Finished Doom and am about halfway through Doom II, but I'm kind of getting sick of it, so I might put it away for a while.
Decided on playing Amnesia: The Bunker again. I thought about doing some achievement hunting, but so far I've just taken things pretty chill. At least as chill as you can be hiding from a monster in a bunker.
There’s nothing more annoying than chilling in ff 8 doing your own thing, then the loudest fucking music ever interrupts your fun time, ff 10 was awful about it too.
But other games it’s no problamo, I think the best way to do it is how the mother series went about it, with them being semi random and dodgable if you were good and didn’t want to do them.
8 was so bad with randoms. You can go like 2 inches at a time between over world encounters. And they were so time consuming even when it only took 2 hits to kill everything - intro transition, battle animations, victory splash… so long!
I have no idea how I managed to sit through those back in the day. Sooooo tedious.
I like the tales series for how they did, mostly dodgeable, but combat could also be fully automated if you were bored. And there’s a lot of combat, so it gets boring. Needless to say I used auto combat a lot (not for bosses or unique enemies tho). I’d prefer if it didn’t do the battle transition, but I understand the function of it.
I personally love the Ys stories. They pack tons of character development and story into single games. The gameplay is primarily why I love it. It’s some of the best action hack n slash for me. I know some of it is trophy and typical but I don’t care. The stories usually have fun twists and memorable moments with all the characters. Every game is pretty different too, making them feel fresh each time.
One thing I like about Ys, is while there’s a little bit in the games of romance or sexy girls, it is actually pretty astonishing how these games never force romance between the main character and all the women. Especially this game Ys VIII, there’s so many moments where you’re sure they’re going that route, and they don’t.
No, the Ys games truly focus on an adventurer and his friends building rapport and saving the world. I’d argue these games have tons of teachable and wholesome moments.
And as the other person said, all the Ys music is brilliant. I have all the music for almost all the games. Love it.
I finished Doom in the most recent re-release (Doom + Doom II), Ultra-Violence, Pistol Start and no save scumming. The base game isn’t too difficult, but still one level per episode gave me some trouble. The fourth episode is a massive step-up in difficulty though. E4M6 took me a lot of tries, but it got a lot easier, once I found some secrets with extra weapons.
After Doom, I continued with Doom II, still on UV, Pistol Start, no saves, and the first few levels are no issue, but it got tough real quick. Basically, just like E4 in the first game, it’s often about finding the best path to more weapons and ammo. The levels are also more open, so you usually have a few different paths to choose from, so figuring stuff out takes a bit. Depending on how it goes, I might start looking at the wiki to check out secrets and pickups and kinda plan a route that way.
I also finished Lies of P. It’s a good game and I had fun, but the there are definitely some weird decisions by the devs, although they were pretty minor. Weapon durability felt pretty pointless, I think only for two or three boss fights did I have to sharpen during the fight. Same with the jump, which is only needed a few times. However, since it’s like Dark Souls, so you need to sprint to be able to jump, any more would have sucked anyway. Might as well put in a dedicated button like Elden Ring and make it better, or just remove it. The weapon system was pretty neat, even though I basically just used three different heads and handles. I loved the perfect block mechanic, especially if it also destroyed the enemy weapon. Too bad it doesn’t work on the monster enemies, I guess, since they don’t really carry a weapon. The story got pretty lame in the end, but it’s whatever. I disliked two boss fights, the first Black Brotherhood fight since it was a gank fight, and the penultimate boss, because the hitboxes were just really weird, and I was constantly getting shoved around. Even on a perfect block I was a mile away from the boss, so a follow-up really sucked
Finally, I started Horizon Forbidden West: The Burning Shores DLC. I played the base game earlier this year, when it released on Steam, but I’m not really feeling the huge 3D open world right now. I’ll still finish the story, since it’s pretty short, but will probably only do the critical path and little to no exploring.
I've been finishing off Assassin's Creed: Odyssey on my Xbox One X. I mostly enjoyed it but many of the RPG mechanics were quite tiresome. I hear Valhalla is even longer, which doesn't bode well. Odyssey was already hitting the upper limit for me and the mechanics were starting to grow stale.
Still, the world was fairly pretty and it had a surprising amount of comedy in it. The fighting mechanics were mostly fun, although the lack of hidden blades and stupid auto-leveling content rather worked against the demi-god power fantasy.
I should probably get my Steam Deck RMA'd so I can play something else, but that requires more mental effort than I can handle right now.
I’m trying to get into shmups. Just playing whatever I can find on sale on Switch. Mostly Raiden IV x MIKADO Remix on loop. I think I might be getting better!
Well, over the past week I finished my second full Hard run of EDF6 with a modded class, and I updated several mods on other games. Got the updated Shutoko Revival Project on Assetto Corsa, the new Gran Turismo 4 Spec II, which I’m enjoying a lot, feels like a new game. And the Dawn of War Unification team pushed out a minor patch for the 20th anniversary of the series. I am also considering upgrading my old build of STALKER Gamma from late last year to the current one. My setup is working but they added a lot of new things since then that I want to check out, like new early game guns.
I’ve come around to really liking them. In short, they vastly improve dungeons in my opinion.
Most RPGs don’t manage to create interesting battles outside of boss fights. Heck, an increasing amount of RPGs fails to create any kind of challange. However, random encounter can add another layer to dungeons: resource management. You have to plan out how to tackle fights in order to get through the dungeons with your limited items/MP - do you sacrifice more HP or do you go for your strongest attacks? How much exploration can you get in? Do you need to be extra careful and plan for stronger rare encounters? Maybe even plan around lvl up healing.
Sadly, this layer is easily removed. Overworld encounters? Just dodge everything. Adjustable encounters? Grind just enough, go heal and disable encounters. Non-challanging fights? Just use basic attacks. Healing stations? No need to plan anymore. Ideally, the dungeons provides no healing at all - especially not before encountering the boss.
If you’re interested in a game with great dungeons, I’d recommend every single Etrian Odyssey.
I think, it works kind of well in games where you’re able to enslave/recruit the random encouters (Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and such), as it’s then a surprise what you’ll find, somewhat like a slot machine.
But the way the more recent entries work in these series, that you find out what creatures roam the world by exploring, that kind of works, too.
More generally, I don’t particularly like the problem that random encounters solve. Which is that you’ve got sections of gameplay where nothing happens, so you throw enemy encounters into there. That also goes for non-random encounters.
RPGs do this and I used to enjoy RPGs as a form of escapism. But now that I’m doing more stuff in real-life, I want it condensed down in roguelike form, or I’ll just play other genres…
bin.pol.social
Aktywne