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2019 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD


SirSmUgly

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Yeah, Arena is PC only.  it's good and intuitive enough that I'm up on the basic rules and flow.  My issue is just learning the cards and deck building.  Honestly, buying the starter for $5 and having enough gems to get me into some of the drafts, and pauper being free when it runs, and being able to grind gold in free play is enough to get me learning and building up some stuff.  I can't build a deck to save my life right now, but the starter decks it gives and bonus decks it gives for grinding weekly's/dalies is enough for me to figure out more advanced shit and build up cards.  And those decks are enough to win some Bronze tier ranked games, so I'm not getting blown away on a massive loss streak.

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I'm in the "ranked Magic ladder shouldn't be best-of-one" camp. That's really soured me on playing Arena to the point that I've found myself playing Hearthstone more often if I want to play cards. If I'm going to play a game of extreme variance for ranking, I might as well play the one designed to be such an experience. Either that or play in classic competitive, whatever they call the best-of-three mode, to get my daily quests done.

That's not to say I'm not excited for the release of Ravnica Allegiance in the next few weeks. Frilled Mystic, in particular. Mystic Snake helped carry me to some of my best successes in Magic back in the day, so I'm totally hyped for a new version of that card.

And I'll just add that FF6 is my favorite game of all time. My son got an SNES Classic for Christmas and I've been trying to convince him to play it, but he's trying out all of the games on the thing a few minutes at a time and bouncing around between Earthbound, Secret of Mana and SFII: Turbo. At this pace, I'll wind up playing it and beating it before he gets around to it.

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I am over 10 hours into Final Fantasy VII and boy, is this game ever in love with hiding doors nearly invisibly in the landscape. Also... shitty minigames. You can have your pick of the jank-ass motorboke fight or that awful dolphin jumping thing.

 

EDIT: The shinra parade minigame can suck a cock, too. This game... has not aged well.

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This may or may not go here, but it doesn't go in any existing thread and didn't seem to warrant a new one.  Last month when Humble ran their annual-ish "get all of last year's Magix sound and video editing software for $25" bundle, I decided it might be fun to re-connect with my degree in radio/TV/film and picked it up.  I am 15 years out of practice with non-linear video editing, so it's been slow going.  So far I've mostly just been capturing from The Messenger, then using Vegas Pro to cut my long play up into smaller chunks, shuffling and adding shitty transitions etc. to re-learn how everything works.  Not a bad way to kill an unwanted two weeks off, but I want more.  The "exam" I've given myself as a goal is to make a 30-minute match in Fire Pro World (using the default cast, no RL edits), edit it down to 7-10 minutes as though it were JIP and cut for time on an old-school wrestling show and add commentary.  This may have been biting off more than I can chew but it's a fun way to tinker and waste time.

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44 minutes ago, Death From Above said:

I am over 10 hours into Final Fantasy VII ... shitty minigames. You can have your pick of the jank-ass motorboke fight or that awful dolphin jumping thing.

 

EDIT: The shinra parade minigame can suck a cock, too. This game... has not aged well.

And that's where they decided to go, peaking in X before deciding pointless Hunts were better.

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16 minutes ago, Death From Above said:

I am over 10 hours into Final Fantasy VII and boy, is this game ever in love with hiding doors nearly invisibly in the landscape. Also... shitty minigames. You can have your pick of the jank-ass motorboke fight or that awful dolphin jumping thing.

 

A friend of mine had a retro game night at his house, and it is amazing how unplayable most of the games from the PS1/N64 generation have become.  Even the games that we thought were graphical masterpieces of their time look either muddy as hell or blocky as fuck.  Honestly, 8-bit and 16-bit sprites look better than early 3D graphics.  We tried playing Perfect Dark and couldn't figure out just the basic layouts of the maps because everything kind of just blended together.  It isn't that the game is hiding doors, its that the lack of diversity of textures makes everything kind of blend together.  Seriously, that generation of games has aged the worst of any other.  

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I will say that, graphically, Final Fantasy VII probably looks about as good as a PS1-era game can probably hope to be, especially the towns/backgrounds more so than the character models standing out so much. I'm also not seeing the kind of egregious janky polygon seams you see in a ton of games from this era. I don't mind the combat at all which is good since this has to be the meat of your game, though I do kind of have mixed feelings on the Materia system. It's kind of neat that you can assign whatever powers you want to whoever you want and it makes the game quite customizable, but it also limits how individually different characters feel aside from their Limit Break powers. This is pretty much the polar opposite of IV, in that game every character there has a very niche gimmick they fit into. Apples and oranges.

Still, every single time a minigame comes up my blood pressure rises.

The cutscenes actually aren't nearly as overwhelming as I seem to remember. They are actually spaced out pretty well for the most part so far and I haven't found myself thinking "god dammit get on with it", which was my actual fear when I revisited this game after not touching it... like, I dunno, this century?

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I mean, people should always play games and form their own opinions. You cannot design "fun", and any game designer that says you can is a liar. You can only design mechanics inside of which some (but never all) people will have fun of their own creation, so even stone cold classics are not and should not be expected to appeal to everyone. I have relatively little nostalgia for it as a game, though I played *some* of it back in the day (borrowed it from a friend, never actually finished it). It's funny that I am enjoying some of the stuff I thought I'd dislike, and found this totally other minor element of the game that just sticks out more in 2019 than it ever would have in 1997. Overall I am still enjoying it enough that I absolutely am going to finish the game, and in this era of the several-hundred game Steam catalogue or whatever being the new normal, "I am going to finish this game" has become a much more meaningful statement than it used to be.

