What Games are you playing 2015?

[Grefter]

I downloaded Dark Souls 2 Super Awesome Edition, looked at the glorious 60 FPS, then realized I knew the game too damn much already.

fenrir plz do a casual Champions bare fist only run just so I can read more Fenrir.

[Cotigo]

Cid - Rephrase, we beat Nito but none of the other Lord Soul bosses. Yeah, Nito was the only boss so far that I am not sure I could beat Solo with Comp Bow.

Anyway, run is deas because DS2 remastered is out. Oh well none of the other bosses were going to be a challenge anyway.

[Captain K]

Streetpass Mii Plaza Roundup!

Mii Force:  Finally beat Arcade Mode.  I usually choke on the last world (example, got to 5-1 with 8 lives, lost 5 on last boss alone).  But I was in the zone for once and didn't even die to the last boss.  First of these games where I've gotten all the plaza tickets.

Flower Town:  Only plaza ticket left is the one for growing a short Gloria, which is proving difficult.  All the ones from the seed shop are average size, and I can't get any other short plants to breed into Glorias.  Other than that I'm at 74/80 breeds grown.

Warrior's Way:  Missing the tickets for greeting 50 people, killing 100, and the ridonkulous one for killing 300.  Meh.

Mystery Manor:  Missing the tickets for getting all weapons (grindy but doable) and getting all puzzle boxes.  Which is fairly ridonkulous due to there being 50, they don't show up often, and you can get duplicates.

[Crystalgate]

Pillars of Eternity: Got my own fortress. So far it's not doing anything, but I've build 2-3 buildings so far. I've picked peasant type of weapons to focus on. They give you Spears which has increased accuracy and look dumb when you dual wield them. I also get hatchets as a more defensive option, but I suspect that won't be very useful. Deflection seems like an all or nothing option, the more you have, the more additional points help. Since my character is more DPS focused, she doesn't gain much from extra deflection.

So far the game is fun, but not really that great. I'll see how things turns out when I get more options.

[Fenrir]

The bit where he spawned the sword inside scenery was very rude, though.

EDIT: what are the restrictions on #3, anyway? I had hoped that if nothing else co-op would make hacking through the more tedious chalice levels less of a boring thing, but I don't immediately see any way to set that up.

It works like every other area in the game, you need to use a -1 insight bell and be in the same area.
If you need help for a boss and want a stranger to help you, you need to share your dungeon, get inside, waste 1 insight, and hope that there's a stranger who's selected the random dungeon list, seen YOUR dungeon, gotten inside and used the jolly co-op bell.
Note that the random stranger needs to have unlocked the dungeon level 4 by going through his own dungeon level 1/2/3 to be able to access your level 4 dungeon.
So yeah chances are pretty abysmal.

I downloaded Dark Souls 2 Super Awesome Edition, looked at the glorious 60 FPS, then realized I knew the game too damn much already.

fenrir plz do a casual Champions bare fist only run just so I can read more Fenrir.

Bring me 50 awesomestones and I'll do it

Champions run on NG actually sounds good, and I've never tried it! With the new item/enemy placement I hope I can find some exotic weapon earlygame to base my playthrough around that. That or pyromancy.

Bloodborne: Got some arcane gem on my Ludwig's, got the arcane stat to 50. Harry Potter hitting like a truck.
I also found the blood rock to get Ludwig's to +10..... Jesus Christ man. You can now terrify El cid and me just by mentioning "LALALAAALA"

BRB going to eat a few umbilical cords. Yummy.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Long Live The Queen - I managed to complete a full magical girl queen playthrough and a military dynamo no-magic run in the same night. Now, I wonder whether I can pull off having a print, a hospital and death magical girl abilities in a successful run as well. Also should start planning for lesbianism playthroughs and evil monster Elodie runs as well. This game is ridiculously addictive for what is essentially an underage magical girl murder simulator.

(Have I mentioned there are achievements for running into the ridonkulous ways you can horribly die? And they're all drawn in chibi-cutesy-animu-style? Yeah.)

I also want to make a goon Elodie run, but holy shit social stats rule the universe in this game.

[Luther Lansfeld]

The Last Story - I raided a bandit's fortress in a way that very much felt like a D&D party's adventure. You run into enemies in discreet pockets and you slowly make your way through the dungeon. And after that, I just saw the awkward/romantic scene at the Stargazer's Tower between Zael and Calista. I'm really enjoying the character work in this game -- contrasting this game to FE9, which I just watched, mercenaries act like (gasp) what you'd expect lower-class people who are trying to get by in the world to act like. Calista is definitely feisty compared to her trope and I quite like her.  The gameplay sure is a thing of no difficulty so far though. :p

[Crystalgate]

Pillars of Eternity: Went to the big city in Defiance Bay. I decided to explore and do some sidequests before progressing the story. I soon hit a catacomb and went in to loot it and fight some skeletons since catacombs have a 100% chance of the dead taking a stroll. Suddenly my main quest journal entry updated. Turns out that was the next main story location. Also experienced what happens if you accidentally pull three different monster groups. I should let enemies come to me, even if they are below my level.

