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Comments
I'm now done with the main content of Cogs, with all puzzles triple-gold. The Portal 2 promo puzzles...will be rather more difficult. The second I'm mostly just seeing as a huge cognitive clusterfuck because it's double-sided and has portals, but probably won't be that bad once I sketch it out...but...
The first one is basically a considerably more hellish version of the final level, but replacing all gears with forked pipes, and all faces with ring shuffles (which are disorienting and tedious because you have to rotate the entire ring to insert one piece at a time, and the intermediate bits don't look like they're in the right order until they're in the right orientation).
It took me about half an hour of notes just to sketch out a solution at all on a main page, and now I have to implement it in less than 6 1/2 minutes. There are now two shopping list sized sticky notes attached to it mapping out a game plan for two of the faces that I can now do in under a minute apiece.
I can't remember the last time I had to use anywhere near this much paper for a puzzle game, much less bust out a hierarchy of sticky notes for a single puzzle on it. Then again, it's immensely satisfying to work out a step-by-step on paper, try it once, and see it fall into place perfectly.
I used to play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance with several stapled sheets of paper indicating the level, class, experience points, judge points, current equipment, current abilities, current ability learning status, and ability slot choices of every character on my team.
Then I realized that I'd recruited too many characters to make enough room for all the secret and extra characters.
Then I stopped playing.
At least FFTA had nothing like the Riovane's Castle/Wiegraf mess. 3 hard missions in a row, with no chance to grind? Sure, why not?
On the other hand, FFTA I find has the issue of making team-building the core gameplay focus rather than actually playing the game. It's a bore to jump through a bunch of hoops to ensure that I have the abilities and combinations thereof that I want. This wouldn't be so bad if there was as much depth in the tactical gameplay as there was in team construction, and perhaps there eventually is, but then said team construction is both a barrier and enabler.
Or, basically, you can only access the essential gameplay content of the game after leveling up and developing a number of different classes. I think this is generally a pretty crappy approach; I want to be knee-deep in the mechanics and tactical considerations of a game within the first hour or two rather than waiting several additional hours to unlock the privilege of having an interesting gameplay experience.
This is one area where I think Fire Emblem kicks FFT in general to the curb; since the essential conditions and rules of battle are the same throughout FE with only character stats changing over time, you'll have all the abilities you need to employ interesting strategies as soon as the tutorials are over. The big difference here is that you don't unlock any additional abilities that serve as enablers for new strategies, so your frame of reference and your potential bag of tricks remain consistent.
I started Bastion again, since stuff happened and I never got very far last time I played.
I just got the last core and the thing got busted.
Alex you son of a bitch make a huge post about the DMC demo or else.
I'd love to, but the fact of the matter is that my experiences with DMC have always been at least a little "second hand". I've played and enjoyed DMC games, but only in spurts, having never owned one myself. So I can't really comment on how the new DMC's changes are negative or positive, as everything I know about the series comes from one DMC1 marathon when I was around 14 and then a smattering of half-hour gaming sessions when opportunity allowed. What I can tell you is that DMC is a series that thrives on a combination of schlocky, sincere appreciation for action and anime stereotypes and a well-considered combat system that rewards split-second switch gameplay with a side of strategic thought.
So I suppose the essential question is whether the new DMC conforms to these essential elements that make DMC what it is. It has to treat itself as the ridiculous clusterfuck it honestly is and it has to be fun and intuitive in gameplay, but with the potential for some depth of thought to be applied as well. If it doesn't do these two things, then I would suppose it fails at being what DMC is essentially supposed to be.
Mind you, I'd still probably take the new DMC over God of War in a heartbeat. Or Darksiders. DMC, I thought, really nailed the hack-and-slash style of gameplay for 3D games and many of its imitators have been regressions on the concept rather than progressions. And I think DMC's ridiculous context is a part of that, since it can justify any kind of game mechanic setup it likes -- such as having a two-handed sword and a pair of high-caliber pistols. This means you can have furious, quick, immediate range combat with moderately distanced ranged combat as well, and since pistols have known immediate range applicability as well, it was kind of a stroke of genius to meld them into the general combat system rather than have them turn the game into a third-person shooter while they were active.
Some really cool stuff comes out of this, such as using the pistols to keep yourself airborne for a while longer as you continue an aerial combo. With airdashes as well, this allows the game to not only use a bunch of otherwise "dead space", but provide some correction for error via the pistol recoil. In addition, many of the most efficient ways to get around are attached to attacks, which incentivises moving around a large fight via clever use of combat abilities. So the gameplay rewards consistent, furious, but overall measured aggression, where your mobility and damage output defend you better than anything else. Other games with similar combat systems don't often seem to realise this, and instead focus on the superficially cool elements without covering the essential bases that need to be covered for this kind of thing to work. I'd consider these to be the essential combat techniques for such a game:
Anyway, that was much longer than intended.
However from personal experience I tend to get bored of a game that forces me to use the same units in similar strategies to previous missions.
Where as I usually finish games with a lot of class builds and I just love unlocks and team building to the point of breaking the game ( dual wielding paladin/fighters with illusionist/white mages anyone?)
Plus easter eggs lots and lots of easter eggs
Its just those little carrots on a stick that keep me interested to the end and post endgame hence why I've replayed disgaea and ffta more than any other game in my library.
While this is more a comment of my personal taste in gameplay, I'm pointing out that just because a game focuses on team building doesn't necessarily make it a lesser game than a more strategic one.
That's a true fact, but I do wish FFTA had further developed its core strategic engagement. Team building and strategy aren't mutually-exclusive, after all, but FFTA is so heavily biased towards the development of one's team that the early game (and even the mid game) don't feel like playing the "real" game, so to speak.
