dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork, 4 days ago

Some AI or central computer going haywire and destroying everything is, like, the third or fourth stock RPG trope just behind the Dark Lord burning down the protagonist’s village in the first act or the mysterious waif girl actually turning out to be a princess.

You really think they’d know better.

dual_sport_dork, 10 days ago

You can use the same license for both, and your purchase includes access to both versions regardless of how you buy it, unless that’s changed very recently when I wasn’t looking.

Officially, both versions also explicitly require you to create (or already have) a Microsoft account to sign-in and play. Unofficially, the Java version is dead easy to pirate.

dual_sport_dork, 10 days ago

Yes, but Minetest/Luanti is not a fork of Minecraft, it is its own separate thing.

dual_sport_dork, 30 days ago

Crono needs a legendary sword that requires a time-hopping fetch quest to get all the ingredients. Frog requires a sword that’s already legendary, and a whole episode devoted to getting it powered up further. Marle, Luca, and even Magus require triple techs and in the case of the former two, a deliberate power up by Spekkio to even be able to access them in the first place.

…Ayla can merely punch people for 9999 damage.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was pretty close to the peak of the series if you ask me, and the PS2 version was the superior one. THPS4 also came out on the Playstation 2. I see you already have Underground on there.

If you’d like something you can handily use to consume the rest of your entire life, Disgaea and/or its sequel will probably do you.

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are also legendary. I haven’t tried in ages, I have no idea if modern emulators can get the latter to run at a non-crap frame rate. It’d be a lot nicer if so.

Odin Sphere is an often overlooked 2D action sidescrolling fighting thing wherein you Norse In The North and beat the shit out of absolutely everyone. Its sequel, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is much the same thing except therein you Ninja In The Night instead. The latter stayed locked to the Wii to my knowledge but the former was on the PS2.

The PS2’s library is quite vast. I’m not going to go looking this up to prove it right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s got the most titles ever released for a home video game console (i.e. not the PC) in history. Even just trying out unknown games at complete random, it’s likely to be able to keep you entertained in one way or another basically forever.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

Re: Final Fantasy games not tying together or having continuities.

Yes. Except, ironically, specifically Final Fantasy X, which had a direct sequel in X-2. Final Fantasy XIII also managed to have a direct sequel in Lightning Returns. Thankfully, if you care to think of it that way, it was crap and can be safely ignored.

Anyway, have an upvote for not blithely suggesting that everyone start with VII.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I’m just being that guy on the internet as usual, but Symphony Of The Night is a PS1 title, not PS2. I’m sure OP can run a PS1 emulator on his her Deck if she wants to, though. It is a great game.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

I was not aware it was released in that packaging, but I’m pretty sure that’s still a Playstation 1 disk dressed up in a PS2 style DVD case, meant to be used with the PS2’s backwards compatibility mode. To my knowledge SotN was never rereleased as a native PS2 title and wasn’t rereleased at all until the PSP version. (And then later the Xbox 360 and PS4 as downloadable titles, and also the ghastly mobile phone versions.) If you have a PS1 kicking around you can try it and see, I suppose.

For what it’s worth my copy is the green-stripe “Greatest Hits” reprinting, so what it’s worth is alas not much.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3a74b238-322a-4017-9fdd-6a4b4f60e7c8.webp?format=webp

Her, and him, and whoever!

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

The synopsis in the manual also states that Bowser turned the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom into “stones, bricks, and field horse-hair plants.” In a given playthrough, most players probably smash a lot of bricks. Bricks which used to be Mushroom Kingdom people, who are now dead. Because Mario killed them.

It’s a big maybe on Mario being the hero because he may or may not actually succeed in reaching Bowser and rescuing the princess depending on how much the player happens to suck, and/or of Luigi winds up being the victor instead.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

I think the implication is supposed to be that when you beat Bowser they’ll be turned back.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

With the best will in the world, given the dire performance of Borderlands 4 even on much more powerful hardware, the notion that it was ever going to work on the Switch 2… how should we phrase this… was never realistic.

Randy seems more interested in running his mouth than getting anything done about the game’s performance issues on any platform, so this decision is hardly unsurprising at this juncture. The fact that they were able to pull the plug this close to the alleged release date also points to the fact that this was to be yet another one of those game-not-actually-on-the-cartridge deals, if they were even planning to make cartridges for it at all, so that would have been yet another nonstarter for many potential buyers. This whole thing was dead on arrival. The only difference is, now we know it’s official.

Borderlands as a whole doesn’t have a great track record on portable platforms anyway. The OG Switch version also had less than stellar performance, and the best that can be said about the PS Vita version of BL2 is that even with all the cuts and downgrades its frame rate is probably better measured in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. (I have direct experience with that one, being one of the six people on Earth dumb enough to actually own the Vita version of Borderlands 2. But in my defense, it was literally cheaper to buy the BL2+Vita bundle than to buy a Vita on its own. That’s right: It’s so bad, the Vita release had a negative retail value.)

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Here’s one that’ll hit them closer to home: The original Donkey Kong is literally a mod for the earlier Radar Scope cabinets. Nintendo had better hope they don’t wind up with any video game nerds in any juries or they’re going to open a can of worms on themselves that they really don’t want to have wriggling all over their lap.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don’t know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac’s theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it’s unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.

At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don’t show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Binding of Isaac items are explicitly in that vein, in fact, given that its version of potions (pills) are indeed randomized on every run. I haven’t checked out the new update yet but insofar as I’m aware those still are.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you’re regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you’re an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you’ll run across all of the components. Ignore all other risks.

This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I’ve got such an immense respect for the latter. If you’re willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac’s strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally…) to see what sticks, with a garnishing of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

But there will be an actual NES version. Hot damn.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

It really says something that like the first mod that was ever published after release was the one that eliminates the damn hold-to-confirm mechanic that is on every. Single. Stupid. Interaction. (At least this became an official feature and you can natively disable it on most interaction prompts now.)

The fact that basically none of the inventory and crafting screens are consistent with each other is one of the main things that still bugs the hell out of me with NMS. Especially when you’re using refiners and so forth, because the dumb popup they give you that only shows you like four options at a time doesn’t even arrange the items within it in the same order as they are in your main inventory. They should have just stolen the paradigm from Minecraft and used it for everything.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

But you just don’t understand. Sean Murray personally lied to me nine years ago!!! Boycotted forevar!!!

(Edit: I thought the sarcasm in this was clear enough but maybe it’s tough to get through to some people.)

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Me too, pretty much, but I’m fine with that. Every couple of months we get a new content drop (for free!) and I go experience the new stuff, max out everything new there is to be maxed out, and then I can put it down and play something else. I appreciate that NMS doesn’t try to make itself my full time job or require such an asinine time investment that it forces you not to play anything else.

I think the only FOMO aspect built in to NMS at all is the expeditions, and even then you can replay them any time you want with a third party tool (on PC, anyway).

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

They have brought a few expeditions back for replay a couple of times. However, another user here alerted me a while back to the presence of this:

cwmonkey.github.io/nms-expeditions/

On select platforms (PC and strangely also the Switch) you can replay the expeditions and get their rewards payouts any time you like.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Did you include the fuel port in the glovebox in case you need to install any Liquid Schwartz?

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

It’s a melee oriented Metroidvania. Think Ori And The Blind Forest but with more insects and inexplicable frilly faux-Victorian edifices, and less pokey combat. You could play it on a SNES pad if you wanted to. I got to 100% on it back when using a cheap wireless keyboard from my couch.

I don’t know about you, but Hollow Knight’s main contribution to my household is that my wife and I still call any filigree wrought ironwork benches we see “save points.”

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

+1 for a Chrono Trigger ranking. For as popular as it still is in retrospect, I think people still don’t quite give it the full recognition it’s due for smashing pretty much every dreary console RPG convention that the genre had been persistently saddled with up until that point, while still remaining a console RPG. Believe it or not the developers had plans to make it even more ambitious at the beginning but they weren’t able to pull it off in the time allotted.

There are a lot of subsequent RPG titles (like even Final Fantasy goddamned Seven, not to mention Pokémon) that should have learned a bevvy of lessons from Chrono Trigger, but still didn’t. It was well ahead of its time.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Those are what’s known as knowledge gated games, where your progression as a player is either wholly or mostly tied to your own personal knowledge of how the game world works. Indeed, many of the mechanics may make no sense due to being crude mockeries of how the real world works. But some of them have become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that developers of later Indie Crafty Survival Sandboxy games can rely on the notion that most players will reflexively begin their adventure by punching a tree, and can probably accurately guess what the crafting shape of a pickaxe will be. This is no doubt down to the Earth-shattering popularity of Minecraft itself.

If you ask me, these games refusing to handhold the player and letting them discover things for themselves is part of their appeal. Expecting to be able to dive right in and know everything right from the starting block really rather misses the point. You have to admit that if you’ve been playing, say, Minecraft since the alpha days, your experience and approach to the game if you spun up a new world right now would be vastly different from your first playthrough, and none of the wonder or sense of discovery would be present.

Gating progression by knowledge (byzantine knowledge though it may be, e.g. in the case of specifically knowing not only how to construct a portal out of obsidian but also activate it by lighting it on fire) mirrors real life in an ineffable way that skill or time/microtransaction/XP accrual gated games can’t.

Some games do both. For instance, ask any Dark Souls player. The Souls games are both knowledge gated and very, infamously, exasperatingly skill gated.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

That case I advise you to never, ever play Noita.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Obviously our solution here is to send a pissed off bard to beat up Mastercard, then.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Concur. I’m still banned from PayPal and I have been since the early 2000’s because I used it to buy a “high capacity magazine,” which PayPal declared was “illegal activity” with no appeal.

…An airsoft magazine. Not a single state in the union where that’s illegal (or at least certainly not at the time).

Payment processors attempting to police the nature of online transactions should expose them to liability, not the other way around.

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

Obligatory.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0c17e508-256f-472a-803b-20a986136006.gif

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

And if you know anything about what he’s talking about, you quickly realize that in fact he does not know it all.

Can I be a big time Twitch celebrity too if I doodle a series of completely nondescriptive boxes and link them with little lines in MS Paint as I talk?

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

They’ll release a “New!” version in a year with an improved screen as one of its bullet points, in a bid to get you to buy it again. And people will. See also:

• The Gameboy Advance SP/New SP
• The DS/DS Lite
• 3DS/New 3DS
• The Switch/Switch OLED

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.

The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.

So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

I’ve held multiple times before that it possibly would have been better off if it were a more focused, linear experience possibly akin to how the newer Deus Ex games worked. Within those you had the freedom to screw around in the area/mission you were in and given a wide latitude to complete things as you saw fit, but it definitely excised the wannabe GTA filler in the middle.

2077 had an excellent series of incredibly well-directed moments, both within the main story missions as well as several notable side missions, but the stuff in between made little sense especially given the story framework of V living on borrowed time with a ticking bomb in their head. But sure, let’s save up and buy nine apartments, collect all the gold class weapons, stock your garage with all the cars, traipse all over down finding all of Delamain’s rogue taxis, do a sidequest for this random chump, see a concert, check all these cyberpsychos off our list…

There is incredible detail in the world if – but only if – you stop to search for it. There are a lot of things most players will probably miss unless they’re specifically pointed out, and while that’s certainly neat it also means that the lack of discoverability means the time spent on many of those details ultimately turns out to be wasted. 2077 is thus a weird hybrid of a linear and open world game and as a result feels both too constrained and to unfocused at the same time. It’s all to easy to get derailed, and alas to some extent you have to let yourself get derailed to accrue enough XP and equipment so you don’t get your ass handed to you if you just try to stick to the main storyline, even though that storyline is written as if it’s supposed to be a single linear narrative.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game. I just would have presented it much differently if I were in charge.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:

Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.

In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

Journey is indeed absolutely fantastic. It finally got a PC port a while ago after languishing on the PS3 for quite some years, and its hardware requirements are probably low enough in the modern era that practically anybody should be able to experience it.

My only gripe is that online randos seem not to understand the meditation achievement, and get antsy when you try to entice them to sit there with you until the achievement pops. And since you can’t type at them you can’t communicate to them what’s going on.

I got the trophy on PS3 back in the day but I haven’t successfully wrangled anybody into helping me get the Steam achievement for that yet…

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

I also maintain that Breath of the Wild was superior to Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently this opinion makes Zelda fans incredibly salty.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

I thought at first you guys were thinking of this, and I was puzzled. Then I looked it up.

Crivens, it’s like a combination of Tempest and Flappy Bird, but since it’s a Terry Cavanagh game it’s also been whacked over the head soundly with VVVVVV.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

…Just don’t look at it too hard when you go to the Great Deku Tree in BotW.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

Bethesda ought to just let the Doom IP go and give it to someone who actually cares.

I will never give a single red cent to Bethesda ever again and I sure as hell ain’t doing it for this. Whatever this is has no business claiming to be a Doom game. They probably would have had slightly better luck if they slapped the veneer of some other IP over it rather than Doom.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

I kind of get the thing about the map even without seeing the world design of the new game, because even Borderlands 1-3 (especially 3) already had a lot of vertical aspects to many of their maps. The prevalence of paths looping over other paths, hills, tunnels, holes, inexplicably impassable ditches dividing the map, and generally the entire path to anywhere being designed like the queue at an amusement park ride made using the 2D minimap to actually navigate anywhere basically impossible. (And the main full screen map wasn’t much better.) Showing your local terrain, such as it even did, was not really very helpful because even if you tried to use it to proceed in a straight line to your target you would inevitably find yourself blocked by an invisible wall surrounding waist high pile of rubble, and that the actual way to get there required looping all the way around the map anticlockwise, with nine switchbacks, four gates, and a one-way cliff jump in between.

At the end of the day it’s a fancy radar only useful to help you snout out nearby enemies, especially in the ever-so-many instances where your current mission objective outright requires you to find where each and every one of those stupid red diamonds is hiding so you can murder them all to proceed.

So I hope there is at least still a local enemy radar. They need to either make their map usable and 3D (like e.g. Doom 2016 did) or fix their level pathing so it’s not like a tornado just tore through the spaghetti factory.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

IIRC all of the past ones have worked over LAN, including over a private VPN if you so desire. I definitely played pirated copies of 1 and 2 with my mates. I had no real desire to get very deep into 3 because the campaign storyline was so stupid, but I don’t doubt you could.

It’s only online matchmaking with randos that you’ll be blocked from, which if you ask me is not really that much of a detriment.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

Panel 3, that’s me right there.

Yes, I have several working controllers. Including a couple of spares, unused, still sealed.

dual_sport_dork, 6 months ago

If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.

Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.

On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.

dual_sport_dork, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random abrupt cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.

You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.

dual_sport_dork, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)

If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.

So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.

dual_sport_dork, 6 months ago

And I also have a VR headset and VirtualBoyGo if I really feel like giving myself an authentic headache.

dual_sport_dork, 6 months ago

It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.