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Beating Games

RT-55J

space hero for hire
(He/Him + RT/artee)
I think you and peklo are referring to different visual effects related to the arm cannon.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i played prime 1 and 2 around 2006, and particularly the first one a bunch, since there were a lot of relatively interesting skips and tricks known at the time, and that's definitely the context for my moderate affection for the game, doing weird stuff to avoid backtracking for some of the late-game macguffins and skip certain boss fights...definitely makes the game a bit better. and the "space jump first" trick especially makes the early game a bit more fun, to the point i almost think they should've just given it to players at the start. although certainly part of the appeal is feeling like you got to cheat the system, even if it's just a little bit. in the end you still get it so early and will probably cross the landing site so many times that it doesn't change things that much after the first little bit of the game.

i'm inclined to think a lot of the game design is owed to something like ocarina of time, with the originally lock-on-based combat and rather specific key item elements, albeit without the kind of quasi-naturalistic dressing that underlies a lot of the latter. that's not entirely a complaint since i guess i tend to feel like a lot of games in the 3d zelda mold are ones where i'm often confounded by specific intentions of the designers; i don't exactly prefer my memories of being confused in that game until i looked something up explaining that the wooden beams are valid hookshot targets, for example...probably this is not my favorite kind of game in general, hahaha, though i can get into it decently if the presentation or some other kind of hook appeals to me enough. which the visual design, music, and some of the aforementioned stuff was for a while, although ultimately i can't say i've thought "oh yeah, i should play through that whole game again!" in recent years. occasionally over the years i've booted it up to do the trick at the start of the game and wander around for a little bit again, but the process of doing stuff later in the game can definitely drag for reasons i would say you totally nailed.

there's an ambitious goal to make these really detailed and intricate environments that emulate some of the concepts of super metroid and the like, but it's basically impossible to convey it the same way when the space covered by the camera and the character's movement ranges are ultimately so much smaller by comparison. which i think speaks a lot to the way that people compared dark souls to a metroid type game; it's got a lot of secrets and stuff, but the "powerup" that makes areas easier to traverse in various ways is...usually a ladder, or a huge door, or something like that which you can open up so you can use it from the other side, which both emphasizes the tight geography of the world and lets you pass through some routes without fighting so many enemies on the way. and i think something like that would've really worked in prime as well, or even some variations on that if they were used sparingly, like a morph ball tunnel that you need certain items to reach but bypasses several rooms, even though it feels "wrong" on a surface level to compare it to having stuff like space jump and screw attack in 2d metroid. and i mean, there were likely technical hurdles that would've made something like that more difficult to do as well...although funnily enough a lot of speedruns go out of bounds constantly to similar ends these days, so i dunno

i definitely think there were people who were negative about it at the time, though a lot of complaints i remember revolved around the first-person platforming focus and the fact that the game didn't really have aiming in the same sense as a shooter game. though i feel like echoes was the game where stuff about the world being pretty laborious to traverse and some of the boss design (although there are a couple i remember liking a lot, certainly more than any in prime 1, including one a lot of people hate...) became more broadly prevalent in people's reactions to the game. basically overall even though i'm pretty sure i have liked the game significantly more i wouldn't really disagree with most of what Peklo wrote
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
I think you and peklo are referring to different visual effects related to the arm cannon.

It's quite likely -- I haven't bothered to check out this game, as I haven't even put that much time in the copy of Wii MPT I picked up ages ago. Maybe one day.
 

madhair60

Video games
I just beat Bayonetta after over a decade of sincere attempts to do so.

I am delighted to “get it”, though I give the game a generous 8/10. The good outweighs the bad, but there is some rotten shit in there.
 

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
Minish Cap complete. Vaati is no more. Well, until he pops up again, anyway.

I remember MC being pretty good, but marred due to kinstones and figures taking too much time. This time I ignored all of that & had a blast. It’s a beautiful, quick, fun Zelda game. Definitely worth checking out if you somehow missed it.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
Devil May Cry 3 is really quite difficult, isn’t it? At least compared to the relatively simple first game. The less said about the second game, the better, yet I do think 3 overcorrected too far. The guns are back to being combo extenders instead of weapons, and Devil Trigger has been both neutered and declawed, despite the awesome SMT designs from Kaneko. The light customization of DT was one of the very few neat ideas from DMC2! Why make it so inconsequential in this one?

