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2019 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD


SirSmUgly

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I've seen a bit of Samurai Showdown on stream and it's a very strange, but good fighting game. Strange in that (I gather, like most of the series) it's actually very light on combos and also doesn't seem fireball heavy, but the matches I've seen players are definitely playing dimensional chess looking for openings. It feels like a game that probably deserves more popularity than it has, and I like what it's going for, but it seems almost all fighting games now are hot for maybe 3 weeks.

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So Fire Emblem Three Houses, Wolfenstein Cyberpilot and Wolfenstein Youngblood all come out on Friday and I want to get them but by the time I play them they'll all (except for Fire Emblem because Nintendo is stupid) will be less than $20.

EDIT: Fire Emblem Three Houses is mine. Wolfenstein Cyberpilot/Youngblood will be mine at Black Friday.

Edited by Andrew POE!
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 Picked up Fire Emblem Switch on Sunday. These tend to be the most anime ass, anime games ever. This one is no exception, and it’s scratching that itch. However, I’m not big on the snobby aesthetics of this version of the world. Tend to prefer something closer to Record of Lodoss War/D&D. But like recent games, it hasn’t been much of a distraction.

I think what might make me put this game down, are the academy shenanigans that take up your time between battles, and the story. I mean it’s a nice natural break from the action, and it beats having extremely long dialogue that makes me drowsy. It’s just that I find it so tedious, and boring at times too.

Edited by LoneWolf&Subs
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32 minutes ago, LoneWolf&Subs said:

 Picked up Fire Emblem Switch on Sunday. These tend to be the most anime ass, anime games ever. This one is no exception, and it’s scratching that itch. However, I’m not big on the snobby aesthetics of this version of the world. Tend to prefer something closer to Record of Lodoss War/D&D. But like recent games, it hasn’t been much of a distraction.

I think what might make me put this game down, are the academy shenanigans that take up your time between battles, and the story. I mean it’s a nice natural break from the action, and it beats having extremely long dialogue that makes me drowsy. It’s just that I find it so tedious, and boring at times too.

I'm sorta the same way and I normally like the anime style games. It at times reminds me of Shin Megami Tensei IV except there's nothing immediate with the battles and first hour or so like it was with Awakening. Instead, it's about an hour or so, I pick a house, go through cutscenes and dialog, then in my room and looking at a calendar. I probably need to give the game more time but perhaps I've been spoiled by FE: Awakening as far as what I expect.

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SATISFACTORY [3]
Every now and then I play a game with a lot of intensity and focus, and then when I'm done playing it, I realize that what I was actually doing was a complicated coping behavior through an intensely depressive situation. Now that my personal life has calmed down, I have realized that the 40 hours I put into Satisfactory was the latest variation of this behavior pattern. So, uh, it's fine. It's Minecraft with conveyor belts. So instead of depleting the resources by hand, you harvest infinite veins with hardcore drill technology. It's in early access, so the endgame isn't there, so I've bottomed out on it. But! Glad it was there. Really needed it. If you need some zen digging shit with spooky caves, it's there for you.

ENVIRONMENTAL STATION ALPHA [4]
Inspired by watching streams of people playing Bloodstained, and after talking myself out of beating Cave Story for like the ninth time I decided to find the cheapest Metroid I could. Environmental Station Alpha is $8. I'm fucking loving it. It's got a really particular graphical style, kind of similar to the Pico-8 stuff (basically pixel art with half the detail, extremely small sprites and such), but the gameplay is there. It's floaty but it takes place on a decommissioned space station, so it's contextually floaty. The control otherwise feels tight, the boss fights feel nice and dangerous, the music is fantastic, the environs are VERY spooky... I really don't have anything negative to say about it at all. Recommend. Hopefully I finish it.

FUN FACT: The other game that the developer of Environmental Station Alpha put out? Baba Is You! So that's 2 for 2 on great games.

MAGIC THE GATHERING ARENA [3]
This earns a 3 (which, reminder, means "I don't regret playing this") simply through the nature of the friends I am playing it with. Gameplay-wise, it's MtG that makes Hearthstone explosion sounds. You already know if that's for you. I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about the battle pass thing. It really did not take long to make me resent this application of economics in games. Games are preying on addictive behavior in a way that is getting more and more concerning as time passes, and this new frontier bums me the fuck out. For the unawares (oh blessed are ye), the battle pass is a tiered system in which you pay for the Premium Skinner Box and you always see what you could have gotten from that Premium Box whenever you go to collect whatever you got. It is the infection foisted upon the world by Fortnite, although it's rooted in Dota 2's nightmarish Compendium thing. It was fine when it was in Dota 2, because the bar for entry was "must be unhinged enough to play Dota 2 enough to understand why you would want these cosmetic effects." And, it was only available once a year because it was a fundraising system for their world championships.

The adaptation of that system into this unending fundraiser is like the transition from "we are a political action group and we're gonna fuckin solve this to "well I guess we need a new problem to solve, we'll always need problems to solve." It creates a yawning infinite drain where there was once a closed loop. It's a recursive end game. It's the end of history. And now every fucking free to play game shoves this fucking thing in it, which also has the double effect of creating this dichotomy of Haves and Have Nots (go look up the emergence of "Default" as pejorative among kids thanks to Fortnite), so no matter when people come into your game, since the battle pass is never ending there will always be a wave of new players experiencing the joy of being the Have Not and the immense constant reminder of how all you need to join the Haves Club is enough disposable income to un-disposable yourself.

