been re-enjoying The Case of the Golden Idol through the mind journey of Limmy
Doing my usual thing of having multiple games on the go despite lacking the concentration to juggle them all. Iāve mostly been replaying Persona 5 R and Bayonetta 1 & 2 on switch. Going from Bayo 1 to 2 is quite the transition - those colours! Iām otherwise playing through DQ5 on the PS2 via emulation, more out of curiosity. Seems like a nice way to play it but dunno if I can handle two enormous JRPGs at once
@āchazumaruā#p90565 well I ended up playing some of Scott Pilgrim vs the World last night with that pad. Itās hard! Thereās grinding to be done and I guess itās probably more fun played cooperatively. It didnāt occur to me to walk into shops during a level to buy stat boosts, and yes I have played River City Ransom and yes I did notice the big obvious reference to it in Scott's high school flashbacks in the books!!!
I always play as Kim!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@āSyzygyā#p91036 Oh nice, good to know. Admittedly I've only played a wee bit of it. I should probably make more of an effort given its prestige!
@āyesoā#p90799 Yeah, I agree with both of you. The game feels really good to play mechanic wise and it really plays well in every decision visually, but it feels more like a mixture of things and while there are some games which I enjoy this, I have the same feeling here as Anno: Mutationem, but milder since everything feels more cohesive.
I started signalis over the weekend but was a little negative on it. It follows the rhythm of survival horror but was lacking tension. Reading the positive impressions is making want to go back to it. I did like the shifts to first person in the plot oresentation. Nice, cold atmosphere in those bits. the super dense menu interface was cool too.
@āLeFishā#p90475 Well I finished Returnal last night and it turns out that I was taking ages to make progress because I was being cautious when exploring new areas - that was not the case after a few deaths and I was more familiar with the layouts.
Unlocking more abilities made things a whole lot easier to the point that it took me only a handful of attempts to beat the fourth biome and I subsequently beat the fifth and final ones in the same run, and beat the game. I do think that it's not just down to feeling more comfortable with the game, and that it's also down to unlocking certain skills, upgrades and weapons that are disproportionately better than the ones earlier in the game. In that respect I do stand by saying that it's a game that feels like it doesn't want to be played - it requires some real perseverance early on.
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@āseasonsā#p91130 It follows the rhythm of survival horror but was lacking tension.
I felt that way at first too, but it really starts to pile on in the second act. Namely in increasing enemies and doing some cheeky stuff to limit your self defense abilities.
It's gaining steam as it goes along.
For example, the boss fight I had was actually pretty _good_, which is a rarity in the survival horror genre.
I finished Bayonetta 3. Felt like it had way too much in the game and could have done with more focus but those were some extremely impressive set pieces and the game never stopped surprising me.
Really struggled with Viola's combat though. Her timing window to trigger Witch Time was too different and made those sections really frustrating.
@āChopemonā#p91179 I was thinking that Iād be rushing to get Bayonetta 3, but I have just now realised that I donāt think I ever really played more than maybe half an hour of 2 (and really thinking about it, I cannot recall if I finished 1 or not).
I have Bayonetta 1 and 2 on my Switch, maybe I'll just go and play either or both of those instead.
I'm not sure _what_ I want to play presently. I've recently played a few slow paced, story driven games (visual novels and point & click adventures, etc) and think I need something different but I'm not sure I'm feeling like I want to bounce against a wall of difficulty in a _hard_ action game. I can't remember, do Bayonetta 1 or 2 have a _ah to heck with it make it easy enough I can mostly breeze through_ mode? I'm not after any Gaming Kudos here, I just want to sit back and press some buttons that feel good while Verified Dumb Shit happens on the screen.
Considering going back to my Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon save also. I think I _wanted_ to like that game a whole lot more than I did.
@āChopemonā#p91179 Iām still in the middle of the game but Iām loving it precisely for how excessive, maximalist and wacky it is. They didnāt say no to any of the ideas they had and thatās awesome. Coming from Bayonetta 2, which was one of the most conservative sequels I've ever played, I appreciate how they decided to go above and beyond with this one.
