe this one is on me, but I didn’t know you could shoot the first boss. I was just running around killing adds and avoiding instant death squares for a really long time. I thought there would be some kind of gimmick. By the time I realized there was no gimmick I was already dead. Just fully unloading on that boss trivializes it. I reckon they ought to have had a gimmick there.
Also, I did’t realize that reviving KOd team members is just a metter of clicking the coin icon that appears until the last boss of the run. I guess that means I almost 1cc’d my first run but I’m almost positive that was not in the tutorial. If it was, it was couched within some very tedious text.
There is way too much text for the quality of writing. The backstory found by digiing through the menus is nice but between and bookending missions once again had me thinking of Tactical Breach Wizards overall quality. Still a fun one. I may return to it.
Dragon Age 4
I have nothing good to write about this at this time. Because I am obsessed with how much I enjoyed the first one and how terrible it got immediatly with the sequel, I made some really stupid youtube videos of Inquisition a long time ago. One friend told me he liked them once, which means I’m working on a painstakingly slow stylized playthrough for youtube of The Veilgaurd.
I remain ambivalent about Nine Sols, 4 hours in but I just found out a a game changing feature. On the bosses I kept thinking “I wish I was doing 20% more per attack.” Bringing the pattern repeating down from 6-7 times to 4 times. And the number of parries needed from 30 to 17 or so.
At the beginning you have the option of STANDARD or STORY MODE. And that big scary text if you start in Standard you can switch to Story but never go back.
It turns out in Story Mode there are adjustable at anytime Damage and Attack sliders, left at 100% it is equivalent to Standard. You can survive about 4 hits normally which is perfect by my standards. Anyways gonna switch to Story Mode tonight boost my attack by 20% and probably have a much better time with the game. There’s just a little too much tedium and repetition as it is now.
The conversation around this game (Nine Sols) reminded me of Hollow Knight and I kept wondering what this one had over it and bought it
It seems to be « parries, and plot » right? Unfortunately?
I kind of want to leave behind the part of my life where I press a button at the right time to deflect an enemy attack and potentially launch a powerful counter-attack (unless the enemy’s eyes turn red, indicating an unparriable attack)
I keep reading it as « Nine Soles » and wondering why there’s an uneven amount of soles, did they lose a spare sole, is this a family of 5 with one having lost a leg… like « For Sale : Baby shoes » , but with soles
The default controller layout for Caves of Qud is indeed bizarre and I was sort of despairing about it after fighting with them throughout my first session. It’s also got not-hard-to-find bugs, like the game reverting from PS to Xbox button icons every time I take my DualSense into the Control Mapping screen. Ehh. I’ve reported these and also sent in a number of suggestions to help smooth out some bumps, hopefully.
I also eventually realized I could shuffle the controller mappings around a bit, and didn’t need a bunch of them, and yay cleared up enough space to set 8-way movement up like I did for Angband–4 cardinal directions on the d-pad, diagonals on up/down on left/right analog sticks (instead of the game’s default press and hold left-analog, then press R2 for each square you want to move =ppp)–and heck even streamlined a few other very basic commands (look around is now activated by Square and moved with d-pad, instead of monopolizing the right analog stick, and Triangle activates the interaction menu, instead of having to use L2 plus X ; PPP).
Uh and I learned from Googling that you feed yourself with the for-free “Make camp” command, instead of, like, having to scrounge for another dose of scummy dungeon food every minute or so (my character was in constant dread state from having to subsist on dreadroots to stave off starvation in the very first dungeon because I didn’t know how “Make camp” worked or what it did and the Tutorial didn’t cover it : P Update: Ah, it did cover it, or tried to–I stumbled across a way to skip it; have submitted that as a bug).
So, feeling much more positive about going back for another session. ^ _^ But boy they’d probably get more people into the game if the default controller set-up was way less bizarre. = o Like, anyone who skips the tutorial is just not going to be able to move their character via controller, because who suspects that moving a single map square defaults to press-and-hold-left-analog-direction-then-press-R2.
Also the game’s made-up vocabulary is pretty maddening. ; D
This is my reasoning. I could do without another parry-based Search Action Game but I hold Red Candle Games is such high regard especially for their story-telling that I’ll play whatever they put out for at least the next 10 years. Same as yeo. They can make whatever I’ll buy it on release.
I think the plot is doing interesting Red Candle things so far and to borrow GameArts it has Storytelling not Story. One of the things that sets apart Red Candle Games is they give clear immediate and long-term goals for the Player Character. And yet you are kept away from the PC. The PC never needs to state information outside of context.
Like it impresses me that when the PC meets one of the other Nine Sols they have a naturalistic conversation. The Other Sol says “I Didn’t know!” And the PC and the Sol know what they are talking about and the player doesn’t. The mystery is not information withheld by the characters, it is information withheld from the player. They know what was not known.
Like just something being this well written is a treat.
played a bunch of Remnant II (solo) and last night a few hours of Remnant: From the Ashes cooperatively with my brother. works a lot better on co-op, pretty enjoyable!
the games are very very similar. i would kinda forget which one i was playing. i guess the second one adds a few systems and tweaks some of the UI, but they are very close.
not a super inspiring series or anything, but solid, enjoyable, combat is great fun. i’m having a good time
An AI quirk in Caves of Qud can cause the Warden in the newbie town to go on a murder spree of the residents right before your innocent baby eyes–this happened to me fresh out of the tutorial for the first time. ; D
