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Post by TG Barighm on Apr 12, 2021 18:50:39 GMT -5
Dark Souls 2 down! Some of those DLC bosses were no fun with a low level build. On to Dark Souls 3!
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Post by TG Barighm on Apr 29, 2021 17:56:22 GMT -5
As expected, Dark Souls 3 going much easier, although a couple bosses slowed me down. That said, as easy as DS3 is, it's home to some of the hardest bosses in the franchise and I'm already having issues with dealing damage.
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Post by TG Barighm on May 8, 2021 18:36:26 GMT -5
Got to Bloodborne in my little playthrough of the franchise (heh, little; took me the entire month). Got through it pretty quickly. Happy to discover many of the weapons can be collected without fighting tough bosses.
LOST PLANET 2: My issue with this franchise has always been the funky control scheme and bizarre design decisions. That hasn't changed for LP2. Why do I need to switch to a gun that fires special energy just to open a chest? Why can't I just kick it open? And why does picking up a grenade cause me to drop whatever weapon I'm holding? And, for the love of god, why does the VERY FIRST ENEMY IN THE GAME knock off 90% of my health in one hit? Even intro enemies in Souls games don't do that much damage. Anyway, gave the game an hour, but I was constantly battling the controls and referencing the guide to see I was doing wrong. The game is just not intuitive. Not one bit. Gave up on it.
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Post by TG Barighm on May 16, 2021 4:24:34 GMT -5
TORCHLIGHT: Now THIS game is intuitive and it's no wonder it's considered a classic. It will never match the likes of Dark Alliance or Norrath, and I wouldn't call it particularly exceptional aside from the way it handles pets, but it's very easy to jump into and just play without worrying too much about anything else.
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Post by TG Barighm on May 18, 2021 3:32:52 GMT -5
ARMORED CORE-VERDICT DAY: Another game that just isn't intuitive. You need to go through a whole bunch of screens, entering all sorts of info, before you can even start the game. The aiming cursor, while not as necessary as other shooters, does this weird thing where it "jumps" from the left and right hemisphere of the screen. It doesn't just smoothly follow the right stick like in most games, or former AC games. There are also some weird design decisions like having THREE BUTTONS dedicated to boosting which is bizarre. It's cool being able to constantly boost around the screen, but THREE buttons? And the whole "scan" system is funky. I get switching to scan mode to scan stuff, but throwing a recon drone that also, uh, scans stuff? And what exactly is the benefit of scanning? Even when I hit the button on enemies, nothing happens, not to mention the option to switch weapons sometimes just doesn't work for no reason I can discern. Oh, and there's some MAJOR tiny text going on. It would probably be too hard to read even on a widescreen TV
Now, I liked Armored Core back in the day, and I sure miss my big ass robot action games. There just aren't that many around these days. The closest I get is Titanfall and Earth Defense Force, but Titans aren't as much of the focus as they should be, and vehicles handle horribly in EDF.
As for Torchlight it's quickly becoming the best game I've played this year. It may not play quite as well as DA or Norrath, but it has some great ideas like transforming pets, spells you can pickup and learn, not just the spells assigned to your class, and the ability to teach your pet those same spells.
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Post by TG Barighm on May 27, 2021 4:16:26 GMT -5
DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS 2: Basically Minecraft with a heavy dose of Dragon Quest themed questing. I hear Minecraft also has a similar full scale RPG variant, too. Anyway, just like the first game, there is SO much busiwork. You pretty much have to do everything for everyone, including feeding them and designing their own rooms. I do like the idea of RPG mechanics being applied to building stuff, but not to the extent that it becomes an endless series of chores.
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Post by acathala on May 27, 2021 19:34:57 GMT -5
Yes but some people like that busy work though. Didn't bother much with settlement building in my last play through of fallout 4. Just built a bunch of water purifiers, as clean water was easy caps.
