Somewhat related, but I am trying Ninja Gaiden Sigma. I actually played a little bit in college at a friend's dorm, but not much otherwise. Ninja Gaiden Black I do own, but the save file is gone, and I barely got that far from the beginning.
What are you currently playing?
- Thread starter Nick Calandra
- Start date
I completed the first two chapters Ninja Gaiden Sigma. I can see how this is the most DMC1-like of the franchise. The camera angels, exploration, and maps you can pick up to explore the areas. I do know many of the puzzles and complicated platforming was taken out in this version, but that does not bother me too much. I am trying some of the ninja trials now.
I tried emulating my PS2 copy of Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance on my Steam deck, but the performance was... disappointing.
Hovering between 30/40FPS, slowdown, and stutter. Not really playable, unfortunately.
They did rerelease the first and second games to run natively on Xbox One/PS4/Switch/PC over the last year, but despite both games being 20 years old at this point, they were still both slapped with a massive £30 price tag.
So, that attempt failed. I guess I will just wait until they go on sale, or something.
Hovering between 30/40FPS, slowdown, and stutter. Not really playable, unfortunately.
They did rerelease the first and second games to run natively on Xbox One/PS4/Switch/PC over the last year, but despite both games being 20 years old at this point, they were still both slapped with a massive £30 price tag.
So, that attempt failed. I guess I will just wait until they go on sale, or something.
Last edited:
I got LIMBO about 10 years ago in one of the earliest Humble Bundle deals, and despite a few attempts, I never actually stuck with it long enough to finish it (despite it only being about 3 hours long). But, today I decided to finally sit down and go through it. About time, I guess.
Depressing artstyle. Lots of puzzles. Probably more puzzles than I was expecting/would have liked.
Im not really sure what I expected Limbo to be, but I certainly wasn't expecting to be dealing with magnets and anti-gravity rooms by the end.
I really did like the atmosphere of the game when you were navigating through the wilderness, dealing with hostile wildlife and the murderous locals. The game did kind of lose me when it started getting more industrial, though. Dodging bear traps or figuring out how to cross a lake is one thing, but dodging buzzsaws, and jumping over electric floors, just feels a whole lot more gamey.
In the end, I do feel like the game did start to overstay its welcome a little bit. There is only so long that I can go, just going from room to room, solving puzzles completely without context.
Overall, the game was fine. More puzzles than I expected, and it went in a direction that I didn't particularly like. Probably wouldn't play it again.
Depressing artstyle. Lots of puzzles. Probably more puzzles than I was expecting/would have liked.
Im not really sure what I expected Limbo to be, but I certainly wasn't expecting to be dealing with magnets and anti-gravity rooms by the end.
I really did like the atmosphere of the game when you were navigating through the wilderness, dealing with hostile wildlife and the murderous locals. The game did kind of lose me when it started getting more industrial, though. Dodging bear traps or figuring out how to cross a lake is one thing, but dodging buzzsaws, and jumping over electric floors, just feels a whole lot more gamey.
In the end, I do feel like the game did start to overstay its welcome a little bit. There is only so long that I can go, just going from room to room, solving puzzles completely without context.
Overall, the game was fine. More puzzles than I expected, and it went in a direction that I didn't particularly like. Probably wouldn't play it again.
Last edited:
Ninja Gaiden Sigma - This is where the exploration opens up. Chapter 3 gives you some of the this, but once you make it to the city in Chapter 4, the game becomes a Metroidvania. Now this is the part where the DMC1 vibes can be felt. I am stopping for tonight.
All goals on School in THPS 1+2 completed, with a score on my best run of 170,000. Next up is the Mall, which has been improved a lot from the original version in one major way: hitting the end of the track doesn't immediately end your run, but instead teleports you back to the top where you can continue to use your remaining time to score more points or try to catch another objective.
I didn't play the original, but I've heard about that change, and I think that's definitely one for the better.
I didn't play the original, but I've heard about that change, and I think that's definitely one for the better.
Well I did reach the mark of a true uber-1337 mega hax0r gamer: I beat Malenia solo after about 2 hours of attempts. I still think that fight can go choke on a fat one. To me it came down to two words: boring and inconsistent. It's boring for the same reason Maliketh is boring: you spend so much time of the fight dodging her interminable attack chains that I just wanted to scream "***** YOU DONE YET?", and when there is an attack window it's for like 1, maybe 2 attacks, then it's back dodge dodge revolution. In most other fights you can hit trade to some extent, but with Malenia the margin of error is so slim and her damage so massive that it's basically not worth it, not to mention the lifesteal. She can combo her various moves seamlessly into another so it's almost impossible to say for certain if she's going to stop or switch to another combo. The only move that consistently opens up an opportunity is when she slams her sword into the ground, but that's like 20% of the time. So if you want to only capitalize on definite opportunities, the fight's going to be incredibly boring.
