What Games are you playing 2016?

[Excal]

PXZ2 Chapter 21 - Bison continues his role as the co-villain of the piece (seriously, he's proactive going into this and is causing all kinds of problems for non Street Fighter people, whereas all the other non-Ouma folks are pretty reactive and just taking advantage of the chaos).  As well, Sagata Sanshiro = Poochie?  I think yes.  On the plus side, Yuri's gone up in my estimation with the non-stop stream of sarcasm he levelled at the guy.

Segata is... hard to get unless you really know about the Sega Saturn market back then.
He is completely random if you don't have any foreknowledge. But a glorious peice of nostalgia if you do.

That's kinda what I figured given who is super into him as well.  Since I could buy Sakura Wars getting their start on the Saturn, though I always thought Space Channel 5 was more Dreamcast era.  Regardless, my well of trivia for him is pretty dry since I was on the victorious side of the Console Wars.

[Niu]

Youtube it, and you can find Sakura's commercial with Segata. Where she is all Segata san~
You can find other things too if you Youtube it harder.

I am also amused that one of the scenes felt like something out of Desmonds and Dragons.  Namely, Captain Commando really, really makes me think of the friend who plays Alexander, and well, Alexander himself.  There is also the quintessential merchant, Sylphie or something like that.  Super opportunistic, super capitalist, totally goes where the money is.  Because the team works well with her, Captain Commando tries to recruit her by appealing to rightness and justice.  She, kinda shoots him down, hard, because that isn't profitable and would force her to neglect all of her more morally flexible customers.  However, she is willing to give us all a free ride not to where we want to go, but where we need to go.  And completely coincidentally, a lot of our enemies manage to very quickly find out, from a mysterious informant they all paid individually, separately, and handsomely, where the party happened to be.

Love that merchant so much.

Finally, gameplay.  the gameplay is kinda braindead easy right now.  Only buying one of each weapon and armour each map, which seems to be more than enough.  Game is actually less threatening than PXZ1, but it's also going by a lot faster too.  Notably, in spite of the hardcap on attacks, enemies are dying faster.  At this point in PXZ1, mooks were still killable in one chain, but nothing else was.  Here, mooks are killable by support+solo attacks.  With a back attack, a good weapon, and a Super, I can still kill most bosses with a single Pair chain.  Which is insane.  Also insane are the damage numbers getting pumped out.  I've managed to rack up 60k damage in a single attack sequence.  That's a good score for PXZ1 endgame.  And because you're fuelling skills with SP instead of XP, you're a lot more likely to spring for marginal/situational skills, since they won't detract from pumping out supers anymore, which means you can get your attack boosters a lot easier.

As for Sylphie, just what went wrong with her after NxC until her reappearnce in this game.
She wasn't that much of a heartless merchant back then.
Or did she just lose all decency just because the Dust World MCs are not here?

Damage? It gets worse. One shotting the last boss is acctually easy. Hiryuu and Akira hits so hard! 500K+ damage is not big deal by end game!
But that's why this game has after game super boss with hp in the millions!

[Sierra]

I have a heroine addiction.

<3 <3 <3

I don't know what you're talking about.

Now I'm going to sperge on about music in Fromsoft games for a while and you should skip this post:

Demon's's's: The only song I actually appreciated in this game was Astraea's theme (which is exceptionally poignant with context but I imagine wouldn't shine without it). In retrospect I also kind of like the bad end music, but since I haven't experienced that in context, it is pretty much entirely due to this remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5678aqCRTM&list=PL770h6MBVlwHmzMs7e4DYmY4rAJyDOLL4&index=6

I can't stand the Tower Knight theme! The goofy laughing just grates on my nerves. And not the way boss music is supposed to.

Dark Souls 1: Best to listen to are Gargoyles, Sif, Golem, O&S, 4K, Gwyn, but there's other stuff that's outstanding for mood. Artorias theme for example is simple and not much to grab your ear in a vacuum but also exactly what you needed to hear at that time and place. I also think Quelaag's is an aptly schizophrenic match considering what you're fighting. There's a few tracks which sound a bit samey (notably the demon bosses, which the game unfortunately likes to reuse the most) but overall I think the soundtrack does a very good job of varying the tone. I feel like most tracks I can point to and confidently say that doesn't sound exactly like anything else here.

Dark Souls 2: Yeah I think we're pretty much in agreement here. Ruin Sentinels is good, Sir Alonne is great. There's a handful of other "Yeah I guess that was alright" moments like Dragonslayer/Chariot, but mostly it's a mass of forgettable foreboding. Sakuraba phoning it in hard.

