one-armed dwarf

I am going to replay this game at some point but it's going to be on PC, so the combat isn't all blurry lol

I hope they add some difficulty select options for new game at some point, make it more demanding. Like how Rebirth had dynamic mode

Now we gaming

You don't think A.B.A sounds fun from the way I described her in my screed?

16's dialogue is more like FFXIV, or XII. A quaisi-Shakespearean but with a few more 'fucks' thrown in to modernise it a bit.

I actually think the dialogue is great tbh, on its main quest anyway. Very well acted as well. 

The cast is pretty boring currently tbh, it needs a few more weirdos with unusual gimmicks. GG has that but its whole battle system doesn't reward the investment in gimmickry over straightforwardness. 

I'm probably going to pick up Ed as he's the most Nero-coded character on the cast, and has some light mid-screen zoning gimmicks. 

Another vampire guy is next DLC

This is the next DLC character

As much as I liked this game I wanna hold off on getting back into it and see if they do something to make heat more interesting to interact with. I'm not a good Tekken player but reading the reddit there's a lot of fatigue with how aggressive the game is. My own scrubby take on heat is it makes matches feel a bit linear as you can't really do anything but block the smash move. 

May 22nd

3 minutes ago, OCH said:

I didn't even acknowledge stuff like that until fairly recent times. Listening to YouTube videos of people referencing i-frames, bit rates, slow down etc I just used to play the game, however it was presented.

The other day tho you were posting images of how Castlevania 'should be' played. They were fucking us over for years with way slower versions of games with fucked up aspect ratios. Tekken slowed down by 16.6 percent, we also got a terrible version of Devil May Cry

Good and bad with this generation of games. I think I prefer playing PS2 games now than back then, cause I can work around all that bullshit at least and get the proper version.

(vid comparing 50 and 60hz)

Someone made a macro for 3ddy just to spam 3 (x) over and over and he got to a really high rank

Lots of rage quitters

https://www.twitch.tv/jimmashima

https://clips.twitch.tv/LuckyBlazingBatteryAllenHuhu-IbCu4ytNss99s4Rz?tt_content=url&tt_medium=clips_api

I'm somewhere in the middle on that in I get what nick is saying, what it is to me is they're packaging more heavy and adult themes in things which aren't and they lay it on pretty thick. There's an article I posted up above which kinda talks about how the arc of this series is trying to speak to a sense of post-9/11 alienation that the creators wanted to explore, particularly wrt race. I think though at times the mythologies of the characters and their powers can distract from the themes of the story they are telling.

You get the sense of it in this episode particularly, with characters talking about the need for a little less civility and maybe a little more radicalization even if it makes the oppressing classes unconformable. Which is where it gets more violent and dark. At the same time I can't get past the design of a character like 'Mr Sinister', an evil Dracula guy. Stuff like that pushes me out of it. Some of the characters are interesting (Magneto, Rogue, Cyclops, I like how Beast quotes random shit) but some others are like these bright primary colours saying what they're all about, like Captain America

I'd say it's a show punching above its weight class but sometimes it's still got those 90s kids cartoon characters delivering these subjects, and not always without it being jarring. I'd say it's mostly successful but a bit awkward at times

I think though it's a shame that the showrunner got fired and they couldn't put him in script writing duties for the X-Men movies they will be doing. That seems like such an own goal by Disney. Unless the guy got fired for a good reason, the internet rumour is that it was cause he had an onlyfans and the mouse didn't like that lol

I don't like having a big moan, I think most of the games the past couple years I've played I've really liked. But SB isn't really doing it for me, despite me thinking it might based from the demo. Least not so far. My issue is it's just sort of vacillates between being either unremarkable or just competent at everything. Nothing is bad as such, but nothing seems great here either. It's just sort of all a plateau of quality.

Story and tone is 'Nier at home'. The combat is this stiff thing with a staccato rhythm, where the point is aggression but it's all kinda locked into these prebaked light->heavy alternating combo strings with limited expression. There's stuff to discover, some combo strings will high profile you over sweep attacks, and you can power them up to stun enemies during their own combos, but it's still very regimented. You can't cancel an attack string if it becomes active, which might make sense in theory but it means light strings are harder to cancel than more elaborate ones with extra startup cause of that. So when you're pushing the enemy, the controls feel really unintuitive and the sense of connection with the character feels strained.

The things you do in these levels are finding batteries, restoring power, finding data logs, getting passcodes, it feels very rote. You do this over and over, then at the end you fight a spiky rhino thing with no face or a big fat guy or whatever

Then there's a hub with sidequests and an open world area with a checklist. Unlike in Rebirth where I was able to look past it cause it was so good in other areas, I don't have anything carrying me through this part. So I'll probably end up ignoring things in the OW if something interesting doesn't happen

If it would excel at just one area, like its combat or story or even quest design, it would be interesting. DMC5 has bad levels, but deep and free-flowing combat. Nier has bad combat, but it looks cool and has a great story. Bayonetta has exhilarating boss fights, though not as exhilarating as Metal Gear Rising (tho Bayo's combat is better and more technical). God Hand is hilarious, and has a unique battle system.

I'm just not really able to see what sets this one out from the pack. There's nothing so far in the first couple hours which is like 'oh yeah, that is Stellar Blade's "thing"'. It's all a bit "you've been here before". Deja vu

Mouse aiming feels like aiming whereas controller aiming feels like steering a mech to point a gun in a particular direction.

I cannot play FPS or TPS on a controller anymore. 

The DLC does suck, Control is a game were less was definitely more and the main campaign was good enough for that

Perhaps it changes after a few hours, but picking up progress from the demo this game is aggressively boring. If the word 'mid' was a video game, it would be this.

That said, most games in this genre don't start off that interesting I guess. 

