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Post by dsparil on Nov 7, 2019 9:56:26 GMT -5
Luigi's Mansion 3 (Switch, First Time) While I didn't entirely hate the experience, I find myself oddly ambivalent. There's some nice parts and details, but some of the bosses are total stinkers and the controls are cumbersome. Gooigi also feels underutilized despite getting fairly frequent use. I finished in 10:36. Rating: 6 Have you played Luigi's Mansion 2? If so, how would you compare it to that one. I haven't played LM2. I think the root of all my problems really come down to controls. For whatever reason, the right stick rotates you left and right (plus up and down) instead of just sweeping in a limited arc and that caused me all sorts of problems. I guess that it is isn't a terribly unusual decision as it's basically a standard FPS set up, but it doesn't work well with a fixed third person camera. Gyro aiming is also limited to up and down only for some reason which greatly limits its utility.
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Post by dsparil on Nov 8, 2019 7:46:10 GMT -5
puzzlement (Switch, First Time)
Way back at the beginning of the year, I semi-derogatorily called Landstalker a spatial reasoning test masquerading as a game. This really is, but in the best possible way! This is a pretty simple puzzle game where you control a red circle thing and need to collect all the red squares in a level. You move around intersecting planes and which way is up frequently changes. It isn't complicated, but it's hard to describe. There's only 50 levels, but it was totally worth the $2!
Rating: 8
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Post by alexmate on Nov 9, 2019 10:27:18 GMT -5
Party Hard (PC - Steam Version) Time Taken: 14hr 28m - Timer.
Really fun game had me laughing a few times. I found it quite difficult as I was playing it more as a stealth game when I should have treated like Gauntlet. Game has been compared to Hotline Miami which isn't unfair, but it is its own thing.
Rating: 8
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Nov 10, 2019 17:16:10 GMT -5
I haven't played LM2. I think the root of all my problems really come down to controls. For whatever reason, the right stick rotates you left and right (plus up and down) instead of just sweeping in a limited arc and that caused me all sorts of problems. I guess that it is isn't a terribly unusual decision as it's basically a standard FPS set up, but it doesn't work well with a fixed third person camera. Gyro aiming is also limited to up and down only for some reason which greatly limits its utility. Hmmm...I don't remember any control peculiarities in Luigi's Mansion 2. I guess I'll see how LM3 plays when I get around to it.
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Post by dsparil on Nov 11, 2019 8:25:49 GMT -5
Takeshi & Hiroshi (iOS, First Time)
Such a sweet game! You play as Takeshi who's made a primitive RPG for his younger brother to play, but he has to manually put together the battles since he hadn't programmed much beyond the title screen! You need to make each battle winnable while also not making them too boring. You do five battles per chapter and need to reach a certain amount of Joy before the end. Hiroshi has a Stress level that starts out at -30 and goes up as his character gets attacked. Whatever his stress level is at the end of the battle gets added to the Joy meter plus a possible bonus. It starts out easy enough to get enough Joy, but it gets a lot harder at the end. For the last chapter, I basically just lucked out and got a big bonus that let me get finish the game.
Also of note is that the dialog and cutscenes are all stop motion and super cute! The story is really nice and is just about an older brother trying to make a fun game for his sickly younger brother. It's an interesting counterpoint to The Bard's Tale creator Michael Cranford's supposed belief that defeating the player meant that he "won". Highly recommended although it is exclusive to Apple Arcade.
I finished in 2:10.
Rating: 10
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Post by dsparil on Nov 12, 2019 9:51:35 GMT -5
Tokyo Dark -Remembrance- (Switch, First Time)
This is a side scrolling horror/supernatural adventure game although it's really more of a VN that makes you run around from place to place as there's only one puzzle and a tiny minigame. The plot concerns a Detective Ayami Ito investigating a botched incident where her boyfriend and fellow detective was murdered by a woman that Ito herself had killed 6 months earlier. I did like the plot overall, but I was still a little confused by the end. There's 11 endings total, but I have some issues with that that I'll get to.
Gameplay is very basic. You run around the screen and look at or interact with hotspots on the screen. There generally isn't too much and there are very few side details for atmosphere. There's technically a city map, but you have almost no control over where you actually go so there's no real element of investigation. Some situations do have multiple "solutions" but you can basically lump the options into either acting professionally or acting like a loose cannon. The plot itself is still linear though and what you do only affects your "stats". There's 4 meters for Sanity, Professionalism, Investigation and Neurosis (SPIN) although they have little actual gameplay purpose. Getting you Sanity down to -100 brings you to a "failure" ending so close to the end that it isn't really an early ending anyway. Investigation is the only one that seems to really go up as I ended with 100 in it. Neurosis and Professionalism move a little but mostly in chunks. I ended with about -50/25/100/30 in my stats.
My main issue is with how the endings are handled. Excluding one very early failure ending and the one mentioned above, the rest of them are actually just in two sets, and you more or less just pick the one you want at the end out of four or five. They can roughly be categorized as being neutral+bad and neutral+good options with the neutral options overlapping. The game makes such a big deal about your choices just to branch at the last few minutes. It's certainly based on your stats somehow, but it's probably just based on if you have positive or negative Professionalism. What's supremely annoying is that the game constantly autosaves so you can't actually go back and choose a different ending available to you! There's a NG+ that adds the ability to save so you'd have to basically repeat everything you did on a second play through just to see what should have been available to you in the first place, and you can't skip text since it isn't presented as a VN. The whole autosave thing is a terrible design decision. It'd be one thing if you choices really did matter, but it's all smoke and mirrors in reality.
I finished in 4:07:40.
Rating: 6
Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim (macOS via WINE, First Time)
I've literally waited 16 years to play this after it was first announced for PC but skipped over for English release. Never played the PS2 version either for some reason. I did generally like it from a gameplay perspective, but I did find myself very disappointed by the story which is very skimpy and basically just pops up at the very end. The story from start to finish is handled uncharacteristically poorly, and it's frequently unclear what you're supposed to do.
Gameplay was more different than OiF and Origins than I was expecting. There isn't a general MP pool and has to be recharged per sword. I found magic to basically be entirely useless until the swords where maxed out because it recharges so slowly before that point. I also find it odd that the site's article makes no mention of the extreme annoyance status effects are in this game despite complaining about poison in MotS. Poison in particular is a constant issue. I played in Catastrophe mode (and Normal difficulty) which makes it play more like OiF and Origins in that picked up healing items are used instantly and can't be bought and hypothetically makes it harder as you can't use healing items during boss battle that way. It was never an issue for me and some of the bosses were complete jokes including the final boss.
Ys Seven does seem to actually work for me but not MoC so I'll at least be able to get through all the non-remakes.
Rating: 8
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Post by Woody Alien on Nov 14, 2019 20:07:34 GMT -5
Crossing Souls (PC/Steam, first time, about 13 hours)
An action-adventure title by a Spanish team, funded on Kickstarter and heavily inspired by various media from the 80s. It's about a group of five kids from a small American town who find a mysterious artifact and go from fighting local bullies to saving the world from ghosts, a cartoonishly evil military dude and entities from Egyptian mythology. Despite its flaws I enjoyed it and was surprised at the amount of neutral or negative reviews it received (anyway I bought it during a sale). It has some great pixel art and nice music and some animated cutscenes meant to resemble cartoons from 30 years ago. In general it does a good job of being a nostalgia title even if the reference angle is a bit overplayed, for example there's a whole part of the story directly lifted from Back to the Future III that could have been removed without affecting the general story too much.
Super BOO Quest (PC/Steam, first time, about 1 hour)
An exceedingly simple arcade-style game where we play as different ghosts who have to pick up pellets in order to scare all people in single-screen stages with their powers, while avoiding every light source that can destroy us. Nice but nothing special and too bare-bones, well it costs less than $2 after all. I don't know if I want to finish it with every single character, the gameplay doesn't really change.
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Post by alexmate on Nov 16, 2019 12:39:13 GMT -5
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (PC GoG Remastered Version Time Taken: 7 Hours Guesstimate)
I was a fan of this on the N64, but I never owned the system back in the day. Graphics and atmosphere are great for the time. Gameplay is blooming tedious, collect keys from obscure places and the platforming bits. Weaponery is very creative. No doubt a classic game, but not worth playing these days.
Rating: 7
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Post by zerker on Nov 17, 2019 16:36:28 GMT -5
Finished Goragoa (Android) on the bus today. With the small amount of Mobile gaming I typically do, I've been playing this one since August . A quality puzzler, standing notably above the typical stuff on mobile. 8/10.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Nov 20, 2019 17:15:47 GMT -5
Pokémon Shield (NSW, 1st time, 26:00)Team for the final battle: Cinderace, Sirfetch'd, Thievul, Barraskewda, Perrserker and Appletun I have a lot of thoughts on this one, since I've been playing Pokémon for most of my life, but I'll try to keep it brief. It doesn't innovate that much, but it does have some nice QoL changes, especially when it comes to getting your hands on Pokémon. Like, you can just run into Pokémon that were hard to get by or required some work in the past. A lot of changes are clearly catering to the competitive scene, and as much as I'm not interested in that, I still feel it's a good change, since it could be a pretty convoluted hassle to get the mon you want from what I understand. As far as how the game is constructed, it reverts back to gyms, but it feels a little different from the past games. There's no real evil team this time around, and there's not a lot of story. Which is a huge improvement over gen 6 and 7 where characters just couldn't shut the fuck up. There's even an option to skip all story segments, from what I understand. There's also no victory road, no elite 4, and the final couple battles your team is healed up. Which brings me to my main complaint. The game is way, way too easy. Pokémon hasn't been very challenging for a while now, but this is the easiest gen yet. I think I wiped out once at the beginning because I got a little cocky and didn't feel like returning to a town to get healed, but that's it. Gym leaders, the final stretch, all very, very easy. Anyway, discovering all the new monsters was very fun this time around. They just went absolutely nuts with the designs. The new Pokémon are always the highlight of a new gen for me, and the fact they didn't reveal a lot this time (compared to gens 6 and 7 where we knew way too much beforehand) made it all the better. I'm looking forward to trying out the battle tower some more and maybe battling online a bit. And of course filling up the pokédex because I still haven't seen about a quarter of what's found in the region. Overall, not the best gen, but not the worst. Rating: 8/10
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Post by Digitalnametag on Nov 20, 2019 18:35:44 GMT -5
Did you try any of the Pokemon raids? I've heard they give out candies that make raising new Pokemon easier. Course if the game is piss easy there isn't much of a reason to switch out Mons other than aesthetic reasons.
I keep wanting to like the new Pokemon games but the battle system is so incredibly boring and after years of playing I've been burned out. In game battles are mostly determined from the minute you start them. If you have Pokemon that are effective/resistant you've won. At least in other RPGs you have team mechanics happening. Too bad double or triple battles aren't the standard for the series.
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Post by lurker on Nov 20, 2019 19:00:09 GMT -5
Gen 7 had an interesting way of handling gyms.
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Post by lurker on Nov 20, 2019 19:45:44 GMT -5
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Nov 21, 2019 4:16:12 GMT -5
Did you try any of the Pokemon raids? I've heard they give out candies that make raising new Pokemon easier. Course if the game is piss easy there isn't much of a reason to switch out Mons other than aesthetic reasons. I keep wanting to like the new Pokemon games but the battle system is so incredibly boring and after years of playing I've been burned out. In game battles are mostly determined from the minute you start them. If you have Pokemon that are effective/resistant you've won. At least in other RPGs you have team mechanics happening. Too bad double or triple battles aren't the standard for the series. I haven't done that many difficult raids yet, but they seem fun. Definitely seems like you'd need more strategy, since it's 4 against 1 and the giant pokémon can block attacks. As far as the candies go, I think they're mostly meant to be used not for your main team in the story playthrough, but more for getting your mons ready for more serious battles post-game or raising additional mons. There's a lot of changes for the competitive/online side of things, and I feel those candies are part of that. IDK, maybe you miss out on EVs or something if you feed them candies, I have no idea. But I feel they're not for the main campaign. As far as pokémon's battle system being boring. Yeah...the one-on-one format isn't that great. In older games you can have some more challenging moments, and the elite 4 always felt really fun to beat. Pokémon is pretty much the first RPG series I've ever played in my life, so at that time I didn't really have a problem with it. But once I played a more traditional RPG with 4 or so party members, I really started to notice how limited one-on-one RPGing is. Pokémon is kind of weird in that the preparation side of it is more important and fun than the battles, mostly. But online or in the battle tower, where the battlefield is leveled, it shows its full potential. Though even then, I prefer 2-on-2. I've been playing some double battles in the battle tower, and that has been a lot of fun so far, and online people can really pack a punch even in 'casual' or whatever it's called (haven't even tried ranked). Ultimately, it's kind of a weird game where they cater to the hardcore players more while also making the main story easy as shit. You can probably rush through the main story very easily and just get to the more interesting post-game battling in no time. For me, the new monsters were enough to make it worth playing through, and I'm more motivated to do post-game battling for this gen than any other, so I'm ultimately happy with my purchase.
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Post by dsparil on Nov 21, 2019 7:40:19 GMT -5
Giving too many candies can hypothetically make them miss out on EVs since they are no longer gained once they hit level 100. Realistically, it isn't much of an issue since EV yield tops out at 3 anyway so you could candy a fresh Pokémon up to level 99 and grind low level Pokémon until you get the values you want without hitting max level.
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