What games are you playing 2014?

[Anthony Edward Stark]

One thing about Citan I would say is that I always felt like his many good qualities were there to get the player to trust and depend on him so that when it comes out that basically everything he tells you in the first 2/3 of the game is a lie, it feels like a more significant thing in a game where everyone is lying to you constantly.

[Grefter]

I covered how much it was made for me pretty thoroughly when it came out and 12 months later when I replayed it and it still ripped me apart emotionally.  Even when I knew what was happening and was enjoying the simple math/mechanics and how to do things well I was still affected by it to an amazing degree.

[Dhyerwolf]

Snowfire, yeah, I view it more as that Jeanne naturally sped up what they wanted and not that her mistake was somehow their effect. She blunders and they used the opportunity (IMO at least).

[Fenrir]

Freedom Wars:

Total weak ass non-ending there, it was hilarious.
My god.

The main villain (Abel) had the lamest motivation: "What do humans need? Friends? Love?? NO. CONFLICT" and that's why he opens the gates to hell.

Then Yattaf beats his ass (let's be fair. This might be a 8 men team but Yattaf does all the work). Then she beats whatever terrible thing comes out of hell.

Then surprise betrayal from a party member, he stabs Yattaf in the back. He then puts some glasses on for some reason then leaves while going "HAHAHAH" and letting The Damsel's Angry Evil Sister enter the fray. She slaps all the weak party members left, because they can't do anything without Yattaf. (who can't do much with a dagger in the back)

Then time stops and Yattaf can magically go to hell where she meets Cain who gives her some super weapon before going all "We'll meet again".

So she comes back, and in a cutscene she kicks the crap out of Damsel's angry sister with the super weapon. Damsel's angry sister becomes super nice because Damsel gives her a hug. Everything blows up but every party member survives by riding Sister's Dragon.

They are overall pretty happy but the sister goes all "Now I have something mysterious to do..." *brood*

The End

JRPGs guys.



This wasn't a good game. I think the devs just put any idea they had in the game, so things don't quite gel at all.
My biggest issue is that healing is extremely impractical/bad. Reviving however, fully heals, costs nothing, and is super fast. I had to rely on reviving; this means that all my losses essentially came from friendly AI placement and behavior instead of say, my own effectiveness in battle.

Great fashion options though.
Here is endgame Yattaf with her android on the left.

http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2014/51/1418770126-2014-12-14-191151.jpg

Dang I just got super cool clothes for beating the game too.


Anyway right now I just did some online mission, and a citizen I was supposed to save went flying in a fetal position.
WTF?
Fission mailed.

[SnowFire]

Fenrir: So who's the damsel?  The person captured all game or something?  And what do Cain & Abel think about imprisoning all people for the "Crime of Living"?

My biggest issue is that healing is extremely impractical/bad. Reviving however, fully heals, costs nothing, and is super fast. I had to rely on reviving; this means that all my losses essentially came from friendly AI placement and behavior instead of say, my own effectiveness in battle.

Randomly: Muramasa Rebirth has a less-annoying similar issue.  Healing items are expensive and money is hard to get and healing is semi-limited, but death just slaps you back to the start of the same screen with full health.  Well, this is certainly less annoying than being encouraged to run away from all encounters to save health at least, but weird that death is the best healing.

[Fenrir]

Warning: The plot of the game makes no sense


The damsel is Beatrice, a girl with mystical special power who's kidnapped by the panopticon you're in at the beginning of the game.
You go on a clandestine mission early on, notice her, get captured/interrogated.
Then you go on a rescue mission, and thanks to help from the higher up you manage to have her become a prisoner like you. (Until she gets kindapped by Abel)
Nobody freaks the fuck out when they notice that the girl isn't there anymore somehow. They kind of explain it by saying that they got all the use they wanted out of her or something? They know that her super mystical power = being the key to open the gates to "hell". (they don't call it that)


Abel doesn't give a fuck at all, he's just there for CONFLICT. (Has he not noticed that basically the entire world is in a perpetual war?)
Cain literally only appears in one scene to act mysterious, give you a weapon and tell you you'll meet again.


In the end you solve basically nothing.
I think in the postgame you can actualy go see Cain again, probably to go on a war with Heaven SMT Nocturne style, but the credits have already rolled so I'm not expecting something life shattering.

The heaven/hell stuff is the most basic metaphor, there is no connection to the bible aside from the names of the characters, and the fact that Cain is in a hellish looking place.

My biggest issue is that healing is extremely impractical/bad. Reviving however, fully heals, costs nothing, and is super fast. I had to rely on reviving; this means that all my losses essentially came from friendly AI placement and behavior instead of say, my own effectiveness in battle.

