I liked the game well enough when it came out, had a good friend at the time whom I always traded little game design insights and fun facts about the AssCreed games with.
But the one thing nowadays I always remember about this one is that the ‘opening’ part is looooo(…)oong - until you really swing you sword and hidden blade about it takes hours of grand opening, shipping to America, learning the controls, doing little ‘preview’ missions in a restricted zone, then
Spoilerfinally switching to the actual main character only to have to do a new tutorial intro all over for a couple of hours.
It felt somewhat compelling the first time round but on subsequent playthroughs it really stretched your patience - imo, of course.
Yeah, I’ve sunk maybe 4 hours in already and I only just got out of Haytham’s part. Granted I went off and started doing all the Sync points, but still. The game’s pacing really is it’s biggest issue
It was mind blowing to me on a technical level back then though. I just remembered the footprints in the snow, the slow-trudging animations in the deep snow, the free-running along trees, all that was really cool.
Sidenote: thanks for always posting some interesting games to learn and/or reminisce about. Haven’t been posting much in your threads but they are always a joy to read when they pop up!
I didn’t play any BF6 this weekend because Arc Raiders sucked me in. My first extraction shooter too, but nice to see that it isn’t crazy sweaty (at least in the first map). I’ve run into people left and right who just mind their own business, or I like to jump in and help others if I come across them.
Yeah the main thing I’ve noticed is solo queues tend to be way chiller. People are mostly just minding their own business. Group queue however is, for the most part, shoot on sight. Which at least feels a little less bad since you have people with you
My STALKER: Anomaly playthrough is progressing at the typically languid pace. As soon as I find a scoped shotgun for Hip’s quest I can start thinking about migrating my base of operations a bit north. For a Loner run this would be prime time to setup in Rostok, but Mercenaries aren’t on friendly terms with Duty so that’s out. I’ll have to make it to Dead City probably and that will be quite a trek. I probably have to wait until I find and repair a better suit. And also hope my companions don’t die on me as I need them to haul over all my collected shit in my stash.
I’ve also been playing Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yes it’s a gacha game (don’t buy any currency to gamble) and yes the character designs are unfortunately a bit too gooneriffic, and yes the story is pretty bad and the translation is pure Google Translate level machine-translated slop. But you know what? The actual gameplay of the roguelike deckbuilder portion is actually very fun. Tons of customisation with an incredibly mutable deckbuilder that has tons of variations for every single card. Even the balance is surprisingly good, with such endless possibilities in combos and specific versions of specific cards that you can make pretty much any character shine with enough work on finding just the right decks and setups. Don’t know if it will stick, and I’ll keep an eye on balance going forward to see if they start making it more pay-to-win, but for now I’m having a surprisingly good time with it.
Lots of people hype the game up, but boy is the gameplay boring to me. I love a good turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.
Especially didnt like Blitz ball. And the story wasn’t good enough for me to keep playing to find out. I played about 20 hours and got to the Seymour Wedding scene, after the desert area. That’s about where I dropped the game.
To be fair, I don’t really like JRPGs that require grinding, especially turn-based games with no tactical movement which require grinding, so I was already not going to like the game. But I had read that the story was one of the best among Final Fantasy. Also super hate random battles, especially when I am just trying to explore somewhere I already feel like I “cleared” out with battles. Also, gigachad Lulu was carrying like the entire time I played. L bozo Waka, your brother hated you bro. Ject would have been a better protagonist than Titus. Better design too.
Honorable Mention: XenoSaga.
My experience with XenoSaga can be summed up with: “When I am in a Designing Horrendous Boss Battles and my competition is The Developers of XenoSaga:”
I dont hate turn-based games as a whole. I do enjoy turn-based games like XCOM, Tuned Heart, Vagrant Story (its combat is somewhat turn-based), Galactic Civilization, and Mega Man Battle Network, for example.
I do not enjoy turn-based games where the only thing the player does is select an action from a list, with static party members and the same music/cutscene/background etc. For example: Wizardry, Octopath Traveler (I liked the art though), Pokemon, and XenoSaga. I also didn’t like Slay the Spire because of this. I didn’t like the autocombat in the XenoBlade games either.
Its hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I might like one game and dislike another even if they are similar in gameplay. Legend of Dragoon held my attention because at least I had the QTE during battles that gave me something that would directly impact my actions, but my save was corrupted and I haven’t got around to restarting the game.