Yes, that was a good post.
I'm half-awake right now, but I just want to tell you that you're able to parry (And in some cases, reflect) enemy attacks by timing you attacks against them, just like in DMC 1. That makes me happy.
All things considered, I'm looking forward to DmC.
I definitely found myself playing missions and entering battles only to level stuff up in FFTA.
I stopped around mid-game. Second boss.
But that was the best part of FFT.
All I know about FFT, which I haven't played (as opposed to FFTA):
Also the mechanics are slightly better in certain ways. For one, it's actually fairly easy to tell what effect your stats have (there's no defense stat so armor just increases your HP, numbers for stats are small enough that even one point is a significant difference, etc.). Also it only has human characters, so any character can be any class. Also it's far more exploitable which probably isn't really a plus, but it's fun to cast Holy on every enemy every turn for no MP, or to beat one of the hardest fights in the game by one-shotting the boss with your bare hands.
Oh yeah. Only human characters; that's a plus in my book. I'm fantasy-speciesist like that.
But I guess what they do with armor really drives the idea of HP not being health but rather being durability or stamina--that is, how long a character can keep on fighting even when hurt.
Though, if characters go to zero HP, do they die?
They are knocked out, and then if three of their turns pass before they get revived, they die permanently.
So I guess getting reduced to 0 HP means they're critically injured, but not actually dead yet.
Maybe if Rafa wasn't utterly braindead, then perhaps.
Well, okay, yeah, the last fight in that sequence is kind of stupid. Fortunately, you can save between fights and once you get lucky enough that Rafa doesn't get herself killed immediately, the fight is fairly easy.
I kind of want to get a Vita, and I want to get a 3DS but I don't know which to get first. ;-;
The Vita is the technologically superior choice, but it's been doing so dire in terms of sales that there's very few titles for it that aren't ports or severely stripped down spin-offs.
I think Persona 4: Golden, and VLR as well as BlazBlue will be enough to keep me busy while I wait to get the 3DS.
So I've finally got Dragon Age and its pretty damm good on PC.
I've said this before, but I have a massive issue with the early game in Dragon Age. I cannot for the life of me understand what BioWare were thinking. I mean, I remember going through the mid and late parts of the game and having a blast, despite disliking the combat style of the game very deeply, but I've made multiple attempts to play the game again and the beginning sections just shits me up the wall.
why do you hate the start?
To me, it's simply a combination of boring and cliche, plus it has some really bizarre design elements in places. Take the human noble origin story. Your first combat encounter will be against rats, and the game gives you a wink and a nudge about it -- like the "old stories", it says, which I found sort of insufferable. Before said encounter, the game also gives you the armour-equipping tutorial... when it had already given you the weapon-equipping tutorial some time ago. Why split this up? Why put it there, of all places? Why interrupt the flow like that? It might seem like a really minor thing, but from a design perspective, it's just this ludicrous, silly, dumb choice.
Then you go on to the early game that everyone gets -- the Warden camp and being inducted into the order. Your task? Go into the forest and kill so many zombie-orcs to acquire X amount of various resources and bring them back. It's like an MMO quest got lost and found itself in a single-player RPG, and this is where the game begins and provides its first impressions in a context where the stakes have been raised.
Quizzically, the game then rises in quality considerably, with a snap of the fingers. You get a decent amount of choice on what path to first pursue, although the balancing of these different paths isn't made clear to the player, unfortunately, which is another bad design decision. This ensures that the game is somewhat likely to be more tedious than it has to for the first two of four major quests. Goodness help you if your decide to take a dip into the Dwarves' troubles early on -- that whole section of the game is a huge slog through seemingly endless waves of mooks, most of which are reasonably tough. There's something of a meatshield to prevent you getting in via a tough encounter, but this encounter can be overcome by good tactics... but good tactics is the point of the combat, so it's still too easy to get in over your head and into a questline that is difficult to physically back out of and has a lot of tough combat content.
Dragon Age is not a bad game, really. While I don't like its style of combat, its gameplay is pretty robust for what it's meant to be, it's often aesthetically pleasing and has a pretty strong story up to a point, and I absolutely mean that its story is more or less engaging by any speculative fiction standard. But there's a number of decisions that were kind of terribly made, like the ones I mentioned above. It's also stupidly imbalanced, with a mage player character making the whole game considerably easier.
In short, it plays well for its gameplay type, looks nice and has significant narrative draw. While it's good overall, it has lots and lots of small failures that add up over time and make the game a real hassle to enjoy a second time, at least for me. I sincerely cherish the memory of getting to the end of a certain plot arc for the first time and the implications it had for my party, my character and the true finale of the story, and I can't say that about many games. But from a technical design perspective, there's a lot of amateurism and I'd expect much more from an experienced studio like BioWare. Especially when lots of their previous titles, such as Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, lacked these kinds of flaws.
Maybe we can work something out. I bought a 3DS mostly so I could play Kingdom Hearts 3D, and now that I've got it and beat it, I haven't really touched the DS at all. Wanna buy it off me?
I'll PM you.
Obnoxious Portal 2 Cogs puzzle done. Apparently there was one more hidden right after them where I have to construct a Companion Cube. It's not difficult to do in itself, but the time challenge is a really tight minute and a half.
Also, charge times, the Attack command isn't overshadowed by loads of abilities that are like Attack but with a status effect, more defined jobs (Chemists use items, Knights break stuff, Ninjas throw weapons, etc., not necessarily a good thing.), it doesn't take ages to learn an ability, you can get Exp. and JP by hitting yourself if you're into that, many more unique characters with unique jobs, etc.
I just made a "Yes, graphics are important, you numbnuts" rant elsewhere. The ghost of Glowsquid will be proud.