Beat Kingdom Hearts 1 for the first time. While I did generally enjoy the experience, the bosses often crossed the line from challenging to outright tedious. Just grindy as fuck taking and dealing a ridiculous amount of damage. Ursula especially was excruciating to play, just this side of broken; honestly, that fight alone has me doubting I'll ever play the game again. All but a couple bosses felt entirely unbalanced, where you had to nick away hit at a time while they're surrounded by near unavoidable damage. The final boss was honestly a chore that stopped being fun well before it was over. This motherfucker has 11 god damn phases until he's finally beat, and you can only put more items in your inventory after the very first phase, and NO OTHERS. Honestly, just letting you re-up on inventory at any reasonable point would have kept it from being such a damn slog. So, mostly great game with most tedious bosses and enemies of varying tedium. Still enjoyed it enough to stick with 'em, though one play through might be all they ever get.

I found a lot of fights that were tedious during my first playthrough were due to underutilising all of my abilities. Selecting the right party members (Ariel vs. Ursula) and using summons are key and battles that once took me ages to beat were over in a matter of minutes. There's no doubt though the original game is filled with sloppy game design that makes certain portions more difficult than they ought to be. KH2 is better in this regard as the animations are smoother and Sora has more abilities to run through.

MARIO TENNIS ACES! It is so good. I can't get enough of it. The GameCube one was one of my favorite games.

This one has so much strategy with an added shot type and mechanic. The games are so competitive and intense. I honestly didn't expect it to be this good, but I am loving it more than Smash right now. Tennis aces is the best Switch game.

Check out this suspenseful high-rank battle!

Been playing this, “No Thing” it’s on Switch and phones for like $3 AUD. Really addictive game

So, I WAS enjoying Chain of Memories...all the way until the final boss, where it becomes so ridiculously unbalanced, that this character I haven't struggled with much at all, with this amazing deck, suddenly can't do a fucking thing. Other than attack cards, anything under a 9 seems useless, he's just crushing me. I spent today grinding up some levels, I'll do it again once tomorrow to try to get some better healing cards (6 is my top, I never needed them, so I never bought them), then I'll turn the difficulty down, and if neither of those things work, I quit and move on.

Jan 9, 2019 7:15:16 GMT RagnarokMike said:

So, I WAS enjoying Chain of Memories...all the way until the final boss, where it becomes so ridiculously unbalanced, that this character I haven't struggled with much at all, with this amazing deck, suddenly can't do a fucking thing. Other than attack cards, anything under a 9 seems useless, he's just crushing me. I spent today grinding up some levels, I'll do it again once tomorrow to try to get some better healing cards (6 is my top, I never needed them, so I never bought them), then I'll turn the difficulty down, and if neither of those things work, I quit and move on.

That's how I felt with Dreamdrop Distance. Everything was going smooth and then they throw a ridiculous final boss at you. Like c'mon people.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the prime example of this, I still haven’t beaten the final boss.

Final Fantasy IV: Advance
My valuable commute companion. I played the SNES version a long time ago. I remember liking it a lot, but playing through it a second time taught me that I remember none of the details. The game moves at a blistering pace, so while it tries to have a grand story, I'm not really feeling it because events happen so quickly and characters come and go like ants at a picnic. The blistering pace also holds for combat, which presents a nice challenge as actions have to be input extraodinarily quickly, and there's no time to waste. Another drawback is that the game is very linear, and even though you have freedom of the world map from a very early stage, there's only ever one location you can go no matter how large the explorable area. Still, I'm enjoying the game a lot.

Dragon Quest VIII
I now have the ability to fly, which is awesome. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I'm going. The game did a good job of gently guiding me to my next destination after you completed a dungeon, but only up until a certain point. After that I have repeatedly gone through the process of completing a dungeon, being completely clueless, exploring randomly, getting fed up, and heaing to GameFAQs. This happens after every single dungeon. I don't have time for this shit.

Jan 9, 2019 7:15:16 GMT RagnarokMike said:

So, I WAS enjoying Chain of Memories...all the way until the final boss, where it becomes so ridiculously unbalanced, that this character I haven't struggled with much at all, with this amazing deck, suddenly can't do a fucking thing. Other than attack cards, anything under a 9 seems useless, he's just crushing me. I spent today grinding up some levels, I'll do it again once tomorrow to try to get some better healing cards (6 is my top, I never needed them, so I never bought them), then I'll turn the difficulty down, and if neither of those things work, I quit and move on.