Randomly: Muramasa Rebirth has a less-annoying similar issue.  Healing items are expensive and money is hard to get and healing is semi-limited, but death just slaps you back to the start of the same screen with full health.  Well, this is certainly less annoying than being encouraged to run away from all encounters to save health at least, but weird that death is the best healing.

Wow this sounds pretty terrible. So only bosses matter I guess?

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I covered how much it was made for me pretty thoroughly when it came out and 12 months later when I replayed it and it still ripped me apart emotionally.  Even when I knew what was happening and was enjoying the simple math/mechanics and how to do things well I was still affected by it to an amazing degree.

generally scenes rooted strongly in XG's bonkers cosmology with contacts and Cain and all that shit don't play well with me. The "Citan betrays you/Fei is Id" scene is kind of the exception to that because the sense of betrayal is very straightforward.

[Grefter]

I was talking about Little Inferno.  Games about setting things on fire are infinitely more emotionally impacting than Evangelion remakes.

[Cotigo]

Yo BTW this came out yesterday
http://store.steampowered.com/app/335670/

Welp. *Install.*

[The Duck]

Yo BTW this came out yesterday
http://store.steampowered.com/app/335670/

Welp. *Install.*

LISA's subheading is called "the miserable adventure of a broken man" so this is to you what Little Inferno is to Grefter.

[Niu]

Gref, DJ, stop making me wanting to have you two play ToD2. Just that I can examine how high your hate value will rise.
(in other words, this means the hate rant is good, give me more)

[Luther Lansfeld]

Super Mario 3D World - Collected every single stamp, got to the top of every single goalpost, got all of thegreen stars in the game on every stage and opened up the final world. There was an ultimate marathon stage, an ultimate CAPTAIN TOAD stage, and an ultimate regular stage. Tackled the Captain Toad stage first, had maybe seven resets on it, pretty legit. Did the marathon stage, which is basically a stage where you have to solve a puzzle / defeat all enemies in the room and collect a green star in ten seconds, but in this stage you have to do thirty of them in a row without screwing up (ones in the maingame would be 5-10 in a row). So that was interesting. Took me some time to beat, maybe an hour or two, but no big.

And then there was the final stage. Filled with cheerful music and pink and blue platforms, the Ciato did not know what she was up against. The tirelessly friendly stage music and aesthetics began to fill me with hate as the course was just a marathon of the trickiest, most challenging bullshit that the game had to offer compressed into one stage. At first I was disappointed that there was only one regular stage, but that feeling went away after the 70th reset. Eventually, after over 100 resets (!) and like four days of plugging away at the damn game, I finally beat that godforsaken stage. As I went through the pipes that were arranged into a cursive "Thank you", it was like a victory lap of fuck yesness. HAHAHAHA!!!

Now I am sad it is over. I think I have Stockholm syndrome.

[Fenrir]

Man I knew that Zenny was going to love it.
There's the Earthbound styled music/graphics too. (the music is great)


LISA is pretty good, it's about as disturbing and crude as it looks but there's heart there too. I'm not too fan of the gross humor sometimes.

The gameplay is nearly Earthbound-simple (there are some pretty basic legaia combos too) but it serves the setting well. It's all about getting you out of your comfort zone. The game is very difficult so far, so the choices do matter.
It's probably a way less interesting game when you know the mechanics perfectly, but right now: oh boy.

The best part is that :

Resting is absolutely not safe, so I try to avoid it and not just auto heal whenever I can but whenever i should. Savepoints aren't necessarily near rest points, so it's not like Baldur's Gate where you just quickload if resting got you in trouble.
Things that happened because we rested so far: Entire party poisoned, one party member fled, one party member got abducted, I got ambushed and suffered a permanent stat loss.

I don't think they're ever going to explain why exactly there are no women anymore.

[Grefter]

ciatos ur ready

the reel dark souls starts hear

ToS - I worked out who Rodyle reminded me of.  He might still be a DBZ dude somewhere, but it is actually Lezard.

So I blew up Palmacosta ranch and that way more cleanly outlined that the bases had self destruct mechanisms.  So the party isn't packing demo kits we don't know about or anything.  That said Raine is the one that blows them both up and the party is is all like " u gonna blew it all up again.  u so gnagsta raine u da real mvp" and they would be so very fucking right.  Highly educated, pragmatic, competent, the game's healer, a Tales healer who has damn decent offensive spells of a good element and she slaps the shit out of Genis repeatedly.  Could Raine be the best Tales character ever?  Her level of pragmatism is like she is a proto-Yuri.

