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Comments
Christ, X-Com doesn't fuck around.
Get satellites, try to get laser weapons quickly (you'll need engineers), smoke bombs are handy, don't even bother preparing to capture aliens until later.
It was kind of funny that my first time through the boss rush, I completely demolished the Arthropod, but ate shit on the Construct and Silent Sands guys, and I'm not entirely sure why because I remember they were easy as hell. And then proceeded to wreck everything else like a cheesecake.
Turns out Arthropod is all about the setup. Put enough care into spreading out the first phase, and his health bar goes down in like two passes with minimal poison bombing.
By "Construct", do you mean that gear-handed guy? I remember him being pretty easy, but then again, it might just be that Yunica is better equipped to dismantle him. Her lightning ability is an absolute killer in a local area, so I could often catch a hand, his head and/or his "helper" in one charge.
Persona 4 Golden is unsurprisingly good. It's a shame that the new social link girl is a text book tsundere.
She's a poet too though. That's pretty cool.
Also, I think Extra Credits bit on religion is the best they've done.
Unsurprisingly, the comments section for that particular Extra Credits video is a baleful pit of rage and fury at the fact that the Extra Credits people didn't choose to disavow religion entirely and claimed that science has an element of faith (which it does, which I say as an atheist-leaning agnostic).
Playing The Last Remnant.
It's pretty cool.
^^Existence itself has an element of faith in it, right down to the 'does your red look like my red' thing.
The people who cling to science as a complete and utter truth and disavow any spiritualism ever become just as dogmatic as the fundamentalist they purport to despise. Think maybe there's something we can learn from that?
I'm trying to rack my brain on how a game would properly deal with faith in a way outside of the narrative. The problem with gameplay mechanics is that they're... mechanics and as such they pin themselves down to objective a bit too much for faith to really play a hand in it. It's the same as my problem with magic in vidya, really.
The construct is ridiculously easy for Hugo too. The Trap Mines tear through the gears AND his head like nobody's business.
I was just sucking for some reason. And I'm not even sure how.
I think faith-based mechanics could work on the basis of psychology and in terms of wider interaction with an environment. For instance, you might be able to show faith via a set of mundane actions, especially at risk to oneself. Kind of like when Luke confronts Vader and Palpy at the end of Ep.6, and his ultimate show of Jedi completeness was throwing his lightsaber aside and rejecting the execution of a fallen enemy. His powers and skills with a lightsaber are rendered obsolete against his understanding and sense of compassion and rightness.
So I suppose the thing would be to have a game measure, passively and perhaps without notifying the player, when an action has been taken in literal good faith.
So, like Silent Hill: Shattered memories? I'm not trying to be a sarcastic ass, I'm genuinely asking.
Though the Luke Skywalker example reminds me a bit too much of the final act of Prince of Persia: Two Thrones where you have to punch your evil self into submission and then revoke violence in a cutscene. The thing that really annoyed me was that I saw where the plotline was going I spent like twenty minutes just looking for some other solution when I really just had to stab the dude some more to learn violence was wrong.
Cecil Harvey says he sheathed his sword before it was cool.
^And then went back to killing stuff.
YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO THINK ABOUT THAT
Reached World 4 of Donkey Kong Country Returns and I think this might be where the difficulty starts to ramp up.
@Malk
I haven't played either of those games. But it sounds like the Prince of Persia example was too obvious in-game. Like it was obviously setting that conclusion up and removing interactivity in the process.
Whatever the thing is, it shouldn't be obvious but it should have a frame of reference. For instance, if there's a game where you play a knight and therefore one of the themes is acting in accordance with knightly virtue, the game should measure that kind of thing while the player isn't looking and then respond in turn.
This could be subtle; perhaps enemies have a random chance of entering a begging-for-life state when they're at low HP (with some enemies perhaps having a 100% chance). This might raise an invisible "mercy" counter by 1 upon activation of the begging event, which is then reduced by 1 should you choose to kill them anyway. The game never needs to tell you that it's taking these measurements, but might spring some alteration of an event on you at some stage and reference your in-game behaviour through said event.