Bloodborne: It's the best OST because the songs make optimal use of pacing. You're talking about crescendoes? Bloodborne's composers understood how to exploit these. Bloodborne's soundtrack does the most outstanding job of shifting tone to match gameplay changes that I have encountered in a game. Bosses pretty much always have 2-3 distinct behavioral phases and every time they shit gears, the music keeps pace to reflect the escalation of AI nastiness. Recognizable musical themes and phrases come back embellished, darker and meaner and exactly as tense as the player should feel by the final stage. You can listen to pretty much any boss track out of context and exactly pinpoint the Shit Just Acquired Verisimilitude moment. It's fucking brilliant. Not one of my favorite songs but a very good illustration of the subtle menace this soundtrack can casually convey when it wants to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWx4we-xCMk

It'd actually be shorter to pick out the few tracks that don't really seem special to me than to list all the ones that work...but yes, Gascoigne and BSB are great work, Amy and Darkbeast are good tension builders, and The Queen, how do you not mention that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTN5x0M9Qmo (2:21!)

Also spoilers for last boss but holy shit you guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V9zxXN1rx0

Dark Souls 3: So the bit in that song above where the chorus kicks in? DS3 fails at music because it does not have such a fine understanding of pacing. Too often tracks start in your face and stay in your face. That's okay sometimes! But you can't blast gothic chorus immediately in every song and expect it to retain impact. It's not going to keep seeming epic. It'll start seeming like wallpaper because there's not enough distinctness between songs. And that's mostly my response to DS3's soundtrack--little of it impresses out of context, and what does so in-game accomplishes this through contrast by actually being restrained (Abyss Watchers/Dancer pretty much it). These songs are just too lacking in tonal variety for any of them to stand out.

[Excal]

As for Sylphie, just what went wrong with her after NxC until her reappearnce in this game.
She wasn't that much of a heartless merchant back then.
Or did she just lose all decency just because the Dust World MCs are not here?

You ask what went wrong.  I ask what went right.

[Dark Holy Elf]

The Civfantatics crowd did a rebalance patch for Civ5
[...]
Really guys, you made Artillery -better-?!

Nope, sorry, this is an either/or thing.

[Grefter]

Rebalancing doesn't imply improving balance.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Point.

Laggy where is LFT v666 with massively buffed Summon Magic and swordskills/Excalibur.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Civ5 Community Improvement Patch- Played a few games of this. The Civfantatics crowd did a rebalance patch for Civ5, drastically altering game mechanics. It... rather reminds me of the Mod of Balance in FF1. There's a lot of thought and effort put into rebalancing the game, but overall the changes end up detracting rather than adding to the game. In particular, the tourism system is not well balanced like at all (It's too easy for AIs to get culture victories pre industrial era, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it). It also has really bad interface. You get a million popups per turn thanks to the changes (Bonus yields, etc) and it just makes it painful to hack through at the start of turns. It also has some absolutely dumb design choices. Really guys, you made Artillery -better-?! What the hell.  It also tends to crash a fair bit, as it is a very heavily modded version of Civ5.  It also tries to nerf the relative value of population by no longer tying food to science and nerfing rationalism. I don't think it's that effective- more food still means more ability to work production tiles and specialist slots- but it's at least an attempt to change things up.


It was fun for a game or two, but I can't really recommend it.

Sounds like every major Civ rebalance ever.  Turns out it's not as easy as people think to make an enjoyable game?

[SnowFire]

The Community pack always struck me as "remake Civ4 in Civ5."  While I guess it's kinda cool you can make a Civ4.5 that is a bizarro mix, I think Civ5 works better as just Civ5.  Plus I *like* a lot of the changes Civ5 made from Civ4 that they reverted.

Also since this is Dark Souls 24/7 chat here, I have important "explain funny YouTube video" questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgfY2o6dkoM
What's up with the skeleton mob doing the dance-off @2:30-3:00 or so?  i.e. what's supposed to happen here?  Is there just an invisible barrier, or did an entire zone's worth of skeletons get mysteriously aggro'd at once?

(Most of the rest of it is self-explanatory enough and pretty amusing.  The invasion @7:20 is good times.)

[Fudozukushi]

There's a huge mob of skeletons you're supposed to run past.  They can't go in that door because it's a transition to a boss so they faceplant into the invisible barrier.

[superaielman]

Civ5 Community Improvement Patch- Played a few games of this. The Civfantatics crowd did a rebalance patch for Civ5, drastically altering game mechanics. It... rather reminds me of the Mod of Balance in FF1. There's a lot of thought and effort put into rebalancing the game, but overall the changes end up detracting rather than adding to the game. In particular, the tourism system is not well balanced like at all (It's too easy for AIs to get culture victories pre industrial era, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it). It also has really bad interface. You get a million popups per turn thanks to the changes (Bonus yields, etc) and it just makes it painful to hack through at the start of turns. It also has some absolutely dumb design choices. Really guys, you made Artillery -better-?! What the hell.  It also tends to crash a fair bit, as it is a very heavily modded version of Civ5.  It also tries to nerf the relative value of population by no longer tying food to science and nerfing rationalism. I don't think it's that effective- more food still means more ability to work production tiles and specialist slots- but it's at least an attempt to change things up.