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@ārejjā#p91188 do Bayonetta 1 or 2 have a ah to heck with it make it easy enough I can mostly breeze through mode?
They do have automatic combo modes, although I think those counterintuitively make the games more difficult for not having as much control. At least for B1, it doesn't make enemies much easier to deal withāthey do less damage, but you still have to dodge at the right times and getting hit never feels goodāand you have little control over how to deal with them. YMMV but Bayonetta 2 has more frustratingly aggressive enemies I think
I would suggest playing a different game, personally. The Verifiably Dumb Shit quotient is pretty high in 1 but is proportionally demanding/frictional. Do you specifically want to play a game on Switch?
I started Bayo 3 last night, and, likeā¦ I probably shouldnāt have read as much as I did beforehand, because I would have certainly enjoyed it more leading up to the letdown of the ending. I donāt usually worry about spoilers, but in this one case I think my enjoyment is without question reduced as a result of spoiling things. Lessons learned!
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@āJoJoestarā#p91191 Iām loving it precisely for how excessive, maximalist and wacky it is.
I appreciate how it immediately pulled out all the stops with bonkers shit, much in the way 2 did compared to 1. There's just moments of absolutely joyful bullshit, and I'm hoping it never stops (spoiler: >!it will stop!<). The gameplay itself is quite good, but I'm hoping it doesn't end up going down the road of jamming in as many mechanics as are physically possible, given the constraints of what the controller can do. I'm only a few chapters in so there's plenty of time for it to happen! And it's not that I'm saying it's too complicated, it's that I will inevitably forget that some mechanics exist if I'm given too much to remember.
I'm also trying to decide if I want to attempt to play anything alongside it since I have an unpleasant but necessary flight coming up in the next few days and it might be nice to have options on multiple big dumb games.
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@ācaptainā#p91196 I would suggest playing a different game, personally. The Verifiably Dumb Shit quotient is pretty high in 1 but is proportionally demanding/frictional. Do you specifically want to play a game on Switch?
Switch is not a requirement, no. I just mentioned that as I never owned a WiiU so the Switch was my first opportunity to play Bayonetta 2.
I'm all for a different game, I just don't really know what. There's a whole bunch of stuff I want to play, just when I look at them I don't necessarily want to play them _right now_.
@āJoJoestarā#p91191 that is all true and wonderful but at a certain point, the excess leads to a lack of polish in readability and while certain set pieces are amazing in their surprise, they become frustrating because the experience hasn't been polished enough.
I didn't stop being surprised by it but in the last third I went from using almost no items to almost draining my inventory.
The move to include your demon buddy pals as summonable combat participants means that the combat arenas have become bigger and that combined with the larger enemy variety and the enemy visual aesthetic being harder to read caused me (admittedly a low grade scrub with bad execution) to get hit by attacks that were too hard to read/coming from off camera.
All of this is definitely YMMV because I can see people clicking with the combat in a way that I couldn't. It is definitely a thrill ride though and I was incredibly impressed with the scope and visual execution of the set pieces. Oh! And there is a demon thing that you get that has a wildly different mechanic to the rest that you could probably build a 3 hour game out of which is very cool and impressive.
In typical fashion, Iāve been sampling some random stuff in my backlog instead of finishing any of the many games Iām in the middle ofā¦
On Halloween I was looking for something spooky in my Switch library and I decided to finally play _Paratopic_ after being tempted by the grimy PSX-inspired aesthetic for years. Well....I _really_ wanted to like this game, but sadly I think the visual motif is the beginning and end of my appreciation :( I do like the idea of a bite-sized aesthetic-driven narrative experience (_Gravity Bone_ and _Thirty Flights of Loving_ were pretty impressive for their time!), but for some reason the barely-hinted-at story here just fell flat for me. I could have probably given that a pass and just basked in the atmosphere, but the actual gameplay was honestly pretty mind-numbing. I nearly shut it off when the middle section had me trudging through a way-too-big forest map with a walk speed that may have been slower than an over-encumbered Elder Scrolls protagonist. I discovered that there was a "run" button, but that was just barely enough to motivate me to see it until the (very abrupt) ending. I feel bad being too harsh with this one because I truly respect the creators and what they were going for...maybe I'll enjoy one of Doc's other projects more. I've heard that _Adios_ game is supposed to be pretty good!
