At 12/21/17 03:12 PM, Absurd-Ditties wrote: Enjoying it but still wish it was a bit harder. To be fair I think I've gotten pretty lucky in having the Black Knight sword drop early on.

Well yeah that explains it. Where did it drop? I'm pretty sure the black knight weapons are meant for NG+, since their drop rates are astronomically higher in the Kiln than anywhere else, and they're easily the best weapons in the game without going into specialized builds. The black knight halberd carried me through NG+++, and even then I was still switching to lesser weapons to keep it from getting boring. The BKS dropped early one time for me and I had to drop it because of how much it negated the challenge.

I got into attempting to speedrun DaS at one point (I wasn't good, my best time was something like 6-7 hours killing all bosses), some of the speedrunners I watched had their entire runs hinge on getting either the BK sword drop or the BK halberd from two of the early knights. If neither dropped they'd just restart, that's how much of a difference it makes.

Fair enough that it just happened to drop and you used the best thing you had, but I'd have recommended dropping it if you mentioned that earlier and without a doubt it would have impacted the game's difficulty. u played urself son.

At 12/22/17 05:07 PM, Absurd-Ditties wrote: Bed of Chaos can absolutely fuck off. Worst boss I've encountered in the series so far.

The problem is that every boss/area after the lordvessel can be tackled in any order, and so they end up relying on gimmicks to stay challenging regardless of player level. Chaos is the worst one for sure. His pattern is the same every time and the fire is easy to avoid when you know where you can stand so he's easy on a replay, but the first time through it's just pure trial and error.

At 12/23/17 01:03 PM, Absurd-Ditties wrote: How the fuck you're meant to figure out how to activate that without looking it up I'll never know, but anyway.

You're not, probably. Needing help is a purposeful part of the design and not just in combat.

At 12/26/17 01:38 PM, Absurd-Ditties wrote: And that's the lot. As with Bloodborne I think playing the DLC spoils the final boss a bit since you're probably going to end up too powerful for them to be a challenge. Smashing Gwyn to paste with my +5 black knight sword while he couldn't do shit to get through Havel's Greatshield wasn't really an epic finale

The DLC should be NG+ material u dang goof. Gwyn is a pretty understated showdown anyway though, he's extremely susceptible to parrying so if you're good at that he's a breeze, if not he's a bit of a bastard, but either way he feels more like an equal to the player character than a big bad to be toppled, like you're already on the same level as him which emphasizes the whole passing the torch motif.

Also I assume you did the painted world as well? That's one of my favourite areas. Did you fight Gwyndolin?

At 12/23/17 02:07 AM, Ultramartyr wrote: man, i never thought i'd see a fresh reaction to Bed of Chaos again. it really is the worst, huh? the director of the game, Hidetaka Miyazaki, made a public apology for that boss. Lost Izalith is shit in general. the catacombs and duke's archives aren't much better, a lot of copy-pasted enemies and underwhelming bosses.

The catacombs are technically a pre-Lordvessel area and shouldn't really be lumped in with the rest, I actually like it. I like Tomb of Giants too and I've never had any issue with the Duke's Archives (crystal cave is eh). Lost Izalith is the one area that's clearly unfinished, but it's more empty and underwhelming than outright badly designed (minus the boss fight). The later levels are worse than the early ones but I don't think they'e bad at all.

and yeah, Dark Souls isn't that difficult compared to Bloodborne or DS3, but those games are just frustrating, whereas with Dark Souls you can kinda kick back and have a good time with it.

Damn I don't agree at all, DaS had me throwing my controller the first time I played it but BB was an enjoyable breeze. The later chalice dungeons can fuck right off though.

The Witness

Finished this a while back and got the platinum trophy more recently. Ending was a letdown. I was genuinely hoping for a Braid-style reveal where it all comes together and suddenly all the statues and monoliths and cameras make sense and give the whole thing a new meaning on a replay. Instead we get as close to literally nothing as an ending can be. No closure, nothing is answered. It was already dragging with the final area and that just put me off entirely.

But then a couple days later I came back to wander around some more and get the last trophy. I solved the cloud puzzle and through that I realized there's puzzles hidden in the scenery everywhere, that was a mind blow moment and I spent ages looking for more. There's a bunch I'd already noticed but never thought to actually try activating. I got about 34 myself and looked up a few more to give me an idea of what else to look out for, the ones that require lining up parts of the videos with the environment are fucking mental and I'd never have figured those out in a million years. I've yet to actually finish any of the monoliths but looking it up it doesn't seem like there's any incentive at all for doing it so I probably won't bother. Finding these puzzles is both fun and satisfying but it'll kill me if I attempt to actually get all of them, and there's no point in just looking up the answers.

I found the second ending as well, that was another mind blow moment. When I opened the hotel I thought this was finally going to give me the real answers and pull back the veil on what the game is really about.. but nah, it's just some credits and then a nonsense non sequitur live action video. It actually managed to piss me off a bit and question what the fuck am I watching. It did answer some questions on the nature of the island and its contrived design, but there's still little in the way of closure. It left me pretty soured on the whole thing yet again.

