Titanfall 2 campaign is completely breathtaking. I enjoyed engaging with the movement mechanics in the game and had more fun cranking up the difficulty. You’re basically invincible if you move at high speed, so the battles are about figuring out how to chain wall-runs into melees and wild fly-by hipfires, with a couple moments of tactical ADS fun.
3 Likes
the single and the multi are both absolutely fantastic
TF2 was 2016’s best summer blockbuster
1 Like
Does anybody know what the story behind Telenet Japan’s logo is?
Edit: lol
4 Likes
Looks like a person in an armchair contemplating the cosmos
3 Likes
Uh… I am looking for people’s favorite game journos re: fighting games, action RPGs, or indie stuff. I am super, super out of it re: who’s writing cool stuff about the games I like. I generally just go to SB and twitter and ignore everything else.
Pat Miller has long been the best fightman writer around, when he does that
5 Likes
3 Likes
Ian Walker at Kotaku is pretty good on fightmans. RockPaperShotgun are strong on indie PC games and are generally idiosyncratic enough to be interesting (again, if you care about PC).
1 Like
Nah, in 0 and particularly in Kiwami, the combat has been refined so much that guns are rarely a problem, unless you suck at the game.
as for Majima character, there is no going back to his mystery after 0. it really made a “hero” out of him, so he’s not going to deviate from that template.
other than that, if you’re a newcomer to the series, 0 is probably the best entry point. i’ve played every single English entry so far, but if you’re not planning to invest significant amounts of time to this, playing the whole series can be very daunting.
on the other hand, it’s just amazing and almost unparalleled in other video game series in how familiar you become with the cast and the Kamurocho location once you have played through the whole series. there’s a lot of recurring minor characters and storylines that enforce this connection even further.
as for Kiwami in particular, I think the disjointedness works fine, especially when you compare it to the whole series. it really is one of the most confusing and shitty times for Kiryu in the whole series, coming back from prison to find that everything has changed around him. compare it with the bubbly optimism of 0 or the warm paternality of the later entries, it just fucking sucks.
1 Like
Nope, sorry, guns still suck and are annoying. please don’t blame the player for a problem in the game, K? Thanks.
2 Likes
Why wouldn’t I blame it on the player if it means ignoring the toolset available to you?
If there’s a problem with the combat and encounter design in the series, it’s that they don’t ask enough from the player (given the combat toolset available).
Sorry but nah, dudes shooting at me from off screen when I got jack shit to do about it aside from pump healing items or possibly grind for some item that might make that less annoying? That’s just bad design, and always will be. Maybe you have adapted to it, but that penultimate boss in Kiwami is still some boring bullshit, as was the other gun-boss on the roof earlier in the game.
What “toolset” are players ignoring? Dodging? Oh wait, they are offscreen, so not really doable. Move the camera to get them on screen? Great, still getting shot by a dude while fighting other dudes. So yeah, what ya got? As a dude who has been playing these games since launch of the PS2 original, any time a gun comes out in a fight is a mental UGH and still is.
No grinding involved at all, unless you mean unlocking some basic skills in the ability tree. I mean, what grinding even if you rely on items? Again, the problem in the series design is that the items are useless, with the game throwing at you healing items, protective items and all sorts of OP stuff extremely leniently.
Easiest method? Switch between Rush mode and Thug mode. Rush mode to keep dodging and accumulating heat, either through evasion or quick cancelable combos off of other goons, and then switch to Thug mode for Gun-specific heat mode action. The whole point of the gun-wielding enemies is to be a hassle to you, and as such, your primary target.
Roof-boss is not even worth mentioning, each move could be seen a mile away. And even then, Rush mode gives you crazy invincibility frames anyway.
Oh hey, Rush mode, a thing that didn’t exist in previous games? Yeah that sure solves that problem in the 6 main series games (counting Of the End here) without it. Or not at all. Maybe I don’t want to spend combat spamming dodge but actually fighting. As for grinding, yeah, to get Rush mode’s dodge working that wellby the time you get to a gun fight, you have to have levelled that mode, so magically if you haven’t, good luck player.
Also, the roof boss is worth mentioning. Rush/Thug was useless against that boss because Rush did so minimal damage to him that he wouldn’t even flinch and Thug’s gun specific shit didn’t work (and also is late on that grind tree, sooooo).
And you literally said nothing about the camera issues exacerbating the gun problem. “You could see the move a mile away” is meaningless if the camera can’t maintain a good view of the enemy.
So yeah, keep blaming the player for poor design decisions. It’s not like they could just…not have guns in the game or some other crazy idea.
In my first post, I specifically mentioned how it’s not really a problem SINCE 0.
Rush does little damage, yes, but even if you don’t utilize the gun heat move, it’s still very useful to switch to Thug mode on the fly for more damage.
What camera issues? There’s certain problems in areas where there’s a lot of them (although easily avoidable by dodging), but on that boss there are almost none. Even for a moment where the camera may not be able to keep up, you keep dodging until you are in the view.
What grind? There’s way more experience out there in the game than you need to MAX out the whole skill tree by mid to mid-late game. Oh god forbid, there are skills that may benefit the player’s ability to deal with the situation most efficiently. So what? There are still plenty of ways to do it.
You just keep strawmanning about grinding or otherwise cheesing and then just blame the game for it.
Sure OK lol.
That roof fight is dreadful and if I hadn’t known I was near the end I would have given up on the game.
The first time I have to explore my fuckin’ toolset shouldn’t pop up during the penultimate battle. In fact I kinda don’t want to have to explore my toolset at all. The Yakuza games are JRPGs and as far as I’m concerned the main draws are the side stories, the setting, and the characters so I’d be perfectly happy playing one with no combat. That’ll never happen though so if they’re gonna make me fight maybe they should stop making boss battles a total slog.
Like that roof fight has guns + respawning enemies + healing, right? The guns are the least of its problems. It goes on forever.
I also got to the final fight without unlocking the ability that would have kept the boss from regenerating health, and that’s pretty fucking bullshit. That should not be locked away by doing Dragon Style quests. The side stories in Kiwami are largely not good and even if they were amazing…yeah, shouldn’t have to do them to avoid a prolonged boss fight because CPU enemies in games should never heal it’s so fucking annoying fuck any game that has that shit.
My final playtime was still 10 hours longer than the PS2 version. I do not feel like that was 10 hours well spent. I missed the dub. The dub was really good.
Yakuza 0 was the best game of 2018 though. I forgot all the stuff I hated about that game.
1 Like
I know, right? I mean, I like having the JPN voices, but that dub had some charm to it that I missed when it wasn’t there. We could have had Mark Hamill as the new Majima? That would have been the best.
1 Like
i still think of the “whatthefuck?” random encounter soundbite on a stupidly regular basis
1 Like