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Man, if you manage to get these, fucking hook me up. I really want to replay Fable III, but getting that achievement (and a couple others) has steered me away from committing myself to actually doing so.

On the subject of San Andreas, I'd always had extremely little interest in the GTA series, but I would play it for a few minutes just to go on a silly rampage every once in a while when a friend brought it over. San Andreas, on the other hand, I straight up wouldn't even let on my TV. I hated the characters and lifestyle portrayed in that game significantly more than in the other GTA games. Call it racism if you want, but if it is racist to despise that way of life, hideous humor, terrible music and fucked up sense of morality, then, well, I guess I'm "racist."

I mean, I generally hate most things about the GTA games, and really only enjoyed IV due to thinking Brucie was funny (I rarely find a damn thing about GTA games remotely funny) and feeling like the game actually had structure and a kind-of interesting plot. I just really hated San Andreas.



qft

I just hope the NGP has a better launch than the 3DS :S

Why can't that stupid shop open up so I can get my damn MML3 demooooo

Decided to buy Oath in Felghana on a whim when I saw a premium edition available at GameStop for only $30 (it's funny how having a job makes $30 seem like considerably less). I already posted that I got it in the latest purchase thread, but I figured that I'd elaborate a bit, here. An ARPG seemed like the perfect kind of game to fit into the two and a half hours before I start my shift that I'm stuck at work because of having to ride in early with my roommate (we work at the same place, but he's the one with the car). An action game would be something I wouldn't be able to relax and play, and a straight-up RPG like Strange Journey just seemed like it would be too slow for me to feel I was getting into it while at work.

Ys was right there at the Portal 2 midnight release (which I wasn't there to buy, actually, I was just dropping by with my roommate) at Gamestop, and it had a pretty looking box at ordinary box price, so I just went for it. I've been playing it a couple hours 3 out of 7 days of the week, and pacing it like this has given me a really great opportunity to enjoy my first experience with the series and ponder about the mechanics about it rather than plowing through it and making an immediate judgment. The art, atmosphere and structure of the game seems to suggest this is really the best kind of way to pace the game, as there's a lot of it to take in and enjoy.

Anyway, how the game actually plays - the game's combat is fast-paced and really addictive. This seriously does wonders for the game, considering that it helps alleviate boring dungeon crawling with fast-paced hack n' slash action. There's an abundance of bosses that all have creative, interesting attack patterns and the game really does a great job of never getting stale while keeping itself from becoming overbearingly complicated. ARPG's often teeter dangerously on the scale of "too complicated" or "too simple," and Ys finds a great balance by keeping the RPG elements simple and the action deep.

That said, the lack of a lock-on button seems kind of mysterious. One of the shoulder buttons could have easily taken this up. I often end up attacking the wrong enemy or wailing into an invincible portion of a boss (or, worse yet, an invincible portion of a boss that damages me when I collide Adol into it). I don't think it was really all that much to ask for, and given that the game is really based on chaining lots of hits together, it seems kind of ridiculous that there's no way to lock on.

The leveling mechanics are a pretty nice way of providing incentive to explore, but on the difficulty I'm playing on (hard), they also lend themselves to encouraging you to exploit them by leaving the best room to grind in and then repeatedly re-entering it and clearing the bad guys out. Difficulty balancing is also done rather strangely. Getting better equipment or leveling up even a single time makes a dungeon play much differently, and drastically effects boss fights. It makes it hard for me to find a sweet spot for where to be when I fight a boss, because I seem to be stuck always "almost killing them" before a level or two, then beating them on my first or second try after that level up.

Not to say that leveling breaks the game, but it just seems like they could have done a better job with balancing things out. There's never been any point where I could just walk through the game with completely zero challenge, at least, which is more than I can say for most games with RPG elements. Boss fights, although unbalanced and reliant upon your level for how difficult they actually are (it's nearly impossible to play in a way reliably enough to just never get hit), are always fresh and entertaining. Each boss so far has also been very vividly rendered with a superb attention to detail, which gets major plus points in my book. They're all unique, interesting moments in the game, and there's definitely no lack of them.