The only lazy take I absolutely cannot abide is "you chose this position to be contrarian", as if I actually give enough of a shit about what other human beings think to jump on a video game opinion bandwagon. Having not played 8 and 9 I am super prepared to come out of this little winter adventure with people thinking I'm crazy.

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14 minutes ago, Death From Above said:

I mean, people should always play games and form their own opinions. I have relatively little nostalgia for it as a game, though I played *some* of it back in the day (borrowed it from a friend, never actually finished it). It's funny that I am enjoying some of the stuff I thought I'd dislike, and found this totally other element of the game that just sticks out more in 2019 than it ever would have in 1997. 

It's not so much me trying to diss the game as knowing what I was willing to do in a long-form RPG when I was in college or unemployed living with my dad vs what I'm willing to do in an RPG in my 40s with a girlfriend and a job (even one I'm on hiatus from) and a desire to be social and make it to the gym 5 days a week.  I loved Persona 5 but fell off it like a drunk off a Bird scooter after the first in-game month because I never seemed to have enough time in one sitting to keep it going and not feel like I was lost on boot-up.  I really enjoyed most of the FF series, but the chances of me sticking with it in my current attention-span and schedule are nil even if the story is everything people say.

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Well, aside from That One Moment, the story isn't anything special anyway. Tend to agree with the overall sentiment that it's a game that suited its time but doesn't hold up. 

Reminds me, I never finished 9, but given the amount of time I recall wasting on cut scenes and chocobos, I doubt I ever will. As I go l turn on Skyrim again...

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Yeah, the overall issues of the FF games is that they all do something really right, but also do something REALLY wrong, and the rest falls inbetween that scale, and it's a matter of finding the one that fits that balance.  I'm very "bleh" on 11-15, love 9 and 10, didn't like 8, both liked 7 well enough and think that in the grand scheme it's massivly overrated, 6 is awesome... then you'll probably never see a touch 1-5 again.  Honestly, I'll only ever touch 7, 9, and 10 and even then it's not likely I'll finish a playthrough, because of time investment and how much I got sitting around that I haven't finished yet(like MGS5 and finishing Horizon)

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I think that it's a testament to Nintendo's development ability pre-GameCube that their N64 in-house games (like from the Japanese divisions such as EAD, not from Rare) aged extremely well even with technological limitations like the lack of dual analog. Super Mario 64 has no right to be as excellent as it is in 2019 even with the camera on the C-Buttons. 

I could list a number of N64 games that I think are still fantastic. Honestly, I could do that for PS1, too. something like Jumping Flash is still good as hell, for example. 

The Saturn, of course, has the best-aged games of that generation since so many of them were 2D masterpieces. 

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Mario 64 might be the only game I've ever played that actually took "this game has an awkward camera because we haven't mastered that in the year 1996" and actually turned it into a real game mechanic. Like, there are secrets and hidden stars and stuff that are specifically placed to take advantage of the natural discovery process of fucking around with the camera while playing the game for the first time. It's taking a really shitty technical problem and making an actual good game mechanic out of it. There are SO MANY games from this era that could have used this design trick to their advantage but just weren't clever enough to actually do it.

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What's amazingly awesome?  Seeing that your PS4 won't sign into PSN even though it's on the Internet, therefore locking out half your games and kneecapping half the ones that you can actually get to!  After a ton of research, it appears that my battery has crapped out (which seems to be a somewhat known issue) as the date rolled back to 1/1/69, and that's causing the TOS acceptance not synching up.  So... I gotta preform surgery on the PS4 to replace the battery.  Lovely.  Shouldn't be hard though, as I recently pretty much rebuilt my laptop from scratch due to the motherboard shorting out/power socket breaking/HDD failure, but it's fucking annoying.

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Tried a bit of Bastion yesterday. Cute, the narration is a neat gimmick, but I will start over on easier mode after dying too many times. I also think I'll change to the mouse to move binding instead of the keyboard, because I kept hitting my special attack button when trying to move. ? 

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3 hours ago, JLSigman said:

Tried a bit of Bastion yesterday. Cute, the narration is a neat gimmick, but I will start over on easier mode after dying too many times. I also think I'll change to the mouse to move binding instead of the keyboard, because I kept hitting my special attack button when trying to move. ? 

I completed that a couple of years back on the PS4. A really fun game - one of the better ones I've played in recent memory.

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On 1/6/2019 at 3:35 PM, Death From Above said:

I am over 10 hours into Final Fantasy VII and boy, is this game ever in love with hiding doors nearly invisibly in the landscape.

I may be remembering this wrong, but can't you press the select button and have arrows be displayed over entrances + exits?

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I put at least 70 hours into Xenoblade: Chronicle before I realized I could level up the main character's unique weapon-based skills.

I'm about 80% done with The World Ends With You and I've just now figured out how food and the level-slider works.

I beat Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance w/ the girlfriend and we didn't realize the escape potions had a two-way use.

 

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