I guess there's probably some zen idea of the journey rather than destination in there, but fuck me they could have been at least slightly explicit about it. The reason those endings are an ass pull is because you can't retroactively change how you played the game. If they established it as some meditative relaxation thing with no goal at the start I'd have played it as such, instead I was rushing through so I could see what was behind all this, and got no payoff.

I wanted the creepy bucket in the castle to mean something. There's an ominous atmosphere to the island thanks to the emptiness and dead silence in lieu of a soundtrack, but it's never tapped into and I wonder now if it was even intended.

Then I came back to do "the challenge," for the last video and the last trophy. I knew about it already from looking up the trophy list and was dreading it with how much complaints I saw, but I actually really enjoyed it, it's one of my favourite parts of the game. In fact I wish there were more randomized puzzles on the island and more areas with time limits. I love how it trains you to solve the puzzles with just a glance. You can't just fumble around for a solution, you have to have a deep understanding of how they work until you're able to read them like a kind of hieroglyph and see the correct paths almost instantly. Pretty cool.

I went on to solve more of the cave puzzles and the hidden perspective ones, and having thought more about the game and what it may be implying I've warmed up to it again. I'll leave it there for now, but I'll probably be popping into the island now and then to solve some more panels and look for more hidden puzzles or audio logs. I like that there's a bunch of stuff left over that you have no real incentive to do, it means you can just wander around at your own pace.

Right now I'm not even sure where my opinion lies on this. I loved it at first, hated it by the end, and now I think I like it? As for what it's about, I'd say it's about perspective, and vaguely about human accomplishment particularly in science and philosophy. I guess it's also about game design, the second ending makes it pretty explicit that there's meant to be some meta-commentary going on, but it's all so vague that I can't really get excited about it. Part of me thinks there's literally no meaning behind it and it's just a lazy ruse, but another part of me wants to believe Jon Blow and his team are a league of supreme intellectuals who've planted meaning in every miniscule aspect of the island with such surgical precision that it's just gone over my head.

I don't think this stands up to genre greats like Myst or Portal, but there are aspects of The Witness not found anywhere else. Definitely a unique experience with some pretty ballsy creative choices.

@Jercurpac go ahead and @ me also rate this essay of a post

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Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy

FINALLY got the last gold relic in the first game, now I've got all three platinum trophies. Native Fortress, Lost City and The Lab gave me the most trouble, I was dreading Slippery Climb and The High Road but managed to beat both in a couple tries. Fuck everyone at Vicarious who allowed time trials to be added to Crash 1 regardless though, it clashes so aggressively with how the game was designed. It takes decent levels and then makes you play them in a way where every tiny flaw is blown up to become the most infuriating shit.

The rounded hitboxes rightfully get criticized in this, but Lost City and Sunset Vista take it to a whole 'nother level, it is fucking ridiculous and inexcusable how hard it is just to make crash stand on these fucking flat, rectangular platforms. He slips off them like they're spherical. It doesn't make any fucking sense. And the level is already so fucking aggravatingly difficult without the basic platforming functionality totally dicking you around.

Anyway, still ticking away to see if I can get the gold relic on stormy ascent as well, but I'll probably give up. It currently has a 0.3% completion rate. I'll probably snap the disc in two sooner than beat it, but it's gonna annoy me having this one thing left to do across this entire trilogy.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm (@Auz)

Finished this and got the platinum trophy. Nowhere near the first game but it's pretty good as a side-thing and doesn't feel too pointless. Captures the same cozy feeling. It's nice. But then it's all undermined by the fact we know multiple characters either die immediately or do awful things when the next game starts. There's no happy endings for any of these characters.

Being a prequel also negatively limits the side stories though - like for eg, we get quite a cathartic arc between Chloe and David here where they grow to tolerate each other, but we already know they're at eachother's throats throughout the original game and it never gets resolved. Also it's weird to bring in characters like Elliot or Samantha, when they're suddenly never seen or heard from again in the sequel. There's no puzzles at all which is slightly disappointing, but the talkback mechanic and graffiti were decent additions.

Assassin's Creed Freedom Cry

Finished this and mopped up the trophies as well. It's hyperbolic to say, but this might be one of the worst games I've ever played, for just being thoroughly uninspired and with absolutely nothing in it worth experiencing. As a DLC it's pretty shit, as a standalone game I don't know what they were thinking. Not only does this have nothing that we didn't already play multiple times in AssCreed 4, but they picked all the worst parts of 4 to copy and paste. I don't know anyone who actually enjoyed missions like the eavesdropping, that's the stuff you trudge through on the promise of doing something cool later. It's filler, but it's most of the content in this one.

I don't think there's anything I'd call an actual mission in here, it's all disjointed busywork. Going for 100% sync also made several sections excessively frustrating. The final showdown takes about half a second to beat, in fact one of the sync requirements is beating him a certain way and it got frustrating because he kept dying in the fight before I could do it. That's right, the final boss is so easy to kill that it becomes frustrating. That's a new one. Every time he died I had to watch the entire unskippable ending cutscene and get to the credits before I could retry the mission from scratch. Abysmal.

