2018 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD

[J.T.]

12 hours ago, Death From Above said:

The biggest problem with Mass Effect 1 is the inventory spam of useless items, for me.

I saw it as an "endless supply of Omni-gel."

3 hours ago, odessasteps said:

Cover? What’s That? 

It's that stuff you find if you don't want to continue to be hit by bullets.

You should try it sometime.

[J.T.]

Oh, yeah.  FUCKING PLAY SLEEPING DOGS~!

[Cliff Hanger]

8 hours ago, Robert C said:

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person that prefers the combat in ME1 to ME2.  I think I'm just biased against cover based shooters.  It didn't help that I'd wander into a new area in ME2, spot some low walls, and tell myself "well, time for another fight."  ME3 was a big improvement there.

You aren't the only one. I've never gotten very far in ME2 because I prefer the RPG fight mechanics to the 3PS ones.

[Raziel]

10 hours ago, Robert C said:

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person that prefers the combat in ME1 to ME2.  I think I'm just biased against cover based shooters.  It didn't help that I'd wander into a new area in ME2, spot some low walls, and tell myself "well, time for another fight."  ME3 was a big improvement there.

I know I haven't played ME3 in a while, but I'm pretty sure ME3 was actually heaver on the cover based combat than ME2 was, just endless streams of Reapers in some cases (although there were some that required better tatics and movement).  

 

Now saying that, I'm wondering if I should reinstall the ME Trilogy on my PC and play it again (or just hook my PS3 back up to play it after I crank through my PS4 backlog).  Although I hold out hope for a remaster of PS4/Xbone

[J.T.]

2 minutes ago, Raziel said:

I know I haven't played ME3 in a while, but I'm pretty sure ME3 was actually heaver on the cover based combat than ME2 was, just endless streams of Reapers in some cases (although there were some that required better tatics and movement).  

ME3 was all about hard cover combat and the multiplayer was fun AF.  Rippa and I played it for YEARS~!

[RIPPA]

Just thinking about getting grabs brings me to my happy place

[Robert C]

5 minutes ago, J.T. said:

ME3 was all about hard cover combat and the multiplayer was fun AF.  Rippa and I played it for YEARS~!

ME3 felt like it did a better job of handling the combat.  Enemies tended to do a better job of flanking you/finding better firing positions.  It made the fighting more interesting for me.

There were definitely things to like about ME2 combat though, especially after doing Zaeed's and Kasumi's loyalty missions.  Those two spamming grenades while Shepard unloads on everything with the Revenant/incendiary rounds/concusive shot quickly equals piles of burning, dead enemies. 

Biotic slam was all kinds of fun as well, especially in situations where you could use it to space your enemies.

[J.T.]

47 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Just thinking about getting grabs brings me to my happy place

Screwing up my Grab attempts immediately put you on the No Revive List along with a host of other offenses...

I actually miss the hate messages I used to get for playing my N7 Paladin with the Winter Soldier build.

[ARMDRAGON]

I really wanted to enjoy Nioh but after dying 800 times in the Tower of London, it’s on to Sleeping Dogs.

[SirSmUgly]

I've made it to the point Tromatagon mentions. I'm now in Chapter Six, and I've stopped everything to buy up properties, finish making friends with people who gift me management of their properties, and manage said properties, going out to throw hands (and bicycles) wherever needed. Keeping the cash flow going is all that I care about now. Yeah, yeah, there's some shit with the Dojima Family and the Tachibana Real Estate Company coming down, but fuck that, I need to manage properties. 

And go bowling. 

And send postcards about the crazy substories that I've completed (at least, when I'm not already hiring people from said substories to help manage my properties). 

I actually feel bad about only paying 19 bucks and change for this game. It was clearly worth all sixty dollars of original MSRP and more. 

[Tromatagon]

You have to bowl a turkey.  Like focus your resources into bowling a goddamned turkey.

 

Just do it don't look it up.

[SirSmUgly]

I've actually bowled a frozen turkey before (shooting at two-liter bottles of soda), but for all I know, this game could involve bowling a live turkey somehow.