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Post by TG Barighm on May 27, 2021 23:11:43 GMT -5
Oh, no. This isn't like Fallout 4 or Terraria where you only have to meet certain conditions and things like food are determined by scores or by having certain people on hand. In DQB2, it's not enough to build houses and farms. You have to baby the town's residents, right down to literally putting the food in their plates for them.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 13, 2021 2:50:02 GMT -5
MANEATER: Be a shark! With ELECTRIC JAWS!
More specifically, this is an ARPG with the gameplay loop of a collectathon MMO: you get out into the wild, fight nasty creatures, find treasure, and all of it adds experience which you can use to buy mutations. The mutations are mostly basic, but you get weird things like throwing stuff and the aforementioned electric bite. The game is at its best when you're tearing into a beach filled with panic swimmers and snatching people off boardwalks or boats, but the vast majority of the gameplay is pretty shallow (pun unintended). Then again, I guess there really isn't much to a shark's life besides finding food and getting stronger.
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Post by acathala on Jun 13, 2021 16:12:37 GMT -5
I was actually considering getting that.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 13, 2021 16:53:52 GMT -5
I say it's worth it. It's a special game, mainly because there aren't exactly many games out there that allow you to go on a murder spree with a superhum...er, superheroic shark. I wouldn't pay more than $20 for it, though.
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Post by acathala on Jun 13, 2021 17:12:29 GMT -5
It's about £18 over here.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 14, 2021 3:13:54 GMT -5
DESTROY ALL HUMANS: Plays a lot like Ratchet & Clank, except this is one of those games that gets in the way of its own fun. Is running around blowing up stuff and pscyhokinetically launching people into pools and melting buildings with a death ray fun? Oh, absolutely. Now evade 20 missiles while chasing down ice cream trucks. Not fun. Is probing people, assuming their identity, and psychically forcing cops to do the chicken dance fun? Immensely. New sneak into a pool party, but if you are seen by anyone, who have the ability to see through your holographic disguise, restart the mission. Not fun. In many ways, the game is at its best when you're free to just run around in exploration mode. The actual campaign missions aren't much fun, and they get frustrating very quickly. I'm also surprised a game about wanton destruction has so many stealth missions. You have a lot of options for stealth, but still. My biggest problem with the game was the finicky lock-on. For the most part, it's fine, but when you absolutely need to target a key mission item or grab a certain explosive barrel to take out groups of soldiers, it rarely targets what you want and you can fail missions simply because you weren't standing in the "right spot" to use said objective object. The ship is also a pain to use. Its controls are awfully clumsy which is too bad because strafing cities with rays of fiery death that leave towering walls of fire in their wake (which ignite anyone who runs into it) is great fun. Good luck focusing on a specific target though.
I'm also surprised to discover I was just a couple hours short of finishing the game, so it's only like 5 hours long. I may be a little tough here given my backlog is so big I will look for any reason to drop a game. Popping the brains out of entire groups of people in a single shot is frickin' hilarious.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 14, 2021 21:18:29 GMT -5
Hellpoint is on sale for $20.
ME: Should I buy it? I can just return it, but I hear it has nasty performance issues on PS4. But that doesn't matter. I'm just trying it, right? Doesn't matter how poorly it performs if I'm just seeing how it plays, but then I don't really get the feel for the game if I'm playing the worst version of it. But it's so cheap...I can't decide!
GOG: We're offering you a free game! HELLPOINT!
ME: BWA HA HA HA HA!
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Post by acathala on Jun 18, 2021 17:55:13 GMT -5
Apparently the next fallout is in London.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 18, 2021 18:16:05 GMT -5
That's a mod.
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Post by acathala on Jun 18, 2021 22:24:30 GMT -5
Is it? I had assumed because it was advertised on YouTube it was official. Dear me.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 19, 2021 16:35:26 GMT -5
I've known some 3D animators. They're a proud bunch. They want everyone to know about their work, and advertising a mod is a big part of that. But a lot of these mods are as deep as some professional expansions, so I can't really blame them. New Republic in particular hired professional voice actors and it's a surprisingly hefty mod. Might as well be a whole game nevermind an expansion. I haven't played it yet, but I'm capable of doing so since I have the GoG version of New Vegas.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 23, 2021 1:18:43 GMT -5
Reading more about that Fallout London mod, it can easily serve as a new game. Since none of the American actors have any presence in London, there will be entirely new factions, new weapons, new mechanics, and a host of new creatures. Interesting, for sure, but that does mean the team will have to create a whole bunch of brand new creatures. That will take some time.
