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Dalisclock

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It’s been years and years since I’d even replayed it but it’s highly likely you’ll be pleasantly surprised/relieved/etc.? Series purists may dismiss it as not hardcore enough, but to me it felt like a step in the right direction for advancing the series in terms of design let alone presentation.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, as III comes before IV!
I take it you're referring to IV, not III, correct?

I am interested to see how the SNES "Remake/Reimagining" of the first game compares. I'm optimistic, since the SNES games felt like a step up for the most part in actual gameplay compared to their NES counterparts. Especially in games with "SUPER" in the title because they were essentially SNES remakes of NES games and thus required by Nintendo Law(I'm not a lawyer, I just pretend to be one at parties) to put SUPER in the title.

Technically four is just a remake of one. The Japanese version doesn't even have four in the title. So he could go out of order, if he wants, but I know he's sticking to his protocol.
Since I'm doing these generally as a Video Game Historical Appreciation tour rather then "Oh, I love getting murdered in a bullet hell game where I'm the weakest and slowest thing on the screen while racing a time limit" version of fun, I'm sticking to the order for now. Besides, I want to play III mostly because it's the one the series is based off of and I'm curious to see how much the series cribs from the game aside from the setting/characters.

Also, there's a weird sort of satisfaction to finishing 1 and 2 because I played them as a kid but never beat them(or even got close) so finishing them now feels like finishing some long unfinished business that means nothing in real life. "Hooray, I kept a promise to my 8 year old self!"
 
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BrawlMan

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I take it you're referring to IV, not III, correct?

I am interested to see how the SNES "Remake/Reimagining" of the first game compares. I'm optimistic, since the SNES games felt like a step up for the most part in actual gameplay compared to their NES counterparts. Especially in games with "SUPER" in the title because they were essentially SNES remakes of NES games and thus required by Nintendo Law(I'm not a lawyer, I just pretend to be one at parties) to put SUPER in the title.
Technically, the first Castlevania has been remade three times. There's the Sharp X6800 version, Haunted Castle (an arcade remake), and on PS1 called Castlevania Chronicles. And that particular version has the Sharp version and an arranged mode on PS1.

Since I'm doing these generally as a Video Game Historical Appreciation tour rather then "Oh, I love getting murdered in a bullet hell game where I'm the weakest and slowest thing on the screen while racing a time limit" version of fun, I'm sticking to the order for now. Besides, I want to play III mostly because it's the one the series is based off of and I'm curious to see how much the series cribs from the game aside from the setting/characters.

Also, there's a weird sort of satisfaction to finishing 1 and 2 because I played them as a kid but never beat them(or even got close) so finishing them now feels like finishing so long unfinished business that means nothing in real life. "Hooray, I kept a promise to my 8 year old self!"
I've noticed that Castlevania & Devil May Cry both had a similar situation. A groundbreaking, genre defining 1st game, a controversial second game (DMC2 is legit, not a good game), and a third game that is hard as balls and is a prequel to the first two games. Ironic, because Hideki Kamiya is a huge Castlevania I fan. That was his inspiration to make DMC1.
 
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Dalisclock

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I've noticed that Castlevania & Devil May Cry both had a similar situation. A groundbreaking, genre defining 1st game, a controversial second game (DMC2 is legit, not a good game), and a third game that is hard as balls and is a prequel to the first two games. Ironic, because a Hideki Kamiya is a huge Castlevania I fan. That was his inspiration to make DMC1.
Zelda also fits this pattern, except Link to the Past was arguably less difficult then the previous 2 so it may not count. It does feel like a lot of games took inspiration from Zelda, Castlevania or both(FROM games feel like they're like Zelda and Castlevania had had a horrible, hardcore baby at times, and Bloodborne straight out has it's own homage to Castlevania in Cainhurst)

Not to contradict what you said(because they can both be correct) but wasn't DMC1 originally a resident evil game/spinoff that basically evolved into it's own thing?
 

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Not to contradict what you said(because they can both be correct) but wasn't DMC1 originally a resident evil game/spinoff that basically evolved into it's own thing?
You are correct. DMC1 was going to be the original Resident Evil 4 and it shows heavily. Dante even looks like a white haired Leon in his first outing. Originally, he was going to be a human called Tony Redgrave, and he would get infected from a virus by Umbrella. Instead of turning him into a complete monster, he would gain super strength and speed. Juggling zombies and monsters in the air. The reason why they dropped the idea, was because they felt it will be too silly and not scary. There is so much irony in that statement now. Plus, DMC1 has some scary and creepy moments. If you ever decide to get the HD collection, check the bonus features in the menu. There is something called The vault and you'll see a lot of early concepts of DMC 1. You'll notice how Resident Evil looking most of the monsters are.
 
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Dreiko

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Grinding the hell out of Guilty Gear Strive. So far mainly focusing on Chipp stuff, been making tech videos and doing a lot of online fights. Got the golden wanted poster in record time and now having matches in the secret heavenly floor. I wanna test player rooms too. Btw this has rollback so the netplay is amazing so if someone wants games from here we could easily arrange em, I'm having good games even with Japan and I'm east coast.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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Thinking of getting Scribblenauts Mega Pack. It's games 4 & 5. Used to find the games fascinating (I played either 1 or 2, I think) but I wonder if the novelty still makes them fun.
 

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Arkham Asylum again. I thought I was close to Killer Croc, but that's way further in to the game than I realize. I did another Scarecrow section. I completed it, but I noticed some platforming can be finicky. I upgraded all of Batman's combo and melee skills, so I'll probably do health next. Also, the game does annoying thing of not saving a character and they die and it's instant game over. Only for her to die in a cut-scene and it's has not even been two minutes. I keep forgetting that this a game from 2009, and a lot of games were still doing this.

Other than that, combat I am getting used to now, and upgrades make combo strings easier. The evade button and batterang upgrade are your best friends in helping maintain a high combo. I might do some combat challenges when I get home from work later in the afternoon.
 

Chupathingy

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Hopefully you have T2: Seeds or Evil because it is pretty much like comparing the first two Uncharted games. If you’re unfamiliar, the common thread is the sequel is such an improvement it makes the original game feel merely like a proof of concept vs fully realized game.
I do have it, and if it's better than the first in practically every way then I'm very excited to play it.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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I do have it, and if it's better than the first in practically every way then I'm very excited to play it.
It’s been a long time but as a kid that’s how I remember feeling about the two. Come to think of it, I recall seeing the game on Steam which I will definitely check out to revisit at some point.
 
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laggyteabag

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Played a random 4-player FFA game on vanilla Dawn of War with some friends, last night.

The three guys who I played with had never played DoW before, and i have probably put in about 100 hours over the years , so I purposely gimped myself by playing as the Eldar, which is a race that I had never really touched.

As it turns out, a full stack of Fire Prism tanks, and the Avatar of Khaine is a pretty good combo. The Fire Prisms just AoE everything, deal huge damage to vehicles, and massively displace any and all infantry, whilst the Avatar just soaks up damage, and gets right in everybody's faces.

Then whenever anyone tried to attack me, I had created what was effectively a massive wall of invisible cannons.

Ended up winning that one.

The game was definitely showing its age, though. The camera zoom is far too low, pathfinding is a joke, and the game doesn't run too great, even on modern hardware. Also the game didn't seem to scale that well to anything resembling high resolutions, so my options were either text that was too small, or too blurry to ready.

Still a great time, though.
 

Kyrian007

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I'm taking a crack at Mad Max. I played it a while after its release, but I kept getting sidetracked by making new Fallout 4 characters and various FO 4 DLC releases. So I never finished it. Coming back to it years later I've come to an odd conclusion...

Its a great game, that there is far too much of for me. I like the variety in stronghold assaults, its not just the same thing over and over like a lot of sandbox stronghold assaults. But there are too many of each. I love car combat. But random enemies always pop up between destinations, wherever you are driving. The story missions are interesting, but its dragging on too long. Every aspect of it goes on about 30% too long and becomes grind-ey.

I usually complain when games are too short, and I guess I should be happy there is so much content. Mad Max just doesn't have quite enough variety to justify its length. Honestly, I'm about as far through it as I was when I quit playing it the first time through and I'm seriously burned out on it and am losing interest. If a new game catches my interest in the next week or so, I may never finish Mad Max.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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I'm taking a crack at Mad Max. I played it a while after its release, but I kept getting sidetracked by making new Fallout 4 characters and various FO 4 DLC releases. So I never finished it. Coming back to it years later I've come to an odd conclusion...

Its a great game, that there is far too much of for me. I like the variety in stronghold assaults, its not just the same thing over and over like a lot of sandbox stronghold assaults. But there are too many of each. I love car combat. But random enemies always pop up between destinations, wherever you are driving. The story missions are interesting, but its dragging on too long. Every aspect of it goes on about 30% too long and becomes grind-ey.

I usually complain when games are too short, and I guess I should be happy there is so much content. Mad Max just doesn't have quite enough variety to justify its length. Honestly, I'm about as far through it as I was when I quit playing it the first time through and I'm seriously burned out on it and am losing interest. If a new game catches my interest in the next week or so, I may never finish Mad Max.
Yeah it’s too bad because the combat and car stuff is really fun with great physics effects and sound design but the open world grind’s the thing that turned most people off. The story is actually pretty good too.
 

meiam

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I'm taking a crack at Mad Max. I played it a while after its release, but I kept getting sidetracked by making new Fallout 4 characters and various FO 4 DLC releases. So I never finished it. Coming back to it years later I've come to an odd conclusion...

Its a great game, that there is far too much of for me. I like the variety in stronghold assaults, its not just the same thing over and over like a lot of sandbox stronghold assaults. But there are too many of each. I love car combat. But random enemies always pop up between destinations, wherever you are driving. The story missions are interesting, but its dragging on too long. Every aspect of it goes on about 30% too long and becomes grind-ey.

I usually complain when games are too short, and I guess I should be happy there is so much content. Mad Max just doesn't have quite enough variety to justify its length. Honestly, I'm about as far through it as I was when I quit playing it the first time through and I'm seriously burned out on it and am losing interest. If a new game catches my interest in the next week or so, I may never finish Mad Max.
Yeah a victim of the open world crazy that's (hopefully) subsiding now. Played maybe 20 hours of it, could have been a tight experience if instead of having 100s compund to assault they'd have like 10 really interesting one. Car combat was also really good, could have been more focused on that.
 

happyninja42

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I'm taking a crack at Mad Max. I played it a while after its release, but I kept getting sidetracked by making new Fallout 4 characters and various FO 4 DLC releases. So I never finished it. Coming back to it years later I've come to an odd conclusion...

Its a great game, that there is far too much of for me. I like the variety in stronghold assaults, its not just the same thing over and over like a lot of sandbox stronghold assaults. But there are too many of each. I love car combat. But random enemies always pop up between destinations, wherever you are driving. The story missions are interesting, but its dragging on too long. Every aspect of it goes on about 30% too long and becomes grind-ey.

I usually complain when games are too short, and I guess I should be happy there is so much content. Mad Max just doesn't have quite enough variety to justify its length. Honestly, I'm about as far through it as I was when I quit playing it the first time through and I'm seriously burned out on it and am losing interest. If a new game catches my interest in the next week or so, I may never finish Mad Max.
I found the game wonderful up until the final bit. Where the narrative takes such a brutal and depressing turn as to just kill all my enjoyment leading up to it. Really sucks, because most everything else about the game was tickling all my apocalypse fancies just fine.
 
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Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
The sequel to Hedon comes out later this summer so I'm replaying that.

Also messing around in No Man's Sky since it got another big update.

I also got Astro Aqua Kitty and I need to play more of it.

Come saturday I'll be playing some Guilty Gear Strive.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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Replaying Blasphemous, trying to kill every boss without using any heals.

Sort of simultaneously doing a speedrun on a different save.
 

happyninja42

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Just finished Dishonored: Death of the Outsider.

Didn't end how I thought it would exactly, though that might've been behind the other ending choice I didn't pick. It was good, nothing great, nothing terrible. Average Dishonored quality game, though I really don't like Billie's power set. Well, I don't like her version of Blink. The best one was the one where you could freeze time when you were aiming the Blink power. It made for some fun as hell leaps of faith as you just hurled yourself forward to see if you could make a jump+blink. And if the target wouldn't reach, well that's ok, you could just turn around and blink back to where you started.

Her Foresight ability was handy, being able to scout ahead, and mark enemies/objects of interest was quite useful. It became OP when I got a bonecharm that added the perk of significantly reducing the detection range of any targets you marked. The reality is "reduced" basically translated to fucking blind as a bat. So couple that with a charm that let me mark more than 3 targets, a crafted charm that made my sneak speed faster than my normal walk speed, and I was just dancing around the map with little hassle.

It definitely felt like they were trying to transition to a new paradigm shift for the setting in general with the end. Opening it up to way more options with any new games. Not sure if they have any plans to make a new Dishonored, but if they do, I hope they find someplace and someone that has nothing to do with Dunwall. I'm frankly tired of the city at this point, and would like to see...well...anywhere else really. New setting, new biomes, new mood/tone. I'd love it if the next area was perhaps of Arabian influence, instead of European design.

But yeah, overall, not a bad little game. Seemed to want to try out a lot of mechanics that ultimately didn't make much difference (like charm crafting, really superfluous), but overall, not bad.
 
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Drathnoxis

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Finally beat Noita. 200 deaths exactly. To be honest, this was also the run when I figured out how to save scum, but I DON'T CARE I'M COUNTING IT ANYWAY BECAUSE THIS GAME IS BULLCRAP! I only reloaded twice, one when I stupidly decided to go exploring the surface with low health and ran into a miniboss, panicked and got burned to death in lava, and the other time when I got frozen by an enemy and two shotted in the last level. This game is just completely unfair. Enemies do a huge amount of damage with no I-frames, enemies have way more visibility than you and can shoot you from offscreen while you have a fog of war covering 40% of the screen, you get next to no chances to heal outside of one full heal between levels, enemies get extremely tanky late in the game and your damage output is entirely dependent on RNG, most of the spells you find can damage you as well and thus are too dangerous to use, you can only edit your spells in one area that you can't return to without using what amounts to exploits, you can get polymorphed into a sheep and killed in one hit, and this game has permadeath.

There's so much to explore and interact with, but I can't do any of it because the game is so unrelentingly hard that I'm scared to go into the optional areas for fear of dying instantly. Worse, you have to be so methodical in exploring the first 2 areas or risk being underpowered later on. An extra couple health boosts can make a big difference and you can't afford not to get them. But this means that when you inevitably die anyway to something you had barely any way of avoiding you've spent over a half an hour crawling over the same ground and then immediately need to do it again. So much of the optional stuff seems to require very specific RNG as well, it seems like it would be extremely tedious to do a lot of it.

I could have easily loved this game, but Noita just hates me so much. So no, Noita. I'm not going to play the game on the Nightmare difficulty you just unlocked for me, and I'm not going for the true ending either. You're mean and I don't want to play with you anymore.

...maybe
 

Dalisclock

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Technically, the first Castlevania has been remade three times. There's the Sharp X6800 version, Haunted Castle (an arcade remake), and on PS1 called Castlevania Chronicles. And that particular version has the Sharp version and an arranged mode on PS1.
Isn't Haunted Castle the one that is incredibly difficult(partially because it only allows you a maximum of 3 continues)? I was like "Oh, and Arcade version. Those are usually interesting and sometimes better then the console versions." and then I read about how it's basically Fuck you city that even the hardcore of the hardcore would struggle to finish. And also apparently doesn't understand how arcade game economics work.
 
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