one-armed dwarf

I don't think they're doing the scenario switch thing, it's more of a smooth single playthrough. I think you swap the same way as in Code Veronica. eg when the story demands it

Yeah you run up and do the ol switcheroo and they're like "ruuhhhh??..."

But it's scary doing that in a hallway with three zombos ☹️

I think it probably doesn't work as well in the non PS1 games. Either cause of greater grabbing range or different AI or something. I've only managed it a few times so far

But either way it's where where the push pull with "do I kill them or do I mrun past?" comes in. Being frugal is good but being a Scrooge is stupid and I sort of miss this part with the current series. Even a lone zombo can cause real trouble either by catching you with your guard down or cause you forget to burn the body in the remake.

The crimson head was such a great mechanics. In lots of ways the remake is kind of easier than the OG but that one mechanic adds a lot of panic if you forget to take care of a dead zombo. Suddenly that tiny hallway in the mansion becomes a dangerous bottleneck of very aggressive zombos cause you weren't diligent enough.

Course they all pale in comparison to those froggo assholes (the real reason the OG is harder to my recollection anyway).

This is like the 4th or 5th edit to this post but RE is why I don't hate backtracking in games. Some games need it, I hope RE2 has it so you aren't just passing through and you have to make these decisions all the time if you're going to return to an area often.

Oppressive I mean in how every zombie is a massive threat in those old games cause of limited space, not just ammo. The few bits of footage I've seen make the zombies seem easier to deal with. It's not specifically mood that I'm talking about, there just seems a good deal more space to move around in.

The old game used space against you very well. Early in RE1 there is a section near a saferoom on two levels with zombies on each side of the hallway on the upper level and another just around the corner at the foot of the staircase on the lower level.

You have to make some key decisions very quickly there and in my playthrough just the other night I made the wrong decision twice and paid dearly. All cause it's so claustrophobic. It's oppressive cause there's no room to breathe around every corner

I was playing some RE1 remake the other night. Hard mode as Chris. It's easy to forget just how full of consequence every decision you make in that game is. Like entering a new room with low ammo or heals, something which happens too much cause of Chris' rubbish inventory slot limits.

I died twice outside the first safe room in the game beside the staircase and gave up. But loaded up another night and got to the first save room and started burning fools with fuel cause I ain't up for dealing with crimson heads later.

I don't have much nostalgia for RE cause I came to it very late but theres so much push and pull in that original game (PS1 and remake) when it comes to managing resources and handling threats. I've been wondering for a while if this RE2 remake will have any of that. From what little I gather they've gotten rid of the rubber banding from post RE4 where enemies drop ammo if you're having a hard time but the little bits of footage I've seen I'm not getting that same sense of oppression that the older ones have. It just sort of looks like those Revelations games but scarier, but I haven't been watching much footage of it really cause Capcom show too much of their games

If you have 37 minutes and 47 seconds to spare like I do then this is a very interesting take on the design of Red Dead delivered by a white dude on a bouncy ball.

The way he describes his experience of whiplash between the openness of the open world and the boring scripted missions is basically all the same problems I had.

Sony have finally made it so I can add my Irish card details to my UK PSN account. Also there's a new sale on PSN today which runs into January

Given how weak the GBP has been against every currency I might keep my powder dry into the new year, see if I can nab some real bargains

That post game stuff was a thing in VIII as well. It became very frustrating to me cause levelling became very very slow after level 45 or so and you had to grind metal slimes to get anywhere. So I never saw how all that stuff ended.

Wrt the re2 stuff I'm actually fairly sure that the original RE2 doesn't have the quick turn. I did a first time playthrough of those old games a few years back and re3 is the one I remember implementing it first.

Take him away, Blakey ??

You have the right to remain silent, anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of spoiler law.

Spoilers Nag ???✋

Ok, this is unlikely to change in the next week or so

1. God of War

2. Spider-Man

3. Civilisation VI Switch Edition (if this is invalid pop it down to the not from 2018 list)

3. Shadow of the Collosus

4. Spyro Remake Trilogy

5. Pokémon Lets Go

Games not from 2018 discovered in 2018

1. Breath of the Wild

2. Dragon's Dogma

3. Dark Souls II

I'm not able to fill a full top 10 list as I simply haven't found 10 "new" games this year I really really liked. I couldn't really put RDR or Octopath on as they are games I didn't like. The best game I played this year was Breath of the Wild. It's just the best designed open world I've ever seen and I loved how much of what made it great were a bunch of really simple ideas rather than a complicated set of systems and skill-trees where you grind for hours. It's just wonderful to play a game which is simply about exploring and little else. That's the  one that got away in 2017 but I was never going to blindly buy a Switch until I knew that it would be worth it.

Dragon's Dogma has not got a good open world but it's the only game I've played which marries an open world with an exceptional combat system and great enemies to fight in it. It's very uneven and plain bad in some respects but it's also got some of the best open world moments I've had in a game. But that's also kind of the problem with Dragon's Dogma. It's full of amazing moments but spread out across a game that can be full of tedious busywork. So it's a testament to how good those moments where that I was able to get on with the boring stuff.