The Palmacosta Ranch arc gives us another amazing character that I can't tell if is original DBZ related OR it is just the Team Four Star version but this guy



Reminds me the shit out of the Ginyu Force. He is melodramatic and is always crazy over the top angry when "inferior beings" ruin shit he is doing and then chuck a giant tantrum while being completely ineffectual.  He sits on a floating lounge above a dais that to get off of he needed the chair to float sideways (like a Wonkervator) half way across the room and have it unfold so he could dismount.  It serves literally no functional purpose.  Otherwise, he is another half elf who dresses in purple, speaks with a lisp and rocks pointed elf booties (I swear those are not standard issue).  ToS may be a little problematic with most of its large villain cast at this rate.

I also want to talk about the plot during this part, because it wants to be really poignant and it kind of fails completely.  They bring back up Marble, the old lady that died at the ranch at Iselia when her Ex Sphere was removed and she turned into a monster and attacked the party, so Lloyd killed her.  Lloyd takes this on as his fault, but the whole time he has been talking about when his mother died how it wasn't his father's fault, it was the people that setup this situation.  Which is literally the same one for reference.  He has this conversation with his Secret Angel Dad Kratos who is always shady in these sequences and once even talks about how you need strength and power to stop these kinds of situations, so you know, foreshadowing the fact that he is A Betrayal Waiting To Happen.  Part of the problem is that this is all trying to reach forward to well past the point where the plot really shits itself.  The other part is that they drag in a fresh NPC to actively ignore any of the party dialogue in favour of listening to Magnius who is all "lolno lloyd is murder" anytime someone tries to ppointed out that um no actually it is the fault of the aliens who abducted her and put her in a concentration camp then turned her into a Bodysnatcher.  It is both contrived and fucks up with the clarity of the foreshadowing.  There is way too much noise for it to be effectively. Not to mention it is a tension that Lloyd already helped Genis through when they hooked him up with an Ex Sphere.

But hey at least the arc also has a little girl having been killed and replaced by some weird kind of half elf that look like Freeza mixed with a Demon who then goes on to back stab a middle aged man they tricked into thinking they could heal his body snatchered wife.  That part is nearly cool.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Super Mario 3D World - Went and beat all of the stages with Peach to get her stamp in my stamp book. I can quit anytime I want.

Oh yeah forgot about this

Super Mario Kart - Old school. 100cc was too stronk for me so I had to turn it on wuss mode. Rude.

[Excal]

Super Smash 3U, been playing both versions of this.  I think I'm going to be regularly using about a dozen characters for the near future, but that's fine.  It'll get smaller with time, and experimenting with a new roster is half the fun.  Sadly, as much as I like the character, I suspect Little Mac is not going to be for me.  That said, I am having a ton o fun as Robin, even if the damned Elf is learning how to dodge Thoron.  But, his attempts to interrupt me are leaving him eating Elthunders more often than I was expecting with my current level of skill, so bonus!  Just means I'll have to learn to be sneakier. 

Aside from that, it feels so nice to have a usable Link back, and I'm really impressed with how Charizard plays.  Shulk, well, he's kinda weird, but my mains for Melee/Brawl were Marth/Ike, so he feels pretty natural to me and I'm adding him in.  I'm actually tempted to add Pikachu back into the roster as well because no one's using him, but, eh, we'll see.  It does explain why I have little desire to add Peach back in despite liking how she plays, since I think Ciato's using her.  Same with not feeling a need for trying out the new and improved Bowser.  He gets a great deal of love already.  Theoretically, I should probably not use Lucina, since we are all using Lucina.  But screw that, Marth's been one of my mains since Melee, him and his less bloodthirsty clone are on my team.  Feels like Ike is still my best character, since all of the tricks I used with him in Brawl feel same or better, but some of his other moves, like Eruption, just feel straight up improved.  Does mean I'll be hosed if I ever play him in Brawl again, but I doubt that'll be an issue.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Ike definitely seems stronger in this game. Clearly he went from FE9 Ike to FE10 Ike. Elf is actually the primary Peach user, but I have tried my hand at her a couple of times. I've been using a roster of Palutena/Zelda/Dedede/Lucian/Samus, with Megaman and Bowser and Bowser Jr. being used a bit less often.

[Shale]

Bravely Default: Picked this up again on the train yesterday. Spent almost the whole commute bashing my head against the Praline fight, and finally won with just Ringabel standing after the last axeman standing OHKOed two people on consecutive turns, leading to his death by Megiddo Flame. Ran through the subsequent rescue mission in a hurry and now I'm grinding for specials before I head into the next dungeon, since it'll probably have a boss fight. Party is Ranger/Spell Fencer/Time Mage/Valkyrie.

