@“saddleblasters”#p92559
Yeah, I played those ones with my son earlier. They were both definitely more challenging than this one, and that Luigi one is a hectic, wild kind of fun! There's a real thrill to finishing a level with five seconds left.
@“edward”#p92566 The weird thing to me about the New Super Mario Bros games is just how little 2D Mario there was before them. There are now more NSMB games made over a longer time period than the thing they're riffing on. Pre-NSMB, the only fully mature 2D Marios were SMB3 and SMW, which is of course obvious, but also very strange to think about given how massive the idea of 2D Mario feels.
@“esper”#p92556
to gaag‘s point don’t get too invested in the mechanics and consider the bigger picture which is really just about how you want to get from point A to B or Z.
if you like grinding, have you got a *game* ahead of you. if you don't like grinding, have you got a *game* ahead of you!
you very quickly assert your dominion over BTs, though they become something more of an obnoxious impediment than a spoopy one (to the credit of the narrative)
I think some early BTs are forced encounters and there may even be a forced fail in there to introduce you to the Not Game Over mechanic.
When I started DS, I treated every package as extremely important and got so mad when BTs messed up a delivery. Packages should be treated as easy come, easy go and missions are never lost, they reappear after an amount of time.
For BT encounters, just crouch, hold your breath and ping as often as possible to see them and then just take it slowly. Soon you will either be able to zoom through patches of them without too much trouble, go around them or turn the tables and become the hunter. The game follows the Kojima open world curve and your unlocks and upgrades out pace the enemies' abilities to keep up with you and eventually to you become a god out for a stroll.
More than any other game, I wish I could play Death Stranding for the first time again.
Death Stranding really does a wonderful job of creating an open space that‘s both incredibly specific and allows you to fill in your own anxieties/general miasma of being alive right now. I’ve mentioned it before, but I coincidentally started playing it on January 6th, 2021 (here in the US) and I tell you what
I have started Death Stranding twice now, once on my PS4 when I bought the game upon its release, and later on Steam when I grabbed the Director's Cut.
I drifted off and stopped playing both times at around about the same point: I do not enjoy having to deal with (either by combat or flight) the "MULE"s. As mentioned above, BT encounters become unconcerning rather quickly, but the human enemies are a frustrating hindrance.
I want to like this game, I want to hang out in it and have a cool time wandering around the environment; a big orange blob-circle on my map appearing is just so demoralising for me that I quit and cannot muster the will to return and continue.
How did you all get past this? Is this problem unique to me?
@“rejj”#p92612 It’s been a couple of years (edit: three?!), but I remember disliking the MULE stuff too. Apart from a couple of story-critical encounters I think I was able to keep my interaction with them minimal. You don’t actually need to raid their camps if you don’t want to and if you encounter them by mistake then the basic tools and skills are enough to deal with them.
It’s one of those games where you can pretty much ignore the systems you don’t like and still have a rewarding time. Most of it is still there in the post-game too should you want to go back and engage with stuff you missed (like I did with MULEs).
@“rejj”#p92612 It‘s been a while for me, too, but I think I just didn’t hesitate to toggle Easy mode for enemy encounters (believe you can change it at any time?) and relied heavily on whatever the best bola gun available to Norman at the time was
For the MULES you need to get the non lethal assault rifle or shotgun and the armour plates. They are super easy to take out with the rifle. When you need to go on a raid to their base, don't go with loads of cargo. Set out just to do that raid then leave.
If you don't have access to the assault rifle, try luring them out and one shorting with the Bola gun.
And like tokucowboy says, just switch it to easy.
Like all parts of this game, the first time you engage with a feature, it is hard work that is quite off putting. But then after a while, your mastery combined with the upgrades outpacing the rest of the game means it becomes completely trivial and you can get back to ferrying packages between Junji Ito and Sam Lake.
@“Chopemon”#p92627 oh and equip loads of blood packs on your rig. When you get low on health, they'll be used automatically and you can have multiple health bars.
Welp, couldn't resist paying $60 for Tactics Ogre again.
30 minute impressions:
-English voice acting isn't horrible, I might stick with it instead of turning VO off
-If anything it's making me curious what this script would sound like in a stage play or something
-It turns out a mouse was probably the best way to play this game all along! ...does the Switch version have touch control?
how bad did they fuck up the pixel art on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the most atrocious)
Yeah I‘m a bolo boy, I’m still over by the weather place, and I find MULE stuff way less stressful than BTs. I got the directors cut upgrade for $5 but I‘m unable to download an entire new game over my mobile network to upgrade it. I thought it’d be easier than installing a whole second copy of the game, sheesh.
Anyways with MULE camps I just go through, prentending to sneak and then bolo them all one by one. if they get too close I put a package in my hand and smack them or just running charge attack them. Also if I can get in a truck I run them over. Not saying it's that much fun anymore, but not very difficult either.
@“yeso”#p92633 hmm I‘m no purist but if 1 is whatever you prefer between a good scanline filter/1:1 original pixels, 10 is FF5/6 for iOS, this is maybe 5 or 6. Not really a fan of the smoothing but there’s definitely games that do it worse, and the dithering is bad, but I‘m sitting back in my office chair with my glasses off it’s not sticking out to me.
me playing Atari 50 : Hm I wonder why Nolan Bushnell isn't featured in all these interview
me _after looking up Nolan Bushnell on Google for less than 30 seconds_ : oh thank fucking god that creep isn't in
beautiful game anthology though. wholeheartedly recommend
I was hanging out with some friends last night. They have a projector hooked up to a PS5 and we ended up playing The Witness.
I think I've talked about my dislike for the game in this thread before, but last night was a way better time. I think the problem with the game is it's too quiet. When playing with friends we could discuss thoughts, make fun of Jonathon "Jo" Blow, and share the puzzles between us. It was a much more chill environment.
They still got stuck on that one early puzzle where you trace the rocks but the post is twisted. Luckily I remembered that as one of the few puzzles I had to llok up originally. We were all sort of making fun of the game at first, but once we stopped we had mostly come around. The art house with the coloured glass is cool, but the tetris puzzles in the nearby swamp get old fast.
I guess working in a group adds more determination to finish a difficult puzzle. When playing alone, I would get frustrated then walk more around the island.
https://twitter.com/MaxwellFrostFL/status/833424206620717056?s=20&t=Js7maBfhzCb35eUeCenhPg
This may upset some people, so lemme say this is just my opinion– I unsubscribe my headcanon to some stuff that may be canonically correct about kingdom hearts.
The story of the Kingdom Hearts series was obviously being made up as they went along, and sequels were not on the table before the original game proved to be a hit. They then went on constantly retconning stuff, because that's how you make sequels for something that wasn't planned to have any. The first game was insular, aside for a secret unlockable teaser which is vastly different from what ended up happening, and was no guarantee of a sequel.
I don't think any of this nobodies stuff was intended from the start. An early cutscene shows a scared Don Bluth looking manlet having his heart sucked into a vortex, then a heartless appears, not where the man once sat, but where the vortex was. This was always confusing to me. Where they trying to avoid a mature rating?... The sequels do way too much reaching to create new beings from every angle of this already vague process. Also I will not accept that the Final Fantasy squad's home world is supposed to be Hollow Bastion, lol. They are from Final Fantasy land. And no way will I accept that Kairi is a transplant.
I think life will be more simple and clean if you only play the first game and just ignore the rest. A lot of the overcomplication and retconning in every sequel does a lot to remove the simple and cleanliness of the original game. Disney sucks anyways. I'm gonna keep playing though :p because these games feel real good in the hands as Square action RPGs, and have great music and stylish design overall. Even the moment to moment scenario and character writing is good and compelling, but the big picture, the lack of consistency, the timeline writing is real real bad, like a fifth grader wrote it.
The original game was called Kingdom Hearts, and you can see how they'd come to that when conceptualizing a Disney Fantasy RPG. By game 3 it should be called Worlds of Nobodies.
It just compounds upon itself too. Namine was just "kairi's shadow" in chain of memes. They were clearly not planning this from the start.
Sora, Kairi and Riku are just kids I just want them to be normal kids! I want the really huge shoes to be their most abnormal feature. none of this crazy jargon!
@“Syzygy”#p92683 I thought the robed guy was a prime example of making it up as they went along. That stuff was cool and mysterious, and wasn‘t originally intended to be explained. It’s Star Wars syndrome, explaining every little thing ruins it. I think that comparison is apt. Agree to disagree!
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@“Syzygy”#p92686 What are we agreeing to disagree on?
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To my mind whether it’s done well is a separate question from whether it was “originally intended to be explained”,
https://media4.giphy.com/media/3o85xIO33l7RlmLR4I/giphy.gif
>and uh, Nojima Kazushige does not exactly have a track record of writing ambiguous mysteries. He’s the spiritual opposite of J.J. Abrams.
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advent children, subspace emissary, FFVII, Crisis Core,
call it what you want. I think the first KH game is better in seclusion. so is FFVII. Subspace Emissary checks out, lol.
I don't think it was some big brained move planned totally from the start. The ending teaser trailer has cloaked kids dual wielding keyblades. I think it was a fun mystery that they then explained after the fact when it was sequel time.