Great LPs outside of Talking Time

!!!!!

Also, have you good folks heard about this Xenogears LP? It is fabulous. Though Something Awful seems to have a bewildering profanity filter (why???) that really awkwards up a lot of the posts. Nevertheless it's great:

The profanity filter is only there if you aren't logged in.

The filter is also much funnier... and downright required for their Sims 3 thread. -_-;

Speaking of which, the Sims Medieval thread is looking pretty good right now.

I noticed all the filters when I didn't have an account, but I haven't noticed any unfiltered swears since registering.

On a related note, what is "GBS thread" a filter for?

"Shitting"

I've been reading this and it really is super great. As someone who had almost no prior knowledge of Xenogears, watching someone go through the game, it almost looks like it would be...fun?? I'm half tempted to try playing it for myself, but everything I've heard about it leads me to believe that I would eventually come to regret that decision if I did.

I think I'm going to stick it on my PSP and replay it. It has its flaws but I think it's worthwhile to (re)visit.
And if you don't like it you can just read the LP!
One concern is that the LP doesn't really show how frequent the random battles are. They can really become a pain.

Xenogears is an ambitious trainwreck. It tried a bunch of different things, and has a great soundtrack and a pretty fun battle system and manages to hold together for three quarters of a disc, and then it just shatters.

I recommend it if you can get it for cheap, even if it is kinda terribly flawed.

God help you if you try to do the Kislev sewers without a map. I played it at just the right age to not realize how painful it is to look at the same one tile for hours on end, but I still couldn't muster the will to come back to it after getting all the way up to the sewer boss with one Zetasol and no saves since the start of that in-game day at the latest. Hint: Carrying no revive items in your inventory is generally a bad idea against a boss who can randomly decide to spam his one-hit kill against your entire party.

I remember wondering how much game my brother had to blow through to hop from boss to boss so relatively quickly in Disc 2. I had no idea that it was literally one wall of text after the other except for the, like, two dungeons that the dev team actually completed.

So I was reading the Xenogears Let's Play and after trying to go to the next page, it prompted me to get an SA account. Well, I guess I'll have to wait until (if) it gets put up on the LP archive before reading it.

Oh no, not again... Something Awful blocks off non-members for about a fortnight every so often, and it always takes me days to get caught up afterward. T_T

Right when there were so many good ones going, too...

BUT THE GHOST TRICK LP

WHAT ABOUT GHOST TRICK

...Oh God.

I miss Missile already.

The last time they went pay, thedarkid (the Xenogears LP'er) had gone offline because a hurricane hit his island. I had to pay up just to see if he was still alive. Okay that's a lie, I just asked Turnip, but he guilted me into paying.

nooooooooooooooooooo

Just pay the ten bucks seash.

But they don't accept Paypal... and not everyone has access to the few credit cards SA accepts, you know.

Seriously, I would gladly pay double if I could. :/

Adding insult to injury for the folks that are locked out: Someone's doing a Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3 let's play. FFT1.3 is a romhack of FFT for advanced players that makes the game more challenging. In other words, it's full of horrible bullshit. The player compares it to Kaizo Mario World.

...Sane people would not touch that game with a ten-foot pole, despite the item's many uses.

But if it's halfway as entertaining as Colon V's Chocolate Secret LP, I might give it a look. Could be Schadenfreude-licious.

But doesn't a paid membership remove the loving swear filter?

Entire Deep Dungeon floors filled with nothing but Divine Knights. Hasted, Protect/Shelled, all 13 slots etc. etc. Also that one version with the E N D battle that was literally impossible because the Arc Witch had a forced first turn.

Hahahahahaha

Although the normal battle tweaks in theory looked to be no worse than just throwing the same ridiculous (S)SCC tactics back at the community that has been using them for years to crush FFT. Then again, we are talking about a group of people who casually say

The best part of 1.3 is listening to people defend it.

It's funny, I love FFL2 to pieces but also know enough to break it six ways from Sunday with four robots or justabout-TAS it with four monsters, so I figured Amuseum's tweaks would make it fresh and challenging again. I didn't even make it to the Baby Wyrm before I hopped back to OG FFL2. The same thing happened when I tried FFT 1.3 after the umpteenth SSCC--even though in theory I should have relished the opportunity to have to fight for my life for the first time again, there was just some intangible absence of an essential something that made me drop it after meeting Algus.

Forget bullshit difficulty; romhacks suck because they suck the soul out of beautiful games.

It's because they're made by people who've played the hell out of the original games, so they're either Kaizo Mario hard or a venue for people to make their own not so original games. Shame too, because something like FFT 1.3 sounds like such a good idea on the surface.

To be more exact, ROMhacks just add more tedium to the experience. Like the old-school difficulty levels in video games, they just up the numbers and don't change any of the existing AI or scripting. Modern difficulty settings (at least when they're done competently) instead adjust enemy AI routines and by and large leave the raw numbers alone (maybe a small adjusting up or down based on difficulty level, but nothing to the level of excess that you see in ROMhacks). What these hackers fail to grasp is that the numbers were set where they were because they were the right values for the AI scripting used. Tweaking with them simply unbalances (or in the case of some games, properly balances) the challenge, but doesn't actually adjust it.

Speaking of RomHacks, HideofBeast just did another thing. Unfortunately, the commentary he wrote was too long for the videos, so he just threw it on pastebin instead of recording it.

The difficulty of the hack itself is still pretty silly at times, but it does do some neat things with its level design.

Other than the dick move rainbow beams, and the pointlessly 10-times-too-strong crusher robot that was otherwise not even a threat, that stage was actually pretty interesting. I chuckled pretty heartily at the Kirby Lolo/Lala-inspired part.

Yeah, those crusher robots are pretty ridiculous. The only thing I can think of is that some subweapon completely schools them, because damn.

The hack isn't completely finished yet, but he plays through all of what's there. It's still missing Cossack 4, Wily 3, and Wily 4 at the moment.

Cossack 3 is pretty neat in that it manages to actually make the Yellow Devil interesting again while still feeling sufficiently Yellow Devilly. It loses some points for the stupidly overlong midboss, though. That's definitely something that's better on paper than in practice.

Yeah, that bubble fight was pretty much an extended session of bad game design in practice. It reminded me a lot of Clive Barker's Jericho, actually: if a fight is interesting, clearly the best solution is to make the player do it again under slightly harder circumstances! And then again with the challenge upped a bit more! Not that the player's tactics have to change in the least, it's just more tedium.

Game Design 101: the more unique experiences you give the player, the better. Because while the experience may in fact be novel, interesting, and generally quite cool the first time, it's going to be significantly less so for each and every time it happens afterward.

Shadow CatBoy finally has put his epic (5+ years in the making) Planescape:Torment review up on the LParchive if you are ever looking for something to read.