But the more frustrating aspect is the inconsistency. There's just no logic, pattern or reason to her AI. The difficulty can differ massively depending on how she happens to feel that particular attempt: sometimes she'll be placid as a sheep, sometimes her aggression is turned up to 11 zillion. And as a result I didn't feel much of a sense of accomplishment from defeating her, I just felt it was 70% down to me getting lucky with her AI. On multiple occasions in the second phase she literally did 3 of her jump up in the air attacks in a row, with zero chance for retaliation in between. So all I could do is just keep dodging and wait for her majesty to grace me with like 1,1 second of downtime where I could heal.
And of course there's still the Waterfowl Dance, which I somewhat managed to not die to consistently, but never found a consistent pattern to dodging it. Again, I feel like I just got lucky, because on my winning attempt I just happened to be far enough away that I could just run away from the first 2 flurries. I still think that move straight up ruins the fight, because it breaks up the otherwise pretty good flow of the fight: you're just constantly dreading "is she gonna do it now? Is she gonna do it now?" And again, there's no logic or consistency to how many times she'll use it, which is a huge factor in the challenge of the fight. Easy solutions could be something like setting a HP threshold where she always uses it after passing said threshold. Or setting a hard cap on how many times she can use it per fight (once for phase 1, twice for phase 2 for example).
So yeah, major poop-ass fight, not fun, not exciting, never doing it again outside of co-op.
But the more frustrating aspect is the inconsistency. There's just no logic, pattern or reason to her AI. The difficulty can differ massively depending on how she happens to feel that particular attempt: sometimes she'll be placid as a sheep, sometimes her aggression is turned up to 11 zillion. And as a result I didn't feel much of a sense of accomplishment from defeating her, I just felt it was 70% down to me getting lucky with her AI. On multiple occasions in the second phase she literally did 3 of her jump up in the air attacks in a row, with zero chance for retaliation in between. So all I could do is just keep dodging and wait for her majesty to grace me with like 1,1 second of downtime where I could heal.
And of course there's still the Waterfowl Dance, which I somewhat managed to not die to consistently, but never found a consistent pattern to dodging it. Again, I feel like I just got lucky, because on my winning attempt I just happened to be far enough away that I could just run away from the first 2 flurries. I still think that move straight up ruins the fight, because it breaks up the otherwise pretty good flow of the fight: you're just constantly dreading "is she gonna do it now? Is she gonna do it now?" And again, there's no logic or consistency to how many times she'll use it, which is a huge factor in the challenge of the fight. Easy solutions could be something like setting a HP threshold where she always uses it after passing said threshold. Or setting a hard cap on how many times she can use it per fight (once for phase 1, twice for phase 2 for example).
So yeah, major poop-ass fight, not fun, not exciting, never doing it again outside of co-op.
That's why to beat Melania I just did mimic tear + bleed, and kept charging her with attacks until RNG let me prevent her from even doing any of her bullshit.
The best criticism I heard of ER is that you're more likely to play the meta, not naturally explore and figure stuff out, and I think that's true. The "magic" of the first two Souls and Bloodborne has been replaced with, as you say, "true uber-1337 mega hax0r gamer" b.s.
Funny enough I am playing Cuphead and each "boss" fight is basically about throwing yourself at them 100x until you get it perfect. But because it's 2D and each attack follows the classic old-school game pattern of telegraph+reaction, it is still "fair" even if insanely hard because there are a million attacks.
So comparing the experience of throwing myself at Melania 100x vs throwing myself at Baronness Von Bon Bon 100x, each attempt at Melania after first few felt like a masochistic self-punishment that I was trying to get past so I can move on with my life, which each attempt at the Baronnes was something silly and fun to do with my hands while I listen to podcast. I just have to be in the right mood for it.
So my Cuphead play-through will be very slow or even incomplete- since it's not part of a franchise I've committed myself to, it's ok if I don't beat it. And as a bunch of interesting stuff is coming to GamePass over the next month, I'll leave and come back.
