Ok, so, Life is Strange. (Warning, Madoka spoilers and analogies.)
Time travel was the cause of the giant murder tornado in the first place. So why rock the boat anymore? Who knows what would happen next? The tornado eating America instead? Nah. No more messing around with that.
This was my train of thought too. I mean, the premise that time travel caused everything was pretty shaky to begin with (there's literally no evidence for it), but even accepting that premise, taking it to the conclusion that more time travel is the answer doesn't really follow.
That, and just after that whole montage of all the good times, I couldn't just let Chloe go again. Although apparently the kiss only happens if you do sacrifice her, which makes sense--it's a last goodbye rather than the somewhat mood killing "everyone else is dead" situation--but still disappoints the yuri fan in me.
That or the emulator is fucking up the FM parameters quite a bit.
Also, I'm pretty amazed at how a console that was supposed to be the Next Big Thing really doesn't look all that different from a Super Nintendo, at least on this game.
Metroid Prime minimalist hypermode run: on Ridley.
Three deaths to Omega before he went down. It pretty much hinged on a very lucky guard spawn near the end where I could stun one of them until Omega blasted them all down for free power bombs. Finished with a super missile to the face.
Seven deaths to Ridley so far. He's quite a bit harder on Hypermode, since it seems like his homing missiles now explode into homing scatter bombs, which scatter into a third salvo. So you have to strafe across pretty much the entire arena to dodge the first two waves, and jump at the edge to dodge the last one. This is borderline impossible at the beginning of the fight, because there are totems all over the place.
They unfortunately took out the glitch where you can boost ball into his crotch and instantly push him to ground phase.
The ground phase is easier on Wii than it was on Gamecube, because free aim can much more effectively take advantage of his open mouth moments. It's pretty easy to pop him right before each jump attack, and you can knock him out of his charge attack while he's rearing back.
The problem happens during the second half of the ground phase, when the timing on his charge changes. You get the barest flash of a second to stun him out of it, and he starts turning toward you a bit to make it even harder to dodge. On hypermode it does like 70 damage and can hit multiple times, and pretty much the only way to not get murdered is to stun him out of it several times in a row. It's...difficult.
So, I caved, and I'm trying the Undertale demo. S'pretty good-- the way it uses JRPG tropes whilst being about as far away from a traditional JRPG as possible is interesting, and it manages to be both funny and a bit unsettling all at once.
I'm trying my best to be a pure-hearted cinnamon roll. I've heard that the full game makes that impossible on the first playthrough, but I'll be damned if I don't try it now.
I killed one of the Vegetoids completely by accident and even though I managed to get through the whole demo without killing anyone else (Toriel included) the ending still made me feel terrible.
(flowey u piece of shit, how you gon' try to kill me the first chance you get and then call ME the selfish brat?)
Not in the sense of a boring turn-based story that just lives in its tropes and then does little else. I want one that has good storytelling and sensible progression of tone and an epic story that actually contains and celebrates its grandeur unironically and doesn't feel the need to be parody or ironic or satire or sarcastic or subverting tropes or anything like that.
Don't try to trash the JRPG while being a JRPG, but don't try to imitate only the superficial elements either.
The gameplay of a JRPG is still gameplay. It should be meaningful, not merely a thing to shuttle the player from cutscene to cutscene.
I'll get around to playing Trails in the Sky soon...
I killed one of the Vegetoids completely by accident and even though I managed to get through the whole demo without killing anyone else (Toriel included) the ending still made me feel terrible.
(flowey u piece of shit, how you gon' try to kill me the first chance you get and then call ME the selfish brat?)
That's Flowey for you.
That's what happened to me when I played the demo too. Surely eating a vegetable doesn't count as murder, right? Well, yeah, it does.
I don't think there's anything like that in the rest of the game--I was really worried that I'd killed someone by stealing his hat, but no, it was just hat theft.
Also FWIW, there's nothing stopping you from being as pure and cinnamon rolly as you like in the full game. Like it says, this is a game where no one has to die.
Nor is it boring. (Also, the gameplay does a damn good job of driving the story, especially considering how the game's plot relies largely on the player's actions within that context rather than the cutscenes.)
I tried to play CSGO again today. The knee-jerk antagonism combined with the White Boy Standard discrimination is intolerable. I had to stop playing.
My favourite server is depopulated and the others are mostly custom-game bullshit.
I was just talking to someone who suggested that, as bizarre as it may sound, the FPS genre may basically be dead. It still exists beyond single installments unlike, say, RTSs (the only major one that has been made in the last 5 years was Starcraft 2), but there are basically no popular shooters that exist outside of the categories "military peek-a-boo" and "press X to activate the right ability". (It should be noted that the weird AAA push for MOBA-shooters is largely an extension of pressing X to activate the right ability.)
