who else thinking about Zingy Bingy right now…
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“in touch with pinball philosophy” is a powerful phrase. Also going to completely DESTROY my next debate opponent by asking them “who are you?”
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Im just impressed someone got funding to drive around playing pinball. The way to play a pinball is to nudge the table just enough so you dont drain. They all kinda wiggle on their legs with the back board being your axis of rotation. Man i should fix up my table
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Try to find a place with older 70’s or 60’s pinball machines, those are often a lot simpler so you can learn the fundamentals of controlling the ball and scoring easier. My favorites are 8 Ball Deluxe and Dragster. But other than that just find one pinball machine that you like the design of and play it a bunch, mine was World Soccer 94 - known as “Doggy Soccer” because of the dog mascot.
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Weird I was just thinking about pinball and how much I love Monster Bash, though perhaps because circumstances allowed this to be the only table I’ve ever developed any mastery of. The audio presentation rules though
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read the drop target zines they have good tutorials
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I’ve been playing Hell Let Loose after picking it up for free on the christmas Epic Games giveaway days.
WW2 Mil Sim. I tried it a year ago on a free weekend and bounced off of it hard. It’s not actually a shooter, but a first person strategy game with an FPS interface.
I’ve been gravitating toward the tanks because it seemed like a simpler way to approach a very intimidating learning curve.
The tanks require a minimum of 2 people, preferably a third as your spotter. Everyone on the tank crew needs to have good voice communication to make it at all viable.
So I drove some chill random dudes around who explained the game to me as we crushed the map. Driving a panzer around narrow streets and farms feels like Mud Runner. I think a few evenings with Mud Runner really opened me up to the experience. We crushed the map as all the infantry crowded around our tank offensives and we kept winning the engagements against the enemy armor.
Ultimately I actually made very few inputs as most of the contribution was just being in the right place at the right time and holding still for the gunner to do his thing. Really interesting strategy game where the strategy is the emergent quality of 50 people cooperating (or not). Didn’t think I would like this style of game but it’s growing on me. It probably depends a lot on getting paired with the chill dudes who can laugh off getting our tank stuck in a trench, but that seems to be a lot of the existing community so fingers crossed it’s replicable.
If anyone else has picked it up for free I’d be down to run a tank crew some evenings over the coming weeks.
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I have something like 350 hours in this game and have been in a tank exactly once. This game has legs.
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for as much as i complain about tunic, i do really like the music. some of the areas are pretty slick. it’s not even bad if you turn on the assists, i just kinda wish the whole game was more openly a puzzle-y adventure game rather than pretending to be a zelda-y thing but ultimately having other interests. those other interests are 100% of the appeal of the game, but you have to put up with the half-baked zelda crap to get there
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Used to play Hell Let Loose a few years ago, and really love its strategy-FPS hybrid design too!
The success of the team really lives and dies on how well you communicate. Love it when a multiplayer game gives you reasons to talk to other players.
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Hard agree. I grinded up enough money to boost all the stats I could so now I’m actually at the recommended attack/defense level for this area’s boss. This involved running around the west garden area fighting the monsters over and over and I don’t know, maybe I suck at the game but I can’t seem to figure out how to consistently block/parry attacks. It appears holding the shield up will block an attack at the cost of some stamina but you have to be facing the particular enemy that’s attacking? Fighting three crocodile dudes at once always seems to mean I get hit by at least of them when they surround me despite having the shield up.
I guess I shouldn’t be just holding the shield up so much but rather bringing it up at the moment of attack while targeting the enemy that’s attacking. This seems to produce a parry attack. But why does the shield button have to be on a trigger? It just feels mushy trying to do precise timed actions with it.
Also I got close to killing the west garden boss but usually he just annihilates me in about ten seconds because I’m not sure when in the fight is a good time to recover the stamina I immediately use up from shielding and dodging his first attack. Sometimes I dodge but get hit anyway because maybe I’m holding the stick in the wrong direction or something so I just dodge right into the attack? The 3/4 view is maybe confusing things a bit here for me.
I finally looked up some Pro Tips and it is mostly “git gud lol” thanks Dark Souls maybe someone’s made a YouTube explaining this better. And apparently there people who are able to go through this whole game without getting hit? For real?
I’m too proud to turn down the difficulty. If I can’t figure out the combat enough to beat the bosses I might be done with it. My other option would be to grind up money to buy a bunch of bombs and just cheese it that way but ehhhh I don’t know if I really want to do that either.