Anyway, I finished it on Normal, in Gold Mode, whatever that means. I might try to see how far I can go on Hard. I have maxed out health and DT gauges, so I might do okay.
 

jpfriction

(He, Him)
Cerberus is a hell of a roadblock but once I got through him, I found the rest of the game reasonable.

Adding in the ability to switch weapons and even styles on the fly in the layer editions helps a lot.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Devil Trigger has been both neutered and declawed, despite the awesome SMT designs from Kaneko. The light customization of DT was one of the very few neat ideas from DMC2! Why make it so inconsequential in this one?

It's very versatile and effective from my experience. The universal benefits for each of the forms are 1) hyper armour on moves so you won't be interrupted 2) health regeneration 3) generally increased physical attributes in terms of the numbers powering Dante's efficacy in the background. In addition, each Devil Arm has their own specific niches in what their DT form generally focuses on improving, which are:
  • Rebellion: all-rounder, so a balanced overall boost
  • Cerberus: increased movement and attack speed
  • Agni & Rudra: increased attack strength and elemental weakness effect on attacks
  • Nevan: increased health regeneration speed and access to Air Raid and its Thunder Bolt and Vortex attacks, returning from DMC1
  • Beowulf: increased defense
DMC3 is also the only game in the series that employs the Devil Trigger Flux combat mechanic, wherein holding the DT button for a time charges it up, expending the denoted amount of runes upon activation and unleashing a massively powerful area-of-effect pulse around Dante as he transforms. It's a tradeoff, as often people will prefer to use DT on its own for survivability purposes, but also represents the single most powerful burst damage in the game.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Hi-Fi Rush is a really fun rhythm based action game with beautiful graphics.
We tried to play this on Gamepass but it's cloud play and was just laggy enough to be a problem for a rhythm game. I was bummed because it seemed neat and I was enjoying watching my spouse play it. Should try it again on the PC I suppose.
 

madhair60

Video games
i did not enjoy it personally. the characters are really obnoxious and unlikeable and the gameplay just wasn't fun to me. I may go back because my understanding is you keep unlocking mechanics that might make it more interesting. but I just really didn't like the MC or that lady who keeps treating you like a piece of shit. I hate that dynamic
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
We tried to play this on Gamepass but it's cloud play and was just laggy enough to be a problem for a rhythm game. I was bummed because it seemed neat and I was enjoying watching my spouse play it. Should try it again on the PC I suppose.
Is this a PC thing? I played it on Gamepass on Xbox and it downloaded to the system.

The writing is definitely hit or miss. The character dynamics do change over the course of the story.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Is this a PC thing? I played it on Gamepass on Xbox and it downloaded to the system.
We have an Xbox One which only offered the cloud streaming. On a PC you can download it.

If you have a One and were able to download it I'm curious, we played it in the first few days it came out so it would be nice if they changed that.
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
I have a Series X. I guess it's not actually released for the One, but you can play it on the cloud. That's actually cool, but it's a bummer that this particular game doesn't work well streaming.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
i did not enjoy it personally. the characters are really obnoxious and unlikeable and the gameplay just wasn't fun to me. I may go back because my understanding is you keep unlocking mechanics that might make it more interesting. but I just really didn't like the MC or that lady who keeps treating you like a piece of shit. I hate that dynamic
I am curious to try this game out but the way people talk about the writing and attitude definitely gives me pause. One of those cases where I wish there was a small demo. I guess there's always the Steam refund option...
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
I rolled credits on Horizon Forbidden West. All in all it was a good successor to the first game, but didn't hit me nearly as right as the first one did. I loved the first one, but found myself frustrated with the second one being so goddamn chatty all the time, and something about the way they did all the different weapons didn't sit quite right with me (though I recognize that the rather limited weapon application in the first game wasn't ideal, either, I don't remember it bothering me very much). It was still great shooting robit dinos with my bow and arrow, but in the end I wasn't tempted to finish any of the collectables or anything like that and have little desire to start an NG+ (which I did with the first one).
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
Played through What Became of Edith Finch in one sitting, and jesus, what a sad game. I think I found it more depressing than moving or whatever they were going for.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
finished breath of the wild. i feel like a looooot of this game didn't work for me; a lot of the music you hear most often is grating, i wasn't that into the story or visuals for the most part either. and it took a long time for so many of the mechanics and stuff to start to click. but eventually it really came together, and the core stuff is so refined yet varied that i really got into just blundering around the overworld for dozens of hours. which was what i was originally hoping for, i think...i guess it all came full circle

