What games are you playing 2014?

[Grefter]

The victims are killed by literal planting of evil seeds inside them that grows into trees.

It is pretty standard slasher film stuff played completely literally.

[Fenrir]

Doesn't he only "plant his seeds" in women?
I re-read the wiki and this looks pretty damning to me.

Anyway, if there's no hidden implication for something this important and it is just a dumb slasher plot, then the rest has to be weirdness for weirdness' sake.
If there is some hidden implication, then it's terrible

So either way the game loses.

[The Duck]

Yeah, it is not great, and it's hard to see whether that's due to its emulation of Twin Peaks (which has its own problems) or because it has the sensibility of a Japanese dude who is a lunatic.

[Grefter]

I always just figured a Japanese guy that into Twin Peaks is a bit crazy.

Even of it is weird for weird's sake, it is pretty fucking good at weird from the bits I have seen.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Re: Snowfire on Child of Light

I hadn't noticed some of those lingering plot threads about Umbra and Lemuria. The Fairy Tale atmosphere sort of lulled me into a "don't worry about details like why someone would want to take over a kingdom, that's just what bad people like to do."

Also total agreement about that scene with Gen and Aurora. Well written and somehow the rhyming verse didn't spoil it. An accomplishment all on its own in my opinion. The rhyming verse in general mass it hard for me to take most scenes too seriously and I felt the best use of it was when our resident bad jokester broke it...

On the whole optional PC thing... I hadn't realized that many of them were optional. Man that would have made the game pretty boring.

[SnowFire]

You have to be Fenrir-level perverse to miss them, though, so I don't consider it a big deal.  (e.g. refusing to help Oengus, ignoring Rubella's request, not going back for Gen, etc.)  It's an interesting alternate way to play the game, I presume (but maybe they force you to go recruit 'em at some point anyway.  Hence the question!).

[DjinnAndTonic]

Fenrir, I have a request. Play Child of Light in a Fenrir-level perverse way.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Yeah, they're near impossible to miss, but I still think making them missable is fundamentally a mistake, as it limits the amount of interaction they can have in the main plot. (This is a bigger deal in plot-heavier games than it is in Child of Light, though.)

[Grefter]

Last recruit was the only one I missed and that was because I had expected them to spoon feed them to the same level as previous recruits.  Sooooo yeah.

[Sierra]

DS2: Now that I've exhausted my stock of profanity for a few days, I guess there are a few other final notes to add. Crown of the Ivory King has the best/worst NPC invaders in the game. Sometimes they're the same person:

-Witchgirl doesn't understand that Dark Orb has less range than bows. Near-worst due to incompetence.

-Hexjerk embodies everything that was wrong with dark magic in DS1. Wrath of the Gods + Affinity combined into one spell that fires as quickly as DS1 WotG did? What. Why. What did we do to deserve this, From. Maybe it's survivable on NG, but on NG+ it's purely trollololol oops what do you mean you didn't have two thousand hit points to spare? Definite worst due to being an obnoxious OHKO machine placed after an extremely long and unskippable line of normal enemies.

-Holy knight has precisely one gimmick, but it's an awesome one: Chameleon! I'm glad From finally went there.

-The last invader is...special. In a lot of ways. Spoiler-texting for the Fenrirs. It's an unannounced invasion, and he's wearing the White Ring to make himself look like a helpful phantom. He'll even do the friendly wave gesture, and then calmly follow you around while you look for the switch to open a nearby gate...Of course, he's a repeat invader from DLC2, so I recognized him and attacked him immediately. The fact that you can lock on to him should be a tip off even if you don't recognize him. But later I loaded up another file to see what happens if you actually trust him: he stays friendly just long enough for you to be engaged flipping the switch and then...*backstab*, of course, which is a OHKO because horrific lance crits. And then he does the I Don't Think Sooooo taunt over your corpse.. So basically every dickish thing a PC invader is likely to do rolled together. He even runs off to hide behind chibi-bonewheels and recolored bosses to heal up after taking notable damage! Mauldron is a meta motherfucker.

By this point I've managed to collect a couple wins in the optional zone. It is horrific, sadistic and wrong--and, like the optional areas of the other DLC installments, plainly meant to be navigated in co-op (there's a reason these specific areas are the ones people can warp into as summons even without the DLC). This is the Frigid Outskirts:

-80-90% of the time area is covered in near-whiteout blizzard conditions. It's actually a straight line to the boss gate, but in no way is this obvious when you first get there. There are a scant few landmarks, but following them isn't actually the safest way to progress (which again is not remotely obvious). I at least give the zone credit for being incredibly unpleasant in a way different from every other area of the game. No gray hallways here!

-But I don't even want to play any reindeer games! Dear god, they're everywhere. They're durable, evasive, have a plethora of irritating spells and knockdown effects, and spawn at random near constantly whenever the blizzard's active (which is almost always). The game will not wait for you to kill one before producing another, and if you're too slow doing that you could easily wind up with two or even three of them after you at once (which is basically guaranteed death). It's especially bad near the boss gate, where they seem to spawn with doubled frequency and where it seems almost inevitable to get stuck in a chain of "kill reindeer just in time for another one to show up." You can't run from them--they will track you relentlessly, all the way across the map, blizzard be damned, and not only is it very likely you'll get jacked right outside the boss gate by a reindeer you didn't know existed, I'm actually more surprised now when this doesn't happen.

-The boss is a duo, and appallingly tricky to track while both of them are in the field (second activates on an HP trigger, which looks somewhat easy to blitz through based on YouTube videos of NG but that isn't remotely feasible on NG+). You really have to mind what's going on everywhere in the battlefield, because the two of them--like most of the other DLC bosses--have an unnerving tendency to disengage combat just to charge across the arena and smack someone who's busy trying to fight a different enemy. Just because you happen to be the player constantly attacking the boss is no guarantee he'll actually pay attention to you. I'm not sure if this is deliberate programming or flaky enemy AI (there's certainly plenty of the latter to go around in these games) but they do seem to pointedly target distracted players. Anyone still suffering under the delusion that they can safely stand across the arena casting spells just because they've got friends to distract the boss isn't likely to last ten seconds--it seems like the AI for these bosses avidly punishes anyone attempting to rely on range (because From hates focused casters now).

-The worst part of the fight might just be that they can smash you with falling damage from landing on you during an evasion (sorta like what happened constantly with Sif in DS1 except whups there goes half your health instead of oh noes four or five HP). I'm not even sure this is deliberate--it feels like genuine B.S., because everything else in their arsenal has a genuinely useful tell, but half a ton of smilodon instantly landing on you really doesn't and it's just the lamest way to die.

The place is a nightmare. You can apparently permanently despawn the reindeer after enough kills--which is actually what happened before I managed to land a successful boss run. So much death. What can men do against such reckless caribou?

Oh, but there's a ring that lets you look all sexy and human while a phantom in someone else's world. Is it worth wasting a ring slot on this? Guys, please. (Of course it is, why would you even ask.)

That's pretty much it, I think. Like the other DLCs, occasionally aggravating but there's some nice loot and bosses, and the environments are notably cooler than most of the base game's so I'm mostly happy with the balance.

[Fudozukushi]

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: So, bought this based off two videos and I'm just really liking it.  Probably gonna be my Game of the Year(though not like that's an accomplishment with what little I've played).  Gameplay is Assassin's Creed + Batman Arkham Series just with a helluva lot more decapitations so it's pretty spiffy.  I wasn't too attuned to Arkham's combat but this combat flows really well to me.  I think my highest combo in Arkhams was like... 20.  I've already broke 100 here so yeah.  The sheer chaos that can happen in combat just makes it a DELIGHT too.  My favorite fight was me getting swarmed by orcs so I shoot the lock off a cage to free a captured beast(Caragor) who strats tearing into them and giving me breathing room.  So I climb up, mount the beast and waste the guys.  Meanwhile their reinforcements get attacked by wild Caragors and because I'm mounted the wild ones ignore me so I clear like 50 orcs in no time.  Or that time I needed to sneak by some orcs so I shot the locks on two cages to get a big fight going then dropped a giant bee's nest on them all.  Or when I got caught by like 30+ orcs I lured them over explosives and blew them all up.  Also you can poison orc grog and they'll start fighting each other because they don't know who's to blame.

So, yeah, I kinda like the game's gameplay a lot and it's not even complete.

The most intriguing thing is the NEMESIS system.  Enemies have their own sets of stats that power up as they complete their own goals or kill you.  The stronger they are the better reward you get from them too.  So you can secretly support some orc on his rise through the ranks to pillage him for better stuff later.

Story's about as simple as anything LOTR narrative is; so good vs evil yadda yadda.  It's played very nicely so far though. 

Climbing can be pretty finicky, but I don't have any complaints about the controls otherwise.

In other news, I'm not gonna beat the bonus dungeon in Xillia 2.  I just hate it too much to play anymore.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Hyrule Warriors - Did some 2P with Magey yesterday, got my final character (Ghirahim) and a new weapon for Zelda. I will try it out soon~ Magey said he was pretty enjoyable to play as; I may need to try him out myself.

Smash 4- Piddling around with this, played Magey and Elf last night and got my ass kicked. Alas. I think the person I've had the most success with so far is Dedede, but that's mostly due to familiarity.

Kirby's Return to Dreamland - Finished World 1. Fluffy little game like the rest of the Kirbys I've played. Never will be an all-time favorite but enjoyable enough I suppose.

[Grefter]

Suikoden 3 - Finished this the other day.  It is still good, but feels weirdly long right after Suikoden 1 and 2.  The series starts as this pretty tight punchy thing into something I have easily sunk 60+ hours into multiple times, but it never really feels like its just a pointless long grind out for time.  There is definitely things that pad the time out with regards to travel, but the game generally moves along all its points pretty smoothly.

I think my biggest criticism of it now is the Strategy battles.  As an aged game that isn't being compared directly to is predecessors in a vacuuum, for all that they are way way more interesting compared to 1 and just better put together than 2 by many magnitudes, they are introduced really poorly.  You have a couple of "unwinnable" battles to learn from in Chris 1 that your performance really doesn't impact anything.  There is the optional Thomas 2 where you can get a quick crash course in them, but it is incredibly short and incredibly stacked in your favour to turtle it out (For good reasons).  Then it doesn't come up again until Chapter 4 and your first couple of battles are actually plot retreats where you don't get to use ANY of the characters you have recruited so far.  You are stuck with a bunch of mostly shitty characters (Lizards) you have never used before and a handful of good characters (Lucia) you haven't used before.  Everyone you have sucks, the enemies massively outnumber AND are statistically superior, so you are better off just disengaging completely.  You don't get much of a chance to learn how you actually use the system.  After that there is the Brass Castle fight that is pretty easy if you know what you are doing, except there is invincible Yuber there.  Then you only have like one more fight in the last chapter.  It is a whole system that is actually kind of interesting with the way you get to choose your parties and can prioritise grouping of units, who is the Leader, making a Support team who pretty much only exist to use as Cover and support skills or to sit in the area and buff everyone else.  It is very mechanically appealling to have party members performance directly based on your normal battle stats and runes etc.  Just very satisfying to have your two game systems interact like that and it helps you predict units performance because of it.  The only really disapointing component of that is that there is some characters that are usable in game that are strictly support in Strategy battles. 

The actual Strategy battles themselves feel pretty flavourful too in the abstract of your lack of finer control of the units during engagements, but they do enact what you tell them to do etcetc.  It is just a shame that once you are there, you just don't get to play with it much and it is the last time the series really plays with Turn Based Strategy game as a side mechanic (since S4 is puzzle game really,Tactics is kind of the whole of it and 5 is more Real Time with Pause Ogre Battle style gameplay) and it feels like they were heading in a pretty decent direction with it. 

The final strategy battle shit me pretty hard too, since I did it twice to try and get the Major Victory spoils (which I shouldn't have bothered with since its just a Wind Hat, which is functionally worse than Chief's Hat in most situations).  First time through I had a massive grind to get through the minions to even get to Sarah, then Yuber suicided on to someone I had over on the other side of the map (I think he ran into Chris critting him in the face for like 800 damage).  The whole time Sarah bouncing around behind a pile of 2/3 guys that I couldn't blitz down fast enough to pin her down (Or she would dump an Explosion on your face).   Second time, move bigger party to the left, kill the second wave of summons, Sara moves forward and attacks instead of being super defensive.  Eats crits to face and dies.  Final strategy battle prety much finished in 5 minutes.  It was just two polar opposite experiences and the fight is super swingy as fuck based on random AI choices from Sarah (whether it be "ATTACK KEKEKEKEKE" on the macro level or "blow up entire opposing party with a super fast Explosion in first round").  Really the biggest issues with the Strategy maps comes down to developer choices with the plot bosses.  When you are systemetically dismantling regular units the combat flows nicely.  As soon as they introduce boss units that capable of randomly destroying an entire combat unit; either via spells or via being straight up fucking invincible and randomly busting out 3x damage crits; the flow is just gummed up into a slow dribbly shit.

The second plot retreat fight for example (From Duck Vilage IIRC) , I actually lost that at one point because I pressed the attack and you can actually hold up pretty okay against the statistically superior Harmonian Infantry (that also love to bust out them rando crits for massive damage) going on the offensive.  I pushed all the way through to being able to engage Sarah directly with the shitty shitty lizard guys before the Geddoe cutscene (which from memory does get you a win?).  They were completely wiped out by a Breath of Ice before I could do anything.  Don't even know why I fucking tried.

But yeah.  Everything else?  Game is pretty solid.  I even fucked around with Trading more than I have before to get Thomas some money to recruit Watari.  I am pretty sure everything is rejiggered from normal so that Thomas can get some mad profits from stuff though.  Crystal Balls you can buy at like 3 towns for a few hundred potch to sell at duck village for 6-10k?  Ancient Texts for a few hundred to sell for 10+k at Vinay Del Zexay?  Craaaaaazy.  This was a waste because I recruited too many people as Thomas aaaaaand didnt ge to use him in the Strategy battles since you can't reform parties there.  I did get to use an unlevels Nei/Toppo/Shabon party though!11!1!

Black Pokedudes 2 - Did stuff.  Got 6 badges.

Atelier Rorona - Tal said this is nothing special as far as Atelier games go, nothing realy much experimented with here.  Agree.  It is just repeating the same basic quests over and over.  It just feels like an Atelier game made with the absolutel minimum threshhold of effort.  I don't know if quests are randomly picked from a pool or there is assigned ones avaialble on a table, but either way is done boringly and incredibly haphazardly (Failed a few quests due to time now because I saw a new thing I know the recipe for but the materials are literally unavailable as far as I can tell...).  I really should overcome my need for Data and play it pretty blindly since it is pretty bland and I don't need to obsess over data for it.  We shall see.

Dragon's Crown - I picked this up cheap second hand on the strength of Jim's like of it.  I wasn't expecting my biggest complaint to be the controls.  Too many things are on Square.  As Dwarf you use it for Attack, Block and Run.  You use one button for offense, defense and motion.  The Triggers go largely unused at this point to other than Dodge.  I also am REALLY fucking shitty about different move inputs.  I can move left and right while doing attack strings, but up and down change the move I am doing and I don't move in those directions.  Unless the attack type I am doing is an aerial attack (?  I think?), then I get to move more freely.  This is a 3D game with a 3D space.  Don't lock me to 1 plane of movement because of how you get me to input attacks.  This just straight up feels fucked.  I know old side scrollers were likely to just lock you in place to attack too, but you had consistency there so it is a whole lot less jarring.  I could probably get used to it, but I wasn't exactly going into this game with a whole lot of good will towards it to start with.

That said, before I took the game out of the PS3 and swapped it back for Frilly Lace Friendship Sim RPGs I did get to watch Dwarf ride around on a giant sabretooth tiger (which is to say he sits on it with his arms crossed doing nothig while the tiger mauls the fuck out of everything).  That was pretty fucking metal.

[Magetastica]

Smash 4: Been playing pretty much just this since it came out. I have over 16 hours logged in for play time, and I think it was 9 hours or so of actual time spent in fights, which considering most of those were in classic and took on average 1-1.5 minutes, uhm, yeah. >_>

Without people to play with until recently I've been muddling around in Games and More. Played a bit of All-Star, some Trophy Rush, Target Blast, etc. Just got R.O.B. (the last character for me) yesterday, shortly before playing against Ciato and NEB. I've been trying, for the most part, to just play through Classic with everybody however. I am missing 7 characters, 9 if you want to count the 2 Mii Fighter types I didn't use.

My thoughts so far are that I feel most competent with Little Mac and Lucina; Little Mac being my exact playstyle and I really enjoy the fact that some stages are just going to wreck him 5ever because they don't have much ground for him to be on, and Lucina just feels a little more like Melee Marth, who was one of my favourite characters. I really want to enjoy Robin, but ze is just... so underwhelming. None of zer moves are terribly great, and it feels like once you finally get to a point where you're finally doing shit, you run out of all of your tomes at once because it doesn't seem like they recharge until used up which is kind of terribad and probably the nail in the coffin. I don't enjoy playing a game that tries to promote varying up your moves, only to have that exact strategy screw you over. Everyone else seems fun and fairly unique. The AI is way too good at Duck Hunt and Ness IMHO, but as far as tier-type things, nobody seems to be just so far away from everyone else that there's no hope for them, aside from I feel Little Mac is kind of OP, and Robin is kind of terrible. Everyone else has a chance against everyone else, I feel.

Lots of the items, however, are just too unequivocally strong though. They introduced a lot of new items, and I'm glad for that, but the fact that so many of them come with almost no downside is just... too much. The new collect-the-pieces item is a huge beam that acts like a Home Run Bat but in a straight line, the bombs now rarely, if ever, have a chance of hurting you, the vaccuum is way too fucking strong because it goes on forever and has such strong pushing power. Why they didn't make Mario's F.L.U.D.D. have as much pushing power as an item, the FLUDD being a charging option and with much less time on its pushing too, is baffling and makes me look down on Mario more for it.

Going to take a bit of a break from the game for a bit, though, since I may have logged a few too many hours, and I'd like to not have NEB and Ciato and such refuse to play with me. >_>

Hyrule Warriors: Played this yesterday with Ciato, as well as about 10 minutes on a demo at an EB Games a week ago. I really enjoy it. It's simple but has fun and interactive gameplay, which was the part about Dynasty Warriors I liked, but it also adds in the Zelda elements pretty seamlessly. If you like Dynasty Warriors this is definitely the right game for you. I played as Darunia, Link, and Ghirahim. Darunia was a little boring until I figured out I could just roll around and pick up enemies and just sort of kill them as I made my way elsewhere. Link was... interesting? Didn't really stand out in any way whatsoever, though. Not against playing him, but he's not going to be my first pick either. Ghirahim, however, was amazing. He runs around slashing things apart, shooting things with magic, and making enemies explode. One of his combos that got unlocked was that he will slice at people, make them explode, then do a little dance as he creates a magical ceiling above them and at the end of his dance he magically tosses them into the ceiling. He also has some move where he acts like some sort of vampire as he shoots a red beam at someone, attaches it, then licks his blade. I don't know what it did (maybe amplify damage to them?) but it was fun and cool and stylish. He was so fun to play as.

My only complaint was how little there was in terms of fulfilling objectives. I liked having to strategically take outposts, and make sure you planned when and where to fight the various generals because the mooks actually mattered during boss fights. I'd still rate it 7.5-8/10 though. It fills its purpose wonderfully and is still very fun.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Going to take a bit of a break from the game for a bit, though, since I may have logged a few too many hours, and I'd like to not have NEB and Ciato and such refuse to play with me. >_>

Dude don't worry about it. You just serve as motivation for the rest of us to git gud.


Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn - No resets run. Up to 3-11. Death so far: Laura (1-E), Jill (1-E), Mist (3-1), Leonardo (3-6), Edward (3-6). This should not be an especially surprising list outside of Jill, which was unfortunate but man is that map mean. Other things of note: my Nolan missed gaining speed for his first 8 levels (and has still only gained 1). He has a 60% speed growth, so the odds of that are about 1/1526. <__< Terrible. Not used to seeing Leonardo, Micaiah, and Aran all with 3+ speed on him. Ike has also doggedly refused to gain any speed, but this isn't as big a deal, since he just becomes Gatrie trading a second weapon type for +1 move and better supports or something. Does mean I'll have to give him a Speedwings if this keeps up, since he does need to gain 2 speed to not be doubled by Zelgius.


Smash 4 - Fun times, etc. I really love the expanded roster, as everyone probably knows. Mega Man! Palutena! Bowser Jr! Roy! FE characters who aren't male sword lords! Bowser who doesn't suck! Elecman as an assist trophy! So far I've had most success with Pikachu (my Brawl main) and Palutena, but I really need to play more; there are so many characters I want to try out more. There are so many modes it's hard to know where to focus and what the best way is to gain skills at human-to-human play which is what I actually care about. For items... I will give a special shout-out to the air bellows item being awful. Thank goodness for being able to control which items spawn! (However, possibly my biggest complaint about the game so far is they seem to have removed the ability to change the rate of item spawning, it's just on/off now. Which is a shame, because I really think that items on Low or Very Low is a better Smash experience.) For stages I really enjoy the Rainbow Road stage (no shock, I usually like the F-Zero type stages which it reminds me of), while I do not enjoy that Mario stage with the rotating Bowser statue (which you can't even hold onto... okay) or Magicant, which keeps alive the tradition of EB stages which aren't Onett being terrible (I want to fight other fighters, not flying men, thanks).

But yeah, I'm certainly enjoying the game a lot. I've always enjoyed Smash so yeah the roster being such pure unadulterated Dark Holy Elf fanservice pretty much guarantees the game being a hit in my eyes.


Lightning Returns - At the final dungeon. Mmm. Unfortunately the gameplay of the game never really evolved to be that great. It's not terrible by any means, but compared to the first game (which was brilliant) and the second (which had a great system if only sometimes well-used), man it's disappointing. I'll say more about the game when I'm done.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Wasteland 2-  Finished.  About 45 hours long, I would say?  Overall quite good, with a couple of problems.  I enjoyed myself all the way through.

The game is, to a large degree, carried by the atmosphere it creates.  Every area just drips with the work of the art staff, and they're all pretty distinctive in their own way.  It's a much smaller game world than Fallout 2, but I wasn't expecting it to be of that scope in the first place.  Another thing that sets it apart from FO2 is that unlike FO2, where you had the early reemergence of industry and the inklings of moving away from a scavenging-based economy, WL is still set firmly in the mindset of scavenging and refurbishing.  This means when you buy that last magazine of 7.62, that's all they have.  They don't have an Adytum to mass-produce bullets for them, let alone guns.  Vendor stocks tend to be pretty decent but I've cleared out one or two in my time.

Skills have a lot of granularity (What would be "small guns" in FO2 has been split up into four different guns, safecracking and lockpicking are different skills, ect), but generally they give you more than one way to do a thing based on what skills you have, with differing difficulties.  A chain link fence is easier to open by force than it is to pick the lock, for instance, but something might be nigh-impossible to force open but pickable.  Combat is XCOM-lite, with less emphasis on how good your character is at combat as the single metric of whether you should use them.  A character with computer skills, for example, can override the targeting program of a robot enemy and turn it on your side (a tactic that saved my ass many a time) or someone can win over an animal to your side.  Healing items that anyone can use are generally too weak to make a difference past the early game, where they are a valuable safety net, so having a field medic (or preferably two) on your team is an important thing, as is having a surgeon.  Characters who reach 0 hp don't die immediately, and can be saved by a surgeon if they can be stabilized before bleeding out.  So with a few exceptions, the game rewards you if you diversify your skills as much as possible and cover a lot of bases with your maximum of 7 characters (4 rangers, three recruitable guests).

The writing is generally pretty solid, with a lot of descriptive short passages that go into your combat log like an old-school narrator.  Dialogue isn't the high point of the game for the most part, but the dialogue tree is pretty robust and allows you to poke around and investigate the background of things or not as you please.  I cut off the final boss' big speech about how the danger I represented to the world after four words with "Fine, whatever, I'm dangerous, and now I'm going to kill you to prove it."

On the downside?  Weapon balance is not great. Assault and sniper rifles become good quickly and stay that way almost the entire game, but everything else is all over the board (except heavy weapons, which chew through ammunition at an unsustainable rate for a game where vendors don't restock and you are finding bullets 2 or 3 at a time in caches).  Blunt weapons are extremely bad to begin, become servicable if you get the skills to use weapon modifications, and then get stupidly good once the sledgehammer enters the picture.  Bladed weapons would be better if they didn't rely on causing bleeding for extra damage in a game where you fight a fuckton of robots all the time, but are solid early on and fall off a cliff.  Pistols and SMGs are okay until you make it to LA and then stop being able to penetrate armor, and energy weapons do more damage the more armored something is, so they only get better and better until they're practically mandatory.  Shotguns are bad, then amazing, then kind of bad again.  Committing to one type of weapon seems to be a bad idea unless it's an AR or sniper, which is frustrating.  Also, Hollywood and the Bastion, the last major quest hub, is an amazingly complex interwoven set of quests and story triggers, which of course means in this, the first post-release patch, it is easy to break, and I locked myself out of a quest or two on accident when I don't think I should have been (when you fuck up a quest, you get told you fucked up).

All in all, though, I greatly enjoyed it and would like more in the future.

[Meeplelard]

Smash 4: Damn it ROB, stop being elusive and unlock already!  I'll find you yet if it's the last thing I do...which may very well be the case!!!

Also I suck at Smash Run it seems, but seem to win the final battle pretty consistently anyway.


Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze:  Finally got back to this, finished World 4, did first stage in World 5, and lost 30 lives over the course of 4 stages.  This is a situation where if I say "I only lost 30 lives!" someone will go "that's a lot for 4 stages" but if I say "man, that took 30 lives, evil!" someone will respond "ONLY 30 in 4 stages!?  Man, the game is pulling it's punches!  You're suppose to lose that many in ONE stage!"

...it's still fun in that frustrating, masochistic way of course, just like DKCR, and it's far prettier too.  May have said it before, but also one of the better handling of swimming mechanics I've seen in a platformer, if for the simple reason of your still have offense.  Yeah, gameplay changes, but at least an enemy is not just a glorified hazard outside of a power up like in other games.

[Fudozukushi]

Shadow of Mordor: I beat an Orc Captain so damn hard he actually wanted me to eat him.  That was hilarious.  Another of the Orc Captains is a poet and that's just PRECIOUS.  One other time I was just traveling along when I tried to sneak kill an orc and WHOOPS it was a Captain who it didn't work on.  EXCEPT it was the very same Captain who'd been plaguing my efforts for a long ass time despite me killing him like three times.  And then three other Captains and a whole garrison joined the fray!  It was an utterly bloody affair and I had to let two go, but my nemesis and another died along with another fifty orcs.

That fight allowed me to unlock the final Tier of abilities too.  Combo requirement to get my insta-kill finisher down to five hits?  Hell yeah!  Two finishers off of one combo?  SIGN ME UP!  The upgrades in this game just FEEL strong.  My stun combo now ends with a head explosion, me regaining my health and enemies being frightened.  My bow now allows me to teleport to enemies.  I can make Death Threats against Captains and power them up for more LOOT.  This game is pretty crazy awesome.

I think one of the things I like most is that the Bonus Objectives are just some small thing instead of hugely elaborate and stupidly hard.  Assassin's Creed 3's were so agonizing and my own compulsions forced me to complete them each time and it made a bad game even worse.  Even AC2: Revelations had so many bad ones, "get through this area filled with guards without being seen also there's literally only one route and the guards come in groups and if you fail enjoy climbing for 5 minutes to get back!"  The most difficult bonus here?  Get a 100 combat multiplier and even that was pretty reasonable.

[NotMiki]

Dragon's Crown - I picked this up cheap second hand on the strength of Jim's like of it.  I wasn't expecting my biggest complaint to be the controls.  Too many things are on Square.  As Dwarf you use it for Attack, Block and Run.  You use one button for offense, defense and motion.  The Triggers go largely unused at this point to other than Dodge.  I also am REALLY fucking shitty about different move inputs.  I can move left and right while doing attack strings, but up and down change the move I am doing and I don't move in those directions.  Unless the attack type I am doing is an aerial attack (?  I think?), then I get to move more freely.  This is a 3D game with a 3D space.  Don't lock me to 1 plane of movement because of how you get me to input attacks.  This just straight up feels fucked.  I know old side scrollers were likely to just lock you in place to attack too, but you had consistency there so it is a whole lot less jarring.  I could probably get used to it, but I wasn't exactly going into this game with a whole lot of good will towards it to start with.

Wait you chose Dorf and are doing things other than throwing dudes into other dudes?

[Fenrir]

Megami Tensei 2: Damn! The atmosphere!

Check out that shirtless guy with a sword + pink pants + long blonde hair, on a pink and green motorcycle













Still a constant grind though


Edit:

Fenrir, I have a request. Play Child of Light in a Fenrir-level perverse way.

Eventually.

Reminds me that I really really did like playing P3 as a loner who only ever comes home to play MMORPGs and who shuns his friends constantly.
I eventually stopped because P3, kinda boring on replays

[SnowFire]

Good man.  Also, checking, it is possible to abandon Robert too (don't follow him into the vault) so an antisocial CoL solo is probably legal.  If probably impossible at reasonable levels (have one of your frailest party members getting stunlocked by 3 enemies in a game without the ability to grind for broken items, have fun.).  At least there's stat boosters...

DLC isn't much FWIW, but it is cheap.  It's just a new character; there isn't really a quest to go with them, unlike say Mass Effect 2.  Oh well.

[Fudozukushi]

Shadow of Mordor: The teleport allows me to continue my combo chain across vast distances.  I managed to get halfway across the map with just one combo because of it.  It's AMAZING.  Combat in this game just feels sooooo fun and this is a more enjoyable experience I've had in gaming in a year.

Now for the absolutely best part: I can Mind Control orcs.  This allows for such an absurd amount of fuckery it's amazing.  I can command captains to murder other captains, command warchiefs to start riots, pick and choose who lives or dies!  Well, more than usual anyway.  Even the generic grunts I control keep under the spell when I'm on the other side of the map.  It's so cool!

[Fenrir]

FFX-2 Yattaf solo: NOT FORGOTTEN

I kinda was stuck on Dark Yojimbo.
It's an optional mission but... I didn't want to just leave it there.

Dark Yojimbo is fought after a long mission with no savepoints, He has a dog who can't be targeted and attack basically whenever the fuck he wants. He also has Zanmato, which reduces HP and MP to 1, and which can be immediately followed by some dog attack or poizn damage for the kill. He doesn't use it every X turns so it's unpredictable, and the rest of the time he either does low damage or MP damage + Poizn.

But it turns out you can basically cancel the mission with no consequences. So you can get the teleporter to Yojimbo, cancel the mission, then be able to get back in and fight him in a few seconds from the savepoint. (and learn his attacks more) Neat.
I noticed that Zanmato is the only move with a charge time.

Equipped the HP+60% and status immunity rings
Equipped the +strength mantra

Started the fight hasting Paine and activating all the +strength nodes then just staying with the Furry (/Berserker) class
Always waiting for Yojimbo to act before acting myself to not get caught by Zanmato by surprise. Whenever he started actually charging a move instead of using it immediately, I picked a mega ultra chocolate potion to  fully heal HP right after the Zanmato.
Otherwise, berserker smash
It worked!

I could have used supervillain flying Iron Woman Paine with physical and magical immunity (it works on Zanmato), but applying the immunity every X turns is a shore.

[Grefter]

Nier - I started this up when I wanted a change of pace from Atelier Rorona because while I was enjoying it, it was super repetetive and I wanted to break things up and Dragon's Crown wasn't pushing buttons in ways I wanted to.

So I finished the Forest of Myth last night, which was cool at first and then had 2 more sequences more than it needed.  Spent today finishing off the last of side quests in Part 1.  THen dismounted a boar to kill some shadows.  Game hard froze.  Hadn't saved.  Lost a lot of really tedious side questing.  Kiiiiiiiiiind of think I might move on.  Apparently 4 years has been a long time in standardizing Auto Save.

Game is neat writing, but gameplay is shitty (as in Normal isn't worth my time, it isn't nearly good enough to want to crank it up to Hard, so I am seriously considering putting it on Easy because if its boring at least I can make it quicker).  Neat writing isn't worth the time it takes to do things.  Side quests are really good for setting tone but again time:pay off is too high.

It is okay, but its my first Cavia game, so I don't have mega boners for seeing how it plays out.  I am just not super invested in it.  The soundtrack feels pretty overhyped from what I have seen now too.  This amazing that you guys have hyped is orchestral stuff with some okay female vocals over the top?  Eh, I will stick with Shadow Hearts and SMT as the stand out more interesting JRPG music.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Valkyria Chronicles - Anime meets World War I. That's some stunningly pretty art direction, though.