As my personal gaming project for 2019 went surprisingly well I decided to embark on a much more foolish one for 2020. There are a number of video games I bounced off quickly, often in violent fashion, and decided that no they aren’t for me/they suck and left it at that. The thing is that with a bunch of these games this happened 10-15 years ago and I’m a rather different person now than I was then, yet I treat these now fairly old opinions like they are rock solid and unchanging.
So given that this is a year of second chances to get things right (I’m talking to you America) I decided to make a list of these games and revisit them over the course of the year. I ain’t gonna promise to complete them as that would be potentially masochistic, but I’ll give them at least a couple hours and try to get beyond the opening bits to see if maybe this time I can find the joy in them.
I mention this here as the first game up is God Hand and you all are the reason I ended up with it in the first place. I have never made it past the opening area in the few attempts I’ve made, and I am kinda on my own as for whatever reason the game has one of the least helpful fanbases I’ve ever come across, but there has to be a bunch of youtube vids up there by now to look at and I have more experience with the 3d brawler genre now than I did back then so perhaps that’ll be enough to get me over an initial hump. Wish me luck!
Anyways feel free to mention any games you played and hated only to revisit years later and go “hey, I get this now and it is pretty swell!” I hope that is something that happens as if not… this may be a long gaming year for me :\
Sonic the Hedgehog. I used to be one of those ‘Why the spikes???’ folks until I realized the spikes were communicating that I was doing something wrong, and that playing sonic isn’t just about running forward.
That sounds like a cool concept, and i will contribute to it by extending it a bit further:
tackling the games that never got a second chance, even thoug they didn’t even make me bounce off of them, I just… never got back to them, for no apparent reason. And there where quite a few of these, which i absolutely want(ed) to play!
Will assemble a nifty list that’ll include PS2/3/4,X360 and maybe even 'cube games.
This is gonna be an obvious one but it took three tries before Dark Souls clicked with me, after trying Demon’s Souls twice and bouncing off it as well.
Once Dark Souls had me, it broke my brain. Now I love these games. Help me.
i played the pc port of halo on release and thought “lol… is this it… really?” after growing up on peak id software, now i love them shits
when breath of the wild first dropped my twitter feed was full of god awful americans talking about how it’d helped them Finally Feel Joy Again, my initial impression was ‘boring, sterile ueda knock off’ but coming back to it over christmas was very pleasant
dragon’s dogma took four attempts to get into but probably doesn’t count as i always found it really charming
Maybe I’ll play Bloodborne again, that one clicked a little for me vs the other Souls games and I mainly abandoned it due to life getting in the way of playing more. I definitely need to restart, though.
God Hand is also one of the reasons that I happened upon this community (via IC) many moons ago and I cannot exactly place whether it was down to me being a Clover fan (Viewtiful Joe especially) and disagreeing hard with That Review or if there were those that influenced me seeking it out for myself. It is also something that I’ve played roughly twice a year since owning it and consider it breathlessly one of my favourite things of all time…despite not being terribly good at it.
Last year I made an effort to apply more juggles as opposed to sweeping and found combat much more digestible, not to mention less stressful. In the intervening years games like Nioh and Sekiro have made systems reliant on being as offensive as possible to break your enemy’s nerve, which is also a mindset that think is helpful. Once you do find this aggression you will be forcing the AI into much more predictable patterns that are easy to recognise and counter.
As for which moveset to run with this is very much down to personal choice, but I would advise making your bread & butter combo string as efficient as possible with as few gaps between each move, which is both essentially for feeling out the enemy and making best use of going full GOD HAND (tension meter). The starter moveset is actually very competent and can be upgraded across the game, but there are vastly superior options that should always be tested and can be played around with in the Arena area.
Random Hot Tips:
Only buy the most damaging Roulette moves (of course!)
Prioritise buying health/meter/orb upgrades over moves
Playing on Normal should help you cheer or laugh at yourself when levels go up and down, which is something I miss when just playing on Hard
The secret challenge/s give better rewards depending on level
Check out the Fighting Arena after each stage. Good for practice and money
Also like the Souls series it helps to PREPARE TO LAUGH more than it does GET PUMMELLED, because the pummelling will happen.
Okay, I started God Hand today but before that I figured I should include my actual list of games that I held off posting earlier as they are generally all loved (except for one that is… divisive) and I didn’t want to start off with people marveling at my awful taste in games:
Killer 7
Deus Ex
God Hand
Gradius V
Shenmue
Bayonetta 2
The last one is a bit different as I never played it but I played the original and beat it. I thought it was alright but grew bored of it about 75% of the way through, then Platinum got chosen to be the team that got to make several of my dream games in a row and made them all like Bayonetta, a game I had my fill of and really did not want any more of. Over a decade this resulted in me going “I hate Platinum and never want to play any of their games”…but I had to try Nier: Automata and they were unobjectionable there (mainly because the game is easy as hell on normal), plus a digital copy of Bayonetta 2 game with my Wii U, so I’ll try this one instead of revisiting the original. My grudge with them goes back a decade, so I say it counts!
Anyways, God Hand. Good break #1 is that I thought to check the game at beforeiplay.com and it had a pretty large entry with several tips that seemed useful. I also checked out a youtube tutorial vid by someone who has spent way too much time with the game. The number one benefit I got from this (aside from everyone saying “press the right stick forward to duck all the time until you know what you are actually doing”) is that I shuffled my attacks around and moved the guard break onto just X. Now I when I spam my combo I just have to press a single button on react when they start to cover up. That may fall under noob tactics but it made things much more manageable for me. I finished the opening section on my third attempt, something I’ve only done once previously.
Good break #2 is that I messed around in the casino and moved from 2000G to 2800G. My hope is that I won’t have to spend too much time in the casino, but I’ve been warned by several people that it might be a necessary evil.
Biggest worry is the camera which is still a disaster. As far as I can tell the only way to deal with it when people are close to you but not in front of you is to run away, hit the 180 degree turn button and hope they weren’t following too closely on your tail which is… inelegant. Sometimes backflipping repeatedly can help but that seems to result in me eating damage more often than I am comfortable with. I worry what will happen when I start dealing with more aggressive enemies that do bigger damage as I have had period during most group fights where I have to disengage just to try and get a better view of things which is often when I end up taking the most damage.
Still this is the best any attempt of mine has gone so far, so I will consider today an overall success!
It was like 14 years ago at this point, but my D&D group spent basically an entire night just messing around with the chihuahua races in God Hand. Despite how much fun we had with it at the time, the only thing I can remember now is that Lucky Clover felt like it won more often than it lost, but only if you hadn’t put a huge bet on it. We were not rigorous in testing this hypothesis.
Yeah Bloodborne. I wanna like it. It’s kind of what I imagine a new 3D Igavania to be like. One that actually looks as good as the 2D games. Breathtaking gothic cathedrals filled with Lovecraftian abominations. It’s also light on stats and somewhat closer to a Metroid but with enemies guarding progress instead of doors. Good gosh do I miss my automap though.
Okay I’m not gonna put up daily updates as to my progress with the game as I’m not that interesting (on to the Games you Played today topic~), but I put a bit more time into God Hand today and I think due to having a bit more fluency with the genre now than I did back then I am finding it to be a good bit more approachable this go around. I’m not even close to good at it (although compared to my earlier attempts only dying twice each in the first two areas makes me seem like an expert), but I can at least read the situations better now and formulate basic plans. I am downright awful at remembering that I can dodge forward to duck and I think the only time I have done a sweep was by accident (I don’t even recall what I set it to), and I feel that anyone who knows how to play the game who happened to view me constantly running away to press the 180 degree turn button would want to yell at me… but I don’t hate it, and at least early on it doesn’t appear to scare me. I consider those to be two notable early victories.
Also I played some video poker and got a full house on my third hand, so I can go buy an upgrade now!
…The fanbase is so split on whether I should buy sushi
So I finished up God Hand earlier today and I did not hate it, so this project starts off with what I can only consider to be a success! I don’t like the game as much as some of you seem to, but I’d say it is alright overall. Even at the end I still wish for a better camera or radar (the most recent God of War had systems in place for these that likely would fit well here) and dealing with multiple enemies at the same time was a problem I don’t think I ever completely cracked, but I do think that the almost explicit guard break/juggle/launcher distinctions or set ups made it more moment to moment tactically interesting than I ever found the various Platinum-style 3d brawlers.