There are some small things that I don't love about the game, like having to save at phone booths or other phones in the city (the save process takes a long time). The game could have used an autosave. It's also weird that the game doesn't easily mark the businesses that can be purchased; I have to use a map from IGN just to easily tell which buildings that I can buy into. 

But aside from small things like that (that I hope they fixed in Yakuza 6, which I am going to try and play before the end of the year), the game is fantastic. I miss SEGA's classic brawlers, and this scratches that itch. I'd love for them to try and bring Streets of Rage back as a 3D brawler that borrows from Yakuza with character switching and different fight modes and wacky quests that supplement a good action B-movie storyline. 

[Tromatagon]

6 has an auto save and you can also manually save whenever you want from the pause menu.

[Craig H]

Welp, I picked up Mario Tennis Aces, but I won't be able to play it until later. I love a good tennis game though (even though nothing will ever touch Virtua Tennis 2 or the first Top Spin).

[SirSmUgly]

I also have Aces. If anyone wants to play, my Switch Friend Code should be in the proper thread. 

[John E. Dynamite]

Finished off Hollow Knight on Switch a couple of days ago. Great, great stuff. It didn't quite transcend the way Celeste did, and it was noticeably derivative for the first half, but it still scores a good 9/10 in my book. Killer artwork, gameplay richer than sherry sauce, exactly in my sweet-spot in terms of difficulty, it provided that excitement/fear of exploration that you want in a game like this. Delving deeper and deeper into God-knows-where, realizing that exact point where you're going to have to conserve your health, going to the next screen and seeing a new background & harder enemies instead of the GODDAMNED MAP GUY you were looking for. It's a little much for the first, I dunno, 5 hours while you figure out the interface and the combat, but once it clicks it clicks hard. Combat's a treat and always evolving, whether it's Ducktails-bouncing off dude's heads with a downward slash, using the dash for dodging. or figuring out how to balance soul (magic, basically) between attacking and healing.  Charms are a great system for giving you situational tweaks without affecting the gameplay too much or feeling extraneous (like every Castlevania) - I had unique ones for exploring, harder platforming segments (not a lot but oof when they happen...), making extra dough while backtracking, and to regroup any time a boss wiped me out.

I certainly wouldn't recommend the game to everyone. If you haven't put in your time with 2D action/platformers then you're gonna die *a lot*. This should be nobody's first Metroidvania. I felt bad for getting whopped by one boss (that I didn't realize was post-game) over a two-hour span, but I found posts from people on reddit gushing about the game that freely admitted to having 3+ hour attempts on multiple bosses so hey, coulda been worse. The bosses are an absolute highlight of the game and it kinda felt good to die that much again.

It also runs smoother than anything else I've played on the system save for one crash against a boss. TYVM autosave

[Death From Above]

I had technical issues with input lag that prevented me from really enjoying Hollow Knight properly and I still put 14 hours in.

The soundtrack is so fucking good.

 

[Liam]

I'm assuming the PC version of Hollow Knight would be worth a pickup then?

[Andrew POE!]

Got my 112th Platinum with BigFest for PlayStation Vita. The game servers are shutting down on August 27th, 2018. The game involves being a music festival promoter and booking bands to play. Mostly bands you've never heard of that are real. It's almost Theme Park / Theme Hospital like. If you have a VIta, it's only $10 and it's worth checking out. At least 1 trophy requires online but I would say all of them are online trophies -- you need to change your bands out and you have to connect to the server to download / switch bands.

[J.T.]

On ‎6‎/‎20‎/‎2018 at 7:28 PM, Tromatagon said:

You have to bowl a turkey. 

That just brings up lots and lots of GTA 4 100% Completion trauma. 

Landing on the fucking air traffic control tower at Liberty City Airport and risking a five star wanted level all to shoot one damned pigeon.

WHY~?

I hated bowling in that game until I got the hang of it and would routinely beat the shit out of Roman.

Also, I think I have tracked down a copy of Battle Chasers on the cheap!