Seeing that MtG: Arena left me feeling numb. It's already a randomness game, strapped to the pay to win nature of booster packs being the only way to upgrade your decks. That it would also have The Brand New Soulsucker is the opposite of a surprise. Once you cross the threshold of exploitative, what is the point of stopping?

by the way: yes I know it's a business and businesses have to make money, yes I know that you don't have to pay if you don't want to, and yes I know that it's "only cosmetic."  I've got family with gambling addiction problems. those facts will not change my position no matter how ornately they are expressed or displayed before me. please don't. just consider this some venting.

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I was a paying MtG: Arena customer. I pre-ordered the last set. It wasn't the first thing I paid for in-game.

They rolled out that set and the battle pass on the same day, and I haven't played the game for a single second since. For me to have pre-order money in, then log in and find "hey you want the GOOD rewards now? Pay us another $20" is gatcha-game level horse shit. I'm out.

If you don't care about that, it's very good.

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It's always neat to me to watch freemieum games go from "Hook you in and entice you to buy the extras" to "Fuck it, we're Whale Hunting!" over time, where it always ends up to the point that the game caters to only the whales and you have to pay to have a fucking chance.  Yeah, Apex and Fortnite are the exception and the pay stuff is actually cosmetic, but games like MtG can claim "it's only cosmetic" but really, they slowly removed ways to grind packs for free by removing them from daily/weekly rewards and removing gold as a way to pay enter the latest drafts/sealeds, ensuring you HAVE to blow money on gems to get into those.

I swear, I've seen every F2P game I ever played go down this road.

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On 7/29/2019 at 2:13 PM, Raziel said:

It's always neat to me to watch freemieum games go from "Hook you in and entice you to buy the extras" to "Fuck it, we're Whale Hunting!" over time, where it always ends up to the point that the game caters to only the whales and you have to pay to have a fucking chance.  Yeah, Apex and Fortnite are the exception and the pay stuff is actually cosmetic, but games like MtG can claim "it's only cosmetic" but really, they slowly removed ways to grind packs for free by removing them from daily/weekly rewards and removing gold as a way to pay enter the latest drafts/sealeds, ensuring you HAVE to blow money on gems to get into those.

I swear, I've seen every F2P game I ever played go down this road.

I'm just curious when was the last time you looked at Arena?

There's a lot of hammering Arena in this thread and while there's a whole other topic for Magic, I figured I might as well give y'all an update.

For $20, I think the battle pass for Magic Arena is now worth it. With how many packs and gems I've won, I've pretty much made the $20 back. They also restructured how the battle pass works. There's the free path and the paid path. The paid path just gives you extra gems or card skins or packs, but you still get all of that with the free path anyway.

You also don't have to login each and every single day. Before you had to login every day to win 3 games and complete your quest to get all of your XP for that day. Now you can basically do the same every 3 days. The way it works now is that instead of winning 3 games every day, you can win up to 15 games over the course of a week and earn XP that way. You can also bank up to 3 days worth of quests.

On top of that, I earn a shitload of gold every week. On average, I probably earn close to 5k gold per week and you can use that gold for most events. They also still give away a random card every 2 or 3 wins and in between you're earning gold. They also added free events you can play where you're using their decks. It's a nice distraction from grinding constructed and limited games. Right now they have a guild wars event where they made a deck for every guild in Ravnica and the more wins you get the more card skins you unlock.

Point is, while at times they pulled back on how many packs you can earn for free, they also quickly responded to all of the negative backlash to undo those changes. The way you're describing it or others are describing it is how the game was with the last update, and how it was two updates before that.

tl;dr the battle pass is worth it because you make your money back by around level 40, it's more casual now, the free path still gives you plenty of rewards, and other stuff was added so you don't have to spend as much real money.

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Trailer looks out of this world but I'm watching gameplay from this past week and it's not quite living up to the hype. I'm on the fence because I was going to dive back into F13th on the Switch.

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The list of things mentioned in threads this week that I'm happy I don't really know what they are:

Ninja

Twitch

Mixer

Jason Whitlock

I mean I've heard of two of those things, but I've never actually encountered them in any form.  Sometimes I think being old and clueless has it advantages.

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fwiw I find mixer to be a better platform to stream on than Twitch, the delay between what I'm playing and what people see is much shorter on average compared to Twitch so it's good for like streaming parts of a game for friends. I guess we'll see how it works as a long-term platform, but it's got that Microsoft Money so it's probably fine

Edited by Lamp, broken circa 1988
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Mixer had to make some kind of a big move eventually, but I am surprised they went this big. An actual Twitch competitor is probably healthy for the industry in the long-run, and Mixer at least is trying not to be the next Youtube Gaming.

Not that this sole move makes them a serious twitch competitior, but, I mean, it's not going to be the last big signing. Anyone even slightly in the know on streaming can add 2 and 2 that there are offers being floated out there. Ninja's success there will be the barometer for how those are received.

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Ninja left Twitch.... GOOD.  He can take some of those toxic shits that clog up his chat with him.  I do like the articles were like "Mixer has a nicer community".  Yeah, wait til the incels that make up NInja's "community" propagate into other streams.

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Well, I use Twitch as my background, and the Fortnite people don't usually spread from there.  Course, most of the streams I watch are Mario Maker and Resident Evil streams.

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