Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
SpecOps' main point--if we are to distill it down to its most basic level--is that violence and the glorification thereof is wrong.
Midden's point is roughly the same.
Middens is just generally a more subtle experience all around. You're in very deep before you realize that what you're doing is wrong, and it's interesting that even with enemies that literally plead for their lives as you attack them that it takes as much as it does before that switch gets flipped. Plus, Middens is free and is made by someone who is not primarily a game developer, so its message doesn't come across as somewhat hypocritical like SpecOps' does to me.
Setting Middens aside for a minute.
In general I just mostly don't like that SpecOps is treated as some kind of 10/10 experience when it's really not. It's a mediocre game that makes a good point but does it poorly, and it's astounding to me that the gaming community still eats this stuff up (other "just good" games are oversold in this manner all the time, see Braid and Antichamber for two other very different examples. Keeping in mind I actually like the latter quite a bit), and it just annoys me to see a game so consistently--and I hate to sound like a hipster here--overrated.
There is nothing revolutionary about finding the glorification of violence in video games wrong, people have been criticizing it for years and have done so more effectively, both in journalism and in other video games. I think the focus/over-praise on SpecOps is mostly the result of the rather small reference pools people tend to deal in these days, and I find that aggravating. A game cannot be called good--and it certainly can't be called "perfect"--on the moral strength of its central message.
Kind of like how SpecOps pretends to be a generic shooter for about a third of the game? I mean, sure, everyone gets spoiled on it, but it still does.
Yeah, the mechanics are really unfun. That is, in fact, half the point of the game.
how so
Dude, I play at least 50 or so games every year. Few people have larger reference pools than I do, and I'd appreciate it if you don't say that people who like the game must just like it because they're less familiar with games than someone as awesomely brilliant as you.
except that isn't why people call it good, and nobody calls it perfect
To be honest, my only real question or point that hasn't been covered by CU is: Have you actually played this game or at the very least have watched an LP or something like that? Because the more and more you talk about it, the more and more I feel you're only talking about it based on what you have heard rather than having actually experienced the game in any level.
edit: Fuck that, I'm not leaving this here. If he didn't read it then oh well.
I watched a silent walkthrough. Which is generally what I do with games I am interested in but cannot afford (which is most games I'm interested in). Granted, it was a while ago.
None of that, mind you, has anything to do with what I just typed. My dislike of SpecOps is honestly mild at best, I only brought it up because I saw someone make the SpecOps/Middens comparison on another forum and found it interesting.
Then please leave if you're just going to be like that.
K.
bye.
@Saturn: Holy shit, why are that girl's legs so far apart? That's freaky.
And why are the knees bent inward again...dangit, people, why can't you draw animesque girls without their knees being bent inward???
> Game Dev Tycoon
Haha, that was some epic trolling.
@Bee: I was thinking of Epona as well, since it was implied that she survived the battle.
Also, Velagunder (the first tower boss) is arguably harder on Nightmare mode than Pictimos, who is a cheating cheater who cheats but is at least very consistent.
Yeah Velagunder can screw you over on Nightmare if he decides to use too many grubs. The third character is about the only one properly equipped to handle them without leaving himself in a slime trail to get lasered before he can move.
I can handle two bugs, three bugs, and sometimes four. Six bugs is...he's gonna get healed.
Seriously, what is with this tower and bugs? Between this, and the epic arthropod boss, and the cheating cheater who cheats mantid boss...it's like this tower is trying to bug me.
And the plant that shoots bugs. 2/3 of the major bosses are or involve bugs.
So I finally defeated
Velgaurder* Velagunder with Yunica at Nightmare difficulty.Not surprisingly, I had to learn a new tactic to do this. I had to learn to tell roughly when I was about to disable the lower body of the boss and thus know when to wail on it and ignore the critters. My final round of wailing on its "brain" got through because of this.
Also had to really master being able to deal with the critters, and do so economically because I don't have an infinite amount of MP going around with which to spincut those things. Also learned to stop moving sometimes because that goop messes with momentum, and when you have none...you don't slide at all.
Also found this: http://theologygaming.com/jesus-and-feena-and-reah-friends-of-sinners/ . There are some ys series spoilers in there, fyi.
* Velguarder was observed in Ys the Oath in Felghana.
It's also important to keep attacking while he's inhaling. You can whirlwind away when he bites, and if you disable him before that, he doesn't heal from any grubs you missed.
All the characters can get away with that, for various reasons.
Vagullion is almost trivially easy in Easy, Normal, and Hard.
Vagullion is a pain in the ass in Nightmare.
