What games are you playing 2: The revenge

Antimatter

Well-Known Member
Randomly got a nintendo switch form my sister as a chirstmas present. So woo for being a two console family for the first time in ages.
 

seitora

Well-Known Member
Bought some games in the Steam Sale, though I'll be going back for more before it's over.

I bought one game that I've had on my Wishlist for most of the last year, called Crossing Souls. Sort of an 80s cartoon homage game. The pixel art is beautiful in this game. Unfortunately, the platforming segments start to fall apart within a few hours, and the mini-games get annoying. The last boss fight I did was pretty cool. Still, a lot of polish that should have been done. If you lose a boss fight, it'll let you re-start again no penalties, but you have to go through an entire cutscene again first. The game's decently generous with the health restoratives, but while I can smash barrels and stuff for hearts, it often forces me onto a single path so I don't even have the chance to try healing myself up again with stuff from the environment before I have to fight again first - and it never will automatically restore your health for you. Ever.
 

chronodekar

Obsessively signs his posts
Staff member
Armed *aircraft*, though, is a bit much - as far as I know, only military aircraft can be armed in US airspace. No exceptions. Not law enforcement. Not even for hunting. The ATF and the FAA would throw everything in the book at you if you got caught with that.
Gun law/Aircraft question: Is a passenger allowed to use a sniper or similar weapon from a helicopter for any reason? Say hunting or something? Am asking about legality, not if it's possible to aim well or not. Am going to _guess_ the answer is no, but under which law? air or gun ones?

-chronodekar
 
I've been playing The Old Republic recently, been having a tough time adjusting to using the Mouse and Keyboard. How do people do this?
 
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Antimatter

Well-Known Member
Gun law/Aircraft question: Is a passenger allowed to use a sniper or similar weapon from a helicopter for any reason? Say hunting or something? Am asking about legality, not if it's possible to aim well or not. Am going to _guess_ the answer is no, but under which law? air or gun ones?

-chronodekar
Depends on the state actually. Some game can be taken from the air in certain circumstances. Trophy hunters have been known to do that to kill wolves for example.

edit: this is because of a loophole that allows for the reduction of predators from the air to protect certain species. In reality it's just an excuse to sell expensive hunting permits to sport hunters.
 
Gun law/Aircraft question: Is a passenger allowed to use a sniper or similar weapon from a helicopter for any reason? Say hunting or something? Am asking about legality, not if it's possible to aim well or not. Am going to _guess_ the answer is no, but under which law? air or gun ones?

-chronodekar
The answer is "definitively yes" - but not every jurisdiction allows it. Many parts of Alaska and Texas do (you may or may not recall stories about former Alaska governor Sarah Palin hunting from a helicopter), and I expect Montana probably does as well.

And I'm in complete agreement with Antimatter - selling expensive hunting permits to sport hunters is also why African nations sell permits to hunt lions and such.
 

Antimatter

Well-Known Member
Been playing some Mario Kart 8 deluxe. @0 years later and I still hate the blue shell with a passion. Why on earth does a weapon exist that soley seems to be there to punish winning. It also seems to only target the player in single player games, hitting me in second place even if first was farther ahead.
 
Finished Far Cry 5.

Went as expected. I really enjoyed it and both endings were unsurprising.

I don't get all the people complaining about the endings.

Every Far Cry game but the first one has had "bad" or at least ambiguous endings where everything you did was basically negated and what you've been doing for the entire game is essentially thrown in your face. It's super weird that anyone was expecting anything resembling a happy ending from the game at all.

The Far Cry Instincts expansions were the first to kind of move in this direction. They turned you into a literal animal and predator, but still largely stuck with the formulaic action story formula. Far Cry 2 is where they really ran with it.

The entire point of the series is to deconstruct action game plots where you end up being a hero for going on a massive murder rampage. They pretty much all slap you over the head in the finale and make you face what you've been doing. They basically all say to the player "Well, you've been running around slaughtering hundreds of people, how did you think that would really go?"

Initially, your actions as the player may be justified, but in the course of the game you become more and more involved and go past the point of no return. You always end up being used by one side or the other, often both sides by the end.

I could have done without the constant "capture" segments. There were way too many of them, but I think that might have been the point. Far Cry games are always kind of artsy deconstruction, so it may have been a commentary on cutscenes and railroading players.

Overall, the world and mechanics win out though. Well worth a playthrough because the sandbox itself is so well done.

Probably gonna do Crosscode next.
 
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Nanya

Well-Known Member
Just beat Neptunia Re;birth 1 on my Vita

True ending was cute, the DLC and the Candidates make it way too easy.

Anyone know of any good Neptunia fics to read?
 

Karnath

Well-Known Member
Just started replaying Xenoblade 2. Can I just say how much I hate Gacha systems? Last time I played this Kos-Mos was my second last blade, this time I got her in chapter 3.
 

Antimatter

Well-Known Member
With no major events going on in MHW, I switched over to mario kart 8 and Hyrule warriors on switch.

HW may not be the greatest game ever, but it sure is fun. Still get a kick out of how Tecmo felt the need to sex up pretty much everyone, though it did give us some awesome designs for Link, Impa and Zelda.
 

chronodekar

Obsessively signs his posts
Staff member
If it's this = https://store.steampowered.com/app/368340/CrossCode/

I look forward to hearing what you say about it. That game was on my maybe list. Speaking of lists, I think the remaster for Tales of Vesperia is coming out on PS4 any day now. Never played it before and the idea of a Tales game makes me happy. Will very likely buy it this week.

-chronodekar
Yup, it's that.

It's set in a sort of future MMO. Think Sword Art Online or .Hack.

I'm not entirely sure what your character is just yet. It's not entirely clear aside from she may or may not be someone's sister who was involved in creating the game. There's a plot element that limits her speech that has led to some fun moments. She's not silent, but not talkative either. She also doesn't seem to have a life outside of the game, where as the companion characters will occasionally talk about theirs.

It's very much like Secret of Mana actually. I'm really enjoying it so far. You only control a single character, but can party up with other characters and they'll help you out as AI companions. They're actually quite useful in combat and you can give them simple commands and set up how aggressive they are and such.

Weirdly, you're usually on your own in dungeons. The game explains this as "instances".

You have a melee attack and a ranged attack, and can specialize for using either in the level tree. Your ranged attack works twin stick shooter style, and your melee works like a typical top down ARPG. You also have a more powerful ranged attack that will bounce off surfaces a few times, which is used in a lot of puzzles.

You upgrade skills using something called CP, which you gain every level. There are also separate trees for each element, and they do not share CP, so you don't have to worry about keeping any aside for those trees. Once you unlock them they have their own separate CP pools. There are also certain segments of branches that you can switch between at any time that you can have one or the other active. These largely have to do with your special attacks, but it is nice that you don't have to commit to one or the other.

Overworld enemies seem largely passive until you attack them so far. There are a few that will attack you if you get near them, but for the most part you can walk right through most mobs on the overworld and they'll ignore you. Dungeon mobs are always hostile.

It has anti-grind, to a point. You're expected to do a certain amount, but the enemies give lower and lower xp as you level, keeping you within a range when you're in an area. As I understand it, you won't reach the level cap [99] playing naturally, and even if you do you can't fill up the entire grid for your CP upgrades. You do get the opportunity to respec by visiting a certain NPC, but I've not actually done it and am not entirely sure what is involved.

You'll also need resources. As there are only a few armor sets you can outright buy. The others need stuff gathered from an area to craft in addition to a gold price. Some items may require you to craft other items from lower tier items, and then use those to craft the gear. If you're running around breaking anything you can, you should have enough to stay upgraded fairly well.

There are a lot of "build" options for your character, which is nice.

There's a "combo" system of sorts where you level up from D to S rank by killing enemies. It doesn't reset when you get hit or anything, but you need to kill a bunch of enemies in a row. Once you clear a set of enemies, a timer bar starts and you need to find more and engage them before it runs out to keep the combo going. The higher your rank the more resources you'll get from enemy drops, and some drops can only be obtained above certain ranks. You do not auto heal or level up until you let the bar run down and reset your combo.

Enemies also respawn fairly quickly, so it's not a huge chore if you need to kill certain ones to get a certain resource. Though you may want to plan out a route to face the largest possible group of a certain type of enemy when your combo is maxed out.

Plus, you'll get decent equipment and resources as quest rewards if you're doing sidequests. As far as I can tell, you don't actually need to grind more than a little. Unless you're trying to craft every item in every area, you shouldn't need to grind a whole lot and should come across what you need just by playing normally assuming you're fighting most things and breaking any destructables along the way.

Getting some of the rarer stuff might be a bit of a pain later on, but I've yet to come across that issue as I'm still fairly early in the game.

There are some neat settings that you can tailor the difficulty how you want. Don't like the puzzles, but like how hard everything else is? You can turn down just the difficulty for the puzzles. The same goes for the combat, as you can adjust both enemy attack frequency and how much damage you take.

I think some of the towns are a bit too big, and a bit convoluted. Once you get your bearings it's not so bad, but it did get a little annoying trying to figure out how to get around the hub towns because they're so crammed with stuff and often the path to get places isn't terribly clear. This is both a good and bad thing. It can make finding a specific building a pain, but also means there's a lot to explore.

There are lots of jumping platforming paths throughout the game, some covering two or three screens, you'll need to navigate them to reach a lot of optional chests and hidden stuff. Figuring out how to get to something across a two or three screen jumping maze is not an uncommon thing to do. It can be a bit hard to tell whether some platforms are level with or above others and where you can and can't jump, but the only penalty I've run across is having to start from the beginning. Falling won't kill you, even though getting knocked off a ledge or falling into water loses some health, you'll immediately regain it unless you're in combat.

Overall, this game is totally worth it so far. The areas are pretty big, there's lots of NPCs to interact with, and lots of hidden stuff. The combat is fun and has a fair amount of challenge, there are lots of clever puzzles. It's one of those "hidden gem" kind of games if you're a fan of old school ARPGs.
 
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An important tip for Crosscode.

There are lots of NPC other player characters running around on the overworld. You can't interact with most of them, but it is important to realize that they can't go anywhere you can't.

If you see groups of them sitting or standing around on a ledge, you can reach it. It might be a hell of a convoluted path, but you can get there.

If you see them hopping over gaps or hazards, you can do the same thing. They aren't just there for background flavor, but are hints about how to get places. You may need to activate switches to go where they go, but if you see them going somewhere, you can reach the same places.

Realizing this got me out of being stuck. There's an area in the desert where you have to hop across lily pads to get somewhere. Water is usually a hazard and I never would have though to try jumping across what looked like scenery. I saw another "character" doing it, and figured out that I could as well.

If you're stuck in Crosscode, pay attention to what the other "players" running around are doing.
 

Antimatter

Well-Known Member
Flipping between Monster Hunter World and Hyrule Warriors is tough, as the attack buttons are not the same in both.

Kind or at a wall in MHW now though, just augment farming. May drop it for a while unless a cool event starts up.
 
Finished Chasm. Decided to play it to take a break from Crosscode and ended up finishing it.

Was meh. Neat idea, a procedural metroidvania. Not particularly difficult, I finished in two sittings of a couple of hours at 100%.

You do rely on RNG for loot drops, and there is a leveling system, but leveling is soft capped to areas and is static.

Execution is bland. It's very generic, but not bad. That's the rub with this game, it's not bad at anything, but doesn't stand out in any way.

Despite the procedural nature, I doubt I'll ever play it again.

If you like Metroidvania games, check this out if you're in the mood for one and have run out of better games and/or can get it for super cheap. Otherwise, skip it.

Still playing Crosscode, though I'm in the last dungeon.

I ran into a huge "fuck you player" puzzle room in the final dungeon and decided to call it a night. It's not particularly difficult as I have a good idea about what I need to do, but it's one of those things where you have to figure out each segment as you reach it, and start from the beginning every time you fail.

Really like this game a lot. Will definitely be giving it another run through at some point in the future.

The puzzles in this game are hard core. Most of the dungeons are full of puzzles with few combat encounters. There are also a lot of puzzles in sidequests, though most of them are combat related. There are some rooms in dungeons where you need to kill things, but mostly it's just figuring out how to unlock a door or get to the other side of the room. They can be a bit frustrating and if you don't like dungeon puzzles the game is not for you. Seriously, some of them are brain melting, but all are possible.

I like that kind of challenge, but this game is more a puzzle platforming RPG than a combat RPG. That isn't saying there isn't a fair amount of combat, but as I mentioned earlier there are only a few enemies that are hostile if you don't attack first. This remains consistent throughout the game.

There are also some pretty inventive sidequests, including a tower defense minigame. Most are just "go here and kill/defend the thing", not a ton of gather X number of X quests, though there are some.

When you play a dungeon you "race" with other characters. They aren't with you, and it is essentially a hidden 90 minute timer. Do not expect to win your first time through any of them, as figuring our the puzzles will slow you down a lot. If you want any shot, ignore any extra pickups such as chests on your first time through.

Most of the rooms don't take that long, but there will always be that one that takes you 20-30 minutes and will cock up your time.

As far as I know, the only thing you get for beating the other "players" is an achievement and you don't lose anything. It just affects some dialogue.

Once you finish a puzzle, it stays completed permanently, and you can run through any combat rooms without fighting anything else, so it's best to just go back and get chests and such after you finish. They never have anything that will help you in the dungeon itself, usually just crafting materials or consumables.

There are chests with gear in them, but as far as I can tell, they are all on the overworld.

The bosses are tough as well, but in a good way. They all have some sort of trick or elemental weakness.

I haven't actually crafted any gear. You can easily get through the game with what you find, or the gear you can just buy with money. It's the most balanced set, so if you want to specialize, you should craft gear.

EDIT: Finished Crosscode. The final boss was hard and is kind of cheap, go in with lots of healing items and you'll be fine though.

The game was neat, but the ending is a bit disappointing because it isn't done. The game is not in early access, but there's apparently post game DLC in the works. As it is, you do have the option to go "back in time" a fair bit, not to the beginning of the game, but to an important point to what ending you get.

However, trying to go forward only leads to a message about upcoming DLC content that doesn't have a release date as of now.
 
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Decided to start Ni no Kuni II next.

It's one of those games that's been on my backlist for a bit and has all the DLC as I got it on sale a while back and just never bothered with booting it up outside of just checking to see if it launched. It gets good reviews and a lot of praise and seems fun enough.

Never played the first one, but I've read that outside of a few easter eggs it's not necessary and has no real relation to the plot of this one outside of a bit of lore. That's not unusual for JRPGs.

It's a sufficiently odd premise, which is nice. Your character is the President of totally not America who is transported to a magical land of furries after a city you were traveling to is destroyed by a nuclear missile, also you've been de-aged from about 40-50 to 20ish for some reason and just sort of appear in a tweenish king's bedroom, and it just happens to be during a coup. Oh, and you just happen to be being hunted by totally not anthro-mouse Darth Vader.

This is all within the first five minutes of the game.



Still, I like the action combat system and characters almost literally tell the player to not worry about details and shit and just get on with the game. I kind of like the sensibilities of that.
 
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chronodekar

Obsessively signs his posts
Staff member
I got Tales of Vesperia on launch day. Been playing it for a bit ever since. The combat is ... not quite easy to get a grip on. I feel like I'm getting stunned too often and am not in control of my attacks. Just feel like I'm button mashing all the time. There have been at least 2 bosses (or boss like) battles that I couldn't win with that 'strategy'. Had to tone down difficulty to easy, just to clear the fight.

Which is weird. I don't remember having this kind of combat trouble with other Tales games before.

And on the PC side of things, my brother and I had setup a server to play Factorio on. A couple of days ago it crashed. And logging into it gives me error messages. So it appears that we've reached the limit of what our cheap $5 server could do. On the factorio forums, folks mention running the game on much, much larger system configs and especially if you are not keeping the server on 24/7, there are ways to reduce costs to just under a dollar. So we're looking into that.

-chronodekar
 
I got Tales of Vesperia on launch day. Been playing it for a bit ever since. The combat is ... not quite easy to get a grip on. I feel like I'm getting stunned too often and am not in control of my attacks. Just feel like I'm button mashing all the time. There have been at least 2 bosses (or boss like) battles that I couldn't win with that 'strategy'. Had to tone down difficulty to easy, just to clear the fight.

Which is weird. I don't remember having this kind of combat trouble with other Tales games before.
Really? I don't remember it being that difficult to come to grips with on the original 360 version.
 

seitora

Well-Known Member
I've got a lot of games in my backlog to catch up. Like, I'm only now beginning to play Pokemon X.

Also, holy crap, what an enormous Pokedex. Only just got up to the 4th badge and already I have like 130 Pokemon.
 
I've got a lot of games in my backlog to catch up. Like, I'm only now beginning to play Pokemon X.

Also, holy crap, what an enormous Pokedex. Only just got up to the 4th badge and already I have like 130 Pokemon.
There are 593 Pokemon that you can catch in Pokemon X/Y.

There are 18 version exclusive Pokemon per version, so if you only have X then it's 575 that you can obtain in game without trading or transferring.

There are also version exclusive mega stones.

Every single Pokemon is available in game, though about 126 are only available through transfer/trading.
 

seitora

Well-Known Member
There are 593 Pokemon that you can catch in Pokemon X/Y.

There are 18 version exclusive Pokemon per version, so if you only have X then it's 575 that you can obtain in game without trading or transferring.

There are also version exclusive mega stones.

Every single Pokemon is available in game, though about 126 are only available through transfer/trading.
Yeah, so essentially if I want to finish off the 'dex I'll have to pray on the GTS. Or use PokEdit or whatever it was called, if it's still around.
 

chronodekar

Obsessively signs his posts
Staff member
Really? I don't remember it being that difficult to come to grips with on the original 360 version.
Perhaps they changed something in the remaster? Right now, I'm at the 4th town - as soon as you enter a cut-scene starts and Yuri walks off into an alleyway. Now there is a 1 vs 3 fight here and I'm getting pummled. Am keeping away from the game for a bit to look up combat tips.

Oddly enough, nothing noteworthy comes up on youtube for "Tales of Vesperia combat tips beginner" ... oh wait there's a new video about manual cancelling that wasn't there before. Hmm...

-chronodekar
 

Knyght

The Collector
Perhaps they changed something in the remaster? Right now, I'm at the 4th town - as soon as you enter a cut-scene starts and Yuri walks off into an alleyway. Now there is a 1 vs 3 fight here and I'm getting pummled. Am keeping away from the game for a bit to look up combat tips.

Oddly enough, nothing noteworthy comes up on youtube for "Tales of Vesperia combat tips beginner" ... oh wait there's a new video about manual cancelling that wasn't there before. Hmm...

-chronodekar
Having bought the game myself as well, I do find myself struggling with the combat myself at times and don't remember having these problems during my original playthrough. Those same three guys murdered as well. I ended up just running around the field and using hand-and-run tactics to avoid them attacking me one after another while I'm helpless to actually do anything.
 
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