Well I accidentally stayed up too late playing this fuckin’ thing so I guess I like it.
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I reached the point of no return on tower 2 lmao this game’s difficulty curve is WILD
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I think I might beat the second tower, but I’m partway through and I’m not sure where it ends. I managed my keys such that I was able to go DOWN from the starting floor and there’s some nutso shit down there.
Honestly I’m very excited to play more of this weird video game.
I was able to get a silver medal in the tutorial tower and that felt pretty good. Supposedly it’s possible to get gold in that one without any meta game shit and I feel like I’m missing something big in terms of efficiency because I have no idea how that works.
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That’s a much better way to describe how I felt about Survive, but for me I had this weird obsession with the FOX engine because of how smooth it felt to exist and move in and I just didn’t want it to be trapped in soccer game purgatory with Kojima’s split from konami
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appreciating how trials of mana (2020) doesn’t ““modernize”” npc dialogue or (dream logic) narrative progression at all, so you’re basically playing a SNES game dropped into unreal engine. every npc spouting weird nonsense at you & having to hunt around a dude’s throne room to find the hidden switch in a mysterious sideboard cabinet feels charmingly surreal in High Definition 3D
it’s a solid junk food B game but idk if i’d like it as much if i hadn’t played a fan translation of the original when i was a kid? it’s not pretty and folks used to modern jrpgs would probably find the lack of stuff other than progressing the plot thru fighting a lot of adorable monsters pretty dull
tho the one concession to Modern Game Design is 1000% hilarious: any time you need to do the standard 8/16/32-bit jrpg “ok, new town, time to talk to every npc until one of them tells me what to do” thing, the game puts giant honking quest markers over the 1-3 people who trigger a progression event flag. it hadn’t occurred to me how long in the past that whole trope was until seeing a system clearly designed to paper over it without having to make any actual changes to the game
so yeah, a budget jrpg remake made me confront that i’m getting older and contemplate both my own mortality and how things so familiar to me that they’re invisible will eventually be alien and confusing to future generations??
sooner or later we all become boomers
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this happened to me a bit when playing Turok 2, they put big markers over everything that you can/need to interact with, once you get within a certain radius, and it made me realize how awful it was just poking around every little corner until you found the one thing you need, BUT! In the (very small) hub section there are about 40 keyholes that you need to fill with keys you find throughout the levels, and every single one of them had a big red arrow over it. It was just a mass of red arrows. Incredible stuff.
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i enjoyednthis game purely because i played it in a way thats unintended. got lost on a mission in the fog and wandered around in static and fog while huge abominations i had never seen before chased me until i found my way back to the base. it was incredible and immediately ruined by every mission after
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Tower 3 is capital Fucked. Completely changes the stat curve on you and idk what to do with it.
Honestly the genius innovation of this over DROD RPG or Tower of the Sorcerer is that you can obtain keys as level up bonuses. That means that WAY more routes are possible for varying opportunity costs. It’s a complexity explosion. That combined with the already huge scope of the game means that you get to focus on big optimizations and the little ones don’t matter nearly as much (at least at low-mid level play).
Like it’s bean counting vs. overseeing the entire bean supply chain.
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Did you notice that the details on every enemy sprite tells you what they drop? I just noticed it last session.
Shield guys always drop DEF items, sword guys always drop ATK items, sword and shield together is always high XP, birds are always HP, and “emote guys” (the ones with the black smiley above their head) always drop keys
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Yeah, that’s super important and the tutorial sort of glosses over it. It makes the shield & sword guys way better to fight for XP than the birds, because the birds just drop health (which isn’t usually an immediate concern). If you hold spacebar you get a list of enemies on the floor, and that menu also shows you what they drop.
The tutorial tower has such a glut of health that I think it’s optimal to skip as many potions as possible until you have all the HP multiplier hearts. I think it’s worth it even to hold off on some of the potions that give you stats. Especially the dream potions that give you 9999 health. I’m fairly confident that’s the strategy to get gold in the tutorial tower. Skip as many potions as possible until you have the max heath multiplier, then rake in the points.
My silver run tried to do that, but I prioritized feathers (XP) over hearts (HP), and I’m pretty sure that was a mistake, because those health numbers get super big, and it basically overshadows any stat gain I would have got from extra levels.
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today I finally acquired the fabled Gamer’s Reward
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Year 2 of Stardew Valley now I have chickens, a duck, and some fruit trees to go with my tiny plot of cultivated field.
The second “dungeon” is so hardcore in terms of how much damage monsters do to you I lol’d the first time I went in there and got my ass kicked I did not expect the game to go this hard on this particular aspect tbh.
One gripe, which I mentioning late – the character portraits are like, weirdly ageless. Everyone’s mom looks the same age as they are, with the exception of like 6 NPC’s who are explicitly coded as “old”.
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that’s healthy living
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All these farm folk applying SPF 3,000 before heading out to the fields
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chop of the tree
juice of the bee
take from the lake
fruit of the sea
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if that silent hill game comes to fruition at least i can hope that it means he gets to use the fox engine again
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Survive was fun for most of the story in my experience, largely because it is such a delight to control MGSV. I hit a real wall when the goals I was interested in achieving became locked behind either a resource grind or individual resources that pretty much could only be satisified with the online tower defense matches, because the community on the PC is totally dead.
For a while I was thinking it wasn’t so bad either. A brain-dead game is good for the head every now and then. And, honestly, the story could have been a lot less interesting or incorporated into the MGS canon than it was so I gotta say I kind of appreciate the plot.
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i started up a game of SPACE FISHERMEN for the ps2
i have the theme song stuck in my head but i don’t know how to fish! it’s very confusing
anyone else play this?
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Maybe or they could even end up with the Decima/Death Stranding engine if there’s any truth to Sony wanting to buy the IP. I’d almost settle for being content with crouchwalking espionage action forever but that engine deserved more chances than it got.
MGSV feels so good because it’s 60FPS + a good movement designer, things that should be replicable in future Kojima productions divorced from the FOX Engine.
I’m anxious to get my hands on Death Stranding because I’ve been denying myself until I can PC it at 60 because I want it to feel, so good
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