Also like to revise, put Akiyama up behind Kiryu, not sure what I was thinking there.

Also instead of having four TVs before every PPV, it's not only 1.

I should proof read posts more.

This was for my WWE Smackdown vs. Raw post, I meant it's 'now only 3'. I have no idea where my mind was. :lol:

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019; FromSoftware)

Unlocked the platnium trophy after about an hour of doing this:

This was one of the weaker aspects of the game. I imagine FromSoftware intended for gamers to get this after playing through the game until they exhausted all the difficulty upgrades or even challenged themselves and added exp barriers, but when you provide a shorter path, players will take it despite it being more monotonous. If the rewards had have altered the game in a more meaningful way, it would have made the efforts more justified, but I've yet to see anybody use them in a playthrough nor did I find much use for them. I'll eventually test them out in a playthrough to see if they make certain bosses easier to deal with, but after five playthroughs I'm going to take a much needed break from the game.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (2004;Natsume)

It's official, Harvest Moon is now a fishing simulator. I find myself barely tending to my fields in this game, I water my plants and that's that. All my money comes from milking the cow and the only real progress I'm making is chatting up Cynthia who is an easy lay. I pick flowers out of her garden, give them to her and she keeps falling for me. So there isn't really a lot to do other than hit the bottle or fish. It just sucks that if I'm in the middle of reeling in a giant snapper, my guy will stop if he's got the munchies and needs to chow down on some weeds.  I'm just going to push through and hope the game picks up as it goes on.

The uncanny valley going on in Detroit Become Human is quite possibly too creepy for me to get over. Started to play it last night and almost instantly gave up. Heebie jeebies!

Jul 17, 2019 14:47:03 GMT 🤯 said:

The uncanny valley going on in Detroit Become Human is quite possibly too creepy for me to get over. Started to play it last night and almost instantly gave up. Heebie jeebies!

So that's a no to a double date between you and the wife and me and my sex robot?

Final Fantasy IV
Playing the GBA remake. Today I beat Zeromus, officially completing the game, although there is a good chunk of post-game content to look forward to. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through the game, but when I look back on it, I'm not really sure what hooked me. Everything is pretty mediocre or even outright bad.

The overall plot arc is quite complex, with lots of twists and turns, characters dying and reappearing frequently, but the game moves at such a rapid pace that the story doesn't have time to breathe. Not contributing to this is the dialogue. All the characters speak like children, uttering only the most basic sentences and having a very limited emotional range. The story isn't given time to breathe. Fortunately they massively improved on this concept in Final Fantasy VI, proving that you can have a deep and engaging and emotional storyline even with the limitations of 2D sprite graphics.

As a whole, Final Fantasy IV feels like the scrappy first draft of the epic games to come. The game introduced the now ubiquitous ATB battle system. Unfortunately it isn't implemented very well. The difference in speed between my playable characters becomes ludicrously large at the end, at which point three of my characters get two turns before the ATB bar of my white mage has filled once. The status effects are broken. Your enemies can put you to sleep just fine. But I have put an enemy to sleep many times, only for them to attack immediately as if nothing has happened. Defensive buffs like Haste, Protect and Shell give minimal boosts, and need to be cast multiple times to have any noticeable effect. Unfortunately this is infeasible because of how slow the white mage is. There's also the Final Fantasy trope of useful negative status effects being unnecessary against weak enemies, and useless against bosses because they are immune to everything. The most egregious example is the Wicked Mask, an asshole monster in the final dungeon who casts Reflect on himself and then spams Holy and Flare on himself. The usual Final Fantasy solution is to cast Dispel on him, removing the Reflect, but nope, he's immune to it! Utterly absurd.

Despite all my complaining, I breezed through the game except for a lull in the action where I had to grind a lot after a sharp spike in difficulty when the Moon is unlocked. The pace of the game is not good from a story sense, but it is good for a gamer. Although random battles are frequent, I could still fly through dungeons at lightning speed. The difficulty scaling was very-well designed: random encounters and boss battles were almost always at that sweet spot between too easy and too difficult.

Quite a few of the boss battles demanded some clever strategy beyond mashing attack. The final boss, Zeromus, sadly was not one of them. He has an awesome buildup, and the final boss music is the best track in the game, but he's a one trick pony. That trick is spamming 'Big Bang', the typical final boss attack that does huge damage to the entire party. So the entire battle was: endure Big Bang, heal sufficiently, spam strongest attacks, repeat, Zeromus dead.