I feel that the Tales Of series needs to go back to its roots in some respects.
I would illustrate on this opinion more, but emulating Tales of Phantasia for SNES in my youth may have given me unrealistic expectations. I don't know. But the entries I've picked up since then have lacked a certain something. It's like Tales of Phantasia was this phenomenal JRPG and the rest of the series just took some things too far and scaled back on the simplicity and charm of the original.
Metroid Prime minimalist hypermode run: Ridley down.
Died once to his final phase, then won a particularly harrowing second attempt where I ate an early scatter bomb and spent 3/4 of the fight at 9 health. Repeatedly stunning him out his near-undodgeable charges at the end is one of the most harrowing things ever.
Tried Prime himself and got instakilled on the first phase by a bombardment. I'm going to have to watch some videos or something to see how to handle that. Also, hitting him with anything other than wave/plasma is really, really hard.
Nor is it boring. (Also, the gameplay does a damn good job of driving the story, especially considering how the game's plot relies largely on the player's actions within that context rather than the cutscenes.)
From what I've heard about Undertale it does indeed seem like quite a good game, that uses its gameplay well to deliver its narrative.
Also, I'm pretty amazed at how a console that was supposed to be the Next Big Thing really doesn't look all that different from a Super Nintendo, at least on this game.
Super Nintendo: 16 bits Sega Genesis: 16 bits Atari Jaguar: mind blowing 64 bits
Also, I'm pretty amazed at how a console that was supposed to be the Next Big Thing really doesn't look all that different from a Super Nintendo, at least on this game.
Super Nintendo: 16 bits Sega Genesis: 16 bits Atari Jaguar: mind blowing 64 bits
I haven't gotten Undertale yet, because tfw no Linux support :P
one of these days I'll have to get a cheap Windows machine to run Steam on
i haven't gotten Undertale yet because i just don't feel like playing it at the moment and i'd also prefer waiting for when it's on sale to get it
also partly because the way people around me can't stop talking about how great it is yet jalf the time just cite memetic elements (e.g. dating a skeleton) as "reasons" when talking about why it's good
I kinda wanna play Ryuutama but no one has a group for me to join so I'd have to create my own scenario and all and that just makes me think that I should play it with my future children.
Am I the only one who thinks there's nothing fun whatsoever about fighting a Rathalos? I'm rank 9 and have a bunch of them under my belt. Literally if you count the Atk 2 gems. But they still feel like the obnoxious parts of every other boss in the game put together (which is weird because I know he predates almost everything else in the series).
Constantly airborne like a Seltas. Runs out of reach all the time like a Gore Magala. Poison, fire, and borderline undodgeable autotracking swoop across the area like his waifu. Tail swipe almost as long as a Deviljho. That ridiculous wind/roar -> takeoff -> fireball cheapshot that you can only avoid with specialized gear that's completely useless in every other situation in the game (I can't even think of anything that cheap from any other boss). And he almost always shows up on quests that are already super-annoying and time consuming like schlepping 3-4 powderstones.
Seriously, fuck this asshole. The whole fight is an exercise in extreme tedium.
I find a lot of elements of Insurgency to be very unpleasant, but it's a pretty good game and its community is pretty good compared to most Military FPS communities. I didn't expect to play a popular game explicitly about Middle East conflict and find it to generally have significantly more pleasant players than Counter-Strike.
Like, CSGO, as a public for-fun game, is mostly dead. And yet the people who still play it are people who shout down children who are trying to chat casually and sling slurs at black players.
I could try it again, but the reason I quit in the first place (years ago, mind) was that I was lone-wolfing and I got matched up with two people who called me a faggot because I had an anime avatar and then went on to harass our fourth, Asian teammate (via racism, of course) into teamkilling them. If I quit the game, I would lose rank and get barred from matchmaking for 40 minutes. If I stayed, I had to endure over 15 minutes of teamkilling, team-damaging and griefing, not to mention lack of comms because I muted everyone.
I like challenging myself, but I can't deal with that shit any more. Plus the MM setup put an absurd amount of pressure on me to deal with whatever assholes I ended up with.
I'd play CSGO ranked if I could play with people I knew who weren't assholes, I guess, because you don't have to hear the enemy team.
I played a tonnnn of competitive FPSs back in the day (I played AVP1 in a no-name clan when I was, like, 10) but I think I'm done with that stuff now, sadly enough. Lots of reasons for that, shitty communities being one of the major ones.
Remember the time Switzerland dismantled the Holy Roman Empire and ate Austria-Hungary, all without having any coastal provinces? Neither do I, but was sure as heck a fun campaign.