[supremebve]

On 6/23/2018 at 1:56 PM, John E. Dynamite said:

I certainly wouldn't recommend the game to everyone. If you haven't put in your time with 2D action/platformers then you're gonna die *a lot*. This should be nobody's first Metroidvania. I felt bad for getting whopped by one boss (that I didn't realize was post-game) over a two-hour span, but I found posts from people on reddit gushing about the game that freely admitted to having 3+ hour attempts on multiple bosses so hey, coulda been worse. The bosses are an absolute highlight of the game and it kinda felt good to die that much again.

Thanks for this.  I'm a pretty big gamer, who has played a decent amount of Metroidvania style games, but spending 2+ hours on a single boss fight seems miserable to me.  I was really thinking about getting this game, but I'm not a gaming sadist.  I don't enjoy games that are difficult to the point of being frustrating.  

[John E. Dynamite]

9 hours ago, supremebve said:

Thanks for this.  I'm a pretty big gamer, who has played a decent amount of Metroidvania style games, but spending 2+ hours on a single boss fight seems miserable to me.  I was really thinking about getting this game, but I'm not a gaming sadist.  I don't enjoy games that are difficult to the point of being frustrating.  

Here's a a more detailed account, cause I'm certainly not trying to put anybody off this game.

There's an ending, and there's a REAL ending - as is expected of any game based off of Igarashi Castlevanias. Two items are required to unlock this - one is gated behind some Meatboy-esque platforming (made a lot easier by a somewhat out-of-the-way regenerating health charm) and the other is gated behind a boss.

When the game first game out, said boss was basically a pushover, just a giant version of a pre-existing enemy. Lots of reddit and Steam forum threads are dedicated to ranking the game's many bosses by difficulty, and at the time the threads were created this boss featured on the butt-bottom of the chart. What I didn't realize was that when the game was patched + had a lot of content added in April of this year, the boss's difficultly was ramped up. WAY up. It, after all, is a gate to getting the best ending and it's prior difficulty didn't match that.

At the point in the game where I reached the boss, I didn't realize any of this. My weapon was two levels under the max, I didn't have some of the more useful charms and I hadn't collected many extra health containers. After getting my ass beat about ten times in a row, I consulted with those old threads which were filled with comments about how it was "the easiest boss in the game", a "total chump" and "a joke boss". This flung me into a self-conscious nerdfugue that I didn't snap out of until I beat the fucker.

The pain I endured was caused by my own ignorance, not balance issues. And I believe the bosses that the 3+ hour shmuck on reddit was referencing were all optional bosses added in patches, all of whom have no consequence when lost to.

[Craig H]

This is going back a long ways, but when Top Spin was out on the Xbox, I think I was in the top 10 in the world. I was really good at that and Virtua Tennis. I went into Mario Tennis Aces thinking I would still be good at this shit. I go online and get stomped repeatedly to the point where I don't know if I want to play online.

[FireThunder]

Had a bunch of free time this weekend, so after a six month hiatus (missing two sets) I jumped back into the Pokemon online TCG.  After doing a bunch of trading, something I really miss in online CCGs like Hearthstone, I had built some of the top decks in the competitive meta: Buzzwole, Mono Psychic Malamar and Ultra Necrozma-GX.

I also forgot how refreshingly different gameplay is compared to Hearthstone.  In Pokemon, you're constantly searching your deck, drawing a fresh hand of cards, and plotting out future attacks on the pokemon your opponent has on their bench.  It can make for a downright frenetic pace of play compared to just trying to play a card on curve every t

And then I made the mistake of checking the prices of decks in cardboard... eh.  I'll stick to the digital version, thanks.

[Craig H]

I started playing Hearthstone awhile back because I wasn't that much into Magic, thought it was a money pit, and felt Hearthstone would be a nice change of pace.

All playing Hearthstone did was get me back into Magic in a big way. Like you were saying about Pokemon, it's just so refreshing to search your deck, draw fresh cards, play counterspells, play out combat tricks, use activated abilities of creatures and artifacts, etc. 

Also, same thing with paper Magic vs online Magic. Online is much cheaper, but that still didn't stop me from getting back into Modern and Standard.