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

[superaielman]

Effort games post, since I realized I haven't been talking much in here of late!


FF13:  Stalled on this one due to classes. It's an interesting game to play, but requires time and energy to really sit down and play.

Defense Grid: Playing this a ton. The high level gameplay's been very absorbing. It's less about winning and more about maximizing resources and damage in a small area. It rarely pays to make long, looping maps and instead rewards tight formations of towers where you are always hitting the aliens. I'm top 100 or so on all the DLC maps. My latest success was breaking top 200 in forge, which required lasering most of the last wave. Fuck that final wave of Mantas- there has to be near 100 flies there. I usually have to use three fully powered missile towers, which is an insane waste of resources.

Breath of death 7- I'm up to the dungeon where Erik joins, just after the second savepoint. The game is delightful to play. It's a pretty entertaining homage to SNES and NES RPG's in both style and humor- the game is one long inside joke. I find it particuarly entertaining because it pulls so much of it's style and visual cues from dragon quest. Gameplay is extremely well balanced and fast paced- a modern take on those classic titles.  Take fucking note, Dragon Quest: You can have 'inns' and 'churches' for the old school feel without having to make them be the only source of healing and saving.

Sara>Lita=Dem>>>>>>>>Erik for worth so far? Lita's lack of speed is really starting to hurt, as are randoms taking a notable jump in damage and durability at this point. Sara just has the best physical in the game, and a couple of good damaging skills plus healing. Dem is a solid tank and has good boss fighting skills. Lita is kind of slow/frail but has MT physicals wihch are godly. Erik sucks. Slow, not especially damaging, but durable. Pretty much an old school fighter, on other words.


Madden 12- Bought this because well, the Packers won the super bowl. It's Madden in all of it's pretty, noisy glory. I'm digging it.

Wizardary: Heart of the Maelstrom (5)- Entirely a nostalgia thing. I beat this in a couple of weeks around the time Hurricane Irene hit.. It's an old school dunegon crawl complete with nonsensical spell names and awful polish. A couple of things stood out, though:

A: Class balance is decent. You end up using every class to some degree due to the way the promotion system works, unless you get very lucky with bonus points at the beginning.  I think Ninjas may well be the worst class in practice in the game- They seem to be worse than thieves at detrapping things, and they are *really* hard to get due to the alignment and stat point needs. The FF1 style equipment gimmick is very useful for item space, but otherwise blah. Heavy armor constantly outpaces them.

B: Game is tough but not grindy. This surprised me. If you follow the general path of the game with the clues you get, you should be in reasonable shape to fight most things. Granted, getting the silver mail from the thieves den made the game much nicer in that regard- free healing makes randoms tough without having to constantly keep track of your limited healing resources.

C: Thieves are remarkably competent fighters thanks to a couple of good bows late. Granted, those bows are pretty uncommon and they can fall behind at points. The Sylvan bow is solid if you get it, and has excellent range.

[Grefter]

You are almost at the end with Milkman Conspiracy (which you are right, it is a damned shame the gameplay is off the rails there because as a concept it is so damned good).  I can't really provide any motivation though because the Meat Circus (next and final level) is straight up terrible and pretty much universally disdained.

Also you guys are seriously still going on?

Personally RE: FF8 the dating sim?  I don't see it.  Not at the point where they started doing much of anything that mattered anyway.  Quistis arc at the start of the game is pretty clearly a setup to a piece of character development for herself (lol that went far) and for Squall.  It establishes that he is very clearly not looking for a relationship and that he is a complete and total twat who brings armies of men to tears who dreamed of having had an amorous 18 year old teacher.  It is part of what shows how much Squall has really changed when he loses his shit and decides to run along train tracks while giving a chick in a coma a piggy back ride and then later jumping out into space to save someone who should have lost huge portions of brain functionality due to oxegyn deprivation in space.

There is just way way to much of FF8s core story for that to work properly.  Now it isn't particularly good, but FF8 isn't so dysfunctional that going from point A to point B makes no sense at all.  It might be stupid as fuck (lol u 4got cuz of gfs gais) and pointlessly melodramatic (the whole fucking game), but it isn't so off the rails that it didn't do exactly what they set out to do with this one, which was to tell a focussed love story in the Final Fantasy style.  Which is to say it is stupid as fuck and pointlessly melodramatic.  THEY LOVE EACH OTHER ENOUGH THAT THEY GO ALL CARTESIAN AND WILL THEMSELVES BACK INTO EXISTENCE FROM THE END OF TIME and their friends as well I guess.

You know which FF does do it though and it is honestly pretty terrible in?  FFX.  Where you get that awesome organic relationship thing built up that is all lol no Tidus and Yuna is canon because making cutscenes for each of the chicks is a waste of money and this is the way the plot flows.  But then at the end of the game you get a special scene depending on which girl you have the most points with!  yayyyyy cohesive plot and meaningful choices.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

But if you have an idea and drop it, you kind of need some sort of compensation, especially if 2 of the characters interactions, development, etc. is HINGED HEAVILY UPON THIS.

So then they never had anything in mind at all for Zell and only slightly more for Irvine? Sounds about right.

[Fenrir]

I liked the Meat Circus, but then again I liked the whole game. If you don't like Milkman Conspiracy there's nothing else to see and too many other games to play, really.

999: Addictive game, I think I'm halfway through it. I think I just can't be that excited by that kind of story anymore (Think horror movies like Saw or Cube without the stupid torture porn), but this is still pulling me in.

I'm mostly going to bitch but the game is really good seriously:
I figured, the main character has most likely 9 hours left to live, why not live those 9 hours with that girl. You know who I'm talking about. You probably deserve it, little guy. Find solace and redemption in breasts.  BUT this was a bad mistake, as the game hit me with multiple "She's 30 years old so she's supposed to be really old" scene. This deserves a smiley, and I'm not using it lightly.0
And I hope there's a good reason why every character in the game is extremely knowledgeable.

Things seem to point to n°

Code: [Select]

1 being the bad guy so far, but I might be completely wrong! (I hope so)

[OblivionKnight]

Find solace and redemption in breasts.

Man, this made me laugh.

[Shale]

Meat Circus after Milkman Conspiracy? I thought you had to do the Conspiracy just to get into the asylum.

[VySaika]

Dissidia 012: Beat Confessions of the Creator finally. True Feral Chaos was a thing, but I managed. Yuna supremecy here, combination of small stage, large enemy and the AI having trouble dodging megaflare even on large stages made megaflare spam a winning strategy. Equip accessories to increase wall rush HP damage, a Safety Bit and Smiting Soul and a solid booster acc mult going, and things went fairly smoothly. EXP to HP helped as well.

Will prolly put this down for awhile again now, especially as I have P2IS.

[Niu]

Niu:
I tried again, but her using Seraphic Law in the middle of a Grinn Valesti = Dead Capell before being able to move.
I... could try beating her with only the most basic regular attack, not chained to another second regular attack or anything, I guess. But that sounds painful. One error and I'm dead, and I'd need to hit her about 1000 times.
Not to mention that getting back there takes 15 minutes.

Well, the trick is to attack her when she is attacking or chanting her spell. If you see her charging Angel Lawcite, get close to her quickly, and when she shoots, you use Grin Valesti. The jump will evade all the shots and you can have a clean hit on her the same time.
If you see her chanting for spells, you can just smack her with Levantein Bash

[SnowFire]

Good taste on 999 Fenrir.  Should dig up my giant set of recollections and finish it someday.  I had the same thoughts as you did at the point you're at, FWIW. 

Minor not-really-a-spoiler gameplay tip: If you can pick door 2 voluntarily ever, don't.  FAQ up a decision tree if you want to see why; there's a path that forces you into 2, if you'd like to see what's behind every door.  Don't feel too bad about FAQing up a decision tree in general, though if you pay attention / have a bit of good luck it shouldn't be TOO hard to figure out which routes have more possibilities.  Specifically (more possibly too helpful) if you see more text in a scenario then a previous replay, you are on the right track.  Should be really obvious since you're skipping text like crazy and it suddenly slows down to new text speed.  Of course it's more subtle if you got the extra text before and are now missing it that this playthrough is probably not optimal.   That said, whatevs, I got the main "bad" endings first and it worked out fine for me.

[Nitori]

Bastion - Standing still pyro murders all the birds, all of them, all of them that ever existed and will exist

[Clear Tranquil]

Radiant Historia- End of Chapter 2. I did scout ahead a bit but I was tired and not taking it in properly so I quit for the night. About to get Rosch and Aht back in my team I think. Stocke is L20, Aht is L16 and Rosch is L14. It could be worse!?~

[Shale]

DQ5: I really wish this weren't a Dragon Quest game. With the way the plot plays out it had the potential to have a really interesting main character, but then they made him silent for no reason other than pigheaded tradition, which is the same reason Dragon Quest games do anything else that's stupid, and we instead get an almost totally character-focused game except the character it's focused on never reacts to anything. Argh.

[Cotigo]

Bastion - Standing still pyro murders all the birds, all of them, all of them that ever existed and will exist

Aaaall the birds, eh?

I wonder if that's true for the 10-idol 2nd arena.  *Goes to try.*

EDIT: Holy shit the flamethrower is awesome.  Hey Kappa get the upgrade that makes it do burn damage for a little bit and put on some leechade.  Shit is whack yo.

[Meeplelard]

DQ5: I really wish this weren't a Dragon Quest game. With the way the plot plays out it had the potential to have a really interesting main character, but then they made him silent for no reason other than pigheaded tradition, which is the same reason Dragon Quest games do anything else that's stupid, and we instead get an almost totally character-focused game except the character it's focused on never reacts to anything. Argh.

I think CK said it best that if DQ5 were a Final Fantasy, it'd be one of the best plots in the genre, but just being a Dragon Quest ALONE kind of kills its credibility on many levels in that regard.

[Cotigo]

So after that I played through the second run of Bastion.  Beat the arenas.  The flame bellows ended up probably being the best non-BIG GUN weapon in the game.  Also there's not really any additional content in the NG+ aside from 10 idol mode, a new special skill and two changed lines of dialogue.  Which was kind of disappointing but 10 idol mode was difficult enough to keep me drawn in so whatevs.  Realize I didn't get the achievement for completing every memorial item but I could care less since I did the impressive ones. 

Also, now that I have something on topic to say and I've said it, LOL oh my god you all really should just be embarrassed.  This argument is bad and you should feel bad.  DL at it's best.

[Sierra]

Catherine: And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a dozen beautiful demon wives, and you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

True Cheater end. Yes. Will wrangle what other endings I can from my endgame file, possibly make a Law run through for the rest (since it seems simple enough to bash through the game on a replay) before commenting on the game in general.

[Fenrir]

I followed your advice at heart and got horribly stabbed, Snow. :p
Replaying immediately of course. Damn.
OK: http://i.neoseeker.com/ca/999_conceptart_LVnNw.png
Edit: Got spoiled just searching for this image on google

[Shale]

I think CK said it best that if DQ5 were a Final Fantasy, it'd be one of the best plots in the genre, but just being a Dragon Quest ALONE kind of kills its credibility on many levels in that regard.

It kind of does. Any other game, I'd at least have noticed all the crazy unique stuff the plot was doing. But it took almost 18 hours for me to think, "wait, this is DQ and the plot has potential! What the flying fuck?"

And it wouldn't even have to be an FF. Take this story, plug in a talking main, have anybody better than the Legend of Dragoon team write it and boom, you've got at least a cult classic.

[Captain K.]

Bastion - Standing still pyro murders all the birds, all of them, all of them that ever existed and will exist

Yeah, flamethrower is a great weapon in general, but especially for the armor piercing.

[Cmdr_King]

Shockingly, I've felt that most of the Dragon Quest games after... 2? had some potential for plot that was completely wasted because it's a dragon quest game.  IV's got the whole chapters thing, VII has like the coolest plot premise ever (A tiny island is the only thing in the world!  Wait, what?), and I really wish the opening act of DQIX was a bit longer because it's a nice setup, plus stalking around NPCs as their guardian angel has a certain coolness.

[Meeplelard]

DQ6 of course had the split world thing like Chrono Cross, but didn't explain jack shit about it, and it even had a neat little twist regarding the intro...but again, "its Dragon Quest" sort of spoils any sort of resemblance of maknig it decent cause the execution is that dreadful and it puts it on such a bare minimum level.

Say what you will about Chrono Cross' plot and its convoluted fucked up nature and everything, at least it made an EFFORT to explain its Split world shenanigans and all the shit surrounding it.  Oh sure, everything about that may have been a lost cause given the direction they were taking, but at least they put a semblance of effort into it.  DQ6 just sort of said "ho hum its there because...it is."


And DQ3's potential was...uhh...basically, its entire twist is "HEY GUYS! ITS A PREQUEL!!"  There's nothing remotely interesting beyond that.  Its a macguffin driven story that goes nowhere, then when you beat the alleged villain, the game shoved on an extra whole world map section that, from my recollection, has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE REST OF THE GAME, and basically exists to link DQ3 with DQ1/2.


...so yeah, DQ4 is about where the "wasted potential" thing kicks in.  DQ8 as usual is a freak cause it at least made some use of its potential (actually, its plot wasn't even half bad.  its issue, of course, is that the plot takes FOREVER to actually manifest itself)


And yeah, it didn't have to be Final Fantasy so much as I believe when CK said it, he was more acknowledging that Final Fantasy, being the other big jRPG series, tends to have at least have a decent level of execution to make its shit work.   You could insert stuff like Wild ARMs, Tales series (...when its acknowledging stuff exists BESIDES Tropes...), Suikoden, etc. and most of them could have pulled off DQ5's plot in a way that would be rather strong and memorable...
...basically, interesting plot put into the worst possible series to make it clear, and its strong example of how Good Ideas are completely meaningless without a decent execution to go with it.

[Clear Tranquil]

Radiant Historias- Chapter 3 - Alternate History. Rosch in Despair. I seem to have gone as far as is possible along this path without returning to the other timeline. I'd been having fun though steamrollering my way forward to the frue ending and progressing plots. Ran with Stocke, Aht and Raynie for the 3 x Shadow and Auto Defender/Astellian grunts x 2 battles. Managed to steal 3 x Seed Rings and 2 x Horn Charms overall. Raynie kept dying to Blizzard/Frost spam in the latter fight and since I was worried I was going to run out of revival items I eventually decided to just leave her down until Stocke and Aht had taken down at least one target with move skill/trap combos. Once done I revived Raynie and she fell at least once more before the other soldier was taken out but once that was done I was able to gain proper control over the fight. Aht kept HPs out the danger zone with Greater Heal, buffed Stocke with a Might Herb, scanned for weakness and poked things, Stocke abused Fire and Double Slash, Raynie got Regenerate back up then spammed Fire. Poison Blow didn't work vs the Defenders =( Stocke/Raynie's Fire didn't seem to do much to them either despite their weakness there (buffed Double Slash is where it was at/damage)

Currently Stocke L23 (Sorcery Epee, Hymnal Cape, Charm, Charm, Charm) Aht L20 (Custom Knife, Silver Cape, Breeze Armlet, Crystal Charm, Bishop Stud) Raynie L22 (Magic Spear, Silver Mail, Charm, Leaf Ring, Charm) Time to return to Preparing a Meal !(fetch quests bleh) ~

(Poison Blow did work a treat vs the Shadows though as did Polaris vs Paralysis spam =) Other stuffs ... hmm Bear was scary (one reset) until I realised that yes he could be pushed so move skills and traps made relatively short work of him. Aht was L17 ... 18? The level she learns Bomb Trap at~)

[superaielman]

Breath of death- Finished.  It's a well balanced, fun fan game that mixes the right amount of gameplay and silly plot. It's a very short game (Four-five hours) but it feels well paced anyway. Donno if I'm going to jump straight into CSTW yet or not.

[Clear Tranquil]

RH- After Rosch's Fury. Time travelling to get the materials to fix the "equipment" Game feels roughly around the halfway stage? Still enjoying it on the whole though there is stuffs which feels rather repetitive at times (and not just from doing it over >.>) Also needs more Boss =D

Still haven't decided on a permanent team yet. I really wanted to use Rosch but now I'm not so sure. I was kind of going off the idea since I haven't been able to use him for ages but seeing stuff like "Iron Wall" and "Guard Down/Steel Lance" kind of put me in the mood again >_> Most recently been trying out Eruca with Stocke/Marco/Eruca (fights have been taking a while since Eruca has no damages - and uhh neither does Marco really/not much) ~

(Rosch probably doesn't really get to use those moves proper but still >_>)

I miss Raynie/Aht for damage (+ speed) Pushing/moving enemies together for crowd control Fire/etc spam or setting up/triggering multiple traps at once is fuuun~

[Captain K.]

Picked up some cheap games during the XBL sale this week.

The Path of Go:  obviously reading Hikaru no Go will make me awesome at this... Or not.  I can't even beat the first guy after the tutorial.  Where's the horsie guy that can jump over other pieces?

Might and Magic Clash of Heroes:  pretty good!  It's like Ogre Battle MotBQ fused with Tetris.  The sprite colors are a bit unforgiving on my poor colorblind self, but it's fun so far.