I like ATB. The strategy still matters, but you're under pressure to improvise a bit. Of course if you have Hastega up you basically get attacks off as fast as you can select them.
I also like straight turn-based when you can see the turn order. So I'm not that difficult to please I guess. As long as it's not bullshit like FF3 DS where the turn order is pseudo-random but enemies put out way too much damage to survive without heals lining up perfectly mid-turn.
also disclaimer: i've only played 2 games in the series, of which one of them was X
so what i'm actually saying is i didn't get along with the combat in FFXIII, but that leads me to suspect i won't particularly enjoy the combat in the other titles in the series, either
Mm, X is far, far more indicative of how the rest of the series plays than XIII is.
I can't speak for most of this genre since I haven't played Civilization, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, etc.. Though I'm not surprised it's far more difficult to actually mechanicize (in any playable form) various cultural interactions and such. (I mean, what can you do, have the Nazis roll dice to see how successful they are at suppressing the music of Chopin in WW2 Poland, and have the Poles roll to see how much of a morale bonus they get from it each month? It becomes a practically absurd simplification, and one which also risks feeling really cheapening what's happening, because human interactions are a lot more complicated than that.)
That said, I _have_ played Age of Empires, specifically Age of Empires II, and regarding...
But here's the thing. In all of human history, generally, empires rise, reach an apex, and fall. Strategy games are good at simulating those first two parts, but tend to end before that last one actually happens (unless of course you make it happen yourself, which often requires some genuine effort on your part). I get it, more or less, most people don't find watching their hard work fall to pieces particularly rewarding, but, it gets at the core of my issue.
One thing I always noticed with my AoE2 games -- albeit partly since I tended to play on heavily-wooded maps like Black Forest -- is that I basically just built my empire on eating through my supply of forests. Putting aside the obvious real-life environmental concerns of this, it's still glaringly obvious that I've just advanced my civilization by chewing through an entirely non-renewable resource. They don't even give me acorns to replant trees I've felled (the way, say, Terraria does).
For those of you who aren't familiar with AoE2, there are basically four major resources: * food * wood * gold * stone
You need food to create villagers and many military units. Fair. You need wood to build houses and various buildings, and to create many of the cheaper military units You need stone to build castles, walls, and some other buildings. You need gold to build some of the more advanced buildings as well as a number of elite military units.
You get food by hunting wild animals, fishing, and farming. There are only so many wild animals to hunt (even including the ones that fight back). Fishing stocks are depletable. The only non-depletable resource is setting up a farm.
You need wood to create a farm.
You need wood to set up your mining outposts which gather stone and gold. Well you also need wood to set up a sawmill for gathering more wood anyway.
Deposits of stone and gold are also depletable.
Now, do you need more of any resource and have an excess? You can sell off resources and buy other resources with your gold, using a market. But if you keep doing the same trade, the trading price will become horribly out of your favor.
But by the endgame, at least on the Black Forest map style, if the game has been going on for a while, you end up with some villagers diligently chopping down trees increasingly further away from their sawmill, while you're probably having an excess of wood and food but not that much in the way of gold and practically no stone anywhere so you just smack the buy button a few more times at the market when you need stone. And smack the sell button when you have extra wood and food from all those really efficient lumber and farming operations you've spent the early game setting up.
The ONLY truly renewable sources of resources in AoE2 are: * having a temple and having your monk gather religious relics and place them in the temple. This generates a steady but small stream of gold. * having trading carts running between markets. This also generates gold, every time your trading cart makes it back. If you want to do this, though, you had better have allies, because if you try to send your trading cart to an enemy's market...well, you certainly CAN, and you will still get money from it, but your enemy, if they have any military units, will desginate your cart to be their enemy and proceed to wreck it.
So, basically, IF NOT FOR THE FACT THAT THE GAME EXPECTS YOU TO MILITARILY OVERPOWER YOUR ENEMIES OR JUST BUILD A DAMN WONDER AND GET IT OVER WITH, the long, long-term prospect of what the game will look like is as follows:
* Each civillization has felled all its trees. Even if they grew back they wouldn't grow back that fast. * Each civilization sits on relics in temples, waiting for gold.