Not a bad game, but certainly one of the lesser in the series. Still a milestone achievement and a sign of great things to come.

Jul 17, 2019 19:48:44 GMT @ness said:

Jul 17, 2019 14:47:03 GMT 🤯 said:

The uncanny valley going on in Detroit Become Human is quite possibly too creepy for me to get over. Started to play it last night and almost instantly gave up. Heebie jeebies!

So that's a no to a double date between you and the wife and me and my sex robot?

Never say never.

Jul 17, 2019 21:22:33 GMT 🤯 said:

Jul 17, 2019 19:48:44 GMT @ness said:

So that's a no to a double date between you and the wife and me and my sex robot?

Never say never.

Eden Club does rent those out for a small fee of $29.99.

Conventional wisdom tells me a brick wall randomly in a boss battle is the perfect spot to hide from a laser.

Oceanhorn says fuck off.

So why even put them there?!?

Getting around to playing a LEGO game I've yet to touch. LEGO City Undercover has to be the most boring start to a LEGO game ever. I want to love it but it's really feels very barren. I walk around the city to no music. Not really sure it has a proper ost, just some music cues. I'll play it, i'll finish it, but not sure if remember it too fondly. Now I just started, so i hope it picks up.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (2004; Natsume)

I'm one year in and I'm contemplating what a speedrun of this game would be like. I keep imagining a scenario like that Futurama episode where Bender becomes human and dies of obesity in a matter of weeks.

So here's the deal with A Wonderful Life.

In order to beat the game, you have to play through 400 in-game days.

Each day lasts 20 minutes if you're doing an honest days worth of work.

So we're talking well over 130 hours of gameplay.

I'm currently 13 hours into my save and I'm so bored with this game.

I was able to propose to my SO after 10 days of courtship and then I spent the next 30 days ignoring her waiting for the year to end so she could move in and make a baby. In the end, I spent more time trying to woo a mad scientist so he could unlock the best feature in the game, the seedmaker. It converts crops/fruit into seeds, at a 2:1 ratio, which breaks the economy of the game. Unfortunately there is just so much god damn waiting I can't use it until my tree grows and I'm in the right season for fruit to appear.

So really the only things I can do now is wait around. There is another feature that allows you to fuse crops together to create things like Tomacco which gives you another way to mess up the economy, but for what? The real goal at this point is to watch your kid grow up and find a career. That's just another 360 days of waiting.

The other goal is to befriend the towns folk, but all they ever talk about is the weather.

The impression I get is that the people at Marvelous had a bunch of half-baked ideas, but they never got a chance to polish them to make them fun. The idea of playing through an entire character's life-span sounded like a neat hook for a sequel, but the content is spread so thin it's extremely bland. I don't think Marvelous were counting on this being a game you play through in one go. Either it was intended for a casual audience who don't really game that often and just go to it to pass the time, or it's one of those games you return to every so often. I think I'm going to take the latter approach. I'm not going to will myself to play through 100+ hours, but I may return to it every couple of weeks/months, do a season and move onto something else.

Splatoon 2 (2017; Nintendo)

The final Splatfest went down on the weekend pitting Chaos vs. Order.

It was actually interesting reading social media's analysis on the topic, a lot of people took it extremely seriously and what it said about the person making the choice. My 2 cents is that in the world of Splatoon, Chaos seems to be a key ingredient to keep the world 'fresh' but I chose Order anyways because you need balance. As it turns out, Order went 0-3 in all major categories, but personally I had a decent campaign.

I stuck with the Sploosh-O-Matic, which is more of a support weapon that prioritises covering the field over killing other enemies. My main strategy was just trying to stay alive and push if there was an opening. If things got really desperate, I'd try and get behind the enemy, ink as much turf and try to retreat back to base to at least divide their offence. Despite my efforts, I'd say I went 1:1 for the most part. Maybe a touch better but it wasn't my best campaign.

Map Rotations - Ancho-V Games, Camp Triggerfish, Wahoo World and Moray Towers. I could be mixing those up, but Moray and Ancho were definitely in the rotation and where I played with more caution than I normally would.

Then the next day I came back because I just wanted to mess around. I believe the 10x and 100x matches were in higher rotation and I found myself in a 100x match in my second playthrough of the Shifty Station. Truth be told, I didn't know the gimmick of the map and just inked as much as I could. It was a fairly even contest where it went back and forth right up until the last few seconds.

This year has been real good for me in gaming, from CTR: Crash Team Racing to Bloodstained:Ritual of the Night to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice....here is another contender for GOTY: Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

Holy shit, this game can be overwhelming with the amount of social activity you are allowed to do. Tea parties, fishing, gardening, lunch, one on one cooking, cathedral singing, note book opening, lecturing, training.....hell. This game makes Persona's social activity look amateurish, you will be overwhelmed about what you do but man once you "Get it" it's so insane. Each week you will lose an hour of real life time if not more setting up your people in many facets. Weapons can and will break on use and special arts so you are frequenting to FE Staple Anna the Mercenaries goods every time.

The combat is typical Fire Emblem goodness, I am on Hard/Classic meaning the difficulty is challenging enough(Not crippling since Lunatic will be in a future patch for the sadists out there) but if a party members dies, that's all. Not happened to me yet but I will soft reset if that time comes up OR the new rewind feature that will allow you to turn back a move to save yourself or a teammate.

There are so many damn characters between the three schools(Black Hawks FTW, so many distinguishable women LOL)and the professors/Knights that I barely know half of the available characters by name. I have my core guys and build them as much as possible as I am in the 3rd month of the game despite being almost 10 hours into the game.

If you play this game, it is recommended to do Female, they have more S Class/Romance options compared to the Male. If I recall, there is only one same sex relationship you can do as a male, as opposed to quite a few options you can do as a female avatar. I went female without even knowing any of this to switch it up but this game is sort of meant as playthrough meant to be done 3x, one for each house. Missed opportunity with no character customization, maybe I have been spoiled with Soulsbourne games but being stuck with a blue haired protagonist and having zero say in their appearance stinks. 

Game is well done, story can be a bit much unless you entrap yourself to the lore but I think we are getting to the part shit hits the fan in the story. Can kind of see what is coming, wondering if the game twists the way I expect it to or not.

Stared in on the first Nier, really fun game so far, not too far in though, a couple missions, mainly got through a chunk of the fishing sidequests today.

Mario Tennis Aces is free to play for an entire week.

That's basically the perfect time-frame to experience all the single player content.

Fallout 76: Finding items for crafting early in the game is a nuisance I still don’t have enough material for a work bench or purified water,
sandylea somehow made the former and is lower level than me so I have no idea what I did wrong.

Aug 7, 2019 6:52:43 GMT System said:

Fallout 76: Finding items for crafting early in the game is a nuisance I still don’t have enough material for a work bench or purified water,
sandylea somehow made the former and is lower level than me so I have no idea what I did wrong.

I think you missed looting a crate around the first my camp area.

Speaking of Fallout 76. When i did the free trail week, for whatever reason, it shows that I actually own the game. I look in the store and it says I can literally download the game. Not sure if I should be happy or repulsed. I may give it another shot when the Nuclear Winter rolls around.

Finished up with Nier, very fun game all around, if I had one complaint, it's that there were really only a couple areas, so you have to run back and forth A LOT to complete all the side missions. They only had loose fast travel, where you could travel to a specific point in each area, but the, rather important, area where you upgrade your weapons didn't have one, so you had to make that trek everytime. They also had boars to speed you along, but they controlled like dog shit, so it was almost preferable just to hoof it. Still though, enjoyed myself start to finish, and I'll definitely buy it someday...sort of game I can see myself grinding out 100% completion.

Now, back to Youngblood.

Eh, I gave up on Youngblood, it's not a terrible game, but the RPG elements suck aaaass. There's a leveling system, but enemies level with you, and seem to level higher each level, so not only are you not making any ground, but they become more tediously strong. Just end up getting a dozen enemies on screen that take so much damage that you end up getting swarmed by a screen full of bullet sponges. I might return to it someday, gunplay was still a ton of fun, and I was having a blast until the leveling issues, just not into it right now. Could have really benefitted from couch co-op, my brother'd have played along, but alas, online only, and I don't want to deal with people like that.

Gonna do the Shenmue collection instead, hopefully only a few months off Shenmue 3, need to see how they stand the test of time, as while they were years ahead of much of the market, that was 21 years ago, so now it's about how well they aged.

Aug 10, 2019 11:46:44 GMT RagnarokMike said:

Eh, I gave up on Youngblood, it's not a terrible game, but the RPG elements suck aaaass. There's a leveling system, but enemies level with you, and seem to level higher each level, so not only are you not making any ground, but they become more tediously strong. Just end up getting a dozen enemies on screen that take so much damage that you end up getting swarmed by a screen full of bullet sponges. I might return to it someday, gunplay was still a ton of fun, and I was having a blast until the leveling issues, just not into it right now. Could have really benefitted from couch co-op, my brother'd have played along, but alas, online only, and I don't want to deal with people like that.

