I started playing Vampire Survivor on mobile last week and I’m so addicted. I know I’m late to the party. I had heard about it many times but I never played the Desktop version because I wasn’t a fan of the 16-bit graphics. But a few days ago I saw it in the Play store for free and decided to try it. Wow! I’m so impressed by this little game. The game play is fun and satisfying. There are plenty of unlocks and secrets in the base game to keep you busy. Well worth a try. Once you get powered up a bit and you unlock some new characters it’s really addictive.
I come back to finish off a few more unlocks every so often, and it seems like the list keeps growing. Great little game, very trippy towards the end of the “story” as well.
It really does get pretty trippy. I’ve been working through the secrets to unlock all the other characters. Some of them are pretty funny, others have curious quirks.
It’s a volunteer and donation run anarchist collective that has been around since 1999. They have fought a number of legal battles against governments to varying degrees of success.
The people involved have close ties to basically everyone involved in Tor and should be regarded with the same level of trust (what ever that means for you). There’s also a lot of overlap with some core Debian contributors.
That said, I wouldn’t use them for P2P other than occasional use. Or if you do, consider making a substantial monthly donation. It’s a lot of resources to pull from a small organisation at the expense of people who need their services for political organizing, which is their primary focus.
Skullgirls, which is now my favorite game, scares people away with its tutorial, so I ended up making my own for it instead. It was through resources for a bunch of other fighting games that I ended up realizing what I wasn't understanding about Skullgirls.
Honestly, you could probably just put fighting games here in general. Understanding what it means for a move to be plus on block is super important, but most new players will have no idea what that means. I can only name one game, Fantasy Strike, that teaches you to jump to escape command grabs.
Came here to say fighting games. SF6 is attempting to address this with the whole single player mode. The Battle Hub also serves as a better spot for casuals. I’m hopeful that more fighting games take a better approach to teaching the game. When I first booted SFV, there was a 2 minute tutorial teaching you how to move and block and then it just cuts you loose. We’re likely in the next golden age of fighting games. It would be a shame if Tekken fumbled the bag with poor new player on-boarding.
Dark Souls 1. It's tutorial is decent for controls but it doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't explain rolling, weight and stats are only in level up screen, at least for prompting. So many things about the game you need to know that they leave to expensive trial and error.
I’m pretty sure Dark Souls is intentionally obtuse, that’s like a core part of the game’s philosophy. It doesn’t explain them because it wants you to try and figure it out on your own or discuss with others.
Nah, I don't think so. It actually explains everything you need to know, but it's buried in stat and item descriptions that, especially in 2011, we weren't trained to read through to understand the game. So if it's all that missable but still in the game, I think it's fair to say that it just sucks at teaching you.
Well, sure, it sucks at teaching you. But you can learn enough through the tutorial and checking stat and item descriptions to be able to learn and discover the rest on your own, you won't get to a spot where you have absolutely no idea what to do, and if you do, you havent explored the available space.
Part of that game's specific appeal when it released was that most other games at the time treated you like a child that needed every detail explained for you to learn and enjoy yourself, they grabbed your head and said "go RIGHT here, right now". It both sucks as a tutorial, but succeeds at establishing a baseline level of expected effort, resilience, perseverance, and experimentation from the player.
That game specifically is not trying to thoroughly teach you how it works. Its job is to provide a world and mechanics that provide a sandbox for you to roll around and suss it out for yourself.
They've sanded that frustrating learning experience in subsequent games to the point where Elden Ring now has more traditional tutorial pop ups, and unsurprisingly, it's their most successful game to date. That and the aforementioned evidence lead me to believe that the experience a lot of people had with Dark Souls was not what they intended. And you can absolutely get to a few points in Dark Souls 1 and get stuck without a guide; I know it happened to me when it came time to walk the abyss, and even having read item descriptions, it's very easy to forget the one description of one ring you got potentially hours and hours earlier that would solve your problems.
It's hard to talk about Elden Ring's learning experience the same way since by that point the world had enjoyed around four or so similarly constructed From Soft souls like games that had entered the cult popular internet gaming vernacular.
It was no longer as uniquely obtuse as Dark Souls was at its time. But yes, it does teach better, and is more straightforward in a lot of ways, it aligns more with most gamers' common understanding. It has a map.