Immediately after that I booted up _Powerslave Exhumed_, which was something of a tonal shift lol. The crazy movement speed was exceptionally liberating and I just ate up the dorky campiness of it all, especially when it came to walking up to camel.jpg to travel between maps. I don't have any nostalgia for the original game to draw from, but I really like what Nightdive offers for customization, right down to the ability to turn on "Fixed Point Geometry" to inject some real early 3D engine jank. I wish every game had that option!
I also finally decided to give _Bayonetta_ (1) a play on PC, just in time to be fully two games behind what everyone else in the world is talking about. I don't have a ton of experience with Stylish Action Games or whatever they're supposed to be called, and it felt like some mashy inscrutable visual noise at the very start, but two chapters in I feel like I'm somewhat getting the hang of it. I'm also struck by how dynamic the gameplay can be--I expected non-stop combat encounters, but the traversal and hangy-out interstitial bits lend some nice pacing to the game. Other than the gross leeriness of some of the camera-work, I'm also really enjoying the presentation! The VO work is wonderfully over-the-top (especially Enzo!) and the characters actually play off each other well. The cinematography in the cutscenes is surprisingly impressive, as is the overall sense of style and confidence from Bayo herself. I would like to see this one through, maybe bump down the difficulty if necessary.
@ārejjā#p91201 Iāve been in and out of this same situation recentlyāI probably shouldnāt have said anything because I donāt really know what to recommend as an alternative! Youāre already playing and not really into a Yakuza (though maybe 7 is the wrong one, idk). Youāve already played Asuraās Wrath. Bayonetta is cool, itās just I recently finished replaying it (on Normal, the default difficulty, though there is one
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[color=gold]_~"Bury me with my posts"~_[color=black] - **Tastefully yours, Gaagaagiins of the Abyss <3** [color=gold]**#boycottbigbelt**
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@ācaptainā#p91238 Youāre already playing and not really into a Yakuza (though maybe 7 is the wrong one, idk).
Just for a bit of context, I _did_ like it however I just .. stopped
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/wdi0wJb.png]
(note that play time on pretty much every game for me is somewhat inaccurate, I have a habit of leaving things running in the background or idling in menus while I do things like walk away, or fall asleep, etc)
I think the last thing I did was grind through what seemed like an optional side dungeon in the sewers, only to get to the end of it and be absolutely wrecked by a huge robot vacuum that was genuinely impossible to beat. I guess it turns out it wasn't so much an optional side dungeon as something I'm probably supposed to do considerably later on.
I also realised that I just wasn't having as much fun with the turn based combat compared to other Yakuza titles. There are moves that require specific positioning for party members, and the game gives exactly zero control over movement and positioning.
...maybe I should check out Judgement.
(apologies for the double-post)
I briefly contemplated Judgement, but thought it would be far wiser to play something I already own or have access to. Iāve had Hellblade: Senuaās Sacrifice in my Steam library for ages and had never gotten around to playing it. I figured I might as well! I've heard good things about it.
Early impression: I like what I've seen so far -- which, mind, is just the intro walk and be whispered at sequence and the first combat encounter so far. The buttons feel good to push, and there seems to be at least a little bit of depth in the combat. There's a red flash that I haven't worked out what it means yet, but there seems to be a parry/riposte system with an exact-block type timing.
That first encounter:
https://i.imgur.com/VhKdDD6.mp4
The presentation has drawn my attention, and having nice enough buttons will help hold it. I guess I'm playing this, for now.