[Fenrir]

I pretty much binge played through all of LISA.
What the fuck guys. I liked the game but it remains as wrong as it looks in the end, so most of you shouldn't bother ever. It wasn't Drakengard level fucked up, but pretty fucked up nonetheless.

The story is Last of Us except the main guy doesn't get away with what he did at all, and pretty much everyone dies. He goes all Tony Montana at the end and you can decide if he deserves redemption or not. I went with No.
He also ended the game with no arms because I had sacrificed them earlier. He seemed to have a lot of trouble riding a bike and climbing ropes without hands.

I liked the game well enough and now want to retry it to see different things and carefully watch everything again.
Maybe do a freaking STAT TOPIC.

[Grefter]

How does it actually play?  As much as I love Concept there is still mechanics porn I need to know about.

[Meeplelard]

Alpha Sapphire: Completed!  Final Team was Swampert, Aggron, Latias, Breloom, Manectric and Gardevoir...yes, that's 5 potential Megas and I was juggling them for a while, which led to the situation of "do I really want to go Mega or will I want to save this for someone else?"  When recognizing that flaw, for the last few E4 members, I actually planned ahead of time and shifted items around!

I'll hold off most thoughts until I finish Delta Episode because...reasons.  I guess what I can say is it's about what you expect: a Hoenn game with a Gen 6 coat of paint, just like FRLG were Kanto games with a Gen 3 Coat and HGSS were Johto games with Gen 4.  If you like Hoenn, you'll kike this game!  If you don't like Hoenn...uh...depends if you think the XY improvements are enough to make up <_<?  Otherwise, you pretty much know what you're getting before you play the game given the history of the franchise, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Fenrir]

Err the battles aren't really the most interesting part of the game at all. There are a lot of interesting things mechanically outside of battles that do affect battles though. The first big choice is whether you want to sacrifice your only teammate or your arm for example. Also, when you start getting a ton of teammates, you can have some of them play Russian Roulette to get a fuckton of cash + one new party member to compesate for all the dead ones. I highly recommend it.

The battles are generic unimpressive DQ/Earthbound style.

There are three kinds of characters, those who use SP and do s1ck combos, those who use SP and do not do s1ck combos, and those who use TP.
- SP works like MP.
- TP works like Lufia 2 IP, except it's reset after every battle.
- Combo characters work like Legaia characters, but they can also select skills from a menu. Say if you throw a fireball by typing DAD, you'll do one hit for D, one hit for A, then throw one fireball. You can just select it from the menu but you'll just do the fireball. If you have more than one combo character it can be difficult to remember the combos you want to do, that's why selecting from the menu is an option.

There are a lot of PCs with unique playstyles so that's pretty cool. I mostly used a geese that does a lot of superfast damage and could POIZN (10% mHP damage after every round, works on everything), a fast guy who could restore HP/SP/TP, and a drunk guy who could fully heal the entire party or throw oil at enemies, so the main character could do a ton of damage with his hadoken fireballs.

There are very few areas with random enemies, most encounters are scripted. Most of the fights are against unique humans (which is pretty cool!), sometimes there are some avoidable fights on the world map against generic copy pasted time wasters who give very little exp.
If you hoard items and go back to heal after most battles the game quickly becomes a chore. You really have to learn to not hoard with this one.

The main character is a drug addict:
- Randomly (and often) he'll have stats dramatically reduced because of withdrawal.
- if you feed him drugs he'll do a ton of damage for a short while.
Also at the beginning of the game he can use WASD for his combos. Then he loses W if he loses one arm (that was one of the punches, which he obviously can't do anymore), and then if he loses both he can pretty much only bite enemies and not do combos anymore. (He still retains the useful skills that involve throwing himself at enemies though)

Some enemies can instapermakill allies. Usually you can just reload an earlier save if you don't want to bother. It's pretty hard to get out of the first real boss battle without one death though, and the savepoint is far apart.

[Dark Holy Elf]

"Earthbound's gameplay/graphics/music but made in 2014. Also there are no women." I have rarely heard a game described which I have less desire to play.


