Games you're playing: The 2009 edition.

[Fudozukushi]

Soul Nomad: Up to map 17? ASDF BLUE BLOB THINGS, RESTRICTED MOVEMENT, SNIPER HELL, WHAT THE FUCK AM I JUST SEVERELY UNDERLEVELED. Ahem. Anyways, lost like a little bitch to the map, gonna try it again later. On the positive side, just got my fifth room. That might help some, but thus far I can only get one unlocked room to be any good after a Change so eh.

No, that map is just assholish.  Thus do cackling joy do I feel when I 9999 smash it in NG+

[superaielman]

Valkyira Chronicals- Just finished map 8 of the game.

The good- Presentation. It's wonderful across the board. The VA is excellent, the graphics are extremely crisp and help reinforce the world. In spite of being a fairly grim story every map's been colorful. It's a joy to just wander around and look at things. Gameplay? Very good core concept. You have four basic classes, all of which feel balanced in a void. Scout is movement, Engineer does everything but take hits, Shock trooper's are your melee fighters, and snipers are snipers, Lancers are bazooka fighters, specialize in taking out tanks. 

The execution? Less good. Scouts have been MVP by a long ways- movement (AP, uses a BoF5 style system) is way too important. The game actively encourages you to snipe maps and avoid combat, since your grade reward is entirely based on how quick you win the map. Damage taken, people killed, enemies killed? Doesn't really matter, finishing up the fights as quick as possible is by far the best way to play.  Which ties into the second problem- the maps are all pretty and have different settings, but they're all about rushing them as quickly as possible. The first seven maps have two flavors- rush and win with your scouts, or rush your tank forward and protect your scouts while they capture the goal. Every *single* fight is capture the flag. I loved it at first, but they really need rotating mission goals. The one time they've changed this is the second desert map with Maxmillian, and that map sucked. There are many ways to win fights, but generally there's a very clear most effective tactic for every map for getting that shiny grade/EXP/money.


SRPGs rarely do a good job in rotating map and goal missions, which is extremely frustrating. FM4 kicked tremendous amounts of ass, one of the reasons for this is it did try to give you different mission goals. Brig? A lot of the fun of the game was the duality of attack and defense. I'd love to play some defensive maps in this game and use shock troopers and snipers more, but no such luck. There are other problems- namely the load times for in map saves blow. Camera problems have gotten me killed as well, you really  need a normal pause to adjust the camera after attacking.


It's not living up to what I expected so far, but it's a damn good title and has me interested in buying a PS3 and getting the DLC for the game.

[DjinnAndTonic]

SRPGs rarely do a good job in rotating map and goal missions, which is extremely frustrating.  I'd love to play some defensive maps in this game and use shock troopers and snipers more, but no such luck.

Out of curiosity, have you played Growlanser 2, super? This is pretty much the best aspect of that game - They really do a good job keeping battle goals fluid and tied into the (lackluster, but serviceable) story. And not in the FE-style "OMG LOL more enemy reinforcements!" way, which was a nice change. It also has non-grid-based movement similar to PB.

Just sounds like an SRPG you'd like based on your review here.

[superaielman]

It looked decent from what I saw of it, even with some wonky turn mechanics.  VC annoys me becuase all the classes are so perfectly balanced, while the missions are not. Argh.

[Lord Ephraim]

Super's right. The few good missions in VC don't have Capture the flag for mission completes.  There's only a few destroy all enemy tanks, defend your position, take out the enemy leader and they're all the best missions in the game.  Sadly the game doesn't throw much of a curveball until you try hard mode skirmishes which actually discourages Scouts due to low turn CP and their durability.

If the game used a Advance Wars scoring system (balance between turns spent, units losts and enemies destroyed), I agree the game would be a lot better.

[Scar]

SWR3: Just beat map 9.

It's fun playing a SW game with anime characters I recognize.

Amuro is really disappointing so far. He's a freaking New Type for Pete's (whoever Pete is) sake! He seems like a good enough pilot. Maybe his Gundam is just unimpressive? Camille and his Gundam are by far the better of the two. It doesn't hurt that Camille has luck and with that is 9 levels ahead of Amuro. >_>

There are plenty of faces I am not familiar with, but oh well!

Luck is awesome in this game (I think in the other SW games Luck wasn't exp AND money?) if I hadn't mentioned that before. Units with it benefit tremendously.

The Getta trio is just plain wrong. Three separate spirit users in a mech with three forms.

Those five pilots who form the Super Robot (whose names excapes me at the moment...) am I only getting one of the pilots spirit points? I was looking foward to an even more broken unit. >_>

Other usefull units? The mechs that can heal are fun. Other then that most are forgettable.

Question: How do I determine attack power? Because sometimes it follows the numbers the game lays out, but most of the time it doesn't seem right.

Anyways, I'm having fun with the game. Maybe I'm just a fanboy!

[Xeroma]

Amuro is traditionally a stupid good pilot with very few exceptions[and as far as I know old SRW didn't have any of those]. Find him a better mech.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

TotA - God-General highlights: Sync missing Mystic Artes aimed at the AI PCs. Three fucking times in a row. Legretta HP in the group battle. Arietta HP in that group battle, as a matter of fact. That was vaguely inspiring.

Also, Jade is a horrible, horrible human being, and that shouldn't need any justification at all.

[AAA]

L4D-Got the Unbreakable Achivement a few days ago, sloooowly making my way towards Red Mist (about 200 to go). I've been getting really shitty groups lately, and my mic has been extremely picky about whether or not it works, so my drive to play this game has slowly been dissolving. I think I'm still going to give Expert a shot though, if I can find a good group of people (with mics!) to do it with.

And really, that's the problem, finding a good group of people. Far too many games have people who:

1. Think the game is some sort of race and rush ahead of everyone as fast as possible (and then get pissy when they're pounced or whatever)

2. Think they must search each and every little crevice of the level (and then get pissy when they're pounced or whatever)

3. Refuse to listen to advice or cries for help. I had one game where I was covering a guy on the turret and was pounced like 2 feet away from him. It would have literally taken him two seconds to turn around, knock the Hunter off, and then let me keep covering him, but he never moved. Even when I yelled at him(as if he didn't already know because my character was crying out pretty loudly).

4. Do various stupid shit, like trying to Cr0wn a Witch at the worst possible time, or trying to peg a Smoker instead of helping the constricted person first, or not looking where they are and falling off a ledge, requiring someone to stop and help them up, or not healing even when there's a perfect opportunity to do so.

5. There's an exploit in Versus, specifically in No Mercy, where the Infected can move certain objects of the game by slashing them. The main use of this is to block off choke points with generators or forklifts or whatever, so the survivors have to just sit there and hopefully melee it away. The biggest example of this kind of bullshit is an elevator you have to go on. The opposing team will move a generator in front of the elevator door and you're sitting targets for as long as it takes to move it, if nobody has a Pipe bomb.

It's not only cheating, it's a boring, shitty, utterly retarded strategy that sucks no matter what team you're on, since if you're Infected your only option is to just sit around until they bust loose. And it doesn't work, either, since every team I've seen do it uses it as a crutch to work around their inability to work as a team. Of all the games I've played where it pops up, I think I've seen the survivors all killed like twice.

On the flip side the survivor team can hide under a walkway in the Finale, where they're completely protected from above, almost entirely protected from the side, and all the undead have to funnel thorugh a narrow entrance that is easily defended. This is more successful than the above tactic, but again it's dull and makes the last level zero fun(press the right trigger over and over again! Wheeee!).

Apparently there's a patch coming out that fixes that exploit, but the 360 won't see it for awhile.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still having fun with the game, but now that I've played it so much I just find myself getting more and more impatient with shitty teams.

Zombie kill count: 32,000

[Hunter Sopko]

SH:FtNW: Started. Game shoulda been called Lenny the Combat Butler. It at least starts off with the same atmosphere as the previous two, though it's easy to see it won't stay that way.

Otherwise, it's amusing so far. 1920's America has a Shibuya-esqe feel.

[Luther Lansfeld]

SN: Been playing this a lot lately. I like the game but...

WHY WON'T SHAUNA DIE? DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE?!?

[Anthony Edward Stark]

SotS: AMoC.

As usual, each expansion adds stuff that really helps contribute. My personal favorite of the additions, though, is one of the more limited ones: the Flagship. I named mine "LCS Invincible" and holy shit was seeing that thing in action awesome. Using it almost doesn't seem fair, because that thing rapes whole worlds and entire fleets alone now that I have Quark Resonators.

The game seems to agree because it just played the System Killer card. Since all the other races in the galaxy are very busy fighting each other, it falls to SolForce and the LCS Invincible to take care of business. I have to track the thing down, but we'll see how it goes.

[Grefter]

Iji - Played this because Braid's optional content is a giant slut.  Anyway, beaten.  Neat little game, probably won't get in on the replay stuff, but it is cool anyway.

[Pyro]

Bioshock: Beaten. Fun little game. I was kind of glad when it ended though, as it had stopped being fresh after you didn't get any new powers for a while. Still, I have to give the game credit where credit is due: It gives you a lot of varied and fun ways to deal with situations. Overall, I'd say Decoy-> Rape is probably the most effective of all, though. Cheap on resources and so effective it might as well be gameplay skip in some scenarios. But the other weapons/abilities all had there time in the sun too. Definitely worth the price I paid for it (i.e. pick this up if you have a 360)

[Grefter]

Obligatory PC version is betterer if you can run it and whatnot if you are good at FPS.

Iji nitpicking.

I have 3 things. 

Weapon skills need to do something between new weapons, discussed this with Sage in Chat.  It isn't really a huge deal though, just something minor.  I am still really liking the idea of making them reduce the charge up time when you swap weapons by a minor percentage (2.5% per point was what I had imagined as a workable number that isn't a huge deal).

Jump upgrades are useless outside of the level they are in.  All it becomes is the building just gets really weirdly designed the next stage after you get jump upgrades (it just progressively gets taller and taller, what the hell?).

The difference between Komato and Tasen weapons is woeful  You can get... better damage but shorter range machine gun!  2 kinds of rocket launcher and unless the level 10 Komato is massively different than I expected... 2 kinds of bigger rocket launcher!  The way they are with the upgraded versions with Crack are more varied of course, but the issue there is you need both the weapon skills for that -anyway-.

It is still a really good game anyway since you know that shit is all kind of minor.

I can't see Attack as worst stat in the game, I found it really noticable after I had most of the other skills I wanted boosted on my replay first 6 sectors then finish the game run, faster autoloading is nice to.  This may just be because I overused the Shotgun though.  From my experience though... Well Strength might help you get more optional stuff but it didn't really help me get through the game.  I certainly didn't miss it.  I could be way off the mark here, but I just can't see it as a great functional choice if all you care about is getting from the start of the game to the end of it.  Sure it effects a couple of weapons, the crappy Resonance Detonator (might be better for extreme Resonance Deflector abuse for stopping shit get close to you?) and the Hyper Pulse or whatever it is called.... but that is pretty underwhelming, lets you errr knock around enemies at 30% shields from 4 steps away instead of just walking up and kicking them in the balls?  Nah, really can't see it.

Oh yeah frustrating elements of the game.  No vertical tolerance for attacking whatsoever outside of say... splinter gun?  I dunno, having there be windows stopping you from getting places is just fucking rude by the way OH NOT I CAN'T POSSIBLE AIM A SHOT UPWARDS OR JUST THROW A FUCKING MONITOR THROUGH THE WINDOW.  Cheap way to hide secret areas. 

This comes up again when you have stronger enemies on skinny platforms that you have to jump up onto.  They stand at the edge and you just either take the hit and hope you can get up there to do something before they knock you off or.... yeah.  This is a point where the Jump upgrades being useless come in as well, because all the platforms seem to be designed (Oustide of a few jumping puzzle type things for optional stuff) for you to reach your maximum jump height to get onto, you are just pretty fucked in those situations, you can't even use your apparent superior mobility to jump over the enemy and capitalise on the situation.  They are the areas I could see Strength being worth shit if you wanted to knock them off the ledge, if you know the problem wasn't getting up there in the first place.

Alright so it is more than three things.  It is still a good game, I just needed to vent frustration about obnoxious Komato Berserkers.

[Lady Door]

Is it just me, or did Persona 4 lose its animation budget by the end of the game? >_>

[Anthony Edward Stark]

AMoC: The System Killer has been... killed?

It's tough fighting that thing as a human, because you can't intercept it very easily. Eventually, I realized the perfect weapon to get the job done, though: the Meson Projector. That thing is useless in most combat because anything that can move worth a damn will get out of the way. The System Killer is too goddamn huge to do so, fortunately. So I piled three of those and the Invincible on top of it with a bunch of missile DEs for fire support.

At the end of the battle, there was one Meson Projector DN left, no DEs (the system killer one-shots DEs and CRs) and I had to sacrifice the Invincible, which was a sad moment. I wish I could have rammed the thing to make it EXTRA dramatic, though.

[Ranmilia]

To respond to Grefter a bit...
Komato exists for the Plasma Cannon, which is about on par with the Doom SSG and should be your standard go-to gun for pretty much the entire second half of the game.  If you're dismissing it as another rocket launcher then you didn't abuse it enough, it entirely obsoletes most other weapons in most situations.  Pulse is useless, fusion is actually very good but rarely seen because most players don't bother getting it without also maxing Tasen and Crack for the upgrade.  Both weapon paths are fully viable by themselves, with the catch that Komato weapons don't show up until later. 

Strength... is an all or nothing stat.  It takes a lot of points before you are able to do anything useful with it, but if you ratchet it up to the point where you can kick all the enemies you're facing at that point in the game (6ish earlygame, 8 once Berserkers appear) it becomes amazing.  If you just want to get from one end of the game to another, relying on kicks is actually much easier than using weapons.  It is the sort of thing where you won't get the hype until you actually try it out for yourself and see, though.

Attack is the dump stat not because it is bad (it's not!), but because everything else is better.  Unless you know exactly what you want from it and have a specific damage point in mind (to OHKO enemy X with weapon Y), if you want to increase your weapon offense it is pretty much always more effective to put your points in Komato, Tasen and Crack for better weapons and Assimilate for more ammo (to increase consistency of your offense).

[074]

Eh.  Hyper Pulse is good for a Supercharge and a couple of posters.  But if you want autofire, then you want Fusion or Velocithor.  Either is -damned- solid, and has a really good rate of fire.

Strength 10 is if you want to rely on the MPFB Devastator.  Which -is- a badass gun, don't get me wrong (Most efficient damage for its ammo cost!).  Just that it knocks you on your ass (and not in the way that'll get you secrets) if you don't max Strength.  And yes, that is really bad for your dodging.  Problem being that it's reflectable, so by lategame, it's only good for Annihilators.

...given, that thing plus a high enough Attack stat is more than enough to cut an Annihilator down in a few shots.


As a sidenote for WHY the Plasma Cannon is so awesome--it's not reflectable, it does 3 HP per shot (only beaten in HP damage by the Nuke (5 HP, Fullscreen) and MPFB Devastator (3 shots of 3 HP per trigger press)), it pierces enemies, it has a VERY good range, and it hits nigh-instantaneously.  Hands-down one of the best weapons in the game, to the point that I usually find myself running low on the Shocksplinter ammo needed for that thing.

[Grefter]

I only got Komato pretty late game really so yeah, that is my lack of use of the plasma whatever.  I am just talking base level weapons here though, combined weapons get most of their credit to Crack as far as I am concerned (Crack is very good obviously).  If we are talking the base rank 6 Komato though, yeah I know it is good, but it is just another rocket launcher.  It is a -better- rocket launcher yeah, but it is still not something you empty at point blank, it has long range, it knocks shit around, it has splash damage.  It is a rocket launcher.  Just better one than the Tasen one, which is no slouch itself.  Rocket Launchers are good, they just aren't terribly interesting when all things aside you do have roughly 3 as base weapons, (Rank 6 for both and Rank 10 Tasen which is a really damned big one yeah).

SO your choice in weapon skill to focus on most just comes down to availability or whether or not you are working on Crack at that point or a bunch of other factors that have pretty much only to do with whether or not you want the slightly better rocket launcher at the cost of a more useless other weapon or two (No autoshotgun would make me sad because it is very good at what it does early on).  That isn't really a compelling choice to me, it is more an If/Then circumstance and 9/10 it seems like Komato wins anyway because they are so prevalent when they DO show up and slightly better rocket launcher is probably worth it.  And hey if you had weapon swap being faster with weapon skill then early Komato points are a total waste since woooo you could swap to Resonance Detonator quicker if the situation called for it >_>!  Underwhelming yeah, but bringing something to the table early is good and having a reason to cap either skill out before the rank 10 weapons show up would be nice as well.  Edit - Scrap that as a reason, but make it a less punishing the player completley. for wasting points early on that should be spent later.

[074]

Eh.  To be fair, Komato weapons that require ranks start showing up at Sector 3.  Ones that are worth a damn (Shocksplinter, and by proxy, Plasma Cannon) start showing up at Sector 5.  The MPFB Devastator (and Nuke) appears at Sector 4 and the CFIS (and Velocithor) at Sector 6.  It may not be helpful to new players, no, but there's likely some sort of progression you can follow if you want to get the weapons as soon as possible.

[Yakumo]

Plasma Cannon is a crack that only requires Komato weapons, not one of the base weapons, and... do you need the rank 10 for it or is it the rank 3 and the rank 6?  I forget, I'll have to double check.

[Veryslightlymad]

HoMM5
Somehow, reading the HoMM3 threads on SA made me want to play this series again, and I started to play HoMM 5, which is supposedly not as good, but somewhat comparable.

I wish it were HoMM3 already, for multiple reasons. I hate the graphics, even though they're "better" (the art just bugs), and I dislike how skills/abilities work. Since I don't KNOW all the individual skills, it makes picking abilities remarkably difficult. I also wish factions had 2 types of heroes.

Otherwise, game is HoMM. I know what I'm getting into. Right now, it's almost losing my entire army because it was declared week of the Thane, and a group of powerful dwarf whatevers decided to spawn in the middle of my path, and I lazily continued on my merry way, instead of finding a route that was NOT through the powerful Dwarf guys.

Yeah, I'm not very far in at all. I already have the capacity to produce dragons, which feels kind of odd, but then again, I have no idea what I'm doing. When I said "I know what I'm getting into" I meant, "A series I never had any idea how to play anyhow."

[Taishyr]

HoMM5 plays very differently from 3. So very, very differently.

I didn't play enough to get any judgment on it, granted, but the difference was very notable.

Felt like an attempt to appeal to a far different fanbase, honestly? There were some cool things (Heroes having an actual attack!) but overall I hadn't actually really played enough to decide if I liked it or not.

[Shale]

SRWZ: Finished the Pacific routesplit, which is a collection of giant pain-in-the-ass stages on EX-Hard because nothing in your party can take a hit, and got the Balgora Custom. That one should be fun. Still perfect on SR points, not sure how I'm going to handle stage 25 though. That was skin-of-my-teeth with upgrades.