BIOMUTANT: This is one of those games that SHOULD be much better than it actually is. It's a rather competent ARPG, with a host of abilities to learn, whether they be from leveling or unlocking them by completing quests, lots of gear to find, modify, and craft, tons of different ways to build your character, a nicely sized world map to explore, and some pretty nice graphics. But there are so many questionable design decisions. Combat is nice, but janky. The graphics are pretty, but framerate drops are common and there is all sorts of funk. The narrator is a decent idea at first since none of these animals can really talk, but then he DOESN'T SHUT THE FUCK UP. All of the different things you can do are great, but the game won't let you learn anything, instead constantly holding your hand with so many endless tutorials (which mess up a lot of the cutscenes). And the cutscene direction is odd. Instead of just letting the characters talk, it frequently warps you around or zooms in on every creature no matter who they are. Many games handled this much better so it's a wonder this dev allowed this. And the writing is...poor. And I don't mean continuity errors, but actual grammar and syntax errors which comes off even weirder when the narrator reads the error. The game is also awfully preachy, like annoyingly so, and I've even encountered actual programming code in the text. Yeesh. This isn't to say the game is bad, and it has actually improved a lot in just one patch, but still...it's really unfortunate to see what was an otherwise solid ARPG with pretty good depth crippled by sloppy design.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jun 29, 2021 1:06:16 GMT -5
MORTAL SHELL: A soul-like that does well in the graphics and atmosphere department, but kind of messes up in the intuitiveness department. It's one thing to be obscure about the lore, but it's another thing to be obscure with game mechanics. There is no good excuse to not explain game mechanics. There is also this weird delay on every action you do, so often times fights feel less like I'm playing the game and more like I'm trying to play around the game's mechanics. This little hitch is enough to really throw timing off in nearly every fight. Even Souls games are certain to make sure combat is responsive.
**So after spending more time with the game, it really eases up after you find other classes and weapons. Turns out the starting class you get is...well, terrible. Just frickin' terrible. As soon as you get one of the other classes, things ease up considerably and you can access weapon abilities and skills that are actually useful. The stealthy class, for instance, is agile and that little hitch greatly diminishes when playing him. The tank is still slow, but he has so much HP and trip resistance it doesn't matter much. The scholar is useful across the board and greatly empowers items. I don't know why the dev elected to start the player with a class that plays so poorly it makes the game feel worse than it actually is.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jul 11, 2021 3:19:36 GMT -5
ASHA IN WONDER WORLD: So now there is a PS4 version of the game. I just played the original not too long ago if you remember, and I found it a little too simplistic. But, hey, the new Wonder Boy games are apparently very good. Maybe this one will be.
Well...I don't think it was made by the same people behind the Wonder Boy remakes. This game is, quite simply, the same as the original game with better graphics and a save anywhere system, so everything I disliked about the original is true about this one. The new art is very charming though. Shame it's being used to cover up such basic animation. A game with this level of artistic quality with an equal level of animation quality would be gorgeous.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jul 15, 2021 2:54:10 GMT -5
OCTOPATH TRAVELER: An old school JRPG with some new school mechanics. I was expecting this to play more like Saga Frontier, but it's more traditional than that. It actually uses more FF13 mechanics where you need to stagger enemies in some way to deal damage, although it's not nearly as obnoxious. There's jobs to pick up, too, and there is quite a bit of strategy in how you go about recruiting characters and completing their quest lines. The game really makes it a point for you to explore dungeons and look for loot. Can't say how deep the story is yet. There's some better writing but it's mostly pretty cliche so far.
Very long game though. This would be a much easier game to recommend if it weren't restricted to GamePass and Nintendo consoles.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jul 16, 2021 2:11:23 GMT -5
GOING UNDER: Why do all RPGs have to be rogue-likes, now? This game had a perfectly cool concept by being so bright and colourful and being a blatant knock on corporate culture, but, oh no, has to be a rogue-like. More of the usual losing all progress at every death and never getting anywhere. Couple that with wonky weapons, which seemed fun at first in a Dead Rising sort of way but end up being wildly inconsistent, and unreliable dodge rolls...meh, phooey. I just don't like rogue-likes.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jul 24, 2021 0:12:54 GMT -5
SCARLET NEXUS: Remember when RPGs had fully animated cutscenes and dungeons with actual depth? Seems like ancient history. I haven't really played much of this game yet, but so far I'm getting a lot of ho-hum action, generic anime characters, and a lot of boring dialogue. Still early, and the game could easily make up for it later as combat complexity improves, but games like Ys have spoiled me a bit, so I expect high octane ARPGs to be fluid and responsive. Scarlet Nexus isn't bad, but I'm not all that impressed so far. Frankly, the good reviews are making me worry there is a ton of woke crap around the corner...
**Okay, so the combat complexity increased greatly in the next few hours as they started adding special environment objects and new characters with their own fighting styles and abilities that can buff you with special attacks. I'm still not too fond of the generic arena dungeons or the high school anime dialogue where all anyone seems to care about is dating, but the gameplay is definitely improving.
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Post by TG Barighm on Jul 28, 2021 2:29:06 GMT -5
BUG FABLES: Cutesy RPG highly reminiscent of Paper Mario, although reviews suggest it's a bit simpler. Very well rated, though. Seemed a little bit too simplistic to me.
CRIS TALES: Another PC retro RPG with a fun art style. This game utilizes an interesting mechanic where, using time magic, you can send enemies into the past or future, or even their equipment or surrounding environment, to give you a leg up in combat. A lot of people complain the game is very tedious though, and I did notice a lot of short load screens. A lot of the early quest was just constantly running back and forth to NPCs.
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Post by TG Barighm on Aug 2, 2021 3:11:46 GMT -5
THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU NEO: This is NOT remaster, but a sequel. It actually has a different name in Japan. So far it's your pretty typical JRPG and I'm not sure why it's so well lauded. It does play more smoothly than Scarlet Nexus, although just running around town doing obvious MMO style quests, which the game doesn't even try to hide and the characters will often remark on it, is hardly amazing. Combat feels a lot like Tales of Bersaria where it's awfully button mashy and I'm not too sure what's going on most of the time. Plus the characters where face masks. Kind of prefer not to be reminded of how shitty the world has become. The game is also pushing some heavy metal culture, which is an automatic "nope" for me. It's not a bad game, but I'm not seeing what's so great about it.
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Post by TG Barighm on Aug 4, 2021 3:18:03 GMT -5
THE ASCENT: Twin-stick shooter masquerading as an RPG. It actually looks pretty cool, better than Cyberpunk in some ways, but it's loaded with little flaws that add up to major issues. Might be cool after a year or so of polish.
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Post by TG Barighm on Aug 6, 2021 1:34:29 GMT -5
SPLITGATE: Halo with Portal warping mechanics. No, really. I'm not just saying that. Everything about the look of the game and the feel of the guns is distinctly Halo right down to the gun and armour designs. The only thing the game is missing is the grenades and the vehicles. This is actually a good thing mind.
OGRE BATTLE: I've NEVER actually beaten this. Owned it for years. Played through it a bunch of times. Tried lots of things. Kind of a tinkerer's dream. But never actually beat it. It's time to end this injustice! ...well, before the disc dies from disc rot.
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Post by acathala on Aug 6, 2021 21:05:02 GMT -5
Ogre's battle. I have finished this. If memory serves, there's two endings for this, depending on a fork in the story you take. I enjoyed this one immensely.
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Post by TG Barighm on Aug 6, 2021 21:57:46 GMT -5
You might be thinking of Tactics Ogre which does have branching paths in the story (more than two, actually). Ogre Battle doesn't really have a story, just a series of battles, some of which can be optional. There are dozens of endings for that game.
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