The only time I actually enjoyed a game with this kind of gameplay was ironically the mobile game NieR Reincarnation (RIP). It wasn’t exactly turn-based, but it was similar in that all the player does in combat is select when to fire a character’s skill. Everything else is automatic. But I really like all of Yoko Taro’s works, and I liked the story and felt it was worth going through the combat for the story. Also, combat was over pretty fast, usually ending under 60-90 seconds.
Blitzball was interesting but I felt like it was an undercooked gamemode. It wasn’t explained super well and was frustrating occasionally. It didn’t really add to the story and just felt like filler, so except for the ones time I was forced to play it, I never touched it.
Final Fantasy X is probably my favorite Final Fantasy of all time. Just don’t play X-2, assume the story ends immediately.
The HD remaster has some “cheats” to smoothen your experience, if you ever want to give it another shot:
No random battles
Infinite gil
All non key items
invencibily (to make up for low levels)
This way you can enjoy the story and move quickly through the game.
If you don’t enjoy turn based battles nor grinding I think this IP is just not for you. Definitely nothing before Final Fantasy 12. Maybe Final Fantasy 12 is ok, though I thought the story was on the weak side.
Ha, yes I heard X2 was pretty universally disliked.
I have really tried to like Final Fantasy. Over the years I have tried plyaing a few of them, like the FF 13 - 2 Lightning (?) demo, whichever game had “Lightning” in the title. I didn’t really like it. I suppose the only Final Fantasy I will ever like is FF Tactics.
IMO, if I am going to use that many cheats just for the story, I might as well just watch the game “movie” or whatever on YouTube.
I tried it whenever it was like brand new. I think I tried the demo before the game even launched on Xbox 360, though I can’t be certain. I don’t really remember much about what I played except the main character had pink hair I think and there was a lot of blue or like, ice on the screen.
Also tried FF 7 (the original on PSX) and FF 4 on SNES. I haven’t tried Crisis Core, but I did have it on the list of games to try, even though its not a mainline game.
I have been going down the rabbit hole of overclocking and undervolting Nintendo Switch. So the games I have been playing are Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Ninja Gaiden (2004). Thanks to overclocking, the former runs at stable 40 FPS, the latter of course doesn’t need any.
Ah. I guess of the Sigmas it’s the least offensive version. It’s a shame still though as NGB is the perfect version. But yeah I momentarily forgot about it being an Xbox exclusive.
Just finished it with all achievements (except final Takezo fight, yet) in about 50 hours. It was a little repetitive yes, but it didn’t bother me much. The setting, presentation and gameplay checks all the boxes for me so I kept going.
But I would’ve also been happy if it was shorter. That’s my general opinion on games these days.
The use of DLSS makes it look like a fugly, smudged mess unless you’re totally motionless. The combat is inconsistent; hit a monster, it gets stunned but then jankily cancels the stun animation to grab you or attack through your attack so it hits you but you don’t hit it.
Not sure what is better than the original other than the graphics when standing still. Even the voice acting is the same not good delivery as the OG, despite having been re-done.
I had a somewhat similar experience. I was playing Phasmphobia just last night as well, and we planned to play a bunch, but an emergency popped up and my friend had to go so we only played the one game. We hopped on Sunny Meadows as a nice warm up before hitting the harder maps like Tanglewood (not that we ever got around to that).
uHS4LQaqtEZV7TY.webp
This was the first attempted hunt in the game. TWENTY FOUR MINUTES in! We had the ghost pinned down to either shade or deogen before even getting any evidence, with our suspicion getting stronger every minute it refused to hunt. We eventually got spirit box evidence, which all but confirmed deogen. And sure enough it was a deogen, which was a dream come true on Sunny Meadows. Easiest (and possibly slowest) $3,000 perfect investigation I’ve ever gotten.
Sometimes the slow but easy ones are simultaneously the best and worst. They always end up having me a little on edge because i’m just waiting for a hunt to pop and take one of our team mates down. Usually they go well though
Not sure how recent we’re talking but within the last year or so my 2 biggest disappointments have been once human and nightingale. I can usually work around jank and weird creative decisions, but unfortunately neither of these two were worth any of the time I’ve spent playing em since they felt like they didn’t seem to want you to progress.
Played once human for about 3 days, nightingale for around 3 hours and then refunded.
bin.pol.social
Ważne