Now to be fair, let me repeat that this game DOES expect you to be throwing your military at other players to conquer them. It doesn't expect you to build a defensive force around yourself and then never attack anyone, ever. So, in fact, as long as you don't _lose_ your military units, they don't require additional resources to maintain.
Now we can go argue and fret over just how unrealistic this all is, but it still goes STRAIGHT to the point of illustrating that this game simulates the growth of a civilization and its arguable apex...but not its eventual downfall. The game literally expects you to finish it by then, and if you're not going to conquer, it's like, here, go make a wonder, it's obnoxiously expensive and only available in the last Age, if it stays up for 50 years you win. Players have strats for destroying (or at least causing the surrender of) their opposing civilizations within the first however many minutes of a game (around 20?). Contrast that to me sorta defaulting to a turtling strat and easily ending up with games that would last well over an hour, sometimes even 3 hours, and the resource depletion was glaringly obvious by then.
Long-haul sustainability of civilization -- on the order of decades, centuries, millenia -- is not something AoE2 does well at all.
I'll have to dig it out soon for it :) in the meantime, I've swapped the controls around a bit (wasd for movement, space for jump, numpad for abilities/attacks) and am having a much, much better time.
You end up getting a dash move that is used a lot in platforming, and downward slashing to bounce becomes crucial, which is easier with a controller I feel
The mouse is used on menus, but it's not used for gameplay. It's habit to think of keyboard and mouse as one unit for me, so there's no real underlying reason, I suppose.
I differentiate between them because I'm a lot better when I can use all-keyboard controls because then I can do arrow keys + ZXCVASDF, which I'm much more comfortable with than WASD + mouse.
Part of the issue is that the arrow keys on my laptop suck; the up/down keys are half size and smooshed into one key location. I usually remap them in any given game to be on the numpad instead.
taking this here so as not to hijack Imi's thread further
@glennmagusharvey the Star Fox 2 scoreboard theme is really pretty! it sounds wistful and nostalgic
what do you think of the more orchestrated sounding music from the later games in the series? e.g.
The scoreboard ("Records") theme from SF2 is actually a remix of the title theme, which is also great, and which I forgot to mention. But rather than being wistful, it's confident and optimistic. On the other hand, the Records theme is a great thing for washing away the tears after failing the mission to defend Corneria...
I'm not entirely familiar with SF64's music, as I never owned the game myself but instead played it with a friend at his house, but I do have some fave tracks from there. The Zoness music is not one I'm really familiar with but it sounds pretty.
The tracks I remember liking most in it, though, are Sector X, Boss B (for large bosses, such as that thing with the RAINBOW BEAM), Aquas, and Star Wolf's Theme.
One curious thing about Star Fox 64 is how "dry" the music sounds without the rest of the game going on. There's very little reverb in the soundtrack itself; I feel it depends a lot on the action being there to supplement the texture.
i never really thought about the reverb, but i definitely get what you mean. listening to it on youtube the music sounds a lot more 'distant' and 'muted' than i remember from the game
Star Fox 64 was very, very beautifully choreographed. The levels were explicitly laid out to the music, and even most of the boss fights were set to launch their first attack right as the intro peaked. There's a reason this game was legendary, and it wasn't (just) the memes.
I kind of wish there were good romhacks of it. The original game even on Hard was kind of embarrassingly easy.
Star Fox 64 was very, very beautifully choreographed. The levels were explicitly laid out to the music, and even most of the boss fights were set to launch their first attack right as the intro peaked. There's a reason this game was legendary, and it wasn't (just) the memes.
the great thing about this is when you listen to tracks from the OST, you can sort of picture where you would be in the level at any given point, sometimes even remember who said what when
There's several fights in FFXIV where the fights line up perfectly with the music. I actually used the BGM to time my heals when I was learning to heal Bahamut Prime.
Yeah, but the problem in Adventures was that the levels they played over were flat-ass boring. They were just a handful of generic enemy waves and blue rocks while you collect shit to open "the force field", with no set pieces or climax or direction or anything.
the original Star Fox got pretty darn hard on the hardest route
I still beat it once or twice, though
I remember my friend had lots of trouble against the upgraded Star Wolf team and basically the only viable strategy I remember from then seemed to be to fly in a circle and shoot and eventually a shot would hit someone
Star Fox 64 was very, very beautifully choreographed. The levels were explicitly laid out to the music, and even most of the boss fights were set to launch their first attack right as the intro peaked.
There's several fights in FFXIV where the fights line up perfectly with the music. I actually used the BGM to time my heals when I was learning to heal Bahamut Prime.
I love it when games do this.
I wonder how many games actually go and change their gameplay design to fit the music like this. As opposed to the other way around (tweaking the music to fit the gameplay timing).
Castlevania Dracula XX, a.k.a. Castlevania Dracula X for SNES, a.k.a. Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss
It's a much-maligned SNES port of Rondo of Blood, and is far more difficult than Rondo.
But its final boss -- probably the most difficult Dracula battle in the entire franchise -- is almost perfectly timed with the music. Dracula uses two different attacks, but in a pattern: He uses fireballs most of the time, but switches to lava balls when the music gets to the intense last phrase at the end of the loop. He specifically starts off with four fireball sequences then a lava ball sequence, then repeats a pattern of three fireball sequences and a lava ball sequence thereafter, in order to get the timing right the first time.
If you take forever to fight him, though, this pattern desynchs, with his lava balls coming earlier and earlier relative to the music.
Touhou will often rubberband the gameplay around your performance to fit the music. Several of the more dramatic setpiece levels like PCB Stage 4 or UFO Stage 6 will insert or prematurely kill/skip waves, just so the finale lines up.
I seem to remember Miko will line up one of her big flashy balls-out attacks (unfortunately a rather easy one!) right on the climax of her song, then the more complicated and strategic one right after it takes place during a low-key bridge with little percussion.
the Area 6 music in Adventures never actually played in-game, except in the sound test. it's from a level that was cut
but yes, the Arwing levels in that game were lacklustre (and obviously just there to justify the Star Fox branding slapped on an originally unrelated game)
Speaking as someone who's only ever heard bits of the FF14 soundtrack through Record Keeper, what I have heard makes me wish I still had time for an MMO just to hear that stuff in context.
Welp I guess we should add it to the list of all the other stuff Nazis apparently ruined by mundane contact. You know, like dogs, painting, the Olympics, classical music, shouting, the number 9, and käsebrot.
Goodbye Cuphead we hardly knew ye YOU DAMNED NAZI.
Welp I guess we should add it to the list of all the other stuff Nazis apparently ruined by mundane contact. You know, like dogs, painting, the Olympics, classical music, shouting, the number 9, and käsebrot.
Goodbye Cuphead we hardly knew ye YOU DAMNED NAZI.
Comments
I can't speak for most of this genre since I haven't played Civilization, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, etc.. Though I'm not surprised it's far more difficult to actually mechanicize (in any playable form) various cultural interactions and such. (I mean, what can you do, have the Nazis roll dice to see how successful they are at suppressing the music of Chopin in WW2 Poland, and have the Poles roll to see how much of a morale bonus they get from it each month? It becomes a practically absurd simplification, and one which also risks feeling really cheapening what's happening, because human interactions are a lot more complicated than that.)
That said, I _have_ played Age of Empires, specifically Age of Empires II, and regarding... One thing I always noticed with my AoE2 games -- albeit partly since I tended to play on heavily-wooded maps like Black Forest -- is that I basically just built my empire on eating through my supply of forests. Putting aside the obvious real-life environmental concerns of this, it's still glaringly obvious that I've just advanced my civilization by chewing through an entirely non-renewable resource. They don't even give me acorns to replant trees I've felled (the way, say, Terraria does).
For those of you who aren't familiar with AoE2, there are basically four major resources:
* food
* wood
* gold
* stone
You need food to create villagers and many military units. Fair.
You need wood to build houses and various buildings, and to create many of the cheaper military units
You need stone to build castles, walls, and some other buildings.
You need gold to build some of the more advanced buildings as well as a number of elite military units.
You get food by hunting wild animals, fishing, and farming. There are only so many wild animals to hunt (even including the ones that fight back). Fishing stocks are depletable. The only non-depletable resource is setting up a farm.
You need wood to create a farm.
You need wood to set up your mining outposts which gather stone and gold. Well you also need wood to set up a sawmill for gathering more wood anyway.
Deposits of stone and gold are also depletable.
Now, do you need more of any resource and have an excess? You can sell off resources and buy other resources with your gold, using a market. But if you keep doing the same trade, the trading price will become horribly out of your favor.
But by the endgame, at least on the Black Forest map style, if the game has been going on for a while, you end up with some villagers diligently chopping down trees increasingly further away from their sawmill, while you're probably having an excess of wood and food but not that much in the way of gold and practically no stone anywhere so you just smack the buy button a few more times at the market when you need stone. And smack the sell button when you have extra wood and food from all those really efficient lumber and farming operations you've spent the early game setting up.
The ONLY truly renewable sources of resources in AoE2 are:
* having a temple and having your monk gather religious relics and place them in the temple. This generates a steady but small stream of gold.
* having trading carts running between markets. This also generates gold, every time your trading cart makes it back. If you want to do this, though, you had better have allies, because if you try to send your trading cart to an enemy's market...well, you certainly CAN, and you will still get money from it, but your enemy, if they have any military units, will desginate your cart to be their enemy and proceed to wreck it.
So, basically, IF NOT FOR THE FACT THAT THE GAME EXPECTS YOU TO MILITARILY OVERPOWER YOUR ENEMIES OR JUST BUILD A DAMN WONDER AND GET IT OVER WITH, the long, long-term prospect of what the game will look like is as follows:
* Each civillization has felled all its trees. Even if they grew back they wouldn't grow back that fast.
* Each civilization sits on relics in temples, waiting for gold.
Now to be fair, let me repeat that this game DOES expect you to be throwing your military at other players to conquer them. It doesn't expect you to build a defensive force around yourself and then never attack anyone, ever. So, in fact, as long as you don't _lose_ your military units, they don't require additional resources to maintain.
Now we can go argue and fret over just how unrealistic this all is, but it still goes STRAIGHT to the point of illustrating that this game simulates the growth of a civilization and its arguable apex...but not its eventual downfall. The game literally expects you to finish it by then, and if you're not going to conquer, it's like, here, go make a wonder, it's obnoxiously expensive and only available in the last Age, if it stays up for 50 years you win. Players have strats for destroying (or at least causing the surrender of) their opposing civilizations within the first however many minutes of a game (around 20?). Contrast that to me sorta defaulting to a turtling strat and easily ending up with games that would last well over an hour, sometimes even 3 hours, and the resource depletion was glaringly obvious by then.
Long-haul sustainability of civilization -- on the order of decades, centuries, millenia -- is not something AoE2 does well at all.
You can only slash down when you're jumping
eriophora said k+m so I was wondering whether it used the m to do aiming. I guess it doesn't so now I'm not sure why she wrote that
I differentiate between them because I'm a lot better when I can use all-keyboard controls because then I can do arrow keys + ZXCVASDF, which I'm much more comfortable with than WASD + mouse.
I'm not entirely familiar with SF64's music, as I never owned the game myself but instead played it with a friend at his house, but I do have some fave tracks from there. The Zoness music is not one I'm really familiar with but it sounds pretty.
The tracks I remember liking most in it, though, are Sector X, Boss B (for large bosses, such as that thing with the RAINBOW BEAM), Aquas, and Star Wolf's Theme.
One curious thing about Star Fox 64 is how "dry" the music sounds without the rest of the game going on. There's very little reverb in the soundtrack itself; I feel it depends a lot on the action being there to supplement the texture.
I still beat it once or twice, though
I wonder how many games actually go and change their gameplay design to fit the music like this. As opposed to the other way around (tweaking the music to fit the gameplay timing).
Castlevania Dracula XX, a.k.a. Castlevania Dracula X for SNES, a.k.a. Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss
It's a much-maligned SNES port of Rondo of Blood, and is far more difficult than Rondo.
But its final boss -- probably the most difficult Dracula battle in the entire franchise -- is almost perfectly timed with the music. Dracula uses two different attacks, but in a pattern: He uses fireballs most of the time, but switches to lava balls when the music gets to the intense last phrase at the end of the loop. He specifically starts off with four fireball sequences then a lava ball sequence, then repeats a pattern of three fireball sequences and a lava ball sequence thereafter, in order to get the timing right the first time.
If you take forever to fight him, though, this pattern desynchs, with his lava balls coming earlier and earlier relative to the music.
Doki Doki Planet
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cuphead: fell for the most obvious shark ever and then beat everyone up on behalf of Literal Satan