Lamp, broken circa 1988

first, look at my monster hunter. beautiful. anyways. BAYONETTA 1 ON THE SWITCH [3] Couple of notes here. 1) I bought this because I had Zero Faith that they would keep Bayonetta 2 in print for very long. I also am a Platinum fan and have been meaning to replay Bayonetta- which I beat twice at release- for quite a while. 2) On the note of Platinum, replaying Bayonetta 1 has finally helped me see a legitimate complaint with NieR: Automata (aside from the braying asshole fanbase who did not notice that N:A is trying to Actually Kill Them Specifically). That complaint is *drumroll* Nier made me fuckin' SOFT at these games. I am getting my ass kicked pillar to post in every stage. I got level-wide platinums on most of that game, and was working on Pure Platinum in a few others before the bottom dropped out for me. So coming back to it after Nier? I have lost all of the Platinum Muscle Memory and I am having to rebuild it like fuckin' Physical Therapy. 3) On the elephant in the room- when it came out, I remember being uneasy about the portrayal of Bayonetta. Now before I go any further, let me be clear- That Shit Is Still A Problem. What perspective has given me though is that the character Bayonetta is no more or less grotesque than literally everything else happening in the video game Bayonetta. Rodin has Street Fighter proportions- his hands are as big as his head. He is emotionless and "cool." Enzo is similarly grotesque to all of his stereotypes. Like, it is hard for me to be thinking about the myriad ways the game is fucked up as I'm playing it, because it's almost literally fucked up in All The Ways. If I saw anyone from Bayonetta in real life I would run the other direction. i mean for christ's sakes, bayonetta's legs are as long as Her Whole Torso Twice. It is an actual nightmare. 4) The Switch Joycons are maybe not the ideal controller for a game asking you to do the kinds of things that a Platinum game asks you to do. You don't really notice how tall those buttons are until you have to mash them and end up with a dent in your thumb. It takes moments like that to make you really appreciate the Dual Shock 4. odds are you know where you stand with bayonetta by now so I'm not gonna try to argue anything for or against it. I'm just having an interesting time with revisiting it and I wanted to share.

my point there was more about the difference between how this feels and how this feels

There's also the part where it plays like a perfected swordsmanship fantasy, where everything you can do interacts in ways that are both surprising and obvious. I have sank 100 hours into MHW, I sank over 100 into MH3, and probably about 80 into MH4, and I am STILL LEARNING ABOUT HOW THE COMBAT WORKS. And the large majority of that time is with a single weapon. Other weapons (with two exceptions) control entirely differently from each other. There are 20 minute long tutorial videos on specific weapons that have to leave stuff out so they can move on to other elements. The only games that play kind of like the MH games are the Souls Games, and the Souls games feel like those dreams where you're trying to beat someone up but can't actually punch hard enough to do any damage. In Monster Hunter, a flaming T-rex lept up a cliff to get at me, so I dove off that same cliff and hit him directly in the nose with an enormous steel bagpipe which smashed him back down to earth like Roger Federer was trying to serve a Tennis Ball through the whole planet. I was too busy screaming to think about the loot table. as someone that has played both Destiny 2 and literally eight Dragon Quests in the last calendar year, to call Monster Hunter a grindfest is to call an airplane a big rickshaw. I mean, yeah, I guess so, because they can both carry you and someone else, but it's the nature and the scale of the endeavor. My character is wearing completely amazing armor, and I did a host of completely amazing things to get that armor, so that I can fight even tougher and scarier monsters to get even cooler things. I have spent the last ten hours of gameplay preparing to get my revenge on this one monster because the last time I fought him he DEMOLISHED me. I want to humiliate him. That to me feels a world apart from "oops these enemies in this area hit harder, guess it's time to random battle for two hours."

Crossed 100 hours in Monster Hunter World. The last mission unlocks at Hunter Rank 49. I am Hunter Rank 14. So if you're looking for one game to play until the winter release season starts, hey, maybe get Monster Hunter World!

hey uh i don't think people got upset at cibernetico because he was only focused on the business well, aside from that time he said the women's title should be a purse cuz then it'd be something they could really get into fighting over or whatever the fuck anyways u still bein a creep and you can do better. i believe in you!

Okay, I just want to say that I'm saying this out of concern for how angry people get over this stuff. I'm trying to cut those bad feelings off at the pass. Y'all talk about development studios like they're bands and not companies in an industry with very high burnout and turnover. While I know Hudson just came back, there's a good chance that many artists, writers and programmers have already left the BioWare that you're ascribing these values to. That's how you end up in situations where, say, you loved Saints Row The Third and are utterly repulsed by Agents of Mayhem- it's because that team that made that thing you like left that company long ago. That stuff doesn't get publicized, because it shouldn't be, because these are tech companies and not bands.

ok I tried to hold back on this but I can't anymore: this thread is really about Constantines

god i need to get that thing at some point thanks for reminding me

If it makes you feel better, the developers of Nuclear Throne are also bad at Nuclear Throne. Honestly, I haven't played it that much since it left Early Access for a really, deeply stupid reason: back before they put the menus in you could like click three times in under a second to start the game, so I would just jump into it by turning the speakers up and mashing through their logo/disclaimer/title screen by clicking where the play button was and it felt like the game fucking exploded into life. It takes too long to start now that there's an actual menu and it's sank my ability to play it. I recognize this is a problem entirely of my own creation. I am, after all, the One Who Complicates Things. but yeah the soundtrack in nuclear throne is aces. the third secret level theme is fucking amazing

how about day two how about enough days to make sure that you wont need to buy a season pass for gasoline or whatever the fuck like look I think that Burnout Paradise is objectively the best video game made yet, but, this is a company that fucked up Mass Effect and Star Wars in the same calendar year. maybe don't preorder a thing from them for a while.

