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2018 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD


SirSmUgly

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15 hours ago, Player One said:

Finally started playing Sonic platformers on the Genesis.  Choice.  Can't believe i waited so long to check those out.  Our entire household has also become addicted to Parappa the Rapper.

 

The timing on the chicken level is off. Even on the remaster. Learn to freestyle and you'll be OK.

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Power supply unit on my less-than-60-day-old PS4 Pro went "pop" this morning, literally an hour after I shelled out for Tetris Effect.  This had better not be the 3-month ordeal I had on the first PS4 back in 2014.  Shit is complicated by the closure of the pack-and-mail around the corner.

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RIP. Brady (which merged with Prima in 2015) actually gave me a few freelance jobs in 1999-2000 and my ex-roommate was a lifer in editorial. I am not surprised that their business model became unsustainable, but the fact that they survived the advent of GAMEFAQS but not the world where everything is a shitty half empty wiki or a video is disappointing.

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Looking forward to playing the Resident Evil Directors cut edition version again thanks to the PS1 mini. But the DS version I have is obviously superior in gameplay and features wise.

Need to obtain the Saturn version and the others, GameCube remake and its revisions, the original ps1 version, dual shock directors cut and more.

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I am amazed a strategy game book company could hang on this long given how easy it is to find youtube solutions to nearly any video game issue. I guess that says a lot about how good some of their material was.

 

Half-assed wiki's are the worst. Not surprisingly they are almost always measureable in quality vs. the game's popularity. Like, Terraria's is awesome (and nearly a required resource). The Dark Souls series at fextralife or whatever it's called is fucking great. The Pathfinder Kingmaker one is still more or less a collection of placeholders and links to the actual, irrelevant, Pathfinder rules.

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9 hours ago, odessasteps said:

Admittedly,  I'm old but definitely easier to have a hard copy of a strategy guide handy while playing instead of looking stuff up online. 

Before I had my Kindle, I had an ancient laptop that I downloaded and put guides on. The thing had no wireless, small screen, and no memory to speak of, but it could run Notepad and a cheap/free spreadsheet program that I'd use. I still have a couple Dragon Age books, and the bonus art books from the FF X-2 and FF XII guides.

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I've been revisiting Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. DS II despite being really wide selling is pretty reviled by most of the Dark Souls community but I wanted to give it a fair shake to see how well it really held up. I went in prepared to have a good time with it as best as I could.

Man, this game is straight up fucking awful. It has absolutely nothing going for it except the really cool Dark Souls aesthetic.

I don't know if I've ever played a game that more clearly expressed a misunderstanding of the idea that more is not always better, more is often worse, and the real skill of design is knowing sometimes you have to say no more. This game has more enemies at a time, more bosses, more big confusing areas (and a lot of these areas don't seem to really relate to each other even when they link together), more areas with a dumb darkness and/or fog gimmick to gimp reaction times. All of it plays out like a really bad Dark Souls fanfic that totally misses the point of what made the first game so enjoyable. Also someone on the design team was MADLY in love with the idea of having things spawn behind you a lot. You walk through a room and then SURPRISE the real enemy was behind you all along, over and over again. This all leads to artificially inflating the difficulty in the most boring and uninteresting ways possible in video game design. Yes, it's probably the hardest Dark Souls, but not for any of the right reasons.

It has like double the number of bosses as the first game, but they pretty clearly didn't have anything close to enough ideas to make that work. There's something like... 7? 8? Fuck I'm not even sure how many Giant Knight bosses. Aside from the mirror shield dude they are all exactly the same: A big knight does big knight attacks, the end. There's several bosses that are just "a bunch of normal enemies in a room but we gave it a health bar". It's a shame a couple of actually pretty cool bosses get overlooked because they are stuck in this shit show. For example, I like Executioner's Chariot a lot as an actually interesting and unique take on a gimmick boss.

I really wanted to like this and find the hidden gem but there is absolutely no reason to slog your way through this joyless experience of a game. If it didn't have Dark Souls in the name I really doubt many people would even bring it up as a top 5 Dark Souls clone. Every minute I spent playing this recently all I could think of was how much I'd rather play the first game.

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God, I love the 32-bit era so much!  Great games and it scratches pretty much every itch I have as a collector and a player. 

I'm going to neglect pretty much every generation through the end of 2019 and spend a helluva lot of money on CIB Saturn and PS games, with some N64 thrown it.  I kinda want to get into the Neo Geo, but the catalog doesn't excite me and there are plenty of other ways to throw my money into an expensive hole.

Currently playing; Rayman (the original).  I love the colors and look of this game.  Kinda sad it went 3D even though I like 2 an awful lot and 3 was rather fun.

 

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On 11/10/2018 at 3:35 PM, Death From Above said:

I've been revisiting Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. DS II despite being really wide selling is pretty reviled by most of the Dark Souls community but I wanted to give it a fair shake to see how well it really held up. I went in prepared to have a good time with it as best as I could.

Man, this game is straight up fucking awful. It has absolutely nothing going for it except the really cool Dark Souls aesthetic.