And I'm not saying Dark Souls is entirely impervious to the argument that it's obtuse, I mean look at the resistance stat. What I'm saying is that you can understand enough to become intrigued by the world and become hooked if it's your sort of game. At the point that you really get hung up you've got incentive to discuss it with others and do that legwork.
It gets you into the game well enough while also establishing that you may totally have some mental hoops to jump through later. If there were to be some Dark Souls full remake with some arguable quality of life improvements, I'd bet there'd be a number of areas you could make less obtuse while still preserving a sense of genuine discovery, and that'd be a very fun "ethical" discussion as well with so much grey area to be had.
Donkey Kong 64’s tutorial is very poor. Most 3D platformers give you a safe area or easy first level, within which you can explore and learn the mechanics at your own pace. DK64 instead forces you through several tiny tutorial gauntlets, and it’s a little jarring.
Which is super weird because the same developer (Rare) made Banjo Kazooie a year earlier! BK had a tutorial level with a bunch of easy enemies and platforming and it worked great. I have no idea why DK64 was so different in comparison
I would wager it was a last-minute change as a result of focus testing. There is a lot going on in DK64, and sometimes you’re too close to a game to realise that all those button combinations aren’t the most intuitive to new players - and given the slapped-together nature of the tutorials, it makes me think it was an afterthought at best.
Deus bloody Ex, the first one. Both the tutorial and the first mission are mostly useless and many players outright drop the game during the first mission. Afterwards the game shows its true colours, but the beginning is just rough.
I think Liberty Island is a brilliant introduction, showing you how you can take multiple different approaches to achieve your goal. But yes, it’s also a serious trial-by-fire. I remember I couldn’t even find Filben when I first played.
It seems we agree. In the hindsight: yes, it's a decent level. As an introduction: hell no. With player not knowing what to expect and with barely any character abilities it's one of the most confusing first levels I can recall.
It's not Baldur's Gate 3, because it's Baldur's Gate 2. I think I'm past the halfway point, and I'm hoping to have it beaten before this thread comes up next week.
I also started a co-op playthrough of Quake with a friend of mine, and I play a few runs of 30XX here and there.
Other than that, it's Street Fighter 6, and there's a patch coming for Guilty Gear Strive soon that I'm excited about.
My partner and I started playing Palia this week and like it so far. It has some issues and I wish there was more co-op, but it’s a nice relaxing game that’s been fun to explore.
Fontaine just opened in Genshin, so I put Baldur’s Gate on hold for a bit to do the new stuff. I also went back to play a bit of Mass Effect 2, since I was in the middle of a trilogy run when BG3 came out. I’m sure I’ll be back to BG3 soon, now that I’ve got all the Fontaine areas at +65% exploration.
Fontaine has been really great, honestly. I had gotten burned out of Genshin and had only been doing dailies and none of the events for a while now (I did the bare minimum of the summer event then didn’t touch it again), but Fontaine has gotten me back in. I really like the underwater mechanics and just swimming around and exploring.
They iterated on how you controlled the pari in Sumeru, and they really nailed it. It’s very smooth. The only thing that can be rough is when you have to do underwater combat, because suddenly you’ve got up and down thrown into the fight, but luckily fighting underwater is pretty rare.
Funny, I've been replaying the Mass Effect trilogy as well (through Legendary edition), and I'm also on Mass Effect 2. ME 1 holds up more decently than I expected with the LE changes, but ME 2 is just such a better game in almost every way. Really enjoying spending time with these characters again. Even with other games going on you can always hop back in and do a mission or two in ME 2, the save system lets you make some good progress even if you don't have a ton of time. Femshep for life.
Ironically, ME2 is my least favorite of the trilogy, because plot-wise, it’s worse than just being a plot cul-de-sac because it undoes everything set up in 1 and sets ME3 up for failure by introducing more plot lines that have to be resolved. I know everyone loves it because of the characters and BioWare changing a lot of mechanics so it’s more fun to play, but I like the trilogy for the story, and ME2 really fails, story wise, as the middle part of a trilogy, because it doesn’t advance the story set up in ME1 - it ends with us in the exact same place, story-wise, only with more baggage. It’s got a great series of individual stories and is good as an anthology, but hurts the overall story of the trilogy.
I really love this video on it, since it really explains how ME2 wasn’t actually good for story of the trilogy: Mass Effect 2 Broke the Franchise.
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