I think most flaws are worth taking a good look at, I think I already had three or four by the time I left the first planet. There's a couple that you have to build toward, like skill point one or the one that force you to take every future flaws, those aren't worth using if you're not building toward. But the one that make you move faster while sneaking or the one that massively increase mag size but you get a debuff if you run out are worth using and do a good job of varying build.
It is really interesting you brought up those 2. I did take the sneaking one, actually thinking I was going to pick up an extra perk too. It is the most useful one I've seen so far, but it has also gotten me instakilled 2 times so far. And I agree the mag size one's downside did strike me as being easier to deal with than the others I've seen. But I'm in a pistol build, and they all reload fairly quickly so mag size isn't much of an issue. So I didn't bother with it. I just have the one so far even after being offered maybe 9 or 10 so far. And knowing there wouldn't be a free perk in it, I wouldn't have that one. And none so far have made me think, "oh, I'll do a build around that one."
I still like the game. Enjoying it a lot, but I'd have gone a different way with the sequel. I wanted same gameplay with maybe updated graphics (or not, not important.) The improvements I wanted were more skill options, more perk varieties, more complex rpg elements in general. More weapons, more customization options, more companions, bigger and longer quests... Basically 2 has made cutbacks in every category I wanted expanded, to improve graphics and shooting mechanics I didn't care about at all. Doesn't make it a bad game, but it is hard for me not to be disappointed in how it turned out.
I've finally gotten around to Another Crab's Treasure, after it sat installed on my computer for like a year straight. I've cleared the first area, and compared to all the complex RPGs I've played this year and the frenzied action of Space Marine 2, this feels like unwinding after a busy day at work. It's very reminiscient of PS2 era action platformers, with almost the graphics to match. The writing is very sharp, and hits that perfect sweet spot of being family friendly without talking down to its audience. There are lots of funny jokes hidden throughout (like a crab having been sentenced for possession of seaweed), and in one particular aspect it gives me a boatload of nostalgia: the way the environment is made of and littered with discarded everyday objects reminds me of the Bug's Life videogame from the 90s. It's surprisingly difficult, but not in a frustrating way. It slims down the bloated complexities of Soulslikes to just the basics, which is refreshing.
Oh, it get's frustrating. Behind the cutesy, nostalgic smile are razor-sharp teeth. It's "Soulslike: Basic Edition" for sure, but still really tough. Like you, I played it thinking it'd be a respite from the punishment I was going through with Elden Ring, but it turned out to be even MORE frustrating given a lot of the traversal tends to be a slog. Much of the "point A to point B" is slow, tedious, and empty. I ended up switching to the gun, the easy mode that allows you to one-shot every enemy, including bosses. It was fun, but I won't claim to have actually beaten or really played the game, so can't firmly attest to how hard is gets. Hope you enjoy it though!
My hesitation was that I would get frustrated with the repetition and repeating bosses and then not finishing it but then I realized I don't really give a damn. I just love Supergiant's style too much to resist.
So now I have two games- Hades 2 and Ball x Pit- that I'm just gonna play in small doses here and there and not really care how long or even if I get to the end, both on my Switch 2. I'll see how long this lasts until I'll want to embark on another epic 100 hour story game (i.e., Persona 3 Reload).
I forgot that the driving is so bad, an absolute sin for this IP. A ramming button, lol. They could have given you more control over acceleration (gears) and the handbrake. Why would you make this as shallow as GTA driving when the chases are the best parts of the movies? Also a letdown that running out of fuel doesn't actually stop your car. You continue at slow running speed. Can't jump around on moving vehicles, like in the movies. And of course no motorcycles, monster trucks and semi-trucks. It's so thoroughly unexciting.
Should have emulated the 1980s BDSM leather punk look of Mad Max 2 instead of Fury Road's (a movie I like). The lack of buildings is also boring. If George Miller could have afforded ruined towns and cities, he would have put them in his movies.
Someone said, "Max talks way too much in this game to convince me that the devs are in any way fans of the franchise." Yeah. I would much rather have had the dog as a companion than the talkative hunchback. Studios are so afraid of making protagonists solitary. Of the silence.
Just finally beat Octopath Traveler 2. I gotta say, I really enjoyed it. It did take awhile, but I also tended to just play it like an hour or 2 a night for awhile. Octopath Traveler 2 is a JRPG where 8 characters meet up and have largely disconnected stories together. The characters are mostly really good, the graphics are very nice pixel graphics on chunky 3d backgrounds, combat is interesting and you have to find weapons or elements that enemies are weak too to break their armor and stun them and gain a damage boost. I think my favorite character stories were Castti, Throne, and Temenos, with Ochette coming up a near 4th. Partitio, Osvald and Hikari were good. Really the only odd story out was Agnea since her plot was weirdly simplistic and didn't have a connection to the rest, especially with how dark some of the other stories got, hers felt... out of place. Even with one weaker character, the game is pretty spectacular and well worth the time, assuming you don't hate JRPGs for some stupid reason.
Didn't want to start a new game before going away for a few days so killed some time with two roguelikes, Risk of Rain and Downwell.
In Downwell you fall down (a) well while sporting rocket boots that you can fire downwards in short bursts, briefly stopping your fall while damaging enemies and destroying platforms. The rocket boots only recharge whenever you touch down on a surface, and since you rely on them for combat as much as platforming, using them at all always feels like a calculated risk. You can collect gems to increase your health and shot count, different modules that affect the cadence and width of the shots, and you pick from a menu of random boons whenever you clear an area. It's ok and all but there's not a lot of variety to each run. I've never actually made it to the bottom of the well, and I'm pretty sure it's the lack of motivation to try, try again. I've cleared harder roguelikes just because of their just one more go factor.
Then there's Risk of Rain, which I'm not really getting into, although I can definitely see the attraction. I just don't like how every level has to end with you having to survive hordes of enemies for 90 seconds but then you have to kill everything anyway? Why give me a timer at all? And I might be too myopic for this game. Everything looks too small and far away on screen, and the enviroments are kinda flat and ugly.
After hearing about how good it is, and avoiding hearing anything more beyond that, the fact that it is made by former Telltale Games devs, and the basic concept, started Dispatch. Still too early in the game to be sure, but I'm liking it so far. Have QTEs turned off, and it's definitely awkward with how the cutscenes pause for where you'd put in the input for the QTEs, but the writing is a lot of fun. The scene introducing Flambae has been my favorite so far, but I can't think of a scene so far that was poorly written.
Finished DIspatch, and then started it up again. I don't really have a barometer for these kinds of games. I've owned The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands for like a decade both, but never got around to them. So I don't really know how to grade the game. I guess it'd be on the story first and foremost, and it's a solid 8/10, maybe even a 9/10. It's now among the Spiderverse movies and The Batman as proof that world isn't really experiencing superhero fatigue, but rather shared universe fatigue. This being a completely original IP allows it to play with fresh ideas and execute them its own way. In terms of worldbuilding it's probably closest to Invincible with how vast the scale is, but keeping it in small focus prevents it from feeling overwhelming. All the characters are extremely well written and entertaining, which is good since this is a character-focused narrative over everything else. It's also refreshingly cheerful and optimistic, which I'm frankly all for after all the doom and gloom of the 2010s.
Special mention has to go to the voice direction, because holy moley they knocked it out of the park. The cast does have industry titans like Mercer, Bailey and Willingham, but many of the Z-team's VAs are genuine first timers or non-professionals like Thot Squad, MoistCr1tikal and Jacksepticeye. I didn't even know Joel Haver voiced one of the characters, and he's legit one of the best performances! He completely disappears into the role, playing an awkward, fidgety nervous wreck.
Without going into spoilers, the gameplay side left me kind of mixed when I started a new save. What's here is actually quite fun in how it requires good intuition and management skills for problem solving. There's probably shittons of incidental dialogue for every possible hero combination for every possible mission, and discovering their developing relationships through their in-mission dialogue is quite fun. But it could have been so much more, because from what I've seen the game plays out the exact same each time: the same missions in the same dispatches in the same order. If there was ever a gameplay format for which randomization would have been perfect, it's this. Creating additional missions would probably be a logistics nightmare because of all the VAs involved, but otherwise it'd be super simple: a piece of art, a short mission description, flavor text and bam, there you go. There's so much you could do if you pared the format down some: record additional, generic filler lines for the characters to say, and then create as many new missions as you want. I'm even willing to step into outright heresy by saying that this game might actually be a positive case for AI use in procedural generation.
The eventual story ended up being nothing necessarily special, but I suppose this is more about the journey than the destination. Since I still haven't played the game wholly a second time, I don't know how big the differences can be, but it seems like big narrative branches can be counted on one hand. What I'm most curious about is how far you can push Invisigal into villainy, since so far even treating her with utmost contempt seems to yield largely the same results. I have to say I did end up enjoying the way the game made you constantly question her allegiances right up to the end, and made me reappraise her whole character in retrospect. She felt like pandering, because she was. But at the same time she was personally sincere. What is up to debate is how sincere, and about what things. I personally did end up taking her side all the way, but looking back I did feel pretty duped.
I initially thought that Shroud felt like an underwritten villain, but it's actually that we don't get to see enough of him. Matt Mercer gives a genuinely great and chilling performance, and you get the sense that there's a shitton of history to this guy. Why does he hold Blazer in such high regard? What made him a turncoat? What was his true endgame? These are genuinely intriguing questions we'll probably never get answers for (though I guess some of them are in the comics), but at the same time it kind of makes sense: Shroud is secondary to the game's focus, and since we're experiencing the game through Robert, he doesn't really care that much about the bigger picture either. He just wants his suit back, and revenge on Shroud.
All in all a great experience, and I'm glad to see it making waves. With how successful it's been I think a second season is pretty much an inevitability. Let's hope Adhoc Studio learns from history and doesn't end up oversaturating themselves to death. What a surprise that the shot in the arm for the superhero genre came from videogames and not movies or TV.
I wrote an entire huge post about a game called Limbus Company, but then decided that nobody probably cares about a Korean gacha game no matter how good I think it is. So instead: I've started playing Limbus Company, a Korean gacha game, and I think it's pretty alright. I've only just gotten started, though, so I'll have to see where it goes from here. Pretty much every review I've read says it's the most F2P-accessible gacha game ever, so there's that.
I wrote an entire huge post about a game called Limbus Company, but then decided that nobody probably cares about a Korean gacha game no matter how good I think it is. So instead: I've started playing Limbus Company, a Korean gacha game, and I think it's pretty alright. I've only just gotten started, though, so I'll have to see where it goes from here. Pretty much every review I've read says it's the most F2P-accessible gacha game ever, so there's that.
When I went to the grocery store on Halloween the checkout guy told me he and his friends were going to a party dressed up as characters from Lumbus Company. I tend to keep up on gaming things and I had never heard of it before. But, I also don't really pay attention to phone games.
Didn't want to start a new game before going away for a few days so killed some time with two roguelikes, Risk of Rain and Downwell.
In Downwell you fall down (a) well while sporting rocket boots that you can fire downwards in short bursts, briefly stopping your fall while damaging enemies and destroying platforms. The rocket boots only recharge whenever you touch down on a surface, and since you rely on them for combat as much as platforming, using them at all always feels like a calculated risk. You can collect gems to increase your health and shot count, different modules that affect the cadence and width of the shots, and you pick from a menu of random boons whenever you clear an area. It's ok and all but there's not a lot of variety to each run. I've never actually made it to the bottom of the well, and I'm pretty sure it's the lack of motivation to try, try again. I've cleared harder roguelikes just because of their just one more go factor.
Then there's Risk of Rain, which I'm not really getting into, although I can definitely see the attraction. I just don't like how every level has to end with you having to survive hordes of enemies for 90 seconds but then you have to kill everything anyway? Why give me a timer at all? And I might be too myopic for this game. Everything looks too small and far away on screen, and the enviroments are kinda flat and ugly.
I've beaten Downwell and I agree, it's pretty barebones. More of an arcade game than a roguelike in my opinion. Risk of Rain also never really clicked with me. Some people like it a lot, but I don't know.
I wrote an entire huge post about a game called Limbus Company, but then decided that nobody probably cares about a Korean gacha game no matter how good I think it is. So instead: I've started playing Limbus Company, a Korean gacha game, and I think it's pretty alright. I've only just gotten started, though, so I'll have to see where it goes from here. Pretty much every review I've read says it's the most F2P-accessible gacha game ever, so there's that.