the major dungeons are ok, and a few shrines were delightful, even if a lot of the ones i found (i finished 74 and found a few more i didn't finish) were just bizarre or finicky or a little boring. (bizarre isn't really a bad thing, but i'm not going to go "what a great game!" about the shrines were the puzzle solution is like "use stasis on a giant cube to stand on it, then stasis it again to get to the exit". the funniest actual puzzle shrine was the one where the wind blows a ball around a circuit that i thought was one kind of puzzle, then when i did the thing i thought you were supposed to do i realized i'd been tricked by not looking closely the whole time.) but the really good stuff relies on the core overworld aspects of fighting, climbing, gliding, exploring, bombing, throwing stuff around or trying to bludgeon the monsters with huge boxes and shit. outside of the big labyrinths (which all three felt really unique from each other, and gave the armor i ended up using most, and working really hard to level up!), my other favorite was the deserted island shrine, which feels like the perfect little slice of how the game works

the combat is SO good for a game like this, and i rarely say that. but i also wish the actual bosses weren't so scripted and designed because they were so much less fun than taking on the great variety of stuff in the rest of the game with increasingly powerful tools. (fuck guardians too, they're boring.) despite the timing elements, they're not just pretty generous (you can sometimes hop back into the active frames of an attack you dodged too early to get a flurry rush even after missing it once) but outside of boss battles and sword lynels it's really debatable how relevant they are. you get to balance so many options, between the power of bow attacks, the "free" nature of bombs and magnetized/launched items, and various approaches for head-on attack between the different weapon types and their charge attacks. it never feels like mastering one thing and applying it against everything, but being opportunistic and resourceful while still giving you enough stuff that if you really want to force it you totally can. or you can laze out and stock urbosa's fury every time you really gotta make sure something dies

it's funny that this ended up being my takeaway too because i feel like my first go at the game i went like 50 hours and probably killed less 1 enemy per hour, tried to avoid everything and was unsuccessful often enough i probably died more times than i killed anything. if i go back for anything it'll probably be to finish fully maxing out my armor against more lynels and whatever else the last step takes just to know that i did it, because it feels like a trophy of my enjoyment of the game

i want to play skyward sword now. might play tears 5+ years after it releases too. or maybe sooner if it seems improved in ways i want
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
I replayed Sonic Adventure 2 recently, because I lost my old save file and wanted to come back to it. Aside from tweaking the amount of stat boosts from chaos drives chao get, most mods I picked were mostly aesthetic ones, restoring shading and lighting effects from previous releases of the game. Also set up infinite lives, so I could restart stages without consequence in my hunt for a-ranks, which mostly affected peace of mind.

I have come to appreciate the game more. My main issues with the game initially were not understanding when to appropriately use the spin dash (despite being made significantly harder to use, it is still a useful move -- try rolling down the ramps while being chased by the truck if you've never done so before) and, wanting to a-rank everything, not knowing much about piece placement in the treasure hunting stages. I consulted a guide for the latter, though I don't have good things to say about Mad Space, as its design makes traversal so laborious that A-ranks feel luck-dependent, that some placements do not allow for A-ranks to be possible due to the distance between them. Everything else is, I suppose, fine.

Well, I still don't like Route 280's mission 4. Evil. Took me probably at least an hour. God.
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
Finally got around to Luigi's Mansion 3. Lots of really fun puzzling, some of the boss fights and backtracking were annoying.
 

BubsyFan_86

Enjoying the James Turrell Retrospective
Absolutely devoured King's Field II (KFI US) and loved it. It's such a shame that the western critical reaction to these games was so negative upon initial release; I remember holding the opinion at the time that the King's Field games were unmitigated trash, an opinion acquired entirely via review osmosis. Having completed it now, I'm a bit surprised that the reception was so harsh, given the combat isn't any worse than Morrowind's, though I guess the 6-year difference allowed for some attitude acclimation, and the OG Xbox had some overlap with PC gamers, who were already used to some slightly janky combat.

Great game overall with a compellingly interconnected and self-contained world. I wrote a lot more in the King's Field thread. Definitely give it a try if you like From Soft's later work and have tolerance for a slower, more deliberate pace!
 

jpfriction

(He, Him)
Got the platinum on GOW Ragnorok. Not sure if it was just lingering muscle memory but the post game super bosses felt quite a bit easier compared to the first game. Still a ridiculously good time start to finish. Took me about 50 hours to scrape it clean of content, that’s about perfect for an open world game for me. Never felt the need to rush the story to just get it over with and on the next thing which tends to happen once I play something for much more than that.
 
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