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April 24, 2024, 03:43:03 PM

we're back, baby

I agree that Prime 2 is a slog. There are some well-designed areas, but overall it has a more is more philosophy, while the first Metroid Prime had just the right level of complexity. Prime 3 is better, but it has a slightly heavier focus of narrative, which works against the fundamental appeal of a Metroid game. Other M of course has the same problem and moreso, although I like it better than the consensus because it has a lot of really interesting movement/item finding puzzles within individual rooms.

It's my birthday and I was going to splurge on a $60 game, but I literally can't see anything I want. Dying Light is the only thing remotely interesting right now. Not even sure it would be worth it.

Dragonball XenoVerse awesome, for real

I got the Civ IV complete pack because I never played Civ IV.3 and 5, yes, but just somehow missed 4.

I don't expect a different experience, but I'm feeling a bit nostalgic with Nimoy dying.

Automatically taking damage over time is usually not fun, especially in games about exploration, since that naturally encourages a more conservative approach. It really works against what should be the appeal of the game.

I lived Prime 1 but I put 2 down after playing it for a bit.

Finishing off Risen 2, then onto Risen 3.

Baldur's Gate EE 1 and 2, with mods, Iron Man. 4 attempts, 4 deaths so far. Trying to do it before PoE comes out.

I started playing Kingdoms of Amular which I think I bought on a Steam sale in Winter.

I played a bit of Amalur last year and was bored to tears. I only gave it a couple hours, but it really failed to pull me in at all.

I'm playing The Order (PS4) and it's really not shit if you like those cinematic games with cover shooting. Uncharted? It feels a lot like Resident Evil after 4, but of course with a cover-shooter mechanic so it plays somewhat differently. If you don't like games like that, you won't like this, but if you've played most of them then you'll likely notice the detail that went into this one. Death scenes are nice, atmosphere is consistent, animations are excellent. Story is somewhat hard to follow but it's a mystery in Britain so hey (Yankee tip: turn on subtitles). I personally like to see that a dev team worked hard on a game, and I can see that in the craft on this one... at least, so far.

Otherwise I'm playing Skyrim with all of the DLC (360), and somehow have gotten hooked into Final Fantasy V (Vita) which I have never played before.

The nice thing about The Order is that you can't decide whether you like it or hate it before you've completed it.

Because it's five hours long.

lol

I'm now at the Chykka fight in Prime 2 and this is probably where I'll stop playing. This fight probably includes most of the annoying boss fight gimmicks one could think of. It basically reads like a "ways to make your boss fight as annoying as possible" buzzfeed blurb and gets most of the hardcore fans to dismiss any criticism of it with "just get gud".

- Multiple phases. No save points between phases.
- first phase is boring and completely without challenge but takes fucking forever. (10 minutes or more depending on RNG)
- Forced damage over time because of it being a dark world fight.
- The floor is made of poisonous water and you'll take lots of damage when you touch it.
- You only have a small platform to stand on so your maneuverability and move set is fucked.
- Platform breaks up into even smaller ones at the beginning of phase 2 so even less maneuverability.
- Boss's abilities in Phase 2 and 3 are designed to knock you off of the tiny platforms.
- MP is first person so you never know exactly where you are/are going to land anyway.
- Platforms sink into the poisonous water if you stand on them for too long.
- Moving from a platform to another one only via grappling hook.
- grappling hook activation uses the same button as "lock on targeting". Which is really fucking annoying for this fight.
- Game breaks core game mechanics (lock on aiming with "homing" shots and missiles) to make the fight more challenging so you'll have to aim manually (this being a GC title there's a reason why this is a core game mechanic).
- still need lock on targeting for strafing and certain moves though.
- Gratuitous beam switching and you need to recover light and dark beam ammo during phases because boss is only really vulnerable to those.
- You'll also have to constantly switch platforms to get behind the boss because the only real damage he takes in phase 2 is from the back.
- you'll also have to scan the boss 5 times during phases if you want to 100% the game.
- Boss is a bullet sponge
- RNG will screw you over.
- unskippable cut scenes before the fight and at the start of each phase

The only thing that could make it more annoying was if it were on an enrage timer. At least there's a save station directly at the boss fight arena.

Even with all of that bullshit the boss is not that challenging. I've managed to nearly kill him on the third try on veteran difficulty. These three attempts took nearly two hours ( phase 1 alone can be more than ten if you have bad RNG). Since MP2 is gating upgrades more heavily than Prime 1 you can't even cheese the fight by going upgrade hunting. You only get e.g. the power bomb way after this fight, so a lot of upgrades are unattainable at this moment that could make this fight easier. Retro also removed all sequence breaks from the Trilogy re-release so you can't even cheat.

I can't see myself spending 45 minutes per attempt going through all of this bullshit to eventually beat him. It's not hard or even challenging, it's just a smorgasbord of annoying boss fight mechanics and takes a long time.

They also removed one of the "core" design ideas from Metroid. Namely that it is intended for you to cheese any fight if you know how. Nothing in Metroid is more satisfying than fighting bosses 'the intended way' for a long time and then suddenly stumbling upon the one thing that makes the fight short and easy.

This has been a "staple" of Metroid since the beginning and there is that one intended thing in almost every boss fight in the Metroid series that will make the fight essentially easy mode. The Draygon fight in Super Metroid for example where you can fight him traditionally or you can simply destroy the wall cannons firing at you and electrocute him with your grappling hook once he grabs you. Riley being extremely vulnerable to charged plasma shots in Super Metroid would be another.

In Prime 2 there's just 'the intended way' for you to fight bosses and even worse you'll only get to that point if you scan bosses. Some of the 'key' vulnerabilities need to be unlocked by scanning and won't be there otherwise.

Probably moving on to corruption next.

Quote from: schild on February 28, 2015, 11:18:30 PM

The nice thing about The Order is that you can't decide whether you like it or hate it before you've completed it.

Because it's five hours long.

lol

That was one of the things the Forbes article hit on while roasting the developers ham-fisted response to the length. It's $60 for 5 hours. Even in the debates of how much is enough per dollar for gaming entertainment, I think we can all agree that's not enough when it comes with no multiplayer.

I watched a streamer play through The Order and the fact that more of that 5 hours seems to be cutscenes than gameplay is also a pretty big strike against it. If they wanted to make a movie, just make a movie.

Currently playing DOW:Dark Crusade (I usually play Soulstorm +mods + my own maps in skirmish) but fancied a SP campaign and DC is much better.

Sins of the Solar Empire - Sacrifice of Angels 2 - been playing this a while now, its an excellent mod. The only problem is if i play anyone other than Borg i cant put them in as an AI as they seem to be unbeatable. Current game is a Federation game, with a small tear in my eye for Spock.

Im just about to restart Fallout NV in the hope of completing it this time, ive been finding mods n stuff this weekend.

Gratituous Space Battles 2 - now on pre-order/early access. Good ol Cliffski, this is a great formula. I really like the visual ship editor and have been making 40k ships.

Elite Dangerous - i really must get past the tutorial.

World in Conflict - I had an urge for 80s nostalgia so started playing this (and the excellent soviet expansion) the other day. Its aged pretty well, mainly due to excellent particles/explosions from the gazillion arty/airstrike options.

Monster Hunter is fun and simultaneously infuriating. The monster AI is literally set at "complete fucking asshole" and only goes up from there. Monsters WILL stop whatever they're doing in multiplayer and beeline straight for you if you're stunned or poisoned or low on health and whatever you're hiding behind is always destructible.

Been chewing through my Steam backlog for trading cards this month. So, played a little bit of lots of different titles, including:

Jet Set Radio. Fucking awesome game, I wish they'd port the sequel. Or rather, I wish someone COMPETENT would port the sequel. This marks the second Dreamcast port that has completely shit the bed because of a typo, I had to go in with a goddamn hex editor and change an instance of "save" to "SAVE" in order for the game to load the goddamn save files. This is a problem everybody who plays the game has (as far as I can see) the fix is simple, it has not been repaired since it was released in 2012. Sega's port of Sonic Adventure had a similar problem, where game settings would not save and you had to go in to the registry and manually fix a misspelled directory. A+ Quality control, assholes. I'm waiting for Sega to blame poor sales of these games on piracy or some shit.

Messed around in Eldritch, a FPS Roguelike with an aesthetic somewhere between Minecraft and Lovecraft. Pretty decent game, though tough to run all the way through in one life. It's like a survival horror game in that you're pretty resource starved and can die very easily, but the graphics are super primitive which kind of robs it of a lot of the real "horror" aspect for me anyway. I don't know if I'll be able to beat the whole thing in one run, the weeping angel statues in Nyarlathotep's area always wreck me.

Played through The Hive, which is in Early Access... VERY early access. As in, can be beaten in forty-five minutes early access. It's a pretty generic RTS right now. The author has some nice sounding ideas and seems pretty communicative and involved in the community, but at the moment it's just two maps featuring three buildings (town hall, barracks, generic resource collection building), and four units (worker, ranged unit, melee unit, support unit). Lots of rough edges at the moment. Cards went for like a buck a piece, though, which was neat.

Guild Commander is also pretty short, a game about managing a guild of heroes in a fantasy world. You send them out and they wander around and send back a portion of their earnings to pay for upkeep on your building. It's kind of tricky figuring out how to keep your income positive and prevent the regions from being destroyed, but once you get the basics down the rest is pretty straightforward. Took me like four hours to beat.

Ran through a bit of "Team Indie," a 2D puzzle platformer which brings together a bunch of indie characters (which are just like famous licensed characters, except you don't know who they are) Smash Bros. style. Cool idea in concept, execution feels jank. Riddled with bugs, very unpolished controls, etc. Considering most of these characters are from 2D platformers originally anyways, it mostly just made me want to replay the originals.

ARES Extinction Agenda released some EX version which I apparently bought at some point, though I don't know why since I didn't like the original ARES. It's another 2D plaftormer, which aims at Megaman but doesn't feel nearly as deliberate. Still doesn't recognize my controller, so uses keyboard for movement and mouse for aiming, with dash on the right mouse button for some reason. It does make some improvements over the original, especially when it comes to the crafting and upgrade system, but it's not really a huge upgrade from the original.

Frederic: Resurrection of Music is a neat little rhythm game about Frederic Chopin coming back from the grave and battling against the evil of corporate music. It's super goofy but the music is pretty decent (mostly remixes of Chopin's classical stuff in modern styles matching the stage he's in) and I thought it was pretty fun. Took three hours to beat.

Power Up is a side scrolling shooter. It's pretty boring. You move around and shoot stuff, I don't remember why I bought it. It's not like it's horrible, but there's nothing really interesting to it. The story is some of the most tepid drek I've seen in a while, but who cares.

Amazing Princess Sarah is another 2D platformer, about a princess rescuing her dad from an evil succubus. I'm not sure about the graphics, it seems like it kind of wants to be cheesecake fanservice given that the female characters all have these super jiggly boobs that look like they have more animation than the rest of the game combined, but they're drawn with the old SNES Final Fantasy character proportions, so they're about as erotic as a Treasure Troll. And aside from that, the rest of the game is played totally straight, just a by the books dungeon crawl with skeletons and zombies and so on. Sarah's gimmick is that she can pick up absurdly heavy things and throw them at her opponents, Super Mario 2 stye, but the list of things she can pick up includes her defeated opponent's corpses which have weird properties which makes things at least a bit interesting. Not really a huge fan of the game otherwise, since it seems to really love being as irritating as goddamn possible, putting archers (which can shoot through walls) on the other side of walls so you just have to dodge their shots constantly, or really stupidly long platforming sections with infintely respwaning bats coming in from the sides of the screen, or moving platforms over hugely long beds of spikes that don't kill you instantly, but take away five HP every second, forcing you to walk back through the whole thing going "ouch! ouch! ouch!" the whole way if you miss a jump... Though apparently it was not too difficult given that I beat the whole thing in like two hours, it was a frustrating two hours.

I finally plugged in Minecraft and tried it -- my nephew was dying to play it, and we had a PS4 copy, so why not.

It was very difficult to turn the controller over to him after I figured out the basics and taught it to him.

Now try it on a PC with mods. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

I'm playing Diablo III (MOAR NAO!), Hearthstone and AC: Black Flag.

DIII is fun because I understand it, it's little ecosystem of gems, artisans, plans, lore. Such a tidy package of entertainment. The combat is fun and the phat lewt (does anyone say that anymore?) is well tuned and desirable.

HS is fun because I have a RL friend who is at my skill level, we play for hours. Plus I finally got 1600 dust and crafted Ragnaros!

I'm a bit on the fence on AC. I love the ship battles and I'm getting good at parkour, but it would be better with a controller and the land stuff is not that sticky. I will say a standout is the facial animations and voice acting. Very impressed.

Quote from: Merusk on March 01, 2015, 07:40:40 PM

Now try it on a PC with mods. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Haha, yeah, dangerous advice. I've been playing modded Minecraft, and nothing else, for I don't know how many months now, must be coming up for 6. awesome, for real

Quote from: Malakili on March 01, 2015, 09:42:08 AM

You can't charge $60 for a movie.

But you can problably get a lot more people to shell out $10 at theaters world wide.

Kind of makes me wonder if they'll ever get to the point of some game companies just doing actual movies, using game engines. Graphics are getting impressive enough I'm sure a company with the funds could make a legitimatly good machinima movie that gets widely released. Probably still way off though.

He said a GOOD movie. why so serious?

Movie wasn't THAT awful. Creepy uncanny-valley characters and completely lost the plot towards the end but I've seen worse.

Last of Us would have been a much better movie than a game IMO.

Should have linked Advent Children instead of Spirits Within; if they had dropped the Final Fantasy moniker from the latter it would have been more palatable to hardcore fanbois.

Points made about The Order are not off-base, but taking a step back it's not bad considering the type of product it is. I mean when you compare it to other "why don't they just make a movie" games. If you don't like the WDTJMAM (new term, mine! #camelcho) then you won't like this one. It is technically solid, though, and even the cover-shooting was better than several I have played. The game ends before the story does, however, at the point in a movie where you defeat the midboss and get ready to take on the head mobster. I assume The Order: 1887 will be out sooner or later so I can find out what happens to Victorian Batman.

Quote from: PalmTrees on October 28, 2014, 12:29:35 AM

I was about to ragequit Banner Saga after a story event caused one of the characters to lose all their levels and their equipped item, but then after the next scene the game ended. It was a righteous rage, and then they pulled the rug out from under me. Bastards got me twice. Definitely a "to be continued" ending though and pretty unsatisfying. If they had added a part one in the title I think it would've been a bit more acceptable. Game was decent overall and not too many of my refugees died of starvation. Their system of using one currency as xp and money really constricted things and, while fitting with the refugee theme, was often frustrating.

Picked this up during the Xmas sale and finally got around to playing it. Neat little game; it's not without flaws but easily worth the $5 i paid for it. The setting, art direction and the turn based combat were pretty good, but they sacrificed some of the gaminess of it to the story. Having characters you spend time and money(renown) leveling up killed to further the story outside of combat was a little frustrating, and the story itself did not do a great job informing you of the in and outs of the world. But still, worth playing to see what they attempted. I liked the effort they put into the refugee caravan feel and lots of situations where there was no apparent right answer. The way they structured it, i am not sure there is any replay value though. The story itself does not come to a good conclusion, and the larger issues remain totally unresolved so it does feel a little unsatisfying. Still if you like Norse themed stuff, worth a play though for that reason too; and what a map they put together :)

Been playing a lot of Minecraft lately with co-workers and their kids. In the midst of laying the foundation for a 1300 block long railroad, because somehow that ended up being how far the closest village was to my castle...

Endless Legends, been playing Secret War with a friend on the weekend. Occasionally staring at the icon for Dragon Age Inquisition, wondering when I'm going to go back and finish it.