EDIT: Days later, I realized I put this in the wrong thread.

if someone took all my guitars and said the only way I'd get them back is to either beat MK9 Shao Khan twenty times without a break or beat Goenitz once, I am booting up MK9 in a fukkin heartbeat

I am superstitious enough to believe that if I laugh too much at the Hosmer deal (because fuck san diego and also because they are my older brother's team) I will somehow curse the phillies to make a worse move but sometimes i just can't help myself hahahahahahahahahahaha now bring on cobb or some other pitcher knocking us out of the free agent race next year, I can take it

an album came out yesterday that I could see myself speaking of in the most effusive terms I could ever use, but a lot of the things I want to say about it are things I will have to wait and see if they come true. In the mean time, PLEASE listen to the new album from US Girls, called "In A Poem Unlimited." Here is the first track.

as i started writing this i realized like this was gonna come off as me making fun of oyaji so let me make it expressly clear that that's not my intention SF5 handles comparatively easily to previous SF games. There's a very generous window on execution for a lot of characters, and the new training mode just enabled a function where it will very clearly read out the frame data, both in terms of how much advantage you get and how long the active frames are. It'll even color code your character when you have advantage and read out the number of advantage you have, so you can use that to manually figure out combos without having to turn to the FGC. I will say it is an extremely offensively focused game so if you're used to playing defense you're probably not gonna have a fantastic time. BONUS: Lamp's Free Guide To Getting Better At Special Move Execution (Or, I Hope You Like Podcasts And Repitition) 1. Training Mode. Might want to turn the volume of the game down super low. 2. Pick either Ryu or Fang (or Alex if you have them, this will make sense in a second) 3. Push them into the corner using only fireballs. If you have Alex, you can switch from sweeping inputs to charge inputs whenever cuz he has both. 4. Do 10 sets of 10 Straight Fireballs. As in, if you can do 10 straight, count that as 1. If you don't, don't count it. Make sure you turn the directional input display on so if the move doesn't come out, you can see what you did wrong. 5. Jump over them, and walk them to the other corner with fireballs. 6. Do another 10 sets. 7. Jump over them, and switch to another special move. For Ryu, the shoryuken. For FANG, the poison punch. 8. Repeat that thing you just did. 9. Do this three times a week.

you know I was reflexively about to say something but arthur gies is a good point

Also here's one from one of the few bands that has ever made me actively proud to be a Californian. Beach Boys : 60s California :: HEALTH : My California

There's a German TV show called Beat Club that is a real solid hookup for this purpose, especially for bands that didn't exactly make it onto film all that often. Such as the following:

I figure everyone has a couple of songs that whenever they think about them, they think about this one specific live cut of it instead of any version that appears on any studio recording. This thread is for that.

Sorry, i think I phrased that confusingly. It has very little in common with Cave Story other than "it feels so good to play that it makes me emotional." It's definitely way more Meat Boy than Cave Story. I just don't think highly of Meat Boy so I invoked the last amazing platformer I remember playing, which is Cave Story.

CELESTE [4] - At chapter 4, I found myself switching away from using a controller and to using my mechanical keyboard, because I didn't want to get accidental diagonal inputs on my 360 controller. Celeste is that precise. I will have to review my own memory bank before I commit fully to this but to my mind at this moment, Celeste is the best platformer I have played since Cave Story. You might know how strongly I feel about Cave Story. If you do not, here's how I feel: Very Strongly. Celeste's controls are a triumph. Celeste's character work is fantastic. I love this damn game. It also has a thing called Assist Mode instead of any kind of Easy setting. So if you don't want to fling yourself into the kind of platformer that would make you want a mechanical keyboard and instead just want to hang out in a cool place and hear a ghost story, you can turn all sorts of different options like invulnerability, infinite climbing, and more. Plus, turning that stuff on in no way disables you from seeing the story. In fact, they make an express point to say that the main collectable in the game only exists to show off to your friends. It is a feature I want in every game I have ever played, retroactively, starting now. It is the right answer to the difficulty question. Celeste is now the right answer to a lot of questions in general. For example, "what should I be playing right now?"

also it's directed by a pro-gamergate sort so there's that

just wait for the market to crash, craigslist will fill with video cards

Hey, I said "maybe!"

if i hadn't just changed my name I would take this opportunity to become Lamp The Complicator