[Fenrir]

Nevermind Cid, you can do a dungeon quick search once you've found a short root chalice thing.
It takes a while though. You need to go through 5 chalice dungeons, and that's assuming you have the ingredients for each one of them.
So far I have found 0 co-op partners and 0 people I could invade so far. But hey!

I've been using the Rosmarinus +9, it's like the Flamethrower, except it sprays holy water instead of fire and has S scaling in arcane. It is rather useless against bosses, but it can become spray2win against multiple weak enemies, I like it.

Suddendly enemies started dropping tons of souls (About as much as the final dungeon enemies), and this was needed because these bosses eat all my blood vials. I'm not too much of a fan of the chalice dungeon bosses lately, they have too much HP and a grab attack is typically instant death even at full HP. Which is a bit of a problem with bosses with ADHD like BSB++. (Thankfully I found a way to completely cheese BSB)

I got in a few situations where I just had to run away like mad and couldn't find an exit, and kept seeing new enemies and just kept running and running in circles. LALALA enemies were not involved. So this is all good for me.
What's bad is the blood chunk drop rate. In fact you can forget about them entirely. This means you can upgrade two weapons in NG and that's it unless you want to spend your life in chalice dungeons.

Right now I'm in a defiled dungeon. Defiled means my HP is cut in half. Hilarity ensues. Time spent farming for vials is still 0 though, Fudo take notes.

[jsh357]

I have been playing Bloodborne for days, still can't beat the first boss.  Run out of blood vials every time.  The game has been great aside from this.  I get tired of playing every time because I don't want to farm the vials back up.  It makes one wonder why From decided the Estus Flask wasn't good enough.

[Laggy]

FYI for the DS2 vets, apparently Scholar of the First Sin changed up enemy locations and placement quite a bit.

For example, there are approximately 15 hollows up the first ladder in Forest of Fallen Giants (you REALLY don't want to just run past that). Also there's totally an ogre in the river that grabbed and ate me for a oneshot on my first entry. Cardinal Tower was actually just quite an ordeal in general, though the bosses were easy. Dull Ember's right at the start of Lost Bastille. Cathedral of Blue's now guarded by one of those asshole red dragons and you can't just run past it.

Some rebalancing stuff was also supposed to have happened, I heard lightning nerf, armor set rejiggering, definitely some souls costs on merchants have changed, the degree of impact of any or all of this I have no clue because I'm playing for the first time

I actually only know any of this because I've been plugging stuff into the wiki whenever I run across an item/enemy/whatever and noticing the discrepancy.

ofc they didn't fix the really obvious glaring bugs like durability being tied to dps (why) or soul memory being a shit mechanic

[SnowFire]

ofc they didn't fix the really obvious glaring bugs like durability being tied to dps (why) or soul memory being a shit mechanic

FPS, right?

[Laggy]

too many mmos

[Sierra]

I downloaded Dark Souls 2 Super Awesome Edition, looked at the glorious 60 FPS, then realized I knew the game too damn much already.

Man I'm almost set on cosplaying Maiden Astraea and maining all those support miracles, don't try and tell me it wouldn't be awesome clubbing everything to death as Garl Vinland.

Laggy that is 5x the hollows past that ladder compared to vanilla DS2. Bloodborne really likes huge mobs of dudes that it's tough to aggro individually, maybe Scholar decided to take a page from that.

Max power bare fists was kind of underwhelming when I finally got it (and getting it was incredibly tedious). The power's good, but your hits are a bit slower and wonkier than the caestus so I don't think it's entirely a fair trade.

[Cotigo]

So is the Caestus actually a viable weapon in DS2?  Or is the scaling ruse a distaction?

[Sierra]

The caestus is great if you dual-wield it. You get a cool boxer one-two combo that makes up for the lowish base damage with extra hits (the damage isn't bad on a single hit, but the enhanced striking capacity helps the weapon a ton). Scaling is pretty good if you go straight-up quality and pump both STR/DEX to the gills (I think it's A/A at +10?), and DS2 actually has multiple damage bonus rings which stack and greatly benefit fast weapons. It's also a strike weapon so hits weakness on a ton of annoying shit. Objectively there are probably better weapons, but personally I find it the most fun way to play the game. I went in expecting punching to be a challenge run when I first used it and had a surprisingly smooth time with almost everything.

