What Games are you playing 2015?

[AndrewRogue]

I'm really happy with all of Mass Effect 3's decisions (except everything related to the invincible dumb ninja) but I still am more fond of ME2. It's weird.

Invincible Ninja is one of the weirder elements of ME3. Like, it reads of a weird, fanfic, self-insert character or something.

[The Duck]

My main complaint with ME3 other than Kai Leng is the lack of a Krogan party member. Vega's nowhere close. I guess Citadel addresses this.

Javik also should never have been DLC.

[Luther Lansfeld]

I'm itching to play ME3 just to see the legendary Kai Leng.

Bayonetta 1 - Just finished Chapter 10 and met the amazingly douchey Glorious and Gracious. Whoever created them probably hates all that lives. Luka is such a silly character.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker - Fake endings are all the rage, apparently. I finished Episode 1 and rescued Toadette, but now Captain Toad has been kidnapped by the nefarious Wingo, so Toadette has to save him.

[Fenrir]

You aren't ready for Kei Leng. He cuts you in half.


Have I mentioned that in the special Persona 4 Golden opening, everybody is breakdancing like mad to the sound of some super slow mellow J-pop?
There's this grown man with a Jolly Roger shirt (I forgot his name) and he's pulling these sweet moves because he's hearing the japanese equivalent of a Disney Channel song

It's like they did the animation for the intro, and then someone else decided to insert some crappy J-pop that doesn't fit at all because it's Persona so it needs J-pop. Or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H5pYCw4ET4

Edit: I turned off the music and put on a random ton of music instead. Heavy Metal, Daft Punk. Nelly Furtado. Literally every song fit the animation way better than the J-pop.

Edit 2: The song that fit the best is Lonely Island's Motherlover




P4G Very Hard Mode Solo:


Anyway I beat Avenger Knight at level 11. I waited forever so he could kill Chie and Yosuke, and he ran out of SP before managing that, then spent 5 turns trying Power Charge.  Then he killed Yosuke and I beat him with PULINPA, which wrecks him. GG.


Since I have like only 6 Goho-Ms I have to take a ton of risks or taking the time to get all the way back and then up before grinding.
I am relying on Hama and Mudo even more and they're so awesome. <3 Instant Death. Grind would be super fast if not for Chie and Yosuke. For some reason Chie and Yosuke are super low priority targets to a ton of enemies. I think to physical attacks in general, if that makes any sense.


I need to find a turn off Teddie button.

[Hunter Sopko]

Tried you experiment. The full version of the Psych theme song fits scary well. Best on 2 second delay from starting the video.

[Fenrir]

Niiiiice
We are making this opening pretty awesome



I also like really it with this, to stay with Persona 4ish music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_-o7ljpK_s

[The Duck]

SJW Inquisition: Expressing surprise at two women dancing makes you lose court approval. Bioware is clearly pushing an SJW agenda here, objectively 0/10.

[Hunter Sopko]

Since we're doing crazy, silly, awesome music crossovers. It works okay but not as well as I hoped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6IKTNmn3Uo

Kay, I'm done. Found the best possible fit for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnW35UDmWOI

Start the music, start the video at 4 seconds into the song. Holy shit, so perfect it's scary. ::Drops mike::

Using the video in the link you posted, of course.

[Grefter]

At work so can't do it myself.  Could you test with Clubbed to Death?

ME3 - I did some more stuff.  I am not sure what the lore behind Banshee's is.  They seem to imply they have to come from Ardat Yakshi in the mission they are introduced, but there is like hundreds of them.  Samara explicitly states in ME2 that there is only 3 of them in existence.  When you get to the temple there is clearly more there.  Samara shouldn't really be allowed to lie within her code though?  Whatever they are annoying and boring enemies.

DLC has added more things to help bypass armour, so they mostly just melt to NPCs with armour ignoring full auto weapons.

[The Duck]

I think the implication is that Samara's daughters are the only living Ardat Yakshi; the Banshees in the game must have already been collected.

[Grefter]

I figured it was just that ultimately they didn't need to be Ardat Yakshi and just had to be Asari.  Probably should have emphasised they targeted there as a priority over Thessia just because of fear of the potential of the Ardat Yakshi.

Could have seeded more blah blah about this cycle being one more progressive iteration in increased capability to defeat the Reapers (but then Shephard would be less Jesus). 

Not a big deal, it just feels like a loose thread with potential that could have been pulled harder for stronger world building.  Far from the worst handled part of ME3 obviously.  Space Ninjas and shitty Max Payne fever dreams being the obvious low points.

[AAA]

I thought the idea was that Ardat Yakshi is like some sort of recessive genetic disorder so people can carry the gene but not be Ardat Yakshi themselves. So the reapers could make banshees out of full-blown ardat yakshi or just carriers of the gene, which is presumably far more common. That's also why asari-asari relationships are frowned upon-makes it more likely for Ardat Yakshi to crop up.

edit: Grefter you know as well as I do that running Shepard through a blood maze would be great, especially if they looped Shepard VA instead of a baby crying or some shit.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Bayonetta - Finished Chapter 12! Jeanne is really difficult. ;_; Now I need to pummel the next boss, but I know soon is the rail shooter section, which I am dreading. Although I've been told that it was cleaned up by the Wii U version, which I appreciate.

DDRII - Beat a Difficult 6 and Basic 7 song, and tried a Difficult 7. Deeefinitely not ready for that.

[Grefter]

Mass Effect 3 - Went and started Citadel DLC by accident, so alt F4ed out to make sure I didn't munch an auto save.  Went and got Tali then restarted.

Wrex jumps out of a window 2 stories up from a sky car and destroys it with an elbow drop.  Game of the fucking year.

Citadel is really weird, it is like they took all the good writing that Bioware normally do and put it super concentrated in here instead of the rest of the game where they were being super cereal.  It is pretty dense with all the humour and elicits genuine laugh out loud moments.  I had to stop half way through because it was late and I am thankful for that, it means I get to play it for multiple days.

For Banshee stuffs. 

If it is a recessive gene that is in the general population then they still don't really need to target the Temple though, but I guess there would be a higher population of Asari with it since presumably they will form relationships still on the planet where they would hypothetically only allow Asari on. 

Seeing it with Morinth alive might make more sense?

[Sierra]

EP: I've just twigged to the koona referring to Count Duphaston as "Master D." Now where have I heard that name before?

...

Oh right, exploding Hitler head. This guy just gets more and more trustworthy by the day.

In other news, this game must have the saddest sleep status outside of PSIV.

[Dhyerwolf]

Sleep causes physicals to auto-crit. It certainly has a very sad duration, but considering the effect it might have on your damage, it's can be pretty useful.

[Sierra]

That'd be more helpful if the short duration weren't compounded by a terrible hitrate! (Status hitrates all seem pretty low in this game, so I'd rather take my chances with one that more seriously undermines an enemy's effectiveness for an extended duration, like fracture/disease/bleed).

[Sierra]

EP: Man Penumbra was the saddest boss this game's thrown at me so far. Having a weakness to slashing weapons when there are two swordfighters in the party who know Dual Attack is bad strats. Dude's sitting at 38 HP and he decides to taunt me, "You think you can defeat me, falsin?!" etcetera. Immediately thereafter he gets overkilled by like three hundred damage. Amusingly, this didn't stop him from trying to trash talk. Because there were still more walking bags of EXP enemies on the map, I wandered off to beat them up before properly capturing the boss. Dialogue continued as though I hadn't killed him at all.

Throwing him into a blender post-battle for another useless special attack sure shut him up, though.

Speaking of useless, at some point one of the stray people I rescued gave me a spear that can only be used by women. I...don't think there are female spear-users in this game, game.

[Dark Holy Elf]

DuckTales Remastered - Finished on Normal Mode. Pretty enjoyable, fluffy platformer. Never played the NES game, enjoyed the TV show well enough but it wasn't an all-time favourite + I don't remember much about it any more these days (e.g. I had no idea who Fenton or Gyro were). It's still a fun little game on fluff; diving in the money-pit is great and Scrooge is just such a lovable curmudgeon. Gameplaywise, the pogo mechanic is at least something different which I haven't quite seen in another game, which gives some neat flavour to the platforming sections. Also, maybe this part is nostalgia, but the "three lives and you're out" mechanic works well here, and definitely adds some tension to boss fights and other end-of-level type things. It doesn't work in every game, but it really works here; I can't imagine playing DuckTales with infinite lives. Terrible. On the one hand having one life would also suck with how punitive it would be for one stupid death, so three really is a happy medium.

As a platformer though it can be a bit underwhelming. It's largely too easy aside from a few pits (and there aren't even that many of those), especially once your heart count gets up - eight is ridiculous and I'm not sure what aside from the final boss (or a really bad run of a level) can actually threaten that. It has some obvious parallels to Mega Man, but there are no special weapons to spice up the gameplay, far fewer difficult platforming sections, and random enemy design is pretty eh as well. There are some tough bits, to be sure, like the underground part of the Amazon (in general, definitely the toughest of the first five stages, so it's really weird that it's listed first...), and the final climb, but they're pretty few and far between, and I'd liked to have seen more things like that. Boss design is good, though. Their difficulty is fairly dependent on your heart total of course but it's still a pretty fun set.

The game is littered with small secrets everywhere but they largely feel pretty pointless, since money does extraordinarily little. It's one of those things I do but kinda wonder why. I'm not sure what the best way to remedy this would be... maybe make money able to buy extra lives and e-tanks etc. (and make the game a bit harder to compensate?).

Music's solid. Was nice to finally hear the Moon theme in particular since that's probably one of the most-hyped pieces of game music I completely missed out on and yeah it's pretty great.

May play Hard Mode too? I haven't decided. Not an amazing game, but I'm glad I played it.

[Meeplelard]

Ducktales Remastered is extremely faithful, as far as level design goes, to the original, so any sort of design quirks like the pointless hidden treasures can be traced back there.  Whether they should have changed this or not is a different argument, just trying to demonstrate where the mindset came from.  In particular, being an NES game, the concept of "score" was still pretty common (though some games dropped it, like every Mega Man after the first), and Ducktales money was literally just intended for that.  I think the remastered version does make the money pit fill up more if you have a higher score, so there's that!

If you're wondering, notable changes, besides obvious general update stuff (like plot!), between the NES and the Remake are:

-Intro Stage added
-Final Stage is completely different.  In the original, the game literally just had you redo Transylvania again (hence why the final boss is a random vampire out of nowhere), with a different boss, so no Mt. Vesuvious Death Traps; the post-final boss race also got shaken up.  The original game was literally just "climb a rope and don't do it slowly!" so there was pretty much no challenge there.
-Speaking of bosses, they all got changed notably.  They're the same enemies, but they took advantage of giving them more attacks and more elaborate AI.  For example, Magica Duspell (and Snow is going to kill me for spelling that wrong!) pretty much throw an energy attack, then turned into the bird, flew around, then repeated that.  The fight in Remastered, as you saw, is a lot more involved.
-No money pit in the original


Super Mario Galaxy 2: Started this up, 10 stars in and just beat a giant dragon. 

So far it's pretty much more Mario Galaxy, which isn't a bad thing but I have to say I'm not fond of the waggle for your attack method still.  I will note that Yoshi is more elaborate of a mechanic than I was expecting though.

[Captain K.]

The game is littered with small secrets everywhere but they largely feel pretty pointless, since money does extraordinarily little.

You're Scrooge Fcking McDuck.  Money is everything, and you will have all of it.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Javik being DLC is especially bad given that you need to bring him with you and Liara when you hit Thessia to really get the full effect.

He's SUCH a dick.

[Fenrir]

Persona 4 Golden Very Hard Solo Yessss:


Ada-bro is my favourite S-link so far, he's totes my BFF. I am neglecting my romance options because I'm just hanging out with him all day.

Meanwhile Marie is a pretty bad addition to the game. She has the standard Female Robot / Female Goddess "clueless" personality, who learns what "friendship" is. Kill me already.


I like how Persona 4 Golden is still using the same old demon models from Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne / DDS + a few new ones in the same vein, so they can afford having hundreds of them.
I really do not think that the Persona 5 team has the resources to just model like 200 demons, just so they appear 1 second when you use a spell. So there probably will either be a lot less personas available, or they'll just appear as 2D pictures or something. It's sad!



Shadow Yukiko
I beat Shadow Yukiko at level 20, and I probably could have done it at a way lower level like 17?

Things needed were:
- The best armor available at that point
- A few medicines (100 HP Healing) + a few itemcast Zios / Bufus.
- A Jack Frost (level 16) preferably with Hama. Level him up until he gets Bufula. fuse him into something else with a high magic/level, boom. Elemental affinity doesn't matter since you can't transfer Bufula to a low level persona with phys/fire resistance.
- A Berith (level 15) with Null Fire (not really that needed but cheap and nice?)

I already went over how the first part of the fight is super easy.
When she summons the prince at half HPs, turns out you can just keep attacking her until she gets to 1/4 HPs, and the prince will flee then. This can happen super fast if you git gud.
Because if the prince silences you with Makakajam (this is totally going to happen),  you can just itemcast Zio / Bufu to get extra turns (extra turn = extra chance of status recovery) and double itemcast Zio on him (or itemcast Zio + itemcast that rare 100 MT damage item) to at least make him waste a turn because he's been hit twice in a row.

This means I could get to Yukiko's low HPs phase with near full health. Her super high damage is not too much of a problem if you can survive it -once-, because after she hits with this you can go Bufula -> Médicine; she then usually follows with White Wall, and that means you get to heal for one extra turn. Voila, full HPs.

This would probably not be a good long term strategy. But Shadow Yukiko starts this phase with less than 1/4 HPs and immediately wastes one turn trying to summon her prince, so she goes down pretty quickly.

Tl;dr
I am probably the best at beating Shadow Yukiko in the WORLD. Unfortunately and understandably, no one cares.



I did some extra fights to level up The Aeon Tarot Level 18 Goddess with Japanese Name until she got Invigorate 2, because I really didn't like relying on items to heal SP. Hence fighting Shadow Yukiko at level 20. Still, the grind was surprisingly short because, on the last floor of the castle, Hama wrecks literally everything but some red shadows and golden hands. I'd rather transfer Hama than Healing or elemental spells during fusion.

Very Hard adds a 0,4x multiplier to money, so I get basically no money from fights.
There's no multiplier on item drops though, and since I fought a ton of enemies, I get to be super super rich for this point in the game. I bought 20 Goho-Ms for the sauna, a few books, a few extra medicine, some 3000 yen meals, etc.
Anytime I go do any social link stuff, I make sure to have the tarot-appropriate persona, bought from the compendium.
Nice.


Daring Gigas

lol
Level 23


Shadow Kanji

I think the remake added weaknesses to the two helpers, so they died pretty fast.
I also had Diarama, a phys resist demon, and I even found some Beads at this point.
There was nothing particularly threatening about the battle, especially compared to random battles in the sauna. So this uh only took two tries?

Level 24

[Cotigo]

Saints Row 4: Before the last mission, beat Enter the Dominatrix. EtD was pretty funny, and the Auto-tune speaking guy makes me really want to play SR3 if he's in it.

I may not beat the game though and just watch the ending because I've run into a new problem. Suddenly, the cutscenes and the audio don't sync up anymore. This started I imagine after updating my graphics card... It's a pretty common problem, too, with both SR3 AND SR4, from the little bit of googling I've done on it. Nobody really has had a good fix for it, either. If any of y'all know how to fix it it'd be appreciated, but I've played through the game enough to quit here and not care too much.

[Sierra]

Quitting before the end is fine. I honestly regretted having to kill the villain even though he blew up the Earth, just because he was obviously having so much fun.

I didn't play EtD, but SR3 definitely has an Auto-tune pimp as one of your main allies.

~

EP: Olifen's done, Thage's begun. And I don't care what the game says, there's an H in her name and dammit, I'm going to pronounce it. Anyway, she's unapologetically bitchy to everyone and it's honestly pretty refreshing. Also her stated goal is explicitly Gotta Catch 'em All, so finally someone admits this game really is just gothic Pokemon. Weird team dynamic; can't reliably use the lead for combos this time because the lead's a squishy mage instead of an unkillable frontliner. This means I don't use combos as much (since that would entail losing her turn altogether instead of merging it with someone else's) and instead of those being the go-to for capturing enemies it's usually Thage exploding the fuck out of dudes instead. It's also pretty great using her to bait enemy mages into combat range. Enemies in this game will almost always target a PC they can hit a weakness against, since they psychically check your stats before doing anything (this is fine because that's what the player does man); they don't seem bright enough to recognize the Immune to Magic flag, though. On that note, I see I might actually need to keep healing items around for once. (I haven't even let anything have a chance at hitting Thage yet, but enemy archers are fear.)

Raki not having access to skills is *frumple*, but he's still pretty boss anyway.

~

Touhou Labyrinths: floors 16-18. Not as bad as expected geographically, but damn do the randoms get more and more annoying as the game goes on. Stupid MP-busting mushrooms that act before everyone else, stupid HP-halving skellies that act before everyone else, stupid fairies that simultaneously buff the entire enemy party and hit one PC with HP->1 and act before everyone else. Argh. Dungeon dives are like half as long as of F19 just because party exhaustion sets in so quickly here. Game basically says, "Hm, what's that? What do you mean you're not using Aya?!"

~

FONV: rank three GRA challenges are just the worst. I completed the "Kill Legion officers with Ranger Sequoia" one by headshotting Caesar, but I dunno what's going on with the other two. Kill cazadores with the shittiest bombs? Nope. Kill deathclaws with the game's shittiest weapons? Noooope. I might have to just do the robot-bashing one (sneak attack crits might make individual kills feasible) by stealth ganking dudes from around the vertibird crash site (don't think gutsies/sentries respawn anywhere else?), then go on an NCR killing spree. Yeah, I know, but at least I can reload after doing the latter part.