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In Star Wars Jedi Survivor was dicking around doing various side stuff I couldn’t get to earlier, ended up falling into a cave with one of each of the three giant aggressive animals waiting in it to make my life hell. In a panic I ran and used “confuse: make giant animal my ally” on the closest one so I could at least have a one on one fight for a sec. Went well as I killed the first giant beast when confuse wore off and in a baffling stroke of luck it seemingly killed the other giant beast in that time. Killed it yet was unable to claim the prize as it said combat was still going on. Walked around the cave and it turned out the confused beast didn’t kill the third one but somehow got it trapped in the wall. Just slashed at said wall for a bit slowly doing damage to that final beast, get a skill point when it finally dies as the player character says aloud “that wasn’t a fair fight” and I’m like “you’re right, but not in the way you think”.
(Later I stumbled upon a double rancor fight and that wasn’t a particularly fair one >_>)
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afair, this is the same game, only with a different engine (iirc, the PS5 version got the UE5 one?) … not sure if they spread the same DLC packs across both releases though, there might be a difference hidden there…
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pretty sure both are unreal engine, but 3 is a new campaign that’s PS5 exclusive
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gotta hand in my shmuppin-badge, though it is telling i have both installed and ~5h Playtime since then 
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As part of my ongoing quest to fill the hole left by the rotting Rocket Racing mode in Fortnite I went back to Distance, a game I’ve also periodically gone back to over computer upgrades to see it gradually look better and run faster since I first played it on a Geforce 6600. I played through the campaign mode again to refamiliarize myself with it, and it’s still an interesting, if no longer revolutionary, experience.
Then I tried Lost to Echoes, a prequel campaign they released for the game at some point, and it is genuinely the worst single player expansion to an otherwise good game I can think of. For one the game actually utilizes pitch controls in its track design, and requires you to correct your position vertically, but despite having a “flip vertical controls in aircraft mode” toggle it only activates if the car’s wings deploy, so you have to actually bind down as up and up as down for it to control correctly. Beyond that they significantly increased the amount of geometry on the track edges, giving you more objects to just slightly nudge and throw your jump angle off by 30 degrees. For some damned reason the death floor in most stages is 30 stories below the track as well. This whole thing feels like they got too enamored by people doing silly geometry speedrun tricks and decided to make a campaign for those freaks. You don’t need to make things for freaks! Freaks will bring their freak to you!
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Do you have the ice spell? It’s handy for this fight. Also try not locking on to it because you can scurry around faster and it makes it a little easier to dodge its attacks. A few bombs don’t hurt either. Might be worth hanging on to your mana/bombs etc for when the boss is low on HP the attacks get harder to dodge.
This fight took me a lot of tries but I did eventually break through on standard difficulty.
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really interested in what this game is actually like to play cos it’s come up a number of times in my compelling trash action search but i’ve always kinda let it slide outa my brain. it seems like, at least from my vague and tired memory, that it’s kinda terminally lengthy and grindy because of its weird mmo emphasis. did i imagine this? does it hold true? does it even matter?? the “trash” component has to come from somewhere i suppose…
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It’s just a dungeon crawler with some roguelike elements. You’re just working your way up a tower that gets progressively more difficult and a lot of time is spent trying to get materials and blueprints so you can survive going further up or to sidefloors. I like it because it feels like playing a modern Dark Cloud without the town-building aspect and I like the general vibe of it (outside of most of the characters – I don’t really find Suda51 or Suda51-esque characters all that amusing).
I’ll probably get bored with in it a few more days. It’s frustrating trying to get certain materials when the floors rotate every day and since most of the game is just working your way up the tower it’s not like there’s anything else to do when you don’t feel like going through the process of visiting a floor only to find nothing but cloth when you needed iron and it said it was an iron floor. I don’t need anymore fucking silk!
My initial interest in Let it Die came from it seeming to be really similar in concept to the PC-88 game The Screamer which seems like it’d be really cool but was kind of shitty to play. I had wanted something with the same vibe as The Screamer but actually at least somewhat interesting to play for a while.
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Im still looking for that Killer 7 high from 2005 in Suda51 stuff. Truly a foolish exercise.
I wanted to like Let It die but I kept hearing the Pay 2 Win aspect starts creeping up on you harder the farther in you go. Also I’ve learned the only rogue-like I like is actual Rogue which I played to death on a Palm Pilot in 2003.
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