Dark Souls II, I catalogued my playthrough of this over on GTM. Most of the first half of it was full of complaining about how stupidly it was designed. That for the first few hours your character is hopelessly slow and completely unable to deal with the most basic of threats. Until you pump up the ADP stat and you get a bunch of i-frames added to every dodge and animation and it becomes much more playable. Once I got to the second half of the game I really turned around on it and it's the first Souls game I've played where I managed to make sense of the lore and story on a single playthrough rather than the multiple it took me with Souls I and BloodBorne. That's a good thing and a bad thing probably as the mysterious lore is part of the reason I love replaying the games, trying to make sense of them. But Souls II is way too long to replay.

As for the games I've played that actually got released in this year few of them are really memorable to me except for God of War. I really liked how it's world was relatively small and not-to-scale but gave you a nice degree of freedom. I liked the openness of the combat system. It's not quite all the way Devil May Cry but it's one of those cause-and-effect type combat systems where every technique has a specific set of situations where it's effective and the fun is in figuring out where to deploy them. When to throw away your axe and pummel an enemy's defence down with your fists. Recognising an opportunity to use one of those delay-and-stance-shift moves. The incredible feedback from the axe weapon itself and how it throws the enemies around. It's everything which the old games weren't for me. The combat in GoW 2018 rewards thought while the old ones reward mindless mashing. It also manages to shift tone and lore very convincingly which really surprised me

I can't really write anything on the other games I played this year as they're kind of forgettable compared with these ones. I thought Spider-Man was great fun but just that. Civ VI got me through a tough time in hospital but it's also just another one of those games. Pokemon Go has horrible accessibility issues where I had to just stop playing it after my surgery cause of the mandatory motion controls in it. Collosus and Spyro are just remakes of old games so everyone knows what they are. Spyro only figures in this list I think cause it was such a breath of fresh air after Red Dead Redemption II which was both massively boring to play and had a very limited colour palette.

I'm resubbed to this. After sort of burning out on it ages ago I'm not sure how long ill be back on but I needed a game which devours time cause I still ain't in a place where I feel like I can be productive and use my time more fruitfully. So XIV it is.

My main is a black mage usually, but I got bored of that after a while and purchased the level boost for dragoon to try the Stormblood content. I don't usually buy boosts, but I've raised something like 4 classes from 0-60 already and just wanted something that felt new without just doing dailies for a month.

I skipped Stormblood when it came out. Have been trying to get through it here and there but I feel the main story quests in this are a disappointment after how good Heavensward was (a better story than XV I would say). But that trailer for Shadowbringers has me excited so I got to get Ms Snausages ready for next year. Black Mage, white mage and Dragoon all up to 70 and I'll be practicing those rotations.

Just jumped on duty finder and fought Shiva as white mage. It's overwhelming when you haven't been on in a while. So much to keep track of.

This game is breaking my heart. This fight against this demon guy at the end of the DLC is really great but I don't have the numbers to pull me through, even with the assassin's autonomy ability. I need to get a better sword than +2 Dragons Dogma. I need to run around the island and find a cursed weapon that takes me over the line. But I hate that I have to do that. I've got this guy down. Avoiding all his AOEs and parrying all his physicals (exct the grab) but the numbers just aren't high enough

I also like Sen's Fortress. But Souls is less a game about combat and more dealing with obstacles. When you put the player in a tight spaces in DD a lot of its systems fall apart and the pawns become a useless liability cause they don't know how to deal with close quarters.

I'm not really trying to sell it, it's clearly not going to work for everyone. Just trying to explain my own logic for why I think V could be a dark horse when it comes to combat mechanics. Dragons Dogma has the best magic I've seen in a game so a magic-using DMC character is exciting just for that reason and the fact you're controlling two characters means there's great scope for some really advanced stuff. Maybe.

V looks like a culmination of lots of different ideas the devs have had with different games over the years, not just a weird gimmick born out of nothing.  Only thing I don't like is he's an edgelord but I'm guessing the game will be sending that up and not trying to play it straight.

The series needs to try something new anyway outside of bang bang bang swords and guns for every character. Nero and Dante looks great but there's not really a lot new there. I'll also add I'm not fully subscribed to everything they're doing with this game. Like how it seems like it's sacrificed the twitchiness of the older games for a more realistic and heavy kind of momentum driven combat. When I played the Nero demo at an event I found I couldn't cancel out of his animations as quick as I'm used to and I'm bothered by that. I need to get another hands-on to see how it works.

Edit

Reading comments on other forums it seems people think V is just going to stand back and be passive while the minion auto executes spells and attacks, sort of like it's FFXII or something. It's not going to work like that I am sure. It's more likely you give it instructions and watch for opportunities to set up tandem attacks with V and the parrot guy.

I'm guessing he'll have a higher skill floor than Dante or Nero due to having to manage two characters like this.

You swap characters throughout the game, some missions will let you choose who you want to play as with the other character choice being a co-op NPC or online real player co-op

It's not going to be like RE6. Games like this have to be short otherwise you know it will be full of filler. They've got to be short cause it will kill higher difficulty replays if it's full of slow rubbish. From the TGS demo we already know the first Dante mission is mission 11. Probably full game is no more than 30 missions. DMC missions are usually not very long.