I don't know if this is any different or if AssCreed has just aged poorly, but the actual gameplay is pretty bad too. Combat sucks, and climbing & free running is so automatic and animation-focused it may as well not even have player input. The amount of times my guy ran up a wall when I was trying to go down a street was infuriating, and during the eavesdropping segments he was liable to latch to a building or leap right into the target at any time. When one button does so many different things it becomes a gamble which one it'll actually do at any one time. This is context sensitive controls taken to a horrific extreme.

And don't get me started on those fucking haystacks, they pull him in like a magnet if you come within a square mile of one, even if you're in the middle of combat. It's meant to feel like you're pulling off visually impressive stunts through simple, flow-y controls, but here it just felt like my guy was actively fighting against me half the time.

The sailing and naval combat was the best part once again, but I remember AC4 focusing on 1v1 fights, where in this one I'm regularly fighting 4-5 other ships at once and you just get overwhelmed. There's no way to out-maneuver than many enemies, it's such bullshit. It's more about upgrading your ship and brute forcing it than any kind of skill. Every aspect of this game is bad. I kept playing waiting for the filler missions to end and the real game to start.

At 12/29/17 12:59 PM, Jackho wrote: Well yeah that explains it. Where did it drop?

When I went back to the asylum. I must have been using it from Sif onwards.

The DLC should be NG+ material u dang goof.

Get to fuck, I'm not playing the game twice just to do the DLC, I've too many other games to play to be running through a 30 hour game twice for a few extra bosses.

Also I assume you did the painted world as well? That's one of my favourite areas. Did you fight Gwyndolin?

Aye, once I'd done everything I could think of I looked up any optional bosses I'd missed and did Gwyndolin. Stumbled into the painted world right away after getting to Anor Londo though.

At 12/29/17 02:00 PM, Absurd-Ditties wrote: Get to fuck, I'm not playing the game twice just to do the DLC, I've too many other games to play to be running through a 30 hour game twice for a few extra bosses.

That's not how it works, you don't have to play through it twice and you're underestimating how quickly you can blaze through these games on the second round. It takes like half an hour to get from the start to the DLC area in DeS, in BB it takes maybe an hour, and at least in Bloodborne I thought the extra stuff was pretty clearly intended to be played on an NG+ cycle.

Besides that NG+ is a big part of these games and worth trying anyway, they're addictively replayable.

Currently trying to learn some of the characters on the King of Fighters XIII. Also Sonic Mania and Cuphead.

Got around to playing some Steamworld Dig for 54 minutes after watching some Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 it's a pretty good metroidvania type game. Also planning to play some other games that were influenced by my recent choices.
Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
Ecco The Dolphin
Super Smash Bros
Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater
Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon
Code Name Steam
Crush 3d
Legend of the Mystical Ninja
Defenders of Oasis
lego Star Wars : The force awakens
Metroid
Outrun 3d
Link's Awakening
Earthbound
Double Dragon

Right now, all the games I just got.

Pokemon Ultra Sun and Moon
Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga + Browser's Minions
Miitopia
Metroid Samus Returns

At 12/26/17 01:38 PM, Absurd-Ditties wrote: And that's the lot. As with Bloodborne I think playing the DLC spoils the final boss a bit since you're probably going to end up too powerful for them to be a challenge. Smashing Gwyn to paste with my +5 black knight sword while he couldn't do shit to get through Havel's Greatshield wasn't really an epic finale, but Manus was fun (only fight I summoned for in the game because OF COURSE I'm going to team up with Sif), even if Kalameet was a bit underwhelming after all the hype dragons in this universe get.

like Jackho said, one of your problems with the game being too easy is using a weapon meant for endgame right off the bat. your other problem is Havel's Greatshield. it trivializes the entire game, pretty much nothing can get through it, you could beat almost any boss without taking a hit. you pretty much did everything to make the game easy, save for using a sorcerer.

Kalameet is by a longshot the best dragon encounter in all of Souls. that's not really saying much though, because every other one is terrible.

At 12/29/17 12:59 PM, Jackho wrote:

At 12/23/17 02:07 AM, Ultramartyr wrote: man, i never thought i'd see a fresh reaction to Bed of Chaos again. it really is the worst, huh? the director of the game, Hidetaka Miyazaki, made a public apology for that boss. Lost Izalith is shit in general. the catacombs and duke's archives aren't much better, a lot of copy-pasted enemies and underwhelming bosses.

The catacombs are technically a pre-Lordvessel area and shouldn't really be lumped in with the rest, I actually like it. I like Tomb of Giants too and I've never had any issue with the Duke's Archives (crystal cave is eh). Lost Izalith is the one area that's clearly unfinished, but it's more empty and underwhelming than outright badly designed (minus the boss fight). The later levels are worse than the early ones but I don't think they'e bad at all.

yeah, i meant Tomb of the Giants, not Catacombs.