Four deaths to Prime tonight before taking him down. Suck it, bitches :)
Prime is really hard to hit with free-aim, and you pretty much have to take him at long range if you want to reliably dodge the bombardments (which can OHKO you). Power beam phases suck early on, because you get one super missile and he doesn't launch the loot balls yet, but it doesn't do nearly as much damage as the ice beam when you do get a lucky charge hit.
Later on, plasma phases are the most dangerous, because being even slightly touched by the laser will set you on fire and chew up 70-80 health, and it's difficult to see the telegraph when he's on fire and your shots are still leaving bright traces all over the screen. Ice is nearly as bad, because being frozen is continuous damage, and it's likely you'll be immediately re-frozen -- and it's the hardest one to hit him with by far.
When taking out loot balls, move to the right and kill the right one; this keeps your gun from obstructing your view of Prime and his attacks. By the time the right ball is down, the left should be low enough to the ground to allow a clear view. You will use these constantly to refill your health, as they commonly drop ultra energy.
Not a whole lot of players know, but his lasso attack can be broken by boost balling backward. It also cuts immediately if you break his line of sight with the edge of one of the side trenches.
The final phase of the first fight is a bit sketchy if he charge spams. Try to stay near the central trench -- it's closer than is comfortable, but not much choice. Worst case scenario, his charge is the least damaging thing he does.
Prime's finale is still easy for the most part, but you can't just power bomb metroids freely anymore because you only have 4, drops aren't assured, and the fight is twice as long. Ice Beam + missiles will bring down everything up to fission metroids quickly enough that you don't risk a shockwave as long as you don't screw around. Unless the initial pillars drop missiles, you'll probably have to deal with the first pair of metroids with plasma beam. I had to go through 5 waves of at least one fission metroid, and thankfully it dropped an extra bomb for when one fucking flew away from my first one. Play defensively, even if it means missing a phazon patch if Prime never moves away from it, because collisions really hurt.
And that is how you beat Metroid Prime on the hardest difficulty with no energy tanks or expansions.
Final total:
54 deaths
3 accidental upgrade restarts
29% item collection
See you next mission!
EDIT: the final cutscene where Prime pulls off your Phazon Suit appears to use the Gravity Suit with a black shader instead of the actual Phazon Suit. I was using the Fusion Suit, and Fusion/Phazon is normally the orange post-SA-X one -- but it was black in that cutscene.
Comments
As a music aficionado, I thought you might appreciate this.
Also, obligatory:
The first 30 seconds or so of this is how it is supposed to sound.
these car physics...
FM synthesis, heavy flanging. Nifty sound.
Not in the sense of a boring turn-based story that just lives in its tropes and then does little else. I want one that has good storytelling and sensible progression of tone and an epic story that actually contains and celebrates its grandeur unironically and doesn't feel the need to be parody or ironic or satire or sarcastic or subverting tropes or anything like that.
Don't try to trash the JRPG while being a JRPG, but don't try to imitate only the superficial elements either.
The gameplay of a JRPG is still gameplay. It should be meaningful, not merely a thing to shuttle the player from cutscene to cutscene.
I'll get around to playing Trails in the Sky soon...
Shame since it looks super fun and up my alley.
My favourite server is depopulated and the others are mostly custom-game bullshit.
I was just talking to someone who suggested that, as bizarre as it may sound, the FPS genre may basically be dead. It still exists beyond single installments unlike, say, RTSs (the only major one that has been made in the last 5 years was Starcraft 2), but there are basically no popular shooters that exist outside of the categories "military peek-a-boo" and "press X to activate the right ability". (It should be noted that the weird AAA push for MOBA-shooters is largely an extension of pressing X to activate the right ability.)
Sega Genesis: 16 bits
Atari Jaguar: mind blowing 64 bits
also partly because the way people around me can't stop talking about how great it is yet jalf the time just cite memetic elements (e.g. dating a skeleton) as "reasons" when talking about why it's good
I'm just not in the mood for it.
In fact I don't think I currently want to do much in the way of gaming.
Trails in the Sky SC releases October 29 for $30 on GOG and Steam.
Like, CSGO, as a public for-fun game, is mostly dead. And yet the people who still play it are people who shout down children who are trying to chat casually and sling slurs at black players.
I like challenging myself, but I can't deal with that shit any more. Plus the MM setup put an absurd amount of pressure on me to deal with whatever assholes I ended up with.
I'd play CSGO ranked if I could play with people I knew who weren't assholes, I guess, because you don't have to hear the enemy team.
Remember the time Switzerland dismantled the Holy Roman Empire and ate Austria-Hungary, all without having any coastal provinces? Neither do I, but was sure as heck a fun campaign.