this motherfucker Daniel took the top missouri spot for Puyo eSports during my hiatus, and then just sat on his rank. I can tell he hasn’t touched the game since reaching #1 because his rank has stayed exactly the same. fuck you Daniel. I’m taking my seat back
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if Daniel from Missouri is any of you, I’ll find you.
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sounds like dan is just trying to keep it interesting get some drama going for the summoning salt vid
I finally started playing HITMAN season 1 finally
at first i was worried because it has the “accident kills” again which I didn’t like in blood money because it felt like following these scripts was the optimum to play through the levels, and i really liked improvising in the earlier games.
this turned out not to be an issue because there are HEAPS of “accident kills” or special ways to get to your target, and it’s really fun figuring it all out, plus it’s not factored into the score… i can still get a high score by going in with just my suit and killing my targets with my pistols, which i really enjoy.
i can see why this was episodic, the levels are huge and i was overwhelmed at first but now i’ve played through the paris mission like 30 times and having an amazing time. doing all the challenges and finding all the side-stories going on in the level is really enjoyable. characters feel like real people, and it feels like everyone really has their own agenda going. i also like how the targets seem to be well written too, mkaing some feel very human, especially in the mission with the virus.
this online stuff is bullshit though, why do i need to be online to get my score?? fuck off. especially since i had to wait like 12 hours to download an update before it let me go online.
it still has some of the problems of the original, like the illusion is broken now and then when npcs dont react as they really would etc. i was also save scumming a lot which was making the game less enjoyable, so now im trying to just go with the flow more and enjoying it better.
anyway yeah, i was overwhelmed at first and worried it would force you to follow scripted sequences too much but no this game is awesome. and i’ve only really explored the first mission
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My favorite was the no-disguise no-discovery axe murder challenge on the first mission of Hitman. You need to master the fundamentals of character pathing and stealth/alert rules across multiple floors, and any gimmicks you use are your own lateral thinking rather than something the designers built in. And it’s totally silly
I still like it even though a physics glitch carried the axe off into the void on one of my good attempts
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oh one thing i forgot to mention is that i really wish this game had a speed up time option. yeah yeah i know part of the game is waiting around, but it gets tedious waiting literal minutes for a target to get into place sometimes!
also, is there a mode that semi-randomises enemy and object placement? i would be all over that, for some real improvisation fun/chaos
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Yeah me too, even though some purists insist that the game would be worse with it. Limited-use rewind would be cool, too. Seems fine to me as long as there is a challenge mode to disable such features.
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After a certain point of unlocks and skill and level knowledge you can trivialize anything and have to start making the game as challenging as you want it to be anyway.
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Saturn update: I played through Panzer Dragoon Eins und Zwei, thinking the whole time that I wish I could barrel roll. Imagine my joy at finding it in Pandora’s Box (turns out it’s not so useful after all). The whole atmosphere of these games is intoxicating and more than enough to make up for somewhat shallow interaction. Just being in the world is satisfying. I also watched the opening cutscenes to Saga and was quite impressed with what I saw. I remember reading someone’s posts about how the tone isn’t quite where it should be, so I’m hesitant to dive in. (Edit: Wow, that poster was @alteredfish and the post was from two years ago! November even!! I read that when it was first posted and now I’m mad at time).
Big moment for me today: I finished the second half of Burning Rangers. That final level certainly throws a whole lot of plot at you! Suddenly, it makes sense that the same people would push out Sonic Adventure in the same year.
I really appreciate the diversity in the level design though I want more. I want Burning Rangers 2 for the Dreamcast. I want the impossible. The budget and ambition feel totally out of scope for what Saturn games usually reach for. I can’t imagine what the development process was like; I’d love to read a post-mortem.
I took a couple more screenshots from the final level. If you want to be as surprised as I was, don’t look.
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Honestly I can’t imagine Burning Rangers looking nicer on the Dreamcast, it just has to exist in that strange super-satured blocky texels world sot it doesn’t end up looking like Shadowman or some N64 game washed over with colored lighting
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But imagine if it were…cel-shaded
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actually I’ve thought about it some more and I think maybe waiting it out, keeping calm and not getting too impatient or excited should be part of the game and not be skippable
hmmmm
You can certainly mix cel-shading with light washes and glowing lights to emulate '80s-style underlighting (yeah, I absolutely believe in this), but it took a few cycles to get beyond muted, restrained color palettes. I suppose if anyone was going to kickstart this look it might as well be the Burning Rangers team.