For those playing at home, Marluxia is a pain. It's a two-part fight where the second part constantly disarms you and forces you to play 30 card pick-up. I had a look at it, because I can't recall struggling too much and I realised I used a fairly exploitative strat to beat him. My deck comprised mostly of fire cards, so I could keep constantly casting firaga. I also had a Red Nocturne in my Enemy Card list which boosts fire based attacks for one full reload, so that would do a ton of damage there. I filled the rest of the deck with cures, megaethers and 0 attack cards for heals, fast reloads and to break Marluxia if need be. I jumped straight in last night after having not played in 3 years and made relatively short work of him.

Yeah, I figured out what I was doing wrong, the amount of life I initially had was just WAY too paltry, as I could take basically no damage. After not struggling anywhere else, I never bothered to level it up, so I grinded that to a respectable level. Then you wanted to use distanced attacks in his first form, as when you get close he teleports, but if you had a move that starts away and rushes in, it hits. Once I did that, got right past the first form. Then the robot only took me a couple more tries, and his final form I got on the second try. Basically, if the item I used to re-up my deck hadn't worked, I was dead, but it did, so I managed to take the last of his life off. Does annoy the shit out of me I finally got a Cloud-9 card right before I finally beat him, trying for one of those the whole damn game.

I'll start with Riku tomorrow.

I wasn't really reading the discussion because I don't know what Chain of Memories is, but then Big Pete starts talking about Firagas and Megaethers and I became interested. This is a Final Fantasy card game?

Jan 10, 2019 19:14:16 GMT Emperor said:

I wasn't really reading the discussion because I don't know what Chain of Memories is, but then Big Pete starts talking about Firagas and Megaethers and I became interested. This is a Final Fantasy card game?

Kingdom Hearts. For the gba but I think it was remade for ps2. Probably on one of those six dozen Kh2 ultimate releases.

Kingdom Hearts shares a lot of it's abilities with Final Fantasy. In fact, in Chains of Memories you can summon Cloud to perform Omnislashes and Cross-Slashes on your opponents. Anyways, Chains of Memories is a unique game in so much that it's an action rpg card game. Think Kingdom Hearts gameplay but your attacks are determined by the cards at your disposal. If you have a keyblade selected, you'll attack, if you have a cure card you'll heal and if you have a Cloud card, you'll summon them. In order to do more powerful attacks, you combine cards together. So for instance, when I fought Marluxia, I kept combining 3 fire spells over and over again to cast Firaga.

I found the GBA game to be an enjoyable experience. For the system it has gorgeous graphics and once you get used to the system it becomes like any card game where grinding for cards and building your decks actually becomes enjoyable. The PS2 remake that came out a few years after is an interesting adaptation, but lacks the polish of the GBA game.

Playing through the game when it came out, I thought it was a fun demake of the original game and an enjoyable detour before the inevitable sequel. Then it turned out Chains of Memory was actually a sequel and the rest of the series was following on from where it left off.

Jan 9, 2019 23:00:23 GMT Emperor said:

Dragon Quest VIII
I now have the ability to fly, which is awesome. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I'm going. The game did a good job of gently guiding me to my next destination after you completed a dungeon, but only up until a certain point. After that I have repeatedly gone through the process of completing a dungeon, being completely clueless, exploring randomly, getting fed up, and heaing to GameFAQs. This happens after every single dungeon. I don't have time for this shit.

I recall having very little difficulty in figuring out where to go in that game and never once looked at GameFAQs. Maybe you are just dumb.

The one I'm playing is the one that comes on the Kingdom Hearts 1.5/2.5 Final Mix for the PS4. Quite good for a remake of a GBA game. As I finished, my early opinion holds, I enjoyed it more than the first game. The few bosses that at first felt unbalanced, turned out I just needed a slightly altered method, counter to the majority of the game, and got right through them. The first, while mostly great, just had technical issues, mainly in the boss fights, that bogged it down to something I can't imagine replaying the the regularity of my somewhat annual ventures (time permitting) into stuff like the Arkham games, or even still the original Resident Evil games.

Had myself a bout of insomnia, and ended up finishing Riku right up. While it does add a good chunk of story, a bit pity they went lazy with it, you're just revisiting the same worlds Sora visited, only now you have a mandatory deck you can't alter in any way. Which did annoy me throughout, as you could give mandatory cards, but still let me put them in the order I choose, so I don't have to dig through bullshit to set up MY strategy. The world cards became more critical, as some of the decks they give you are utter shit, and you really need world benefits to even out the combat. But the reason I found it lazy, was they just shunted the same boss fights in with no context, you do get a bit of dialog with Maleficent, but the other Disney rehashes literally don't have a single uttered line, they just pop up silently, and you fight them and beat them, and they fuck off, nothing more too it. Just a few lines of dialog per really clean it up.

But still, I did rather enjoy Riku's section, nice change up without being entirely different. Once you figure out Dark Points and Duels though, you will just fuck absolutely everything up. I didn't find near the trouble as some of Sora's sections had given. You had to level Sora up to, like, the 30's before you got anything near as effective as Riku's starting techniques. Though late game with Sora, and pretty much the whole fucking campaign with Riku, definitely started feeling overly repetitive. At first I didn't mind, because aside from world variations, you were pretty much just doing the same thing in the original. But in this, each room you pick a card with a perk, and in every world, every room with that perk will ALWAYS be identical, so in the areas where your shit deck forces you to go for certain perks, you're literally fighting the same battles repeatedly. But with a solid addition to the mythos, glad I played it, didn't sound like my cup of tea, but really was.

Reverted back to Battlefield I from Battlefield V. I've missed the chaos and destruction of war, V just doesn't capture it as well. The presentation, the menus, etc and connectivity are much better in the new game, yet the actual game itself just isn't any where near as engaging or engrossing as I. Maybe it's the creative direction, it doesn't feel like WWII, it never did.

I've been hunting for trophies in Nioh. I platniumed the main game some time last year, but now I'm working my way through all the DLCs. One of the trophies requires you to beat every mission on NG+++, including all the tutorials and time-exclusive missions. If you know one thing about Nioh, the game has a reputation for being incredibly difficult. You can learn how to exploit the game, but if you want to have fun, your only option is to grind or persevere. I've chosen the former, so not only am I playing through my third save of this long game, I've been playing through my fifth save to acquire stronger gear and level up. Roughly I'm at Lvl 430, with Lvl 260 gear all at +30 with most of the buffs I want (More Attack). My guy is a katana wielder whose strategy is to get behind enemies so he can do 2.5 times the attack. Usually that means I'm casting slow + weak on every tough enemy while casting quick on myself. If things get really tough, I'll lay paralysis traps to freeze them and allow me to hit a charge shot from behind.

So far, I've completed every mission up to the second of three DLCs. I should be able to get through those missions with relative ease, but I imagine I'll have to grind to take care of the third DLC. There's a few missions that I can see myself struggling with. One where fight the two DLC bosses at the same time, one where you fight Ryu Hyabusa from Ninja Gaiden and the 100 Man Gauntlet. I'll give them the old college try, but if I'm not making any progress after a dozen goes, it'll be back to New Game+++++ farming gear.

That's been taking up the majority of time of late - I don't think a game has caused me to lose track of time since I played Civilization V in 2014. During the holidays, I toyed around with a few of the early generation N64 games. Namely Mario Kart 64 where I've been sinking my teeth into time trial mode. I must have played those raceway courses at least 50 times each trying to beat the ghost times. I eventually got there, but it took a lot of practice. The game is a lot better than I remember now that I've got the hang of the turbo boosts and the relatively broken design makes it strangely fascinating. Being able to exploit the game is really easy and quite enjoyable when you get the hang of it. It also exposes how BS the AI is, since you build up such a lead there's no way they should be able to catch up, low and behold!

Final Fantasy IV: Advance
The more I progress the more I realise this game has serious balance issues. It's as if they just tested it, got rid of the major bugs, and then forgot about it. The first few hours of the game is pretty steady. Bosses take a fair bit of time to kill. Characters are more or less equal. Then you get to a place called Mt. Ordeals. You reach the summit, beat a boss, then the protagonist Cecil upgrades from Dark Knight to Paladin. He becomes a little more powerful. The sage Tellah also receives an upgrade. He learns every single black magic and white magic spell. That is very significant. Before that, the maximum damage I could do with a single attack was a few hundred points, either from a physical attack or a level two magic attack. Suddenly Tellah can cast Firaga/Thundaga/Blizzaga and dish out several thousand points of damage. Thus the next two bosses went down in a couple of hits. I have reached the third post-Mr.Ordeals boss, the Dark Elf, who has huge magic defense, where Firaga deals only 100 or so damage. So I have to beat him the old-fashioned way. That's fine.

I bought Travis Strikes Again earlier today for Switch.

Sat it in the car.

5:40 I open it and realise she gave me “Tales of Vesperia”. I was close by so rushed back and luckily there was still some staff there who quickly swapped it over for me despite the store being closed.

Very glad I didn’t have to wait until 9am to get it swapped over.

So that’s what I’ll be playing tonight 😂

How are you enjoying Travis Strikes Back so far? I've heard there's some fun SUDA51 references, but also read a bunch of reviews calling it a bland game.

Maybe you would have been better off keeping Vesperia?

Emp - I really need to get back into the FF series. I try and play through at least one game a year, but I got pretty lax in 2018. In fairness, in '17 I finished XV, Tactics and VI so I was probably due a break. I've barely played through IV. One afternoon I was bored and just played the opening portions of all the SNES FF games, just to get a feel for them. From what I understand, IV was the first to focus on the narrative and included the ATB which made fights more engaging than the typical JRPG of that time. I'm keen to take a look at IV, not just from a FF perspective, but from a SNES perspective too. It was one of the early releases and one of the games that set the system apart.

Collected all the trophies in Nioh the other day. All those concerns I had about certain missions turned out to be for naught. In the end, I equipped two talismans that allowed me to prolong my Spirit mode which allowed me to make short work of all the remaining missions. I'd just get a few hits in and right before they'd attack me, I'd stun them with the spirit transformation and lay waste. Outside of grinding a lot of the post-game trophies were more of the same, but the one clever one was a mission where they wanted you to destroy all these cannons. 4/5 cannons are straight forward, you just set the powder keg on fire and it takes care of itself. There was one where there was no powder keg insight, so what you had to do was locate a dweller with an explosive attatch to it and lure it all the way to the keg and have it grapple you. I always like trophies that award that outside of the box thinking, it just makes you realise they had just as much designing the levels as you do playing through them. The last mission I had to complete was a Twilight Mission (timed exclusive) which lucky for me, spawned right as I was ready for it. I still don't know how to do the level properly, in the end, I just bum-rushed to the boss, avoiding the job of destroying all the projectiles and what not. I'd love to know the trick to the level, because I was just abusing healing items as much as I could.

My favourite part of the playthrough was putting on a 1999 playlist I put together on Spotify. I just used the ARIA 100, and it was such a nostalgia trip being reminded how vanilla pop music was back then. There's some artists who instantly remind me of 1999 like Eiffel 65 and Lou Bega, but I forgot just how prominent acts like Ricky Martin, Backstreet Boys, Ronan Keating etc. were. It did a pretty good job of reminding me of what '99 was truly like, and also put me in the mood to go see The Phantom Menace for whatever reason.

Big Pete I scratched and used the season pass code, others I could have returned it within the 10 day period as I finished it last night 😂

I’d give it a very generous 5/10 the core gameplay is fun but it’s just such a half assed game. I bought it was Suda51 said he needed this to succeed to make NMH3..where’d all your Let it Die money go Suda? 🤷🏻‍♀️ (Let it Die is a freemium game on PS4 where you can pay to receive continues)

I don’t hate the top down gameplay like most, I enjoyed it except for a certain enemy that can stun/kill you in mere seconds so whenever I encountered it I’d use all my resources I was saving for the bosses.
I’d rather they scrapped all the mini games and made it all this style, similar to the game Dead Nation. Boss fights are all fun and the usual sense of humour is there.

Annoyingly if you save within a level you don’t get your lives back, but if you exit out to trailer and then save there you will, wish i think was an oversight with how rushed this game is.

While the game is short, the first few levels are way too long, the mid boss appearing when I thought I was close to the end, with the later levels being super short as it appears they ran out of time. The last level is a super frustrating maze which I never want to experience again,


Also there’s a “visual novel” you have to read a chapter of between levels, or rapidly press A as you can’t skip them and they go on FOREVER.


The graphics are all over the place, I like the cel shaded style but there’s no denying that there’s iPhone games with much better graphics. The 4:3 aspect ratio is annoying, you permanently have a diagram of Travis Touchdown & Badman on each side of your screen.
This even remains if you play it on the gamepad making it a huge struggle to see. The cutscenes range from live action to FF7 FMV style cut scenes..which I hope they did for stylistic reasons and not budget restrictions as they are on par with PS1.

SPOILER: Click to show

as showcased in the end of the game, it obviously wasn’t that hard to switch to the traditional NMH view instead

The few mini games that aren’t just remix versions of the core gameplay are awful. The asteroid game is boring and the opposite of the game, the racing game is rage inducing...you don’t actually steer, it’s more of a change gears mini game.

The house puzzle mini game is ok but stretched out too long, and don’t bother with the co-op. The other player with die if they are on a block that you move, and teleport to you if they move out of your view.
Not a good level to use co-op on can’t speak for others.

The references and Easter eggs are really cool, thought in one part annoying. There’s one really frustrating section where you keep coming across arcade cabinets of Hotline Miami..and I got my hopes up I’d get to play that instead. Also a part where you go into Shadows of the Damned and it teases a sequel to that. It’s frustrating as they cut corners everywhere possible with this game yet teasing they have the funds to make Shadows 2. Still there’s quite a few “Holy Shit!” Moments for fans familiar with Suda51’s other works.

It looks like NMH3 is in the works anyway, but I wanted to support the studio but this definitely isn’t worth the $60 I paid, even if it includes the season pass. One of the levels is like 3 mins long and they make a joke about how it isn’t finished yet...really? 😮.

It’s the gaming equivalent of putting all your leftovers together and making a serviceable meal..then inviting your friend over and charging them.

I’m a huge Suda mark but even I can’t recommend this at its currents price point. Maybe $20? I paid $22 for the game Gris and that’s a masterpiece, so charging $60 for this is Ground Zero levels of ridiculous.

I've been busy playing New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe throughout the week. While I enjoyed the hell out of Super Mario Odyssey (a top-five Switch game for me), there is nothing quite like 2-D side-scrolling Super Mario. I'm just having a real blast making my way through the levels/courses.

So I've been playing Destiny 2 and getting more into it as I've leveled up some. But for the past few game hours I seem to be stuck at level 20. Then, playing with a friend today back in Pittsburgh, I realize that I didn't have the Forsaken expansion that I thought I did. So I begrudgingly buy it. And whammo blammo I can level up past 20 now.

What kind of bullshit sales tactic is that!?!? Calling level up ability unless you give in and buy a new update to the game!? Fuck that noise.

It's what you'd expect from a company that also does Call of Duty. It's that whole "Your friends are doing the new thing. Don't you want to do the new thing? But these dozens different maps now!"

Jan 27, 2019 7:38:56 GMT G/B said:

It's what you'd expect from a company that also does Call of Duty. It's that whole "Your friends are doing the new thing. Don't you want to do the new thing? But these dozens different maps now!"

Activision don’t own the publishing rights to Destiny anymore thankfully.

I know at one point you had to buy the previous two DLC’s on top of buying Forsaken..AND it would prompt you about skipping the previous DLC you just paid for to access Forsaken stuff

If I recall in the first Destiny, they at one point actually paywalled your Platinum behind an expansion until they had to fix it. Never been into FPS but glad Bungie wised up.

*sigh* Fractured But Whole was fun for a bit, but nowhere near as good as Stick of Truth. Kinda funny since there is a line of dialogue saying go back to it. I dunno if it's the game itself or just for Switch but I've had about a dozen instances of the game freezing, especially in the middle of boss fights. I'm fighting the giant Kyle cousin and got the furthest I've ever gotten (several attempts) and of course it freezes on me. Fucking hell.

Think that's a Switch thing, don't remember any such issues on PS4.

Managed to get past it, although it froze again after I made my post...

Fun, but kinda glad it's over. My only gripe with the end...

SPOILER: Click to show

My dad fucked my mom.

Did anyone do that Playstation rewind kinda thingy to look at their stats for 2018?  That is too much Fallout, man.  Also my Borderlands stats are down probably from previous years.