Lost Izalith has three awful bosses and a re-used boss. the Duke's Archives feels like it had the most time and effort put into it, maybe it was the one they started work on first. but Tomb of the Giants has issues. the skeledogs down there are horribly unfair in their movesets, their forward flailing attack can eat through all of your stamina in one go if you're blocking, and it does absurd damage. they copy-pasted it all over the place too. instead of thoughtfully crafted encounters, FROM just made it harder than it had to be and called it a day. Nito is the least developed of the lords as well. besides fan theories, no one really knows what he does or where he stands. it seems like he crawled into that coffin after killing the dragons and stayed there until the player finds him. his boss fight is a mob gank too, which is never fun.

and yeah, Dark Souls isn't that difficult compared to Bloodborne or DS3, but those games are just frustrating, whereas with Dark Souls you can kinda kick back and have a good time with it.

Damn I don't agree at all, DaS had me throwing my controller the first time I played it but BB was an enjoyable breeze. The later chalice dungeons can fuck right off though.

my first experience with DaS was similar, i actually gave up for a long time and ended up beating DaS2 before going back to it. once you get a feel for the combat, it's much more enjoyable (for me at least) to play than Bloodborne or DaS3, where enemies either hit you for 50+% of your health or run screaming at you, flailing their arms. playing Bloodborne gives me a headache.

At 12/31/17 03:40 PM, Zymbot wrote:

At 12/31/17 12:00 PM, Zymbot wrote: Been playing some Karnov for NES.

Wow, this game is really fun! Also, very challenging.

I beat it!

I think I love this game. I wish I had it growing up.

They probably could have come up with a better reward for beating it than this screen, though.

LOL! Old school Nintendo endings were the worst.

At 12/29/17 01:01 PM, Jackho wrote: The Witness

No closure, nothing is answered. It was already dragging with the final area and that just put me off entirely.

The game almost goes out of the way to make its experience meaningless or at the very least it dodges your attempts to find any meaning in it. You work your way into the mountain and delve deeper and it starts giving you more and more little hints and the whole time my mind was going wild thinking that I was getting close to the true nature of the island only to get the most bullshit, pretentious art-game ending. I immediately started playing again hoping that you get put into a NG+ or something and found the second ending pretty much right away (it's pretty amazing that it was right in front of me the whole time in one of the easiest puzzles in the game). And you you find out that you were literally playing a bullshit, pretentious VR art-game that one of the devs was playing, probably against advisement, and instead of finding any form of enlightenment they just end up seeing puzzles in the real world (BTW have circles in the real world stopped triggering your bring into wanting to solve a puzzle yet?) I still bounce back between if there's anything to take away from the game, but if a game can still have me thinking about it a year later it has to have done something right. I think sometimes it's okay to be a little disappointed, it's a valid emotion for a story to elicit.

The best way I can think of it is an anti-mind fuck. Apologies if you enjoyed the ending for Bioshock Infinite, but it tried so hard to be an "isn't this crazy, man" mind fuck that it became an unintentional parody of that kind of ending. The Witness is the exact opposite and tries everything it can to let you down and give you nothing.

Finding these puzzles is both fun and satisfying but it'll kill me if I attempt to actually get all of them, and there's no point in just looking up the answers.

Shame you didn't find them sooner. I think they work a lot better as something to work on as a side quest of sorts as you're working on beating the game since a lot of them are woven into the actual puzzles.

Then I came back to do "the challenge," for the last video and the last trophy. I knew about it already from looking up the trophy list and was dreading it with how much complaints I saw, but I actually really enjoyed it, it's one of my favourite parts of the game.

Probably people who were just annoyed that they couldn't use a guide to get past it. I completely forgot about the way to unlock it even though I'm almost certain I made note of it at one point so I didn't come back to beat the challenge until a few months later and even then it took two hours tops to beat it. I loved that the game had that kind of application for the language it had been teaching you over the course of the playthrough. I feel like just having that kind of challenge to show off your mastery of what the game was teaching you is a reward in itself.

Right now I'm not even sure where my opinion lies on this. I loved it at first, hated it by the end, and now I think I like it? As for what it's about, I'd say it's about perspective, and vaguely about human accomplishment particularly in science and philosophy. I guess it's also about game design, the second ending makes it pretty explicit that there's meant to be some meta-commentary going on, but it's all so vague that I can't really get excited about it.

Have you seen the video you get for beating the challenge? I think it stands as probably the closest you can get to a thesis statement for The Witness. It's 40 minutes, so set some time aside, but I think it's worth it. It think it's a little important to remember that Jon Blow takes at least a little sadistic joy in punishing people for looking too deep for meaning or wanting more out of a game than is immediately laid out before them. Remember that one puzzle in Braid to collect the hidden star that involved waiting two hours for a cloud to slowly move across the level so you could use it as a platform?

I don't think this stands up to genre greats like Myst or Portal, but there are aspects of The Witness not found anywhere else. Definitely a unique experience with some pretty ballsy creative choices.

For me it does, in a different timeline I could see The Witness standing as a manifesto for a new school of game design, but in the world we live in game design doesn't generally stratify into schools of thought the way that other kinds of art and entertainment do.