You might eventually want to upgrade to kung fu grip though.

[Grefter]

Caestus is legit (unless they nerfed it lol).  Basic Club is also legit.  Mace is OP.

Crushing damage is king in DS2.

[Fenrir]

The only time I managed to beat DS2 with no deaths was with a dual caestus build. They are awesome. You do need to put everything into str and skl tough. (and hp) I liked to just leave them normal and not have a quality build, I don't think it changed that much and it allowed me to put everything into strength.

Try to downgrade your Caestus to Bone Fist as soon as you find it (wherever it is in Scholar) if you want to do divekicks in Dark Souls.
Edit: Oh wow I'm late, they all said it already
Also, Giant Club is legit, Mace is what you use in SL1 but I'm not sure it's that OP
Also, the bone fist really is a downgrade compared to caestus, but 100% worth it.

Cid: Ok yes

jsh: I think this is a pretty good change for people who already are good at Souls game (I do think this works better than estus, for this game, because it makes every encounter have a bit more meaning), but it sucks for everybody else.

[Fenrir]

Also:

FF Type 0 HD:
6 is Lady Edgy mc Edge, she is insufferable.
But 9 adding YO at the end of every sentence has gone from annoying to awesome.
I went into a random battle and kept fighting new enemies (with higher and higher levels), replacing all the dead PCs until only King was alive. I still won and it felt really great.
Then 2 lvl 99 Behemoth Kings ambushed me on the world map. I yakety-sax-ran around the battlefield for like 3 minutes before finally confronting my inevitable death. I think the behemoths only run away after killing someone so I was fucked. Dick move, game.


Escape Goat 2: Ok so you're a goat, rescuing sheep, in a tower. The sheep sometimes are thankful, and sometimes leave cryptic messages. In the rooms where you rescue the sheep, there often are a lot of switches that, when all pressed, make all the blocks in the room nice and symetric without serving any other purpose whatsoever (and when you leave / come back, they're messy again)

If you try to escape the tower early on, you get the classic Castlevania end scene, with the goat on a cliff while the castle crumbles (presumably with the sheep you haven't rescued getting crushed to death inside)
If you try to 100% save every sheep and explore every room, you eventually get into another one of these rooms I mentioned earlier. IF you press all the switches, the room gets all tidy, except for one block right in the middle ruining everything. There's also a written message in the room saying something among the lines of "Sometimes things don't fit perfectly, but that's ok, that's what makes life interesting"
Then you leave the room and get the same ending with the castle crumbling with no fanfare. The end.

[superaielman]

FF1- Rakos are victorious. hardest dungeons:

1. Marsh Cave (I was L6 for this so I was running from everything)
(Volcano)
2. Ice Cave (Duh)
3. Canoe to the Ice Cave
4. Walk to the Marsh Cave
5. Walk to Pravokia

The Volcano would've been hell if I had done it unpromoted. Not only are the thieves completely useless there, Kary can OHKO every single party member I had there. To make it worse, none of my physicals would've broken defense without some serious temper/hasting (Maximum four hits after haste=;_;).  Getting through that dungeon would've been awful, beating Kary would've taken some luck with status and Inviz stacking.

Anyway. Thieves suck. They suck a whole lot. Anyone who has used one before in the NES/PSX version knows how bad they are. The really insulting part is that they are at their absolute worst during the hardest part of the game. They get competent post promotion, but still are far worse damage dealers and tanks than Knights. To make it worse, the gap between them and Red Wizard for physicals is pretty tiny by the end. Temper is wonderful and the armor's nice, but they get access to heavy armor at the time when the gap closes (Due to Ruby Armlets/Protect rings) which is just insulting.

The big dungeons (Sea shrine/Tiamat's arc/Temple of Fiends) all dragged much more than usual due to using two ninjas instead of a monk/knight.  The one good thing that came from this was steamrolling Chaos- three temper users there meant I was hitting 1500 damage a turn by the end of the fight.

[Sierra]

Bloodborne: Likely getting backburnered tomorrow, but for now Maya's up to Nightmare of Mensis. Three things to note:

-I made friends with Djura this time! This is as it should be because he shares the amazing voice of Marvelous Chester.

-I took a closer look at the mummy in the chair that warps you to the lecture hall? And, uh, Mico, I don't think you're actually going to wake up after all.

-This time I told Patches I wouldn't forgive him. He did what you'd expect and insisted we were friends anyway, "Plain as a pikestaff." He gave me the same rewards as before so I figured that was that. Then I ran off to clear the first floor of the lecture hall, because I hadn't been there before on this file? And on my way back to Patches' room to take the ladder back up, after I've already killed all the local enemies, I get 6k echoes out of nowhere. What was that, what offscreen enemy killed itself by falling through scenery or whatever? I get back to Patches' room and he's gone. Patches, noooo, why did you have to take rejection so hard?

Incidentally, my brother tells me Patches will kick you into the Nightmare Frontier poison swamp (it's like quicksand in there, mmm) if you find him there? I didn't even know he was in the zone, never saw him. But then, I just bolted through most of that shithole. If I ever have the patience for a third run I'm going to try not talking to Patches at all in the Forbidden Woods and see if this alters his reaction any in the lecture hall.

[The Duck]

Seconding/thirding/whatever the Caestus, especially dual Caestuses(?). I had to move away from that in the DLC though.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Crusader Kings 2: Game of Thrones mod.  Played as Robb Stark during the War of the Five Kings because that's usually fun.  The Ironborn Invasion was definitely the most interesting part of the early game.  Theon fucks off and Balon invades as he is want to do.  Meanwhile Stannis kills Renly as he almost always does, and I immediately go after Margaery because marrying Margaery doesn't guarantee the Reach will join your side (because Mace Tyrell is a lazy, cowardly fuck) but it does guarantee he won't join the Lannisters. He says no.  So my usual "win the war with relative ease" card doesn't work.  I ask Dorne if I can marry Arianne and they also tell me to fuck myself.  So I have no real allies and Ironborn swarming all over the North.

Considering that many of my options are exhausted I have to have the Blackfish's army in the Riverlands basically Benny Hill while I mass all my levies in the North together under the King's banner and swing it around into the Ironborn.  Balon and Asha Greyjoy are leading this army and Robb chops off Balon's head before taking Asha prisoner.  Apparently under the laws of the Iron Islands this means I am now their king (having paid the Iron Price for it) and the Iron Islands pledge their loyalty to the King of Winter.  SHIT IS GONNA GET GOT.

I never knew that could happen but it's pretty goddamn rad.  Roose Bolton (who is my best friend because I keep winning) told me about a dragon in the farthest eastern reaches of Essos so I should probably go and try and tame it for when Dany inevitably shows up, so I can murder her more easily.

[Shale]

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay I got SRWZ3.2

[Dark Holy Elf]

Nier - Five puzzle pieces get. The game sure is in downer mode now.

New Super Mario Bros. U - Finished the first four worlds in my one-player run of this game. It's fun, although I can't help but compare it negatively to 3D World now.

Wild Arms 4 challenge run

Belial (4 resets + 3 resets): Kinda knew this one had the potential to be nasty. Anyway, no Slow Down or Intrude means very few options to get in hits past the distortion, just doubleturns and hoping she doesn't reset the barrier. Unfortunately she presses offensively a bit too hard to be entirely focused on offence. And unlike all the previous fights this one has to be long, so Yulie dying at any point before near the end is a loss, and of course Yulie gets easily 2HKOed (can be OHKOed at the highest variance but this never happens) by Tank Drop. If Yulie gets a spare turn she can Protect herself but mostly she spams Material to keep everyone alive (using it on a leypoint for offence is also an option, but not a terribly realistic one for the most part). Raquel's job is to apply poison, but that her speed and not starting adjacent makes that a bit difficult. Belial can't be shut out so I also try to move to corner her, but 4D Pocket can certainly make a mess of that. Tough one, victory takes a bunch of things coming together. Well, the second victory. The first I eventually got very lucky with her moving twice in a row with the barrier down. Fun fun!

Grabboid: Okay another boss who takes a long time. Fortunately he pretty much just has basic physicals and Illusion and neither is that big a deal. Stone Bullet counters really hurt but they're rare, poison is still great. I botch this fight slightly and let him claim the centre hex and thus threaten Yulie at one point, but by then I'm close enough to winning that it doesn't matter too much.

Platapana passage deserves note because the randoms here are a step up, Cremation really hurts and Efreets are annoying to kill with their Arnaud resistance. I get MP Charge for Arnaud here, it's huge with how long this dungeon is especially since I forget to go out and heal after Grabboid.

Kresnik: So I go into this fight with Max HP Down (so Jude is like 2200 HP) and only three shots of Phantom Line left. I suddenly realise this is a bad idea, since after all I can't heal. But... I win anyway. I make use of the doubleturns to defend at opportune times (as well as moving away once), and Emergency MP at the end of the fight gives me the extra MP I need to get off five Phantom Lines and win. Kresnik is bad.