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« on: May 26, 2015, 07:10:55 PM »
So, finished Ace Attourney vs. Prof. Layton. Game is pretty good at what it set out to do. On the one hand, the puzzles felt easier and not quite as good as the earlier Layton games. But then, that's a complaint I've been feeling about the series as a whole. One thing it did do is give a highly polished Layton experience. As for the Wright side of the gameplay, they added in a few new mechanisms, one of which (comparing different parts of the testimony against another) I kinda wish would make it into the main series.
As for the plot, its resolution is very, very Layton. Not sure how much more than that I want to say, but, I was kinda expecting a twist like that the entire time.
FE:Awakening - Picked this up, suspect I'm just going to leave it on the back burner, so also playing it on Classic Hard. Just finished saving Emmeryn and noodling around with side stuff.
Borderlands: Pre-Sequel - It's very much Borderlands 2 on the moon. They hyped the new laser weapons a lot, but all they really seem to be is just a new weapon type, nothing really worth noting (though they are fun). On the other hand, the low gravity and low oxygen environment has been used to change the gameplay by adding a O2 guage, and giving you a pack that lets you double jump with pretty good control and power stomp things below you. It does a pretty good job of making small changes that makes the thing feel a lot more different than it actually is.
Currently playing as Athena, her melees are ok, though the range is ass. But her big draw so far is the shield. 90 degree field of mostly invincibility? Check. Powers up as it takes hits? Check. Cool and potent Captain America style shield toss at the end of it? Check. Fast recharge time so you can do it lots? Check.
I love this freaking shield. And her snark is coming in as a close second.
Victoria:Revolutions:VIP
So, yeah, I've been fiddling around with this game for a while, and eventually I realized something. When they made VIP, they changed the map, but left the original Grand Campaign in. This means you wind up in a world without rubber, and as anyone can tell you, the modern world, especially once you get near the 1890s, needs rubber. So, a lot of my early runs were flawed and ended poorly.
So, I started again, and decided to check out the VIP campaign with Prussia. They start off kinda weak. I mean, they have a decent selection of provinces, more coal than you can shake a stick at, and start with a respectable amount of factories, but they have only like 19M people. That is tiny. It also meant that industrialization meant that I wound up with almost no farmers at one point. Fortunately, eventually unification happened (though, the Franco Prussian War was amusing since France had the only land route in fortified and manned with a lot of entrenched troops, I couldn't go the historical way, so I loaded up troops on my superior navy and invaded Paris from the Channel).
The one thing I enjoy looking at is the different way the military is handled in the various Paradox games, and this is probably one of the strongest showings for the navy yet. Given they're fast, don't suffer attrition, and give bonuses to coastal combat, they potent even without getting into the fact that colonial warfare means being able to go anywhere in the world. And the navy is the means by which one is able to go anywhere. While land units are still needed to be able to take and hold land, if you don't have a navy, then there's a lot of conflicts where you simply won't have the troops in place to do either.
So, how does this observation fit into this playthrough? England. In the standard campaign, I've found England to be on top of their naval game and to have dozens of the top class ship ready to roll. Naturally, this makes going to war with them a nightmare scenario as your fleet is probably going to get smashed. And because they're Britain, your land army, however strong it might be, is piddly and useless against their island if you can't manage to land on it. In this game, however, they contented themselves with about a hundred ships, all wooden. Well, not entirely, they had a handful of ironclads and monitors. This became relevant around 1889 when the Scramble of Africa was underway and they decided they wanted me out of colonizing. At this point, I had about 50 Protected Cruisers, and a dozen Proto-Dreadnaughts in addition to another 50 Ironclads. It led to the odd situation where Brittania not only didn't rule the waves, but they quickly managed to have no fleet at all, and they did worse than their allies in the war. Britain managed to harry me in one of my colonial holdings, whereas British India managed to kill one of my armies (granted, I made a dumb mistake) and kept their fleet (they made sure to avoid fighting me), and Canada also managed to off some of my divisions and they were the only ones who managed to win a naval fight against me (Unlike the rest of the British Empire, they had a PC and it managed to catch an escort of Ironclads and Monitors off guard). Making this even worse, they didn't have many troops in England or Scotland so I could walk all over the place, while they had more than enough troops on Ireland to wreck my shit, but they had no ships to move them with, nor ships to break my blockade with.
Oddly enough, while Canada rebuilt their fleet and a few years later were the third strongest fleet in the world (quality, not quantity), England declined, and declared war on me again. After losing their transports in that second war (which were all, for some reason, hanging out in the Sea of Japan and got accidentally killed because I was there for the Boxer Rebellion), they seem to have finally come around to building a modern fleet.
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