Media Videogame thread

ScraftyIsTheBest

On to new Horizons!
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Saw the new trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It's just...so beautiful. The game looks to have so much content and the visuals are just a dazzling sight to see. It's gonna be one hell of a game for sure: it just looks so incredible and filled with things to do everywhere. It's definitely showing a lot of promise as a game and is probably gonna be one of the best Zelda games we have seen in years. It's just such a dazzling game: the gameplay looks great and the world is vast with a wide variety of things to do, and it's looking to have a magnificent adventure to unfold as well. It's probably gonna be one of the most important Zelda games in the series since Ocarina of Time, and is looking to be just an incredible game in general, possibly one of the best games released this year. I just can't wait for this game to come out: I have little doubt it will be an amazing game. It's the same experience on both the Switch and the Wii U it seems.

Super Mario Odyssey looks cool too as a new Mario game, though its realistic settings and the setting in general looks pretty interestingly unique. If anyone can pull off weird games right though, Nintendo probably can so we'll see how it goes! It'll probably be great though, as the Mario series is excellent in general and has delivered almost nothing but fantastic titles for years.
 
Saw the new trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It's just...so beautiful. The game looks to have so much content and the visuals are just a dazzling sight to see. It's gonna be one hell of a game for sure: it just looks so incredible and filled with things to do everywhere. It's definitely showing a lot of promise as a game and is probably gonna be one of the best Zelda games we have seen in years. It's just such a dazzling game: the gameplay looks great and the world is vast with a wide variety of things to do, and it's looking to have a magnificent adventure to unfold as well. It's probably gonna be one of the most important Zelda games in the series since Ocarina of Time, and is looking to be just an incredible game in general, possibly one of the best games released this year. I just can't wait for this game to come out: I have little doubt it will be an amazing game. It's the same experience on both the Switch and the Wii U it seems.

Super Mario Odyssey looks cool too as a new Mario game, though its realistic settings and the setting in general looks pretty interestingly unique. If anyone can pull off weird games right though, Nintendo probably can so we'll see how it goes! It'll probably be great though, as the Mario series is excellent in general and has delivered almost nothing but fantastic titles for years.
Echoing everything you said about BotW because it was by far the most beautiful trailer I've ever seen. It looks like it'll have a darker tone in the plot despite th colorful visuals. Also the voice acting sounds fantastic(even though weebs are complaining that the English voice suck).
Mario Oddesy looks cool but Zelda by far stole the show and my wallet
 

Karxrida

Death to the Undying Savage
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
The new Mario is more exciting to me than BoTW. Too bad it's not coming until the next holiday season.

Pumped for Fire Emblem Warriors.
 
musou games have boring repetitive gameplay with no depth or difficulty
modern fire emblem games have boring repetitive gameplay with no depth or difficulty

it's a match made in heaven!
 
I'm considering playing through Chrono Trigger since it's been widely received and FF7's pacing didn't really sell it to me. Would the virtual console edition or DS version be best?
 
Pharaoh Rebirth+ is really good. A bit rough around the edges but the core gameplay is solid and the music is great

sadly Rabi Ribi exists so it can only be the second best pixel art metroidvania starring a rabbit released on Steam in 2016
 

RODAN

Banned deucer.
anyone here played any of the following: axiom verge, superhot, furi. and if you have are they worth picking up
 

Ampharos

tag walls, punch fascists
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
superhot's great, not a ton of replay value but an extremely novel concept and a fun game to blast through
 

Mr.E

unban me from Discord
is a Two-Time Past SPL Champion
Well, being out of a job again has helped pushed me to getting back to my backlog at least, from the $team $ummer $ale to the Overwhelmingly Positive Humble Bundle and February Humble Monthly (XCOM 2 for $10.80? sign me up). Why not also post in a thread I occasionally read through but never participate?

VA-11 Hall-a: Gameplay elements are minimal. It's just a VN with your dialogue choices disguised as drink mixing and most "bad choices" lead to strictly less story/characterization as your customers leave early, so there's little need to experiment. The characters ooze charm though, and as long as you don't let the real-world implications of the existence of one particular character bother you like some reviews I've seen... it's a quaint little journey to nowhere. Gets a little weeby-memey at times but it stays grounded.

Bioshock 2: This didn't capture my attention like the first game but that's probably my age showing more than anything, or my general apprehension to FPS games. The game itself is great. It's kinda easy once you figure things out because everything is broken used to its full potential, but by that same token there's great replayability for those who want more because everything is viable. I like that each area is compartmentalized into separate levels to avoid endless backtracking, though at the cost of more organic exploration that others might prefer.

My only major gripe is that half the Steam cheevos are locked behind the dead multiplayer or the DLC Minerva's Den, the latter of which is supposed to be great but it's also still going to be full-price $10 fifty years from now because it never gets discounted. The main game doesn't even cost that much anymore, get with the fucking program Take-Two.

Plus the aggravation of the Remaster refusing to load on my five-year-old Windows 7 rig which definitely shouldn't have any compatibility issues, so I had to play the original.

Fortune Summoners: 2D RPG sidescroller not dissimilar to a typical Metroidvania, a little doujin game brought stateside by the guys who gave us the more well-known Chantelise and Recettear. It's not so bad that I'm going to struggle to finish it but it has clear and numerous flaws that I probably wouldn't recommend it. There are more good video games out there than time to play them, let alone other media.

The combat, the meat of the gameplay, is actually pretty fun. The main character is a melee fighter who (ideally) strings together swordplay moves like fighting game combos... but the controls are incredibly stiff due to no attack cancelling or buffered inputs. It plays like the Mana or Tales series, where you manually control one character and the AI controls the rest of your three-char-max party. The mage characters are well-implemented and the AI is very good, even showcasing the buzzsaw potential of the MC if you can ever get cozy with the controls.

Even the easiest enemies require strategy to defeat and the game ties your level cap to progression, so there's no grinding to cheese the very legitimate challenge this game offers, but there's also plenty of fake difficulty: the enemy AI, also like a fighting game, instantly reads your inputs. Multiple enemies can easily stunlock you to death; there are no invincibility frames and status resistance comes way too late. The melee range of the MC is absolutely pitiful on top of the stated stiff controls. Those problems alleviate as your party grows but, sadly, you spend as much time solo as you do with backup.

The platforming elements can sometimes be annoying due to imprecise controls, but they're not too intrusive and allow for simple puzzles to diversify the gameplay. More aggravating is the incessant backtracking you have to do through the same boring caves and dungeons to pad game length, with no map to boot. RPG elements are minimal, as stat growth is straight RNG (ugh) and skills simply unlock as you level. Limited space adds inventory management to the legit side of the game's difficulty, with no passive recovery to go with it, but ultimately it is somewhat forgiving in that a "game over" simply places you back on the previous screen like nothing happened.

I'm not done with the game yet, but from what I've spoiled myself with the game basically ends after Act One, so to speak. One-man dev crew simply being too ambitious, or an intentional hook to a sequel that will never come? It's a bit disappointing either way but at least the potential is there. For better or worse, the game Tastes Like Diabetes even in a world where little kids have to fight dangerous monsters on the way to school daily and adults are totally okay with this. Art is cute, music is unspectacular but functional.

Oh, the actual most aggravating thing about the game though is that it only renders at 640x480 resolution. -_------------ It couldn't at least be 800x600? The game isn't that old. You can play in 1280x960 fullscreen but windowed is stuck at 640x480 max, so good luck trying to play windowed on a resolution larger than 1080p... although at least it actually plays unlike the BioShock 2 Remaster.

Damn, I wrote a whole review about it.
 
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Night in the woods seems like a pretty neat game. It walks the thin line of either being extremely real and being cringy. I think it nails the real but I could easily see somebody getting off put by it.
 
It's not exactly a new game but what are ppl's thoughts on Ni No Kuni? It got a lot of hype when it released, but I've found it to be insufferably tedious. The vast majority of the game's encounters consist of mindlessly spamming attack until everything's dead, while in more challenging fights I've found the optimal strategy is to let your allies die off and take the boss one on one, since you have such limited control over your allies that they invariably end up doing really dumb shit and they're overall fairly unnecessary. Meanwhile sidequests are thoroughly boring, consisting largely of fetch quests and battles that are much like ordinary battles except they take longer.

As for the story, thus far it's total ass (I've just reached the point where I have to track down Kublai), consisting of the characters ticking off goals like a supermarket checklist- eggs, milk, a couple spells, that kind of thing. With the protagonists basically ignoring the game's overarching conflict until they decide they're ready to actually do something, interest dies off quickly and the game's antagonists have to awkwardly pop up every now and then to remind the player that they exist. On top of that the villains' writing is comically bad, like I understand this game is supposed to accomodate kids as well as adults but that doesn't mean the villains have to have bricks for brains, as I think I'm up to the third cycle now of "hey this kid's getting stronger" "eh, Shadar will take care of him" *kid gets stronger anyway* *rinse and repeat*. /rant
 
GEOFF KNORR IS A FUCKING GOD IN HUMAN FORM
Some of my favourites but words cannot describe how awesome the CIV 6 soundtrack is. When a series with historically amazing OSTs has one that blows the previous ones out the water you know something is up. I cannot believe how good these are. Especially Greece's one. It blew my mind how a song that was written thousands of years ago by a man for his lover came to symbolise his whole civilisation and was remixed into a modern style.

Im sorry but Im freaking out over how amazing this stuff is.
 
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finished Darkest Dungeon recently. The new Radiant mode, which aims to make the game less grindy without making it less difficult, is just what it needed (apparently average time to beat was something like 80 hours before and I couldn't see myself playing it for that long, took me 45) and it's a pretty fun game now without being too frustrating, would recommend.
 
I realize both my previous posts on this page are me repping whatever indie game I've been playing most recently but I've gotta say Hollow Knight is great. It's a metroidvania with great-looking 2D art, solid combat, and a huge atmospheric world with a ton of stuff to find and do, it feels like a mashup of Ori and the Blind Forest and Dark Souls.

Salt and Sanctuary (which I also liked, though not as much) was already kinda "Dark Souls as a metroidvania" but Hollow Knight feels more like it captures the spirit of Dark Souls rather than just being an attempt to replicate it in a different format.
 

OLD GREGG (im back baby)

old gregg for life
I'm considering playing through Chrono Trigger since it's been widely received and FF7's pacing didn't really sell it to me. Would the virtual console edition or DS version be best?
Honestly, I'd recommend playing it on the original snes hardware if at all possible. If that is completely out of the question go for ds version. I really dislike buying stuff off virtual stores unless I have no other choice. Also, FFVII overshadows FFVI quite a bit. FFVI is every bit as good as VII; in fact most people, including me, think it's better.
 

breh

強いだね
so this is like one and a half years late, but I finally got around to playing undertale after recently buying it. I feel really mixed. I ultimately think that it's a good game and it's hard to say that I didn't at least enjoy it, but I honestly just wish it was more of an interactive movie than an actual game. I liked the story and I liked the characters, for the most part. Some parts feel a little odd and out of place and, even with the game's kind of flippant tone, still really stand out as awkward (I'm not talking about all the weeb shit or the injokes, like the actual plot/ resolution). Still, it has its own (albeit, kind of plagiarized-ish) feel that really reminds of homestuck, really reminds of earthbound, and manages to genuinely make you laugh. Music is great and art looks neat.

I did not like the gameplay itself most of the time. There is really nothing more annoying than attack patterns that you cannot really learn (or that there is really no value to learning) that do like a fifth of your health. The (spoilers?) only fight you're forced into is foreign and annoying. Some of the dodges in the game weren't physically possible on my ass-tier keyboard because my arrow keys don't allow me to do multiple inputs (i.e. simultaneous left + down or something) like 50% of the time. This is a problem when there's no option to rebind keys. The game allows you to facetank anyway if you have enough HP restoring items, but it's tedious to get them - despite always having more than enough money, you're always so far from stores and you walk so fucking slow. Getting caught on corners or walls is also really infuriating and makes me wish that the game copied from mother 3 a little bit more and plopped in that game's dash.

Enemy fights do feel like crapshoots sometimes and less funny / charming than just annoying to actually execute. Once you've figured out how to defeat an enemy, you'll still have to defeat it over and over because it keeps random encountering you. Random encounters are fucking annoying; I understand why an oversprite would be bad (ruining the enemy joke too fast) but I can't see a little flashing crystal thing saying "enemy here" be bad.

The game is short and kind of devoid of characters in a way. It's really weird how small the game ends up feeling as it approaches its close. I almost wish it was longer with a more fleshed out story / more characters to simply interact with since everybody says something funny most of the time. I almost feel like more time was spent on the ending(s) than the bulk of the game.

It's... really kind of funny that a game with such a strong emphasis on nonviolence would probably be better as a generic RPG than a clumsy attempt at a bullet hell.

It's a game worth experiencing, but I kind of wish I had just watched somebody else play it.

~~

also I watched some yooka-laylee streams and I can't place why it doesn't feel very banjo-esque, but something about the emptiness or the scale makes it feel too empty. there's some genuinely nice music but some of the distractions it tries to throw look really fucking boring.
 
I liked Undertale's gameplay a good deal and I'd place the fact that the gameplay and story both succeed as one of the reasons that I like it so much. I do also like Touhou though so

yooka laylee seems to be mediocre feelsbadman
yeah, I was really hoping it'd turn out well, it seemed to have all the right ingredients for success.
 

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