Genuine question: With Jade Empire in the direction down from Fable, what would you points towards in the up direction?
Mostly asking out of curiousness, and for rec’s.
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For an Action RPG about rolling around in a low impact fantasy world? Probably Kingdoms of Amalur.
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If you mean for exclusive Original Xbox RPGs, ummmmm…
Yeah, it’s not a great field there.
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Woke up, dusted off the 3DS, and fired up…oh you know it, Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past.
It’s interesting how, at least early on, it really is a middle ground between the original and this new one coming out. The script seems largely the same as the new one, but even in the early going it still has stuff like the dude who talks to animals just outside the village (he’s gone in the new version!).
There’s something about it though that irks me. Think it’s gotta do with how scrunched everything feels - the opening fishing village is super condensed, with everything facing outward to the coast, like on a rigid grid or something. The castle town is roughly the same layout as the original, with the tunnel to the old guy relocated near the church, same as the new game.
I dunno. Maybe it really is the happy medium between the two, but damn it feels so claustrophobic it actually kinda makes me sick.
Guess I might play a little more and see if it still has all those puzzles for getting into the ruins…
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Kotor 1 and 2 were original xbox rpgs were they not.
Not that 1 was that great
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Yeah, but they weren’t exclusive to the Xbox.
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I thought they originally were.
I haven’t played any games today.
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I booted up Terraria after not having played in several years. So far I haven’t hit anything big that’s new, but there’s loads of little things. Like there’s little graphical things like swaying trees and the design of the hud graphics. I did get very annoyed by the fact it highjacked my keyboard lights and I had to go into the files and delete something cause there wasn’t a setting for it.
If there’s anyone more fluent in Terraria here who could offer some tips of things that are new I should do/look for I’d be interested. I think the last time I played hard mode was pretty new, but I think I played a little bit after that too.
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Playing through D2 with @Kilroy which she is experiencing for the first time. When the intro sequence on the plane didn’t play at the beginning I thought it was either a flashback which I’d misremembered the placement of or else the emulator fucked up, only to realize that in a game with probably upwards of a hundred unskippable cutscenes, the intro is totally optional and you’d have to cycle through the title screen menu to even know it’s there, which on a first playthrough you would do instead of just pressing ‘Start Game’.
When we finally watched the intro after an hour of playing, it said to insert disc 4. Again I initially assumed this had something to do with emulation, but no, that’s how it worked in the original release.
In order to have the intended narrative experience of D2, a player would have needed to navigate through a menu to find the opening cutscene, then swapped discs since presumably they would have first inserted disc 1, watched the cutscene, then swapped discs again to actually start playing the game. The only reason I can think to do this is because disc 4 was the sole disc with enough space to put the cutscene on.
Also somebody on reddit is perhaps the only person to ever legitimately get to level 30 in D2, which requires 999,999 EXP and which they say took them 260 hours https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamcast/comments/mbajhe/d2_level_30_finally_reached/
All of this is very in-keeping with what D2 is all about. It’s an occulted masterpiece.
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So far it seems like someone took the novel “I am Legend” and moved as far further in the right direction with it as the movie moved in the wrong direction, while adding occultism and early survival horror tropes, and with the aesthetic and mechanical sensibilities of an upscaled Phillips CD-I game. So yes, it rules. Three discs left to go.
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Enemy Zero is similar. There’s a Disc 0 that includes the tutorial and a trailer/industrial cutscene. FMVs weren’t cheap!
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did you know: metro quester osaka is really good
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What’s genuinely awe-inspiring for a 3D game from 1999 is they committed to in-game cutscenes for virtually every action you can take. There is a cinematic for entering/exiting every area and for nearly every interact-able piece of level geometry that progresses the game. Experiencing this so soon after re-playing Code Veronica, which was released two months after D2 and where all of this stuff would have been a camera push-in on a door suspended in a black void or a line of text explaining “It’s locked”, is yet another specific detail in D2 that suggests perception of the whole would fundamentally alter a person.
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I played many hours of Terraria but I spent most of my time building so I never saw most of the bosses. (I did get to see the final boss once when I played a session or two with members of this very forum.)
If you’ve never tried them, you might like Starbound and/or Core Keeper, both of which I prefer to Terraria these days (though I still think Terraria has the best lighting effects.)
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Boy that takes me back. I remember Starbound coming out, but I never got around to buying it. I don’t remember it getting talked about very much post coming out.
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I need to dig into Osaka, but the first game was a good time, so it’s just waiting for me.
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Oh yeah there’s been… a bit since Hard Mode came out. After you get aways into Hard Mode you can try Expert Mode, which generates a world at ~Hard Mode difficulty from the start, which also has increased difficulty when you activate Hard Mode, and adds new items to every boss. There’s Master Mode, which is a further difficulty intended to be started with a character that has finished Expert Mode, but it’s a pain in the ass. They also added a creative mode that lets you duplicate any item you find.
The Jungle biome and the Jungle Temple might be new for you too, and I think the Dungeon getting new enemies in Hard Mode happened in a later patch. Shimmer is a very recent addition, which lets you get a handful of new bonuses, break down some items, and change some NPC apperances. They also added the concept of “towns”, when you get enough NPCs together in rooms they like with neighbors they like. Each biome has its own town teleporter, so you’re incentivized to finally split up NPCs instead of stashing everyone in a single apartment block. Oh, and the game has fishing quests now! And golf.
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Ok I think I played more recently than I thought cause I remember fishing quests. Not much else though
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Goemon 64 (that’s the 3D one whatever it is actually called its name is Goemon 64.)
It may be self-hating homophobic (like the whole series is) but it doesn’t have a double jump in a platformer so A+++.
No but serious it is like a B and it sounds like they paved over a lot of the homophobic elements in the English version outside of well…everything with Ebisumaru.
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I haven’t played (mystical ninja starring goemon) in forever but I have very fond memories of it. Pulasumaaaa! I dont think i noticed the antigay stuff at the time.
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