Super Smash Bros. - Been playing this a fair bit. I'm definitely settling in to using certain favourites a bit more, so I'm not quite juggling ~10 different characters roughly equally. Palutena I probably use the most, initially for character hype reasons but she is a lot of fun, especially with customs enabled because Angelic Missile just adds so much to her game. She's very mobile with good smash attacks, I like. Second-most-used is glorious Bowser. I enjoy him a lot, he has great damage/knockback on most of his moves and buttstomping one's enemies never gets old. I tend to receive loads of damage/die a lot while playing him but also rack up lots of kills, so it's all good in the Bowser way. Rosalina's the other somewhat unexpected favourite; Luma makes her very tactical to play as and it's fun to try to control to areas of the battlefield at once. It's also fun to sometimes just say "fuck that" and enjoy how powerful some of her attacks become when both Rosalina and Luma hit something at the same time.

I also play Peach, Lucina (because literally our entire group plays Lucina apparently), Mega Man, Bowser Jr., Sheik, Dedede, and both Samuses. Occasionally Mr. Game and Watch, since he was one of my Brawl mains and I'm still pretty good with him, but I just like so many other characters more now. Pikachu, my true Brawl main, I just can't get into; I know the changes to him are lateral but for the things I use most it feels like a big nerf and I just can't enjoy playing him as such, even though I don't think he's bad. (Actually, I don't think anyone in this game is bad?)


Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete - Beat the maingame. I had one reset on Zophar who despite the fact that I'm notably better at RPGs is still a big jerk. Anyway, the game was pretty fun to replay. The gameplay remains some of the best in any DQ-style traditional turn-based game, and the writing is still pretty sharp even if the plot has some problematic elements (and some good elements! The "Lucia is planning to destroy the world to get rid of Zophar" plot twist is pretty great). Man this game would have been so great if Lucia herself were actually a good character. Or even a decent character. The rest of the main cast is good - Hiro's a cut above the average main, Ruby and Ronfar are both excellent comic relief who manage to occasionally be something more, Jean's not too deep but quite compelling, and Leo is just great fun. Hell, the relative weak link of the controllable PCs is Lemina, who's certainly an acceptable comic character. But Lucia being weak casts a bit of a pall on the rest of the game. (Mauri is also awful but fortunately doesn't matter much outside her one arc.)


Hyrule Warriors - Completed my first skulltula image at last, hooray. I'll probably put the game down in a bit, at least for a time, but I do want to get all the L3 weapons first since it's a big goal that I'm relatively close to.

[Fenrir]

This was actually the most feminist game I've ever played.
But yes it is clearly in a no-NEB-zone.

[Grefter]

"Earthbound's gameplay/graphics/music but made in 2014. Also there are no women." I have rarely heard a game described which I have less desire to play.

Then do I have a game recommendation for you!  You can play as a bisexual female elf and have choice from 6 different characters,

*Cue Snow boycotting Dragon Age: Inquisition for rigidly adhering to monogamous relationships*

Game of the year every year!

Little Big Planet 3 - Since I am back home this got played a bit last night since that is what my family do.

I have to be honest, it is pretty rough.  I was introduced at a boss who needs some work in a patch.  I personally think the boss fight is far too tightly tuned.  This game introduced wall jumping, but makes you bounce off immediately instead of being able to hug the wall like a MMX game, so timing jumps over pillars of fire with very little margin for error is pretty unforgiving.  It is at lest a 3 phase boss fight so far with some plat forming between each phase and the platforming is just as unforgiving as the boss fight segment.  Lots of on hit kill sections with very little recovery chance (which to be fair LBP always is one hit kill and you have limited lives at checkpoints).  It is pretty brutal.  I think it might be further along in the game the I initially expected (it looks like the game uses less linear level select that in the past?).

Anyway, to many of the jumps are unforgiving and require you to be moving at full speed (LBP has a little lag while you start running and momentum carries to your jumps, momentum is very very important to the gameplay of the series classically).  Pair that with some of the jump requiring you to swap distance makes it pretty unforgiving.  The windows for timing are more generous than they first appear (you can jump earlier than you expect), but ultimately what I assume is late in the boss fight the times are tight.

That isn't the worst part though, the camera zooms out really really far in the plat forming sequences and then the game plays with moving in and out of the foreground much more.  This leads you to having to follow what is spawning into the screen incredibly quickly during the platforming  sequences.  Sometimes having to do that while your character is catapulting off an uncontrollable bounce pad.  While all the scenery is a sea of green.  A key anger point being one where the game summons up a big jumpe sequence between phase 2 and 3 and the actual way to get TO it is the last thing to spawn, so they draw your attention away from where you need go.

That and multiple times we had runs cut short by the spawn point not popping up to dump people into the field and spawning into limbo in the middle of nowhere.  Everyone dies, everyone is on an infinite plane of nothingness, reset.  Straight up has a bug in the level.

This is significantly less polished than the second game which was also a bit rougher than the first one(but introduced more fun new mechanics than this one has IMO).