First: Enotria: The Last Song continues to be very tastey Dark Souls. We got some questionable NPC and optional asshole bosses and lots of paths.
But I have to enjoy the buffet and try another Souls-like, Flintlock: Seige of Dawn. This one you got a fox god following you around questioning your judgment. It is all very serious and incoherent in this WW1 with flintlock pistols and the gates of the afterlife are open and also there are Gods.
One of the first things you do is walk into a destroyed village and defeat a mini-boss and then the village is nice again, with green trees and people and you can go to the Coffee Shop to get an extra flask?
I eventually realized this is Original Xbox Game Logic. The level design is all these snaking canyons, despite being Unreal. Then you use the fox to teleport between set points. You hold left on the D-pad to collect points. There are like 4 different meter systems. Like what if Fable IV came out after Dark Souls? And also western devs were paying attention to Dark Souls at the time.
It tingled my brain to play a competent mess (because it is still a modern Unreal game, everything runs and plays fine.) it does give me the same feelings as a C+ Xbox game.
But also could just be playing Enotria instead. Where I had a surprise boss fight against a giant crab, and then immediately in the next area that crab was a normal enemy.
Clear Oath In Felghana this weekend. Another breezy action RPG jaunt that has its charms but I found myself wanting a little more in either action mechanics or RPG stuff but is purer for not having more. I feel like I want a version of this game that has no levels and all power growth is purely tied to story progression so every boss fight is more tightly tuned as a shoot em up battles that they truly are. The arcade player in my head feels like I’m cheating polishing off an extra level or two to make a boss fight a little less of a chore but the RPG player appreciates a mild grind to reduce friction later so this is probably why I wish there was a little more on either side of the equation.
The final boss was kinda cute with the final phase being a zelda like tennis match with magic spheres. I guess next is to either decide to choose a classic Ys4(there’s 2 different games) or stay modern with Memories of Cecelta.
In case you happen to be playing as Ryu (or Ken?), here are my tips to myself, who is bad at ST, for beating the various ST AI on max difficulty:
vs T.Hawk: jump-kicks
vs Blanka, Honda, Boxer: fireballs/sweeps
vs Dhalsim: jump when he teleports, otherwise fireball/sweeps
vs Chun-Li, Cammy, Claw: turtle & crouching heavy punch
vs Fei-Long, Guile, Dee Jay: tatsu
vs Ken: counter after he misses uppercut
vs Zangief: gotta mix it up; tatsu to escape
vs E.Honda: fireballs
vs Sagat: jump kick over fireball, sweep
vs Dictator: heavy tatsu, neutral heavy punch for anti-air, tatsu out of corner
vs all: fireball when they’re down
Also if you need more help, play the version in Capcom Fighting Collection (pick ST mode character in Hyper Street Fighter 2 in that collection, specifically) instead, it ~3 frames less input delay than 30th Anniv. : )
i finished testament of sherlock holmes the other day and it is insane and feels entirely ungrounded and looks insane sometimes. absolutely ridiculous case. you are now controlling toby had me cackling.
crimes and punishments has been really fun, particularly that you seem to be allowed to get it completely wrong, which is hilarious. but i’ve never ever been wrong about anything, just can’t be fooled. two cases down perfectly. don’t ask me about how i feel about my moral choices, i’m not sure why i’m representing sherlock’s character. this game also looks very pretty sometimes. never stays too grounded, not a single murder has been normal. sherlock/watson relationship is underwhelming compared to the previous four games so far.
okay so also still hundred line. it is 100% breadcrumbs to feed fan delusions since some point i passed long ago. trying to cover as much ground as possible without devoting itself too much to any of it. it’s very screenshotable and easily spawns fan works, probably entirely on purpose. i’m feeling a little cynical about it tbh
Yeah, as Rudie said, higher difficulty is a good idea. Also the original version of 3 has a level cap long before you finish the game, so it becomes much more tightly tuned by the end.
In general, Falcom games should be played on hard unless they are your first Falcom game. Hard difficulty is usually where the games start requiring you to engage with all the mechanics, whereas Normal can often be powered through with just the basics.
For 4: I don’t know what to tell you. Memories of Celceta is neat, but also way too padded and grindy. I still gotta go back and play the original two. I know for a long time, the PCEngine one was considered more official, though Falcom has more recently said the SNES one was. Who knows? But play original Ys 3 first, definitely.
Dang, the Kayne and Lynch nightclub level is not only really technically impressive but also pretty distressing and challenging to play. There’s so many NPCs in there. The game is starting to feel more transgressive.
fwiw, in Watchdogs 1 the dump truck had somehow the least worst handling characteristics of most of the “cars”, so i used it way too often for what the game offered.
otoh though, the legend of the sadface-revenge dump truck hacker taking on Goo— blume corporation was born
the house md isis hospital takeover experience is perhaps a bit surreal. i never realized how fucking bizarre the layout was until i played this which is really funny like it feels like walking around a playhouse more than an actual hospital which i guess makes sense because it’s a tv show set.
if this actually happened on the show house would make no less than twelve racist comments during the ordeal and would be so insufferable you would wish one of the guys would shoot him already
marathon: when am I actually going to go in geared up with this shit in my vault, which really seems to be mostly just a bunch of junk anyway. maybe once in a blue moon in june just to see it get instantly vaporized and make me put it off til the next one. and what was that about players co-operating. that must of been that other one, arc raiders, not this one. I don’t know, in dmz it wasn’t really that hard to get armored and geared up from nothing. and when you went down it wasn’t necessarily over. you could get pressganged into a band of marauding slavers. you’d say yes because you wanted to live. and you’d tell yourself you were better than these griefers and dream of a day things could be different and better, but in the meantime isn’t it nice to feel what winning feels like. in dmz you could be living out furiosa or the sea hawk, in marathon you get handed a free space derringer of the day, then get shot in the head. and if I wanted to go on a “gear run” it just seems incredibly more tedious. the robot guys don’t seem to drop guns or more importantly ammo a lot of the time. a larger backpack to actually carry any of this seems even more rare. and better shields seem even more rare than that. I guess you’re supposed to do missions to unlock these things to buy in the store, but you make so little extracting, and you add in the 2hp healing and shield potions to nickel and dime you to death how long and often do you have to play this game for that equation to finally make sense. is seeing a maxed out backpack or shield supposed to be long term lifetime goals? in an extraction shooter I’m dying and losing my shit in all the time? that resets every season? lol. I never played tarkov or any that, just dmz, maybe everyone here hates extraction shooters just cause they didn’t play the call of duty one and realize how not tedious they can be
It’s less about wanting it to be harder as much as I want to take away the thought of “am I to weak or to strong for this right now?” out of my mind. Though some attack patterns have a looseness to them that feel like “NO Hit” runs would be more of a pain than a fun challenge.
My only reservation on hard mode is how much the EXP curve would be adjusted to make it take longer to get levels for when I do run into a wall. Chester’s fights are one case where I feel I wanted a dodge roll or a lock on because he plays different from boss monsters. One of the few times in the game I had to consider stopping mid combo to try and dodge the cross wave.
Fallout: New Vegas (360)
finally persisted long enough to set foot outside Generic Western Town w Post-Apocalyptic Set Dressings, only to get taken apart by the first couple of bandits; had to hoof it all the way back to town for medical attention because healing items are either worthless or as close to it as makes no odds when weighed against their scarcity/cost
watched The Road Warrior yesterday and sorta bounced off it, too, so perhaps Post-Apocalypse as a genre is just one more thing i’ll never “get”