It was fun for a game or two, but I can't really recommend it.

Sounds like every major Civ rebalance ever.  Turns out it's not as easy as people think to make an enjoyable game?

Basically. I like the effort and thought into it, but it largely misses the mark to me.  Another example: It's very possible to get extreme swings in happiness in the new happiness system (I've seen an LP where it swung by 30 points in a few turns, ouch) and that's not from ideological pressure. And Artillery is stronger (wtf), but the biggest thing that makes it better is cities are far easier to take and damage now than in vanilla civ 5. I would have lowered Artillery strength myself in this case.  It was already too easy to absolutely smash the shit out of AIs once you get Artillery/Bombers even on Deity, and the patch doesn't change that.

[Captain K]

"Huh... it's a woman.  Time to mount!"

Never change Dark Souls community.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Civ5 Community Improvement Patch- Played a few games of this. The Civfantatics crowd did a rebalance patch for Civ5, drastically altering game mechanics. It... rather reminds me of the Mod of Balance in FF1. There's a lot of thought and effort put into rebalancing the game, but overall the changes end up detracting rather than adding to the game. In particular, the tourism system is not well balanced like at all (It's too easy for AIs to get culture victories pre industrial era, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it). It also has really bad interface. You get a million popups per turn thanks to the changes (Bonus yields, etc) and it just makes it painful to hack through at the start of turns. It also has some absolutely dumb design choices. Really guys, you made Artillery -better-?! What the hell.  It also tends to crash a fair bit, as it is a very heavily modded version of Civ5.  It also tries to nerf the relative value of population by no longer tying food to science and nerfing rationalism. I don't think it's that effective- more food still means more ability to work production tiles and specialist slots- but it's at least an attempt to change things up.


It was fun for a game or two, but I can't really recommend it.

Sounds like every major Civ rebalance ever.  Turns out it's not as easy as people think to make an enjoyable game?

Basically. I like the effort and thought into it, but it largely misses the mark to me.  Another example: It's very possible to get extreme swings in happiness in the new happiness system (I've seen an LP where it swung by 30 points in a few turns, ouch) and that's not from ideological pressure. And Artillery is stronger (wtf), but the biggest thing that makes it better is cities are far easier to take and damage now than in vanilla civ 5. I would have lowered Artillery strength myself in this case.  It was already too easy to absolutely smash the shit out of AIs once you get Artillery/Bombers even on Deity, and the patch doesn't change that.

I really like the improved strength of cities in Civ V.  Knocking an established city over shouldn't be a trivial task, that's what attacking settlers is for.  Beyond Earth's model is probably the most interesting option, though.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Cities being tougher to take is an improvement, I agree.

I don't like how cities get easier to take as the game goes along, though; that's pretty much the opposite of real history. Although it might be justified for game balance reasons, I'm not really sure.

[AAA]

Probably just so end-game wars against civs with dozens of cities isn't even more of a massive slog than it already is. Or they could just make it that way to keep you from running out the clock if you're going for a conquest victory.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Yeah, that makes sense.

Breath of Death VII - Escaping from prison. This dungeon was quite a spike up. At least it makes an RPG prison break actually feel difficult to pull off? Also, Erik is a hilariously bad PC so far. He really, really wishes this game had the Protect command like Cthulhu Saves the World so he could put his "good bulk, bad everything else" build to some use.

FFX - Got through the big one-hour screen on Gagazet on my low-HP run after dying near the end twice. Ambushes have become lethal, Sonic Steel is the best just for giving me a chance to deal with them.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Well, the increased force projection as we move into the Industrial Era is pretty accurate.  The idea of being able to screen your border and through it completely insulate your population weakens with artillery and modern warships and then evaporates with planes and missiles.   I like how that's modeled in later versions.

[Fenrir]

Dark Souls 3:

*Invading the world of I5lam is c4ncer..."

[Fenrir]

Dark Souls 3:

I don't know what I should talk about!

I have been working under Aldrich, gathering human dregs. I changed my strategy and now have gone from losing all my fights to winning all my fights thanks to one weird trick. Read the rest of the post to know about it.
My prostrat is to do a few stylish moves with the Farron Greatsword to distract the other player and make them adapt to it, then switch to Mercenary twinblades mid-battle and ALL CAPS L1 MASH. It works.

I liked the new prison a lot. I have been wearing the almost full Jailer set, because I'm sure that jailers are everybody's favourite enemies. I wish I had one of their sticks so I could do this instakill BBQ attack.

I got really far this time, straight to spookcity.