@Jercurpac go ahead and @ me also rate this essay of a post

Your paper lacks references and is not formatted to MLA guidelines. Please see me after class.

I generally do all my Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve and, lo and behold they had a whole stack of SNES classics. It's a pretty decent line up, but no Chrono Trigger is a tragedy, Tetris Attack is the best multiplayer game on the system and should have made the cut, there's no good reason that Street Fighter Turbo made the cut over Super Street Fighter, and Star Fox hasn't held up at all even though I get why it's on there. Side loading more ROMs seems to be a fairly simple process that I will never attempt because that would be illegal and wrong, but if I did it would make the SNES classic a nice little package that will hopefully keep me from going through phases where I feel the need to scour ebay for retro games since the market for old games has gotten ludicrously overpriced.

At 12/31/17 03:40 PM, Zymbot wrote: They probably could have come up with a better reward for beating it than this screen, though.

It's spelled correctly, at least, which is a step up from a decent amount of NES victory screens.

Meant to reply to this earlier.

At 12/23/17 09:07 PM, TheQuietGamer wrote: Tales of the Borderlands blew me away. As far as Telltale games go, this is second only to the first season of The Walking Dead.

Have you played The Walking Dead recently? I thought the same at first, but I've been slowly replaying TWD over the last few months as a recap for season 3. I'd now confidently place Borderlands as the best game Telltale has ever made.

TWD still has excellent moments and it deserves respect for carving a place for that type of game, but going back now it's a bit of a chore. Very slow paced with lots of busywork and silly or nonsensical puzzles, loads of terrible animations, bad dialogue or illogical character actions to take you out of it. It does about as much wrong as it does right. It feels like half the stuff in it is filler as well and it's repetitive to boot, it pulls a zombies ex machina so many times for the sake of forced tension that I can't help but groan along with them. And the whole thing is so excessively depressing in a way that even feels outright mean spirited, it makes it such a slog to get through.

I still like the game and respect the impact its had, but the flaws just get more egregious over time. Tales from the Borderlands was a much more balanced experience overall and even with flaws of its own I can imagine it staying as good for years to come.

Also I could definitely be wrong but I think the TFTB ending falls in line with the other Borderlands games in being vague about the vault chest, so there's not much Telltale could've done without going too far into redefining the lore for a franchise that isn't theirs.

Also @TheQuietGamer in regards to SH Homecoming, which system are you playing it on? I really wanted that game when it was new-ish but it was absurdly hard to find in shops, and by the time I started buying my games online my SH fanaticism had passed. Thinking of picking it up now. I downloaded SH1 to my Vita recently so I might be getting back into the series.

The film definitely ended up having an impact on the games, SH Origins in particular seemed to be quite heavily inspired by the film's visuals. Mixed feelings on that.

At 1/1/18 05:53 PM, Zymbot wrote: I played Karnov again and beat it without dying once!

I'm too good at this game. I wanna compete in the Karnov World Championships.

I bet I could even pull off a no damage run if I keep honing my skills.

it seems you've found the perfect game

Doom VFR - This has gotten mixed reviews but I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. Although I got it boxed for £15 at release and that's still the price listed on Amazon, yet it costs 30 on both PSN and Steam. With the amount of content here I'd definitely be more annoyed it I paid the full digital price. It's not a killer app or anything but it is a fun game.

Anyway it's pretty straight forward, you shoot a bunch of demons and occasionally unlock doors. Actually I wish there was more tense "quiet time," where you're just quietly exploring the Mars base. It's quite unnerving in the early missions which just made me realize I haven't played a proper VR horror game yet, and it quickly turns into constant combat with no tension. As much as I like balls to the wall Doom I think Doom 3's style might be an even better fit for VR.

The combat is fun though. Unlike most VR games it isn't based around slow, accurate shooting and aiming down sights, instead it's all about hip firing a machine gun like Rambo and moving around as much as possible. Definitely the most hectic VR shooter I've played. It's got teleport movement by default which puts some people off but I actually prefer it. The teleport button doubles as as bullet time ability which helps dodge shit, and when an enemy is staggered you can teleport into them for an instant kill and some health. Seeing all the Doom enemies in VR is awesome and really gives a sense of scale that wasn't there before - these demons are fucking huge. Shooting a Revenant inches from your face is a whole lot more intense when you realize its head is about as big as your torso.

It also includes unlockable classic maps from Doom 1 and 2, they're visually just like the originals but with the modern enemies, physics and guns inserted, which actually makes them a lot harder. I couldn't beat the Cyberdemon level even on the easier mode, his splash damage is ridiculous and you don't have the overpowered 2016 weapons to make it any easier.

Absolute Drift: Zen Edition - I started to play this to wind down from Crash, the title and the art style made me think it would be pretty chill. I guess it is in spirit, but actually playing it is quite taxing. These cars have the worst handling I've ever experienced in a game, and that's intentional but it just gets tiring when driving around is just constant effort. My hands get cramped pretty quickly. It's a minimalistic, isometric driving game with an emphasis on drifting as the name would suggest.

