What Games ya Playin' 2012 - Suplex a Train Edition

[Luther Lansfeld]

Hey Niji, I think there might be a patch to make War of the Lions less slow (ask Eternal in chat about it?). The original game is not that slow at all.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

They updated the iOS version to fix it, so it's not impossible.

[Scar]

SRT-A

Things are happening!

I got up to stage 14 before I had to go to work. Things are going pretty well for me considering I am still lost dealing with the menus.

I mean, the skills that include numbers are helpful. I found strike, the guarding one, focus, and the HP restoration skills easily enough, but Alert is there somewhere, I just don't know where.

Amuro and Axel (at least I think that's Axel....) are the two units I am spending all my money on right now. I boosted both of their evasions as high as I could.

Uhm lets see...

Camille is good as usual. I use him a lot, Char (er I mean, not Char! shhh) joined up and he is good too. Miliardo, aka another Char clone just arrived on the map I am on currently, and his range is nice. Quatre is with him, but they don't seem to like him much. He's rocking custom Sandrock though. It looks so cute in chibi form!

The usual robots (Getter, and Mazinger) are still good. Just got the Getter upgrade too. You know I never use the other Getter modes. The dragon form I think it is, seems so much better, ah well!

OH! There's a robot, I am not familiar with, but he looks a LOT like the autobot Blaster. Yeah, and he's tanky, so he joins my squad based on that.

I think this is the first SRT game I have played that has Nadesico and G gundam in it too. Hahaha SHINING FINGAH!!!!!

just having fun trying everything out. The game threw me into a jam when I got stuck with 5 mechs that all give me a warning signal after they move around. I am not sure, what that refers too. Guess I picked a fun path!

and yes, I have gotten some random game overs because I was not sure what the objectives were!

Good times~

[Random Consonant]

WA3 - beaten, could've been better but the designers apparently didn't know what the fuck and the world map is egregious, egregious failure.  As such I rate it about a 4/10.  Best part was how mockable the villain cast was.  Seriously Janus/Prophets, overcompensate harder.

[Niji]

Started up

Gungnir: Holy crap this game is fun, very fast but very wierd, intriguing and interesting story that draws you into the characters and sexy sexy graphics. I am a big fan of cloaks/hats/hoods/crazy hair dos and donts so this plays to my desires well. Only 3 battles in so far but having a blast, seems the game has the potential to be very complex there is much moar for me to learn clearly. Starting off with 900s of hp is...nice and refreshing! everything already feels powerful!

Mega Man Maverick Hunter X: GOD they ruined this game imo, excited to play Vile mode for the story.

Phantom Brave PSP: Starting this up later tonight probably.

Also ahh so that was it, it always bothers me when ports are vastly under powered than originals(COUGH COUGH marvel vs capcom 3 on anything but dreamcast).

[Captain K.]

Pokemon Conquest:  I am playing as a girl because no boy would ever choose Eevee as his starter.  So Oichi is the first person to join me with a pimp Jigglypuff.  I decide to make my entire attacking army female and leave the men at home to do the shopping.  This proves to be difficult as the only other female I've recruited is some old lady with a Cottonee.

Oh!  I forgot to mention I attacked the harder water nation instead of the easier grass nation first.  And won, because Jigglypuff is a fucking pimp.  Doubleslapping the bitches down.

[Nitori]

Catherine: Ended up with True Cheaters ending, superior levels of swag. Freedom would also have been acceptable.

[Niji]

Pokemon Conquest:  I am playing as a girl because no boy would ever choose Eevee as his starter.  So Oichi is the first person to join me with a pimp Jigglypuff.  I decide to make my entire attacking army female and leave the men at home to do the shopping.  This proves to be difficult as the only other female I've recruited is some old lady with a Cottonee.

Oh!  I forgot to mention I attacked the harder water nation instead of the easier grass nation first.  And won, because Jigglypuff is a fucking pimp.  Doubleslapping the bitches down.

Boss.... In the original game though Green(blue) was to get eevee as his starter and you were to get clefairy as red.

[Captain K.]

Figures, Gary always was a wanker.

Conquest:  Recruited Ginchiyo.  Yoshimoto's army was a bitch to fight until Ginchiyo's Shinx evolved.  Eat AOE non-contact moves Mr. Poison Point/Jagged Edge army.

[Fenrir]

Dragon's Dogma: Finished. 102 hours in 13 days... >_> Holidays!

The quality of the game depends on whether you're inclined to forgive/forget its sins. Never before have I seen a game this incredible and terrible at the same time. Developpers definitely focused on making combat even better and boss fights even more awe inspiring, instead of making escort quests good or something.

I'm OK with this! Especially since the good outweighs the bad (but trust me, there's a lot of bad) With a little tweaking this could have truly blown my mind, but I guess Capcom was forced to pull the plug at one point. 9/10.

[Meeplelard]

Pokemon Conquest: Finished getting the first few areas, now I can go get those Fire Trainers since I have Water Types to easily "talk" them into joining me *evil grin*

Asura's Wrath: Finished first playthrough, gotta get 3 more S Ranks to get the HIDDEN EPISODE to see the FRUE ENDING!!! Will make more in-depth comments after I do that.

Though, I will say that if the game came out like a year earlier, Asura probably would have been in UMvC3 <_<

[DjinnAndTonic]

Asura's Wrath is what now?

Also... Eevees are awesome and Gary Oak could only have been improved by  the addition of MOAR Eevee. Which is impressive because he's <Internet Meme>.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Gref, you playing Civ 5 G+K?  I'm really digging the implementation of religions this time.  I truly feel like a leader with my ability to shape the religious views of the masses for my political benefit. "Your god will love you if you work 15% harder!" I tell them.  "Also fuck more, I need workers!"

[Grefter]

I hadn't picked Civ 5 up yet, not on a real kick for it.  Thinking of buying it for my bro that hits 4x way harder than I do though.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Get him to play Endless Space. It's their first game and they deserve support.

[Meeplelard]

Asura's Wrath is what now?

Also... Eevees are awesome and Gary Oak could only have been improved by  the addition of MOAR Eevee. Which is impressive because he's <Internet Meme>.

First off, Gary Oak DOES have an Eevee that actually beats Pikachu in the Anime!  Dunno what happened from there because it was the end of Orange Island saga and sort of stopped watching into Johto because series got so formulaic by that point (...even by its standards) that...yeah...


Regarding Asura's Wrath, its basically a CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE!!! game where it pretends to be a Shonen anime, with some short Action sequences that are either Shooter style or "Beat things up with fists til they die", and QTEs...lots and lots of QTEs.  But when you're a game that's mostly cutscenes, and you want people to DO THINGs, QTEs are kind of a necessary evil.  As the name would imply, its about an God who is Angry.  Its basically distilled Shonen Anime of the DBZ style...I'm not exaggerating either.  Heck, Episode 17 may as well be a fight between a DBZ Sayajin, a Naruto Ninja, and a Bleach Arancar. 

And when I say it pretends to be a Shonen Anime, I mean it goes the full length.  Each Episode has credits (though no Opening Animation nonsense...just about the ONLY thing the game is missing!), a Cryptic Ending for a "TBC!" in the storyline arc, "NEXT TIME, ON ASURA'S WRATH!" between each chapter, and even COMMERCIAL BREAKS (...without the commercials, so its kind of silly, but yes, it exists.)

[AndrewRogue]

Pokemon Conquest:  I am playing as a girl because no boy would ever choose Eevee as his starter. 

Bite me.

[Niji]

Started up phantom brave... Lol so many secrets I didnt know a bout, i love replaying games as i get older/wiser for this reason, spent....6 hours unlocking all the owl classes ahahahaha RNG HATES THE SHIT OUT OF ME, get all the rare shit but not the owl dungeons (aka what i actually want)... took me....hmm 1 hour to lvl them on lvl 1 enemies to lvl 6 lol...they are super op

I forgot how much the remove limit makes me weep though

[Dark Holy Elf]

Zelda stuff - I beat Zelda 2, which was pretty tough, then beat the first half of Zelda 1 in one sitting.

Trails in the Sky - Beat Chapter 3. The battle at the top of the Zeiss Tower was easily the hardest in the game so far, in that I actually came quite close to losing. Pretty neat. I wish its (rather cool) boss music didn't get overwritten by the unimpressive "you're in trouble!" music but oh well. Anyway, after that I fought a boss who had over triple the HP of any previous boss (this isn't actually that unreasonable given how Trails boss fights are typically designed, but bear with me). I can't think of too many RPGs which do this, and fewer still in which the boss in question is an evil penguin. I am glad to see at least one PC reacted appropriately.

Plotwise I probably liked chapter 3 the least since I am not terribly enamoured with any of the C3-featured PCs (oddly they're probably the weakest three gameplaywise too?), particularly not Agate as mentioned before. Still sets things up pretty nicely for C4, hopefully.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

Dragon's Dogma

About two thirds of the way through a New Game +.

I haven't done a New Game + in many years, and I'm sort of reminded of why, because this is silly. None of the enemies are upgraded, so it's a matter of slaughtering my way through trivial encounters while I build my fast travel network for this/possible future playthroughs.

I'll be glad to get back to the "postgame" (which is really more like a short World of Ruin than something like the Seraphic Gate; the frue ending is in "postgame," for instance), where the combat is as involving as the system deserves and fewer NPCs are speaking.

Although by the end I didn't mind the NPCs speaking. A few of them (Mason, Madeline, Mercedes... okay, only those whose names start with M) ended up being quite entertaining. Still, the game is at its best when you're climbing up the back of a giant monster to cut one of its heads off, not when you're talking to some schmuck.

As games are actually reviewed, this one is a 9/10. The best in its genre, fun to play, fun to explore, good-looking in all the ways that matter, with a story that reaches levels of non-terrible by the end (putting it, again, at least on par with anything else in its genre). If games were legitimately reviewed on a 1-10 scale it would be a 7.5 or 8, because there are real and significant flaws here, but they're no worse than those in, say, Skyrim.

Wild ARMs Alter Code F

I have a working PS2 again!

I decided to celebrate by playing this for a while, since my old PS2 broke when I went to do so. lol at Cecilia having more MP than it would cost to cast Fire every turn through her first five levels, and MP regenerating when you level. Also, is it my imagination or are the towns much smaller than in the original version of WA1?

[Hunter Sopko]

Wild ARMs Alter Code F

I have a working PS2 again!

I decided to celebrate by playing this for a while, since my old PS2 broke when I went to do so. lol at Cecilia having more MP than it would cost to cast Fire every turn through her first five levels, and MP regenerating when you level. Also, is it my imagination or are the towns much smaller than in the original version of WA1?

Most are. The graphical upgrade meant they didn't want to spend the money to fully render them.

[Tide]

Wild ARMS 4 - the 4th Speedrun:

Yeah, I'm going through this again >_>. Aiming for something SDA level worthy for submission, so I've been grinding my gears to really churn out segments that have little to no flaws. Current segment: From Midway save of Palapatta Passage to beginning of Cerulean tunnel.

Aside from featuring super high encounter rates in one of the last rooms inside this stupid dungeon, there is a forced fight that requires a bunch of random factors to all line themselves up together, which is causing me endless amount of grief. There are 5 soldiers. The fastest way I know how to do this is as follows:

1) Tiny Flower Yulie, Material. Ideally no counters go off to save a few seconds
2) Jude Phantom Lines down the middle, kills one soldier
3) Enemy Incendiary goes, hits Raquel. Must trigger Red Zone
4) Raquel goes, kills 2 soldiers
5) Arnaud goes, boosted Fire gem to kill the last 2.

The problems are as follows:
1) Yulie must hit high variance on the enemies to be killed by Arnaud and Jude. She must deal somewhere between 2800 to 3000 at least.
2) Jude must hit high variance on Phantom Line. The lower Yulie deals, the higher he must hit.
3) Red Zone doesn't always trigger. To force it to occur more frequently, I have to downgrade Raquel's armor to her initial armor, not get a Class level and adjust her HP to 2000
4) Arnaud must hit high variance on his gem hit. He has to do *twice* to both soldiers.

On top of all the random encounters and silly crap such as jumping into the lava myself, I've spent well over 2 hours today. And then the last 20 minutes doing nothing but getting my menu speed top notch. I can now adjust all of that in 8 seconds >_>.

ON THE UPSIDE:
Current run is 7 minutes and 43 seconds faster. Can't complain about practice.

[SnowFire]

Plotwise I probably liked chapter 3 the least since I am not terribly enamoured with any of the C3-featured PCs (oddly they're probably the weakest three gameplaywise too?), particularly not Agate as mentioned before. Still sets things up pretty nicely for C4, hopefully.

Damn rookie!  Stop getting in the way Elf and let a real professional handle this.  You're too close to the case.  Go work anime high school security instead.

Anyway, sounds fair enough.  I agree that the C3 characters are a bit weaker but not offensively so.  Agate is unlikeable but I don't mind because your characters react about like I'd expect them to in such a situation.  Agree that I can see not liking his rather bog standard "blargh I hate you but maybe have a heart of gold and let's get the bad guys" schtick.  As for character balance...  that also sounds right, although not to TOO huge a degree.  Tita's durability is unsalvageable and gets the SPACE specialization and having area physicals is less impressive than having area spells, and Agate / Zane have cruddy Orbment graphs to stop them from getting high-level magic and have the wrong stat build for it anyway.  While magic > physicals in a vacuum (hey the +15% Mag Orbment has no downsides, while the +15% Atk one hurts your defense...  that's not fair...), there are some enemies that spoil magic, and physicals don't have the charge time.  The problem is that it's not like the other characters have particularly incompetent physicals, so "best physicals" doesn't matter quite so much.  Zane at least has game-best durability by a decent margin, which is something.  I'd say the character balance is something like Olivier = Kloe = Joshua = Estelle > Schera > Agate = Zane >> Tita.  But having a single one of Agate/Zane in the party is totally reasonable, you'll get reliable physicals for the few times it matters and they can take hits better than average.

Re your earlier comments, I basically agree except with considerably more enthusiasm for Trails in general.  It's got lots of anime trope-tastic parts, which I consider to be mostly a drawback rather than a plus, but damn if the writing doesn't mostly pull it off anyway.  (Okay the "hahaha let's have Schera torture the prisoners <3 <3 <3!" part in Chapter 1 fell flat for me, but that turned out to be the exception, not the rule.)  But yeah, schoolgirl costumes are apparently the hottest things ever (causes even young toughts to admire the schoolgirls whipping out swords!), super-loyal maids, surprise drag costumes, hot springs, [redacted]...  and yet the world still feels damn real, probably even more so than your average Suikoden, a reasonably high bar for comparison.

That and I pretty much only had to fight battles I wanted to, since the game gives you the tools to evade almost all the random battles if you want.  It's much more fun to fight because I want to rather than because I have to.

Been meaning to post some spoilery thoughts on the ending, but might as well wait at this point anyway.

[Grefter]

Zelda OoT - Clearly best game ever made and that ever will be.  Ran out of time to finish it and was doing Water Temple.  Stopped on Dark Dickbag because I don't feel like learning to play and after a dungeon that's central gameplay element has been changing my shoes constantly I don't feel compelled to give 2 fucks.

10/10 best game ever.

VC2 - I am nearly done this, probs could have finished ages ago, but side stuffs and upgrading peeps and whatnot.  Gotta get dat A Rank on all levels because not getting it while playing on easy is embarassing.

Dodges still suck and totally are capable of ruining a strategy given how tight CP is when aiming for A rank.  At least that is what I thought until I realised it was only the early game that wanted me to do things like kill everyone in 2 turns with fuck all CP.  End game jizzes CP all over your face like you are some kind of CP cake.  Then you get like 4 turns to do stuff.  I still enjoy getting to the end game special missions and trying to do them in 1 turn.  Cause you know, Easy mode for games I don't give a real fuck about and then enjoying them is the new thing apparently.

Magic: Duel of the Planeswalkers 2013 - So new Magic game out.  Challenge mode was fun but not a big fan of the last puzzle (Hurrr durrrrr win because the AI blocks stupidly).  Really enjoyed the one with Artifact duplication though, that was neat.  Only problem was it used cards that I think aren't part of the normal set, so the Info on them was incomplete and I missed the block where Living Weapon came out so that took a bit to realise what was going.

Haven't done Planeshift mode yet, but the Campaign so far is fun.  lol at Encounters in it though.  You can fight a deck full of basic land and pingers.  Whatever the Red Prodigal Sorcerer is.  gj AI attacking with them.  They are not meant to be anything more than a punching bag obviously, but it is still funny watching a deck built around a single card not even using it right.

[Pyro]

So Grefter, are you abusing the fuck out of the 1 CP tank? Because you should be. Because Invincible-mobile-turret-with-super-tank-destroying-sniper-rifle-that-ocassionally-double-acts is too awesome to not use.

Atelier Meruru: Just started Year 4. Time FLIES in this game. Nearing the endgoal of 100K peeps, and have top-end gear now. The +50 HP armor is hard to argue with, as 50 HP matters a lot and ~10 def is a safe trade to make for that. MP is no longer an issue since I have lots and lots of MP restoration.

PC balance is good in this. The game isn't too hard (although the occasional boss will apply brutal rape via triple-turns/fullheal/buff/being fast). Non-alchemists actually have good damage over time, and super-moves are sweet and get used multiple times a boss battle.

Meruru: Main character and Alchemist. She hits things for decent damage most of the time since she has no skills and you don't want to use items on meager enemies. On bosses she is the cannon/healer/buffer/debuffer/whatever.

Keine: She heals and buffs. Her basic physical being an area sleep attack works okay for randoms. But the MT healing/revival thing is what makes her awesome to have late.

Lias: Damage rar. I don't use him much.

Esty: She is fast, has Quick, basic physical hits a large area, can lower enemy resistance to damage, and has a cheap move that makes enemy rare drops more likely (got Medicine Thread for the ultimate armors really early thanks to this).

Gino: ST damage and plenty of it. The whole "debuff boss while buffing himself" thing combined with the fact that he has a skill to increase his power when he faces bosses.... that works out pretty well for him! He has some self-buffing besides that too. A good boss fighter.

Mimi: Fast, and can Slow bosses to reduce their threat. This works out pretty well. Beyond that she has an ITD attack that hits very hard, and a lot of bosses like to have high defense so that works out.

Sterk: Great stats except for speed. Hits things really really hard and has a very high crit rate (50%). Doesn't do much outside of the good stats, but hey damaging tank never hurts. MT move is good for clearing randoms.

Totori: Duplicate. She can use items for free pretty much. While this isn't so awesome for damage due to the half-power thing, it is good enough and she can spam it. Duplicate gets the item double speed bonus too so her actual damage is better than you'd think just looking at one attack. She's solid.

Rorona: Bad HP and her items are weaker than Meruru's because of a default skill that speeds her up and reduces item power. On the other hand you can try to make her into a dodge tank if you want because she has a skill to significantly boost evasion. And if you have the items to spare they are pretty good.