As for character switching well of course that's in. It was always in from day one when they said there was three characters. I can't really see the downside to that, there's too little there if it's just Nero.

Edit

Anyway back to V, I really wasn't into any of it when I first saw it. But after looking at the magic using classes in Dragons Dogma and thinking how the devs could take their experience with that game and work a summoner/caster character into a game like this I'm actually more excited to try V than I am Dante.

If you've played DD then you'll know that the spells in that game are insane. Thinking of how that stuff could work in a game like this has me excited. It's going to be different for sure. A little like Lady in DMC4 I think where you have to keep range from the enemies cause your close range options are secondary to long range ones.

Don't fully know what to make of any of that. I think the way the character talks is fucking lame, but that combat looks like it could be interesting. At first glance I didn't think so but there's a lot of juicy looking systems there.

It looks like what if they took Vergil with his slow walk and teleporting and crossed him with a magic casting class from Dragons Dogma. There's a big meteor spell in there @52 that reminds me of bolide. Everything about how slow his combat is and the different magic attacks makes him look like he could fit in an action RPG.

There's a DMC1 callback object there when V balances on the nose of the panther. That was a special way of killing the shadow cats in the first game. Also has a bunch of lasers which look like Griffon's.

For a game that otherwise looks very safe its cool to see this summoner type character in a technical action game. I'm guessing V will be the hardest character to play cause you'll be controlling two characters really. So Nero is the beginner character and Dante is intermediate.

I'm imagining his fighting style will have loads of opportunities to setup tandem style attacks between V and his parrot friend. So mindless clobbering won't work with this guy. Getting excited thinking of getting to grips with all the new systems

Anyway the series needs something new cause even when I tried the Nero demo it was like oh I totally know most of this already, it's just the arms that are new. And Dante has all his old familiar techniques.

Also V is totally just Vergil or a part of his soul broken off or something.

It's all kind of a spectrum I think. Mass Effect started out with a strong RPG focus then became less RPG and more of a shooter with dialogue trees

Radiofloyd I haven't played Baldurs Gate yet. I have all the infinity engine games but not got around to them all yet

The laptop I have now has a horrible screen and is all busted up so it might be a while until I get on it

The edges blur with a lot of that stuff. God of War has some RPG systems in there but with that stuff you kind of have to take a step back and ask if it's a system fundamental to the overall design or if it's just kind of thrown in there. With GoW I think it's just thrown in there.

I actually think the RPG stuff in GoW 2018 weakens the game and hamstrings some of the combat stuff in it. Cause it's not always easy to tell if something is designed to require investment in player skill or in making the numbers big enough to make the threat go away

Although I'm a big JRPG weeb I'd argue that the western take on RPG is a truer form of the genre cause they apply it to more than just making your characters stronger.

Planescape Torment made me try out DnD for real and I briefly tried to get into reading fantasy. Neither worked out but I think that's the best RPG I've ever played.

Way I see it RPG is anything with strong roots in tabletop dice-rolling RPG. Which means equipment, specialities (magic, close-quarters combat, NPC interactions using charisma or wisdom etc) and decision making.

Zelda has some shared DNA but its more an offshoot of other RPG stuff. The dice-rolling isn't in there. As Maf said you've not got much control over what your player character does or become either in how he reacts to stuff or what he specialises in which is an essential facet of how DnD and its descendents operate.

You find new equipment in Zelda but you always find the same new equipment. There's no player agency, it would be more like the DM always telling you what to do and what your role is. You don't decide that you want the boomerang or the ocarina, you just take it and shut up.

I was disappointed with IV, couldn't really click with it. It felt a little bit of a downgrade from III, visually anyway with the environments.

III just has a look that I can't describe that I've not really seen in any other game. Very low budget and lo-fi but effective.

I voted for SMTIII over Persona cause you've got more freedom over party building and I also loved how the world is just this big post-apocalyptic inverted spherical Tokyo.

Big hopes for SMTV

You haven't even played the best game on that list

If it's straight up RPG then no particular order but

FFVII

Shin Megami Tensei III

Dark Souls I

BloodBorne

Planescape Torment

Maf you're just fucking terrible at video games, I suggest you learn to accept this. It will get easier for you that way.

I really hate the DLC, it's kind of ruining the game for me

The base game is a fun but janky action RPG with great mechanics and discovering how to take down enemies is a lot of fun. But the DLC is pure RPG numbers crunching. You fight everything in corridors. There's no scope for open ended action when you're fenced in like this. It's like everything is Sen's Fortress. If your numbers aren't big enough then you got to go home. The damage scaling is terrible, when DD is an RPG it just isn't good sadly

It's frustrating cause these boss fights are good. I'm at the last one I think (actually the internet says he has a second form, but still). I'm trying to find some better gear else I might try to solo it again like I did the bishop cause the damage scaling is so dumb that the solo augment for assassin might be necessary to avoid grinding for ages.