Actually pulling off a drift in this is extremely difficult and not all that rewarding, and what does or doesn't count as a drift is pretty arbitrary and inconsistent. Obviously skill is meant to be the backbone of the game but it feels very luck based. I bumble through these levels and fuck up so much that it feels like I must be fundamentally misunderstanding how it's meant to be played, but then the results screen pops up and says I've completed all challenges and scored in the top 15% worldwide, so I guess that's just how it's meant to feel. It's alright. Not great, pretty repetitive, and not at all what I thought it would be. I've technically beat the game but I've done less than half the events and don't have much motivation to go back.

At 12/31/17 02:15 AM, Ultramartyr wrote: you pretty much did everything to make the game easy, save for using a sorcerer.

It's bitchy to say, but anyone who beats Dark Souls as a mage hasn't actually beat Dark Souls, imo.

Lost Izalith has three awful bosses and a re-used boss.

None of the demon ruins bosses would rank among my favorites but I don't think they're that bad. Ceaseless is optional and comes with an instant kill option, and he gets bonus points for having a meme-worthy name. And I like the way Centipede drops an item that makes him easier, that's a pretty unique boss feature.

Tomb of the Giants has issues. the skeledogs down there are horribly unfair in their movesets, their forward flailing attack can eat through all of your stamina in one go if you're blocking, and it does absurd damage. they copy-pasted it all over the place too.

I love those guys, they're so goofy and terrifying. I must have finished the game twice if not three times before I even attempted to kill one. They make traversing the tomb so nerve wracking, but they're not that hard to just avoid or run past either. They are a little bullshit I guess but I don't think I'd change them if I could.

Bloodborne, where enemies either hit you for 50+% of your health or run screaming at you, flailing their arms.

That's not inaccurate but it's balanced by having you regenerate health by hitting back. I thought that made BB much more forgiving and meant getting hit didn't matter nearly as much.

At 1/1/18 12:18 PM, TheQuietGamer wrote: I feel like there was more resolution to TWD's ending, while TFTB was much more open-ended.

I felt both were resolved very well to be honest. I don't feel like I'm missing anything with TFTB ending where it did, and TWD would be just as good even if it never got a season 2.

At 12/31/17 09:21 PM, Jercurpac wrote: The game almost goes out of the way to make its experience meaningless or at the very least it dodges your attempts to find any meaning in it.

This could definitely be the case, I think it is with the statues at least. We're lead to think they must have a meaning behind them but it seems they're just decorations with occasional neat-but-pointless perspective tricks built in.

I feel like if a game this well designed also came with a deep narrative tied in it would easily be one of my favourite games and potentially my #1, but as-is it almost feels like a half game, like the precise design is lost because it's all for nothing anyway. I still feel a bit ripped off for my time investment & it's probably always going to make me wish there was more to it.

And you you find out that you were literally playing a bullshit, pretentious VR art-game that one of the devs was playing, probably against advisement, and instead of finding any form of enlightenment they just end up seeing puzzles in the real world. I think sometimes it's okay to be a little disappointed, it's a valid emotion for a story to elicit.

I'm probably reading into it far too much, but what I took from the end video is that the guy is kind of blown away by how little the game world represents reality. Like he has a mind blowing level of interactivity compared to the game, but it also gives no feedback on if what you're doing is right or wrong

Another aspect is that the game is impressive for being so precisely designed, but reality is either all the more impressive for the fact its random, or it was designed by God with such complexity that digital worlds will always be futile in comparison. I prefer an atheistic reading of it but there was at least one audio diary to support a theological creationist interpretation (but then that could also be foreshadowing that the game world is an in-universe manufactured VR thing, das layers fam). It's also acknowledging that if you were even slightly impressed by the island or other game worlds then you should rightfully be utterly floored by reality 24/7. It kinda vaguely underlines both nature's majesty and humanity's achievements and how they are at odds with one another.

One of the videos had the sentiment that art is appealing because it's so simplified and easy to understand, where reality and science is chaotic and scary, that might reinforce this interpretation. But reading back over that previous paragraph I'm probably getting waaay more out of that video than was intended, and I'm someone who thought the video was total bullshit to begin with.

The best way I can think of it is an anti-mind fuck. Apologies if you enjoyed the ending for Bioshock Infinite, but it tried so hard to be an "isn't this crazy, man" mind fuck that it became an unintentional parody of that kind of ending. The Witness is the exact opposite and tries everything it can to let you down and give you nothing.

I wasn't a fan of Bio Infinite's narrative either, but looking at what The Witness gives us I'm not even sure if I prefer it. Although granted if The Witness did give us the type of ending we were expecting we'd actually have a whole lot less to discuss, but it wouldn't kill them to be a little less obtuse.

Shame you didn't find them sooner. I think they work a lot better as something to work on as a side quest of sorts as you're working on beating the game since a lot of them are woven into the actual puzzles.

I felt like such a doof for not finding them sooner. Even the panel on top of the mountain that mimics the river below just made me go huh. It didn't dawn on me to try tracing over the actual river too.