The best criticism I heard of ER is that you're more likely to play the meta, not naturally explore and figure stuff out, and I think that's true. The "magic" of the first two Souls and Bloodborne has been replaced with, as you say, "true uber-1337 mega hax0r gamer" b.s.
Funny enough I am playing Cuphead and each "boss" fight is basically about throwing yourself at them 100x until you get it perfect. But because it's 2D and each attack follows the classic old-school game pattern of telegraph+reaction, it is still "fair" even if insanely hard because there are a million attacks.
So comparing the experience of throwing myself at Melania 100x vs throwing myself at Baronness Von Bon Bon 100x, each attempt at Melania after first few felt like a masochistic self-punishment that I was trying to get past so I can move on with my life, which each attempt at the Baronnes was something silly and fun to do with my hands while I listen to podcast. I just have to be in the right mood for it.
So my Cuphead play-through will be very slow or even incomplete- since it's not part of a franchise I've committed myself to, it's ok if I don't beat it. And as a bunch of interesting stuff is coming to GamePass over the next month, I'll leave and come back.
Booted up MK11 on Steam after like a year since my last session and was pleased to see that my DualSense controller is now fully supported with actual PS button icons. Picked Skarlet and did a Champion tower. Love how solid and smooth the DualSense feels for fighting games. I think I’ll make a run at grinding it out with Sindel though, as I’ve already played the bell out of Skarlet and a few others on the PS4 version.
Also dipped back into Kingdom Come: Deliverance since I’m closer to being done with it than The Witcher 3. I don’t like how they did the save system. Yes, they were trying to reduce save scumming, but quick save is a PC staple, and they could’ve also just used a persistent auto save system like FROM to avoid it. Maybe the game wasn’t designed well enough to support that though, due to the way quests are structured and how they can often just expire if you simply wait too long.
It reinforces my distaste of this practice, and that quest progression is much better off being event-driven, especially in big open world games. After this and TW3, all I will have left in my backlog for open world stuff is finishing Infamous: Second Son and Horizon: Forbidden West, but I might just wait until I have a PS5 to play with all the bells and whistles since I already bought the upgrade at launch.
Then I think I will be swearing off anything new that’s open world, unless something really shakes up the way those games can be played vs just “making it bigger”.
Also dipped back into Kingdom Come: Deliverance since I’m closer to being done with it than The Witcher 3. I don’t like how they did the save system. Yes, they were trying to reduce save scumming, but quick save is a PC staple, and they could’ve also just used a persistent auto save system like FROM to avoid it. Maybe the game wasn’t designed well enough to support that though, due to the way quests are structured and how they can often just expire if you simply wait too long.
It reinforces my distaste of this practice, and that quest progression is much better off being event-driven, especially in big open world games. After this and TW3, all I will have left in my backlog for open world stuff is finishing Infamous: Second Son and Horizon: Forbidden West, but I might just wait until I have a PS5 to play with all the bells and whistles since I already bought the upgrade at launch.
Then I think I will be swearing off anything new that’s open world, unless something really shakes up the way those games can be played vs just “making it bigger”.
Last edited:
I'm legit puzzled at how many people still call her Melania even after beating her. With her having become one of the most contentious, discussed and infamous bosses in gaming history, and literally repeating her name every single time she kills the player during her first phase, you'd think the name Malenia, Blade of Miquella would be drilled into the cerebrum of every Elden Ring player.
I love dark soul combat, but I feel like its just been getting worse every iteration. They listen to people who keep complaining about stamina and made it regen way too fast, now its essentially infinite so the only way to keep difficulty up is to make the boss attack super fast and non stop. Similarly, they made the i-frame of dodge and the parry window more generous, so they had to make the enemy attack more random (and give them tons of hyper armor) so that it would still be challenging to hit those.
I really wish they would go back to basic and refined the gameplay, make stamina much slower to regen, limit boss tracking, remove the i-frame of dodge altogether, modify boss attack so that the amount of damage you take vary during the execution (get hit just as a boss rev up and you shouldn't take nearly as much damage as when the boss is in full swing so that boss can't just have non sense attack pattern) and remove parry but make it so if you attack at the right time during a boss attack pattern it'll have the same effect as current parry (with a certain poise damage value being necessary to trigger).