I don't know if I've ever played a game that more clearly expressed a misunderstanding of the idea that more is not always better, more is often worse, and the real skill of design is knowing sometimes you have to say no more. This game has more enemies at a time, more bosses, more big confusing areas (and a lot of these areas don't seem to really relate to each other even when they link together), more areas with a dumb darkness and/or fog gimmick to gimp reaction times. All of it plays out like a really bad Dark Souls fanfic that totally misses the point of what made the first game so enjoyable. Also someone on the design team was MADLY in love with the idea of having things spawn behind you a lot. You walk through a room and then SURPRISE the real enemy was behind you all along, over and over again. This all leads to artificially inflating the difficulty in the most boring and uninteresting ways possible in video game design. Yes, it's probably the hardest Dark Souls, but not for any of the right reasons.

It has like double the number of bosses as the first game, but they pretty clearly didn't have anything close to enough ideas to make that work. There's something like... 7? 8? Fuck I'm not even sure how many Giant Knight bosses. Aside from the mirror shield dude they are all exactly the same: A big knight does big knight attacks, the end. There's several bosses that are just "a bunch of normal enemies in a room but we gave it a health bar". It's a shame a couple of actually pretty cool bosses get overlooked because they are stuck in this shit show. For example, I like Executioner's Chariot a lot as an actually interesting and unique take on a gimmick boss.

I really wanted to like this and find the hidden gem but there is absolutely no reason to slog your way through this joyless experience of a game. If it didn't have Dark Souls in the name I really doubt many people would even bring it up as a top 5 Dark Souls clone. Every minute I spent playing this recently all I could think of was how much I'd rather play the first game.

Its funny, as I know some people share your opinion but Dark Souls 2 was my favorite of the bunch. I also found it the easiest, I wonder sometimes if it depends on the play preferences. It did have a lot of giant knight bosses and I play as a semi-tank character so I didn't have any issue with them, so I went through entire stage/boss stretches without dying at all. Dark Souls was hurt to me due to the limited fast travel as I am not a fan of re-tracing everywhere, it was the only Dark Souls game I didn't beat as I just got tired of it. I actually thought Dark Souls tried too hard to be "hard" since it was still riding that reputation from Demon's Souls and went too far with it, I died more in it than all the other Dark Souls games. Dark Souls 2 didn't seem quite as punishing and I didn't get stuck nearly as often. I did really like Dark Souls 3 though, and while I recognized Demon's Souls had a lot of flaws (I had to glitch bosses to beat them) it still has a special place in my heart so I can't say anything bad about it. I mean Dark Souls 2 has a 91/8.1 on metacritic, I think you're being a bit hyperbolic with your hatred, clearly the vast majority of people enjoyed it. Although going into playing a game already having read all the reasons the "dark souls community" (whatever that is) hates it may have impacted your enjoyment :) Now I want to go back and play it again, I never did play the DLC.

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So it's worth noting that Scholar of the First Sin is a re-release designed with purposefully harder enemy encounters for the entire length of the game. It was the version put out a year later that's was also the PS4/Xbone HD Remaster version. So base, launch Dark Souls 2 and Scholar Of The First Sin are VERY different experiences, and if the first time you've come to the game is through Scholar, yeah, it's brutal and unfair and poorly made, because it's made for people that already know DS2 front to back.

that thing about the boss design being bogus holds between versions tho

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16 minutes ago, Lamp, broken circa 1988 said:

So it's worth noting that Scholar of the First Sin is a re-release designed with purposefully harder enemy encounters for the entire length of the game. It was the version put out a year later that's was also the PS4/Xbone HD Remaster version. So base, launch Dark Souls 2 and Scholar Of The First Sin are VERY different experiences, and if the first time you've come to the game is through Scholar, yeah, it's brutal and unfair and poorly made, because it's made for people that already know DS2 front to back.

that thing about the boss design being bogus holds between versions tho

That could be a difference, if they did adjustments with Scholar of the First Sin since I played the original. I really didn't find Dark Souls 2 nearly as hard as the others so that may explain if the complaint is that its too hard.

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Haha that's so bizarre, I had no idea they did that. I knew they had a version with all DLC that came out like all games do, I didn't know they ramped up the difficulty for the entire game. I guess that would kinda suck for people that didn't play Dark Souls 2 proper first, what a thing to do.

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I don't even think it's an issue of impacting people that played the original 2 first so much (it's not like 2 threw out all the mechanics I already know and use) because so much of Dark Souls is "once you upgrade your gear and learn the enemy moves the difficulty falls off" and this is literally impossible to make happen in SoTFS, by design. You cannot possibly get a good weapon before the difficulty goes berserk, which makes the game feel totally imbalanced to me compared to 1 or 3 (1 in particular has a hilariously soft beginning if you know what you're doing for a "difficult" game). The early levels are an unbelievable shit show of overpowered enemies (or groups) and "trash spawns behind you everywhere you go".  I honestly have no idea what they were thinking. 

Literally the only thing I will say for it is that it's the best optimized PC game in the series, by a country mile other than maybe the DS1 remaster. It runs unbelievably smooth even on a toaster of a laptop. That might actually be as frustrating to me as anything: the first game you have to fiddle with DSFix (which still doesn't fix the shit show of Blightown), and the third game is from 2016 so it's on that edge of starting to get into games ramping up onto the edge of a hardware problem for me. If SoFS was actually fun to play I'd be all over it because I *really* dig the whole DS aesthetic on the whole, which is as fun to me as the actual gameplay. I just dig the art, and the boss music, and the whole setting. But it isn't fun, at all. A dozen hours with it was enough to make me decide I'll just spend my time with other, better games.

I'm actually kind of curious what OG Dark Souls II is like, but not enough I'll ever pay a single penny to find out after the SoFS experience.

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