Probably people who were just annoyed that they couldn't use a guide to get past it. I feel like just having that kind of challenge to show off your mastery of what the game was teaching you is a reward in itself.

Separating the fakes from the certified True Witnesses. Perhaps the game is really a meditation on how knowledge is obtained, and how those without euphoric intellect are a bunch of plebs who need to get good.

The challenge did take me several attempts so I can see why it might get frustrating for some, but it was enjoyable the whole time and I just wanted to do it again once it was finished. I imagine some people would put down the randomization as making it overly luck based too. At least you're always actively doing something even when you fail at it, where as some of the regular panel puzzles just leave you staring at it indefinitely if you can't get it.

Have you seen the video you get for beating the challenge?

Not yet actually. I watched a couple minutes of it and then decided to leave it when I realized how long it was. I need to get back to that.

Remember that one puzzle in Braid to collect the hidden star that involved waiting two hours for a cloud to slowly move across the level so you could use it as a platform?

And he did basically the same thing here, one of the environment puzzles I spoiled for myself requires you to start the challenge video, use the dot at the start of it to trace a line and then wait until the very end for the video to line up again and give you the end point.

At 12/31/17 09:44 PM, Jercurpac wrote: There's no good reason that Street Fighter Turbo made the cut over Super Street Fighter

What's even weirder is that the Japanese edition does include Super instead of Turbo. The Japs also got stuck with Super Soccer as one of their games though, that's about the most insulting game they could have included.

Side loading more ROMs seems to be a fairly simple process that I will never attempt because that would be illegal and wrong, but if I did it would make the SNES classic a nice little package that will hopefully keep me from going through phases where I feel the need to scour ebay for retro games since the market for old games has gotten ludicrously overpriced.

I've been tempted to get a SNES classic for this purpose, but then I know full well I'm better off just getting something like a Raspberry Pi emulation box or going the extra mile and building a dedicated HTPC capable of emulating everything up to PS2. I even already have a wireless SNES gamepad from 8BitDo that feels as good as the originals, and Nintendo are just using the same roms you can get online.

But then I want it just because it's an official thing and looks like the original console. It's at an awkward price where I can't just impulse buy and be done with it.

Well as of right now I been focusing on minecraft working on an ancient Egypt type of area.

~X~

At the moment CS:GO and Paladins are the 2 main games I go for when I want to play something. Paladins is going somewhat downhill lately though so more CS again recently.

At 1/3/18 07:25 AM, XwaynecoltX wrote: Well as of right now I been focusing on minecraft working on an ancient Egypt type of area.

~X~

Awesome building! Sorry but it has to be said... please use this key

At 1/1/18 08:20 PM, Jackho wrote:

At 12/31/17 02:15 AM, Ultramartyr wrote:

None of the demon ruins bosses would rank among my favorites but I don't think they're that bad. Ceaseless is optional and comes with an instant kill option, and he gets bonus points for having a meme-worthy name. And I like the way Centipede drops an item that makes him easier, that's a pretty unique boss feature.

I love those guys, they're so goofy and terrifying. I must have finished the game twice if not three times before I even attempted to kill one. They make traversing the tomb so nerve wracking, but they're not that hard to just avoid or run past either. They are a little bullshit I guess but I don't think I'd change them if I could.

man, you really do see the sunny side of things. every boss in Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith is garbage to me. Ceaseless Discharge is so awkward to fight because he's so big, it's like the Old Iron King prequel where you just dodge his limb then attack it a bunch while it sits there. or just cheese him and drop him into a lava void.

and centipede demon is HORRENDOUS. first off, the ring he drops isn't guaranteed, you have to chop off a limb to make it drop and my first five times fighting him i didn't even know you could do that. without the ring you have to stand on this tiny strip of land while the demon sits out in the lava and flings it arm at you over and over, giving you no opportunity to counter attack. and when he does approach the camera freaks out because he's on top of you and right next to a wall.

bed of chaos needs no explanation on why it's worthless. and demon firesage is just a reskin. all terrible! i don't mean to harp on about it but it's just surprising hearing a perspective that sees these bosses positively lol.

and the skeledogs, FUCK them. the first inclination when facing the most common enemy in an area shouldn't be to run away or avoid it. i'd say Tomb of Giants and its boss are, while underwhelming, not that bad, EXCEPT for the skeledogs. it's just clearly an unbalanced enemy that they didn't have time to fine tune.

and this is coming from someone who has played Dark Souls multitudes and multitudes of times, going through these areas with all different kinds of builds. i love Dark Souls, which is why i'm also critical of it.

That's not inaccurate but it's balanced by having you regenerate health by hitting back. I thought that made BB much more forgiving and meant getting hit didn't matter nearly as much.

the rally system never gained enough health back for it to supercede just hopping back and popping a blood vial. all the health i could get back from putting myself in more danger, i could just get it all back instantly and safely.

At 12/31/17 12:00 PM, Zymbot wrote: Been playing some Karnov for NES.

Wow, this game is really fun! Also, very challenging.