Gonna do the Shenmue collection instead, hopefully only a few months off Shenmue 3, need to see how they stand the test of time, as while they were years ahead of much of the market, that was 21 years ago, so now it's about how well they aged.

I'll be interested to hear your take, Mike. Personally I found myself enjoying Shenmue I more because of it's deliberate pace and the sense of responsibility the job section gives you. I really found myself getting immersed in 1986 Japanese culture and even watched a few movies from that period (The Sea and Poison and A Honmansu). However it's very light on content and feels more like Metal Gear Ground Zero than an actual game.

2 has a lot more content and the scope of the game is incredibly impressive. However it's compromised by the insane amount of QTEs and doesn't have the same intimacy as the first.

The seven day trial for Mario Tennis Aces finished up a few hours ago. Within the week I was able to play through all the modes I wanted to including Adventure and the Tournament modes. The Adventure mode reminded me a lot of Splatoon. It isn't an extensive journey and it often feels repetitive, but it does a good job of teaching you the basic mechanics of the game. By the time I was finished, I was blocking shots, activating bullet speed and using all the new mechanics to my advantage.

Tournament mode was a breeze, but Adventure mode had it's moments. There is one challenge where you've got to hit 400 shots back to Kamek and can only miss two shots. It seems easy enough, especially since you earn bonus' through out for every 10 shots, but there's a pole right in the middle that the AI will constantly use to throw you off. This is where you really need to use bullet speed just to make it easier to telegraph.

Originally I was going to skip all the optional levels, but I got up to the final world with just the wooden racket and realised it'd be much easier if I got all the rackets. Rackets in Tennis Aces serves as lives. Whenever you mess up the timing of the shot, the racket will lose a third of it's health and shatter on the third miss. I learned the hard way to get the timing right, which was actually good because it forced me to master the mechanics, but the upgrades were worth it.

The game is beautiful and the cast of characters is everything you'd want from a Mario licensed game.

In a lot of ways, it's the Mario game I've wanted since the GBA release. My only gripe is the inability to play a proper tennis match (you can't play multiple sets of six games) and the lack of a doubles tournament. I also never liked the nasally umpire they've used since Power Tennis, Mario can double task, let him do both jobs!

It's back to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, then in 15 days time it's Astral Chain.

Finished up with the Shenmues, really forgot just what kind of games they were, despite championing them since day 1, I'd actually only played each game once (which goes to show how mindblowing they were for me at the time, just haven't had a Dreamcast or X-Box since). Really more like a detective game than anything (honestly, two of the best investigation driven games I've played. Maybe felt more like a real investigation than even Judgement.), running down leads, trying to put pieces together to continue on their path, really not a whole lot like them even now. Glad to say they hold up for more than just nostalgia, yeah, there's some really rough edges being 2 decades old, but for the most part, enjoyable experiences.

It's a pity they were cash grab remasters, as just a minimum amount of effort, and these could have really shone. In part 1, they just needed the waiting mechanic and combat refinement of the second. Was my favorite of the two, but those two aspects really held it back. Waiting especially. And for all the shit it gets from detractors, I still fucking love the forklift, maybe just preys on my obsessive need to organize things; really a pity forklift wasn't an option for the second.

As for the second, it improved part one in pretty much every non-forklift having way possible, combat was sharper, button inputs worked better, everything was just a bit more crisp. Actually surprised, forgetting how big it was, may be larger total area than even the modern Yakuza games. Though that could be a detriment at times, again, with a little improvement, simply cutting out the transitions, making it a singular map, could have flowed infinitely better.

Part 2 kind of "Return of the King's" in the final act though, you go through this great epic finale, and then you're hit with basically an epilogue that slows WAY the fuck down. Part 1 finale rolled out perfectly, I thought, where part 2 didn't need to be as long as it was. Could have practically saved that as the opening for a 3rd, as nothing is really critical to anything IN the game, except the very final scene. Leaving off heading for Bailu would have been a more fitting end, that stuff works better as prologue than epilogue.

In total, very enjoyable, but fairly flawed experiences. Glad I got a chance to go back to them. With the way narrative first games have really taken off in recent times, just another way it was ahead of the curve, always be disappointed it didn't launch on the PS2, might have stood a chance to get the proper story/evolution.