I really don't like the overworld in FF7. Liked the game when it was linear, but now I'm just wandering aimlessly, which makes the random encounters and the turns that are like unskippable cutscenes more annoying. "Guy with a big sword went to the field in the east." Well, I've been there!
Chocobo was too much a pain in the ass to seduce with expensive greens in fights for how easily you lose it.
If you've just reached the overworld and are wandering around aimlessly you should know that you are required to tame a chocobo to get past the big snake marsh. You can also see towns on your minimap. It's pretty straightforward though, and there aren't actually very many places you can go.
I've beaten Downwell and I agree, it's pretty barebones. More of an arcade game than a roguelike in my opinion. Risk of Rain also never really clicked with me. Some people like it a lot, but I don't know.
Risk of Rain seems like the kind of pure roguelike experience that attracts a particular crowd that gets high on The Perfect Run and everything else kinda sucks until you hit that one jackpot. At least Downwell doesn't rely so much on getting good RNG early on to carry a run. Like you play for a bit and it's good enough if I clear a few levels. But anything that isn't a full run in RoR feels like failure. Takes too long to get going too.
Fun fact about Downwell, it was made by an opera singer who used it as a calling card to get a job at Nintendo - then walked away a year later after deciding the corporate workspace wasn't for him.
Okay, tried out Hard in Streets of Rage 2. Made it to the end of the sixth level. If nothing else, was interesting to see how the encounters change, what enemies were added where. Was caught off guard a few times. Instead of one fat guy, Big-Ben and the variant Big-Go debut together. Won't try it again anytime soon because I can't even make it through Normal without a Continue.
If you've just reached the overworld and are wandering around aimlessly you should know that you are required to tame a chocobo to get past the big snake marsh. You can also see towns on your minimap. It's pretty straightforward though, and there aren't actually very many places you can go.
I did go with the chocobo through the marsh and saw the giant impaled Snake, but when I walked to the back of the area the gang exited to the overworld again. Nothing happened after that.
I did go with the chocobo through the marsh and saw the giant impaled Snake, but when I walked to the back of the area the gang exited to the overworld again. Nothing happened after that.
Keep going forward to the cave at the end of that little area. Once through to the other end the main quest is at a big cannon by the West coast. There's a minigame to the South if you're interested, but you don't have to do it right now.
Keep going forward to the cave at the end of that little area. Once through to the other end the main quest is at a big cannon by the West coast. There's a minigame to the South if you're interested, but you don't have to do it right now.
If you aren't going for 100% completion I'd argue Condor Canyon isn't worth doing ever. You are forced to do it one time in the story, but you can throw it and just win the battle that happens instead and get the same result, and even if you lose the battle, you don't lose out on much in that case either.
I think the biggest praise I can give it is that in an industry as stuffed to the gills with superheroes this manages to not feel like just some third-rate depiction. It actually feels like a very legitimate superhero world. Many try to secure a spot, how small it might be, amongst the well known IPs and fail, but Dispatch actually succeeds in getting it. It's not inFAMOUS for example; a game series I very much like, but as a superhero property it's quite flimsey. Dispatch is not.
It definitely works better in its daily grind/slice-of-life elements than when it's trying to be sentimental. Especially when it comes to the character of Invisigal, who is kinda the weakest part of the game, and I feel that the writers trying to put so much emphasis on her only reveal how weak she is as a character. She works fine as the obscene moody brat, but as soon as they peel back some layers and try to make us empathize with her it feels rather shallow and forced. The couple of 'yeah, we actually think you're awesome Invisigal' cheers from the team didn't exactly go down smoothly for me.
If you aren't going for 100% completion I'd argue Condor Canyon isn't worth doing ever. You are forced to do it one time in the story, but you can throw it and just win the battle that happens instead and get the same result, and even if you lose the battle, you don't lose out on much in that case either.
Re-finished Hades 2. Undeniably a better ending than the version on launch, but it does not at all fix how thematically crappy the endgame feels. And it really begs the question, who the fuck thought the version at launch was okay?
I am SO fucking close to finishing the last stupid fucking romance, that little fucking twink Icarus. More than a hundred hours in this game, and somehow I have not finished his "story".
I think that is my last word on Hades 2. Fun to play, made with so much love, but incredibly disappointing in how the story was handled, from both a writing and a gameplay perspective. It feels like they didn't really learn from or expand on Hades 1, it's just more Hades.
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