Final Fantasy's best villains are imo Emet Selch in FFXIV and Ardyn in FFXV. They're basically the same villain tbh, but it's an archetype I'm into. Villains where the evil is like 'yeah ok, we get it, still got to stop you doing that evil shit though'.

I also agree that Kefka is lacking in these great villain moments. He's kinda boring, up until you actually fight him, which is a top tier FF moment but that is hard carried by Amano and Uematsu (art and music). Nothing on the level tho of Emet Selch revealing his name to you, or you learning his backstory. Apparently Ardyn's DLC is really really good but man, the thought of playing XV again, I dunno

The next one you should play is FFXIV. Its one of the shorter ones, and it has cool music

I watch B&W films of bluray/4k on the regular and don't agree with that. We forget at times that those old 40s and 50s films were projected on 35mm film at detail levels which can even dwarf our modern technology (especially as a print can get damaged overtime, so our restored versions aren't perfect either) and that was how they were 'supposed' to be seen, not on a blurry VHS. I would say the lighting on those old films hides the things were talking of anyway

That said it is true that old games are designed for CRT. I used CRT shaders when emulating old games. Its good, but not really that close

I didn't play much of the WWI Amnesia (The Bunker) but it seems to have a cool gimmick and was received rather well

It also has a really really loud gun. Like tinnitus inducing. I thought that was cool for some reason

I had my eye on one of these, but they don't give enough clearance for the 4090 power cable. Which would probably mean there would be an actual fire inside the case lol. 

I have a bunch of spare parts, so maybe at some point in the future I'll put my 3070 machine together in one of them. There's a white one you can get, but I think the colour scheme complements itself better with this black one

Yeah it feels like an awkward application of ideas cribbed from other games. I saw some of its stuff compared with Ghost of Tsushima*, which apparently does a thing to 'guide' you to its attractions like the way Rebirth tries to with chocobo benches and life stream thingies. The towers in TOTK have an environmental puzzle to solve to unlock them, and kinda emphasise the exploration loop in the game. Whereas in Rebirth they're just sort of there, there might be a grapple point. It's unimaginative. 

Like, that stuff is bad. No way around that. At the same time, it's inoffensively bad, something I would do after one of the main story quests where they throw 3 boss fights at you back to back, to chill out and turn the brain off. I would save up and do the empty calorie stuff after the main story sugar rush (this food analogy makes no sense). The game is so good in other areas that it recedes into the background for me. It annoyed me more in the Grasslands where there isn't as much on the plate so to speak

I think it's an excellent game with the most engaging learning curve I've had in a FF, or at least equal with FFXII. But it has a very dated Ubisoft 2010-era structure. But that structure kinda ends up being a means to an end after a point. 

I don't disagree that there's a lot of copy and paste in this

That said, I think the game is massively underrated wrt the mechanical progression of some of the stuff in it, especially outside its (imo brilliant) battle systems. Like the strategies for Fort Condor and the gambit minigame and also the card game challenges. imo, it's really interesting to play a game like this which has so much to learn and so much tertiary scope to what you can learn. I found a lot of that stuff super rewarding, and even the more gimmicky stuff like chocobo races were a neat diversion. It's just got a richness to it that FF hasn't had since FFIX, or even VIII and VII itself maybe.

At the same time, yeah, there's some very trivial stuff the game paints on the map and Chadley says 'why you not doing your homework, Cloud?'. All those towers and things. Picking up the signs, pressing triangle three times on a lifecrystal. Things that aren't that interesting. There's no real discovery or challenge there either, sadly, it's just handed to you

But I feel the good overshadows the boring bits, and I don't really understand this whole need to platinum games if it means ruining the game for yourself, you know? I've not done it as there's a series of progressively difficult combat challenges in the post game which require a massive degree of build theory crafting and you have to do 10 back to back, 17 times or something like that. Like a bunch of bloody palace type missions. Like I might do it at some point, or I won't. I just played the game until I had enough, which was 170 hours (which seems a bit on the slow side, reading online). There were bits that dragged but I enjoyed like 90 percent of it (5 percent of the bit I did not enjoy was its ending, the other 5 percent was bullshit like wrangling chocobos and chucking boxes). But I mostly just did the things I wanted to do and it worked out really well.

I also thought most of the sidequests in this were pretty good, compared with Remake's terrible sidequests. There's one or two I didn't like but most were fine and delivered neat character moments, and some of them had cool dog music. There was one with a chicken which sucked but then had a hilarious ending. I dunno, I give that one a pass lol.

But the platinum in this is like one of those DMC5 style platinums, you got to get mad good at everything in it. Or find some cheesy way of doing things. But imo that sounds tedious.  Anyway you do you, but that is definitely one of those things I don't really get tbh, trying to get trophies if it makes the game less fun. Think this game up in the Plague Requiem thread as well

Why not just not do the side stuff? I dont get it, don't do it if you don't want to.

To me it's like the difference between seeing a film in the cinema or on blu ray versus streaming. It's kinda a question for the purists of the medium, really. The difference is probably not that worth it, unless you really care deeply about seeing these games in their proper resolution, displayed on their proper screen technology and keeping all of their hardware-specific qualities and imperfections.

Like I play a lot of PS2 games on an emulator with CRT shaders. But it's not the same, really, and sometimes it takes you out of it when a sound effects is wrong

In terms of visual communication of its gameplay, the demo has a handy 'screen shake' toggle which makes the combat look a bit more 'flat', but much easier to parse cause it's not juddering constantly. Plus the dualsense implementation is actually really solid so it makes up for that feedback anyway.

Screen shake on a game like this feels fucking awful when you're trying to push its combat beyond a passive to and fro, and play more aggressively. So it's great it has that, FFXVI didn't have that and it was horrible in its late game