Somewhat annoyed at Suzuki though, when Shenmue 3 was announced, I thought he was going to use it to bring his story to a, albeit truncated, end. But he recently said Shenmue 3 is about 40% of the story, which means we might be left in the same position as Shenmue 2, as Shenmue 3 is going to be a harder sell with it's vastly inferior budgetary constraints. Here's hoping it's successful enough to get to a fucking finale.

Next up, another blast from the past in Onimusha: Warlords, this one, I've never really played, so I'll be coming into it almost blind. Think I played about 10 minutes back in the day, but that's about it.

I just finished Batman: An Enemy Within which is the season 2 of TellTale Batman series. I must say it a big improvement over season 1 because that game drags a little in the beginning. It was good once it got going, but not good enough were I had to play the sequel. But recently Xavier Woods has been doing season 1 on UUDD which actually made me want to try the sequel. What makes the sequel feel so good is the “villians.” Though out the Batman history people always say batman creates most of his villains. But in this game it feels you do shape how they turn out to certain extent. And if you take one path you get to see a very interesting take on one in particular. Great game until the very end where the game forces you into some situations to force an ending. And the final choice that would never happen.

Beat the Dark Pictures: Man of Medan, really enjoyable game, say I enjoyed Until Dawn more, but still a solid play. And dammit, I came close to making it through the entire game with all members alive on my first try, but in the final act there's a sequence that takes a specific action that wasn't necessary at any other time in order to save one the characters, BOOM, dead. It's a bit slow really getting into it, 45 minutes or so to finally get to the ship, but once it gets going, keeps moving on pretty steady. It's a fairly short game, 4-6 hours a play through, so doesn't overstay it's welcome. Can't wait for Little Hope.

Starting in on Control, really fun so far, tight gun play, fun powers, interesting world...I like it.

Finished Control, definitely Remedy's best since (and maybe including) Max Payne 2 from a gameplay perspective. Everything I said holds, tight gun play, fun powers, interesting world, story doesn't have a great finish, but I enjoyed it pretty much the whole time. My main complaint is that it only felt like chapter 1, rather than book 1, much like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, didn't give a satisfactory stand alone narrative...just a good thing the gameplay was so fun.


Started in on Greedfall (couple days ago), loving it so far, but know going it, unlike other games were you might be labeled a diplomat, this game is heavy on the diplomacy. Much more talking than action, in a lot of cases action feels like a last resort, granted you can brute force pretty much any scenario, but still going to be A LOT of exposition. I don't mind it, but some might.

Does have a nice gear system, plenty of weapons and looks.

Though I do wish the point system was a bit more giving. You get 1 basic skill point every level, but then you have talents, which is stuff like lockpicking and speech, and even more annoyingly attributes, which you need for different levels of gear (armor, swords, guns, spells), that are way too sporadic. Sometimes 3+ levels before you get either, so it's really limited the build. Have to see how many you ultimately get by the end of the game.

Finished Greedfall, the quest system is very good, doing A LOT of talking, and conversations do most always have some purpose. Action isn't exactly robust, and could get a bit repetitive, but fun enough. My biggest gripe is the map, they do a Skyrim style scroller at the top director, but that only works if you can traverse over the majority of terrain, since Greedfall has specific paths, you're often having to click into your map to guide yourself to where you're going, it really needed a mini-map. And while the point system is stingy, by the end you'll be fine on talents, you get enough to max 2-3 of the 6 styles, I stuck to heavy weapons, usually more of a sword guy, but didn't feel the animations, especially for the long sword.

In total, it's a very good RPG, but clearly a AA experience (reused assets, some funny bugs, nothing too bad), better combat and it could have been downright great. Well worth the play.

I've been playing Slain: Back from hell on Switch, great game so far albeit a bit frustrating.

After horror games that aren't survival horror or puzzle based if anyone has some suggestions.

I'm hard at work watching reception for someone at the moment :lol:

Alice Madness Returns, Deadly Premonition (maybe violates the survival horror component, but has enough going for it), Vampire - The Masquerade, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Majuuou, Monster Party are all decent places to start.

Also don't skip out on the classics. Castlevania is one of the best series ever, pick one, Zombies Ate My Neighbours, Bloodborne etc.

Thank you. I've finished all 3 Dark Souls games and am a decent way into Sekiro.

I own Bloodborne and I can't even get passed the first 5 minutes :lol: