Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Mongrel]

I know there's a lot of emotional moments in this game, and many songs, including a rip-roaring campfire singalong version of this very one, but Pearson doing John Brown's Body/BHotR solo on the rock (and at sunset in my game), is the hardest anything's hit me so far. I spent two hours looking for any video of it (notice how this upload is basically unlabelled), because the odds of that happening again are not odds I'd care to contemplate.



He's too young to have actually fought, sure, and it's too soon in time for him to have been a union man, but Pearson's still a Union man.

[Niku]

ffviir2: i am probably going to take like 80 fucking hours to 100% complete "oh that's sweet!"
god of war ragnarok: it took 50 hours to get the platinum "hello HR???"

Gotta say though, despite my complaints about the length and breadth of the game just feeling like Way Too Much for pretty much the entire runtime, the story and the writing really fucking worked for me in this one. And so far the DLC, despite being Even More To Do, continues the characterwork in really nice ways and is basically "turn God of War into third person Hades", so I'm enjoying it a lot as a wind-down from the main game.

[beatbandito]

Okay this is it. I'm going to sit down and start a new BG3 character and get through the entire game like a normal rpg and not try and do absolutely everything again.

(mild spoilers for mid-to-end game)

[Mongrel]

Well, the game finally did find at least one way to piss me off.

WHY the fuck are you not allowed to retrieve two of your OWNED horses from the stable, when the game specifically allows you to have two horses?! Whose stupid fucking nonce idea was it to make the Stable into some kind of fucking HORSE BLACK HOLE? What's the point of ever stabling multiple horses if you can't get multiples back when the game even allows you to HAVE multiples on the trail?

Yes, I know the workaround is to go grab a new horse by stealing or catching a wild one as a "throwaway", but like... What kind of fucking idiot designed this?

[Mongrel]

Of course it doesn't help my mood that the damn game's started to constantly throw RockStar login errors, and apparently DOES NOT ALLOW offline play?

Literally would have just pirated it no regrets had I known THIS was a thing.

[nosimpleway]

I got Palworld as another Steam gift. Come on man we still haven't played Lethal Company I got as a gift before.

I'm about to wrap the tutorial (it's pretty long before you can finish the last task) and so far it is as extremely mediocre as everyone seems to expect.

It is
a) still in Early Access and may get better as new versions come out
but
b) does not appear to have a single creative or innovative idea to explore

Calling it a Pokemon-alike seems like a misnomer. Yeah you catch critters and tame them but they're not actually all that useful to fight with. Combat is in realtime and your pals act autonomously, hurling attacks at whatever has aggroed whenever they feel like it. Since the "lower the thing to critical HP before you throw the Pokeball" is in full effect, this means you will lose countless catch chances because your minion threw a hadouken at the wrong time.

Anyway, it's a survival game that happens to include 'ems collecting, rather than a collector with survival elements. Yes, you start by punching trees to collect wood. I said there's not a single creative idea, didn't I?

[nosimpleway]

In some games, the experience level of a monster is used to give a general idea of how strong it is. Some games might even go so far as to make enemies of a particular level an adequate but not overwhelming challenge for a player character of that same level. Palworld does not do this. I'm in my mid-twenties and have gone up against level three monsters that take five shots to the face to drop to critical HP, and take a quarter of my health off with every attack. It just don't add up.

Weapon and armor have incredibly unsteady progression. In the early game you're basically rushing to get the Crossbow as fast as you can, because it's literally four times stronger than any other weapon you can get until you unlock firearms several levels later. Catching an 'em usually involves an opening crossbow bolt or two to take off 60-80% of their health, then switching to the next weakest weapon so you can plink little 2-3% shards off until you're ready to throw the pokeball. (You can deploy a Pal to help attack and draw fire, but as I said earlier they throw out attacks whenever they want, so chances of them killing your target while you try to False-Swipe them down to critical HP is very high.)

I don't have a gigantic history with Monster Hunter or anything but I kind of feel like if every enemy can fire off bullets that take away a full quarter of your health with sniper-pinpoint accuracy they should probably have some little warmup animation indicating what they're doing so you can react. 'ems have a little "grr! I'm mad! I'm gonna attack!" animation they do, sure. It's when they stop and go back to their idle animation when a bullet flies out of their face, and then they go "gwargh!" to indicate they're attacking. It could use a bit of tuning.

There's corpse retrieval. Of fucking course there's corpse retrieval. On default settings you drop all your gear, including your equipment, when you die. There's also environmental effects, so if you're not wearing clothes at night you will slowly lose HP until you freeze to death. Guess how these two gameplay elements interact.

[atog]

It sounds like they cribbed a perennial list of rejected/retired Minecraft mechanics and windmill slammed them into the game.

Along with the classic Kung Fu movie soundtrack delay for important telegraphed cues for AI attacks. Which I can totally see being a legit issue if you're playing this shit online from say, Australia, what you see on your client is maybe 250 msec too late for you to react. But if you're installing and playing on your own PC, lag should not be a thing, it's just sloppy media mixing.

[nosimpleway]

I'm about to wrap the tutorial (it's pretty long before you can finish the last task)

Managed to beat the end-of-tutorial boss after several tries. I am currently level twenty-six. The level cap is fifty.

[Mongrel]

Going to break down and learn about modding RDR2, which doesn't look super difficult, luckily.

The single-player game is very weird in how you're encouraged with so much freedom and personalization, but are then somehow also punished for it. You're heavily encouraged to hunt and complete challenges to buy gear from the Trapper but then everyone makes fun of you even if the clothes are actually ordinary-looking and very nice (Coyote Scout Jacket, I'm looking at you).

The goofy-ass bear head hats, or going full mountain man, or whatever, sure that makes sense, same as some of the other eater eggs which get you made fun of like the pirate hat, or dressing identically to Dutch, but there's so many weird inconsistencies and a lot of really nice clothes which get you mocked mercilessly, which is just kind of annoying and tiresome. WTF R*? There's lots of little things like this I'm discovering which are a very awkward exception to the otherwise very player-friendly experience (leaving the ghastly PC controls aside).

Or the fact that you can't fast walk even though 1) it's in the game, in camp or inside buildings. 2) The game is perfectly capable of handling variable speed with existing controls, e.g. when you ride a horse.

The straw which really broke pony's back was the game forcing you into dual wielding and using the offhand holster. I still haven't rescued Micah (lol yes, still farting around in Chapter 2, hunting animals - both regular fauna critters and Murfree Brood), but I did buy one from he trapper to see the interface for dual wielding only to realize you... can't turn it off? Permanently turning one weapon wheel option into three? Really guys? You didn't anticipate someone just... not wanting to do that? Even though the second holster is absent from ALL cutscenes?

They're all little things but they affect your experience for the duration of the entire game. It's such a bizarre contradiction how they went into incredible detail about all sorts of player response and actions, without bothering to check some very basic ones.

Reminds me of the old IT QA joke:

A software tester walks into a bar.

Runs into a bar.
Crawls into a bar.
Dances into a bar.
Flies into a bar.
Jumps into a bar.

And orders:

A beer.
2 beers.
0 beers.
99999999 beers.
A lizard in a beer glass.
-1 beer.
"qwertyuiop" beers.

Testing complete.

A real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is.

The bar goes up in flames.

[Lottel]

I know some of you are playing Balatro and those are the only ones of you I respect.

Balatro is poker-themed roguelike. Every round you have a certain number of points to reach earned by playing hands of poker. After each round, you go to a shop where you can buy Tarot Cards that affect the cards in your deck, Planet Cards which affect the points each hand is worth, and Jokers.

It'd be reductive to say "Jokers affect the multipliers on your hands" like I've heard (and said) before. They often do and if you want to survive, you'll need a good synergy going with high multipliers from Jokers. But they also give such utility and shape your run in so many ways.

The game I can compare it most to is Binding of Isaac. It's a card game and not a top down bullet hell, sure. But the difficulty curve and item interaction is on par with the best of them.

Last night during a run, I got DNA which takes the first card I play and creates a copy to permanently add to my deck. I had blueprint and napkin that both copied DNA. So now I'm making three copies. Then I hotswap my Jokers positions around so they are copying another card, that gives me a multiplier that's double the lowest card in my hand, combined a joker that spawns tarots that let me delete cards from my hands and a joker that builds up as long I keep playing the same hand. That's how I beat the 300k point boss by a couple million. Unfortunately once I hit endless mode, I gambled poorly and lost it all. And I started right back up.

Look, I've put almost 100 hours into this game between the limited-window demos and the release last week.

It's $15 bucks and will destroy your life. 10/10

[nosimpleway]

It's the joke everyone is making and I can assure you it is correct

[Friday]

I know some of you are playing Balatro and those are the only ones of you I respect.

My roommate is super into this game and I sat down and played a run.

It's good, very good, but not my thing. But I can assure everyone else that it is indeed a well made videogame. Just not one I personally enjoy.

[François]

Unicorn Overlord is Vanillaware doing Ogre Battle. It doesn't even try to be subtle about it. It's replicating Ogre Battle the way Dragon's Crown was replicating the Capcom D&D beat 'em ups.

Okay. I promise I'm going somewhere with this. I've done let's plays for popular games that have been let's played before on the Internet at large. My philosophy for this is that I do not compare what I've done to what others have done before me. But I try to do such a good job that if someone who comes after me wants to do it better than I did, it's going to Take Some Fuckin' Effort.

I'm only three missions in, but that notion kept returning to the front of my mind while I played: this is Vanillaware going "the next poor bastard who tries to make an Ogre Battle game that's better than ours is going to have his work cut out for him".

It's not out yet, but there's a demo!

[Friday]

Man, I don't know if I can handle Ogre Battle, but better. I was -obsessed- with the original SNES game. It used to be the game I'd say when asked what my favorite game ever was. Since that time it's moved down my list to like the 40s or something, I forget. It ain't no Undertale or RDR2 or Elden Ring or Bloodborne or Tactics, that's for sure.

But there's still a part of me that misses the me that loved spending hundreds of hours playing Ogre Battle, meticulously rotating my troops in and out to ensure I was never overleveled so that my rep would stay high. Such a weird game. Literally goes out of the way to punish you for playing the way almost everyone wants to play.

Like, imagine if by sticking with your starter pokemon and just overleveling it and using it to crush everything in the game easily, the game not only gave you the worst ending, but said "you became a tyrant that murdered other pokemon and people until you yourself got overthrown. GAME OVER" Ogre Battle literally does that.

(And yes, I know that technically the worst ending is enlisting Galf, but that requires the player going out of their way to get that ending.)

[Mongrel]

Okay so for some damn stupid reason I hadn't bothered to steal a train yet and so I spent like, a full hour doing donuts around the map while tooting in fond memory of my destroying the W key with OG Railroad Tycoon. I may or may not have been singing The Wreck of the Old 97 the entire time, even though you can't crash the train (ah, rats).

CHOO CHOO MOTHERFUCKER

[Newbie]

Considering how amazing 13 Sentinels was, I felt like I had to get VanillaWare's next game no questions asked, so I picked up Unicorn Overlord.

This seems like the narrative/gameplay inverse of 13 Sentinels: the story's the most generic fantasy war storyline you could imagine, but it's executed well enough to not be a problem, and the real draw here is the immaculate troop organization/combat/world exploration/upgrades loop. Unit combat is automated, but each unit has a default behavior depending on its troop type that's built and modifiable using a system like the gambits from FFXII or the companion orders from Dragon Age. (I haven't felt much need to customize orders except when equipping new items that grant abilities: I wanted my thief with a poison sword to prioritize the highest-health targets first, and I wanted my soldier to prioritize columns with her spear—which she was already doing, but not quite as quickly as I preferred.) Field battles seem to be balanced better than the missions in 13 Sentinels were, as well: I'm on the not-quite hardest difficulty setting, and while I haven't had any losses yet, I have gotten into some scrapes where four of my five units were stuck in a rest state and I had to scramble to complete my objective.

The art, music, and UI are all as stellar as ever, and while the voice acting is excellent, characters are necessarily slighter than the protagonists of 13 Sentinels because there are more of them.

Like François said, there's a generous demo, and progress in the demo carries over to the full game. I'm stuck at work, but I am itching to play more.

[Friday]

I really should try 13 Sentinels, I keep hearing good things about it and I've listened to the OST like fifty times

[Newbie]

Whenever you do, make sure you play on the hardest difficulty! Both of VanillaWare's most recent games have novel approaches to RTS/Tower defense combat, and they're both too easy on most of the difficulty settings.

[Mongrel]

Okay I had to wait long enough for it to happen twice (it's very rare, it seems) before I believed my ears, but Arthur killing a reb and taunting "Bitch." made me absolutely lose it.

First time I was like "There's no way.", especially since he usually only comments after combat is over, not on individual mob kills.