He's still trivially easy. He just takes like five minutes to shut up and die because he has a shitload of HP, Yunica can't afford to be close for more than a second, and you die almost instantly and have to start all over again if you overstay your welcome by a split second. Ooh, wait till you get to Kishgal on Nightmare. I want to see your tears.
Oh, and Edge S+ achievement done. The last few levels were a pain and full of memorizing a bunch of dick moves that would kill you if you didn't know they were coming.
This video has some interesting content, including a very, very insightful observation about the camera and lock on in Ocarina of Time; it wasn't just focused around Link, but around the space relationship between Link and an enemy. The game would achieve various different camera angles that both served gameplay and provided a sense of drama because, while using the lock on function, the camera would always ensure that both Link and the target were in view without imposing a visual perspective directly behind Link.
I watched a similar video from GDC. One of the God of War programmers was talking about the techniques they used for their camera. They went pretty far in depth about how they blended camera positions between the cinematic curve path for general exploration, keeping Kratos in the area near the middle of the screen, and an elaborate priority system of the enemies onscreen.
Nightmare Vagullion defeated with Yunica!
So this is Nightmare difficulty in Ys II.
Holy crappin' shit.
Perhaps this is frustration speaking, but I think some of the cracks in Monster Hunter 3 are becoming obvious to me. It's nothing too huge, but there's some balance issues in the movesets of some of the late game monsters. Some of them have powerful area-of-effect attacks, which is fine in and of itself, but not necessarily how in terms of how they relate to the telegraphs. For instance, one monster is both very large and has a lightning AoE attack that extends a fair distance out from its body. The tel, though, is very short, to the extent that the only way to reliably dodge the attack is if you're already exiting immediate combat range when the tel starts.
This means that you either have to be dipping in and out of close combat range the entire time, or simply accept that you're going to get hit. The second option is counter to the design principles of Monster Hunter, where enough skill will carry you through anything. The first option is also problematic because Monster Hunter thrives on player creativity, so reducing a fight to one approach is frustrating when compared to the options available against other monsters.
Another example has a monster have a sort of power up animation. When fighting the normal version of the monster, this is an opportunity to attack. When fighting a very high rank variation, not so much, since it has an AoE attack connected not to the end of its powerup, but most of the duration. Unless you have a ranged weapon or the correct, specific type of item in your inventory, you can only sit there and watch while it enters its advanced mode. I thought using barrel bombs might be a clever way to punish it for its denial tactics, but the AoE attack didn't detonate them -- despite most similar attacks doing exactly that.
These kinds of things are okay for some weapons, like gunlances and lances, which have a range of defensive options. When you're talking about long swords, switch axes, dual swords and whatnot, though, the only option is to get out of distance before the attack completes. Sometimes the tels are too short to allow for this, or if they're not, the evade distance doesn't take you out of range in time. This is frustrating because some monsters can pull out almost unavoidable AoE attacks very quickly if you're using weapons that don't block, and if even you sit it out a bit, the monsters can use these attacks for denial purposes -- thereby wasting your time, bringing you closer to the 50 minute time limit, and therefore bringing you closer to the fail state of the mission.
One of the monsters I'm talking about here has not only one, but two different kinds of highly effective denial attacks. It likes to spam one of them in particular, which protects it from a committed offensive. In addition, it has a damage type that temporarily robs you of elemental damage, lowering your damage output. No one of these elements is bad, but in unison, they produce an enemy that can deny your damage output throughout the fight, deal a ton of damage in return, and mostly importantly, can avoid being punished for spamming a certain technique. But like I said, the worst thing about these elements is that they punish the weapons I most like to use more heavily than others, and it doesn't seem any consideration was made of how these attacks would be avoided by certain movesets.
A good counterexample might be Diablos, which is fond of digging underground and bursting out at unpredictable angles and intervals. It deals a lot of damage and fights very quickly to begin with, but it also enters rage mode at the drop of a hate, making it rightly feared. But it has one critical weakness -- a sonic bomb used while it's underground will cause it to partially emerge and begin flailing in a panic, punishing it for using a type of attack that is otherwise very difficult to predict or counter. Likewise, Pink Rathian has a special lift-off tail whip she uses to launch herself into the air, which has a wide radius and is difficult to follow. If you're good, though, you can use the invincibility frames in a dodge animation to bypass it. If not, she simply punishes you for relying on what is otherwise a safe spot under her belly.
But yeah. I'm probably just frustrated and haven't found the proper solutions yet. But it does suck to abandon a mission near the timeout because I was held at bay by denial tactics, or to use up most of my inventory on a monster I know I'll beat, simply because it has an attack that punishes getting anywhere near it.