Cool level design, cool bosses.
Except Yhorm, fuck Yhorm. I had to look up what to do. I had gotten far on my own: I had the Storm Ruler, had equipped it, and used L2 + R1 to activate its special skill, but nothing suggested I had to hold down L2 for a while for the true real special skill to work.
I just assumed the damage increase from like 42 to 53 by fighting the giant. was the giant weakness mentioned in the item description

[Grefter]

I think the poker just blocks Estus rather than nuking HP bar.  At least thats what the item description says (so... who the fuck knows it probably inflicts Curse or something).

[Grefter]

Card Hunter - Some free to play game.

It is about Sopko GMing a game of D&D


with Gatewalker's stuff



He disapproves that Sopko isn't a killer DM.


It might be an okay filler until the next chunk of Pathfinder Adventure Cardgame hits tablet.

[Fenrir]

Stephen's Sausage Roll:
I've eaten about 18 sausages? The hype for this game is real and massive, but I am not feeling it so far. I've been playing for 2 hours and am already tired of it, though I'm sure there are wonderful gameplay evolutions later on. The Witness and Talos Principle have pretty much created a new standard for puzzle games for me, by adding external rewards after puzzles instead of just more puzzles all the way down.
Holy shit I sound like the most boring person in the world saying this. But it's true.



I've also been playing some Fallen London, made by the Sunless Sea team.

Sunless Sea is a mix between rogue like, text adventure and exploration. The base game's tense and thick, the writing is great, unfortunately roguelike and text adventure go together as terribly as you'd expect, and going through the earlygame multipletimes is definitely not very pleasant. (Still better than in Gungeon) I have played it a few times and need to go back to it.


Fallen London has only the text adventure part and is instead some sort of Kingdom of Loathing-esque F2P game, except lighter on investment required and in a Victorian-esque fantastic setting?

The game has an entire weird logic on its own and million of side stats and weird items.  There are 4 main stats: Dangerous, Persuasive, Watchful and Shadowy, plus one hub for each stat basically. If you go the persuasion route like I did, you're taking drugs and writing novels about your experience with it, or telling jokes at bars, or seducing people to learn their secrets (Secrets going to your inventory and being sellable).
Things going wrong build your Scandal stat, and if it gets too high you get deported to an area and write letters to you aquaintances to redeem your reputation.

I just love that a ton of shit ends up in my inventory or profile: Extraordinary Implications (can be used as a currency, I have 3), my connection to bohemians (12), the fact that I am the Protégé of a mysterious benefactor (4) and that I have recurring dreams about Death by Water (1), etc.


Buying old DLC is really expensive in this honestly. But that's understandable as the game has gotten pretty massive. (1,5 million words, a bit more than all the Harry Potter books)
I wish there was an unlock all the shit option
 
Alas, the app is really really bad and undermines the whole thing. Constant need to sync, frequent crashes, super long loading times. It's the opposite of the Sorcery games, which have fairly standard writing but a great app. Fallen London has very clever and subtle writing but a super shitty app.

[Fenrir]

Join me in Fallen London. I might not betray you. I am Yattaf.

[jsh357]

I ended up disappointed overall with Salt & Sanctuary, but I suppose I should have lowered my expectations since a knock-off of Souls is still a knock-off. The game is really rough around the edges; I was very sad that the bow controls are so poorly thought out in particular. Movement was acceptably fluid much of the time, but I felt like it was far too easy to fall off of cliffs at times, which is strange since there was no slippery footing to contend with or anything like that. I'm not big on the rolling and parrying in a 2D space, though I can appreciate the attempt to get the combat right; that's my story, sticking to it.

While I didn't hate the art style as much as some people seem to, and even liked some designs, the graphics were actually a problem for me, as everything looks pretty similar (read: dark) and it's very easy to miss things. I suppose you could argue that adds to the challenge, and in some cases I'd agree, but for me it was frustrating more than it was neato. The music was kind of annoying when it wasn't just ambiance, but the ambiance and sound effects were well-done, at least as far as I could tell.

Enemies seem to suddenly gain tons of HP midway through the game, and it makes fight a real slog. I might have had more fun if I didn't feel the need to just run past encounters before even getting through them legitimately. Maybe my build wasn't on point, though (Polearms). Any flying/mage enemy is insufferable. Several bosses are downright terrible. I must have died to the Tree boss 20 times due to a platform crumbling as soon as my character touched it at random times. (normally it takes a second or two)

I'm not sure how I feel about the skill tree vs something more simplistic, but I guess it's cool if you want to know what you're working toward? Being able to delete and reassign points was a nice touch.

The game certainly has some enjoyable qualities, and I might recommend it to fans of Castlevania and the like, but I wasn't particularly impressed.

[Fenrir]

Dark Souls 3:

Dunk head in wax