But where mercy is an appropriate measurement to take for a warrior with a code, a puzzle game about a modern Buddhist struggling to reconcile themselves in the midst of a materialistic world doesn't require it, of course. You'd have a different set of invisible measurements, and they might not even aim to condemn your actions, instead commenting on different interpretations of Buddhist philosophy and how religion changes with the context of eras.
I guess what I'm saying here is that it's not so much making faith somewhat mechanical that's the issue, but allowing the player to see all the numbers and calculations. It's about keeping completeness of understanding out of the player's reach, but giving them enough of a frame of reference to speculate. Much like real faith, or like magic.
About the only way I can think of to explore it in mechanics rather than narrative is one of those acid trippy artsy-fartsy games like Passage or something.
I dunno, I'm happy keeping it to narrative myself, though I wish writers would have the balls to actually work it in respectfully as a complex and nuanced philosophical issue. It's one of the reasons I wish Dragon Quest 9 was a character-driven story rather than a scaffold for a shallow MMO -- the very setting begs the question even more powerfully than 8 did (which handled the whole corruption vs. goodness in the church rather well, honestly, and evenly), but the only persistent character is an annoying cutesy JRPG peanut gallery mascot.
I mean, with a developed party they could've started seriously digging into the implications of the whole secret society of angels doing a structurally thankless job for goodness only knows how long without even knowing why, getting screwed out of salvation at the last second, the main character's separation issues, characters joining up with a being they may not have believed existed or may not even like the prospect of, dissonance between what the mortals believe and what said angels really are, everyone being thrown for a loop when they figure out that not only was God not the nicest guy and the world was basically on existential parole, but now he's kinda dead, and all kinds of other meaty stuff. This was potentially gold.
But no. We got interchangeable mannequins to play stat-dress-up with and this prat.
So I think the most succint way I can describe how much I dislike Book of Memories is that with the utterly needless character creator, I made a character who looks like the Riddler.
So a lot of bundles come with Desura keys and/or Steam keys these days.
If I don't redeem them, will the devs or distributors save money that would have gone to Desura or Steam? Or is that stuff already paid for up front?
I'm pretty sure that stuff is already paid for up front. Wouldn't make much sense otherwise.
So I just started a Nightmare run with Yunica. The first midboss took some doing but it was did.
I might have come to a premature end though. The Beast lags to less than 1 fps when I get close, for some reason more than when I was Hugo. I managed to power through it long enough to get to his stun, and it's mechanically impossible to get up on his shoulder under that framerate because standing next to the boss while he's stunned results in about one frame every three seconds. Furthermore, it's also impossible to quit during a boss fight, and the stun lasts indefinitely, so I can't even die.
So I had to alt-F4 out of the game.
FML.
What the fuck is eating so much processor time with this boss? It doesn't happen anywhere else in the game.
Tales of Vesperia is cool. (I should have responded weeks ago XD)
Also, waiting for Bioshock Infinite and Fire Emblem Awakening.
Gah.
I really want to like The Last Remnant, but... in every major fight I've been in, there's so many elements of luck to it that I've had to redo the fights at least half a dozen times because the game repeatedly chose to have multiple armies attack Rush's Union, spam their most powerful attacks, and not give me a Heal attack on the next turn.
It's to the point that as soon as the Fiery Idol attacks, I have to turn around and Heal even if the attack did a whole 90 damage to me because any of his fucking Fire attacks hit me for just under max HP. And that's only if I can even whittle it down to just the Fiery Idol.
Are you playing the console or PC version?
PC version.
Whats your worse?
Mine is jumping near the sun with a 3 man boarding party beaming into the shield room.
This actually looks really good. It's gonna have all 9 Jinchuriki and all Seven Swordsman as playable.
Also Kushina.
Found a workaround for the Velagunder lag. He's down on Nightmare. And it was indeed a nightmare. Those fucking recovery worms -- at the very end of the fight I just barely stunned him out of a meal, halfway through his inhalation, that would've brought him back up to about half.
Yunica's first line in the cutscene following?
"How the hell did I survive that?"
My thoughts exactly. Also you're refreshingly not a douchecake like Hugo.
Mista and Dio :allears: