Playin' any games today, Flying Nun? (WGAYP - 2011 Edition)

[Fenrir]

It's already confirmed Rob.
That director likely doesn't care that much anymore now that he has all that money. (Microsoft badly needed another console exclusive for the 360 at this point)

I believe the interface was made with a controller in mind too?


There's not much to Plants vs Zombies after the main game I found, except trying to survive as long as possible classic tower defense style. Hint: Use those purple plants that shoot in all directions.

[superaielman]

The basic strategy for survival mode is pretty simple- sunflowers in back, tallnuts with pumpkins in front, your choice of firepower in the middle. I'll fiddle with it a little more, but I don't think I will put too much more time into this one.

[Fenrir]

While this strategy works extremely well for the main game, Plants vs zombies actually does get pretty complicated if you want to get far enough in survival (well, far enough for the achievement. Don't know if the other Plants vs zombies games had something similar)
Sunflowers need to be in the middle since the back is too dangerous (and you'll likely want only about two of them after one point), I preferred spike floor to tallnuts too.
One thing that makes planning a strategy easier is that anything that can only damage one enemy at a time becomes obsolete fast. And Offense >>> Defense since you can have pumpkins.

Fun game, by the way. I don't get why it was so successful, but hey.

[SnowFire]

In Endless, you should accumulate a fairly giant stock of sunpower, so it's not the end of the world if back-row sunflowers are briefly taken down by digger zombies.   It's considerably more expensive if ~350 sun Wintermelons die to them.  I also find it entirely worthwhile in Endless to get 2 Magnetshrooms in the middle - while they kind of stop being effective once the true hordes start pouring out around wave ~20, they can severly screw up both the digger and the ladder zombies.

I think the spikeweeds go without saying - you Just Die to Zombonis without them, since they crush Tallnuts.  Usually went with two rows of Spikeweeds, actually, but there's something to sticking Tallnuts behind htem anyway.  Tallnuts are certainly worthwhile on the water at the very least, since Spikeweed isn't an option there.

[Fenrir]

Those purple things with pumpkins are better in the water, seriously. They do so much damage.
The best part about Endless is not even playing the game, but drawing a grid and figuring out what would work best.

Very specific question some Ogre Battle fan might answer:
I have the original N64 version of the game, and I remember it being blurry as hell. This really was a major problem. I never ended up finishing it. Does anyone know if the Wii Virtual Console version is less blurry?
I like those Ogre Battles, at least the concept. I wish they focused more about fighting and less about massive micromanagement. I might rush through OB64 again as an evil bastard who basically only uses generic units and doesn't care about liberating cities instead of capturing them.


Alpha Protocol: Felt the urge to pick that up again.
This time I managed to kill Conrad in Rome. Best part of the game here. Both the concept and the execution are priceless!
Basically there's this boss, a pragmatic and professional fifty year old man, who's supposed to fight you at one point in the game (Rome) and flee after 3/4ths of his health are gone. (Then you meet him again in the final part of the game and finally kill him, unless you join the bad guy)

But if you carefully push his buttons by trying as hard as possible to be everything he hates (making jokes all the time around him, talk about sex, kill everything during missions instead of being stealthy), and if you gather enough intell about him, you can just completely humiliate and piss him off so much he just goes nuts and fights to the death instead of fleeing. Even if it's against everything he stands for.

This is great and I think FF7 would have been better if Cloud could have bombarded Sephiroth with jokes about Jenova, allowing the player to kill him in the midgame. Making Rufus the final boss.

Anyway, I've been putting stat points in melee and it's incredibly effective against bosses so far. Less against generic enemies. It's the opposite of stealth. Marburg and Sis went down so easily. Use CQC active skill -> Get close to the boss -> Mash B -> Dead boss. I heard pistols are even more powerful though.

[superaielman]

Fenrir: I'd dig up screenshots on the VC and see how it looks. I don't recall OB64 being too terrible in that regard though.

And what purple things in Pumpkin, Fenrir?

[Fenrir]

*checks* Gloom-shrooms.
I usually put 4 of them in the water, right in front. Tons of damage to everything!

You can check fullscreen screenshots on the VC?
It's an usual problem with N64 game, but it was particularly bad here (maybe because there's a lot more 2D than in most N64 games?)

[Nephrite]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ruq8Kn8OGRA It looks pretty much the exact same to me.

[Grefter]

Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals - Holy shit, why am I not emulating this game.  Not because it would play any better, but I could screenshot the amazing things.  The President of Percelyte is fucking amazing.  He is pretty close to RICHARD, like a mix of the mythic one and the real one.  He works in a "Mansion" which is totally a castle.  He has a desk and a chair.  The desk is made out of stone and his chair is a throne.  His office is a big open room with a huge fountain behind his desk and water running down either sides of the steps.  It is amazingly opulent and glorious.  I wonder if the Japanese version has him as a King or if he is a PRESIDENT there also. 

I am totally spun out at the effect that compressing the Lufia 2 story is.  I mean in some times it is pretty weird.  It looks like Guy and Selan are both from Percelyte (Guy's girlfriend is there at least)?  Maxim is like from the next town over which has Tia and Lexis in it as well as the egg dragon().  That is... really short order there.  On the other hand, mixing up the amazing thief plot with the Ruby Apple plot is pretty cool and works really well (that is where I am up to).  Also turning the thieves one of the thieves into a woman and making them a couple is pretty good.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

It's already confirmed Rob.
That director likely doesn't care that much anymore now that he has all that money. (Microsoft badly needed another console exclusive for the 360 at this point)

I believe the interface was made with a controller in mind too?

No, it's definitely a mouse interface.

Still, it makes me happy that the Witcher guys now have a game successful enough they can make a bunch of money by selling out.  They earned it.

[Xeroma]

Grefter: Yes, he was President in the JP version too.

[metroid composite]

Bit Trip Runner

Man, beating world 1 of this game was murder on me.  I mean yeah: I've done speed runs and stuff, but the way I work is that I'm always slightly inconsistent--I might nail a hard jump 60% of the time, but I'll also fail really really easy jumps that nobody should fail like...5% or 10% of the time.  So...1-11 was just total murder being "hey, here's a really stupidly long stage where you can't make any mistakes".  Also, the thing about speed runs is that I can practice the whole run, even if I trip up; yes, I won't be saving that run, but I can still keep going and figure out where all of the problem areas are.  As opposed to "yes, I'm farther than I've ever been and...oh damnit!  Troll game!"

Speaking of, I feel like this game has too much emphasis on memorization.  Especially on the 1-Boss level "hey let's drop this obstacle right in front of you".

[Dark Holy Elf]

Radiant Historia - So uh this game is very good.

[Meeplelard]

Tekken 6: Beat Story Mode!  It was inoffensive outside of that one bridge stage where you can randomly die if you're hit the wrong way, and Alisa can die too with no way to rbing her back, and the boss basically demands you have Alisa cause you get swarmed by enemies on EVERY SINGLE SIDE and...yeah...


That said, plot was...uhh...Fighting Game Plot!!! quality, though to its credit, it never gets facepalm level stupid, nor does it ever degrade to trainwreck or get eaten by its own convolutedness.  Just a story of "Jin Kazama starts a war, go stop him.  Oh yeah, you have Amnesia just cause Lars is a bad ass and there needs to be SOMETHING holding him back!" with a silly twist in there just to explain why he's bad ass and...ok, why am I analyzing TEKKEN PLOT, I don't know.  I guess I can say "it makes sense, but still of typical Fighting Game Quality!" which is to say "Not good" <_<

[superaielman]

*checks* Gloom-shrooms.
I usually put 4 of them in the water, right in front. Tons of damage to everything!

You can check fullscreen screenshots on the VC?
It's an usual problem with N64 game, but it was particularly bad here (maybe because there's a lot more 2D than in most N64 games?)

Yeaaaaaah, you weren't kidding. With some spikes in front of them, they kicked ass. My basic strat for survival is two rows of spikes-gloom shrooms-Magnets-freeze pumpkins, with cherry bombs as needed. I will say, god *damn* that kicked some serious ass.

Survival's fun to hash out. The roof will be unpleasant, though- goddamn bungee zombie assholes. Just finished Night (hard).

Front Mission 5: Just got to the carrier/ship base, so seven-eight maps in or so. The new link/friend fire system is goddamn chaotic madness, and I love it. You do have to be careful about how you set your links, or you're going to take some serious friendly fire damage.  The money system is as stingy as ever, with the cavet that arena use/abuse is extremely easy and what you should be doing to keep your gear in shape. It's way easier/quicker than doing sims for cash, so I approve. 

Story's picking up some, we just had our first plot death and there's been lots of dialog. The game is very philosophical about war and the damage it inflicts. FM4 was two disparate guerrilla conflicts set against a geopolitical struggle; this game is entirely about soldiers and fighting.  I miss the splitpath nature of FM4 and the really good party interaction, which doesn't really occur in 5. This makes sense within the theme of the story and gameplay (Everyone but Walter and your mechanic can be removed from the team and replaced, making everyone generics.), but it still is a downer. The other downside to the story is that I haven't played FM1-3 and am missing a ton of the back story/plot, which is a shame. I may have to dig up a FM wiki/FAQ and read on the plot I missed.

[Captain K.]

Resonance of Fate:  Chapter 6.  I wasn't sure before because it was early in the game and I was giving it a chance to get better.  But these game mechanics are complete ass.  There is no balance whatsoever.  You're either raping enemies or they're raping you.  Critical Condition is one of the stupidest, if not the stupidest mechanics in the history of video games.  Getting into critical condition is pretty much game over, even against crappy randoms.  In the earlygame, it's pretty bad since you have so few bezels.  But they let you shoot hats off enemies to regain them and many enemies can be killed without scratch damage first.  Then you get farther along and you're facing five guys with machine guns and no breakable body parts.  It takes a minimum of two actions to kill them (one to scratch, one to kill), during which time the other four outflank you and rape you with automatic fire.  You can't regain bezels fast enough to continue to use hero actions.  And then for some reason when your bar is fully scratched, you lose *all* your bezels instead of just one.

And then in Chapter 6, they take away one of your party members.  Yeah, fuck you game.

It got to the point where I even tried running from battles, which is something I pretty much never do in RPGs.  But that's even worse, since any damage you take/bezels you lose in that battle stay in that battle, so you're permanently crippled until you can get to an inn (which are few and far between).

I want to keep playing to see the story.  Vashyron is so perverted that he's awesome.  But I don't know if I can put up with the gameplay long enough to get through it.

tri-Ace, why did you do this?  *sob*

======================

Magic 2012:  Playing against the AI on Planeswalker difficulty to unlock cards.  Strength of Stone is surprisingly competent.  It gets bashed on forums, but it's got a nice mix of creature destruction, artifact destruction, and big numbers.

[Glen Veil]

Wee games and stuff, beat Tactics Ogre PSP, decent game, seems like it has a ridiculous amount of optional stuff to do, which I may or may not come back too.  The unit balance could have been better, archers are stupid good, ninjas once they get steelstance are basically one man deathsquads etc.  Despite that the only thing about the game that really made me go ARGHJKLFJSJFL WHY would probably be the crafting system, which deserves save scumming to the fullest.

Picked up KH Re:CoM a bit ago because hey maybe I can actually understand the prologue to KH2 if I play it!  Two worlds in and I'm practically ready to just drop the game and say forget it.  While I'll give them the card system being decently unique, god damn is it annoying to randomly get stunned by an enemy you can't see who somehow counter/played a higher card.  It would probably be tolerable if I was better at sleights but my play style has always been more on the lines of conserving resources and fuck if doing that doesn't completely clash with said playstyle.  Best strategy for bosses requiring running around doing nothing but dodging attacks until they run low on cards to sleight with is pretty dumb.

So with that I've decided to finally start TotA, which should be inoffensive since I liked the last tales game I played, minus the fact the localization team decided to not record voices for the skits, but whatevs.

[Meeplelard]

Actually, CoM is almost completely unnecessary for understanding KH2's prologue.  Here's what we learn in KH:CoM:


-Introduces Namine; no, you don't actually learn anything about her.
-Explains why Sora is in the egg thingy (Just assume "A wizard did it" and you can move on from there.)
-Explains what happens to Riku and King Mickey within that time frame (KH2 more or less summarizes it well enough.  The only thing left out is seeing Riku develop from basically being pushed around by the villains to him just sort of giving them the finger and kicking their asses, which is actually not half badly written...actually, Riku's side is pretty well done overall, just requires going through Sora's boring as hell mode first.)
-introduces Orgy 13 but in a way that's basically "they're cryptic evil guys."  By extension, it also explains where there are only 7 of them in KH2.


...yeah when it comes down to it, that last point is really why KHCoM exists.  Having to fight all of the Orgy members in one game, some of them multiple times, could be a bit excessive, so they basically used KHCoM to deal with half the characters then, and have an excuse to write them out of the plot before KH2 happened.


Frankly, if you want a game that actually bridges KH1 and KH2, and actually shows a semblance of significance, 358/2 Days is the one to play.  Shows you what actually happens in the year between the two games, and from Roxas' point of view, so we actually learn about the Orgy 13 from the inside, and the game is not badly written to be honest.

[Cmdr_King]

Put another way, the remake of Chain of Memories really needed a "skip to Riku mode" option.  It deals with the gameplay in a very different (and superior) way, and doesn't feature Sora being an idiot the entire game.  Well, at least the original CoM did, I don't think they changed THAT in the remake though.

[Grefter]

So what you are saying is that they had to make an entire game to introduce a bloated and overwritten story point that could have been handled with four characters but because Nomura had drawn 13 pretty dudes he needed an excuse to use as many of them as possible because no one tells him "No this is a terrible terrible story you are making".  Good to know.  Hooray lets all celebrate overengineered stories!  Here is hoping for another new one coming up in the next 5 years so we can all be suprised when it sucks just like Xenosaga did.  Sadly Baten Kaitos looks to have lost all its steam, so the only thing really in that space is really old guard stuff (Warhammer!  Comics, Star Wars EU, etc) and KH is just an exercise in wheels spinning to make as little ground as possible while making the same game again.

Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals - This game is clunky as fuck and the Tanbel mines are insaney punishing for fucking up.  Maybe I should like pay attention to what I am doing sometime.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Except that Days and BBS both have better plot/writing and less Sora than KH1 and KH2, so honestly I think I the series is clearly progressing in the right direction. KH3 just means more SORA plot.

[Hunter Sopko]

KH1 is solid enough on it's own, honestly. It deals extremely minimally in the stuff that makes KH story such a trainwreck later on and it's generally enjoyable fluff. Not to mention the completely unexpected downer ending is awesome.

[Meeplelard]

Except that Days and BBS both have better plot/writing and less Sora than KH1 and KH2, so honestly I think I the series is clearly progressing in the right direction. KH3 just means more SORA plot.

Um...BbS writing is not better quality than the mainstream series.  The game barely deals with the Disney thing on the same level as the other games (ist just kind of "its Disney, its there!"), it lacks a remote sense of actual characterization (I still can't figure out what they were aiming for with Aqua.  Her actions, personality, and general thought process just change between scenes, its like they said "She's a chick!" and just sort of wrote her however the scene needed her to be), there's no real flow in plot, etc.  There's some good stuff, but I can say the same about KH1 and KH2, and both games didn't suffer from the Polyphonic story-telling style (that didn't help BbS at all, cause they really wasted it and kind of missed the point of that story-telling style structure), and the Disney stuff actually fit.

I mean, in BbS, the trio felt just kind of there in Disney Worlds, rather than actually participating in the stories (well, ok, Vent's side felt a bit more traditional KH, but even then, so its notably better), and the filler drags.


I could go on, but while I can understand people who BbS' gameplay, its plot and writing is not better than the mainstream stuff, and frankly, there are many cases its inferior.

Also, I see nothing wrong with Sora in KH1 and KH2.  Its Sora in KHCoM that's the atrocity.  That said, he probably shouldn't return in KH3, for the same reason Yuri shouldn't (and thankfully didn't!) return in SH3.

[Grefter]

KH is just an exercise in wheels spinning to make as little ground as possible while making the same game again.

Except that Days and BBS both have better plot/writing and less Sora than KH1 and KH2, so honestly I think I the series is clearly progressing in the right direction. KH3 just means more SORA plot.

So they introduced a character and a plot arc then made a bunch of games that do not address said plot arc.  So... yeah.  That is the definition of your plot not going anywhere.

These spin off games not featuring Sora so that nothing important happens so the core series is not overly impacted is the very heart of the problem (and didn't even work in KH2 because even though people say nothing much happened in CoM you still start KH2 completely fucking lost!).

So yeah, better writing or plot in a spin off game does not mean that your overall plot is going anywhere.

EDIT- CLARIFICATION TO AVOID BLEEDING VAGINA/ANUS SYNDROME.  DO NOT GET BUTT HURT BECAUSE I CRITICISE SOMETHING.

Prefering the spin off games is fine, liking KH plot is fine (if a sign that you might be retarded).  You can like whatever you want.  You can prefer the plot from the spin off games regarding Organisation 13.  None of that impacts the way that the narrative has been told in that the first game is there, it is in canon and is the start of the story and sets in motion such gigantic impacting plot points that cannot be ignored unless you want to go on the scale of writing a Lovecraft story and then spinning it off into Strawberry Shortcake canon without ever addressing the looming elder gods about to eat your world.

[metroid composite]

Uncharted 2: finished.  Not much to add over my previous assessments.  Turns out there was only one temple in Tibet that was actually a giant clock full of gears.

Some really high durability mooks.  Not sure how I feel about these, as the number of viable attack paths seemed narrower (running up and punching them didn't work so great.  Dancing around them shooting is not all that advisable either.

On the other hand, towards the end the game was good at getting me to use the high power low ammo weapons (which made quick work of high durability enemies).