I dunno if you made this up but I love the term. I can’t remember if the party members were bad about this in Dragon Age III but my hazy recollection is that I enjoyed shooting the shit with my party in that game but not as much as the Mass Effect crew.
Everything else outside that I had to slog through to get to more Shooting the Shit. I liked a lot of the UI art (all very Alphonse Mucha-inspired stuff, I’d play a whole game that looked like those menu/lore screens)
it’s actually weird how much of what little good there is in dragon age origins was already in kotor (iirc it even uses the same 1 → 2 → 3/4/5 → twist → 6 → 7 narrative structure), a game that had vastly better graphics and art direction despite coming out like 6 years earlier. like DA:O upon release already felt like “we are completely fucked out of ideas, god I hope people like generic kotor” and the series somehow proceeded from there.
kotor isn’t terrible obviously but it has all the same excessively tidy quest resolutions and JRPG pacing/cast that subsequently made their bones despite the fact that you’re like doing THAC0 with vibroblades or w/e for the first third of it.
I am just completely lost in King’s Field 2 but based off the names of places in a Japanese website I think I am 80% of the way through.
theres a real hazy midgame where youre exploring endless caves & jumping down holes into more endless caves, it rules
Man I thought there was something wrong with me for thinking Dragon Age was bad.
It seems like history is gradually proving that 3D was a mistake.
Played Stray. The cyberpunk atmosphere is great and the cat is cute, but gameplay wise it’s a collection of all the actions I don’t like in a videogame. It feels like homework.
Bought Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia in a sale for 79 cents and ended up in a dopamine loop playing it for a solid 10 hours yesterday
It’s like a classic Megami Tensei but much less grindy, or like Pokemon with more meat to the decisionmaking. (Two series I’ve always wanted to get into but always find myself quitting in the early game.)
And the music is super crunchy
I started playing one of the games I had set aside for this year, Faxanadu. Immediately, I am almost moved to tears with how beautiful this game is. The limited palette grounds the world in a believable unreality. The texture and shadow of the backgrounds suggest depth and roughness. And the character portraits! My god!
I have just finished a quest where I had to unblock three fountains within the World Tree. One was watched over by a sleeping sage in the clouds. I had to wear winged boots to meet him. Another fountain was overseen by a prisoner of a monstrous bat. To get to these fountains, I have had to go back and forth through the same labyrinthine screens of enemies. I love it though because the enemy movement patterns are so varied and predictable. There’s a whole toybox of windup monsters that I have encountered and I can feel myself becoming one with the clockwork.
Play Faxanadu. It’s great.
23 posts were split to a new topic: ruining "in particular’ by blonde redhead
it was more that there was like a 10 year period when both fighting games and RPGs were almost completely dead bc they were trying to adapt to perceived tastes and budgets, and during that period a few people kept trying to make them with pretty shitty results, but inevitably you would have younger fans and the media both determined to promote them anyway, so they have this totally unearned reputation of having been a lifeline
Be easier if I had more than one teleport set!! I’ve sort of placed one roughly in the middle and every time I go down an unescapable hole I gotta go back and spend 5 minutes “where was I? Not this way. Over here? Maybe? Nooo…yes?”
Game feels like a dream. If I look away from the screen for a second I forget where I am.
A post was merged into an existing topic: ruining “in particular” by blonde redhead
i beat the main suicide squad campaign today
-the character animations are so full of life and stuff, especially the Australian guy’s face. its tech-demo good
-this is a destiny/anthem style looping chore shooter but the twist is that every character has their own freaky way of moving around in the sky. one of them swings from a grappling hook and you can shoot enemies while dangling. one jumps high and you have dashes. a dlc character can hover like princess peach/a dragon ball z guy, so you have a sniper rifle and you’re hovering in the air shooting a helicopter.
the riddler has placed superman 64 style obstacle courses throughout metropolis where you must move through rings. some are designed with certain characters in mind but you can play as any of them. obstacle courses fucking rule
-the superman boss fight is a really amazing spectacle, especially as the character that can hover in the sky. sometimes i feel like im playing the prototype of the next big thing in niche multiplayer shooters dashing around in the air with a gun. human sized armored core? or gacha force? gundam extreme battle vs?
I managed to get all the way to the last boss of Nine Sols on Standard Mode, but after a few attempts I could tell this was going to be more than I was willing to deal with and so I decided to hand in my Big Boy Gamer Cred and switched to Story Mode. I set it to 150% damage given and 50% received, so it was at least still a bit challenging.
I think part of the fatigue I was feeling was a result of spending less time in the actual boss fight than I spent watching loading screens on account of how quickly you die and there being 2 loading screens per attempt thanks to the boss being in a separate room to the checkpoint.
Turns out I didn’t fulfill the requirements for the True Ending so I ended up with the Wet Fart ending instead. Little bit annoying to play for 40 hours only to get locked into a big anticlimax because I didn’t think to look up a guide. Oh well, I watched the true ending on Youtube and can see it’s a much more satisfying conclusion.
One of my theories while playing is that Shuanshuan is supposed to be the Yellow Emperor, which I think checks out.
I’d still probably put it in my top 5 games for 2024, but I think I’d be happy to see the arms race for Hardest Soulslike come to an end and go back to Demon’s and Dark 1 level difficulty
Were the 2D BioWare games any good?
Tbh I feel like propping up BioWare was a psyop (advertising) and none of their games were actually good. They just decided to take a middling company with a fervent fan base and then… here we are two decades later with a bunch of OK games
The best time I personally had in a Bioware game was the mech traversal in Anthem.
Finally played the last 2 hours of Small Saga.
If the last boss had been a challenge I might give this a perfect in the score board of my mind. You really have to be asleep to fail. I don’t think I ever even used a healing item once in the game.
It has an upgrade tree where you can get all kinds of buffs but here aren’t enough fights in the game to fill it out or even try it out. The last ones you get are only maybe used on the last fight in the game. Though basically any gambit you try will work so they are truly pointless. They put so much work into the battle system and then you dont use it.
Bottom line: Too small.
I beat SOTN somewhat accidentally. I was just suddenly like oh… thats all the dracual bits. Ive just crept up on the game over the course of a year. What I found was that I had gone through all the hardest parts of the reverse castle first lol. I should not have gotten the rare drop sword it made things toooo easy.
Played more RE4 and Im feel like this is pretty good but maybe not my game. I dunno. I think I need to play it on a real gamecube as per my original plan. SD card reader in the GC might need to be a thing. Or get a better emulation PC. It feel mostly full speed but something about the timing feels bad sometimes its getting under my skin. I need certainty. Also I could stand to do a restart now that Im not a fumbling mess. Mastering the stagger + kick really ups the fun factor.
No I mean all 3D games
There are good 3d games though.