I am pretty sure I played it wrong as I never did quite get a grasp on the towards dodge and I used the square combo a ton, but the difficulty for the most part wasn’t that rough aside from the start of stage 8 and some of the arena challenges. It has a horrific early wall to get past as it basically kicks you in the teeth as hard as possible until you grasp a few combat concepts it doesn’t really seem to teach itself all that well, but once it is finally scaled it is tricky but relatively approachable.
Anyways since I always had trouble finding tips for the game that actually helped me in previous years, let me toss out some that I think are good to know:
The first mechanism to focus on figuring out is the guard break. I spent the first stage or two basically square comboing everyone until they blocked, then guard breaking them and following up with a high damage attack. It mostly worked! I started with the guard block on its own button, but soon switched it to down+square so I could jump to it mid-combo just by pressing down.
Learning how to rattle off the heel drop and the default triangle juggle/launcher follow-ups is the next thing to worry about as it stays useful throughout the game and gets you familiar with the whole juggle/launcher system in place.
Feel free to run away from fights whenever the camera isn’t right and you aren’t sure how to quickly fix it. The 180 degree quick turn button is an early crutch to lean on, so do so.
Everyone says not to backflip and just learn to use the towards “duck” dodge. I say nuts to that, if you react quick enough with the backflips you will avoid most combos and attacks enemies throw your way. Slowly add in the duck and sidesteps as you get more familiar.
Activate your god hand powers whenever you have enough meter and you feel like it could help; save your roulette orbs for bosses or other big battles. The meter is easy enough to refill, the roulette orbs often less so.
Don’t miss the Yes Man Kablaam, learn how to use it (i.e. cancel out of the cooldown with a dodge), combine it with the chain yanker roulette move (don’t miss it in stage 2) to get in two free hits before you land the successful follow-up, never use another roulette move aside from that until the final boss.
Eventually attacks that avoid high become available to purchase. Some of them aren’t great but a few of them hit quick, and that makes them among the most valuable attacks in the game. It outright breaks certain enemies and is probably the one thing I’d call a must-have.
I never figured out the proper way to set up my square combo, so I just built it around a quick first strike with good reach and then nothing but quicker multi-hit attacks. I don’t know if it was good or bad but seemed to work well enough, it felt like it dizzied enemies sooner but who knows.
I ended up with about 500k worth of money I never used so you don’t have to spend as much time in the casino as I did. That said at the very least early on it can help raise funds, and the best way to do so quickly is to play video poker and choose to try high/low every time you win a hand. At worst your odds in a high/low are 50-50, so you will end up winning both high/lows and quadrupling your winnings fairly frequently. If you start with a bad run just reload a save, but even with 300 starting bets I had multiple times where I’d be up 10k within a few minutes.
That’s about it. I don’t know when I’ll get to another one of these games from my list or which would be next, but I’ll bump this when I do.
I had nothing else to do today so I started up Shenmue.
Shenmue is a different case than God Hand in that while I hated God Hand the first few times I trued it, with Shenmue I was given a burnt copy of it for the Dreamcast by a friend when I bought a used one off of him. I put it in, played for 45 minutes mainly just looking through drawers, had to go do something else right when I had to go into the actual town and… just never picked it back up. A couple times I was close to doing so but I had this notion that I’d just end up having to go looking through so many more drawers and it just sucked any actual desire to do so out of me.
Still I know people have genuine affection for the game and it likely isn’t just about looking through drawers, so here we go it is 2020 second chance game #2!
I put about an hour or so in (finished up the first day) and my initial impression is that years worth of warnings wasn’t enough to adequately prepare me for the quality of the voice work. After the initial cinematic I had to go change the voices into japanese simply because I could no longer understand it and hence it bothered me less, but for as much money as they spent on this game they should have spent more on recording the lines in a better studio.
I like how the first time you talk to someone they tell you who you should probably talk to, and if you talk to them a second time they add in a detail as to where they are located without it being an obvious gamey “go here!” thing. Telling you about the stores nearby, or how you likely don’t see them much because they live on the opposite side of town than, it is a bit more vague but it makes the town feel more lived in if that makes any sense.
That’s about it, next time I play I have to go check out a chinese restaurant and apparently at some point I’ll have to fight some people, I hope it isn’t too rough as I don’t think there is a way to set the game to easy which is what I’d normally do in a game like this. Also apparently it is possible to take too long figuring stuff out and hit a legit bad end that requires restarting, so hopefully the time constraints aren’t too strict.