The attention to detail in the bosses is shared in the game's general atmosphere, too. While the game definitely has a somewhat minimal approach to story, it really, truly benefits from that with strong character designs, an interesting plot with good lore, an amazingly good soundtrack, and just a general attention to detail and care put into the game that you rarely see. The whole Ys universe is really easy to indulge yourself in, and the way the story is told allows you to paint your own picture of Adol without him coming across as a bland and boring silent protagonist.

It's a really lush game in a lot of ways, and it does so in a way that's very unpretentious. It manages to never get its head up its own ass while simultaneously having a really splendid sense of grandeur. I don't normally enjoy fantasy settings, but Oath in Felghana really nails a lot of what I like about fantasy in all the right ways. I really feel like I can sort of imagine what it's like to be in the world of Ys when I play, which is a sense I get incredibly rarely from any sort of media, these days.

The localization also helps a lot. Almost all of the voice acting is well done (aside from the woman in the blacksmith's shop and the hotel owner, who both speak much too slowly in an attempt to bring out the accents of the characters) and everything is translated in a really delightful way. I don't mean to blow smoke up Wyrdwad's ass, but he's giving Atlus more than a run for their money in doing a truly superb job of making sure that everything in the game (aside from the "bwa ha ha" in the description of a difficulty) really feels completely professional.

Anyway, to put it shortly, I'm really impressed with about everything, but I feel like there should have been a lock-on button and better balancing. Maybe a map feature, too, as trying to find gems (which are very very very important) can be difficult to do when you need to backtrack for them.

Edit: I typed this all up hoping it would help me feel like I could sleep, but it's NOT WORKING AUGHHH why can't my rapid thinking have an off switch

Repeating what I said on another forum -

"This game is profoundly and embarrassingly bad. I've only played the demo stage, but I have zero incentive to give it any more time than that, I'm in fact impressed I even managed to care enough to finish the demo. The stage was ridiculously long and filled with tons of sections where you just sit there and attack one of the three different enemies for like two minutes. It's boring and requires no skill.

A lot of modern action games seem to suffer from this, trying to simultaneously make a game that's fun for single-player and multiplayer, and also has RPG/leveling elements. They end up with some sort of mess that isn't fun on any level. They all suck except for Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, which in itself really isn't a very good game from a mechanics standpoint and an utterly, repugnantly bad one from the point of how much was recycled and how lazy the visual productions were. It manages to at least be addictive, which is more than I can say for a game like Moon Diver.

When I got to the boss, all I had to do to avoid his attacks was walk behind him. It didn't even hurt me to walk behind him. From there, I could wail on him until he jumped to the other side of the screen, where all I had to do from there was casually walk behind him again. As I went through the stage, I was just mindlessly pressing the attack button (well, charging an attack and then attacking, which is ever-so-slightly less mindless). I'm sure the game develops more on the more difficult stages and that multiplayer will add some redeeming value, but it's bad. Very bad.

This game is going to make Isuke go down as a laughing stock. I wouldn't even call the reviews on it "mixed," they're mostly just really negative."

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Seriously, though. This game is trash. It's not funny bad and it's not anywhere near good, the worst type of bad game... a truly mediocre one.

It's funny that, right now, the game holding the throne for the best 2D online co-op with RPG elements is fucking Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. Like, seriously, it shouldn't be so damn hard to make a game exponentially better than that one, but it flies so high over its shitty competition that it's depressing. I dumped easily over a hundred hours into that game because there's nothing else that scratches the itch, and I'm pretty disappointed Moon Diver doesn't even look like a diversion from it.

I mean, I'd argue the next best game to Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (that is, the next best game similar to it, of course) is Maple Story. That's how sad online action-platformers with any sort of RPG elements and online play are. It should be such a fertile genre... Adding the entertainment of action-platforming to a repetitive, but addicting RPG formula really adds a kick you don't get out of big guns like WoW, but it's hardly exploited. C:HoD proved there's an audience for this stuff willing to gobble it up and play it for hundreds of hours, I don't see why actually talented developers can't jump into the fray and make something amazing.

I liked a few things about Spirits, but mostly found it to be an incredibly disappointing follow up to what is my favorite Treasure game.

Lasercat - An XBLIG that seems based off of Jet Set Willy... pretty fun!