Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I’m just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.
I’ve tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I’ve been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I’m very quickly even more broke than I started.
Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That’s just shameful.
If I spend a fiver on a game and it entertains me for two nights I still consider that fine value to entertainment ratio. If I went out somewhere in real life with the boys I’d be spending a minimum of $50 and that’s for a single night out. So I buy a lot of indie games in the $5-10 range without much guilt over it. Weird single-dev projects with pixel art and a 5 year span in early access are my favorite kind of art.
Now if you’re asking me more than about $20 for your game then yeah the quality control checklist comes out. But my standards are much lower for the $10-tier and I’ve found some really good games in that tier. Not ones that I’m still playing, maybe, but ones that I had a good time with for a few days to a few weeks and that I remember fondly.
Moonring is another free game who had to add a $5 megadungeon DLC after being harassed by fans for months to give them a way to support the game monetarily
Fuck that, when I bought Chrono Trigger for the SNES, I owned that game. I still own that game. Nintendo has not broken into my home to rescind my license to a physical cartridge that I purchased.
Hey I was that weirdo that down voted this, and I assure you it was by accident and I changed it now. I actually never got the chance to play Apocalypse and hot damn, I had no idea it was a whole sequel, I thought it was an expanded release in the same vein as a bunch of the Persona games have (P3->FES, P4->Golden, P5->Royal).
So, amending my statement, play SMTIV and then play Apoc.
Also, excuse me, I have some shopping I need to do.
Leave Pokémon behind, play some Shin Megami Tensei, thank me later.
There’s a pipeline of former Pokémon fans thinking “Huh, these games have kind of gone to crap, I wish I had this same monster-collector style game but with a real plot and interesting characters” and then SMTIV falls from the sky like manna from heaven unto them.
I don’t think IV is actually the best SMT game, I think that honor goes to Nocturne - which is available on the Switch - but SMTIV is a good showing of the series that is available for 3DS. If you have the option, pick up SMTIV-Apocalypse, it’s an expanded “GOTY-style” re-release of IV, but the base game is also fine.
Sting Shard trap also works great, I just threw one of those at every minion spawn and then they die in one Needle hit after. If you stack poison on it then you probably don’t even need the follow up hit but I don’t remember if you can have the Pollip Pouch before this fight or not.
Sting Shard is great in general though. Does 2x Needle damage in a trap you can place in midair, can be poisoned with Pollip Pouch for even more extended DPS, is AoE-capable and can hit multiple enemies, and is cheap enough to refill at 7 shell shards. It’s been my primary red tool so far all game, though I just got to Act 2 recently and I’m hoping to find something better here.
Last Judge was the only boss so far that almost completely filtered me from the game and I think the reason why was because of how very little warning you get before the big spin. I think like an extra quarter of a second on that startup animation would go a huge way toward making her way less annoying. Took me two days to complete the fight because I kept getting so tilted by getting hit with the spin.
The runback wasn’t difficult at all but it was very annoying. You can avoid all enemies on the route except for a single drill fly, but it takes a whole 30 seconds or more to make the run back to the boss fight. Don’t fuck up your platforming though, the sand worms do two damage, so missing a landing means you’re stuck spending the first 10 seconds of the fight trying to Bind with your cocoon silk if you want to survive more than one single hit (two, if you found all the act 1 mask shards).
To be honest I ended up finally defeating Judge by strapping on the Pollip Pouch and sticking her full of poison straight pins. I regret nothing and I do not consider this to be dishonorable.
Yep. I didn’t have a huge issue with them charging for new DLC. If the DLC is good then fine, devs gotta eat.
When they sunset content that I paid for and tell me it’s no longer accessible, that’s when I dropped the game like a hot potato. Should have requested a refund, actually.
I prefer to clown on them relentlessly and let them be aware that everyone thinks their opinion is stupid and childish
Allowing this to go unchecked or ignored is how we got here in the first place. “Just ignore the trolls” led to the trolls having actual societal inertia. It is no longer enough to just ignore them, they need pushback.
Paradox DLCs also classically add a ton of content every single time. Sure Stellaris kind of sucks as a new player because there’s $260 of content, but it’s perfectly playable and even good with only the base version and then you pick whatever new content you like as you want more of it. Rimworld has the exact same strategy and I don’t see people complain about that. They release a complete game without any obviously missing parts and then keep bolting on cool new extra parts for the next 10 years.
All that to say, yeah this is kind of out of character for Paradox. Which does have me concerned about this.
I made it all the way through Dark Souls 1 and 2 and about half of 3 before I even knew that was a thing. I was getting curbstomped by Dancer of the Boreal Valley and went online looking for discussions about her. Lo and behold:
Tl;dw - Dancer’s song is in 3/4 time instead of 4/4 and she dances with her music. This gives her a crazy pattern that people always get got by because what feels like an opening actually isn’t. In order to defeat her you have to listen to her song and learn to dance with her.
Once I learned that it opened up an entire new world of understanding across every soulslike game I played and immediately halved my average number of boss attempts. No joke. Not every boss can be beaten blindfolded by just listening to their OST but it’ll give you good timing cues for the fight more often than it doesn’t.