Nearing the end of Cthulhu Saves the World insane mode. Just finished Innsmouth and the first of three bonus dungeons.
The main challenge at this point is surviving the windy-ass dungeons, because you don't run out of encounters, you usually can't afford to take MP regen perks, and everything is faster than you so you'll usually see someone die before you can act unless Cthulhu is playing tank. Ember + October + Dacre winds up chewing through random encounters by just having Cthulhu defend the party while they wind up single-target Magic Hymn and fireball and Aerial Assault spam. By the time you finish, Ember gets Volcanic Aura, which lets October start throwing absurd 4k group fireballs on the first turn. If you keep her dark whip, she can spam everything in sight with 2k voids.
Bosses are basically Sharpe, Umi, and either Paws or Dacre depending on how they spread damage and how many buffs you need, and at this point they're the easiest part of the game despite not being able to use insanity on hardly anyone. With proper setup, you can get a 50+ combo going in just a few turns, and during the Siren Call last ditch you hit for like 60k damage.
Dem has an absolutely absurd amount of HP and prepares his instakill in just a few turns, but by the time you finish Innsmouth you can chew through it without much trouble at all. After I stunned him out of his first finisher, Umi was hitting him for like 12k per hit, and I might have been able to bring him down on the last turn without bothering to consume the 90x combo I'd built up. When he joined the party he was like 5 levels above everyone but Ember.
I made a poke at Soulcaster, and promptly died in the first turn before anyone could act. So I assume the only way to do it is to grind the final boss just to get several hundred more HP to survive the first couple turns.
I think this is the first time I've got a glitch in a game without trying.
So for anyone who still plays WoW, how long does it take to get in contact with account management support these days? I sent them a ticket about my account getting hacked over a week ago and haven't heard so much as a peep.
I did finally manage to dig up one of my CD keys and get through their account recovery stuff...and still haven't gotten through to a person who can just close the account, and I'm not even sure the recovery went through.
EDIT: Turns out they "answered" the ticket within just a few hours by telling me to go into webchat with a rep, and then sent this information...to the account I told them in the ticket that I couldn't log into. /facepalm
I finally managed to get through the account recovery (it asks for the real name attached to the account, and mine predated this), contacted a rep to get in and change my info, and I'm now in the process of getting it closed. All is well.
A new pokemon is named Gogoat.
I'm okay with this.
How much time do you spend waiting for it?
I just bought a used copy of Dragon Quest IX, and I have to say I'm really liking it so far.
Right now I'm at the point where you return to the Observatory, and you hear about how many of the Celestrians have fallen to the world of mortals as a result of the mysterious and powerful force that attacked them from the mortal realm. You then learn that your mentor, Aquila, was the apprentice of a Celstrian named Corvus, who disappeared many years ago when he went to the world below to assist mortals and gain their gratitude, and is now presumed dead.
Gee, I wonder who the main bad guy of the game will turn out to be?
I really wanted to like Dragon Quest IX. It had so much going for it, and then hamstrung itself with the MMO stuff.
Like, with interchangeable silent marionettes as your entire party, it was always just stuff happening to bit characters you wouldn't see again after an hour or so. And the writing was still superb enough to sometimes work powerfully (Coffinwell, and they manage to develop Aquila surprisingly well in absentia), but for the most part nobody stuck around long enough to get attached to except your annoying-ass bitchy fairy.
That, and the MMO stuff seriously fucks with game balance later on. It isn't that noticeable yet, but by about halfway through the game you start finding that there's a grand total of one class that's any good at dealing damage, two more good at support (one of which you can only unlock in the middle of the last dungeon and have to level up from scratch before the last boss because it's the only one with Multiheal), the rest are pretty useless, and your MP bar exists for the sole purpose of healing because attack magic is hilariously undertuned. That, and grottoes are painfully grindy because they're full of monsters so low-level they flee from you, then the boss nukes your entire party dead in two hits because they're tuned about 20 levels higher than their minions.
I personally like to assign personalities to each of the party members.
The Main Character is rather dim-witted, but at the same time is very perceptive and quick to catch on to what's going on around him despite being a total ditz.
Jenny, the Mage, is quiet and reserved in social situations but transforms into a gleeful sadist in battle.
Ian, the Priest, is intelligent and acts as the voice of reason for the other party members, and is constantly exasperated by the rest of the party's behavior.
Coleman, the Martial Artist, is extremely arrogant and believes himself to be the most valuable member of the team (which isn't far from the truth in terms of actual gameplay), but also shows some signs of genuinely caring for the others.