It hasn't had an aftermath yet. I'm just quietly reporting since political discussions are expressly forbidden on Steam forums. Nobody's dropped in to stop it yet.
I just thought the circumstances were funny because Trails's own very obvious political subtext runs directly counter to the guy he was advocating.
I was about to post this in the LGR thread but eh. Anyway, it's Stardew Valley, that game @Epitome mentioned and something I've been waiting for from the people I follow, in hope, and here it is. Haven't watched the video yet, granted, but she's good people so I'm sure it'll be good.
It's pretty cool that Hyrule Warriors Legends means new stuff for Hyrule Warriors on Wii U, although I get the feeling it's just going to be characters and not maps or anything.
Still, playing as the boat from Wind Waker in campaign mode should be fun.
Not a whole lot of options in Link's Awakening, unless they're like, incarnating the Wind Fish or something. Or having him dream of an unusually badass Marin.
Phantom Hourglass/Spirit Tracks, it'll probably be Linebeck. Even if Byrne would make more sense.
nb4 the character from Link's Awakening is the Bucket Mouse
(However, from a purely biased standpoint, I must say that I advocate for Christine as the Link's Awakening character, for my actual name is Christine. I know this will never happen, sadly)
So this might seem petty, but if you load up Dragon Age: Origins and run a two-handed weapon warrior, you'll see the most disgusting interpretation of sword use I've encountered so far. It goes beyond getting things wrong and well into the realm of absurd. Movies and games tend to have things like big weapon swings and in-combat thematic discussions and whatnot, but DAO takes everything to a new level and has a special place in my memory for offenses against fencing.
Right so you take your big sword and the first thing you might notice is that the character wields it in a left tail guard while being right-handed. This is an awkwardish position, not awful, but it's hardly a default and generally used because some other technique has landed you there. When you make a basic attack, your character will make a horizontal cut, left to right, releasing one hand so the blow is essentially a super wide one-handed chop.
Reasons this is profoundly awful:
If you are right-handed, you throw stronger blows from your right side. Most media gets this one right, at least. Reverse for left-handers.
Larger, longer swords prefer high, stable guards in most cases to take advantage of their length.
Two-handed swords are designed to be used with two hands on the hilt.
Throwing a wide one-handed strike from your off side from an awkward guard with no control over the cutting arc means you're running a substantial risk of injuring yourself or your comrades, while throwing a weak, easily resisted strike against opponents.
Like okay DAO, you don't want us to play non-mage classes, I get it.
Thought: Dragon Age is *FINALLY* clicking for me. Mainly because it's better at aping Discworld than it is at aping Lord of the Rings/pulp fantasy
It's more aping Wheel of Time than anything.
Ehhh, maybe saying it was "aping Discworld" was something of a reach because it really is going for a more cookie cutter pseudo-MMO look with some entirely superficial lip service to Tolkien and some ketchup sprayed on the whole affair.
Reading through Chorocojo's Pokemon Platinum LP for giggles.
I completely forgot about the part near the end when ADHD Rival teams up with you against the two Galactic commanders at the end, and the optimal strategy is actually to KO your partner's first Pokemon yourself because instead of the awesome fire monkey with a type advantage against everything they have, he leads off with this dipshit Munchlax that just spams Stockpile.
> There are those people who refuse to scramble teams in TF2 even when one team is clearly stomping the other and it's no fun at all, because they find it fun to stomp the other team. These people are jerks.
> stomping other teams IS fun, in dota 2 and tf2 alike, if you don't enjoy a good stomp every now and then you cray.
> No, it's boring, even on the winning team. The action just doesn't move, and usually just congregates at the losing team's spawn. There's no interesting tactics to be tried, going around various obstacles or parts of the map. Nothing exciting ever happens during a stomp. There's no rush of adrenaline when the other team is already capping something and you're trying to push really hard to prevent it, or you're so close to capping something but the other team's got a great defense to balance your great offense. "Oh hey there are easy-to-hit moving targets that we can shoot down repeatedly", whoop-dee doo. That's not fun at all.
> there's plenty of stress release involved with whooping the other team's ♥♥♥ hardcore.