It feels good to progress as you learn enemy patterns, and level layout.

It has unlimited continues, so it's pretty forgiving that way.

i can't believe someone besides me on the entirety of NG has played Karnov. i had that shit on NES growing up and it's a fucking weird game. it confused me as a kid and i never got very far, but i always found the music and the fact that i was playing as a pudgy middle aged man amusing.

At 1/3/18 07:38 AM, kw12 wrote: Awesome building! Sorry but it has to be said... please use this key

yes I probably should but that pic was taken with my camera but yes I agree with the key lol

~X~

Pinball Arcade

Starcraft: Remastered.

Started Dark Souls II.

Not really feeling it so far. Five bosses in and none have really clicked. Last Giant is a joke, Pinwheel-tier difficulty, the Pursuer was a fun fight (and the biggest difficulty spike in the series so far) but he's pretty bland since he's a dude in armour, Dragonrider was no harder than the giants in the same area, just with more health, the Ruin Sentinels felt like fighting 3 regular enemies rather than a boss, and Flexile Sentry was another total pushover.

At 1/4/18 05:18 PM, Absurd-Ditties wrote: Started Dark Souls II.

DSII was probably the biggest slog for me in the series and I ended up taking a break for about a month near the end before I got around to beating it. Although people who are into postgame/PVP say it has the most flexible combat/upgrade system with the most viable playstyles, which has never been my bag with the series. Honestly, if you're not having any trouble at this point you may just have gotten too used to the way the games play to be genuinely challenged unless you're intentionally keeping yourself at a low level and are going out of your way to play with weapons you're not comfortable with.

At 1/2/18 05:10 PM, Jackho wrote: I feel like if a game this well designed also came with a deep narrative tied in it would easily be one of my favourite games and potentially my #1, but as-is it almost feels like a half game, like the precise design is lost because it's all for nothing anyway. I still feel a bit ripped off for my time investment & it's probably always going to make me wish there was more to it.

I've had this discussion with friends and I guess I tend to be able to appreciate disappointing things more than most people. I can totally understand why most people wouldn't appreciate being led around for 20+hours only to have the rug pulled out from under them. The first ending definitely made me want to punch my monitor, but the second gave enough context to it and the more distance I get from it the less it all bothers me and the more I enjoy it for having done something different.

One of the videos had the sentiment that art is appealing because it's so simplified and easy to understand, where reality and science is chaotic and scary, that might reinforce this interpretation. But reading back over that previous paragraph I'm probably getting waaay more out of that video than was intended, and I'm someone who thought the video was total bullshit to begin with.

The audio logs and videos seemed preachy and forced at first, but I think I like them more when I reevaluate them less as "here's a nugget of wisdom courtesy of Jonathan Blow" and more "here's something the fictional designers of this game added in because they thought it would be enlightening." They do serve as food for thought, but I think one of the funnier jokes is that the first video you're likely to find in what is ostensibly a grand artistic statement basically says that art is not as important as people make it out to be.

At 1/2/18 05:10 PM, Jackho wrote: I've been tempted to get a SNES classic for this purpose, but then I know full well I'm better off just getting something like a Raspberry Pi emulation box or going the extra mile and building a dedicated HTPC capable of emulating everything up to PS2. I even already have a wireless SNES gamepad from 8BitDo that feels as good as the originals, and Nintendo are just using the same roms you can get online.

That's almost certainly the better choice, but the aesthetics of the actual hardware are nice, the UI is cleaner and more user-friendly than you'll usually find with free alternatives, and the prospects of tampering with an official Nintendo product and turning it into an all-on-one collection is appealing in a 1st world renegade kind of way. Plus, I already have the option to emulate 95% of games ever released on my PC and having that kind of infinite choice usually means I'll end up spending more time curating my collection rather than actually playing games. Having something that will only every be a SNES machine means I'll end up playing with it more often, but that's a personal issue, I guess.

At 1/5/18 10:19 AM, Jercurpac wrote: Honestly, if you're not having any trouble at this point you may just have gotten too used to the way the games play to be genuinely challenged unless you're intentionally keeping yourself at a low level and are going out of your way to play with weapons you're not comfortable with.

I've found the levels themselves some of the most challenging in the series, it's just the bosses that are pushovers. Fucking sick of the lack of variety too, outside of one or two everything so far has just been someone vaguely human sized with a weapon.

Fallout 4

I... don't think I'm gonna play anything else for... a while.

I did pick up Just Cause 3 after about a year of not playing it just to beat it real quick so I could uninstall it to make room. Turns out I had like 3 missions left. Probably not gonna try to "liberate" every oppressed settlement remaining cuz that sounds tedious as fuck.

At 1/6/18 09:48 AM, Zymbot wrote:

At 1/6/18 09:46 AM, Zymbot wrote: Played and beat Yo Noid last night.

And I also found out that somebody recently made Yo Noid 2.

WHAT?!

WWWHHHAAAAAATTT?!?!

ARE YOU SERIOUS WITH THIS NONSENSE?!

It looks competently made.

God of War II: Electric Boogaloo.