What Video Games are you playing?

[Sith_Mafia]

I got monster hunter world on sale last week and am enjoying it.

I killed the t-rex which was supposedly the difficulty spike into the real meat of the game with no trouble but I'm a grizzled soulsborne vet so I guess that's expected.

The biggest adjustment is how long some of the animations are. In ds3/sekiro the animations are fast and furious, especially the player's. There's a lot of reacting RIGHT NOW and not a lot of "position yourself at the beginning of this animation so you'll strike where the monster will be 2 seconds from where it is in its current animation". In monster hunter so far that's the entire game.

thats a great game. had a lot of fun with it. i'd recommend trying out all the different weapon types, as they can completely change up the core experience. i end up using the hunting horn quite a bit

[tombombodil]

I got monster hunter world on sale last week and am enjoying it.

I killed the t-rex which was supposedly the difficulty spike into the real meat of the game with no trouble but I'm a grizzled soulsborne vet so I guess that's expected.

The biggest adjustment is how long some of the animations are. In ds3/sekiro the animations are fast and furious, especially the player's. There's a lot of reacting RIGHT NOW and not a lot of "position yourself at the beginning of this animation so you'll strike where the monster will be 2 seconds from where it is in its current animation". In monster hunter so far that's the entire game.

Also, from my somewhat limited experience, the fights in MH often take way longer because of how little damage you do to certain bosses even when properly equipped.

In Souls games for the most part you win or lose relatively quickly unless you're pretty underleveled in which case winning could take a while.

Lord Foul complained about my phones automatic sig so I changed it. - Sent from jizzmop 4040 using bollocks

[John]

I've noticed the fight length too. I started without understanding how often you have to sharpen sword&shield and beating the first great jagras took me half an hour and I though ok I must be playing this game wrong (which of course I was).

But now that I'm doing it right (or more right, anyway - sharp swords and combos instead of just repeated light attacks) it still takes me a year of continual pounding to beat bosses solo. Most of them don't do much to threaten my health bar while I'm at it either.

[Sith_Mafia]

I've noticed the fight length too. I started without understanding how often you have to sharpen sword&shield and beating the first great jagras took me half an hour and I though ok I must be playing this game wrong (which of course I was).

But now that I'm doing it right (or more right, anyway - sharp swords and combos instead of just repeated light attacks) it still takes me a year of continual pounding to beat bosses solo. Most of them don't do much to threaten my health bar while I'm at it either.

also i think the boss health scales in multiplayer, but only once. so 2 player is technically the hardest. If you play multi, try to get a full team

[John]

also i think the boss health scales in multiplayer, but only once. so 2 player is technically the hardest. If you play multi, try to get a full team

I think that's correct.

[Knaight]

Subnautica. I bounced off this a while back, but now I've unbounced off and have been having a lot of fun with it. The reasons for my initial bouncing still hold (the randomness involved in equipment finding made beacons later game than they should have been, which made navigation just unnecessarily difficult), but I'm glad I returned.

[tombombodil]

Subnautica. I bounced off this a while back, but now I've unbounced off and have been having a lot of fun with it. The reasons for my initial bouncing still hold (the randomness involved in equipment finding made beacons later game than they should have been, which made navigation just unnecessarily difficult), but I'm glad I returned.

Don't feel bad about looking shit up. there's a lot that's hard to intuit.

Other than that though it's a fantastic survival exploration game, I've blabbered about it somewhere lemme find that post...

edit huh maybe i didn't. Well anyway I really love that they took a genre that's been so dominated by never-ending, "make your own fun" sandboxes, and injected it with lore, atmosphere, context, and an actual interactive story with an arc and an ending.

I hope more devs realize that having a game with a definitive ending and a well thought out story can really make it stand head and shoulders above its peers and stick in its player's minds like nothing else. even for a genre as suited to a sand-boxy, play it for its own-sake, structure as crafting survival.

[Spammy V]

Yakuza Kiwami is a pretty good game that loses its fun in the last third as they try to ramp the difficulty up. I have no idea if this is how later boss battles in the original PS2 Yakuza 1 went, but in Kiwami as things get harder instead of giving bosses trickier patterns, bosses just get to auto-dodge and put up a perfect defense in the middle of your combos. In some cases it's extremely obvious that their cue to dodge is you pressing the attack button, not your animation. Bosses also become able to break grabs faster than it is humanly possible for you to exploit having grabbed the boss, and sometimes can get free hits in on you as they break free, turning a button on your controller and a whole mechanic into a pure liability. It also compresses what you can do from putting all your acquired abilities to work down to using Rush style for every boss, because Rush allows you to dodge the best and that is what these fights come down to: Dodging and getting the fast, weak hits in.

Bizarrely despite the Majima Everywhere system springing boss fights on you out of nowhere, even in the late game Majima still plays relatively fair, and the Majima boss battles are about learning to sidestep or wait out his combos and strike, rather than watching a boss dodge away from everything you do with perfect I-frames.

It makes Kiwami a difficult game to talk about because I still enjoy the character writing, and I still love the humor of the sidestories. I love watching the perpetually stoic Kiryu dropped in increasingly outlandish situations, milking Kiryu's effortlessly playing the ultimate straight man. I enjoyed the Majima Everywhere system. But so far as playing the game went, I wound up dropping the difficulty to Easy so I could push through the story, because the game just felt incredibly frustrating and unsatisfying. When you press the punch button and the boss instantly takes four perfect I-frame dodges away, there's not much to enjoy. It's especially saddening because Kiwami is running on the same engine as Yakuza 0, and I did not feel these same frustrations when I got to 0's lategame.

I enjoy Yakuza, I love these characters and the humor. Kiwami's story lack's some depth because they hewed mostly true to the PS2 original rather than rewriting it- You can really tell what scenes they added vs. the ones they remade. PS2 cutscene blocking gets really obvious the longer things go on. But ultimately the late game is just not that well balanced.

Oh well. I got to become the king of Pocket Circuit Fighter again and claim the title of best MeSuKing battler in Kamurocho. Kazuma Kiryu the 37-year-old yakuza fighter never met a children's competition he couldn't win at.

[John]

Well I got to the credits of monster hunter, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement over whether this means I beat the game or I finished the tutorial and now am ready to really start playing it.

I'm interested enough to hunt down the post-final bosses but I'm more than a little revolted by the intermittent reward RNG loot drop reward system which appears to be brutally engineering to get as many people jamming the maybe-the-pellet-will-come-out button over and over again. It's a lot easier to design a system like this to hook people for 400 hours than a good game. The fights are actually good though, it's not just clicking turnips in farmville when the algo tells you to. Mixed feelings.

RE2 remake next.

[Azhrei Vep]

So much City of Heroes.

Too much City of Heroes.

In six days: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night will likely fix that. ... Just in time for the Castlevania-Inspired game I'm currently running to end and me to start the Superhero game that will follow it up.


I seem to be doing things a little backwards.