> Well, maybe humiliating people online is something you enjoy, but not for me.
> sounds like someone's a little bit too hellbent with their morals. chillax, have fun, and sadistically destroy the other teams!
I was about to post this in the LGR thread but eh. Anyway, it's Stardew Valley, that game @Epitome mentioned and something I've been waiting for from the people I follow, in hope, and here it is. Haven't watched the video yet, granted, but she's good people so I'm sure it'll be good.
i should have mentioned that this paragraph was kinda hard to parse.
That's not even the important part dude. But, regardless: I ended up posting it here, and at least one other person has referenced it (Epi), so here's a good person talking on what looks like a good game.
I'm trying out FF: Explorers for the first time. It's Squeenix's attempt to cash in on Monster Hunter's fame, but it does so...surprisingly well.
The developers have successfully incorporated both FF and MH mechanics into the game, so that it has elements of one while not feeling like a rehash of the other. A lot of gameplay elements in MH that would be out-of-place in an FF game (e.g. sharpening) are removed entirely. I like the camera homing system a lot better than MH's, and the combat feels smoother comparatively. Whatever flaws it might have are shared with MH, like combat feeling samey or endless grinding/item drop quests.
My biggest beef with it so far is that there are some attacks that are just plain unavoidable, which runs counter to what made MH good. What makes MH combat engaging is that you can potentially avoid any attack as long as you're skilled and mobile enough. Putting unavoidable attacks in a game that uses maneuvering as a large element in combat is out-of-place and turns combat into an attrition game that one can lose simply by having lower numbers than the other guy. This strikes me as an inelegant attempt to blend FF mechanics and MH combat.
I have to be skeptical of any attempt to imitate MH too closely, because the actual MH games are so dense with hidden depth. FromSoftware succeeded because they moved the core gameplay style to a different genre entirely, where they could justify substantial simplification of combat (although then Bloodborne eventually happened), but a more direct attempt at imitation seems like it's doomed to be the poorer end of the comparison.
Man, I'm not sure what to think of Skyward Sword. I love the environmental puzzles, and I like the combat idea and a lot of the things it tries to do. But it really needed to go back to Twilight Princess's control scheme of using the upper d-pad for items so it could free up the B button to say "hey everyone this sword movement I'm doing is actually an attack".
The game has no way of telling the difference between the actual swing, and the flick of the wrist just about anyone will instinctively make to move a sword into position to make that swing. It's even harder for me, because I have just enough fencing experience that I can't not do that -- if you don't do that wrist movement, you have to waste a ton of energy moving an actual weapon's center of mass while the swing builds up momentum, and just propelling a straight swing from a completely neutral position like the game seems to expect means you're actually swinging away from a target in front of you.
The very first Ghirahim fight took bloody forever because you have to bait his hand away then attack his other side, but the movement you make to pivot around and start that swing gets interpreted as the swing itself and he catches it every time.
Like, I would bait his right hand to the outside. Then try to disengage under it and swing at his left. The disengage itself -- the very beginning of a nearly 270 degree arc around his lower torso that snaps a whole bunch of angular momentum like a bullwhip in a horizontal strike to his left -- gets picked up as a downward swing from above at his right shoulder. And the fencer in me cries.
Lots of people claimed, amusingly, that Skyward Sword's sword movement was 1:1 with the player's motions. But when you do actual fencing motions, Link just flips out and does flurries, which is convenient but destroys game depth for fencers. Additionally, the game doesn't calculate your attack angle based on eight directions as implied, but on the basis of four axis, which is never clearly explained. So trying to do the logical thing and attacking an opponent from the opposite direction of their parry? No dice.
So since the directional and defense systems were so wonky, I largely ended up ignoring them and exploiting Link's flip out flurries on flank openings. Skyward Sword is a great example of how representing a literal truth in a game doesn't necessarily represent the substance of that truth; conversely, the more abstracted combat systems of Monster Hunter and Souls games have far more to do with the substance of fencing. Mount & Blade hits a middle ground for pretty good effect, though, and Metal Gear Rising is a really interesting interpretation of fencing in context of a spectacle fighter.
I really like the aesthetics of Skyward Sword, but everything I hear about the actual game sounds like a pain in the butt (I know playing the demo at a Gamestop was just an exercise in frustration).
So I just played the Skyloft level in Hyrule Warriors a lot instead.
*I* liked Skyward Sword quite a bit. It was quite fun once you acclimatize to the controls. It's mostly a matter of not going faster than the controller can detect.
I found a lot to appreciate in Skyward Sword, just not that execution of directional sword combat. The way several pre-dungeon areas acted like their own dungeons was pretty good and I enjoyed most of the flying-related stuff. Plus the aesthetic is a pleasing compromise between the Wind Waker and Ocarina camps.
i loved Skyward Sword (although i never finished it). i did find the motion controls a little awkward, but it wasn't enough to wreck an otherwise great game for me.
i've been meaning to write a Zelda post in response to an Egoraptor video i watched like a week ago that made me think about some things. He had a lot of complaints about the series, and the long and short of it is the games he liked the least were the ones i liked the most.
His contention was that when you play Ocarina of Time you spend too much time waiting for stuff. A part of me came away feeling that he must be a very impatient person and that he seemed oddly uninterested in the fictional narrative, but i'd be misrepresenting him if i said that was an adequate summary of his views. He pointed out that the combat in OOT involves a lot of waiting and not a lot of challenge. He's right, but when i played it i was so bad at games that it was sufficient to challenge me anyway.
i dunno, at the same time i don't feel i was wrong to get swept up in the quest and the fantasy world. The 2D games are good games, but i can't engage with them in the same way; little pixel characters wandering around flat, rectangular rooms with uniform dimensions. i liked how 'epic' the 3D games felt, and Skyward Sword's scenarios and environments certainly delivered on that front.
It is really weird to me that people get so angry that there is any amount of handholding in the crazy experiment in designing a whole 3D world that was Ocarina of Time.
Comments
Ironically, that makes him more likely to be an actual Trump supporter.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
team is clearly stomping the other and it's no fun at all, because they find it fun to stomp the other team. These people are jerks.
> stomping other teams IS fun, in dota 2 and tf2 alike, if you don't enjoy a good stomp every now and then you cray.
> No, it's boring, even on the winning team. The action just doesn't
move, and usually just congregates at the losing team's spawn. There's
no interesting tactics to be tried, going around various obstacles or
parts of the map. Nothing exciting ever happens during a stomp.
There's no rush of adrenaline when the other team is already capping
something and you're trying to push really hard to prevent it, or you're
so close to capping something but the other team's got a great defense
to balance your great offense. "Oh hey there are easy-to-hit moving
targets that we can shoot down repeatedly", whoop-dee doo. That's not
fun at all.
> there's plenty of stress release involved with whooping the other team's ♥♥♥ hardcore.
> Well, maybe humiliating people online is something you enjoy, but not for me.
> sounds like someone's a little bit too hellbent with their morals. chillax, have fun, and sadistically destroy the other teams!
why_i_don't_do_much_multiplayer_gaming.txt
anyway
> http://www.siliconera.com/2016/03/18/drama-scandals-stardew-valley/
well that's interesting
so i guess it's harvest moon plus more character drama
Good thing that never caught on, huh?
i've been meaning to write a Zelda post in response to an Egoraptor video i watched like a week ago that made me think about some things. He had a lot of complaints about the series, and the long and short of it is the games he liked the least were the ones i liked the most.
His contention was that when you play Ocarina of Time you spend too much time waiting for stuff. A part of me came away feeling that he must be a very impatient person and that he seemed oddly uninterested in the fictional narrative, but i'd be misrepresenting him if i said that was an adequate summary of his views. He pointed out that the combat in OOT involves a lot of waiting and not a lot of challenge. He's right, but when i played it i was so bad at games that it was sufficient to challenge me anyway.
i dunno, at the same time i don't feel i was wrong to get swept up in the quest and the fantasy world. The 2D games are good games, but i can't engage with them in the same way; little pixel characters wandering around flat, rectangular rooms with uniform dimensions. i liked how 'epic' the 3D games felt, and Skyward Sword's scenarios and environments certainly delivered on that front.