I really wish they would go back to basic and refined the gameplay, make stamina much slower to regen, limit boss tracking, remove the i-frame of dodge altogether, modify boss attack so that the amount of damage you take vary during the execution (get hit just as a boss rev up and you shouldn't take nearly as much damage as when the boss is in full swing so that boss can't just have non sense attack pattern) and remove parry but make it so if you attack at the right time during a boss attack pattern it'll have the same effect as current parry (with a certain poise damage value being necessary to trigger).
Saw that Terraria had another update recently, so I of course started a new solo character on Expert mode. And hoo boy, that ended up having a steep learning curve. Ended up periodically swapping in a stronger previous character and poaching from my prior worlds to try and smooth out the process a bit. Even then, some fights (eg: Empress of Light, Old One's Army) still required some know-how and altered strategies to manage. Still, this ended up being the world where I finally managed to beat the Moon Lord...and now I have a shiny new Zenith sword and a fast-tram to the new Shimmer pool 
- Apr 1, 2009
- 14,990
- 3,853
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Started playing Hedon, the Bloodrite campaign in Bearzerker mode. I don't think its quite as well balanced as the Crystal Heart was for the Bearzerker mode, but its Hedon so its a ton of fun.
Also doing runs in Arcanium and Tails of Iron.
I wasn't expecting to like Tails of Iron as much as I do since I've never really liked a 2d soulslike that was this soulslike. Arcanium is also still really fun, but kinda easy, like most of my runs are successful, its rather easy to get a pretty powerful team going, but its still quite fun.
Also doing runs in Arcanium and Tails of Iron.
I wasn't expecting to like Tails of Iron as much as I do since I've never really liked a 2d soulslike that was this soulslike. Arcanium is also still really fun, but kinda easy, like most of my runs are successful, its rather easy to get a pretty powerful team going, but its still quite fun.
- Apr 1, 2009
- 14,990
- 3,853
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Cultic came out so I've done a few levels in it. It's pretty cool, has a bit of a Blood feel to it, but with more/less dangerous cultists, at least on the difficulty I'm playing on. I'll do super hard at some point and I'm sure they will kill you as fast as the ones in Blood do.
I tried to check out Chivalry 2 but I couldn't get past the tuturial, lol.
Just another reminder that I should be staying away from multiplayer and first person combat like it's the plague.
Scorn comes out today and it looks interesting but watching SkillUp's positive review is actually turning me off from it. Just seems like another frustrating wandering around in circles in the dark kind of thing and I got enough problems in my life already.
I think I'm about halfway through Cuphead? The fights with the plane look and feel the coolest but are also the hardest for me.
Just another reminder that I should be staying away from multiplayer and first person combat like it's the plague.
Scorn comes out today and it looks interesting but watching SkillUp's positive review is actually turning me off from it. Just seems like another frustrating wandering around in circles in the dark kind of thing and I got enough problems in my life already.
I think I'm about halfway through Cuphead? The fights with the plane look and feel the coolest but are also the hardest for me.
Continuing with my random 7th gen games with one I've wanted to play for a while: Alpha Protocol!
I just finished the Taipei mission and I'm absolutely loving this game so far. It manages to take something I usually hate, i.e. dialogue wheels, and actually make them work and feel relevant to the game. It feels great running around as a snarky, douchebag secret agent bluffing and sneaking my way through my problems. The core gameplay is nothing amazing, but it's served its purpose so far.
I just finished the Taipei mission and I'm absolutely loving this game so far. It manages to take something I usually hate, i.e. dialogue wheels, and actually make them work and feel relevant to the game. It feels great running around as a snarky, douchebag secret agent bluffing and sneaking my way through my problems. The core gameplay is nothing amazing, but it's served its purpose so far.
Its a really great game, possiblby the best obsidian made. Shame its not available anymore. There's also a couple of point where people will react to your gameplay action and equipment in dialogue.
The TakeOver (Steam) - I managed to get the achievement for beating the game without dying. I used Ethan and you will need to use Rage mode and your supers. To kill enemies' fasters and build your super meter faster.
Annalynn (Steam)- Doing more of Random Mode and managed to unlock some more colors. The bonus stages and the item randomization really make the mode more fun than the arcade mode. During random mode you can either a bag of money turning gold coins into big silver pieces, flying boots for a temporary double jump, or a pickaxe for a limited time to attack snakes.
Annalynn (Steam)- Doing more of Random Mode and managed to unlock some more colors. The bonus stages and the item randomization really make the mode more fun than the arcade mode. During random mode you can either a bag of money turning gold coins into big silver pieces, flying boots for a temporary double jump, or a pickaxe for a limited time to attack snakes.