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look i got things to do other than play pretend hitman ok
Finally got internet back and equally finally got to give Warframe’s new melee revamp a tryout and, uh, it feels like it’s on the right track, regardless of what the whiners who complain they can not longer 3 shot enemies in 20+ hour long continuous missions might have to say about it. Exalted Melee (abilities-as-melee-weapons, if you like) could use a second look, but all “The sky is falling,” is mostly pointless doom-saying.
Melee mods, on the other hand, are upside down. Condition Overload no longer stacks total damage exponentially with the number of status effects on a target (so no more 40x bonus damage) but instead affects the base damage similar the other primary base damage mod Pressure Point (and it’s almost twice as expensive to slot tuned up Primed version). This leads to a situation where at 1 status effect on a target CO is as powerful, and with 2+ status effects on the target significantly better, to the point of making the other two mods near pointless to have.
It’s quarter to midnight, my brain is fried, and I don’t think this is the right place to get into the fine details of just how sideways melee modding went. Sideways? Eh, more like a Immelman, really. What else… most of the punch/sparring and other short range weapons feel substantially better now and have pretty usable ranges, while polearms and whips no longer end up with 30+ meter attack ranges that let you just kinda kill everything in any given tile with ease. Combos inputs are much easier to manage and can be moved between with relative ease as long as you attack speed doesn’t get too out of control.
The lifted status sets up a neat bonus damage juggle and hopefully this leads to the ability to tee up enemies for your allies to pulverize. Some stances are still lacking a combo here or their and need more animation work to flesh out, though I wouldn’t expect that to happen anytime soon. It doesn’t leave them all that lacking in function.
The heavy attacks/former charge attacks are neat but due to modding-related issues, using them to burn your combo counter is usually not advantageous to do. Well, maybe. Like, weapons that generate lots of slash procs when used with Relentless Combination which generates combo counter on applying slash procs can build the counter so fast you aren’t necessarily losing all that much due to down time. That said, this melee system really pushes Slash procs anyway due to a bunch of changes to modding, Condition Overload, and changes to crit-related mods.
Yeah, okay, enough thinking about this. Cookies, milk, sleep.
I just miss my gas Lesion blender
I’m still on the fence about exalted weapons, because if they make them too good, that kinda hurts older frames that came out before they were a thing. But in the other hand, if they’re not good enough that you could make a viable build centered around them, that’s practically indistinguishable from removing them from the game.
Ideally, I’d like to see every frame get an exalted weapon in a rework eventually, but that’s probably asking too much.
Also, stop making mods you can only get from non-regular events so OP.
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I wish I could learn Virtua Fighter organically with newbie friends*. I tried out 2 today and it is simultaneously simple and complicated in a way that I can’t quite read.
I know there are a lot of VF-heads in these parts. Is there a way to learn that doesn’t involve scrutinizing move lists composed of acronymic jargon?
*This statement could be applied to any fighter outside of Smash
im replaying mario 3 for the first time in foreveRRRR. like, ive picked it up when people have been over or whatever and they think they wanna play it, then lose interest really fast CUZ ITS NOT THAT FUN 2 PLAYER. taking turns sucks and the lose condition for the mario bros game is SO MEAN it will ruin your friendship
but there were so many tricks that i read in strategy guides that i could never pull off
and i just do them effortlessly!
also i remember which levels i gotta collect all the coins in for STRANGE AND WONDERFUL THINGS. well in the first three worlds so far, and i always remember halfway through the level
i used a save state slot so i could play my favorite part of the game over and over
slow floating down in a ball after the star wears off from a great height
i did it like four times in a row! IT DOESNT GET OLD
im gonna make another one right before kuribos shoe level too
I GOT THE WORLD THREE STRANGE AND WONDERFUL SHOP IVE NEVER DONE IT BEFORE
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So in my Planescape: Torment playthrough I just picked up a bronze sphere and checked out a nearby room that was tricky to get out of and right after I did so is the moment I realized that other party members can hold items as well and… god I dropped so many things before now. Hopefully none of it was too important!
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I actually had to restart Planescape torment because I had dropped junk somewhere and couldn’t find it
And I mean, literally Junk, the item. You need it to progress through the game
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